Tim's blog - Administrative

Tech blurbs

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:32:10 -0400

Two things, real quick:

If you're on a Mac, and you're using Time Machine, and you listen to a lot of music, and you wonder why your backup drive is getting like 300 MB of data every ten minutes, it's because iTunes is updating your music files with the "Play Count" field (see the Wiki article on ID3 for more), and Time Machine is detecting that as a file change and duly syncing it to your drive. That took me a while to figure out.
I need new blog software! I haven't written on here in like five months because I simply cannot stand the interface any more. Uploading media is a pain, sorting entries into multiple categories is problematic, and it's just kind of plain ugly (and I hate going through "themes" or "skins" or whatever the kids are calling them these days). I'm leaning WordPress, but commentary or advice is welcome. (It's a huge bonus if the platform you recommend has a Serendipity importer.)

One more note - as I was posting this entry, the trackback script choked and died in Chrome. So I guess that's another reason to switch.

I do love prescription drugs, but...

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:56:30 -0500

Due to an increasing amount of blogspam over the past weeks, you'll no longer be able to mention a bunch of prescription drugs by name in trackbacks.
Continue reading "I do love prescription drugs, but..."

Canada, the interlude

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:40:01 -0400

This entry is not about Canada. Rather, this entry is about everything else going on that just happened to occur while I was in Canada. As such, it's a little fragmented and disjoint, but whatever. Ready?

Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
This, the new Coldplay album, was officially released today, June 12, in Europe and Asia. It won't appear in the States and Canada for another five days; however, the Internet being what it is, the album was leaked a few days ago. As a result, Coldplay decided to stream the entire album free from their Myspace for awhile. I've listened to it several times through and it's fantastic.

Besides the two singles that had been out for awhile (Viva la Vida and Violet Hill), my favorite song is Death and All His Friends / The Escapist, the last "official" track on the album. This is the one that had played over the beginning of the Grey's Anatomy season four finale ("oh, winter / we got carried / away over / on the rooftops..."). It starts very soft, but builds to a resonant (if slightly repetitive) chorus at the end of the first half before quieting down for the second half, which gently ushers out the album.

As a whole, I'm glad to see Coldplay move away from the styles they had picked up in X & Y. I really felt that they were at their best in the days of A Rush of Blood to the Head, which continued what Parachutes had started. Although the band did refer to their first three as a "trilogy," I don't think X & Y was really representative of their music. And it's good to see Chris Martin drop the falsetto for a lot of his music. A lot of people derided him as sounding "whiny," and truth be told, it didn't really work out for him in a couple cases.

Anyway. If you can find a way to buy the album where a good chunk of the money actually goes to the artist, rather than the RIAA (read: iTunes store), I highly recommend it.

Tomatoes?
Apparently there's some disease hitting a lot of the big tomato farms in the U.S. A lot of restaurants are refusing to serve tomatoes whatsoever, and the rest all have big signs up saying "our tomatoes are safe" or some such proclamation.

I gotta say, this is not helping our economy. Plus, what with crude prices jumping another $5/barrel or so, we could be in some serious trouble if we lose a big cash crop like this.

PHP 5/Mac OS X
One of the reasons I really like Macs over Windows machines is that the Mac OS, as of version 10, is built on a Unix base. It has bash, it has apache, it has vi and cron and all kinds of other Unixlike things. It's very possible to develop on a box running some version of OS X with minimal hassle.

Until you run into a problem. Then it's a huge hassle to figure out what's going wrong, because unlike most Unices, the majority of the Mac OS is not free. It's not open-source. And it's not easily reparable. Case in point: I want to use PHP for a web page I'm using to monitor the progress of a long-running program at my house. I already have the code on one of my machines at home, chugging merrily along on my LAMP stack and spitting out fine and dandy reports and images. I tar it up, scp it over, and voila! I have a website.

Except PHP isn't enabled in the version of Apache that ships with OS X by default. No big deal; just find the LoadModule directive in the configuration file, uncomment it, and the text-based part works perfectly. The image generation, though, is not happy. I dig a little bit and find out that the version of PHP that ships with OS X, although it can be integrated very easily with Apache, does not include GD support, which is what it needs for all those image functions.

Grrr. Does Apple provide a solution? No, of course not: the only article I find is how to get PHP 4.3 up and running on OS X. This article looks like it was written quite awhile ago, and provides no helpful information. Basically it comes down to this: if I want PHP5 with apache2 on OS X Leopard, I have to compile it from source. This is, to say the least, a little bit dangerous. I might make a Genius Bar appointment just to see if they can help me. If so, great; if not, at least I get to mess with them a little bit.

Multicategory entries
This works! I can select multiple categories in the administrative view of this entry and have a single entry posted to all of them, so it shows up in the feeds and searches for each individual category. (For the record, this entry is posted in "Administrative" for this section, "Random" for the tomatoes and album review, and "tech" for the PHP rant.)

Categories exist!

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:03:46 -0400

They've been around for a few weeks now, but I thought I'd take a few sentences and officially explain: categories now exist on the blog. What this means is that you can filter entries by subject matter. The list of categories is in the right sidebar, near the bottom of your screen. Just check the boxes for the categories you want to see and hit "Go!" - only the entries in those categories will appear on your screen.

You can also use the RSS feeds associated with each category. This is a bit tricky. I'm going to assume you're using Firefox, and if you aren't, you really should get it now. If you want to subscribe to the blog as a whole, and see every entry, use the links under "syndicate this blog." Click on any of them, then in the window that pops up, click the "Subscribe now" button across the top of the screen. On the other hand, if you only want to see one category, click the little orange icon next to the category name, then subscribe to just that category. In Firefox, these will show up as "live bookmarks" - menus that update themselves with any new entries. Give it a try. I'll wait.

Cool, huh? You can also use the various RSS readers that exist around the 'net - I think Opera and Safari each have one built in, and IE7 might, but I don't think IE6 does. You might try SharpReader on Windows.