Here is my first entry
Here is my new MT blog, and this is my first entry. How do I enter tags for this thing?
Here is my new MT blog, and this is my first entry. How do I enter tags for this thing?
So I just installed Movable Type to try it out, and so far I like what I see.
The whole experience feels a lot more 'professional' than Wordpress, though it's hard to point out exactly why. Maybe it's knowing that there's a commercial company behind it, and it uses the same software to run thousands of blogs that people pay a good amount of cash for.
The main website seems very well organized, and the software supports building multiple blogs.
The only really annoying thing so far that it is relatively slow. It builds a lot of static data out of each change, so 'refreshing' your blog can take a while. Maybe it just means that dreamhost is slow.
Whenever I create a website, I always make a mistake when choosing directory names. For example, I choose the name "wp" for my directory that houses my wordpress install, and I make my blog URL reflect that. When it comes time to try a different blog system (textpattern or MT) Now I'm stuck with the "wp" name.
It all goes back to the old lesson that nobody cares about the implementation. Name things by their name. Names are inherently levels of indirection, so encoding information about what backs the name into the name itself, is just a bad idea.
Along those lines, I've change the URL for my blog, hopefully for the last time. This blog is now http://levelsofdetail.kendeeter.com. I'm going to write about keyboards and health issues in separate blogs (since MT allows me to do so easily). They'll probably be something along the lines of health.kendeeter.com and keyboards.kendeeter.com, until I think of more clever names.
With such a naming scheme, now I can use the dreamhost control panel to point my blogs at any directory I want, and at any time I want, without breaking people's links or bookmarks. It's so obvious, and yet I seem to mess it up every time.
Yesterday I worked up the motivation to take the Vista plunge: installing Vista Enterprise on my work machine.
Before I started, I did a last minute check. I mean, if I'm going to put it on my main work machine, then it had better support all the software that I need to do my work.
Vim7: check. Outlook: check. IE check. Perforce: check.... Powershell: No. Cygwin: No. Juniper VPN client: No.
Oh well. Maybe when Workstation 6.0 gets out the door, I can run an XP VM to get all the tools that I need. Until then, I guess I'm playing the waiting game.
At work, I use the Services for Unix NFS server to share source hosted on my Windows XP box over to my Ubuntu box. In general the SFU NFS server performs well (way better than sharing over SMB) and doesn't cause any problems, except one.
When an nfs client accesses a file hosted on the windows machine, the NFS server opens up a file handle to the file on behalf of the client. The NFS protocol is stateless, however, so the server doesn't know how long it should keep the file handle open. The server uses a heuristic (a configurable timeout value in the registry) to decide how long it wait for another request from a client to the same file before releasing a handle.
This is all fine, except that while the NFS server has a file handle open, other programs on my Windows box start getting errors when I try to write to that file. The common scenario is code editing -- I'm editing a source file on windows, and an invocation of a build on the Linux side accesses that source file. It accesses it usually only very briefly, but now I have to wait for the timeout before the editor can write any changes out again (though issuing a :w! in vim appears to work).
The real solution is to reduce the timeout value. The registry keys are located in:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NfsSvr\Parameters
Look for the keys:
RdWrHandleLifeTime RdWrNfsHandleLifeTime RdWrThreadSleepTime
On my machine they were all initially set to 5 (meaning 5 seconds). I set them all to 1, and now I rarely run into the problem. Thanks go to Ramesh for the original tip.
I recently installed Edgy in a VMware Server 1.01 VM at work, and discovered that because it comes with Xorg 7.1.1, the vmmouse driver that gets included with the tools package doesn't get installed as part of the tools install.
But it turns out the Xorg 7.0.0 version that we do package works fine with Edgy's Xorg. All you have to do is, copy vmware-tools-distrib/lib/configurator/XOrg/7.0/vmmouse_drv.o to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/ and then in your /etc/xorg.conf, load the "vmmouse" driver instead of the "mouse" driver (don't forget to restart your X session) and that should do the trick.
I know I've written about the beta Windows Live Writer program before, but this thing is truly awesome. Once in a while, a program comes along that seems like it just works like "magic" and this is definitely one of them. I'm sure there are various blogging XMLRPC API's that it uses, but it amazes me how it can pick up the look and feel of your blog, and present it to you while you're creating a post.
There was a slight hickup while using it with Movable Type. First of all, you have to point it at your admin interface. For my blogs, my admin interface has an entirely different URL than the viewing interface. Second of all, for XMLRPC-based posting, MT maintains a separate password for each author, which can be set in the author configuration screen.
Also, while Live Writer can set the categories for your post, it doesn't seem to support MT tags yet. It does let you specify tags specific to a partiuclar service, for example:
But that's just some magic templated text, not something it's doing with the MT API. Oh well, hopefully they'll get that in some future version. I can always post first and tag later.
It's commentary like this that irritates me to no end. All these people going around acting like it's a big flipping mystery why people don't buy stuff of the iTunes Music Store.
If you just thought about it for a second, it's obvious.
DRM. Price. Experience.
Any way you spin it, the DRM sucks. It means you can only listen to a song that you bought on a limited number of computers. It means you can't switch to other stores/services/devices at a later point and bring your music with you.
And guess what, you get all that DRM for a price that's not much better than buying a CD.
As if that's not bad enough, the buying experience is even not as good as going to a store. You don't get to preview songs (if you go to any decent music store, you can listen to CD's before you buy). And the songs that you buy are compressed to the point where someone with good ears can tell the difference.
You're getting a crippled, inferior product for not that much cheaper. And people wonder why they're not selling more. It's not that people just love love love going out to the store and buying CD's, or ordering on Amazon and paying shipping, it's just that the alternative sucks that much more.
But I'm sure Apple engineers don't really care for the DRM either. It's just what happens when you deal with record companies I suppose. They really need to either start selling full lossless tracks, or start a subscription service. Until then, I'm sticking with my Rhapsody.
They announced Dragon Quest IX for the DS. Whatever is left of my gamer pride depends heavily on my claim that I've played every installment of the Dragon Quest series, and one little new console here or there isn't going to stop me now.
I've written about how you can use Consolas (A new font in office 2007 / Windows Vista) on Windows XP, and how to set it up as the font for powershell.
I even set it as my fixed width font in Internet Explorer 7.
All seemed well, until I RDP'ed in. It turns out these new fonts don't have the proper hinting of their forefathers (Arial, Lucida Console, Courier New). So if you RDP into an XP host, which doesn't support font smoothing over RDP, then you get really crappy non-smoothed versions of Consolas. I suppose you could switch the font every time you log in and out, but that's just too annoying.
Because of this, I've switched everything back to the old XP fonts. I'll have to wait until I install Vista to really benefit from the new fonts. With a Vista host, you can use the new MS RDP client to get font smoothing over RDP, then all will be kosher again.
I can never find the exact answer I'm looking for, so I try to write it down when I finally figure it out. This episode? How to get a fast VNC server on Ubuntu 6.10.
First, get the right packages
% sudo apt-get install vnc4server
This gets you a 'vnc' module for your xorg X server, which can export an X session as a vnc host, and also let you use it on your local display as well (unlike Xvnc and vncserver commands).
Once you've installed the packages, you need to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. In your "Module" section, add the line:
Load "vnc"
In your "Screen" section, add the line:
Option "PasswordFile" "/root/.vnc/passwd"
Now you need to create the actual password file. You need to switch to root and run the realvncpasswd utility:
% sudo su % realvncpasswd (enter password)
You should be all set. Restart your X server and give it a shot.
It seems they haven't quite worked out all the kinks out of Flash Player 9. My work machine started having an issue where sites couldn't detect that the player was installed. Instead they would offer a link to Adobe to install the player. Clicking on the link would show a page that indicated that the plugin was installed, but going back to another page that used Flash would still not work.
Pages would fail seemingly randomly. I was just ignoring it, until youtube stopped working.
I googled a bit, and found that all types of people were having this problem. At first I suspected IE7, but people reported the same problem with IE6. After a while, it seemed like the common thread was Flash 9, and I found a post that suggested uninstalling Flash 9 and installing Flash 8.
This worked for me. The steps are easy.
These four steps fixed the problem. Not too many sites seem to require Flash 9 yet, so hopefully Adobe will get their act together by the time I really have to upgrade.
I've restarted my Japanese blog. I used to have a good number of visitors when I was involved in all that Momonga and Gentoo JP stuff. Ah, good old college days.
I've never seen blog software that handles multilingual blogging perfectly. I've seen hacks for various existing solutions, but they all don't really get at the core of the problem. What you really want is another dimension of metadata on your posts, somewhat like categories. But it is also essential that users be able to filter easily by language. And it should allow you to have multiple translations of the same post in different languages, but only one version should get shown to the user, based on their language preferences.
But admittedly, the market for such features is very small. I mean, we're still in a day and age where most software companies can't even get their translation/localization story straight. Internationalization is still mostly an afterthought for all but the biggest software players. And it's not like there's a huge multilingual blogging population out there to start with. Oh well.
I've been very hesistant to maintain multiple blogs in different languages up until now. It would mean dealing with multiple Wordpress/Textpattern installations, with their own databases and settings, and updating each as new stuff came out.
But Movable Type changed all that. It's now really easy for me to post to multiple blogs. The one installation takes care of them all.
This page contains all entries posted to LevelsOfDetail in December 2006. They are listed from oldest to newest.
January 2007 is the next archive.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.