hooray for done!

(and just in time, too, since now i’ve gotta go get dressed for the office holiday party. you know, it’s a sad statement on your social life when you sit down at a computer and think to yourself, “don’t get too involved in, like, reprogramming something that was perfectly fine to begin with that you forget you have to go drink for free at 6PM.” or maybe that’s just a sad statement on my social life… ummm…. HEY LOOK OVER THERE, IT’S A PIE!

]]> http://ziggurat.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1055 0 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=1050 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=1050#comments Sat, 02 Dec 2006 02:03:54 +0000 http://ziggurat.org/wordpress/?p=1050 i am going to try really, really hard to make the switch from blosxom to wordpress this weekend. so, all you out there in RSS-land, you may notice posts disappearing, reappearing as new, reappearing slightly changed, etc. apologies in advance for the annoyingness!

but you should totally check out the new shiny, once it is all done…

]]> http://ziggurat.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1050 0 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=1035 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=1035#comments Sun, 26 Nov 2006 19:34:51 +0000 http://ziggurat.org/wordpress/?p=1035 so, i have done most of the heavy lifting for porting the blog from blosxom over to wordpress. a few things remain. sadly, they are mostly the annoying and hard-to-accomplish things.

• set up apache, mysql, php
• set up wordpress
• import blosxom entries
• modify comments in templates to point at haloscan instead of wordpress
• customize wordpress theme
• go through and properly categorize imported posts (about 200 of ~980 done)
• either fix the formatting that broke in the import, or decide i don’t care about ugly formatting on imported posts
• (showstopper) make sidebar less ugly
• figure out how to rename existing haloscan threads to re-align them with their proper posts
• do the legwork on renaming existing haloscan threads
• (showstopper) figure out why WP’s rss feed isn’t escaping &s in blog subtitle fields correctly, and is therefore too wonky to use
• (showstopper) set up apache redirect for existing rss uri to new rss uri
• (showstopper) decide how to implement redirects for old blosxom permalinks (and then actually implement them)

you can view the new blog now here, though that link will only be valid as long as blosxom is still the “production” blog. there are a couple of entries up there that aren’t in blosxom, but they’re mostly along the lines of “play with the pretty shiny new toy” stuff. whee!

The import script relies on the RSS feed, and something in between the RSS feed and the import scripts is breaking all my links very obnoxiously, and adding in explicit paragraph breaks where all there was before was a non-HTML-encoded linefeed. And let’s not get into what it does to my Amazon Associates links. blah.
I fixed about five posts by hand. I only have about 980 posts in blosxom in total….
Turns out, you know… I know perl.  You know, what blosxom is written in?  And I know how to get rid of extra linebreaks.  Because chomp() is, um, hard  You know what, just forget I wrote the whole bit above about linebreaks.  Let’s pretend this never happened.  Oh, and, um, apologies to anyone who was reading the extremely repetitive blosxom RSS feed (Hi, Livejournal!) while this was being fixed…

So really, all I have to actually do by hand is to go through and add extra categories to things that need more than one category.  Which is, I swear to God, my main reason for switching.  And then I have to figure out how to make it link in my haloscan comments.  And then fix the layout.  And I honestly think the layout may be the worst part.  Your pal niqui is not a web designer.

FROM: [Fred the Support Guy]. From CHIhost.com
TO: me

Hi,

You have WAY too much perl usage, the cpu and ram this site uses is not appropriate for the plan you are on.

root@server132 [~]# cat file| grep zig
32572 zig 18 0 7940 5928 1444 D 6 0.3 0:01.22 /usr/local/bin/perl
32303 zig 18 0 7956 5580 1444 D 4 0.3 0:01.56 /usr/local/bin/perl
32376 zig 18 0 8188 5756 1588 D 3 0.3 0:01.57 /usr/local/bin/perl
31195 zig 18 0 8276 5580 1448 D 1 0.3 0:01.29 /usr/local/bin/perl
392 zig 18 0 7356 5544 1444 D 1 0.3 0:01.18 /usr/local/bin/perl
31012 zig 18 0 7052 5576 1444 R 1 0.3 0:01.46 /usr/local/bin/perl
32585 zig 18 0 8252 5576 1444 D 1 0.3 0:01.33 /usr/local/bin/perl
32174 zig 18 0 8564 5748 1588 R 1 0.3 0:01.37 /usr/local/bin/perl
1038 root 15 0 8560 2256 1804 S 0 0.1 0:00.02 sshd: zig [priv]
1061 zig 16 0 8560 1700 1252 S 0 0.1 0:04.70 sshd: zig@pts/1
1090 zig 16 0 3080 1376 1088 S 0 0.1 0:00.09 -jailshell
11552 root 17 0 8736 2216 1776 S 0 0.1 0:00.03 sshd: zig [priv]
13375 zig 15 0 8736 1664 1212 S 0 0.1 0:00.00 sshd: zig@notty
13483 zig 16 0 5024 952 716 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 /usr/libexec/openss
Please switch to a plan appropriate for that usage such as our
dedicated server $179.95/mo + $99 Setup
or
Semi-dedicated server $39.95/mo + Free Setup

Failure to switch to plan appropriate for your usage may result in your site being shut off without further notice. Which plan did you want to go with?

Thanks,
[Fred]

some days i am better at hiding my contempt than others.

FROM: sabrina downard
TO: [Fred the Support Guy]

> Failure to switch to plan appropriate for your usage may result in your site
> being shut off without further notice.
>
>  Which plan did you want to go with?

Hah! That’s fantastic. Every time I have tried to email chihost support I get utterly blown off and never hear back at all — such as my most recent email after someone messed up my chroot jail, wherein I actually pleaded for just an acknowledgement of the email — but you find a problem and suddenly you guys remember I’m here.

Also, I really like the emailing threatening cutoff on the day before Thanksgiving. That’s awesome.

Tell you what, I’ll do us both a favor. Let me know what the date through which I’m currently paid up through is, and we can shake hands and go our separate ways at that time.

—
sabrina downard

i really, really, *really* wanted to ask for exactly how much “perl” i am allowed to use, or remark on his super-scary “cat file| grep zig” “of course the puny user will be frightened by my PS OUTPUT” attempt to techno-frighten me into submission, or hell, even just say “boy, are you guys dumb,” but i couldn’t bring myself to be mean. well. meaner than i was.

i do really like the threatened cutoff on thanksgiving eve. ‘cos that shit is TOTALLY what i was going to be doing tomorrow, baby!

well, you know — anything broken that used to not be broken. … there seems to have been some issue related to my hotlinking-prevention rewrites. let me know if you are not able to see images from someplace you used to be able to see them from (unless, of course, that is a forum in while someone posted one of my more popular hotlink targets, because i actively enjoy thwarting that sort of thing, and you wouldn’t want to rob me of my joy, would you?).

a quick substr() later and i’m back in bidness. of course, in the course of retrofitting that substr() into my blosxom i managed to break the ‘seemore’ plugin for a couple of minutes. hope i didn’t accidentally traumatise anyone with my clever commentary about BBM or my work desk picture during those couple of minutes.

oh, and — oh the irony — the other day, when i was trying to stuff the comments link into the RSS feed? works great! …except for on the livejournal feed. doesn’t show up there. which is a pity, because the livejournal feed is the entire reason i wanted the stupid link there at all — it bugs me that comments made on the livejournal feed disappear, so it would make me happier if they would be attached to the blog and not lj’s interpretation thereof. i’m not really sure why the link is not appearing. i mean, it’s right there in the rss feed, right there in the description field — not separated by a newline (that was what got me the first time, when it wasn’t working at all). alas, i am thwarted. ’twas ever thus.

oh… oh, wait, i bet i just figured it out. i bet it wants all <‘s and >’s instead of s; my dumb ass forgot i needed to convert the ugly characters. y’all are going to kill me if i update the feed template and it forces all my entries to be marked “new” on your friends pages again, aren’t you? FTR, none of this try-and-try-again stuff would have been necessary if anyone would write up some actually simple and clear documentation for RSS syntax and requirements. instead i get crap like what / does. because i couldn’t have figured that much out for myself. sheesh.

well, i’ll hold off a day or something until i get bored. do it on a day no one will be reading their flist anyways. see, i’m not really doing this to make the feed suck!

p.s. fuzzy warm cozy sweaters on cold and depressingly rainy days RULE.

]]> http://ziggurat.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=295 0 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=350 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=350#comments Sat, 24 Dec 2005 05:10:00 +0000 http://ziggurat.org/blox/main/blosxom/its_important_to_abstract_20051223.html turns out, i was accidentally invalidating my RSS syntax in the feed any time i used any &special; &html; &entities; like è or (a personal favorite) —. this results in things like my livejournal feed reporting my “Bio” to be “qu’il porte des oeillres,” which is not quite so charming as the correct version. — anyways, while the default blosxom rss wackiness was perfectly happy to & up my &s in the blog entries themselves, it was leaving my title and description untouched, which meant when i switched the title to french or used an em dash it barfed all over the place. i cheated; i just copied and pasted the appropriate lines to mess with my $blog_description. it was too much work to fix everything (it would have meant copying and pasting again!), and besides, i don’t plan to change the blog’s title to anything that requires &s anyways. i’m kind of fond of my silly blog title.

discovered that by accident while trying to figure out how to put a link to the comments page in the entry body itself. (which should now appear — for real this time! … an hour later, after LJ barfs all over the feed, uh, for real again this time, maybe?)

in other news, i’m kinda getting a kick out of writing &amp;. and &amp;amp;. and on and on and on! oh, the madness! &amp;amp;! &amp;! try it; it’s fun!

]]> http://ziggurat.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=350 0 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=377 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=377#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2005 04:27:00 +0000 http://ziggurat.org/blox/main/blosxom/new_look_20051123.html if you’re reading this via RSS, you probably don’t care.

if, otoh, you actually visit my humble web site as god and man intended, you — unless you are blind and reading the site via a spoken-text browser (and if you are, i did try hard to make it accessible, at least from the point of view of someone who hasn’t ever used a speaking browser. at least i use ALT attributes!) — have just noticed it went from light colors to dark colors. i felt it was time for a change, and i was really bored with the old look. if, however, you prefer it, i have helpfully provided a link to it at the top of the new page header. (it’ll go away at some point in the future when i get tired of it. quake in your boots, muahaha!)

it’s not really done, i’m not entirely happy with it… but i was happier with it than i was with the old one, and i was deprived of a friday afternoon on which to break shit at work, so i am breaking shit on my personal website on the wednesday night before a holiday instead. i am sure that if you look hard you will find things that are obviously broken. actually, i am sure that if you glance passingly you will find things that are obviously broken. c’est ma vie.

no one will care, really, but apart from the colors, i got rid of some of the crap on the sidebar, added entirely new crap to the sidebar, changed the top header, and switched from a serif to a sans-serif font. (palatino to helvetica, if you must know.)

if you are color-blind, i’d welcome your input. i tried to make colors high-contrast but i feel fairly certain that i have as yet failed in that pursuit in at least a couple of places. so it’s probably completely illegible to 50% of the population, or something. nonetheless, i think it looks pretty cool and that’s what really matters, as this blog is about indulging my own narcissism. (am i engaging in egregious hyperbole, or being completely straightforward, with that remark? it’s up to you to figure that out for yourself, dear readers!)

]]> http://ziggurat.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=377 0 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=968 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=968#comments Mon, 30 Aug 2004 05:27:00 +0000 http://ziggurat.org/blox/main/blosxom/argh_20040829.html i’m really sorry for flooding the friends pages of those people reading this via niquiblog on livejournal, with all the old postings. i was starting to convert the old entries and found a bug in it, so it wasn’t marking things with the proper date in my blosxom entries cache, and i swear i thought i disabled all the postings before i left the house this afternoon, but obviously i didn’t, because they all came back en masse.

bah. sorry!

]]> http://ziggurat.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=968 0