After a bit of back-and-forth with the host, a new gallery has been installed and configured :-) Still no shell access, but at least things are working. I even managed to resurrect the old gallery. All the photos and captions were recovered!
Now it’s time to see if I can migrate the albums to the new gallery. . .
So much for travel sites being the end-all for all your reservation needs. I have finalized my Austin apartment preview for September (a week after ACL, to avoid the unwashed masses ;-) for over $150 dollars cheaper by doing it piece-wise and not choosing a package ‘deal’.
I needed a flight, a car, and a place to sleep for three nights and four days. Orbitz quoted me $561, Travelocity quoted me $534, and Priceline quoted me $510. My price? $360
To make things fair, I’m staying in a hostel instead of a hotel. However, had I made reservations at a cheap hotel (cheap is $50/night, I guess), my price would have been $450, still cheaper than the best quote from these bargain sites.
I suppose using a Denver-based discount carrier (Frontier) and buying directly from them is an advantage since a reseller cannot beat their price. And some diligent car searching revealed that there are weekend rates and weekday rates. Apparently the business pukes pay more than double to drive during the week. And the trump card is most certainly the hostel, which is less than half the cost of a standard hotel.
The one advantage that bargain sites have for them is that everything is taken care of all-at-once. No making sure each part will work and fit together. It just will. Saves a lot of time and some stress. But I sure like my $150!
Uf. Web apps are buggy and finicky, and getting this persnickety software to play nicely on a host where you have very little control (I mean, not even a shell!) is like getting America to have public health care (everyone hates you and then someone ends up dying in the process).
I have more or less successfully installed WordPressMU here at blogs.meriwi.net. It’s been up for a month and didn’t collapse when I added my old entries from the forum. However, a lot of WordPress themes aren’t compatible (even if you choose from the WPMU-approved ones :-\). And that’s just cosmetics. Further into the mess are plugins — little tools and tweaks that make a blog easier or better. Plugins for WordPress don’t necessarily work with WPMU. Ones that do work may only partially work. For example, Spam Karma 2 and OWA install and activate but won’t do anything other than that. No functionality, no configurability, just wasted bits in a folder and wasted tables in a database on a RedHat server in Omaha (more on them later).
Also, during the last long period of disuse, the old gallery appears to have suffered from bit entropy (or bit atrophy?). The albums are completely corrupted and cannot be viewed. The photos are still safe and organized, but the software prevents you from looking at them. The descriptions and comments are there but more-than-likely unrecoverable (at least without a considerable effort). So I went about finding a replacement. A few Internet searches brought me to a nice Gallery plugin for WordPress, and digging a little deeper, I even found that it had been adapted to work with WPMU. But the elation faded to deflation when I read comments from users saying that it doesn’t work with version 1.2.1 (which is what I’ve installed since it was the latest and most bug-free). Like most poorly organized bazaar-style software, updating the core application will break those that depend on it.
Ok, fine. So I decided to install Gallery independently and not have it integrated with WPMU. Without a shell, the upload is very long (over 1 hour on broadband). Strike against the host. Setting up the database went fine, but a shell (rather than Plesk) would really help make it more exact. The installation has ballooned to an 11-step process (to be fair, while Gallery 1 had only three pages, they were three very long pages), and I get stuck on step 2. Cookies aren’t working. I do the proper searching and find a few support threads describing my problem and follow their links. None of their ‘make sure that naninani is nanika’ fit — I either am using a recent enough version, or the tools are properly configured. No dice.
So, before really hitting it hard and wasting effort, I decided to try using the host’s “site application” installer. It’s still gallery, but it’s a little older and buggier. To do that, though, I need to remove the previous (and failed) installation. Oh joy, another 1-hour wait while 3300 files are deleted over ftp. Once removed, the new installation went smoothly but is broken. And now the hands are flung above the head.
What does all of this mean? More headaches. I’ll probably go back to the latest version of Gallery and start talking with the developers and the host to figure out what the exact problem is. But this exchange shouldn’t be necessary at all. The host has us locked down rather tight. And they’re using Red Hat. Just because enterprise is in the name does not make it preferable. I would like to see them offer debian-based hosting. And a shell. And a lot more flexibility (like the permissions in my own directory — root owns a lot of things I would prefer to control).
Basically, I’m becoming dissatisfied with the host. And I’m frustrated at the lack of maintainable design in web software (it makes more sense to me that WPMU be the primary focus of the WordPress folks — it solves the more general problem since a single blog is a subset of WPMU’s capabilities). And I regret choosing WPMU in the first place. I don’t really see any other blogs joining mine here, so installing as many single WordPress copies as are needed makes more sense to me. And I still am thinking about getting my own host. And that’s a whole lot of fun — how can you figure out the good from the bad?
The blag is back. Hope you folks enjoy reading. If you use an RSS reader (like Google Reader), you can automatically see and read any new updates without actually having to come here. Just click the the ‘RSS Posts’ link to the right.
I hope you like the green and the clouds and come around anyway. It’s the only way to read the archives. Man, I had no idea there were so many posts.
In the last post, I mentioned that I went looking for a better project host than SourceForge or BerliOS. Well, I found a different host and only time and experience will tell if its better than the two leading sites. I give you bbgun :-)
Well, here it is! Today was the day that added my previous ‘blog’ entries form the PHPNuke forum. Feel free to click around and read things from the old days.
The Python code is working, but not pretty or optimized (but we all know Jackson’s rules of optimization, right?).
Quirks I’ve noticed so far:
But, it’s good enough for a simple release, I think, in the spirit of release early and release often. So today I’ll search for a new host for this mini project. SourceForge and BerliOS aren’t exactly my favorites, so I’m going to try and find a new host.
I think I’m going to use python to write the database conversion script. It should be a good learning experience in unit tests and module details. This is in fact a test post to see how WordPress names its entries. Strangely enough, there are 2 date fields in the posts table, one for local time and another for UTC/GMT.
Why didn’t they just use UTC and keep an offset, I don’t know, but I need to figure out how the thing works to write the correct conversion subroutines. . .
Much to Drupal-developing Dave’s disappointment (I’m sure), I’ve decided to give Word Press a whirl for my net presence. I’m a sucker for the archaic interface, and it’ll keep only the truly interested reading :-P
It’s been a long time since I’ve bothered posting anything, and I think I remember writing that I wasn’t going to do so any longer. But I’d like to extract my pseudo-blog from the forum and re-work it into something actually more blog-like. And once that happens, I’ll prolly start calling this a blag.
I’ll get to learn some simple PHP and MySQL syntax since I have to convert the PHP-Nuke database into something that I can insert into the Word Press database. *shudder* I wonder if there are any python modules that would help with this…
saa, iyo iyo owari ni tsuita. iitai koto wo ienai kedo, ore ha ittemiteiru zo.
Reading over past poems helps capture my feelings again. Nearly every loose end is tied off - all that remains are my connections to the outside world: tomorrow I cancel my mobile phone and internet. Then I jump on a train the next day for Thailand (there’s an airplane involved, too). With only one night reserved in Bangkok so far, it’ll be an adventure.
Prolly something I need right now - a little uncertainty in the set meal that is Japanese life.
But, as I promised last time, I have the new video uploaded and ready for viewing. Yaizu Suisan: Portrait of a Fishing High School.
So long and thanks for all the fish!
Today I gave my goodbye speech, and it was bittersweet. Afterward, some students came by to give me a few mementos and touching parting words. And now that summer’s officially started, I won’t really be seeing them. Except for tomorrow, which is the school’s first baseball game in the national tournament. Everyone’s going to cheer on the team, so I’m glad to have such a lighthearted atmosphere to say final goodbyes.
Been having a few goodbye dinners and parites as well. One every day or so has been the average. Lots of eating, laughing, and drinking. It’s great to have such positive experiences on the way out - makes leaving a nice memory, rather than the life shattering one that coming out here was. There are a few more left before I take off to Thailand. :)
I’ve also finished the school video, just in time. I’ve been in front of the computer for so long recenlty that I’m staring to loathe writing email and even reading other blogs. I’ll post links next time. Speaking of, there will probably be only one more entry after this one, so if you want to stay in contact, be sure to email me. joe at meriwi dot net
Last lessons are finished, and now exams are on, and I find myself entering a bittersweet period of finality. It’s most likely this ‘blog’ will end with my contract, so if you’d like to stay in touch (or convince me to keep writing), then please send me email - joe at meriwi dot net. There are about two weeks left on contract, and then it’s a small holiday before finally coming home. Exciting turbulance ahead!