This may take several days to get things back to working order. The Dusk theme needs to be reinstalled and the sidebar needs to be copied over and the CSS needs to be fixed so images do not span past the limits. There are several plugins that I need to reinstall such as the Word Count plugin, a stats tracking plugin (not likely WP-ShortStat again), and the Slashdot plugin.

Good news is we finally broke the 1000 hit day. The stats are going to be skewed for the rest of today and likely the week due to the conversion. I think the webserver is still missing some things and will work on getting everything up and running. I’ve also been working on getting more aggregation to places like Technorati, blo.gs, FeedBurner, and so forth. If anyone knows of a good ping service, please share.
More on this as things develop. Stay tuned as things stabilize around here.

A fileserver’s main task is to serve the files located on its local harddisks. This is the essential task of a webserver, but far more focused. I decided that erebus, my samba server, should undertake the responsibility of serving webpages. To move my site entirely over to the fileserver, there were many requirements to getting everything working correctly again.

First, I decided to have erebus host a mysql database for the entire network. After boxing with the USE flags, I eventually installed all of the necessary packages. Then I was on to installing lighttpd. This was a problem last time because the FastCGI plugin support for PHP can be fairly tricky. There was a HOWTO on the gentoo forums that worked well, but still did not bring up how to avoid the baggage that comes along with PHP. The most annoying of them all is gentoo’s reliance on Apache. By default, Apache is chosen as the webserver when one is missing. To make matters worse, gentoo still tries to force Apache to be installed even though lighttpd is installed. To get PHP support, you really only need php-cgi and to fix your php binary in the lighttpd.conf.

PHP support, mysql database, and lighttpd webserver were all installed and everything seemed ready to go. I wanted to install the latest WordPress version 2.0. The problem is the ebuild in gentoo is poorly managed and still remains to be updated. I am tired of waiting for an ebuild to install a php website so I decided to just install it manually myself.

This wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The main problem was the data was on another server for an old version of WordPress. I followed their guide to backing up the data and ended up with a good snapshot; the steps are reproducable. However, since the webserver was on a new machine, the site wouldn’t load correctly but would transfer to the original site. I switched the IP address of the webserver on hanger (the router) and things started working correctly. Just make sure that if you follow this same sort of procedure, that you run the upgrade script. Without it, you will encounter troubles with the categories and links, this changed in the backend on the new 2.0 version of WordPress.

I still have a few changes which I need to get the machine fully working for the webserver, but everything should be up and running tomorrow. Those of you who have accounts will notice the new administrative panel; it has many new features and heavily utilizes Ajax for a slick, responsive interface. I will make an official post once the transition is complete; expect troubles accessing the system between the hours of 5-10pm until then.

This will make babel (dvd burner and current webserver) somewhat obsolete. We should be able to cram the machine into the closet until a burn is needed. I am actually thinking of rebuilding it to be a mini-itx machine that strictly burns discs. Unfortunately, this transition means that I will have to start doing more regular backups on the fileserver, so I will be looking for a program to assist in this chore.

I am also looking to replace the application I currently use to serve my music. I have been looking around and I believe Zina will fit my needs. Hopefully, I can turn this into a WordPress plugin!

Anyways, time to prepare for a long day at work. I have several posts coming down the pipe about this weekend. There were several major events and they needed to be blogged. I will have them finished by tomorrow and then I will continue my work on the server transition. Stay tuned.

First thing I had to do was export the Blogger archives. Using their FTP publishing technique proved extremely difficult as it constantly had something to complain about. That reminds me, I need to uninstall pure-ftpd and ncftp. So then I stumbled across this wonderful gem. I followed the instructions on how to modify the template and everything worked out perfectly. I downloaded the archives (as you can as well) to my SMB server path and I was ready to begin the import.

Two problems arose, one only after the import. First, I noticed that the default category is used, which is “Other.” This won’t fly because I want to have a category hierarchy for any and all blog imports / exports. As you can see from this post’s categories, I wanted the category ‘anti-thought’ (which is a child of ‘Blog Import’) to be assigned to each imported entry. This was a simple change, an entry needed to be made into wp_post2cat linking the post_id to the category_id.

The other problem was that I realized that my blog used to not have titles for entries. I started using Blogger.com way back in ’03 just after Blogger.com was purchased by google (they seem to have a hand in everything these days). So all of my posts from 2003, generally speaking, lack titles and therefore make it difficult for the end user to get to the permalink via the post title. I haven’t decided how I will handle this yet, but my guess is that I should snag X many characters from the front of the post and use that as the title.

I will be submitting a patch to Skeltoac as soon as he moderates my comment and sends me an email. If anyone has any other ideas on this whole import thing, do share. If anyone has a blog that they would like ported and hosted here, just send me an email.

Edit: I forgot to mention that there’s a great visual walk-though of this whole import process located here.

this is my last post on this blogger site, i am moving to a blog that i will be hosting here. the following is the initial post that was made on the new site:

This post will mark the transition to a new site; my “Hello World” so to speak. This site will be a replacement for the old Blogger account. Setting this site up has been a labor of love; I have worked on getting it to where it is for at least a week, if not more.

I have/will be inviting several members of the crew from which I used to roll with in San Antonio. So let me go ahead and post a little something about what this site will be.

I have setup several accounts for 2 other people thus far (you know who you are). Anonymous user registration will be restricted until I can fix the problem with PHP wanting to use sendmail instead of plain SMTP. Users of this site will be given post level 4 access. This means the average user will be allowed to post, edit, delete and moderate content. In some special cases, I will grant some people elevated access. Rainman will be marked as my backup admin until he indicates that he does not desire the duty and someone else steps up to the plate.

This site will allow for content upload by the users, which means a sandbox has been setup. All uploads will reside in this sandbox, so you can upload pics or files of any type and link them from here (use the link: /wp-content/filename). I have enabled a plugin that will prevent bad behavior from occurring such as spam and email harvesting. I have also enabled a plugin that allows for users to select a theme that works best for them. Some of the plugins require changes to be made to the installed theme, so a limited number of themes are available. There is also support for users to add and manage site polls.

I have not set up some of the content such as the sidebar links or the categories. It was my intention to allow some of the users to do this. User level 5 is required to allow for category management, so I will have to debate this more later. Lastly, the sidebar is not consistent across the themes. Most of the sections are out of order and I need to go through the themes tomorrow and recitfy this.

If you would like an account, feel free to email me and let me know. Feedback is also welcome. If you experience any problems with the website, I would also love to hear about it (email me).

Thanks again and I look forward to everyone’s participation.

so i’ve been working on getting this drupal system up and running and i’ve run into many snags.

first, there is an ebuild in portage, but it sucks hardcore. it installs the modules, but does not execute their database scripts. some packages for the modules that are required are not installed. it requires a mail transport agent. there has been bug after bug in getting a basic system up and ready.

after getting it so users can at least make an account, i’ve come to the realization that drupal is mostly likely overkill. it allows for each user to have an account, and all kinds of features. you can rearrange the menu that the user sees, change the theme, install hundreds of plugins that each require tweaking. plus, the idea of everything being a “node” seriously pisses me off. figuring out how to just have 1 front-page and content posted there was more hassle than it was worth.

user blogs are just nodes and you have to alias those. the administrative user is just a regular user and you have to do some complicated tasks to get users correctly setup.

i worked on getting this all up and running on sunday and monday, and basically have nothing to show for it. you can see what i have setup here, but i would not recommend making an account. there is still a problem with the user registration and getting that to work was proven to be more than it’s worth.

so, i’ve revisited the idea of finding a decent content management system that fulfills my needs and i’ve run across 4 that _might_ do the trick (more investigation is required): geeklog, b2evolution, mambo, and e107. for now, they all seem to meet the basic need, but mambo and e107 do not appear to have spam protection. that may prove to be a problem. mambo has media uploading but none of the others seem to provide such functionality. i am going to install e107 first and see how that works, then try mambo, then b2evolution, and lastly geeklog (simplest of them all).

i’ll post more when i have something that i’m satisfied with.

ok, so for the last 2 hours or so, i’ve been working feverishly to get XLink to work with my psp. i’ve gotten a good ways into getting it to work, but i’ve hit one last major snag.

apparently, some of the games switch ssid’s midway. this presents a problem as XLink seems to lose the psp’s connection. so i tried using SSIDMGR in “auto pursuit” and it still fails. but rather than failing on some normal level, windows catches a BSOD error “BAD_POOL_CALLER”. not sure exactly what this means, but i imagine it has something to do with memory pool management.

i checked the XLink forums about this and didn’t find much. i have the tcp ports forwarded, i’m updating windows right now, the psp is detected by windows and XLink, and i can see other gamers in the lobby. i do not have bridging enabled so that eliminates most advice on the forum.

if anyone has had any success in connecting a PSP to a laptop in ad-hoc mode using XLink (kai), please let me know.

well, it seems i’ve finally been hit with comment spam. seems the spammers go off of the RSS feeds to automatically check and see who has made several recent updates to their feed. sorry for any inconvenience, but i will have to turn on word verification to prevent comment spam from now on.

i’ve been hankering to play my psp online, but unfortunately, most games only seem to work in ad-hoc mode rather than infrastructure mode. then i came across the xlink project. it seems that they might be able to let me tunnel most of the psp games available.

the good news is it was written in java IIRC, which means they developed a linux client. while i don’t believe there is an ebuild maintained in the gentoo portage tree, it still should be packages in a manner so that i can make a contained folder and maintain the installations myself.

the only thing i’ll need to make sure i have setup correctly is the hardware. i will apparently need a wireless NIC installed on the server so that my setup mirrors this example.

more updates once i’ve set it up and tested it.

when i was in high school, my first car was a ’92 mazda 626. i had a job as a waiter that paid $2.13 plus tips. You can image that my income was modest at best. i filled up my 626 on $10 of gas ($1.20 per gallon) once every 2 weeks.

fast forward 7 years; gas now costs $2.99 per gallon. i filled up today at kroger’s for $2.79, thanks to my $0.10 discount, which totaled at $34.34. with hurricane katrina, some places in america are really starting to feel the pinch of the oil industry’s control over america. some BP pumps in georgia are paying $6 a gallon (much like the poor saps in europe who pay per litre).

energy costs have sky rocketed and there’s no hope for them to come down. when gas prices hit $2.30, i said to myself that i would consider getting a much more fuel efficient car such as a prius. well, i am now considering the idea; playing with the idea of not wanting an impreza anymore.

i’m still waiting to see if there are anymore great innovations from japan that can reduce my need of oil.

update: i wrote this last night and today i saw a sign for the new Jetta. the new Jetta TDI is being advertised as having 43 mpg. that makes the Jetta sound very attractive. diesel is usually cheaper than regular gasoline, but i don’t really know how it differs. i want to do some research on diesel before i decide it’s a good idea.

as of late, i’ve started to get tired of using blogger. to quote someone i read on a competitor’s forum, “blogger is the fisher price of blogs.” i’ve investigated several content management systems, such as drupal, wordpress, and typo3.

wordpress seemed nice, but not much better than blogger. the only additional functionality that seemed interesting is the ability to categorize all postings.

typo3 looked ok, but it didn’t seem right. typo3 seemed to be geared more towards static type of pages, rather than a slashdot type of posting system. so i basically ruled this out as a possibility.

i checked out drupal last. drupal seemed to allow for community content posting, even a book publishing feature. there are plenty of modules that provide functionality that i would find useful such as a book and movie reviewing plugin. you can make user accounts and manage the entire site from an admin page. it also has plenty of themes. drupal became my choice for a CMS system.

i would like to setup a site so some of the old CS crew from UTSA can have a place to communicate. ideally, it would be a community blog-type of system like slashdot (not for news per se). some of the crew has already shown interest in participating.

so far, i have installed and setup mysql. i had to modify my USE flags to get drupal to install as it’s only available for ~x86 and my system is a x86 system. currently, it is installed but the database include file seems to be incorrectly setup. once i resolve that issue, i will configure the site and begin testing it. eventually, i may even fully migrate this blog to that site. it may take some work however; i’ve seen that many people experience some trouble in the migration.