Tag Archives: Technical Notes

Ok, so the server may not be going away for a little bit after all… First I’ve got to see if the Linksys EG-1032 gigabit network card will work in a blue & white G3 Mac.

Fortunately, we’ve got a spare around the office for just this sort of testing.

I’ll post the results here, on the off chance that it might be useful for someone, somewhere…

The server may be vanishing briefly this afternoon… Nothing too serious, just putting in a second network card. It’s pretty much an axiom that brief downtime for routine maintenance avoids prolonged downtime for emergency repairs.

There’s a new little ‘bug’ on the bottom of the links column… Clicking on it will take you to the site for a handy Movable Type plugin called “MT-Blacklist”. Among other things, it does a sort of pre-flight check of comments before posting to see if they contain links to any of a list of banned sites. If they do, the comments don’t get posted. It’s a bit heavy-handed, but it’s an effective tool to deal with some of the problems I’ve started to see…
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A friend of mine needs to borrow a laptop for National Novel Writing Month, so I’ve been tracking stuff down to put on the old PowerBook 5300 that I got from Wegener Media… It’s very much a bare bones machine. 1 GB hard drive, 32 MB of RAM and a little PowerPC 603e processor chugging away at 100 mhz… Not exactly the world’s speediest machine anymore, but it’ll work for word processing, and it’s been tricked out with external monitor support and ethernet…
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Seems that there’s someone out there spamming the comments on Movable Type blogs. Fortunately, there’s someone else out there who’s written a plug in to help block that sort of behavior. You can find out more about it or download it from the author at www.jayallen.org.

I need to either upgrade Perl on the server or find a freestanding installer for the Storable.pm module before it’ll work here, so I’ll still be spending some time smacking these guys down manually…

I was checking the server logs today and in addition to some hits from folks in Belgium and the Netherlands (hi over there by the way…) there was a link in from something called “Detroit Local Feeds.” It looks like it snags part of the RSS feed from all sorts of places that are listed with GeoURL and posts the most recent headlines. Very cool if you want to get an impression for what various people in different locations are yammering about. I’m adding their link to the sidebar…

I started out intending to write about this in the last entry, but I got kind of sidetracked.

One of the things I noticed when working on the wedding invitations and the out-of-town guest survival guide was how difficult it can be to find a good map of Ann Arbor. It gets even worse around the Medical Center. Not only are people trying to find their way around Ann Arbor’s arcane traffic system, they’re dealing with all sorts of stress. There’ve been a couple of times when I’ve walked people to their destinations simply because there’s no good way to give them directions on how to get there.

That’s one of the reasons that our office came up with this interactive map. It’s in a sort of late-beta stage, so if you’ve got suggestions for improvements, feel free to leave them in the comments here and we may be able to integrate them into the final version.

Booniverse fans rejoice! It’s back! Leaner and meaner, and powered by a shiny new version of Movable Type…

Yes, I said I didn’t want to do a whole ‘delete and reinstall’ thing, but I did it anyway, dammit, and it worked. Restoring the entry database from the backup tapes let me recover all but two or three of the published entries, and the text for them was easy to nab from their saved html files. Just goes to show how important it is to have a good backup system…

And I’m not talking about the Leonard Nimoy movie. I’m getting ready to poke a sharp stick into the server and start wiggling… My Fiancee’s blog has vanished in a strange way.
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I promise this’ll be the last geek out I do this week. If I post something tomorrow it’ll be cute pictures of birds or chipmunks or something, I promise. I put things like this in here because sometimes people get here by doing Google searches for PHP stuff and I’d like to give them something to make it worth their bother…

Plus, sometimes I’m a total geek.

Anyway, I’d just like to say “Wow Cool!” to whoever decided that PHP should be able to have dynamic variables…
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