Digital Alterity

I managed to break nearly everything yesterday. If you didn’t notice any of it, take a moment to metaphorically pat me on the back for my keen Unix skills and responsiveness.

In an effort to keep all the userland programs on Bactroid.net more up to date, I dug into using portupgrade and its brethren. After a quick listing of my ports showed that over thirty of them were out-of-date, I typed and executed a command that would download, compile, and install every out-of-date program on my system along with every out-of-date dependency for each of those programs.

When the churning finally stopped, almost every system was malfunctioning. The web server was pointing at the wrong data. PHP just wasn’t working. Secure SMTP was non-existent. MySQL was so badly broken that even a complete reinstall didn’t help. I launched in immediately and started fixing things, but I didn’t actually completely sort things out until about seven this morning. I brought visible and critical systems up first, so the impact to people was pretty small if logs are to be believed.

The advantage to all of this madness is that I should now automatically grab the latest ports tree via CVS and send myself a report showing which programs have a source update available. That email will spawn appropriate GTD projects for the week, leading to a consistently up-to-date server with relatively little consistent effort on my part.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net

A while back on several of the popular knitting blogs, it became trendy to post something about blogging etiquette outlining ways that the writer wanted you to interact with the site. I decided to outline my anarchic vision for “etiquette” in interacting with me the write and the site as a whole.

Basically, I don’t care.

I’m not very uptight about what I write in my ChangeLog. I know full well that you read my posts about politics, religion, and masturbation. It’s just fine to talk about anything you read here because the Internet is a big public space. Expecting privacy seems silly to me. If I wanted something to be private, I wouldn’t post it on a web page.

If you see me in meatspace and recognize me, feel free to say hello even if I don’t know that you know me. Just let me know that you know me from the Internet, and we’re off. I might seem shy or standoffish compared to what you read here, but rest assured that it isn’t you. This is my normal reserved mode of operations. I don’t mind you talking to me even if I don’t seem “warm”.

Feel like rewarding me for a job well done? The best thing you can do is email me positive feedback. Sometimes I feel like I’m writing in a vacuum even though I know from the server stats that it isn’t true. I’ve added comments to the site, so feel free to drop me a line telling me when you enjoyed a particular post. If you feel this type of reward doesn’t express your gratitude, what on earth did I do to change your life so? If you must press, feel free to buy me something off of my Amazon Wishlist. It’s at the top of every post in my user information.

In essence, do what you want. Feel free to link to any entry. It’s public. That’s why I published it. Feel free to comment on the site or me personally wherever you want. It’s just fine with me if you make fun of me on other sites; I do some damned silly things. I’m a really easy-going guy so none of this bothers me at all. If you want to flame me about something, go ahead. There’s a lot less flaming in my life now that I don’t hang out on IRC and Usenet. Your flame might even make my day in some dysfunctional way. Just don’t expect me to defend my opinions because I don’t see the point in arguing.

Basically, have fun. The Internet is a giant playground, and Bactroid.net is my favorite sandbox. The very act of putting my sandbox in the playground means that I’m ready to share.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Etiquette

This should be the first ChangeLog entry to allow comments. Treat her gently, but give her a good workout as well.

To add a comment, just click on the “Comment” link below. You can submit comments even if you don’t have a Bactroid.net account, but Bactroid.net account holders will eventually be able to edit their posts, so make it good practice to sign in if you have an account.

You can use either Bactroid.net’s loosely-based-on-UBB-but-incompatible-enough-to-piss-you-off markup syntax or you can use a subset of HTML. Valid HTML tags are:

<i></i>
<b></b>
<em></em>
<strong></strong>
<a></a>
<blockquote></blockquote>

Anything else will get replaced with HTML entities. And, yes, I am going to add this ability into the ChangeLog system very soon. It should be cake since the new code is in a callable function.

Wiki edits should also work in the comments, so you can do bulleted or numbered lists. Footnotes will not work however until I decide they ought to.

Report bugs via email…or in the comments! Ha!

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net

I’ve spent most of the day working on getting the Bactroid.net comments system ready to launch. I’m doing all the work in my testing environment, so unfortunately there isn’t anything to see here on the live site. I’ve got the interface pretty well set now. The database backend is ready, and I’ve already got the ability to submit comments. I don’t have much more to go, but I don’t know that I’ll be working on this anymore today/tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll just need to work up the comments display (which is cake compared to the tasks of today) and handle the HTML translation. I hope to have everything ready by tomorrow afternoon, but I take no responsibility for the debugging gremlins that may show up along the way.

Comments will be open to both Bactroid.net users and anonymous users via the Internet. Anonymous users will optionally supply their Name, Email, and Homepage URL to “identify” themselves. Bactroid.net users will just have to supply their Username and Password to validate themselves. I’ve coded the authentication routines in a pretty open fashion, so I should be able to expand to other auth mechanisms as they become available. With any luck, OpenID (and therefore LiveJournal) authentication will be up an running within six months, but don’t construe that as anything approaching a promise.

Users can specify whether or not a ChangeLog entry is open for comments. The default choice is controlled by a preference in each user’s profile. If an entry is open for comments, the user can select an availability window of 1, 3, or 10 days. I may add the ability for indefinite comment windows later on, but I’d rather wait to see if that’s a real need.

It feels wonderful to have made so much progress on the comments project. After nearly a year of sitting on this project, it feels good to be so close to completion. When this is all said and done, I’ll have to reward myself with a tasty beverage.

Technorati Tags: Programming, Bactroid.net

Over the weekend, I added the ability to use a few MediaWiki formatting shortcuts in Bactroid.net on both the ChangeLog entries and the articles. You can now do bulleted and automatically numbered lists by doing something like this…

* Item 1
* Item 2
* Item 3

which yields something like this…

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3

Or you can do the number lists like this…

# Item 1
# Item 2
# Item 3

to get something like this…

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3

In addition, you can also use two equal signs to make a subheading. Your markup would look something like this…

== Subheading Title ==

Hopefully you’ll find these new edit styles as useful as I will. I keep all of my brainstorming in wiki-formatted lists, so this has become my lingua franca.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net

I have completely given up on all blogs and journal entries that don’t offer an RSS/XML feed. I don’t like having to constantly poll for new entries/articles.

Have they updated lately? No.
Have they updated lately? No.
Have they updated lately? No.

For over a year now, I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite as my RSS reader, and I’ve been thrilled with the time I’ve reclaimed just by not constantly refreshing the front page of Fark or Slashdot. If you’re on Bactroid.net, you have an RSS feed. If you’re on LiveJournal, you have an RSS feed. If you’re powered by Blogger or Moveable Type, you almost certainly have an RSS feed. Most blog software ensures that you do.

The downside to this has been that I almost never check User Status here at Bactroid.net. It doesn’t show up in your RSS feed, and I only visit the actual ChangeLog entry page when someone has posted an image.

Last night, while I was up and sick to my stomach, I started coding to keep my mind occupied, and I whipped up a generated RSS feed for each user’s status. You’ll find a convenient link to the feed just under your status queries in the sidebar immediately to the right.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net, RSS, XML

No, you didn’t somehow miss that article about soccer/football nearly a month ago. A bug in the article submission system didn’t fill out the field that decides whether or not to post the article. I just fixed it tonight when I noticed that my newest article about nationalism, the UK, and your never humble correspondent hadn’t posted as I expected.

So enjoy two new articles to read and pretend that the soccer article posted back in mid-October like it should have.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net, Writing, Bugs

Today is the last day you’ll hear from me for a little while. Tomorrow morning, I’m going into surgery to remove all of my wisdom teeth—two of which are “impacted” and “wedged in by bone”. The drugs they’re using to knock me out tend to throw me for quite a loop if the surgery experiences of my youth are any indicator. While I’m sure that I would post some interesting things tomorrow, I’m quite simply not allowed.

Given the fact that I’m going to be laid up for some indeterminate period over the weekend, I’ve decided to expand my ChangeLog hiatus into a vacation of sorts. While I might well publish my completed projects for the week, I won’t consider myself under any obligation to post anything for the next week. Expect the next ChangeLog entry with “substance” from me to appear on October 28.

I intend to spend my time in that week writing other things, reading, and playing FIFA (2005 for Game Cube and 06 for DS). I might work on illustrations for the first time since approximately when Jesus walked the earth. Basically I’m reclaiming about an hour a day for me to do whatever I feel like.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net, Vacation

I’ve had most of the day off from work due to the Homecoming holiday at UF, and it has been absolutely fabulous. I have spent nearly all of my time in front of my laptop listening to new music and hacking on projects for Bactroid.net that I never seem to get around to while working forty hours per week. In that vein, I have:

• Made it possible to see a list of current users just by accessing the User page without a specified user. This is a feature that Karen requested about a billion years ago. In the end, this only took about fifteen minutes (one SQL query and a bit of PHP).

• Made the Sections show up in the Bactroid.net RSS feed as categories. This will enable Technorati to assign those sections as tags. This change that I’ve been putting off for months took about five minutes. And that includes the time spent documenting the change.

• Eliminated the need for Bactroid.net’s content management system to run with PHP’s register_globals turned on. The code for Bactroid.net pre-dates PHP 4.2, so it was designed before register_globals was turned off by default. I went out of my way to secure the code in the first place, but it’s comforting to know that now the code runs just fine with the default php.ini file that ships with PHP. This took around two hours of programmer trance.

The only time I left the apartment today was to throw out a cardboard box and bring in the latest cube storage box from the trunk of the car. I’m as happy as Wayne Rooney in a nursing home.

Technorati Tags: Programming, PHP, Bactroid.net, Vacation

This post should be the first on Bactroid.net with Categories/Technorati tags. When users of the ChangeLog system, input an entry or edit an existing entry, they are presented with the option to add categories to their posts. The categories then link over to Technorati so that their search engine will apply tags to your post, helping others find information related to that in your post. Folks who have used Flickr will immediately understand this tag concept.

Categories are of course optional. If you don’t like using them, don’t click the “Add Category Information” link below the text box where you type your entry.

It’s entirely possible that future code updates might use these categories to allow users to look at only your posts that reference a certain topic, but right now, I’ve just built the framework mainly for Technorati tags.

Technorati Tags: Search Engines, The Internet, Bactroid.net, Technorati, Tags