Archive for the ‘blog meta’ Category

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Thursday, 25 August 2011

This 'blog was off-line for more than 24 hours after an event on the server. A technician at the hosting service ultimately identified the problem as a conflict between a security up-date and the theme — software establishing the appearance (lay-out, color-scheme, &c) of the 'blog. (I find the same conflict when I attempt to use WordPress Default Theme 1.6, upon which my theme was originally based.)

I am told that the administrators can and will change a configuration of the server to allow that theme to be used; but, to get the 'blog back up-and-running in the mean-time, I am temporarily using a very different theme. If, by the time that you read this entry, the 'blog looks pretty much as you're used to seeing it, that means that I have returned to the original theme.

Not Dead; Just Pining

Saturday, 6 August 2011

The recent relative quiescence of this 'blog has obtained from a confluence of things. I have rival demands of my time or of my energy, have not always been in the best of moods, and have not known quite how I want to formulate some of the entries upon which I have been working.

With respect to the last, one problem has been that I've wanted to present the entries in a certain order (or at least a certain preörder), which has allowed bottle-necks to develop. I think, now, that I'd better loosen-up on some of these considerations of the order of entries.

Eternity Is Not a Deadline

Sunday, 22 November 2009

As previously noted, back at the end of April 2008, when WordPress version 2.5.1 was the latest stable release, I reported a bug in the handling of nested q[uotation] elements by WordPress. The bug was scheduled to be fixed with version 2.7. Then, as the release of version 2.7 approached, the bug-fix was rescheduled for version 2.9. When I discovered this rescheduling, I wrote

And there seems no assurance that, about half-a-year from now, that target won’t be reset to version 3.1.

Well, that was actually more than 11 months ago, but two days ago, with version 2.9 in beta, the fix was rescheduled for Future Release, which is to say that it really isn't scheduled at all.

I don't really want to dive into the code to fix the error myself. For one thing, I've been thinking of writing an independent software package that would contain some of the same functionality as that of the package in which the bug resides, and I neither want to license the code of someone else nor face challenge as having perhaps cribbed said code. Further, I'd expect to have to invest significant effort to understand the code before I could properly patch it, and might have no use for the understanding after the patch.

Impending Move

Sunday, 1 February 2009

Some time within the next two weeks, I am going to shift this domain at its 'blog from one host to another. The move should be transparent to visitors. There is some chances that a comment might be lost, if it is made between the cloning of the underlying dB and the up-dating of DNS tables, though I will take measures to try to avoid such loss.

Un-Bleh?

Friday, 30 January 2009

My lack of posts here have been an artefact of my illness. I managed to comment here-and-there to various journals and 'blogs, but putting together an entry to my own 'blog has seemed too much. I'm considerably better now, though I'm still coughing and somewhat congested.

One of the aspects of my being ill has been that I don't have a clear sense of the timing of events over much of the last few weeks, even though I felt fairly lucid during most of that time.

On the worst day, whenever that was, I awoke as weak as a kitten — I had to lay down and rest after the effort of simply finding two matching socks in my laundry — but had to go out and get something for food energy. I managed to get to CVS/pharmacy (a half-block from my home) and got orange juice. After I drank it, I was very cold. I wasn't thinking clearly enough to reälize that I was cold because, on the one hand, I had just put about a pint of cold fluid in my body, and, on the other hand, was too low in energy to generate off-setting body heat. I just climbed under my bed-covers and passed-out. When I awoke, I was over-heated, and thought I'm like an old mouse, who has lost his ability to regulate his body temperature. But I was otherwise feeling much better; the carbohydrates and vitamins in the orange juice had been put to good use.

Later that day or some time on the next (I really don't remember), worried about me, the Woman of Interest placed an order for home delivery with Vons while I was asleep. This was probably a good idea, but in the event Vons quite dropped-the-ball. They originally gave her a two-hour window for expected delivery; at the end of that window, she got a call telling her that it would be another 20 minutes. She told them to telephone her if there were any problem. After instead about two more hours, figuring that local restaurants would soon close for the night, I went out. On my way, I let the Vons delivery man thorough a pedestrian gate to the apartment complex. When I got home, there was no food at my door; just a Sorry we missed you note. And, no, the delivery man hadn't called the Woman of Interest; as I noted to her, he didn't want to have to admit that the ostensible 20 minutes had been more like 120 minutes. (FWIW, I live less than half-a-mile from the nearest Vons store. As the Woman of Interest notes, they probably don't run the delivery service out of the nearest store, but it is none-the-less absurd that they cannot perform the equivalent of a half-mile delivery within two or even three hours.)

Coding Deficit

Friday, 12 December 2008

WordPress version 2.7 has been released.

About eight months ago, when 2.51 was new, I reported a bug that had been giving me grief, a mishandling of the HTML <q> element. WordPress.org automatically set the target of fixing this bug by version 2.7 — which, frankly, to me seemed rather unambitious. It's one thing not to expect to fix a bug in the very next bug-fix release, quite another to put it off for two minor versions.

In any case, I've been looking forward to version 2.7. Now it's out… …and the bug is not fixed. In fact, I've learned that about two months ago, the target was changed to fixing the bug by version 2.9, another two minor versions away. And there seems no assurance that, about half-a-year from now, that target won't be reset to version 3.1.

Unfed

Tuesday, 28 October 2008

LiveJournal has been failing in its attempts to fetch various feeds, including that for this 'blog. When I first saw that the feed to my 'blog was not being fetched, I examined the profile pages for various syndication journals on LJ; quite a few were reporting a parsing error, and next check times were passing without those next checks.

So far, there is no report at LiveJournal Status, at LJ Support, or at LiveJournal Maintenance indicating an awareness of the problem.

Up-Date: Well, the previously unretrieved entries have now been fetched, and now they appear one immediately after another on Friends pages.

Up-Date (2008:10/29 02:23 PDT): The fetching is failing again.

Turtle Travel

Saturday, 27 September 2008

The Woman of Interest and I have been wrestling with the migration of her site to a new host. Naturally enough, the new hosting service began yester-day to up-date its servers, and we were stymied in our efforts for a while as their own migration ran into difficulties.

If everything has now gone well, then, as DNS tables are up-dated, visitors will be routed to a new site that is indistinguishable to them from þe olde Site. If something has gone badly then, well, we will be at the task of fixing things.

Up-Date (20:18PDT): The relevant change is probably still propagating amongst DNS tables; but, otherwise, the move seems to have been successful. The new site seems virtually identical from the perspective of a visitor.

WordPress — Relative Specification of Directory

Tuesday, 19 August 2008

Amongst other things, I've been hacking at the theme for this 'blog, fixing bugs and simply tweaking things more to my liking. While I'm at this task, visitors are occasionally going to find the 'blog either cosmetically flawed or just plainly dysfunctional. (And, tragically, they may find it thus after I'm finished.)

In the course of my hacking, I wanted to use the PHP function file_exists() to check amongst files within the theme directory. One possibility would be to hard-code a relative specification of the theme directory (the theme slug appended to wp-content/themes/), but that approach isn't robust; it would increase the ways in which the theme could be broken by external change or by cloning.

While WordPress has a function call to return a specification of the directory, it does so in the form of an HTTP URL, notwithstanding that there is a call that explicitly requests the theme URL, to the same effect; meanwhile, PHP function file_exists() will choke on a URL. I went prowling around the WordPress documentation, and did some code-diving, but didn't find a function call or global variable for anything more like a relative specification of the theme directory.

However, there is a function call for the URL of the 'blog — get_bloginfo('template_directory'). My hack to get the relative specification, which could preface file-specs that could be usefully handled by file_exists(), was

substr(get_bloginfo('template_url'),strlen(get_bloginfo('url')) + 1)
The + 1 is to account for the fact that returns to queries to get_bloginfo() for directory URLs don't have a terminal slash.

Another Horse Arrives

Friday, 8 August 2008

I have received another, different CNN spoof e.mail, this one ostensibly from CNN Alerts <ontlook_1970@brace4u.com> with subject CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert, [screen capture of spoof e.mail] now with a link to http://missglobe-albania.com/cnnplus.htmlgo there only at your own risk. The page again seeks to download and install malware adobe_flash.exe. See my earlier entry CNN Trojan Horse Attack for some discussion of this malware.