So it sounds like we’re going to have a dumpster in the driveway this Friday, and a hammer-swinging party on Monday morning, as well as a window delivery. I may see if I can get a personal day off from work just so that I can aid in the destruction and help fill the dumpster—besides that debris, there’s an air conditioner that needs to come out of the attic, an old gas heater that needs to come out of the garage (it’s the size of a professional gas range) and several large bags of garbage in the basement. I’m tempted to have the dumpster size upgraded just to be able to take advantage of the opportunity.
RE the air conditioner mentioned above—it’s a holdover from when the Doctor had several boys bunking in the attic. His handyman hacked the window apart to install the unit in the upper pane, then built a crappy single-pane panel to fill the lower half. It needs increasing amounts of tape, nails, and insulation to stay closed and sealed each year, so I think its time has come. Lowe’s sells a replacement vinyl window of the correct size for $115 off the shelf, which I’m planning on installing before the weather gets too cold. The real problem will be getting it down out of the attic.
Last night I finally installed an RJ-45 jack on the loose wire in our bedroom and hooked up a spare Airport Express in order to extend the range of our wireless network, which is based out of the FIOS router in the basement. I still have to set aside a rainy afternoon to trace down, label, and organize the mass of spaghetti in our basement, which has been loosely organized but not cleaned up. My efforts to carefully label and organize each run have been about 50% successful, but there’s a lot of wire down there with no identification.
No, We’re not selling the house. Or leaving the leafy, muggy idyll of the Baltimore suburbs. I’m talking about webhosting, specifically the hosting of this particular website, which has become slower than the Chinese traffic jam lately. Simple HTML requests are fast enough, but serving any kind of PHP from WordPress can be measured in minutes, which is unacceptable. The tentative plan goes something like this:
Get the caching situation sorted out– Done. Does anybody see a difference in load times? I do.- Switch out the template for a little while to see if there’s something there that’s slowing things down.
- Look through the template to see if there’s anything in the code that’s slowing things down—a rogue plugin, greedy PHP call, or flaky image request.
Optimize the database to see if that’s the issue.- Set up a mirror over on my other site, load the database, and see if it’s any faster over there (meaning the DB server here is just slow or overloaded).
Things seem to have sped up around here with last week’s WordPress upgrade. I’m also experimenting with moving my RSS feeds over to FeedBurner, mostly to speed things up and for the built-in reports. So if you may find that your old RSS links don’t work, just use this link and bookmark it. Let me know if it works for you.
I made a backup of the Idiotking database and upgraded the engine to WordPress 3.0 last night, which I’m hoping will speed things up around here. Simple HTTP requests to the website come up quickly but anything WordPress related (well, PHP related) is still slow as dirt, so I’m going to spend some time monkeying around with things here on the site to see what the culprit is. So if you see things missing for a while (the sideblog or Flickr feed at the top, for example) you’ll know I’m testing things out. So far, doing simple things like adding a post and editing on the backend seem to be much faster.
As always, if you see anything hinky, let me know in the comments.
1. We have plumbing in the new (old) half-bath on the side porch! Mr. Scout and his plumber hacked, sawed, and felled a 300-lb. cast iron vent pipe from the side of the house, replacing it with a temporary in-wall unit until after the 4th of July. This morning, after delivering Finn to daycare, I picked up a new toilet and sink from the Gucci Lowe’s. They will get installed tomorrow along with the door and some temporary drywall to make a functional bathroom for the parade.
2. The carburetor on the Scout is being assembled as I type, and hopefully I will get a call this evening with an update and the go-ahead to pick it up. Which is good, because we have new piles of debris to haul away from the house.
3. I made a few edits to the files here on the site in an attempt to speed up pageloads. Let me know if you see any difference (it’s that little link to the left that says “comment”).
4. Plans are afoot for a vacation stay in the Outer Banks in September right around Finn’s birthday. We have a house picked out with a stunning view of the beach and a lovely in ground pool for the girl to splash around in. We are excited to have something fun to look forward to.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I started the long, laborious process of manually adding hand-coded entries from 2001-2005 into WordPress this evening. It would be great to finally have all of this stuff in one place, and I’m not as concerned with archiving the design (such as it is) for posterity anymore. It’s taking a long time—I got through March, February, and half of January 2005—because I’m adding tags, categories, and dates, as well as updating broken links. This is going to take several months of work, but it’s kind of fun to go back through this stuff and reread it. I’m glad I’ve kept this weblog up, even if it’s been sparse at times. It’s nice to have an idea of what we were doing X years ago.
Longtime readers (all four of you) might notice some changes around here, and that’s because the gasping, wheezing hamster that once powered this site has been transplanted by a sleek new robot called WordPress. The content is all the same; some of the permalinks from the old site may not work, and some of the pictures may be wonky in size or format. I’m doing a lot of housecleaning in the backend to make things better, but one of the best new improvements is a world-class comment spam system, which means registration and login and all of that other crap is no longer needed.
The new look of this site is by no means set in stone, so expect some major tinkering around here in the future. What you see before you is a placeholder until I can get some more dedicated time devoted to a sparkly new design; the beauty of WordPress is that it’s a breeze to edit and tweak, as opposed to the 3.3 version of MovableType, which was equal parts black magic, particle physics, detective work, cursing, and blind luck.
The sidebar links archive does still exist (and shows up inline with all the other content, currently) and will be integrated into the site like it was before; I had to do some database reorganization and add it as a new category in order to work within WordPress.
The humorous part about all of this is that I actually had WordPress installed, updated, and running a current import copy of the original Idiotking site back in July of 2009, but I didn’t have the time to fool with it further.
Back at the Panera again today, because the stupid transformer behind our house blew out this morning for no particular reason, again. Of all the days to do so, this was a bad one; I’ve got sketches due this afternoon and a conference call. There’s nothing like shouting over the din of a coffeehouse during a conference call.
In happier news, a Flip Mino appeared on our doorstep this morning, mostly because the Kodak was sold out at Amazon and I’d still need to buy a memory card to use the damn thing. I opened it up before I left (clearly, they looked closely at the iPhone packaging; theirs was done very well) and within 15 seconds was shooting video. I then plugged it into the USB port of my MacBook, and within 20 minutes the battery was fully charged. Later this evening I’m going to do a side-by-side comparison of the video from my Canon G3 with the Flip video to see what the differences are. Overall, I like it very much so far.
Update: I totally get this thing now. And it’s really a work of genius; all of the best design cues (minus the case, which honestly feels a little cheap) are taken from generations of the iPod and put to good use here. What I’ve read elsewhere is completely true: It is absolutely perfect for capturing something quickly with a minimum of fuss and bother, at the expense of high quality output. But the portable form factor, ease of use, and utility outweigh my desire for uber-quality HD video—I’ll get something that shoots high-quality video a little later. Right now, this is all we need.
The spam issue has been solved, I believe. Yesterday evening the site got the shit kicked out of it by spambots, at the rate of one a minute, for about three hours. I shut commenting down completely, and then by accident stumbled on CommentRegistration, a plugin that lets me authenticate commenters locally. So if you’ve commented here before, please take a moment to register (it’s fast, free, and you’ll get a new toaster with deposits over $1,000!) so you can continue to comment all you like. I’ve fixed the problem with registrations not working correctly. I’ll verify you, and then you don’t need to wait a day to see your comment come through!
Really, give it a try so I can test out the system. Please!
In other news, the rain barrels are empty and the air conditioners are out of the windows. It’s officially autumn around here, which means I need to insulate the gutted exam room this weekend to keep some of our heat inside, as well as mix up some hydraulic cement and seal up the holes in the ice room downstairs. And, remember that cabinet I started refinishing last year? I have a few more screws to drill to finish it off so that we might actually use it! Oh, and there’s the lawn, which has two weeks’ growth and half the neighborhood’s leaves… I’m very optimistic, I know.
Update 10.23: I’ve disabled that plugin and removed it, because I was getting unreliable and unexplained results. The documentation is pretty sparse, and there isn’t any customization available unless I start hacking Perl, which I’m too tired to do right now. I’d like to just enable TypeKey on this site (a hosted authentication system) and be done with it, but the documentation for that is about as sparse as it is for this plugin. I found this writeup of someone else’s experience, and with a little tweaking, I’ve got 90% of the service hooked up. Please do me a favor and try this system out. I know it’s another web service to sign up for, but they can handle stuff like lost passwords and info updates where that plugin I tried could not. I’d really like to hear from you all; I just can’t deal with all of the spam right now. And please let me know how it works for you.
Matt Haughey, the creator of MetaFilter, just switched his personal weblog over to TypePad, and wrote a post about why he did so. If someone as technically proficient as he decides to make his life easier, I’m listening. There’s real food for thought in there, and I have to say, after four+ years of banging my head against MovableType, using a hosted CMS package is looking pretty good right now. One of the reasons this weblog hasn’t changed its look in two years is because it’s such a goddamned hassle to do so. For the short term, I’ll stick with what I’ve got, and look into a more modular template system for 3.3. Down the road? Who knows.
Comments are currently turned off due to some serious spam issues. I’m working on some fixes for the problem.
Update: They’re back on, but you’re going to need to register to leave a comment. It should only be a one-time thing, and very easy to do. Meanwhile, all of the images are now too big. I’m working on a fix for that tomorrow.
Sage is back from a hellish hospital visit. His belly got shaved again, and he spent the majority of last evening dragging himself around the atrium in an opiate-induced haze. The doctor still can’t give us a clear determination between cancer or a very bad infection, but in the meantime he gets to eat whatever the hell he wants in the hopes it’ll put some meat back on his bones.
There is drywall on the porch as of last night. The guy I’m using flaked on us twice but finally showed up on Monday to start the job; I’m not altogether pleased with the initial results but I’m hoping his skill with a drywall float will cover up the major blemishes.
We’re getting ready for a trip north to see my folks and present The Belly to the extended family this weekend. Showers will be attended, parties will be held, pictures will be taken, and laughter will be heard. In the meantime, I’m doing everything I can to get a bunch of work out the door before we leave.
We have made it through ¾ of a dish of cherry clafoutis and ½ of a blueberry pie since Monday; there is still about 4 lbs. of blueberries and cherries left over, waiting to be canned. Blueberry pie is delicious for breakfast, by the way.
Also: I’m fooling with TypeKey authentication for comments on this site, seeing as I’m getting slammed with dumb spam for russian pr0n and offshore gambling sites. If you have any problems with signing up, let me know via email and I’ll either fix it or disable the whole thing. (If you’ve got a TypePad account, I’m pretty sure you have a TypeKey account too).
Update: Nevermind. The TypeKey documentation was too hard to find in under 5 minutes, and I don’t have 5 minutes right now. Back to moderated comments.