brainwagon

Well, I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.0. Like all previous upgrades that I’ve performed, this one seems to have gone without a hitch, and all things that I expected to work seems to work just fine.

The biggest change that is immediately visible is the new posting interface, which uses a WYSIWG type interface. It seems pretty nice, and has the added advantage that it should be difficult to actually create HTML which doesn’t validate.

There is a new anti-comment spam gadget called Akismet that unfortunately requires a wordpress.com API key to function (I really don’t mind signing up for a key, but it seems silly to create a blog for me just to get a plugin key). There are also some changes to the permissions system which seem to mean that I can’t create a link in this post. I’ll submit it anyway, and then come back and try to figure out what the deal is.

Still, seems pretty nice!

Addendum: Hmmm. I suppose that I could just enter a link by hand.  That seemed to work okay.  If you just type the html, it seems to actually do the right thing.

I think I’m gonna try to upgrade to Wordpress 2 on the 2nd. If you can’t reach this site, you’ll know what’s up. See you when I’m back alive!

Mneptok let me know that comments on my blog were broken (I had forgotten to reinstall Image Magick when I upgraded the operating system). That should be fixed now. Let the comments commence!

I’m probably going to have some intermittent downtime today as I work on upgrading my FreeBSD server box. Expect full functionality tomorrow.

I feel strangely sad by the following graph:

According to statcounter.com, around 60% of you are still using Internet Explorer to read this blog.

For shame! If you are using IE, get thee over to a more sensible alternative, namely Firefox. Out with the old, in with the new!

General system badness today. I hope all will be better now.

The release of Wordpress 1.5 happened sometime, and I missed it. I’ll be doing an upgrade (and a bit of tidying of my generally messy stylesheets and a few other changes) in the the next few days or so. There may be some minor bits of downtime, but don’t panic! It will all be temporary.

Well, I was kind of depressed that only one person stepped forward to request a gmail account. Does everyone already have a gmail account? Well, perhaps so. Theo stepped up and mentioned the isnoop.net gmail invite spooler which redistributes unused gmail invites. They have 182K accounts in the queue, ready for distribution.

Wow, that’s 182 TERABYTES of untapped mailbox space. Amazing.

Anyway, I still have 48 gmail invites, ready for the asking. Send me an email and I’ll send you one back.

Something occurred this morning that I have never seen on a FreeBSD-stable box: something glitched and my webserver was hung (I suspect for a very short time) and the webserver was offline. If this affected your ability to read my blog or listen to my podcasts, my deepest apologies.

Well, my server has locked up a couple of more times in the last 24 hours. I’m perusing the FreeBSD-current mailing list to see what the difficulty is and hopefully will discover a remedy. Until then, your patience is appreciated. Thanks.

Addendum: It’s alive!

Well, here’s the long and the short of it. The short: don’t use FreeBSD-current on systems when you care about their stability. I’ve used it without problems for months, but recently did a cvsup of the system and recompiled the kernel, and uncovered a serious bit of instability which caused my machine to periodically lock up. I’ve now retrofitted my system to running 4.10-STABLE, and I hope I shall have no further problems.

I had some unscheduled system downtime today. A couple of times in the last couple days, my system (which was heretofore incredibly reliable) has mysteriously locked up while I was at work. Puzzling! I’m trying to sort it out, hopefully, there will be no repeats.