Aug 2007

Or perhaps in Slytherin
You’ll make your real friends,
These cunning folk use any means
To achieve their ends.

How much of your destiny is truly predetermined? How much of it is self-fulfilling prophecy? (There are technical terms for these things, I think, except I can’t remember them. Confirmation bias? Forer effect?)

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Aug 2

getting mephisto (trunk) to work on dreamhost

I found all of this rather confusing, since I’m pretty sure I downloaded the same version of Mephisto to my local machine as well as to my Dreamhost account. But I got things running on my local machine with no problem, but had to struggle for a couple of days to get it to work on Dreamhost (with Ruby 1.8.5 and Rails 1.2.3 as of this writing.)

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Aug 2

bloc party "pioneers"

The video is awesome.

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Aug 2

wordpress → typo → mephisto

Now, bear in mind, there are decent scripts lurking in vendor/plugins/mephisto_converters that will do a reasonable conversion from either Wordpress→Mephisto or Typo→Mephisto. The problem that comes up, however, is the dichotomy between categories and tags. While I was still using Wordpress (which only offers categories and does not offer tags), I was basically using categories as tags. I never really did get into the whole semantic partitioning between categories vs. tags and find that tags alone satisfy my organizational mindset (meaning, complete chaos, but I digress.

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Aug 3

mika "happy ending" revisited

Wow. This puts a different spin on ”Happy Ending” by Mika.

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Aug 3

vaguely troublesome

Some inchoate misgivings haunt me this early morning. My confidence is at once bolstered and yet shaken.

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Aug 6

i'm not sure why i didn't do this earlier

So the experiment here is to see if I can just hack Blosxom and make it read XML files instead of the standard text files it reads.

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Aug 6

andromeda

The Sci-Fi Channel had like six back-to-back episodes of the show “Andromeda”, whose concept was originally conceived by Gene Roddenberry (the creator of the original “Star Trek.”) What made me stop was that Nia Peeples[wikipedia][myspace] was a guest character on a particular episode. It turns out that Lexa Doig[wikipedia][IMDb] is a main character (in fact, the title character.) Why am I not aware of these things?

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Aug 7

purpose

Hoping that when I find myself face-to-face with an ICBM with a neutron bomb payload, I won't have to say the same thing

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Aug 7

jacking a macbook (immersion/submersion)

So my sister is out of the country for another month and a half, and she purposefully left her computer at my parents’ house, so I’ve started using it. It’s a MacBook with an Intel Core Duo running at 1.83 GHz with 1 GB of RAM, literally twice as fast as my iBook G4 with 1.28 GB of RAM, and it’s pretty sweet.

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Aug 7

hbo

My sister has hooked me to HBO original serieses (er, yeah, I know that’s not a real word.) She has been obsessed with ”Entourage” which has now grown on me.

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Aug 8

cocoa vs carbon (an on-going debate)

Even six and a half years after the debut of Mac OS X, this programming API debate continues to draw ~~flames~~ passionate cries of outrage from both camps: the classic Mac OS developers versus the NeXTish developers. [Carbon viewpoint][Cocoa rebuttal] And while Apple does officially intend for Carbon and Cocoa to be both native, first-class APIs, I always got the feeling that the ultimate target was Cocoa. This is unsurprising, considering that Cocoa, derived from NEXTSTEP, is therefore sort of Steve Jobs’ baby.

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Aug 8

one for the road (another shitload of scattered thoughts)

I really can’t articulate why I just don’t feel right. There is a part of me that is sure that I’ve always felt like this, and it’s kind of silly to question the matter now.

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Aug 9

kablog revisited

In addition to stealing my sister’s MacBook, I’ve also taken her old phone, and so I’ve installed a blogging client on it, which I am testing right now against Mephisto.

Aug 9

blogging clients (the good, the bad, and the ugly)

So far, I’ve tried three desktop blogging clients for Mac OS X: Journler, MarsEdit, and Ecto.

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Interesting. You may have heard the song ”Glamorous” by Fergie. The chorus has been driving me crazy:

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Aug 12

fatherhood

Odd, the synchronicity of this post from someone who is going to be a father. (P.S., the asking of highly detailed, extremely specific questions is not a sign that someone is going to be a good father. In fact, it is extremely annoying to the average health care provider, whether midwife, nurse, or physician, and for some reason, the information they have never seems to comport with either the reasonable guidelines suggested by the American Academy of Pediatrics, or the reasonable guidelines afforded by what is traditionally called “common sense.” One could even go as far to say that such nit-picking and attention to often irrelevant detail is a sign that things may go very badly, and that this individual may very well stifle all things that are good about being a child. The specific details of feeding regimens—except in regards to what will allow your baby not to choke to death from aspirating milk—are pretty pointless, since the correct answer to the question of “When should I feed my baby?” is “When he/she is hungry” and believe me, they’ll tell you when they’re hungry, and the correct answer to “What should I feed my baby?” is “Milk” for the first six months of life. There is a raging debate as to whether you should use breast milk or formula, and the data has a lot of good things to say about breast milk, but if, for whatever reason, this is not going to be an option, I would not let your baby starve to death because someone tells you that formula is evil. Bottom line: you’re doing fine, in my opinion.¹

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Aug 12

atm (against the mainstream)

In an [article in the Chicago Sun-Times][1], Steven Pinker brings up some ideas that are often met with knee-jerk reactions. (The terms “sexist,” “racist,” and “fascist” seem to pop up in the brain for some reason.)

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Aug 12

if I were an evil supervillain

…I would be Apocalypse

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Aug 12

cross-posting

I’ve been trying to cross-post some of my blog posts on MySpace. Why do I bother, you may ask? Frankly, it’s probably because, deep down inside, I’m a narcissist and an exhibitionist, and I want to expose myself to as large a population as possible, and fact of the matter is, everyone and their mom seems to be on MySpace.

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Aug 14

back to the beginning

Mephisto broke for some reason. It may have been the plugin that I was experimenting with. But even when I took it out again, it stayed broken. I kept getting the dreaded 500 error. So I did a clean re-install. The blog itself is now still accessible (although I moved it to chaosanddisorder.net.) But I can’t get into the admin page.

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Aug 15

fubar. snafu.

So apparently it was all Dreamhost’s fault. Both Mephisto and Movable Type are working at reasonable speeds. I still stand by the notion that Dreamhost really can’t handle Ruby on Rails very well. I’m looking into switching to (or at least adding on) a different shared host. Site5 looks promising.

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Aug 15

more fubar

D’oh! Another thing I realized is that I just nuked my Mephisto database. The only thing still sitting on the server are some random archives and the index, and luckily, the Atom feed. I have my Wordpress install backed up, and my database for Typo is still around, so the only thing I’m probably missing are a few posts between the last time I used Typo and the oldest entry I posted from Mephisto that is still in the Atom file. Hopefully I can import all this stuff without too much headache.

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Aug 15

that heat, that heat, that heat

Pardon my French, but it’s hotter than a motherfucker out there. This wouldn’t be a big deal at all if I actually had air-conditioning. I’m actually contemplating the idea of renting a hotel room just so I can turn the thermostat to 55 degrees and chill. Literally.

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Aug 16

like a whelk in a supernova (scattered thoughts continue)

Well. It’s hot. What can I say. I’ve spent the entire day floating from cafe to cafe because I couldn’t stand being inside my air-conditionless apartment. (I really dug Influx Cafe, and they even have free wi-fi!) After that I even headed over to Fry’s (after almost getting into an accident after a guy popped a tire on the freeway and nearly rammed me as he headed to the shoulder) and contemplated buying a portable air-conditioner. But seeing as how I don’t have $399, I ended up leaving empty-handed.

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Aug 16

Marié Digby

Looks like fellow Angeleno and California Golden Bear Marié Digby is making it big time.

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Aug 17

trying to convert atom to something MT can read

I contemplated the idea of simpling writing an XSL stylesheet to convert Atom to WXR because this is one of the formats that MT can import. But unfortunately there is no codified spec for WXR, so I have no idea which elements I can safely ignore. And I don’t want to comb through the WXR-to-MT plugin to figure out what MT is actually reading (although I may end up doing this anyway.)

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Aug 17

on the road again

The weather has cooled down wonderfully, but it’s still like an oven inside my apartment. I give up. I’m going to go to my parents’ house in L.A. and bask in air-conditioned glory. Sure, I have to go to work on Sunday, making this a short trip, but whatever.

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Aug 17

perl script for converting atom to MT import format

Ideally, this should probably be a plugin that uses the MT API, but this little bit of kludgery seems to do the trick. Be forewarned, I used a lot of perl modules that may be non-standard.

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Aug 20

indecision

The problem I’m having with Movable Type is I don’t like how the permalinks work. Since using Blosxom, I’ve grown accustomed to permalinks of the type such as http://domain.name/yyyy/mm/dd/slug, which happens to be the default format of Wordpress and Mephisto. (This was actually one of the reasons I wasn’t fond of Typo, because of the it inserts the word article between the domain name and the year. I found this unnecessarily crufty.)

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Aug 21

mephisto on Mac OS X

Currently, I am actually running a copy of Mephisto on my sister’s MacBook. Navigating the interface seems marginally faster than interacting with a remote copy on Dreamhost, but that could all be placebo effect. The main reason I wanted to do this is because I didn’t want to have to SSH into my shell account on Dreamhost for troubleshooting purposes. To be fair, it seems like they’ve taken care of their networking issues and the massive amounts of latency is now gone, but still.

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Aug 22

there and back again

So after much toil and trouble, I managed to migrate back from MT4 to Mephisto. I really wasn’t into the way MT4 handles archives. Of the blog engines I’ve tried so far, there are only really three that allow me to have permalinks the way I like them (domain.name/yyyy/mm/dd/slug). These are (1) Blosxom, (2) Wordpress, and (3) Mephisto. Granted, Blosxom doesn’t do this out of the box. (Actually, Blosxom doesn’t do much of anything at all out of the box) I probably would’ve stuck to Typo if I could’ve figured out how to get rid of articles from the permalink. Oh well.

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Aug 24

harry potter and the lord of the rings

This idea was stolen shamelessly from this page that satirically insinuates that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a thinly-veiled rewrite of The Lord the Rings. Being the Middle-Earth ~~loser~~ otaku that I am, I had to adjust a few plot points:

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Aug 25

rails grief/bot hammering

Not sure this made any difference, but I reverted down to r7357 for Edge Rails because r7358 kept running into MySQL out of memory errors.

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Aug 25

never what you expect

So, yes, now it's Simplelog, yet another blog engine running on Ruby on Rails. I guess I'll be sticking to the stable distribution right now, although it doesn't look like the codebase has really been touched in the past 6 months.

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Aug 25

summer is beginning to give up its fight

Transplants from the Midwest and the East Coast laugh at Southern Californians whenever we mention the idea of seasons. But I grew up in L.A., and I've lived the past three years in San Diego, and I swear to you there are seasons down here.

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Aug 27

haunted by something that never was

I find it ironic when I think of who exactly got me to start reading the Harry Potter series in the first place. But that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

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Aug 27

total eclipse of the heart

For some strange reason, I wake up at 1:45 a.m. My eyes are gooey and difficult to open because I fell asleep with my contacts in. I gaze outside my windowsill, and there's the full moon gleaming down upon me, and I remember that today, there's supposed to be a lunar eclipse.

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Aug 28

it's never enough (successfully migrating from mephisto to simplelog)

When you get down to it, Mephisto has all the things I want in a blog engine. Non-crufty permalinks. (Only Wordpress formats its permalinks similarly, although you can easily get this from Blosxom.) A clean interface (Simplelog is probably the only one that is as clean.) A templating system that doesn't utilize nested angle-brackets (something that every single templating system out there has a problem with, except for Liquid, XSLT, and Erubis.) A templating system that strives to separate business logic from presentation (this is something I hate about PHP, and it's the thing that drove me away from Wordpress and which keeps me away, despite the fact that it has been the easiest blog engine to deal with so far. This is the thing that I love about XSLT despite its obtuse, arcane syntax. This is what I fear about Erb, because it makes it so easy to insert Ruby into your templates, leading to the potential of a PHP-like mess. Granted, Ruby is a much cleaner language than PHP, but still.)

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Aug 28

i am seriously dying

I just wanted to say that there is a beautiful girl sitting across the room from me and it just reminds me how fucking hopeless I am. Hahaha.

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Aug 28

migrating from mephisto to simplelog

So I managed to teach myself how to use Rails a little, mainly, how to utilize the magic that is ActiveRecord (which unfortunately probably took me at least 48 hours of sustained effort spread out over the last six days.) ActiveRecord makes me almost forget that I'm dealing with a SQL database. I don't have know any arcane syntax. I just have to know Ruby, which is an extremely Zen-like thing to know. (I know it's a stereotype, but, damn, you've got to hand it to the Japanese.) OK, I'm oversimplifying. I haven't really gotten the hang of join tables, but its nothing that convoluted kludgery can't get around.

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Aug 28

clinical definition of blogorrhea? (damn Lord Byron)

I don't know why. I've been once again obsessed with the sad and sorry life of Severus Snape, and how he lost the only woman he loved, and how his life was effectively ended after she was murdered.

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Aug 29

the third way

I learned a valuable lesson from a fallen priest back in high school. At the time, I didn't know his crimes, and the lesson loses no value because of them. (He was eventually accused and proven to have molested several children.)

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Aug 29

nelly furtado "all good things (come to an end)"

I’ve been obsessed with song lately. I’m not sure why. It’s pretty catchy, though. Very “Dust in the Wind”-like, or maybe “Sound of Silence”-ish.

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Aug 29

dream academy "please, please, please let me get what i want"

Dum spiro, spero

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Aug 29

judybats "being simple"

…and I want to be good, but good is being simple. Simple is forgetting. I simply can’t forget….

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Aug 30

accidentally clicking on photo booth. the free wi-fi cafe tour.

Whoops!

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Aug 30

mark ronson featuring daniel merriweather "stop me"

Mark Ronson covers the Smiths.

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Aug 31

chief complaint: indecisiveness, avoidant behavior

Despite religiously taking my medications, I’m still not quite all that functional. I mean, I suppose the good things are that I’m not having any problems at work, and I’m not sleeping sixteen hours a day anymore.

mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

Aug 2007