mahiwaga

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.

The Liquid plugin also seems to be acting up. To be honest, I don’t know when I broke it. I diff’ed the original code in the mephisto repository against the code in the liquid repository, and I couldn’t find anything that would explain the change.

Basically, it seems that the comment forms are broken. I was previously getting this error:

Liquid error: you have a nil object when you didn't expect it! The error occurred while evaluating nil.accept_comments?

This seems to imply that the article drop is malfunctioning for some reason, but this doesn’t make any sense because the actual article is rendered OK, and the if statement seems to evaluate fine as well.

Which leads me to believe that something is broken with the {% commentform %}, which seems really mysterious.

To top it all off, it looks like both Yahoo Slurp and the Googlebot are hammering my site, and whenever Rails accesses the database, it runs out of memory. Wonderful.

Just how many blog engines am I going to have to go through before I find one that I’m happy with? The thought of going back to Wordpress makes my blood curdle.

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.

That’s one of the things with Mephisto. All the neat stuff is in trunk, and the last stable version is pretty old. Supposedly, trunk works pretty well, but the problem is that it needs Edge Rails, which adds another confounding factor when the app crashes and burns.

It seems like GoogleBot and Yahoo Slurp have stopped killing my site. I guess Mephisto on a Dreamhost shared hosting plan is destined to crash and burn, anyway. Ah well.

Now the problem is that the importer is not working as advertised. You have to create an MT Import Format file, which is actually a piece of cake with Ruby and Rails. However, the importer doesn’t want to read the one I generated, and peeking through the source, it looks like it doesn’t import comments anyway. Bleh.

So it looks like a little more Ruby and Rails hackery for me. One thing that was nice about Mephisto is that it has a rather robust import system, at least once you know the source schema. Let’s see if I can reverse the puppy and have it write to SimpleLog’s DB instead.

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.

Granted, the differences are very subtle. I mean, if you randomly guessed that the weather in S.D. is sunny with a high around 72°F, you’d probably be right about 90% of the time, no matter what time of year. But 72°F in October feels different from 72°F in July.

To me, it’s the taste of the air. Autumn always makes me think of the smell of smoke. Unfortunately, this is usually because a national forest is burning, but it definitely colors my memories. When ever I catch that smoky taste in the air, I know that summer is pretty much over.

The other thing is that it still gets dark earlier and earlier as the calendar wends its way from solstice to solstice. In June, the sun set sometime around 8:30 p.m., and it felt like you had hours and hours of daylight. Now, the sun sets around 7:30pm, and that hour makes a difference. I can already feel that seasonal affective disorder setting in.

So because I’m working a night shift tonight (oh joy), I made my way to the local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for a latte with extra espresso. And I caught a whiff of that autumn scent. It lasted for about five minutes at the most, and then it was summer again, but it was enough. Time marches on.

Hopefully the caffeine does its job. I thought I had done well with sleeping today, considering that I managed to sleep for four hours after my swing shift yesterday, and another four hours sometime this afternoon. Unfortunately, I just realized that I’m still another eight hours down, since I’m not going to be sleeping tonight.

Must not think of sleep. Must not think of sleep.