Category: Meta-blogging

Spelunking my own blog

One of the odd things about having kept this up for ~15 years is that there is plenty of old stuff I don’t remember it all, like: https://www.cubiclehermit.com/archives/482

For the record.

I do not now, and I have never owned an iPod or Zune.

I’ve owned three MP3 players:
[….]
I keep hoping that battery life on my PDA/phones will improve to the point where it will not be necessary to have a separate MP3 player. Sadly, I see little improvement there, and my present phone (a new HTC Touch Pro) is something of a step backwards for music player use as they went from a semi-proprietary small headset plug to an entirely proprietary USB+sound+etc plug.

(Lest the basic reference not make sense)
For the record, I do not now, and have never owned any Apple iDevices, nor any Intel Macs, nor any Microsoft portable consumer electronics (although I’ve had and have had a few keyboards, mice, and 3 generations of XBox [edit late 2021: 4].)

For that worth, it basically be be about another ~2 years before I got a phone that could “just work” as an MP3 player with adequate battery life. The HTC Touch Pro got replaced with a “Sprint Epic” (a 1st-gen Galaxy S with a slider keyboard) which also brought back proper headphone jacks.

(I’ve yet to succumb to a headphone-jack-less phone in the return of such things, but it seems close to inevitable… 🙁 )

Oh, and the dead WSJ link there seems to refer to this: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2270831/zunegate–is-obama-an-ipresident-or-not-.html

Moved

My blog (and personal web site, family web site, and some others I host) have moved to new hosting. Between caps from AT&T Uverse, and just wayyy too much persona data on my home server, I figured it was for the best. The down side is it’s no longer Gentoo, and not quite so bleeding edge. Plus a few bucks a month.

On the up side, I’ve got a lot more upstream bandwidth, and a much greater sense of security. Worth it!

Upgraded, not that anyone cares.

I’ve been doing most of my updating on Facebook. I’m hoping I can find a way to pull my updates down here, for non-Facebook people, or to push some of the updates up. Til then, not much is new.

OTOH, I did upgrade mysql to 5.5, and wordpress to 3.2. Woot, I think.

“Spelling! That’s where I’m a viking!”

The “webmaster console” feature on Google is interesting.

In my earlier post “I’m simultaneously appalled and amused…“, I misspelled appalled as “apalled” and at least at one point I was averaging the 8th highest ranking use of the mispelling. I’ve just now fixed the title.

This is not my only misspelling that they seem to have caught; in “A keyboard, how quaint“, I seem to be a high-ranking (or should that be “hi-“?) bad speller for “transparant aluminum.” It’s got an “e” and is spelled properly in the article I quoted. (I’ve just fixed that one too.)

This one is going into Word for automatic spell-checking before I post it; I guess I’d better get into the habit of using Firefox rather than IE7 in the future, since that one HAS spell-check-on-the-fly.

Meanwhile, I am much abashed.

Update: errors continue, having included a link but no title for “A keyboard, how quaint”

WordPress 2?

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.  It seems to work with my old home-grown theme, and the default it offers is still the 1.5 one, so I’ve kept my custom one for now.  So far it looks like most of my plugins work, and the new editor looks cool although may get annoying later.  We’ll see.

Anything you viewers notice? Let me know… I may try playing with some alternate themes later.

Tech stuff.

Two quick notes:
1) WordPress 2.0 is out. I plan to upgrade when I get back to the states; I’m not convinced it’s really going to be an improvement, but I need to keep up to date with the security patches, so there’s not much choice. Hopefully my old style/theme will still work. If not, expect a very bland defauly style until I have more time…

2) ReiserFS sucks for news spools, even with “notail” on, at least on RAID1. I’d wondered if that was it, and it appears to be the case. My leafnode spool runs to about 1.5 million articles, and 9GB; when I put in the mirrored drives, I put it on it’s own file system and switched it from ext3 to ReiserFS. I noticed then that it took about 6 hours every day to run texpire, which seemed long – but I hadn’t been checking since it had been growing. Well, “notail” sped it up a bit but it still took several hours…. so I got fed up, and with the wireless here, migrated it back to ext3. On ext3? (with dir_index on, data=”ordered”, and commit=60) it took a whopping 12 minuts… or a 40:1 improvement.

Grrr… downtime.

I have zero idea how long the blog has been down; I may have to set up a script to mail me if it goes down again — being that as it may, it wasn’t software; the server was quite visible here in the apartment, and the SFChat.org address stayed up… it was a DNS problem.

If this means nothing to you, don’t sweat it. We’re back now, and should remain up and running until, well, something else goes wrong. I’m sort of tempted to see about moving the blog to a real hosting provider, but since nobody really reads this anyway, well, I like the geek factor of running my own server. It just has its downsides, as we’ve just seen.

Blogging and the Academic Job Search

From The Chronicle of Higher Education : Bloggers Need Not Apply

What is it with job seekers who also write blogs? Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.

That’s when the committee took a look at their online activity.

In some cases, a Google search of the candidate’s name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn’t fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.

If I head back to grad school, I will take this seriously into account in terms of whether to keep this site live. As long as I’m in IT, I don’t think it matters. Heck, some eccentricity is expected.

(Passed on by an friend.)

The lack of posts recently…

…has a very simple explanation. First, we had a big deadline at work. And now I’m on vacation. I may drop by with some vacation pictures, or I may not… but I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled procrastination, humor, and political repostings come April 5th.

Until then, and barring the odd vacation photo I may post here, be well.

Downtime and administrivia…

Web server was down from 10PM last night to 5PM or so today. Mea cupla, and I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Also, in case regular readers may not have noticed, SFChat.org no longer points directly here, and instead has a brief directory and the note:

If you’ve come looking for Nate’s Blog, the correct address is https://www.cubiclehermit.com/.

Feel free to click on either of these links to go there now. There are some hacks to enable permalinks to continue working, but these (and this message) will be going away. The old “official” address (http://www.sfchat.org/wordpress/) is now being redirected to the correct one, and while this redirection is permanent you are encouraged to update any links or bookmarks.

I’ll maintain the links as long as it’s practical to do so, but please update your bookmarks/favorites. If and when I ever get enough readers that it gets impractical to keep hosting this on a DSL line, I’ll probably have to make some compromises and the links may not remain practical.