From the Orient

This blog went into extended hibernation a few years ago; it is old and often falls asleep. Whilst it slept, Wordpress steadily upgraded leaving this poor blog behind. As the versions progressed, I got more and more fearful that an upgrade would be too much for this old bear of a blog, and it would be killed off, an upgrade too far.

However, not upgrading meant that the blog was more and more likely to get ill, security exploits and spam making it more and more ill. The spam traps were failing and I was getting email after email telling me some spam had been written to the blog or placed in moderation. Something like 2000 odd spam messages built up, growing like a cancer. Yet still I did not act.

I thought it would be too hard, too complicated and take too much time to upgrade. I was wrong.

Yesterday, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade. Finally, reading the instructions about upgrading from 1.5 blog, I realised that it was quite straightforward. I decided to use the SVN version of upgrading, knowing how easy it was to upgrade from other blogs I run.

I can boil it down to 7 easy steps.

1. Backup, backup, backup and check your backup. Backup again, once more for luck. Look, just make sure you backup in case, or when you mess this up. Make sure you backup the mysql database as well (this happens automagically for me on the server)
2. Disable all your plugins - most plugins that worked in 1.5 won’t work in 2.3.2
3. Create a new directory and use the SVN commands to grab the latest version of wordpress.

   svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2 .

4. Copy your wp-config.php and .htaccess to the new blog
5. Move the old blog into a different directory, move the new blog to where the old blog was
6. Run http://blog.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php
7. That’s it

Note, you’ll still have to do stuff like make your blog look pretty, install new plugins etc and so on, but as I was using the default theme before, all I had to do was copy an image across.

I havn’t install any plugins as a) it was so long ago, I don’t remember what plugins did what anyway and b) most of the plugins had functionality that was now part of wordpress itself anyway.

So, if you have an old blog running an ancient version of Wordpress, just upgrade it, it is not that hard.

Don’t do it. Installing RPM’s appears to be like having your teeth pulled out by your dentist. Only the dentist will stop half way through the painful experience.

He will say “Sorry, in order to pull out the rest of this tooth I need to cut off one of your fingers. But you have to guess which one”

You pick a finger. He chops it off. After attempting to pull the tooth out again, he will stop and say “Sorry, in order to pull out the rest of this tooth I need to cut off one of your fingers. But you have to guess which one”.

Repeat until you have to type out your rant with your blooded stubs ruining the keyboard.

Thank god for Ubuntu and it’s Life on Mars coloured package manager.

I think you have to try Magicline to see how good it is. [via "Phil":http://philringnalda.com/blog/2005/08/the_monkeys_back.php]

Django | The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines

bq. Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design

This is something I will certain look into using. a because it is a web framework written in Python, b because it is written my some clever people and c because it has a cool name.

I don’t know if it was named after the “Spaghetti Western Django”:http://www.plume-noire.com/movies/cult/django.html but if so, that would be cool. I used to live with the guy who had the rights to publishing Django in the UK (who just missed out on publishing Monkey and went off to work for the BBC instead). He had a cat called Django which was the meanest cat on the planet.

Anyone interested in how to put together web “services” into a useful system, should check out moosifer jones’ reading.

Mags has been using “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us tags to keep track of books she “is reading”:http://del.icio.us/magslhalliday/reading.current, “has read”:http://del.icio.us/magslhalliday/reading.read and is “waiting to read”:http://del.icio.us/magslhalliday/reading.to.be.read.

Then, it has all been put together on a blogspot weblog. As Mags points out :-

this lets me just google a book, tag it with delicious and the whole updating thing is done. Much easier, and not reliant on a book being on amazon’s lists.

I’ve been thinking of doing some sort of book recording system for ages and the answer is out there.

On a related note, is “outsourced”:http://erikbenson.typepad.com/mu/2005/02/using_bloglines.html where Erik Benson (of all-consuming, speaking of book recording systems) talks about how he uses various online systems to manage his online presence.

11) RSS is already normalized. Bloglines also does some cleaning up for me. What I get back from Bloglines is beautiful content that looks the same no matter which site I originally posted it on. Since everything goes through this filter, there’s really no need to have access to the database of content directly. I therefore decided to move all of them off my server and to make Bloglines the mesh net through which I collect all content.

Food for thought there too. I’m leaning towards doing something like this myself.

I’m not sure why I decided to try out “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ today but I’m glad I did. I’d heard about it on its release (and before in fact, but it didn’t have a name then) of course, and in fact downloaded a disk image of warty.

I’d had a small epiphany at work today and managed to get ssh tunneling working though the firewall and could grab my home email directly from my trusty Debian woody server. I think it gave me a small boost of linuxness that made me try it out.

The main reason for my previous reticence was I could never get my wireless network card to work on any previous variant of Debian. Woody just couldn’t see, and I had so much trouble with Sarge, I gave up.

The whole installation process was flawless. I had to answer a few questions, but they were not questions that the installation process could guess. It did say it couldn’t find my wireless network but I simply entered the required details and it just worked. Roughly twenty minutes of package downloads, a reboot and that was it. A working desktop. Looks nice too.

I am certain that this is the beginning of Linux working as a desktop. The developers have done a marvelous job. I will be installing it on one of my work machines tomorrow. If all goes well, I’ll have a go at installing on my laptop.

Just a few issues to sort out. Getting Firefox 1.0 (it comes with 0.9.3), finding and installing printer drivers, and getting the dual boot system to start with Windows XP so that the kids can play their games.

By kids I mean me, and by games I mean Half Life 2 which appears to be lacking a Ubuntu version.