Bandwagon launches tomorrow; it purports to back up your entire iTunes library over the Internet to their servers (or alternatively to your Amazon S3 box) for a flat rate. Updates occur automatically in the background. Sounds like a good idea, if they can pull it off. (Mac only at the moment, apparently.)
Disclaimer: This post is earning me, like others, a free one-year subscription.
Item on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Apple Genius says: Moo’ing normal.
Same item as quoted on Powerpage: Apple: It’s Normal for MacBooks to Moo.
Now I’m not a professional journalist, but even I can tell the difference between one offhand comment by one employee at one Apple store, and an official position by Apple the corporation.
Also omitted from the quote on Powerpage: the part where the TUAW writer then called AppleCare and is having his MacBook repaired under warranty. (Of course, the Apple Genius should have handled this…)
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to take Jason O’Grady seriously. How he ends up writing for ZDNet is beyond me.
(By the way, my new black MacBook does not moo.)
Well, I’ve been really busy, is all. How do you people find time to post every day? I’ve got a wife and a kid (make that two kids now, which is obviously a large part of the issue), a job, a commute… I barely have time to listen to the radio anymore. (And I lost my iPod somewhere…)
So since virtually all of the activity over the last six weeks has been from comment spammers, and since WordPress 1.5 has just hit the streets, I’m taking the opportunity to switch over. You like it? It’s so purty, too…
Switching was pretty easy, too, especially since I’d been playing around with WP last December and kept a parallel copy of all my posts; so it was really just a matter of following the 1.5 upgrade instructions. A few little graphical glitches here and there, but I’ll probably be hacking the CSS anyway soon.
I should probably think of a more clever name for the weblog, too. Hmm…
To the fraction of a person who cares: the one page on the Internet that links to my pre-MT blog is now correctly redirected to the equivalent items in the MT blog. (Originally, I used a Redirect directive instead of a Rewrite. After I reinstalled MT and switched to a MySQL database because the Berkeley DB was corrupted, I just put the archives at a compatible URL.)
Oh, and Google finally indexed my website again, so searching for the title of the weblog now yields the weblog as the second result (the first result is still Blogshares, for some reason — I don’t play, but I claimed my blog anyway).
That is all. Please resume your regular indifference.
If anyone out there was checking the blog during the day, they may have noticed the appearance flipping around a bit. Turns out I was editing the CSS stylesheet directly on my web site, where it got overwritten the next time I published (silly me). It took me a while to find it in the “templates” list of MT; poking around my web site didn’t reveal any obvious source file. Guess I’m still getting used to this whole CMS thing; I remember when we had to make our websites by hand, with stone knives and bear skins…
As you can see, I’ve installed Movable Type. I hoped it would be easier to get things like comments and trackbacks working. Plus I can check out the very promising MarsEdit for writing posts. And now my blog looks less spartan and more… well, more like every other MT blog. But hopefully that can be addressed too.
After my experience with WordPress, I installed MT to use Berkeley DB rather than MySQL, but since the dynamic publishing capabilities seem to require MySQL, I may have to switch over again. Probably I should do that before I get too many entries here.
…speaking of which, I seem to have changed over just after Nick became the first person to link to me. And now I’ve gone and broken those links. [Edit: I made an effort to see if I could fix this with an appropriate set of RewriteRules, but that way lies madness, so I guess Nick will just have to fix his links.] Sorry, Nick.
About a month ago a coworker offered me a Gmail invitation. Although I prefer to use a regular IMAP mail client to access my mail, I figured I’d take him up on the offer and reserve a reasonable email address.
The next time I logged into Gmail was this morning. Of course I had no new messages in my inbox, which is not surprising since I’d never given this address to anyone.
I did, however, have a piece of spam. Received less than three weeks after creating the Gmail address. Which (to repeat) I never gave to anyone. And which uses a different account name than the one I normally use (at which I get about 750 pieces of spam a month).
By the way, Gmail’s filters had caught the spam. Good to know, and no less than I’d expect, really. So if I post a feedback link to this blog, I may well use that address instead.
But really, the whole thing was quite breathtaking. They say 75% of the traffic that crosses the Internet these days is spam. I’m beginning to think it’s time to chuck SMTP and invent a new, fully authenticating mail protocol.
The events of the past week having motivated me to restart my weblog, I decided to take a look at WordPress, which seems to be getting popular and looks like it has some nice features.
So I downloaded it. Gee, it requires a MySQL database. Now I’ve got a lot of software experience, but it happens that SQL databases is not one of those things I’ve ever needed to use before. OK, so it’s easy to create a MySQL database at my webhost, and the WordPress setup automatically creates all the necessary data structures.
So now I figured I’d change the auto-generated password. And here my troubles began. The new password didn’t work. I clicked on the “lost my password” link. WordPress sent me a new password. That one didn’t work. Oh well, I thought, I haven’t really done anything I can lose, yet, so I deleted the database and recreated it, made a test post, and went to bed.
This morning there were seven pieces of comment spam waiting for moderation. I’d made exactly one post, with commenting turned off, and apart from a reference in a set of PyCon notes, nobody even knows I have a blog. I can’t be having this…
…but, not ready to give up, I deleted the spam and tried to make a couple of new posts, figuring there must be something in the WordPress community about this. Then I tried changing my password again. Bad idea; same problem. I checked the WordPress websites. Hey, it’s a known problem, and there’s a way to fix it — edit the database directly. Boo. Hey, my webhost supports phpadmin. Yay. Hey, I can’t log into my own database with any password I can think of. Boo.
People, I’m sure there’s something obvious to do at this point, but I’ve got a job; I’ve got a family; I’ve got a life; and I’m pretty sure a simple weblog doesn’t really need a freakin’ SQL database. It’s just words, right?
So I’m back to Blosxom for now. (Sorry, Ted, Pyblosxom wasn’t looking very stable for me last spring; at that time, even one of the developers had switched his own blog to WordPress or MT or something. I’m sure it’s better now, but I’m not interested in hacking a blog; I just want to write.)
Also, no comments for now. If you want to comment, (a) get your own blog, or (b) send me an email (I’m not posting my email address, but you can probably deduce it) and if it’s cogent or worth a reply, I’ll post it.
