My So-Called Blog

Hej hej from Stockholm where I arrived about two weeks ago for a fun-filled two four six weeks of meetings and face-to-face contact with the MySQL Cluster developers. And the chance to check things out when it’s not 2°C and raining, all the time, as it was when I was here in November and December of 2005. (This week, it’s 12°C and kind of misty.)

The last five or six weeks have been pretty hectic, and this evening (it’s just after 10 PM local time as I write this) represents the first time in that span that I’ve actually had time that’s not been planned out for me in one way or another. At the end of April, I moved out of my place in Brisbane and stuffed all my gear into storage in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, where I rented a post office box that now constitutes my sole legal address for the duration.

That last sentence is actually shorthand for “Two 1,000-km round trips between Brisbane and Coffs in a rented truck loaded with furniture (and unloaded again), mostly by me, costing me about 2 grand and not inconsiderable wear and tear on and protestations from portions of my anatomy whose existence I’d been hitherto unaware of”. When I arrived in Australia just shy of five years ago, I had a rucksack and a couple of carry bags. Where did all that crap come from? By the time I got it all hauled and stored, I found myself wishing that I’d just set it all out in the street and taken a match to the whole lot. I then went back to my empty townhouse and spent a few days cleaning up the place. On the 8th of May, I turned in the keys and headed south to spend a few days with Elly before zipping off overseas. I took my first ever ride in a propellor-driven plane on a rainy and foggy Friday morning (11 May); we took off just before dawn, and I was hoping fervently that the pilot could tell which way was up, since I myself couldn’t really tell. I was pleasantly surprised to land alive and unscathed in Sydney a couple of hours later for my overseas connection. Five years and about a thousand exchanges of “You live in Australia? What’s Sydney like?”–”Dunno, never been there” after coming to Oz, I can now instead say, “Well… It’s a big bloody city with a big bloody airport”. I was there for about 3 hours.

My first post-Australia stop was Hong Kong, where I spent a few days on holiday, in the company of my friend Mei Ching, who acted as my guide and translator. It was nice to see her again. Fortunately, she place she picked for me to stay was in Kowloon and not downtown, where the air pollution was just ghastly. One day, we went up to The Peak and spent the day walking through the park, which wraps around the mountain just below the top. We also visited the temple and gardens at Nan Liang, which is quite a nice place, as well as the Temple of Wong Sai Tin (I will not reveal here what I wished for there, but I’ll be quite surprised if it comes to pass).

Of course, I couldn’t visit Hong Kong and not see the Big Buddha, all (nearly) 100 metres of it. The theme park village and religious prsentations were a little on the commercial/cheesy side; on the other hand, I can’t knock the proprietors for trying to spread the good word of the Lord Buddha. I nearly had my hand squeezed right off during the skycar ride up to the site; Mei hadn’t told me beforehand that she’s quite afraid of heights. I got the chance to pay my respects in the temple at Po Lin Monastery, and we also got some excellent vegetarian fare afterwards in the monastery’s cafeteria.

I made a couple of interesting acquaintances while I was there, including a cab driver who claimed that (over the course of a 30-minute taxi ride, yet) I’d taught him something new about the teachings of the Lord Buddha, and who insisted on giving me a book I’ll likely not be able to learn how to read if I live to be a hundred and fifty. I’m still figuring that one out.

On the 16th, I bade Mei and the Hong Kong Special Autonomous region farewell. I quite enjoyed my stay there — I might have to stop over again on my way back to Oz. I’ll post some photos soon.

[To be continued…]

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…have been posted in the gallery section. Fans everywhere of the Divine Miss “E” will rejoice. :)

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Two weeks into the New Year, and four weeks since I got back from Thailand, I finally get round to updating this thing. By “updating”, I don’t just mean posting. Gojira the One-Lung Webserver has had an overhaul as well: I’ve added some more RAM, caught up with the last couple of months’ worth of Windows 2000 patches, updated to the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and Cygwin. (Tip: If you’re running PHP and MySQL on Windows, be sure to get rid of the libMySQL.dll that comes with PHP — because it’s crap — and to use the version that comes with MySQL instead.)

So… 2006 was a pretty decent year, with a number of positive changes:

(Read the article)

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Some people might have lives, but I have a webserver.

I think I’ve now upgraded just about everything (software-wise) that’s upgradable on this machine:

• Apache 1.3.33 -> 1.3.37 (Thanks for hiding the win32 binaries under “Archives” when the *nix version is out in plain view, guys)
• PHP 5.0.3 -> 5.1.4 (This required ditching my old php.ini file and doing a new one from scratch)
• MySQL 5.1.8 -> 5.1.11 (Dead easy, even on Windows - yea, TEAM!)
• Perl 5.8.7 -> 5.8.8
• Python 2.3.2 -> 2.4.3
• Tcl 8.4.12 -> 8.5.0
• BlogCMS .3.4.6 -> WordPress 2.0.4 (The RSS feed was broken, I was getting tired of seeing my posts quoted elsewhere sans formatting, and every time I tried messing with the code, it just got worse)
• Singapore 0.9.11 -> 0.10.0 (The one part of BlogCMS that I still really liked after switching to WordPress, especially after finding that the upgrade fixed most of my outstanding annoyances with the old version of Singapore)
• Cygwin 1.4.16 -> 1.5.21 (Because trying to use DOS as a shell makes me want to bang my head against the monitor until one or the other breaks and puts me out of my misery)

I also invested a few hours yesterday learning some basic ins and outs of Apache’s mod_rewrite, which is a pain to deal with (as is anything when you’ve no idea WTF you’re doing), but the results are quite nice. Especially when you’re getting pings to files that no longer exist following a makeover of your server.

For now, I’ve *cough* integrated *cough* the new gallery by means of an IFRAME, which makes it easy to view in its own window if desired. There’s a Singapore mod for this that I might try out, but it appears to be a pain if you want to use the same gallery both within and independently of WordPress, so I might just leave it the way it is.

I also updated the OS. Why is it, Microsoft, that I can patch 5 Linux systems in less time than it takes for the Windows Update “Checking for the latest updates for your computer…” to finish flashing green at me? And that I invariably wind up rebooting the Windows machine 3 or 4 times, whereas patching the Linux machines almost never requires a reboot - just if and when I feel like upgrading the kernel? I think that’s what I find most annoying about Windows - other than the fact that I’m stuck with a single desktop, there’s no shell worth mentioning, it’s a haven for viruses (an issue that basically doesn’t exist on other operating systems), and that an install of the base OS alone takes 2-3 hours not counting drivers and Windows Update, and only then can you think about installing some apps so you can actually get any work done on the thing - everything requires a FREAKIN’ REBOOT. How on Earth can people consider this “normal”?

I suppose I’d better quit ranting and get some work done on my Linux laptop PC while I wait for the server to reboot. And ask myself why I even still have a Windows machine in the house.

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I was becoming decreasingly impressed with the blogware that I’d been using. Possibly inspired by the workmen who woke me up clattering about on my roof at 7.00 AM yesterday, I’ve decided to rip it out and replace it with WordPress. Hopefully I’ll get things sorted in a couple of days.

In the meantime, please pardon the dust and banging noises and such.

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