My So-Called Blog

I’m headed to Thailand in September (along with my friend and MySQL colleague Morgan) for an extended working holiday. It’ll be my third time there, and each time I visit, I fall more in love with the place. The culture is fascinating, the food is marvelous, and the people are some of the nicest I’ve met anywhere.

Since we’re planning to be there for a while, we figure that we can take a little time out from work and play to do some Open Source evangelising and networking. We’ve already contacted Open Source Thailand about the possibility of participating in any events they’ve got planned for Software Freedom Day. (Actually, Morgan got the ball rolling on that.)

However, we’re not limited to that particular event. Either one of us (or even both of us) would be glad to meet up with and speak to your group about MySQL, Linux, or Open Source Software in general. We’ll be staying in Bangkok for the most part, but may be able to travel to other places in Thailand. (I’m supposed to be going to Krabi for a week at some point, but I don’t yet know exactly when that will be.) So if you’d like to get together, just get in touch with one of us through the mailing list, and we’ll see what we can arrange.

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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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