There and Back Again

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. I don’t think i like the new admin theme, too much change.

If you see something broken please let me know.

Having fun with my new camera

(Yes I used WebThumb to take the snapshot)

<webthumb>
	<apikey>keyhere</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>http://flickr.com/photos/joshuaeichorn/sets/72157604167994594</url>
		<outputtype>png</outputtype>
		<width>1024</width><!-- browser width -->
		<height>768</height><!-- browser height -->
		<excerpt>
			<x>420</x>
			<y>180</y>
			<height>80</height>
			<width>350</width>
		</excerpt>
	</request>
</webthumb>

With Jen moving in, I’ve been doing a lot of home improvement projects lately.

A couple weekends ago it was building a Dog Garden (Thanks Charles and Alex), then hanging a new door so the dogs could have a doggy door to get the patio and the garden.

Last night it was planting some flowers, I got some nice orange marigolds and some white petunias. Hopefully I didn’t mess anything up too much and they will live.

• Trying to figure out how to use twitter #
• Troy is an old man #
• Trying to fix my imap server #
• That you are #
• rebooting server cause i’ve leaked memory that i can’t seem to recover #
• I feel young #
• Server fixed: http://tinyurl.com/2kr28q #
• The camera stole my soul #
• Back to work #
• Coding on whiteboard with steven #
• Working fine for me #
• Php 5.2.x upgrade meeting #
• Lunch at stumpies #
• I made this site http://bemba.com/u/4672 #
• Working on a search engine #

So i’ve finally given in and joined twitter and started mo-blogging with flickr.

I’m also looking into Bemba, since it’s one of my WebThumb customers.

I’ve been slowly moving all my websites to a new server. Today I moved email. If you try to email me today and I don’t answer there’s a chance thats way. It could also be because I didn’t want to respond :-P.

This blog is running on a new server, you shouldn’t notice anything but faster performance but let me know if find any 404s

I’ve finally launched my new theme.

Let me know what you think, I expect to make some more refinements and to clean up some content yet but the majority of the work is done.

The big new featues are the magic help bubbles you saw on page load. The dock containing secondary navigation, and the new comment styling.

Let me know what you think, and if you see any bugs.

Oh and I only tested things on ie7 and ff so if your running something else and things are totally broken let me know.

I’ve slowly been working on a new theme for this site.

I think i made some good progress tonight.

Take a look and tell me what you think: http://new.joshuaeichorn.com/

Oh and thats not a link for a good reason, its a week old copy of my wordpress DB and I don’t want it too get indexed.

Update
Also check out a page with a lot of comments, I did a neat layout trick that puts my comments in there own column and things line up so each of my comments is next to the comment its replying too.

I’m not done formatting the content in the comment boxes yet, I want to switch too a x days|months|years ago date formatting style

You may have noticed that my blog has been running a bit slower these days. I’ve been getting huge load spikes a couple times a day.

Looking at that and my Akismet counter, its seems im getting 3-4000 spam comment submissions a day. And while the server could handle the load if the spammers were polite about it, its much harder to handle spams coming in 500-1000 spam bursts (less then 1 minute).

I’ve added mod_evasive support to apache but it doesn’t look like things will help since so many different ip’s are being used in the spam attacks. There is nothing like being dos’d by spammers.

I may end up having to rewrite wordpress’s comment submission code in order to get enough performance out of it too handle the attacks. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Update
I moved my comments page and since serving up 404’s is cheap my load is no longer spiking. Now i just need a script that finds 404’s to the old comments page and add them to my firewall.

I got up early to vote before work, the lines weren’t that bad but something got messed up in my registration process so I had to vote on a provisional ballot.

For some reason they had me marked as having recieved an early ballot. 2 years ago I used an online service to signup for my ballot while in London, I wonder if those guys did the really annoying thing of automatically signing me up for another one.

I’ll be at LinuxWorld on the 15 and the 16. On the 15th i’ll be demoing Clearhealth as part of Healthcare Day, and on the 16th I’ll be talking to people about my book.

Let me know if your going to be there, maybe we can meet up.

Megan and I tied the knot on the 29th, and then spent a couple of days relaxing in sedona.

We have a couple hundred pictures from the wedding and reception online. I ended up writing a simple picture viewer to show them all.

Do to lots of problems with my old server i’ve moved to a new hosting company, and have been in the process of moving all the old content. Due to some issues beyond my control the move was forced on me before things were ready so there have been more problems then I like.

If you see any 404’s or missing content please let me know.

Wordpress 2.0 has been released, its got lots of new features, but as far as I can tell they are all on the author side, not the reader. A full list of the changes is available over on the asymptomatic blog. There is a bit of AJAX in the interface as well, they could use it remove a couple more dialog popups, but editing is much cleaner now. If your running wordpress and are looking to upgrade there is a good article in the support forums walking you through the process.

The release process seems a bit odd though, the files exist, the website is updated, but there isn’t even an blog post announcing the release.
I’m also using the new akismet anti-spam plugin, I hope its good since they force you to create a blog at wordpress.com to use it.

Update:

Offical wordpress 2.0 release announcement is out, has the complete feature summary.

I’m in Chicago its friken cold

Megan and drove here and took pictures and notes of our journey, i’ll try to get them up eventually or at least link to them on her blog

Oh and thanks to weather.com for the image

Blog spam has started to find its way into my moderation queue again. To help cut down on the amount of junk I have to delete by hand I added ringtone to my kill list. So if you want to make sure your comment is never seen, toss ringtone in it and it will be gone.

I got tired with the look of my blog so I updated it. I’m not 100% sure i like all the changes Mainly with how the lists on each side of the content turned out.

The site is optimized for higher res monitors and doesn’t work without horizontal scroll at anything less then 1024×768, but hey geeks read this site, they should have some resolution. I guess I should be concerned that this pushed my Google ads off those same none wide screens, but I guess thats the tradeoff for more room for content.

Anyhow tell me what you think, biggest thing im worried about right now is the light gray background the main content area is one. All that white seemed like too much but now the gray seems worse.

And yes the header is 1400px wide because thats the width of my laptop screen and I didn’t want to look at it running out while I was reading peoples comments.

Update:
I fixed a number of things people pointed out. I ended up cutting the width of the sidebar by 5px and the main content area by 40px. This gives you all the main navigation and content at 800px wide. You’ll still have to horizontal scroll to see the archive/category links, but I like this better then the huge single bar especially since that part of the nav isn’t that important. I also shrunk the textarea to fix in the content box, and moved the ads below the navigation on the right. I can also play around with them if the new placement means I get fewer clicks.

Since the begining of the project i’ve been subscribed to the fedora devel list. I read it too see whats in the new releases and to make sure I know all the tricks when im upgrading my server. I don’t post often but its a pretty good way to get an idea of whats happening in my distro of choice.

Over the last week a thread has been going on that has me convinced I know the reason Linux isn’t ready for the desktop. Many people just don’t get what developing an operating system is about, I’m not even sure they get what using a computer is a about. And even if they aren’t a majority they slow down the approach to sanity so much thats its taken Gnome since 1997 to get to windows 95 levels of usability (and hardware integration isn’t even to that level yet).

To sum up the thread, Gnome is removing the open terminal item from the right click menu of Nautilus, and a number of people think thats such a big deal that Fedora should make an exception from its policy of using upstream code whenever possible.

The reasons they give are odd in a number of ways.
The terminal is the most important part of unix (if your a graybeard maybe)
The right click menu is the easiest way to open it (kinda odd since a terminal junky would always say a keyboard shortcut is better)
The terminal should be used by everyone since its so much more efficient then a gui
That having to use a terminal to get something done isn’t a bug

Now whats also odd, is that there is already a package to give you this open terminal functionality back if your really want it only its better since if your in a window in Nautilus it open in that directory.

So whats my problem with these arguments.
Wake up, Fedora and Gnome are about being cutting edge, how is pushing the terminal as part of normal usage part of that.
The pointless rightclick argument, its already in the menu and you can drag it to the toolbar for a launcher
The terminal being more effiecient might be true, but thats only after you’ve managed the learning curve.
To change to a directory in nautilus move a file all I have to do is point and click, then drag and drop, its a pretty basic skill that everyone knows and since it has good visual feedback its reasonable to figure out.
To do the same thing in a terminal I have know the following cryptic commands (they are meaningless just because you and I have long memorized them doesn’t mean there not)
cd, ls, mv

I’m not sure why someone who uses the computer for surfing the net, checking email, and writing papers would want to learn these commands, but a very vocal group of people on fedora devel thing were doing them a disservice by not making them memorize them. Many even seem to think everyone should learn bash scripting and awk and crap I don’t even have a need to learn in order to be good computer users.

The reality is most people don’t want to become computer geeks.
A computer is a tool, just like there toaster is a tool.
It should work well, most of the time, and not be too difficult to figure out.

Thats what people want out of computers and thats why they use Windows or Mac OSX, neither of these are perfect but at least there developers have the right idea.

So I had a linksys wireless router that I use to share internet between my laptop and megans ibook, its an older 802.11b job a befw11s4 or something like that. So Megan got a new ibook today, yeah I know the new intel mac’s ones are coming out but thats not for a year and the current 800mhz thing is slow and was the old OS and had a 12 inch screen with a poor viewing angle. So we got a new one, nothing insanely fancy but its a 1.3ghz with 786meg of ram, and to make a long story short it broke the router.

So you connect to the router and about a minute latter internet stops working, reboot the router and sometimes the cable modem too and things work again. Very odd stuff, so I just went out and got a new one, one of those wrt54g models that run linux. Once I ignored there setup program that didn’t work right and just used the web interface everything was good. I now have working wireless, and its even g on the ibook, of course I somehow managed to get a new laptop with only built in b.