Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

When WordPress 2.5 was announced, I decided to stay on 2.3.x for a while. I finally upgraded to 2.5.1, and I’m glad. My Bad Behavior plugin was outdated, and WP offered to upgrade for me. It happened without a glitch. From reading the upgrade information, it seems that when 2.5.2 comes out, I’ll be able to update by just clicking a self-update button on the administrative interface.

The new WordPress administrative interface is a lot less cluttered, and more useful information is shown on the main page. The look is cleaner while remaining usable. It looks like a lot of time and effort was spent improving it.

Rather than tip my hat at the WordPress folks one more time (it’s getting old to do that every few months) I’m just going to give them Dread Pirate PJ’s Hoard of Loot lifetime award.

The image is from playrough’s photostream on Flickr.

Over on the WordPress Development Blog, they’re pimping the upcoming WordPress 2.5 and the release candidates process before final release, and it sounds awesome. It includes a boatload of new features, but my favorite has got to be one-click plugin upgrades.

Upgrading WordPress itself is fairly easy, but upgrading your plugins can be an annoying manual process. You have to disable the plugin on the admin dashboard, download the new version, move the old files out of the way and put the new ones in place, then re-enable the plugin on the dashboard. You typically do this one plugin at a time, to check for problems and rollback as needed. Take my word, it’s annoying doing this for more than two plugins at a time, even though it is still a fairly easy process.

In 2.5, the WordPress developers have now made plugin updates as easy as in desktop applications like Firefox. That makes the whole management of the weblog much easier and more hassle-free than it ever was.

I am probably going to wait a few weeks once 2.5 is out, to let any bugs and issues shake out. But it sounds like a really worthwhile upgrade. I’m really glad to run WordPress here. Hats off once again to the WordPress developers.

Technorati Tags:
weblog.engines, upgrades, wordpress

Hiya, folks!

As is tradition in most blogging circles, I’m posting to let you know I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest version. My buddy Ken already beat me to it, as always.

I upgraded the Bad Behavior plugin while I was at it. One of my pet theories regarding why I have fewer akismet spam caught than other sites, like Ken’s, is that Bad Behavior blocks most malicious spam bot-like behavior. That leaves akismet with less spam getting through and being caught.

I like my pet theories, they help me sleep at night.

I wanted to write this post before 2008 started, but better late than never, huh?

–

I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails for over 18 months now, and it continues to be a lot of fun. There are still challenges, as projects are never a total walk in the park. There is also new stuff to learn almost every week. The Rails team keeps improving the framework, and the community keeps authoring more plugins. Keeping up is a demanding part of the job, but it adds to the fun factor.

One activity I’ve been doing lately on my own time is learning different programming languages, development environments, and frameworks. The move to Rails from Java seems to have been a good choice career-wise, and I did it by trying to keep current on technology. I want to be ready for the next shift, whatever that may happen to be and whenever it comes into prominence.

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After many attempts, I finally had published not just one IT-related article, but three, at IBM DeveloperWorks and Amazon Web Services Developer Portal. The articles were published between late October and late December 2007. They are:

Display Google Calendar events on your PHP Web site with XPath

Don’t Get Caught with Your Instance Down

Using Parameterized Launches to Customize Your AMIs

These articles are just the start of a shift from developing software as one of the faceless multitude of IT geeks, to being somewhat more known among my peers. I hope to turn these and other articles into presentations at software development conferences in 2008. Hopefully this enhanced exposure and networking will lead to great new things in 2008 and beyond.

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Just before beginning this post, I updated Wordpress to the latest stable version. I am always amazed by how easy Wordpress upgrades are. Considering how easy it is to write unmaintainable crap in PHP, the Wordpress team deserves a big standing ovation for doing software right in PHP.

The theme I had up for the last year was not compatible with the change to Wordpress 2.3.x, so I picked out a totally different theme this once. It’s really simple and unobtrusive. If I get creative, I may tweak it or pick another theme altogether.

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That’s it for now. I’ll try to post more often. Feel free to give me a nudge in the comments if I let posting to the weblog slide again.

Technorati Tags:
life, weblogs, software.development, wordpress

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.3. It was another flawless upgrade.

Akismet tells me that it has blocked over 1900 comment spam since March 22, and 3,130 since I installed it. I have only had three or four false negatives. That is, spam that wasn’t caught and ended up in my moderation queue. I made an effort to go through all my caught spam looking for false positives, and found none.

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So when they flew me to NYC for lunch, I was very sure this company was interested in hiring me (duh!) I had a great time talking with the company CEO and the president, enjoying their wit and seeing their lifelong friendship at work during our discussions. That was quite interesting. I also had a good conversation with a fellow grunt, Sonny, with whom I will probably be working. I start at the new job on April 16.

They paid for my flight, overnight stay, and lunch. The lunch was really enjoyable, both conversation-wise and food-wise. I don’t remember the name of the family-oriented seafood restaurant where we went. It was within two or three blocks of Broadway and 19th Street. I want to go there again and try more items from their menu.

At the end of the day, I received a job offer, which I accepted. I’ll still be working from home as a Ruby on Rails developer, but I will be a salaried full-timer with benefits, instead of an hourly gun-for-hire. I have had enough of the gun-for-hire lifestyle for now, and this opportunity with this company was too good to pass up.

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NYC was a hoot. I saw this guy with a giant inflatable cockroach in front of a building. Turns out he was a paid protester! When some group wants to protest something, they hire this guy, and he prints out some flyers, drives to wherever they ask him to go, gets out the giant inflatable rat and/or the giant inflatable cockroach, gets out his bullhorn, and he has a protest! He is also available for political campaigns, but he prefers hanging out with the cockroach and the rat. I thought that was pretty funny.

Another funny aspect of NYC, is that every block has at least one guy in a small plexiglass shop on wheels hitched to a truck, selling a bagel or donut with coffee for about $3. Each of these vendors has enough coffee, bagels and donuts for a few hours of sales. When they run out, they drive to the bakery where they get their goods, stock up, and drive back to the area they were last at, to continue selling their wares.

I really had a good time in Manhattan, and would like to visit again and do more touristy things.

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After my interview in NYC last March, I took a train to Lancaster County, PA, and stayed with my friend the sci-fi writer, her husband and twin 3 year old girls. I rented a car to visit my other college friends and an aunt and her husband in Southeastern PA over the weekend. It was great to see everybody and to see them well. I’m glad they all live within one and a half hours of each other.

I am going to be planning a move to the Philadelphia suburbs over the next six months. I don’t own any furniture, don’t have a wife and kids, so it’s just me, my computers, and game consoles. I’ll probably disassemble the two PC clone towers and ship the parts separately, then reassemble them back in PA.

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Wednesday is my last day at the hourly Rails gig. It has been a crazy seven weeks. We’ve been ready to go live for the last two weeks or so, but the client wanted some changes to how a few things worked. And of course that meant new bugs to stomp.

I’ve thrown in a few hints as to what the site is about, specifically mentioning yesterday’s Malaysian Gran Prix in a previous post. I can’t wait to show off what we’ve worked on. It really is a cool site. Latest news is that we go live Wednesday, but I’m taking that with a grain of salt. So don’t hold me to it.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development, upgrades, wordpress

I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.1, with the now famous 2.1.2 codebase (famous among WP users, I guess.)

And the asshat spammer is still trying to beat Akismet, with 428 more comment spam since the original 376, for a total of 704 between 9 am on March 16 and now, 8:28 pm on Thursday March 22. He is losing, because even if he makes it through Akismet (which he is not, not in the slightest), he is going to end up in my moderation queue, and I’ll flag his trash as spam.

As a famous Texan governor asshat already said earlier this decade: Bring it on!

Technorati Tags:
upgrades, wordpress, akismet

Between 9 am March 16, and noon March 17, some asshat decided to attack my site with 376 comment spam. All but one got through, and it made it into my moderation queue. I promptly marked it as spam.

Thanks to the Akismet guys, for a job well done!

Technorati Tags:
wordpress, akismet

Let’s cut to the chase: the iPhone is the most innovative communications and media device of the 21st century’s first decade. The other devices and manufacturers don’t even come close. Before the iPhone, you could think the competing devices had evolutionary interfaces, a step up from the previous interface. Now, you can’t help but think them mediocre in comparison to the iPhone. The user interface is the iPhone’s forte, followed by the convergence of widescreen media player, full featured web browser, PIM, and cell phone into one device. Is my opinion clear enough?
All that being said, the iPhone is not ideal, nor flawless. The PIM features are, in my opinion, incomplete. I am referring to the fact that you can’t enter new data into the Notes, Contacts or Calendar apps, except by syncing the device to a Mac running Stickies, iCal and Apple Address Book. I hope Apple starts to see the potential market this has with more PIM features. Maybe they were pressed for release, and cut the features out for now to add them later. We’ll have to wait and see on that.

Apple could also open the device for third party development. According to Apple, it’s just Mac OS X Tiger inside. Perhaps someone will figure out how to hack Safari to download Mac OS X apps on to it. Or at least let us install Dashboard widgets on the thing.

But this being an Apple product whose name begins with I and P, it is a great media player. Strong Bad Emails, Ask A Ninja, and Tiki Bar TV rule! They’re my favorite videoblogs. Evil Genius Chronicles, Coverville, Raven n Blues, and Bandana Blues, are among my favorite podcasts. Since the iPhone is essentially a phone with 8GB video iPod features, we’ll be able to access all our new media on it, with a better interface than anyone has ever produced. I predict Apple will bring the iPhone UI (without the phone features) to the rest of the iPod family within the year. They’ll be stupid not to. MultiTouch rocks!

Of course, the iPhone’s price has to come down for it to be really mainstream. I predict (you heard it here first, folks, LOL) that next year, the 8GB model will be the low end, and a higher capacity (16GB?) model will be the $600 high end.

In order for the iPhone to be really successful and mainstream, it should also be sold unlocked, free of carrier lock-in. Not everyone wants to be Cingular subscriber. The whole carrier lock-in thing is bone headed anyway. It surely has been demonstrated in Europe that expensive carrier-exclusive phones are not necessary to retain customers. And the practice isn’t that effective for that purpose either anyway. Carrier chickenshits, if you ain’t got good service, an expensive locked-in phone won’t help you keep any subscribers you’ve pissed off. They’ll just sell it on eBay and move on.

In conclusion, the iPhone is a great innovative cellphone/media player with some PIM functionality. The crux of its innovation rests on the MultiTouch touchscreen interface and wide screen media playback. It has a few flaws, namely the lack of smartphone PIM features and a closed development model. To really hit it big, it has to come down in price a bit, and be available at more than one carrier in the US. In any case, Apple has essentially raised the bar way up in the user interface front, making the competition look ancient in comparison.

Technorati Tags:
technology, gadgets, iphone, podcast, personal.media, videoblogs, mac.os.x

I’ve upgraded Wordpress to version 2.0.7, and added a plugin. The Share This plugin by Alex King lets you share a link to any of my posts on Digg, del.icio.us, and many other social bookmarking sites. If you see anything on this blog that you consider share-worthy, click on the Share This link at the end of the post, and share away! You only need an account at the social bookmarking site of your choice.

Joined the Amazon affiliate program

I’ve applied for an Amazon affiliate account. Among the different content on pjtrix in 2007, I plan to post book reviews on different subjects, but mostly about technology and software development, as that is what I know best and what I typically buy. I will only post about books I have actually read.

These posts will not be sponsored in the typical sense, in that no one will be offering to pay me to write the post. But the post will have an Amazon link to the book. I will earn an affiliate fee from any purchase made from that link. I will have a disclosure paragraph at the top of such posts, the titles will begin with “Book Review:”, and I will tag them book.review. It’s up to you whether you want to read the reviews. It is up to you whether you follow the link to Amazon and buy something.

Feedback

If any of my recent writing about ReviewMe.com, PayPerPost.com, Google AdSense, and now Amazon.com affiliate stuff bothers you, don’t forget to speak up in the comments! Or if you have anything else to say about it, don’t hesitate to let me know what you think.

I will not be seeing any money from these programs for some months. But I hope to recoup what I’ve spent so far on hosting. I will put any moneys earned into paying for my hosting expenses.

I’m certainly not going to be making a living, much less striking it rich from Google AdSense, Amazon affiliate fees, and getting paid to blog about stuff. My intention is to keep the site running, and to keep writing about things I care about, in the hopes others can benefit from it.

In the months ahead, I will be making use of this weblog to discuss software development technologies and processes I’ve learned to use in my ten-year career. I will most likely be writing about web technologies and web services, and open source technologies rather than proprietary ones.

I am more likely to cover Ruby on Rails and Ruby as a language and cross-platform development technology versus other open source technologies, as this is what I now prefer. But you may also see posts on C and C++, Java Enterprise Edition technologies, Python, Mozilla technologies such as XUL and XULRunner, and software development ideas in general. I may cover C# and .Net, but only because you can develop cross-platform applications with them using Mono.

My article proposals for “the secret online geekly articles site” are most likely to be accepted if they are about Java technologies. As I research my articles, I am bound to write about Java subjects here. But I’ll try to make the weblog posts more general than the articles. If the article proposals get turned down after a few rewritings and retries, I will publish the subject here or try to get them published somewhere else, like InfoQ and The Server Side.com. (BTW, that should be a hint that those two sites aren’t “the secret online geekly articles site.”)

I will also cover some Unix administration topics. For example, I feel I ought to cover the details of pjtrix’s Subversion configuration, as I found the online manual a bit wanting in specifics. Other like-minded geeks, the very people I’d like to bring to my weblog, might welcome a more direct approach. There are also more ssh tricks I haven’t begun to cover.

All of this writing will hopefully be bringing new readers to my humble weblog and other parts of the website. Armed with this hope, I continue to get pjtrix.com ready for 2007.

Tuesday night, I signed up to Google Analytics and Tools for Webmasters, and added to the WordPress and Trac templates the bits of JavaScript that report to Google where you all come from. The reports Google provides are nice and pretty, but I find Google’s solution wanting, specially in their support of blogging and citizen media. The tools are more geared towards “website” traffic analysis. That’s just lame.

Not everyone that will come here will do so with a JavaScript-powered browser. Feed readers and podcast clients, for instance, only speak HTTP and RSS or Atom. They will leave no trace in Google Analytics’ logs.

To complement Google Analytics, I’ve installed the Webalizer Apache log analysis tool, which will help me study my web server logs in more detail without my being swamped in hundreds of megabytes of raw text.

I also installed the Popularity Contest Wordpress plugin. This should help direct search-passers-by to what’s hot on this site, or just make it more clear sooner that they got to the wrong place.
Hopefully, the combination of Google Analytics, Webalizer, and Popularity Contest, will together help me learn who my audience is, learn what is “my voice,” and learn how to make this weblog more valuable to my readers.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, hacks, ssh, software.development, open.source, web.architecture, wordpress, weblogs, web.technologies, web.services, cross.platform