Yeraze's Domain 3.0

So I did some research and found a plugin that can add “Blogger API” support into Geeklog, meaning you can use it with tools like Ecto and such. Supposedly it’s a “shareware” plugin, but only $5 to register (for a personal site), so if it works out I might start to use it. Currently I’m using it with Performancing integrated into the spiffy new FireFox 2, and this is my first post with it. Hopefully it will work well, and I might start using it more often.
[tag:firefox][tag:geeklog][tag:performancing][tag:blogger]

Update: When this message was posted, the Title I set was overwritten with the first few words of the post. So it’s not 100%.

Update 11/04/06: I did some more digging around, and found that evidently Performancing just doesn’t support Titles with the Blogger API. A bit of reading in the documentation (and a pointer from Dirk) got me to install w.bloggar, which fully supports all of the bells & whistles of Geeklog & the blog plugin. It’s Java Based, so it runs pretty much anywhere, and seems to integrate beautifully with all the functions. In fact, I’m editing & publishing this post with it. I think I’m gonna make this my blogging “tool of choice” when the Website won’t do. [tag:wbloggar]

Quickie here, I just noticed someone hitting my website exactly once a minute.  When I noticed them, they were up to 1300 pageviews, pretty much all in the galleries.  The user-agent string was “ZIBB Crawler (email address / WWW address)”, and they all came from 208.68.136.5 .  I finally had to ban the IP once I noticed it was retrieving the same URL about 30 times in a row, before moving on to the next.  Pretty bizarre behavior. 

Anyone else seen this thing?  I can’t find much about it on the net.
[tag:zibb][tag:crawler][tag:robot]

I was in town today and noticed this game sitting on a shelf today entitled “What’s Gnu?”  Apparently it’s “The 3-letter Learning Game” designed to teach kids language and vocabulary.  Of course, most people reading this would say otherwise as I’m pretty sure the GNU Movement was around long before this was.

What do ya think the folks at gnu.org or the FSF would say about this?  Copyright infringement?  Trademark infringement?  Or just a poor choice in marketing?
[tag:game][tag:gnu][tag:fsf]

Well, just to complete the earlier article on Time Warner/Comcast’s fubar at my house, it seems things are back to normal. Normal in the good sense, not the “Dropping connection every 10 minutes” sense.

They did finally send someone out (took the requisite 10 days, of course) to bury the cable. THhey were kind enough to leave the old dirty cable behind, cut into nice 6-foot segments without connectors, just laying in the yard. Unfortunately, then my problems returned, but this time they hit the entire neighborhood. After a heated call with the RoadRunner service people, 3 day wait, and a missed service call, they finally fixed the problem and it’s been running great ever since.

Of course, between the $30 of RoadRunner over 3 months refunded, and the $20 credit for the missed service call, I don’t think I’ll have to pay for cable for another month or two.  I’m still seem to be getting the “Unicast Ranging” errors from before (Although I think it may be a Firmware bug, since the top line in the Log is always the current time), but my connection hasn’t dropped since.  I’m gonna give it a month or two, then I may look into getting their $100 package of Digital Cable + Free HBO + Internet + Digital Phone… That’ld be $30 less than I pay now (I pay $100 without phone, another $30 for Vonage), and I’ld get free HBO.  Just have to wait and see.
[tag:comcast][tag:roadrunner][tag:timewarner][tag:cable]

So this week marked Week 34 in the pregnancy.  It’s been action-packed if nothing else.

Monday saw Laura back at the doctor for her weekly visit.  Once again her Blood Pressure was high so he sent her to Labor & Delivery for a NST (NonStress Test).  Everything came out fine, so he scheduled her to return on Wednesday and sent her home.  Wednesday was a repeat of Monday, another NST.  That NST makes either 6 or 7, Laura’s become quite a pro at them.  Anyway, this time they decided to go ahead & start her on the prenatal steroids (Stimulates lung development in the fetus) and sent her home.

Wednesday night hit Laura hard.  Her heart was racing and she was jumpy and jittery all night, until around 10:00pm when she lost feeling in part of her face.  Worried of a stroke, we took her to the ER and they ran another NST.  They said she was ok, but her pulse was up over 140, so they doped her on Stadol and let her sleep it off.  According to the Doctor, she’s having “Irritations”.  Irritations apparently are nearly identical to starting contractions, except there’s none of the other things like broken water or such.  Evidently, Ethan’s about ready to get out. 

Now, Laura’s back home and finally getting some sleep at night thanks to a good dose of Ambien.  Between the Magonate, Ambien, heartburn medicine, iron pills, and prenatal vitamins, she’s a walking pharmacy.  Add to that the 3 separate blood workups they drew this week, and she’s probably anemic as well.  As for me, except for a bit of stiffness from sleeping on the hospital couch, I think I’m holding up pretty well.
[tag:prenancy][tag:baby][tag:premature]

Google offers a service called Google Sitemaps, where you can submit simple XML files to their crawlers to significantly optimize the time they spend navigating your site.  It cuts down on bandwidth (for both parties) and seems to help out your PageRank a little bit.  The file contains just a little bit of information: URL’s to index, how often they update, priorities, etc.  It’s pretty trivial, but sadly not natively supported by GeekLog (yet).

So I managed to hack together a simple piece of PHP that will do it nicely, with some of “RealPanama’s” suggestions.  It assumes alot of defaults, but for a basic start it works pretty well  Anything more would require significant changes to the GeekLog interface & databases (to add the fields for Change Frequency and Priority) which I’m not going to get into.  Hope it helps!

Just save this as sitemap.php in your geeklog root directory.  If you like, you can even create a RewriteRule to change attempts to access “sitemap.xml” to “sitemap.php” .

(code inside, to reduce frontpage clutter)
[tag:geeklog][tag:google][tag:sitemap]

I just threw together a neat hack for MediaWiki that I thought I would share. 

On VizWorld.com’s Wiki I run the “AuthGeeklog” plugin, so that the usernames are shared between the two systems.  It works pretty nicely, so far.  The one problem is that if someone tries to create a new account in the Wiki, they can’t use it to login.  Only accounts created via GeekLog are valid.  This has caused only a few problems, but could create alot more now that the Wiki is really starting to get some content. 

So I did some research and hacked the following lines at the end of the LocalSettings.php file:

if (($_GET['title'] == “Special:Userlogin”) && ($_GET['type'] == “signup”)) {
    header( “Location: http://www.vizworld.com/users.php?mode=new” );
    exit;
}

Basically it takes all attempts to create a new account and redirects them to the VizWorld Account Creation page.  Simple and effective.
[tag:vizworld][tag:mediawiki][tag:geeklog][tag:hack]

One of the more interesting problems I ran into with the MythTV (that I was able to actually overcome) was flashing the BIOS. To flash the BIOS you need to boot into a “driver free” zone, typically DOS-compatible. So that means you can’t boot Linux or Windows, just pure DOS. Add in that many systems don’t even have 3.5″ floppies anymore and it gets interesting. How do you get to a pure DOS prompt anymore?

I dug for over an hour all around the net before finding the guys at www.bootdisk.com and the “FlashCD” system. The FlashCD install is less than a meg and boots (from a CD) to an old version of Dr DOS with CD Drivers. The instructions say to “Edit the ISO File” and add your flashing utilities and roms, but I found it much easier to simply burn a multisession CD (First session with FlashCD, second session with my tools). I wound up using less than a meg on the CD, but it booted in just a few seconds and worked perfectly. I was able to Flash the BIOS of my BP6 with no issues.

Why can’t more things be this simple?
[tag:bootdisk][tag:cd][tag:dos]

Well, I’ve pretty much concluded Version 1 of my MythTV rig. It’s been a learning experience, and I consider myself better for having endured it. Although Myth is a simply amazing system, the hardware I chose to deploy it on (Specifically, the Abit BP6 motherboard) just isn’t up to the task and the results are far less than I had hoped. But before we get to where I am now, let me take you through the journey of the last few weeks.

Note: This is an extremely long post…

[tag:mythtv][tag:pvr][tag:dvr][tag:bp6]

A friend of mine recently tipped me off to a band called Delain and their newest album Lucidity.  It’s listed as “Goth Metal”, which usually would send me running in the opposite direction.  This stuff is actually pretty nice tho.  Granted it does have one or two “Deathlok“-like tracks, but most of it is an interesting mix of Celtic themes with Queensryche-style rock.

It’s been a bit hard to find, but I finally found a place called dis-order.com that stocked it and accepted PayPal.  They’re based out of somewhere in the Netherlands (I think) but they mailed the CD here with no trouble. 

[tag:delain][tag:lucidity][tag:music][tag:cd]