Sho Fukamachi Online

It’s been a while, but WP requires a new “urgent” update. If you’re running an svn install – and you should be – you’ll want to do the following:

[sho ~]$ cd /path/to/your/wp
[sho wp]$ svn info
Path: .
URL: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.1
Repository Root: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress
Repository UUID: 1a063a9b-81f0-0310-95a4-ce76da25c4cd
Revision: 6298
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: ryan
Last Changed Rev: 6293
Last Changed Date: 2007-10-26 16:10:08 +0000 (Fri, 26 Oct 2007)
 
[sho wp]$ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2
U    wp-includes/query.php
U    wp-includes/wp-db.php
U    wp-includes/formatting.php
U    wp-includes/taxonomy.php
U    wp-includes/post.php
U    wp-includes/version.php
U    wp-includes/pluggable.php
U    wp-includes/functions.php
U    wp-app.php
U    xmlrpc.php
U    wp-mail.php
U    wp-settings.php
U    wp-admin/includes/file.php
U    wp-admin/admin.php
U    wp-admin/setup-config.php
U    wp-admin/install.php
Updated to revision 6544.
[sho wp]$

This release is database-safe so no need to mess around with plugins while doing the upgrade. Of course, you should always keep regular backups whether or not you’re going to do an upgrade – and always backup before one, “safe” or not.

Michael Arrington was making over $100,000 a month running an ad campaign for Microsoft. He’s been lambasted all over for not disclosing that his lame ads were, in fact, lame ads – but hell, $100,000 a month says I couldn’t care less about disclosing that either.

So! Here we go! Did you know that this blog is People-Ready? It is so ready for people, and it’s all because of Microsoft. I love Microsoft, and because of them, I’m People-Ready. This is a People-Ready business. I, myself, am permanently People-Ready, especially if those people are hot chicks. Forget I said that.

People-Ready, People-Ready, People-Ready! This blog has comments! It empowers people to communicate with me and hold conversations. Comments, and this blog, are People-Ready, as am I, as are my readers, and heaps of other stuff, etc. Also, I write stuff on this blog. From the second I hit submit, that content is People-Ready, thanks to Microsoft.

I am so motherfucking PEOPLE-READY it is beginning to hurt. I may actually be TOO People-Ready. Did I tell you how much Microsoft software ROCKS MY WORLD? Because it does. Thanks to Microsoft and its top-quality people-readying software, I am now more People-Ready than pretty much anyone else on earth.

I am also Dollars-Ready.

You know what I am? I’m motherfucking PEOPLE FUCKING READY! Now please send me 100,000 People-Ready dollars a month.

Another day, another WP exploit! This one’s apparently been floating around the net for weeks, and a fix was only released a few hours ago.

I’m lucky. I have enough technical skill to set up WP as an svn working copy, which means that the upgrade, for me, is as simple as issuing this command on the three or four WP blogs I’m responsible for:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.1/

And it’s done, instantly. For minor upgrades I don’t even bother disabling plugins.

But the vast majority of people install their WP blogs manually, from the downloadable archive that is the recommended method by the WP team. Those people face a monthly task of laboriously backing up, replacing files all over the place, copying and replacing any customisations like themes, moving their pictures and content from folder to folder .. in other words, a pain in the fucking ass, especially when it happens so often. Therefore – it doesn’t get done.

A good quick check of how on-the-ball security-wise a site is is to do a quick “view source” on their wordpress blog. I do this on pretty much any WP blog I regularly visit. Just checking! I know several popular blogs that haven’t updated for months and months – one of the most popular is still at 2.1.2. And that’s an internet company. If even internet companies can’t, or don’t realise they have to, keep their WP installs up-to-the-fucking-minute-or-else, what chance does the regular joe have?

So – if you’re choosing blog software, here’s my advice: don’t choose wordpress. And if you did make the mistake of choosing it and are now a bit too locked in to easily move, like me – keep it religiously updated. Move to svn distribution. Go to trunk, if necessary (I used to run trunk but stopped when I gained a little more trust in WP .. I’m thinking of going back to it now). But the best option is just to never sign on to this endless security-flaws treadmill in the first place.

Seems that during one of the practically daily updates to fricking WordPress I managed to nuke the results for my animal poll on the right. Please vote again!

I am really, really getting sick of WordPress. It’s nice to use, but management and maintenance is a pain in the fucking ass.

Oops, looks like I missed my big one-year anniversary! By several months! Ah well, might share some statistics anyway.

First post was on 16th July 2005, but I only started reliably counting statistics from 24 Aug, 2005. Since the latter date this blog has received 24,562 unique visitors and 127,465 hits. There have been 402 posts including this one, so about one a day, and a mere 602 (!) non-spam comments – mostly in the auspicious, intellectual tone set by that very first post.

Alexa ranking slipped down to 5 million from some better number I can’t remember, not that I care. The site has a PageRank of a miserable 3/10, but scores #2 on a search for “sho fukamachi” on google – as one can imagine that is an extremely popular search string.

So, all in all a highly successful operation! I’d say I have lots of “big plans” for the next year of periodic ranting but I cannot tell a lie, I have no plans at all for anything more than this; as you can see I can’t even be bothered fixing the template. If anything, my interest in all things blog-related has diminished over the year; I have a vanishingly small interest in “blogs”, “blogging”, and especially “bloggers”. I have no wish to ever be described as or thought of as a “blogger” and while I don’t doubt that with enough time and effort I could probably create quite a successful blog, I simply have no interest in doing so. This is probably quite evident to any regular reader of this site. The reason for this is quite simply that it is a lot of work for precisely no gain, especially financially; I don’t value the “blogosphere” even in the slightest, and I am not interested enough to “get serious” in any meaningful way. Et cetera.

So, here’s to many more happy years of sporadic online proclamations! よろしくお願いします！

Seems the WP team has finally managed to fix quicktags in Safari. Good work guys!

Running on a new server. Might take some time to get everything set up!

And thank you PHP for wasting hours of my time with your silent and unlogged “out of memory” errors!

I need a new server.

Current options are:

LayeredTech
SoftLayer (currently winning)
LiquidWeb

I like SoftLayer because of their vLan policy, and of course price/performance. The everyone-is-a-vLan is a great idea because if you need another server or 20, they can just drop them in, configure them on the same vLan and voila! Another server at 192.168.x.x. Although they should give a discount if it’s not going to be internet-facing (eg DB…). And RackSpace, while by popular consensus the best, are just too expensive.

I’m undecided between managed and unmanaged. Well actually – I just can’t see why management is necessary. I have never needed management help before and can’t really imagine why I would need it in future unless I was DDOS’d or something – but surely that would be covered even by “unmanaged” services? I’d like to know exactly what management is supposed to do?

Unfortunately, all the above seem a little slow from Japan. In fact everyone seems slow from Japan – ironically the fastest appears to be GoDaddy, from whom I would not rent a dedicated server in a million years. Naturally the cost of an in-country DS is absolutely ludicrous at what seems to be around a 3-5x premium over the US market. There must be a market opportunity for someone to open some kind of reasonable-value dedicated/colo service in Japan?

Another option is of course to go for someone in HK or Singapore but I don’t really want to mess around with those countries at this stage. It’s just too hard to find someone who can be trusted, and there’s too many dodgy outfits, and not enough large companies. I’m not buying a DS from someone who accepts fricking e-gold and Stormpay but no CC except through PayPal! Jesus, what kind of operation doesn’t have CC processing?

Anyway SoftLayer it is unless I find something else. This site won’t be making the move immediately, though – if there’s no troubles after a couple of months, I’ll bring everything over for good. I’m not moving until I’m absolutely sure I only have to move once, though.

This blog now receives one comment spam attempt every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day. I’m using the excellent Spam Karma 2 to deal with them, which has maintained a wonderful 100% accuracy ever since I installed it, but I hear Akismet is also good. What seems pretty obvious though is that if you have a blog, and no spam protection, you’re either very unhappy right now, or your blog is nothing but one big advertising board for whatever spam ripoff is current.

It’s quite a miserable situation and a none too positive comment on human nature that the spam issue has degenerated this far, but it seems to only get worse.

A happier tale is that of email spam, which for me is extremely rare. I’d say that’s a result of a fairly strict policy of never putting my email address anywhere on the web in text format. A google search for my email turns up nothing, and that’s the way I like it.

UPDATE: from the Akismet site’s “daily zeitgeist”: over 1.2 million spams seen in the last 24 hours, out of around 35 million total since epoch. That seems to support my theory that some kind of massive surge is on now ..

I was sick of that pussy grey and needed a colour to better express the DARKNESS OF MY SOUL!!!!!!

Please ignore the flaws around the content area until I can be bothered fixing it, which will probably be in the next few weeks.

I decided to clean up the site a bit, removing the most juvenile of the humor and just keeping what I think is actually a positive contribution to the internet.

I haven’t gone as far as Greg, who decided on a whole change of format, engine and philosophy – I’ll just try and reduce the psychosis a little. But on the whole I agree. Much of what I posted here is for my own amusement only – it really has no relevance to anyone else, and shouldn’t really be cluttering up the net to annoy everyone else.

Why is that? What has changed? It could be that I’m being influenced by this country and its concept of 建前. Sure, I have a right to act however I want, post whatever I want. But should I? And I’ve been realising that, much as I criticise the japanese for their lack of individualism and their conformity to social norms, I like them more than westerners, and it’s mainly because of the politeness. It’s a shallow measure of a person, but how else do you judge a stranger but on how they act? And on the internet, everyone is a stranger. It occurred to me that it would behove me to act more in accordance with the traits I find most likeable in others. So, I’ll be making an effort to do that.

Having spent the last 2 days playing with textpattern and attempting to shoehorn the look and feel into it that I want I have this to say – 感動した!

Although the learning curve is initially steep, it soon flattens off once you learn the terminology and get yourself out of a blog and dreamweaver template mindset. Soon, the design begins to make sense and you realise that it’s actually much more flexible than you thought, and the apparent initial lack of a lot of important features disappears. I’m very happy with it now, and I’ll be moving 2 web sites to it and maybe more. I don’t think I’d use it as a blog, though, although it does have that functionality – what I’m really looking for is blog-style convenience, though.

This is because I’ve noticed that, due to my incredible innate laziness, if something web-related is too hard and fiddly, I just won’t do it. I’m just sick of fiddling around with fricking dreamweaver, trying to get so and so template just right. Without an automated system, any new page has to start off in DW, and that just gets very old. I had the time and inclination in the past, but not any more – it must be automated, and I must be able to do pretty much everything in a web browser, or it just doesn’t get done. There’s not a lot of excuses for this kind of laziness, but at least I’ve identified it and am working around it by setting up web-based systems to use.

I don’t mind fiddling around with templates and PHP/CMS code ONCE. I’d like to get it right once and then have everything “just work” from then on. There’s no problem mustering that initial discipline to get something looking and acting just right. What kills me later on is the incremental fiddling around just to post this or that. It becomes a barrier, a small one really, but enough so updating something becomes a big enough chore to make you avoid it altogether. This, of course, accounts for the phenomenal popularity of blogs compared to pretty much any other kind of non-professional website – they’re just an order of magnitude (or two) easier to update, if not set up. I’d like that kind of streamlined ease of use for a semi-pro, or even pro, website, and so the search has been for a CMS framework to enable me to create such a thing without a month of programming and tweaking the bloody thing.

Anyway, for now, I’m deliriously happy with the possibilities TextPattern seems to present, and I’ll be sure to link to one of these conversions when it looks something like what I’m aiming at. For now, I’m getting pissed off with my 17″ monitor (much too small for any serious work) so I’ll take a break and go look at some 桜.

I’ve been searching for a decent open source CMS for a while now for another project, and as I’m sure anyone who has tried to do the same will agree, it’s a miserable prospect. Every free CMS in existence seems to be either hideously ugly, hideously complicated, or most often both. My requirements are actually fairly simple – create a decent-looking minimalist web site and not have to do too much work to maintain it. It seems that every single OSS CMS has been designed to do the job of a combined blog/forum/kitchen sink site, with incredible bloat, complexity, lack of speed and above all – a hideous default install.

I mean is it so fucking hard to come up with a CMS that isn’t a blog, and isn’t a “community site”? Just between you and me, the world has enough community sites, and many times more than enough blogs. Does every article need to be commentable? And I don’t know about you, but I hate sites with more than 2 columns. Serious commercial sites do not feature annoying calendars highlighting recent activity, or “recent comments from the forums”. Sure, you can turn all this stuff off, somehow. But just the fact that it’s left on in these default installs – and i’ve been through a few now – tells me that the authors are not targeting me.

Anyway, after a lot of experimentation, I finally settled on textpattern, which seemed to be the best of a bad lot. It’s still too damn complicated – why can’t CMS authors match the ease of WP for testing out themes, for example? But it’s better than most, and seems to have been designed by someone with at least a rough understanding of the word “style” – just the fact that the name is somewhat cool and stylish instantly sets it above the “Plone” and “joomla!” crowd of obvious made-by-nerds-for-nerds projects.

It seems well supported, common enough, and appears to possess that all-important “critical mass” one looks for before throwing one’s lot in with any open source project. But it’s sure as hell no WP or MT or even Blogger.

Anyway, there’s still a steep learning curve, so I won’t be showing off my efforts yet – but at least I managed to make a decision (took about a month!). The current web site for that domain is actually made in iWeb (lol) so obviously has to go. iWeb is extremely limited, actually, and is basically useless.

Onwards and upwards …….

I’ve bemoaned the lack of Safari support for WP Quicktags in the past. Not that I’m not hardcore enough to type it out manually. Because I don’t WANT to type it out manually. And my image uploader utility requires those buttons – I’m sick of using Firefox every time I want to upload something.

Now, I’ve discovered a fix. Behold: The Safari Quicktags Workaround. And I used quicktags to make that link.

I know it’s been slow. Pumped up the server a bit, so it should be a bit faster now.

Kicked it up to WP 2.0 while I was wasting hours messing around with fricking computers. Great.