Technophile Monkey

Until about half an hour ago, I was a relatively happy user of the [Typo](http://www.typosphere.org) blogging engine. However, there are a few things about Typo that have started to not smell right to my nose. Their Trac is taken offline, the typosphere.org page has been saying “coming soon!” for several months and upgrading to the latest svn version has destroyed all comments in my Typo blog. Granted, the migration warned that I should backup my database, which I did, but for the moment I decided I just don’t have time to live on the bleeding edge. Without a working Trac, it becomes hard to follow Typo’s development. I don’t want to have to run a three tier architecture just to thoroughly test upgrades to my blogging system before I roll them out.

So for the time being, I’ve converted to WordPress. [Stuart Johnston's conversion scripts](http://ctrlclick.co.uk/articles/2006/06/26/automatic-migration-from-typo-to-wordpress/) helped me move from Typo to WordPress. If you use them, keep in mind that they were made for Typo 2.x. If you try to migrate a Typo 4.x setup, you’ll have to rename Typo’s “categorizations” table to “articles_categories” and do some fiddling with the post and comment counters.

Since I’m used to Markdown, I’ve found [Michel's PHP Markdown plug-in](http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/) for WordPress quite useful, too.

Oh, and please bear with me while I write a new WordPress theme. This migration came quite unplanned,

The face of gaming has changed a lot in the last 30 years. Genres appeared, genres disappeared. The industry grew, and with it the audience changed. Through all this time, some annoyances have remained, completely untouched by the things going on around them.

Vestiges of an era where “roleplaying game” meant “draw dungeon maps with pencil” still exist. Remnants of a time when storage space was tight and cramped are still defining when and how a player is allowed to save their game today.

So I’ve identified the five point in modern gaming that annoy me the most and tried to find possible solutions. Not all of this applies neatly to all platforms and all genres, but you’ll get the point.
Read the rest of this entry »

I love rsnapshot, for the most part. It’s one of the most efficient and straightforward incremental backup solutions I’ve ever used — much more reliable than some of the commercial solutions I’ve tried. It leverages the power of GNU cp, your filesystem, rsync and others and smashes them all together into a big happy chunk of reliability.

However, it must contain some idiocy, and I guess it’s somewhere in parse_config_file. I just set up another server, the same way I usually do, but it needed a slightly different rsnapshot.conf. So I edited the one that was there and known to work because it automatically comes off my server images. Afterwards I wanted to do a test run of each of the backup intervals, because that’s what you do. But rsnapshot didn’t agree. It didn’t disagree either. It didn’t do *anything*.

The next step was to increase its logging verbosity and look for hints in syslog. Interesting: It seems to read its config file successfully and it even writes a pid file. Next, it checks for stale backup directories it might have to rotate. That means it parsed its config file and is happy, no? No! The thing wouldn’t copy anything into the backup. Not a single file!

As a last resort, I straced one of those test runs but forgot to include the tracing of child processes. That probably would have given me more of a clue — the way it was, it just added to my confusion.

In the end I decided to unpack a fresh, distribution-approved config file from /usr/share/doc/rsnapshot/examples and to make the required changes by hand. At that point, I scrolled back through my bash history to relaunch the test runs, but with my other hand I was already preparing to submit a bug report, when… It worked! The thing performed all the backups reliably, packed up and went to sleep until cron wakes it tomorrow.

There must have been **some** character **some**where in my config file that deeply confused rsnapshot, confused it so much that it claimed the config file syntax was OK but silently refused to work.

Perhaps config file parsing in rsnapshot has to be rethought. The way I see it, this is sad indeed. It’s the least reliable bit in an otherwise very reliable package, but it’s always the weakest link that breaks the chain, and other assorted age-worn sayings.

Ruby on Rails is still the Hot Thing of the Moment for at least 68.4% of web developers, according to my highly scientific poll which involved asking no one at all. But while Dave Heinemeier Hansson was busy basking in his (entirely deserved) glory, other easy web development frameworks have come sneaking up from behind. “Yeah, those metoo projects,” you might say, “they try to mimic RoR in PHP and COBOL! Fools! They don’t realize that the Ruby bit is essential!” And you’d be making a good point. That’s why I chose a project with a different philosophy into whose direction you may kindly orient your nose now.

TurboGears is as fresh as a breath mint after a week-long diet of anchovies in garlic oil!

Read the rest of this entry »

Madonna’s adoption scandal may have catapulted Malawi into international headlines, but for my friends Alex Antener, Nathalie Bissig and me, the country has had some significance long before US pop stars have started buying children out of it.

Alex is currently on his second visit there and Nathalie is joining him on her first. That means that I’m still stuck in Switzerland

I’m trying to support Alex’ new project in Malawi, “Exterminate All the Brutes”, from here. So as you can guess, these impressions are not my own, they are photographs and drawings made by Nathalie Bissig in Malawi, who is in charge of documenting Alex’ work as well as doing work of her own. Nathalie has posted a blog entry with some more information and a link to the photo album of her sketchbook. The images are free content, released under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.5 license.

I just wanted to tickle your curiosity for these wonderful images. I will probably write about the software libre aspects of all this at a later date, or in the blog at lix.cc. Over there, I’ve already talked about thin client setups with Edubuntu that the students of The Polytechnic will subsequently be working with.