Mark's Blog

I decided to remove the links to statistics and "referer"s since they were getting abused by too many spammers. b2evolution does supply an antispam blacklist, which is a noble effort, but it still requires a concerted effort to keep up to date with the legions of gambling and porn spammers. Anyway, I'm sick of playing whack-a-mole, and I suspect nobody was even reading those stats except me.

I joined the masses and bought an Xbox, the first console gaming system I've had. I got Amped 2 and Topspin with the game, and bought True Crime: Streets of L.A. and Madden NFL 2004 used for a very reasonable price. There is an incredibly large market of used console games, something that doesn't quite exist on such a scale for PC games. I can't see myself playing PC favorites such as Grand Theft Auto or Need for Speed on the Xbox -- it will probably be reserved for arcade-style multiplayer games. The Xbox has its strengths though, a solid controller, ease of use (no upgrading video cards to play the latest game) and seemingly fewer glitches than PC game releases (whose manufacturers can always rely on patches to fix problems).

I got b2evolution 0.9.0.10 installed tonight. It looks pretty good to me. I'll probably need to make a couple of little tweaks over the next couple of days but I think I'm basically where I was before. Two little glitches: one was totally my fault and very dumb -- FTPing everything in ASCII mode, which of course broke all the images.

The other glitch was in the upgrade program. I ran the installer, which broke on a SQL command. I went to the forums and found a solution. The only problem was that the script was in the middle of a bunch of database operations, so when I re-ran the script it broke again, since it was expecting to create tables that were already there from the first unsuccessful run. So, I deleted everything, restored my original version, ran the modified (as per the forum) script and everything worked fine. A bit of template fixing and it's all good. Estimated time: 2 hours.

I got some new blogging software working, which is kind of neat. It's b2evolution, a GPL fork of b2. It took awhile to set up, but that was mostly porting my old posts from my previous blogging software, GreyMatter. b2evolution is cool because it has a lot of features, is being actively developed, and uses a MySQL backend. And as they say in a Dilbert cartoon, "We like databases". Not to mention it has multiple categories per post, a sophisticated template system that I understand about 1/1000 of right now, some cool access logging mechanisms and a lot more.

There are a few things left to do, such as figure out how to get it to generate a static version of the page automatically, and get it to write the RSS feed to the existing location, so as not to break backwards compatibility. Also, I'd like to figure out how to rewrite URLs so that any existing links don't break. I have left in the text files from the old blogging software for the time being.

Any ideas on this? I basically want to change /blog/archive/00000012.htm into /blog/index.php?p=12&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. I looked into mod_rewrite and it seemed like I could put something like

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/blog/archives/0+(d+).htm$ /blog/index.php?p=$0&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

in my .htaccess file but no luck (I did have the slashes escaped, but b2evolution didn't seem to like that). I tried a very simple RewriteRule in an .htaccess file and that did work, so it should be possible.

Not much else to say right now, since I should get some sleep.

This is a test post from b2evolution

I will be importing the remaing dozen or so entries from my Greymatter installation and completely replacing it, hopefully this weekend...

First of all, I saw Master and Commander tonight, the newish Russell Crowe movie. I'd definitely recommend it, it's a solid period action movie (which I tend to like), with good acting and an enjoyable plot. The only thing that kept on annoying me was continual changes of weather and light. Seemingly five minutes would pass and it would go from pitch dark to a bright sun, with no indication that any time had passed. I give this movie an 8. Worth seeing in the theatre for the action on the big screen. Not a must-see, nothing ground-breaking, but a good all-around effort. There were some vaguely amusing parts foreshadowing Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos Islands, where the ship's doctor expresses his interest in the flora and fauna there, but his expeditions understandably play second fiddle to the Captain's orders.

Anyway, this post also marks my first anniversary of blogging. In the first year I made 78 posts, which works out to about one every 4.7 days. I don't know what I expected but I've enjoyed sharing some of my random comments and I'm sure I'll continue for the foreseeable future.

The five most popular blog entries, in order, have been:

• Joe Millionaire Episode 3 (mostly because I initially made a typo, "millionare", which drew a large number of spelling-impaired people, obviously such as myself)
• Curb Your Enthusiasm (mostly visited by people looking for information about the fourth season)
• Finished GTA: Vice City (mostly visited by other gamers looking for 100% completion stats).
• The Bachelor Finale (which seems to draw in some more people for each Bachelor season)
• Spammunition (this was an entry I wrote on a spam filter that I used to use -- I now use, and am extremely happy with, Spambayes -- there's not much on the web on it, and my blog entry is on the first page of google results, so that pretty much explains things)

I just disabled karma voting. Since the karma voting is done with a simple link, bots will be making random votes to the site, which isn't very meaningful. Feel free to leave a comment instead of a karma vote. Who am I kidding, it's not like anyone is visiting my blog anyway (yet!).

I wonder if karma / mojo / reputation systems in general have made web sites better, in general. I suppose so, otherwise they would be abandoned, however it seems that a large amount of discussion turns to these rating systems rather than the topic at hand (this post is to be construed as "Exhibit A"). Then there's the whole "karma whoring" phenomenon as exhibited on Slashdot, in which users make painfully obvious posts, often copied-and-pasted, in order to get a few "Informative" ratings. I suppose if the net effect of the system is to encourage good posts and make it easier to filter out the bad ones, it is worth doing.

Well, this entry is basically to test whether or not my installation of the greymatter software works or not. I have no idea if I'll be blogging a lot but I figured I'd better get with the times.