How I got back up and running

The reason for this site’s extended absence from cyberspace was due mainly to a hardware changeover. The site is run as a secondary functionality off the back of my home media server, which recently underwent a major upgrade. I got sick of watching videos where the video would get out of sync with the audio, after this happened 1 of 2 things would happen: 1) a comical fast-forward effect would bring them back into sync 2) they would stay that way until a fast forward/rewind event brought about sync. Needless to say this was kind of annoying.

The cause however was simple to diagnose, it was the Celeron 500MHz CPU that was doing the decoding. The fix was also (in essence) simple – upgrade the CPU, however given my constraints (mainly of the monetary variety) this was a bit harder to accomplish. What I ended up deciding to do was to beg some decommissioned equipment from work which would do a better job and then to buy a solid 320Gb HD to store all my digital media on.

I decided that if I was doing a full hardware upgrade I might as well go the whole hog and scrap my previous Gentoo distribution in favour of something a bit more media centric. Enter Mythdora! Mythdora is a specialized Linux distribution based on Fedora Core 6 and MythTV 0.20-1 (thanks wikipedia), what that basically means is that it wraps up the mythtv package (very hard to install) with a nice fedora core 6 system install (very easy to install – if you have a blank harddrive to install to). I’ve been using fedora quite a bit as it is the distro of choice for our work computers so it wasn’t hard for me to transition – plus being able to install new applications without having to fiddle with USE flags and such was such a relief.

The unfortunate part of all this is that with wordpress being stored mainly in a MYSQL database it took me a while to transition the site over from the old Gentoo install to the new Mythdora. The default installation comes with the LAMP (linux, apache, mysql and PHP) stack already enabled so there wasn’t a whole lot to do in the setup department, there were however a couple of gotchas. Firstly is the movement of the mysql database from the old machine to the new. The easiest way to do this was to reboot the machine into Gentoo (thank god I didn’t wipe that)


mysqldump -h localhost -u root -p wpress_db > wpress_db.sql


then reboot to mythdora


mysql -h localhost -u root -p wpress_db < wpress_db.sql


After this I had to create a wordpress user for mysql and grant privileges to the newly created database. Things now worked well except that my settings weren’t as I’d like them (don’t know why my theme had reverted to default) but that was fairly easy to fix. The thing that took the longest was the lack of pages (ie. http://jamie.homelinux.org/publications/), I eventually tracked this down to the mod_rewrite apache module being incorrectly configured, well it was correctly configured for a default system but needed the following change to allow on the fly re-writes of urls for my blog.

  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
  #AllowOverride None     # Comment out this line
  AllowOverride All       # And add this line instead
  ...

Sweet! Now things were back up and running just the way I like them.

I’m back!

I am back from my trip into limbo with many exciting stories and pictures to share with you… actually limbo was pretty boring come to think of it… all grey and not much else The good news is that my home server is back up and running better than ever and wordpress has been upgraded to it’s super dooper latest version.

What have I been upto? well… first let me give you my thesis update.

Status: SUBMITTED!!!

You heard right, my years of hard work are finally coming to fruition with the submission of my thesis for external review. It’s been in for about a month now and I’ve been loving life since getting rid of it. I’ve been going to the gym and yoga, sleeping in, playing with the dog, getting work done on my garden and (eventually) on my server. All very relaxing, also I went down to splendour in the grass but that is a whole other post!

Things

Well been a while since I posted here so I guess I should catch up on whats been going on in my life. Truth to tell it’s all been pretty boring lately, we’ve bought the new house and started making some mortgage payments so we are feeling a touch short of cash. Therefore I’ve been keeping pretty close to home for the main part, the other weekend my mum dropped the dogs off for the weekend while she was at a conference and the younger one gave me a bit of a scare. I took him down the park and he literally played until he couldn’t stand up any more, I quite freaked out thinking that he’d gotten tick paralysis but after about 5 hours of running from vet to vet (this was at about 6pm friday night thank you very much) found out that it wasn’t anything too serious. Mum tells me he is back to normal now so I’m hoping it was just a freak occurance.

Been out to see Liam play a couple of times, he came runner up at the recent Bar Soma singer song writer contest so good on him. Will be heading out this thursday to check out UK band Elbow when they play at the Tivoli here in Brisbane, I saw them when they came out with Placebo and enjoyed the show (although I was much more excited about Placebo). Doesn’t hurt that Liam scored free tickets either

Removing “Permanent Link to” from post titles

I’ve just managed to get my automatic pinging of sites such as technorati working withm my new permanent link structure and I noticed that when my posts were showing up in technorati they would be called something like “Permanent Link to Gentoo emerge”. Obviously not a huge problem as they are actually showing up (step in the right direction^TM) but it doesn’t look very professional.

I think I’ve fixed this up by editting my current theme to remove all instances of “Permanent Link to” in the titles. This post is mainly to check if it has worked or not.

Update: That seems to have done the trick.

Moving my blog from Bloglines to WordPress

A long time ago I was headed overseas for the better part of a year and I decided that it would be a good idea to set up a blog to allow me to post my incoherent ramblings while travelling. I decided that it would be a good idea to set up a blog using the same service I use to read all my various feeds, unfortunately bloglines is much better suited to displaying blogs than it is to creating them. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until I had a fair number of posts in my archives there, then when I started shopping around for a new service I realised that there was no easy way to export my archives to a new service.

I set up my wordpress blog on my home server with the dread thought in the back of my head that I would have to write a html scraping script to run over my old blog before importing into wordpress. Thankfully it didn’t come (quite) to that and I thought I’d share with you my solution for the ugly bloglines lock-in problem.

1. Get this bash script which will rip down and dump the bloglines xml-feed into a single file
2. Put the script somewhere you can execute it. If you don’t have cygwin or linux installed you can probably execute it from your hosting company server (if they give you shell access)
3. Run the script by giving it your user name and the range of months you were active on bloglines for: ie ./genBloglines.sh -u yourUserName -sm 1 -sy 2005 – this will get everything from Jan/2005 to the present month
4. From the wordpress admin panel choose the Import option and choose import from RSS feed
5. Select the file generated by my script (default is bloglines.xml) – you might have to download it to the local machine if you’ve run the script on your hosting server.
6. Voila – you are done