number 9

I’ve slept 6 hours in the last 72, and I somehow stumbled onto DeveloperWorks’ Haskell overview (I won’t link to it as it needs registration and their site is a trainwreck) .

The core features are baffling to an imperative guy like me:

• all variables are immutable
• order of instructions don’t matter
• no function side-effects
• no loops (or blocks by the look of it)

It keeps cropping up in odd places: PUGS , DARCS, pragprogs language of the year (for 2002, admittedly).
I finally read Mob Software which laments (among other things) that all computers are build to be spoken to in the spawn of FORTRAN. A new perspective might be good – if only for its Sapir-Whorf effects.

Also it’s less bracy than Lisp/Scheme (easier on the RSI), and seems to be considered a ‘pure’ functional language. It might as well be full-on weird, no sense doing things by half.

This tutorial looks promising, I’ll stick HUGS on and give it a whirl. I daresay I’ll get bored/scared within a week, but you never know…

Right, nighty night.

Just been moving the big blog over. The Wordpress upgrade drill is pretty good. (It works, for one thing). But the shit involved in updating “AN_ropey_theme/plugin” has Got Nothing To Do With A Good Time.

I finally found a 1.5 version of Toni for mama, which seems to put the sidebar in the middle of the page. There’s a ‘Toni Tweaked’ but that’s 1.2 only. Aaargh. I’m going to have to do a theme from scratch for stitch, and I really can’t be bothered.

But for true jaw-dropping clankiness, nothing caps the Flickr gallery plugin 1.2 → 1.5 ‘upgrade’ (the plugin itself looks quite nice once you tweak out a coupla bugs).
I’ve Googled for two hours and the official 1.5 solution is ‘use the 8 month old 1.2 version and apply these horrible hacks to get it working with the new theme model’.

This includes brain deadness like copying gallery.php into your active theme directory.
Pardon? What has a Flickr gallery got to do with theming? I’m going to have to go through this each time I change theme? Not to mention the next upgrade… No. If I want to support multiple layers of buggily patched webapp I’ll stay late at work, thanks.

Poor bastards.
It says something for a language that it’s easier to do this kind of evil hack than update 2 pages of PHP against the new framework.

I’m sorely tempted to try the Typo wordpress migration thing and have done with it.

• I doubt it’ll work, but typo is readable so I have a chance at tweaking it in.
• once I have shoehorned it in, I hopefully get less painful upgrades when a new version comes out
• there’s no rush, I can’t switch to 1.5 until I sort the theme and plugin anyway.
• I know enough Ruby to be dangerous, and I’d enjoy learning more. ‘Life is Too Short to Learn PHP.’
• typos theme framework is sane
• I’ll still need to write my own CSS, but it looks like that’s going to happen either way and it beats the hell out of learning PHP…

I’ve been doing really well.

I still haven’t got a gumstix , I’m #1 on Google for ‘pootooth’ (which I’m thinking of putting on my CV) , and last week I decided I definitely wasn’t getting conned by apple.

My girl got an ipod mini last month for her birthday – 6Gb for 155 quid.
I had a 512Mb shuffle as part of a deal from audible at the same time.
I knew that new ipods were imminent, so thought I’d ebay the shuffle (while it wasn’t quite obsolete) and spend the cash on a mobiblu. Colour features, open interface, nicely dinky, etc.

Then his Jobsness tells me what I really want is an ipod mini, only

• 2/3 the storage
• with no accessories
• in only two colours
• unproven. Apple hardware in my experience is less than reliable (bad ibook experience at a formative age)
• with a colour screen I’ll never see that will piss horrible chemicals into my groin when it cracks
• that’s brittle and I’ll forget is in my back pocket – until I sit down

for 20 pounds more. Oh, and just to help me make up my mind, you can’t get minis anymore. Cheers.

But today I read the ArsTechnica review ( involves throwing it out of a car at 50mph, then driving over it, and it still working) . And I’ve had a rethink:

• these things are bulletproof. Might even be todder proof…
• white is a nice colour and they do nanotubes (ipod condoms) if you really want a snot green ipod
• there are already hacks out there to use the colour screen
• it’s dinky
• there are OSS apps that speak ipodian
• 165 pounds is very cheap for a 4Gb flash player – a 1gb mobiblu is 130 quid, and that’s a choke hazard

Still think I’ll procrastinate a bit longer though:

• some analysts reckon sales figures aren’t as awesome as they could be, so a price drop might be on the horizon.
• I have a lot of crisp packets
• the refurb store (no url, it’s a secret) opens tomorrow; if the minis are cheap enough I’ll get a few
• I really need some shoes.

Thought I’d migrate gfs (wordpress) blogs to textdrive to take advantage of the mod_security umbrella.

Since she has a few I thought I’d set them up as virtual subdomains (sub.yourdomain.com → yourdomain.com/sub) and have them share a database. Started with a simple one that gets hundreds of comment spams a week.

I was expecting problems getting it into textdrive because I’d set up the main (only) vhost to ”ProxyPass /” → typo (on lighttpd). This ( and the fact that the A record for hellooperator.net doesn’t point to textdrive ) caused all sorts of problems with dav, ical and svn, as you’d expect.

moving the proxied blog to a dedicated vhost

1. made a new ‘virtual server’ (a.k.a vhost) for number9.hellooperator.net
2. got rid of wildcard ”ServerAlias *.hellooperator.net” on the main vhost so the second one would match
3. set some ServerAliases on the number9 vhost
4. mod_proxied the whole number9 vhost → lighttpd
5. unproxied the main vhost and added an A record for it (fixing dav/svn/ical in the process).

getting virtual subdomains to work

1. made index.html in docroot/testsub
2. setup testsub.domain.com at DynDNS pointing to textdrive
3. started tweaking until testsub.domain.com showed the index I’d made
4. tried to figure out why I kept getting the top level index.html.

Turns out it was because of step 2. in the ‘moving proxied blog’ list above.
I was getting the default textdrive index page (because the entire vhost wasn’t recognized) and mistook it for my own index.html. Not sure how I could have avoided that, since number9 is a subdomain of the main site.

Anyway, set testsub.hellooperator.net as an alias on the main vhost and I could see my custom index page.

the wordpress upgrade / server move

1. backed up docroot and db
2. ran upgrade.php on existing server to get 1.2 ->1.5
3. gasped as it actually worked. Theme is screwed but that’s ok.
4. mysqldumped the new db and setup the table_prefix
5. rsynced oldbox:docs → textdrive:docroot/sub
6. loaded dumped db into a fresh textdrive one
7. checked ’helloooperator.net/sub’ worked.
8. repointed dns
9. sub.hellooperator.net worked.

Mainly blogging this so the next one goes a bit smoother….