Some time over the last few days, the software that runs this blog, or the database on the back end, decided to mess with me. All of my WordPress “Pages” were converted to “Posts,” which is why the links above to “About,” “FAQ,” and “Links” don’t work.

In real life, I’m employed as a software engineer. I fix buggy software daily. But I’ve been on a short vacation, and couldn’t be bothered to turn it into a busman’s holiday.

I’ll fix it one of these days. Meanwhile, if any readers are WordPress hackers and have seen this happen, I’d be happy to know how to fix it without having to restore from a backup (which is what I’ll be doing as a last resort).

If you’re like me, and don’t think making Portland, Ore. look like Vancouver, B.C. should be the beginning and end of city development policy, you’ll probably like Portland Gentrification and Other Problems. With a sidebar of links annotated with snarky commentary like “Page after page of unintentionally hilarious stupidity that must be seen to be believed” (pdxcondos.net) and “PSU Architecture students see steel, get wood” (SkyscraperPage Portland Forum), you’re either going to love this blog… or just plain hate it.

I’m loving it, and added it to my feed aggregator the other day. (I read blogs almost exclusively in my aggregator, which means I get to have black text on a white background, regardless of what bad style decisions a blog author may have made, and I get to skip the ads.)

Anyway, today when I updated my feed, it came up with a bunch of new posts. The top of the list was about Natalie Imbruglia’s latest single. There was news of Joan Armatrading’s tour. A review of Neil Young concert. And something about “Pink snuggles up to hairy rocker.” All mixed in with articles about Portland gentrification, including “‘Fast Flip’ b/w ‘Do Ya Wanna Rent My Condo’ (12″ dance remix, nm, no ps).”

Confused? So was I, until I realized that either my aggregator was confused, or the blog’s feed got crossed with the feed from The London Paper. Fun stuff.

I’m a bit wonky about numbers… some of you might know this about me. So I have a couple different ways of tracking visitor stats for this blog. One of them is AWStats, which analyzes my Apache logs and gives me nice reports. The other is Site Meter, which uses an image and some JavaScript embedded on each page of the site. I like Site Meter because it gives me an instant look at who’s on my site at any given time, and organizes data by visit, which is cool. Today I just happened to take a look, and lo and behold, I got four visits from my friends at Portland Public Schools, all within about 45 minutes. Glad you guys are reading!

Well, it happened again, almost exactly a month after it happened before. Seven hundred-some Portland General Electric customers lost juice in North Portland, this time on the hottest day of the year. We didn’t have the multiple power surges like last time, and we managed to get all of our stuff unplugged just in case. The only casualty was the Wacky Enterprises blog farm, which does not function without all those electrons wiggling around in the copper, and was consequently off-line for five hours (from 4:30 PDT to 9:30 PDT).

So two lengthy outages in two months is making me think more and more of moving this whole enchilada to a hosting company. Anybody got good suggestions? Requirements: WordPress (and all its requirements, e.g. MySQL, PHP, etc.) , ssh/ftp access, reasonable rates, 24×7 rock-solid reliability, decent customer service. Local would be nice. Maybe I should just collocate, since I’m kind of anal about running my own servers.

The bonus of doing it here by myself is that it’s basically free. Maybe I’ll just keep it that way, and consider PGE’s monthly outages a cost of doing business.

Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again

— Bob Dylan, “Odds and Ends”

It’s been a tumultuous few weeks here at Wacky Blog Central, so let me just lay into it.

1. I migrated all our blogs to a new server over the weekend, and other than a few glitches, things have gone swimmingly.
2. One glitch was that I made the mistake of using SuSE’s yast2 to configure apache, and it totally f’ed up my virtual host set-up. This caused all of Wacky Mommy’s traffic to be routed to this blog for a day. I fixed it by doing it the good old fashioned way: editing httpd.conf, and all its subordinate *.conf files with vim. I mean, seriously, yast2 totally f’ed up the virtual host configuration.
3. Another glitch was that I didn’t set up the aliases for www, which meant if you put “www.” on the front of our blog URLs, you wouldn’t find us. (Why anybody — and by this I mean Web site owners — still uses www is beyond me. It made sense in the old days, when www.somedomain.com meant “a computer named ‘www’ on the domain ‘somedomain.com’”. These days, though, I would guess 99.9% of Web sites are virtual domains, so the www is just plain spurious. Subdomains can still make sense, for instance if you have a software package site, you can have mysoftware.com, docs.mysoftware.com, downloads.mysoftware.com, etc. But www is just silly. Of course it’s the World Wide Web. Why waste those keystrokes?)
4. Another unrelated but stupid pilot error glitch was that I let this domain expire yesterday. Oh, man, I can’t believe I did that. I renewed and everything seems to be back in order. It is if you’re reading this, anyway.
5. The dog had a massive “accident” in our home last night. Shudder. Thank god for the the following:
   1. Carpet shampooers
   2. Bi-O-Kleen Bac-Out
   3. A strong intestinal constitution (me, not the dog)
6. The new TV device for the new computer doesn’t work as well as the old ATI All-in-Wonder. I’m not sure if it’s the USB interface (probably) or the hardware mp2 encoder, but there’s this horrid delay when watching from an external source (like a VCR). And the DVR software pretty much sucks. It’s cool to have a remote control, but damn, when you’re watching a recorded show, and you fast forward, it’s virtually impossible to stop and play again without it jumping to the beginning. Why the hell isn’t there a commercial skip feature? Basically, they haven’t made the effort to make this a fully-featured DVR.
7. Did I mention the dog crapped all over the house?
8. Yeah. It’s fucking horrible.
9. On a brighter note, the sun’s been shining in Portland for several days. Cold, clear and crisp.
10. We had “family art night” at school last night, which I was expecting to be an evening of sitting at grade-school cafeteria tables with the kids as they pasted things together. Instead, we were treated to a concert by Trashcan Joe. No glue, no markers, no glitter, no whining about not being able to make it look like the teacher’s example. Nice.
11. Due to a snow storm two weeks ago, and a fever last week, I went nearly two and a half weeks without playing hockey. I finally get out on the ice yesterday and was pleased that I haven’t totally lost my cardio.
12. I still haven’t cleaned up all the boxes from the new computer and misc. peripherals.
13. We’ve got a Web server (this one!) in our bedroom. It’ll be there until I decommission the old server, which means migrating the mail server to the new Web server and a couple other virtual domains and…. and…. Oy. Maybe running our own blog farm isn’t such a great idea.

Busy busy busy.

For a new, improved More Hockey, Less War blog. Same bat channel, same bat time.

But with a new, improved Web server, new, improved blogging software, and a new, improved design.

Two years ago, I set up the current Web server to host family photos and my wife’s blog (because I didn’t like Google/Blogger’s privacy policy). This server is a 1997 Dell with a 200MHz Pentium MMX processer and a whopping 32 MB of RAM. It’s performed admirably for two years, and would still be fine except, well, Wacky Mommy’s gone and gotten popular. Her blog’s getting 50,000 hits a month, transferring a half a gigabyte of data to her legions of fans. She’s averaging 500 unique visits a day, and when you add to that my relatively puny readership, this little dinosaur of a Web server is starting to creak under the load. We’ve had a couple of outages in the past month when I’ve had to hard reboot the poor thing.

Meanwhile, back on the desktop, our home-built workstation has been getting creaky, too. We’ve been running a 700 MHz Athlon with 256 MB of RAM for several years now, and with the commodity pricing on new machines being what it is, it’s time to move up. So I bought a new dual core, 64 bit box with 1 GB of RAM and a new 19″ flat panel monitor for the desktop, and rebuilt the old desktop with Open SuSE 10.2 (Linux) to use as a new Web server.

The current server is running a very stripped down installation of Debian Linux, which has served us well. But I wasn’t able to run X because the machine was such a dog. With the “new” Web server, I installed the full monty, including the very fancy KDE desktop manager, OpenOffice (a free Microsoft Office clone), and everything else you can imagine you’d need in a home computer (not to mention all the server stuff I really need). Since the new desktop came with a monitor, my Web server now has a monitor, too! What a concept.

Anyway, since the new Web server has more horsepower, I decided to step up to using WordPress for blogging software, which uses MySQL for a database. I am currently running Pivot, which uses flat text files for storage. This does not scale very well, but it was very adequate before our blogs became popular. Well, since Wacky Mommy’s became popular. It would still be fine if she were a loser blogger like me. So anyway, what’s all of this mean to you, dear reader?

First, everything should be faster, particularly when viewing single entries or comments, or leaving comments. Second, I’m redesigning the blog for (hopefully) better usability. WordPress behaves more like most people expect blogs to behave. (Pivot’s a little funky in many ways.) But really, that’s it. All of my existing entries, and all comments will be transfered to the new blog, and the URL to the front page will remain the same. Some URLs to individual entries (permalinks) may be broken, though. Sorry about that.

The big switch is scheduled for this Sunday. I probably won’t post again until after the new server is up and serving.

Next step: more bandwidth. Stay tuned for that.

So while I’m on a rant roll about enviro-yuppies and their Prius fetishes, hows about biodiesel? More and more you see (at least in Portland) old beater VWs and Mercedes diesels with “powered by biodiesel” bumper stickers. The good news: When your stuck behind them on the freeway, they stink like over-cooked french fries, not a belching diesel truck.

The bad news (and this is really, seriously bad news for the enviro-weenies who drive them): producing liquid fuel from biomass is horrendously inefficient. It takes 27% more energy to produce biodiesel from soybeans than you get back in terms of usable fuel. It takes 118% more to produce it from sunflowers. That’s right, you evil do-gooders, you’re wasting more fossil fuel by switching to biodiesel.

Ethanol’s no good, either. The best source, corn, requires 29% more energy to produce than you get back.

Check out this brief story about a study by Cornell professor David Pimentel. It would appear that the gubmint push for biofuel (amounting to some $3 billion in tax-payer funded subsidies to ethanol refiners) is nothting but pork for agribusiness (my conclusion, not Pimentel’s) .

What? Himself dishing? Sure, what the hell.

Our neighbors really like to think of themselves as environmentalists. When it came time to buy a new vehicle, they were really conflicted because there aren’t any hybrid mini-vans out there. So they got a mini-mini-van, the Mazda 5 (or is it 6?). It’s a cool vehicle, really. I think it’s the smallest car you can get with three rows of seating (seats 6). But (now get this) they got it in a 5-speed because “mileage is really important to us.” Uh. Okay. So I’m thinking, with modern technology, a 5-speed automatic is proably just about as efficient as a 5-speed manual. Sure enough, the EPA ratings are 1 MPG less for the auto. And if the environment is that important to them, why are they buying a vehicle that seats 6 for their family of 3?

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