Archive for the 'Follow Up' Category

Who is Ron Paul?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on October 27, 2007
in Announcements, Commentary, Follow Up, Government, Internet and Links
. 0 Comments

As a follow up to my last post, I thought I’d post the list of brief facts about Ron Paul that came on one of the info cards. It’s really a great representation of some of the things he’s stood up for during his long congressional career.

  • He voted against the Iraq war.
  • He voted against the Patriot Act and a National ID Card.
  • He voted against the Military Commissions Act.
  • He voted against regulating the internet.
  • He has never voted to raise taxes.
  • He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
  • He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
  • He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
  • He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
  • He has never taken a government-paid junket.
  • He is against amnesty and in favor of securing our borders.
  • He is against the North American Union, NAFTA, GATT, WTO and CAFTA.
  • He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
  • He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

Can you name another candidate who’s done half of that?

Please, check out some more information on Ron Paul. I think you’ll agree he’s the best candidate for the job.

I highly recommend the Youtube channel. Hear his stance in his own words and realize the passion he has for restoring America to its former glory.

Garland for Wordpress 2.2

Published
by
Chris Meller
on May 16, 2007
in Announcements, Follow Up, Incoherent Code, Internet, Links and Wordpress
. 10 Comments

Update 2/3/08: The links below are broken. There’s a new version of the Garland theme available here!

Attention all Garland-wanters! The Wordpress.com adaptation of the Garland theme is now available for stand-alone Wordpress 2.2 installations.

I know a lot of people have been disappointed after actually downloading the raw SVN-exported version from my previous post, and I finally took the time to check into what was wrong. Surprisingly, it didn’t really take long at all to get things working once I had a few minutes of solid thinking-time.

I have tested this theme and verified it to be fully working on my local test installation of Wordpress 2.2, YMMV. If you notice any oddities, feel free to let me know. I can’t promise I’ll actually fix them, but I’ll at least read them…

Changes

  • Fixed broken and missing Javascript includes that are required by the color-picker in the admin panel.
  • Corrected several URLs to images and stylesheets that had been hard-coded using relative paths so that they now correctly retrieve the stylesheet directory’s URI.
  • Added my lovely info to the credits. :)

Once again, I’ve tested these changes enough to release them, but I can’t guarantee it’ll work under every configuration. There’s really nothing terribly odd about this setup, but you never know…

Download
You can download the zip file here: garland-1.1.zip garland-1.1.2.zip

2.2 Only!
Please note that this theme requires the newly-released Wordpress 2.2, as it relies upon the jQuery Javascript library which was not included in prior versions.

If, however, you wish to place a copy of jquery.js in your wp-content/themes/garland/ directory, you should simply be able to un-comment line 39 in functions.php. I haven’t, however, tested this at all… Please let me know how it goes if you try.

Javascript Documentation

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 4, 2007
in Follow Up, Incoherent Code, Internet, Links and Techno-Babble
. 4 Comments

At the end of the Yahoo! javascript videos I mentioned earlier, they include links to all the major documentation sources for browser Javascript implementations. For convenience, I thought I’d just link to all of them right here on a single page:

Mozilla
Here

Microsoft
Here

Apple
Here

Opera
Opera has no formal documentation on their DOM implementation. Instead, they simply link you to the W3C.

W3C
Here

No, I’m Still Not Going to Help You…

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 5, 2007
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Follow Up and Gripes
. 2 Comments

Kirillz in #wordpress told me that my last post seemed to be cut off, and that I should give more details on why I get so frustrated with people when I’m trying to help them. So here are two that I could think of right off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll be able to add to this list in the near future…

#1
When you’re having a problem and have come looking for help, don’t try and tell me that you don’t think something I’m suggesting will help. If you knew all the answers, you wouldn’t be having a problem in the first place. My suggestion may very well not have any real impact on the problem, but I still expect you to walk through the troubleshooting steps I give you anyway. It’s the way I work, and during troubleshooting I’m driving you by remote control. Shut up and do it and tell me what happens when you’re done…

#2
People like people who help themselves. That’s especially true in my case. If you haven’t checked the clearly published documentation and aren’t willing to at least try to help yourself (and that includes Googling competently for the answer), don’t bother coming to ask me for help.

This also includes not giving a detailed explanation of your problem. There are just some things I expect you to walk in the proverbial door with, and a clear description of what you expected to happen and what really happened is one of them.

From (mt) to Fuzzy Hosting - A Tale of Hairy Joy

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 21, 2007
in Commentary, Follow Up, Hosting, Internet, Media Temple and Techno-Babble
. 2 Comments

I just wanted to follow up to Thursday’s post about moving off of the (mt) grid to Fuzzy Hosting with a few more details about the move.

Migrating was as painless as you can ever hope for a change in hosting to be. Neither (mt) nor Fuzzy use any funky PHP or Apache configurations, so there wasn’t really anything “different” between the two accounts from the perspective of running Wordpress on them. While migrating, I also took the time to upgrade each blog I moved to Wordpress 2.0.7 - still no problems.

There were two minor inconveniences I ran into during the process, although to call them “problems” would be vast overkill since they were very easily worked around.

  1. No SSH Access
    Now to be fair, the average user probably wouldn’t call this a “problem”. Still, once you’ve gotten used to using the command line for migrations such as this (thanks to the scp command), it’s a pain in the butt to go back to regular old FTP. Still, not a big deal. In fact, I took the opportunity (while downloading my old content) to download the new version of Wordpress and uploaded it back up to Fuzzy before sending my content up.
  2. phpMyAdmin Importing
    The other issue I had was when re-importing my main blog. With all the statistics information, posts, and comments (none of which I was willing to part with) the database was rather large. The default PHP maxfilesize for an upload is 2MB. Unfortunately, the phpMyAdmin install found in Plesk inherits this setting. My database was too large to download and then upload all in one fell swoop. Instead, I had to do it in pieces, a few tables at a time. Fortunately, none of my tables were single-handedly larger than 2MB (at least when gzip’d) so it wasn’t a real issue.

Like I said, no real issues, but those were the two things that I did notice during the process that could have been slightly more seamless.

Overall I’m thrilled with the service I’ve received from Fuzzy, even if they did complain about one of my WP-Cron scripts (the reminder one, which tests cron by sending emails every 15 to 60 minutes I believe). They went in and deactivated this script, claiming it was sending out a crap-ton of blank emails to no one and that it was overloading their email server. Seems a tad over-exaggerated to me, but it wasn’t a big deal since it didn’t do anything useful anyway. I don’t much care for other people snooping around in my database and deactivating plugins I’m using on my blog, but I suppose it’s one of those things that hosting companies do from time to time (although in the dozen or so I’ve used in the past, no one has ever done such a thing).

Just as a side note to the whole process, at first I was going to dump a few of my more critical sites onto my Dreamhost account, just to get them up and running. Over the past several months, my Dreamhost account has been rock-solid, while (mt) has experienced massive amounts of downtime on their grid product1. Unfortunately, the Dreamhost panel was so unresponsive during the two days in which I was considering the move that I was forced to abandon that plan. I wasn’t really planning on getting yet a 3rd hosting account, but I’m glad that Fuzzy was there to help me get my sites back up and running.

UPDATE: Correction. Fuzzy Hosting doesn’t have an upload limit of 2MB on their phpMyAdmin installs. Apparently I mis-read the display (which I believe usually shows 2,048 KB):

Fuzzy Hosting Upload Limit
  1. According to monitoring by Site 24×7. [back]