MarteyDodoo.com

After realizing that my issues with WordPress' autosave feature was probably caused by the fact it has been almost a year since I upgraded wpLicense, the WordPress plugin that integrates Creative Commons licenses, I decided that it was high time I looked at changing the license that my content is published under.
In December 2004, [...]

For a relatively long time (more than a year), this blog used a modified version of the Kubrick theme that ships with WordPress. Since I had invested a substantial amount hacking on the fixed-width theme to make it fluid[1], I was hesitant to switch, especially since the majority of the themes I saw were going [...]

Annoyed at the fact that Technorati tags do not work when my posts are excerpted in RSS, I have switched back to full text in RSS.

In what is definitely the strangest way I have ever celebrated New Year's, I am changing the site's RSS feeds from full text to summary. If this causes a problem for anyone, let me know, and I will consider changing them back.

If you have been wondering why certain protected posts just straight-up disappeared from this site and the RSS feed, the reason is that I started using the ViewLevel plugin to protect posts. Since I removed the passwords that were formerly protecting the posts, if anything happens to the plugin (i.e. it suddenly stops working), the [...]

Per my earlier thoughts about the possibility of private posts, I have decided to enable user registration. If I have never met you in person nor conversed with you past midnight, do not bother registering, unless you are really famous or something.
There are perhaps 50 people or so whom I would accept user registration from [...]

This is Martey Dodoo speaking: This is Martey Dodoo is now MarteyDodoo.com.
Why now? What was wrong with the old title?
Nothing was wrong with it, per se (although my inner minimalist did think the "This is" was a bit superfluous). It's been a bit over six months since the last title change, and to tell the [...]

Mildly concerned about the fact that there was no way to contact me other than posting a comment, I created a contact page, using Matt Mullenweg's page as inspiration. Unlike Matt, I refrained from adding my cell phone number; I get enough strange messages as it is.

The RSS feeds are not working, but hopefully this post will fix it. I will probably have to make a comment to fix the comment feed. This is annoying, but life could be worse, I guess.
UPDATE: Uploaded a patch from the bug page previously linked to which should provide a more permanent solution.

I had to completely reinstall WordPress (which took less than half an hour in total), but everything works now. If you notice anything broken, feel free to leave a comment.

I could have (and probably should have) spent the last two hours or so doing homework, but I wasted it away making changes here. Among the things that now work:

The sidebar (that list of links on the right) no longer appears below the footer (that blue bar on the bottom). This was only apparent if [...]

Upgraded to WordPress 1.5. Since I had already done of the hard work when I switched to a beta build late last month, the upgrade was ridiculously easy.
So I decided to make it harder, by moving the blog into the root directory of the site. As a result, you can now access the blog at [...]

Switching it up a bit.

I am not sure why I did not notice the problem that caused only one post and the right sidebar to show up (perhaps I uploaded an older version of index.php?), but I fixed the problem.

The "corefonts" package makes installing Windows fonts like Verdana on Linux systems easy. However, the corefonts ebuild does not include Tahoma, the font used in Windows XP buttons, menus, and dialogs. As a result, I decided to install them manually.
The fonts will not be recognized unless special files exist in the directory. To make these [...]

Earlier this morning, I realized that I was disappointed in the mileage that I was getting out of Linux. I decided that I had a number of options:

Quit: Backup all of my data, format the drive, and reinstall Windows, living the cruel but beautiful world of Linux behind forever.
Start Over: Backup all of [...]

As you can see from the previous post, I have learned how to make inline images with CSS (it was actually quite simple; I just never remembered to look it up). Since images seem to brighten up the page, I will continue to use them.

I have not posted during the last couple of days because I was moving marteydodoo.com to a new web host. This move has fixed the problem with incoming trackbacks.
While waiting for the DNS settings to be updated, I took the opportunity to change some things.

Manually cleaned up the WordPress MySQL database, which was quite messy [...]

While most normal people were asleep, I was migrating the blog to WordPress. The new structure is going to take some getting used to, though. It took me a long time, but I believe that all of the old MovableType links should work, thanks to some mod_rewrite magic.
Either way, I am going to change some [...]

Interesting article on military.com (courtesy of Engadget) about a possible replacement for the M-16 series of rifles. Made by Heckler & Koch, the modular design of the XM-8 (interchangeable barrels!) makes a perfect weapon for any modernized army. And it just plain looks futuristic, like something out of Starship Troopers. Alas, the guns in that [...]

Traveling to New Jersey today. Check for new posts sometime this weekend.

Following the lead of other blogosphere luminaries, marteydodoo.com has been registered. This blog will be moving there, sometime after the DNS propagation.

… to the Frog server at the Harvard Computing Society. It is running FreeBSD. Trackback works. Comments work.
I have not been this happy since Clark squeezed out ahead of Edwards in New Hampshire. Oh wait…that was barely two days ago…

At some point sometime in the future, when people actually read this blog (yes, I know people stop by every now and then), I will receive a message from some stranger, asking "wtf is xor?!" Stranger, this entry is for you.

The FAS server can be a bit temperamental. When I try rebuilding any pages or posting new entries, I would get an error about not finding "auto/Digest/MD5/new.al".
Took me a while, but I was able to fix it by installing Digest::MD5 in my extlib directory,as described here.
And now, I will edit my index file to [...]