My Blog

Two things that needed doing – the first one was that I’m a windows guy, so my site is on windows and IIS.  Apache has a nifty “mod_rewrite” add-on which lets WordPress do the cool url’s like http://blog.digitaltinder.net/2008/12/exporting-blogml-from-subtext-21-and-importing-blogml-into-wordpress-27/ instead of having a link to http://blog.digitaltinder.com/index.php?p=3746.

So I’d found a WordPress URL Rewriter which worked well (as long as PHP wasn’t running as an ISAPI module).  But it needed me to add the url rewriter as an ISAPI module and I kinda wasn’t happy with having to make manual changes to my hosting setup because then upgrades/domain moves might cause issues. I wanted to have the solution I used only require me to change stuff in the plesk control panel, and not directly on the server.

With that limitation, I decided to go with the “fake 404” page solution which is mentioned in a few blogs.  Basically this works because you tell IIS that if someone requests a page that doesn’t exist (like the pretty perma-link) then it should redirect the user to the index.php page with the correct settings in place so that wordpress shows the related blog entry.   This works pretty well!

The final bit of my wordpress migration was that my old site had it at http://digitaltinder.com/blog, while the new site is at http://blog.digitaltinder.com (or http://blog.digitaltinder.net)

A basic sample of what I used can be found http://tech.einaregilsson.com/2007/07/30/pretty-wordpress-permalinks-on-iis/

So I decided to modify my little 404 page to include some redirects and I found the code below:

function redirect($url, $type=301)
{
  if ($type == 301) header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
  header("Location: $url");
  echo ‘This page has moved to <a href="’.$url.’">’.$url.'</a>’;
  exit();
}

And the proof is the fact that the blog should just be working at the moment, regardless of what URL you access it on.  Of course that’s assuming that its all still working now, which probably thanks to the demo god’s will fail miserably now that I’m using it as an example.

Not sure if anyone has seen or heard about this new ARG.  Its designed by the creator of “I Love Bees” and a number of others that I’ve not really looked at.  I just read about it in Boing Boing, who link to a CNet Interview at SXSW and eventually to the main site itself The Lost Ring.  Basically the ARG is built in association with the International Olympic Committee and McDonalds and is meant to be truly global and some kind of a run up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

The premise of the story is as follows (as CNet puts it):

“The game is built around the fictional concept that more than 2,000 years ago an Olympic sport was lost to history and that now, five Olympic-caliber athletes have turned up in corn fields around the world, amnesiac but sure they’ve been tasked with some great mission.

Players of The Lost Ring, then, are similarly tasked with helping these five people figure out their identities, and in the process, rediscovering this lost Olympic sport. ” [Taken from CNet]

Now for those of us in South Africa, the cool thing is that the main character (well, the woman from the introductory film clip) was found just outside of Johannesburg!  So its an international ARG that might actually require some involvement from someone over here in deepest darkest africa.

It took the Live installer about 3 tries to get the installation right, so hopefully Live Writer will actually work first time.  Since I’m writing a “test” blog, I might as well say something other than “testing.  So here goes:  “I don’t like Vista, its a painful thorn in my side that I can’t wait to get rid of every evening when I leave work.”

Copying files is now a hellishly long procedure, my windows explorer crashes at least 5 times a day, applications keep hanging, the “Start bar search” is useless, I have to delete a folder twice if I actually want it to get deleted (first time it just deletes the contents of the folder and not the folder itself), explorer keeps on showing me stuff in “Photo” view instead of the standard view, it also keeps “grouping” stuff instead of sorting by the column I want, and just the other day I installed an application from Microsoft that popped up a dialog box that said:

“This app requires Windows XP or greater to operate.
Please visit www.microsoft.com/windowsxp for upgrade details”

So now I have proof that even Microsoft think that the Windows XP is an upgrade to Vista.

I’ve had to re-install my PC at work due to some hardware issues and Oh My Goodness(!!) some software installations are up to crap!  A few quick lessons:

1. Microsoft – if you ship an MSDN DVD with an installation for VS.Net 2005, please make sure that the installation can actually work?  I sat installing and got to the point of requiring “Disk 2” and the whole thing just died.  There was no way for me to tell the installer “Disk 2 is in this folder here, right next to the one you’re installing from”.  So I had to uninstall, and find an older version of the MSDN disc which actually had a working install
2. Trend Micro – Just give up on UI design now! 
3. I installed Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2007, all went fine (from previous experience I did not install their firewall, since the old version was useless).  I ran their main console and its filled with “warnings”… The biggest one (which window’s reported too) is that is database is out of date…
1. Rule 1: Tell your users what went wrong or how to fix it
   So I click on the big “Update Now” button, it greys out as if something is going to happen, and then becomes clickable again.  But no updates have happened!
2. Rule 2: If you tell me something, then make it so
   So finally I figure out that the Updates are not happening because I haven’t registered the software.  So I go and register it via their ui (which pops up a window WAY too big for the form I’m filling out). At the end of the process I get told that the registration was succesful. 

   Then it turns out that I can’t update my antivirus database until they have flagged something in an online system somewhere that says that I do actually have a license.  Why the crap didn’t this happen during the activation process?  Why didn’t they tell me that this was going to happen?  And why in the name of all things holy does the bloody update button not just pop up a dialog to tell me why it isn’t doing its job?

3. Rule 3: Give UI cue’s if you’re going to perform a long running process
   While waiting for trend to activate my installation in their central database, I decided to look at the features.  I thought I’d try turn on their “SPAM Protection” feature.  So I click on the “On/Off” drop down and choose on.  The whole application hangs.  The cursor shows me the regular mouse pointer, no indication of what its doing or how long I should expect to wait.  Finally it starts responding again.  A little later I’m showing someone else how silly it was: I click on the drop down, and click away from it… Again the long pause with no UI cues to tell me what its doing.  (Even though it shouldn’t be doing anything since I didn’t change anything).
4. Rule 4: If you’re supposed to be doing something in the background then do it in the background
   I expect any antivirus software to automatically update itsself… I’d like some small cue to tell me that it is doing so, but I do NOT expect it to pop up a window randomly, taking focus away from my active application, to let me know that it is going to start an update now.  I applaud their attempt at keeping me informed, but please! I work on my PC… I don’t want to keep having to alt+tab away from your darned update window. 
5. Rule 5: Make it easy to turn off “friendly” notifications
   Following on from rule 4, I had to search through the settings before I found the option to stop it from popping up the “I’m updating now” dialog.  But there’s two more annoying popups that I can’t get rid of.  One is when you start up the main console.  They open a “Trend Online” window on the right, which basically tells me that I can’t use any of their online services unless I buy a better subscription.  Its really of no use to me, but I can’t find the place where I can turn this bloody thing off!  It’s irritating! 
4. Microsoft & Trend: If you need me to reboot my PC, just ask me once!  For goodness sake, I’m not an idiot. So reminding me every 15 minutes that I need to reboot my pc in order for the recently updated components to be applied is just going to piss me off.  At the very least give me an option to postpone the next “warning” for a few hours or a few days!

Admittedly, Trend’s 2007 interface is WAAAAAY better than their older one, and their firewall looks a little more usable than the last version. So they have done some things right. 😀

A few weeks ago I found out about Diarist2. Its a .Net CF application that lets you post to your blog from your Windows Mobile phone. It took me a while to get .Net CF v2 on my phone so this is my first test.

Yay!