steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

Yes... this site is currently a disaster! I deleted my original css file that keeps everything looking nice and clean. So, for the time being, please bear with the absolute mess!

I completely hosed my original css and color design yesterday evening when trying out a new nav bar and color scheme. So, for the past 12 hrs. I've been going around and around implementing different css schemes and testing some include scripts - which I can't seem to get to work. I'm going to take a break for now. At least the categories archive is working to my liking and the navbar above is almost there. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments. I know that on some of the individual archive pages that the title bar which includes links is almost impossible to read, so I'll be working on that first thing tomorrow.

    I have worked hard to make a great number of changes to stevenfettig.com. I am on the verge of being done with version 5a - I still have to work on the guestbook and transfer a number of articles from the old site to the new one, but the most important ones are already here. I hope you, the visitor, enjoys and will leave comments. One really exciting part of the new site is that after each article, there is a comments section that will be visible. I hope that people will use the comments section for correcting or commenting on the technical articles. Perhaps other's observations can help you in making FeeBSD and the associated programs work for you! Thanks for visiting and have a great day/night!

I was surfing through the logs of searches made on this site and noticed a few simple entries for abe. Abe Fettig is not directly related to me, but by coincidence appears to be as passionate about open source-ware as I am. His website can be found at fettig.net. I vaguely remember writing him a while back... I hope that someday we will be able to meet up. His work on HEP appears extremely interesting.
Cheers!

As a side note: as far as I know, all the Fettigs in the US are distant relatives of one another. We seem to have all emmigrated from Germany and Russia (although the Russians were really from Germany) around 1900... So, I guess I could say we are honestly related... except I have no idea how.

     As promised, I finally got around to updating the qmail HOWTO/FreeBSD docs (take a look at the qmail archives). I also spent the better part of my time trying to get the formatting to come out neatly on the website. CSS has become a love, but whoa... what a pain if things go wrong.
     Well, that's really all I wanted to say. I'm tired. Enough of this for the day.

     I learned my lesson, or rather, I finally figured this one out: RSS feeds that are only partials of your entries don't make any particular sense - to me. Jay reminded me of this with a recent entry of his. I still haven't completely grasped the concept of RSS and how it programmatically functions, but I do see the importance of proper implementation. One of the beautiful things about RSS is the fact that I can download the latest from my fav. websites, disconnect and read at my leisure - net or no net connection.
     If you feel okay hacking around with your own MovableType implementation to make sure you are giving full feeds of your entries (and not simply cropped descriptions), here is a site to visit for a quick and dirty explanation:
My RSS feeds - Unix Gal

     A plugin or something for MT that will allow me to record or track all of the places I've been to lately - i.e. a type of bookmarks rolodex for MT? I know I could set up a category for links, but the work involved in posting every time I want to keep track of a link... well, it is my only possibility for now. If you know of something better, please speak up. (Assuming anyone reads this site ;))

Is weblogging an egoistic venture? Sometimes, when days have passed and I have posted nothing to either of my sites, I get a sense of urgency - the urgency to post something soon or people won't come back. The reality is that I think the only reason come to this site is due my translation of Oliver Lehmann's Qmail HOWTO. I get questions regarding other things once in a while, but the majority of my readers are obviously interested in one thing. In the end, that is why I split into two weblogs so that one could be tech based (this one) and the other, well, other stuff. Still, I have a sense of urgency about me when I haven't posted anything - as if it will really matter. Why do you blog? That is the question I asked myself and found only a few reasons for:
1) I would like to have a place to "publish" my writings because I like to write.
2) I would like to continue disseminating any information relating to open source software (tips, tricks and howto's).
3) Writing makes me feel good. When I learned the aristotelian meaning of catharsis, I realized that was what writing was to me. It is a form of release for me.
So, why do you blog/not blog?

Every day, I learn something new from the net. (It is ironic that 300+ spam messages a day never teach me anything new...) Today I learned that two of my esteemed Hillsdale College colleagues are on the net:
Joshua N. Wiley: Through the Dark Wood &
Joshua Mercer: joshmercer.com
After watching Bongwater on Showtime, I realized that I really ought start doing something better with my time! So, finding old friends would be a good start...

     I've been looking for a blogging app for my Treo for such a long time that I eveentually gave up, thinking that I was the only one interested in such a thing... Well, thanks to a comment by Jeff Jarvis, I think I found it - Vagablog. If you are reading this, it even works. (I ended up having to reconfigure a few things with my weblog, but it does, indeed, work!)

Goodness... That took forever, but it's good to see mt-blacklist working again.

BTW, this wasn't Jay's fault - I haven't had time to upgrade the backend of stevenfettig.com and disabled comments in the mean-time - kinda'. They weren't technically disabled. They simply weren't working correctly.

Sorry if I got rid of an important comment during my latest round of wiping comment SPAM off the site. I had some glitches in my MT installation that I finally got around to fixing today and in the process had about 1200 comments that I had to remove. If you left a comment (a valid one, that is) and want to see it again, please resubmit it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I love trackbacks. I hate spam trackbacks. I just deleted every trackback on this site. I'm sorry if yours was one of them, but I didn't have the patience to sift through 2000+ spam trackbacks and find the good ones. Dammit.

This is one for me and the search engines. I feverishly worked on getting WordPress up and running on my PowerBook to test for a new website I'm working on. (Actually, I started with typo, but that's another story.) I'm not bragging, but I can set up website that use PAM (php, apache & mysql) blindfolded. Back when MySQL didn't provide a binary installer for MySQL on OS X, it was a bit more difficult, but these days, everything is easy as cake - or so I thought. The binary installer for MySQL sets the socket location to a different place than PHP is expecting. Hence, when I tried to load the new database backend for WordPress, I constantly got errors that my configuration file (wp-config.php) was not giving the program correct settings to reach the MySQL database. Then began the frustrating experience of loading, reloading, reconfiguring httpd.conf and many other gestures that resulted in nothing but two hours of my time being wasted.
Lo and behold, the answer was hidden in a Drupal forum: the socket for MySQL on OS X is at /tmp/mysql.sock, not /var/mysql/. Dammit. Open up and edit php.ini (or copy php.ini.default to php.ini and edit) in /private/etc (can someone please tell the Apple people to start using BSD similar locations for config files?) and change:

Voila - WordPress is running on my local machine.

With the redesign (thanks Aaron) of my "start" page, I wanted to slowly move changes into the different weblogs I write. Those changes include:
• Coming up with a unified search for any and all of the sites. (Done through the use of Google's customized search tools - not yet added to the sidebar, though.)

• Coming up with a unified rss feed for any and all sites. (I have some leads, but I'm not even close to understanding how rss is actually produced by MovableType and WordPress.)
• Coming up with a new color scheme for stevenfettig.com/mythoughts/. (This is getting really old.)
• Coming up with some way of dealing with comment spam. I've been desperately avoiding this issue for a long time now and simply need to find a way to deal with it. I miss the comments I received for some of the howto postings I've put up over the years. The comments have not only been helpful, but have led me to meet new people. Comment spam is such a waste of time and right now, I receive well over 200 a day on the two weblogs that have been around the longest (stevenfettig.com/mythoughts/ and rescogitans.net/blog/). So, what I've decided to do is remove mt-comments.cgi all together. Once I have learned a way to deal with the crap, I'll put it back in service and hopefully reconvene commenting.
One of the reasons I still even pursue weblogs is that, 1) I'm an avid reader of around 10 and skim through over 60 different ones in a a week's period of time and 2) I like the outlet. We have had a number of things occur at work and with a business venture I ended and whose remains I used to start a new one. Both of those activities have produced a lot of experience and a lot of thought on various topics. In a way, I really do this all for myself. For the two people out there who actually look at any of my writing regularly (thanks dadLaw and naked guy in a lawn chair who is really freaking me out), I really do appreciate the readership and someday, I'll maybe be consistent enough to generate content on a regular basis. So, I want to keep doing it and while putting some energy into it, I'd like to make the experience "nice" for the readers out there.
Step one was the new entry page. Step two... well, that's a conglomeration of things.

Is there anyone else out there who loathes digg.com as much as me? I've found that as time has gone on, the content on digg is getting not only worse, but more and more skewed from one political viewpoint or philosophy to another (and I really mean one or the other because it has gone both directions). I frankly don't care for a site that has Britney Spear's bare ass as a front page topic next to dogmatic political spew about 'pubs versus dems' or how we're scorching the environment. My admiration for the founders of digg (ahem, Kevin Rose, et al) is great, indeed, but their product has lost its edge as time has passed. Not only do the stories on digg get recycled ad nauseam, you never really know whether there is any validity to the content or not. I really have a hard time keeping digg around when my rss list is close to breaking the hundred feed barrier and yet one of the chosen ones is not only unreliable, but slightly boring.

thought provoked via Daring Fireball Linked List: Valleywag: Three Reasons Why Digg Gets Its Numbers Wrong

I started my third (and likely last) weblog sometime around January of 2006 (I almost said earlier this year... but it's 2007 already) and because it was going to be more of an experiment in writing (i.e. seeing if I would perhaps consistently write about things that I felt really didn't fit the purpose of this or my other weblog), I figured I'd also see if I wanted to move to another/different weblog software system. I had already had some experiences with Drupal and it left me with a bad, bad taste in my mouth. It came down to the fact that there was no coherent way of doing anything if you were coming to Drupal from the perspective of MovableType. I say this because it is possible that my perception of how poorly Drupal functioned had to do with my previous experiences with CMS (content management systems) like MovableType. Rather than having a somewhat coherent set of documentation to describe how the system is intended to function, one had to rely upon user/developer provided documentation. Usually, said documentation was lacking in function - i.e. a technical document should have a purpose and how section, at the very least, and consistency among different sections. Drupal's documentation didn't. For example, the term taxonomy was used to describe a user authentication and rights system. Taxonomy? Out of what orifice was that term removed? (According to OS X's built in dictionary, taxonomy means: the branch of science concerned with classification, esp. of organisms; systematics. In my head, this relates poorly to authorization and user rights.) Perhaps this is a poor example. I am trying to give Drupal the benefit of the doubt and it may be that many people will find it a usable and reliable CMS. I didn't, however, and that is the point of the above comments. I found the documentation confusing and incoherent when viewed as a whole. This is not to say the software itself was bad, but my opinion is that software developers need to spend as much time, if not more, writing an explanation of their code as they do coding.
So, with that experience in mind, I looked at the other alternative: WordPress. Everyone seemed to be using it. Two of the bloggers in my top ten moved to WordPress sometime in the year prior to me testing it; Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine fame and Erik Barzeski of NSlog();. There had been general rumblings in the MovableType community regarding two issues: licensing and comment/trackback spam. SixApart had made the move years ago to monetize on the MovableType fame (and rightly so, in my opinion), and in the process irritated many (I'll never forget when they first changed the licensing terms and started [gasp] charging for the usage of MoveableType under certain conditions - especially where MovableType was being used in a commercial environment). I think the worst thing, though, they did, was let issues with comment/trackback spam languish. I know Jay Allen did a lot of work early on to deal with comment spam. This was before he was actually hired by SixApart. I stopped following his weblog after that (frankly, I don't remember why). I think I stopped reading weblogs for some time and his was one that I forgot to pick up again. The problem had gotten pretty big, though, and WordPress had seemed* to have made serious inroads in this area.
One other area of contention - one that I think most hobby users never cared about - was the load that MovableType put on a server as pages were re-indexed and as the site was essentially rebuilt every time a new post was made. This has never been something I really cared about. Most, if not all, of my personal web related stuff is on servers that I either own directly or control and manage. If I needed more horsepower to drive my own drivel, then I had yet another excuse to buy more hardware. Aaron has told me (I consider him a professional in the area of commercial weblogging), though, there are ways around this problem. Either way, it was one of the complaints, and because it was part of my decision to move and try another system, I'm writing it here.
So, with It's you, not me..., I made the jump to WordPress. What a mistake. Why? Simple (for me): MovableType, by default, creates real pages whereas WordPress's default mode (I'm not sure if there are other ways of doing this) is to create pages dynamically. For example, if I set WordPress to create daily and individual indexes of all my posts, you couldn't simply go to the directory in which WordPress resided and find those pages. I learned this the hard way when I couldn't figure out why WordPress wasn't publishing two posts I had just made (and yet I had no errors). After some head scratching, I finally realized the date/time stamp was wrong on my machine (two plus hours behind the real time) and because the posts were made at ca. 18:00 and the server's time was at 15:47, WordPress didn't show those posts until the server showed 18:00. At the same time, I realized that although I had set up WordPress to create individual and daily index pages, they weren't "real" - in the sense there weren't any files sitting there to be had in case the CMS died.
The last nail in the coffin for WordPress was something I wanted on a whim: export all of the content to MovableType. I didn't think this was that big of a deal since it seemed that exporting MovableType content to any CMS I had come across had already been developed. No deal. There is a plugin out there called WordPressExport, but I was never able to get it to work correctly (and believe me, I tried) and it is really too crude to really term as a semi-featured export tool.
This bothered me, not because I wanted to move to MovableType at that point in time, but because I simply wanted to make sure I had a backup of what I had written in a form that could be used in another popular CMS.
As I had experienced with Drupal, I also found the documentation for WordPress to be relatively inconsistent. When I had questions, many people (and Google) pointed me to the forums. I have a problem with this. For the very reason why the first source I hit for information on a given tool in OpenBSD are the man pages or the FAQ, I want the same thing for a CMS into which I'm pouring tons of energy and placing trust to have the same resource. I want an authoritative source for answers to basic questions. Forums and HOWTO's are far from this. (As a perfect example, look at the HOWTO I translated years back for qmail. I haven't updated that information in well over a year. I do have a disclaimer at the top of the page, but the information is still out of date.)
Sure, I believe in the power of user generated and open source software. At the same time, I believe that, for my purposes, commercially written software can be better suited to my needs. In this case, MovableType won out for two reasons: documentation and consistency. I simply like MovableType's tag system and don't mind the issues with rebuilding. I imagine there are many others, if they are honest with themselves, who will come around as I did. Two weeks ago, I spent two hours re-posting all of the content I had generated in WordPress over to MovableType at iynm.net. It has turned out to be well worth the effort. Within no time, I had a Flickr plugin installed and working and no longer have problems posting images inline.
MovableType is far from perfect. I still have issues with comment/trackback spam, but thanks to a [laugh] plugin originally for WordPress (for MovableType: MT-Akismet), that issue is largely resolved. I'm curious to see what other WordPress users will do. I already hear (and saw firsthand) about problems with sites requiring load-balancing and/or to be distributed across multiple servers. This is something I have no clue how one would solve in WordPress. It isn't, perhaps, a common problem, but it is one that seems to be caused by the way in which WordPress insists on generating truly dynamic content. Who knows what others will do in the end. I'm happy to be back with MovableType.

* I know I am using a lot of words like seemed, appeared, etc. I am purposefully softening my commentary because much, if not all, is my opinion and is based upon my subjective impression of the ongoings in the blogging software community.

There are so many web applications out there that I have resisted at first glance. A prime example are all of the Google applications that don't have to do with searching. (The exception being that I have a Gmail account that anyone can write to, but only because storage isn't an issue with Gmail and I don't want to deal with that on my personal server.) I like desktop applications for a number of reasons. The biggest of which, although my friends and family may not agree, is because I am not always connected to the net and like the opportunity to work independent of that connection. The other part is functionality; I like stand-alone applications because they are consistent in functionality and do not necessarily rely on browser API's or hooks that may not be available on my latest favorite browser.
Lately, though, two web services/applications have become favorites of mine, because one solves a very simple problem and the other is simply fun to use - and accents my current use of weblogs. I started using del.icio.us a month ago because I finally outgrew my own personal bookmarking system that had resided at Cogito Ergo Sum (rescogitans.net/blog/bookmarks/) for years. I had so many bookmarks that I was finding it difficult to find old ones that I rarely used and couldn't edit the system such to handle "fluid" and changing needs. The relatively new concept of tagging hit a cord with me (i.e. take a term or URL and tag it with various words to define what the URL is for and/or about) and I watched on the sidelines as del.icio.us grew and I saw more and more people I tracked use it. With some extra insomniac time one weekend, I decided to take the plunge and try it. I haven't looked back since. Tagging is über convenient for me and the search utility works well for all of my needs. Since moving to del.icio.us's system, I've found myself tagging more and more content, making it easy to find later on and keeping track of some of my changing interests.
The second service I just started using is Twitter. The service is ridiculously voyeuristic, but at the same time, a fantastic compliment to my blogging habits. I go for days and weeks without posting anything to my weblogs. Often this is because of lack of time, not for lack of ideas and/or want. With Twitter, I can create a trace of the ongoings (for my own good) in my life and yet, because the service is intended to be short twitters of what is happening, it never becomes the burden I sometimes feel when I sit down to actually write a post for one of the blogs.
Technology ought compliment your lifestyle. For those addicts like myself, it is difficult to find pieces that actually fit together well and in the case of those things I need/want, del.icio.us and twitter have filled a nice void.

me @ del.icio.us
me @ twitter

Technorati Tags: web applications, technology

Sorry - I have a css mess on my hands ;) I'll be back asap...

Update 24 March 2007: Well, the beginnings are done. I'm still working on better navigation and a background image for the header, but I like the plain, clean look. Comment if you don't (now having integrated all three blogs, commenting should finally work and be under a bit of control) or if you have any advice. (By the way, IMing me would be easier.)

For years, I've been planing on setting up a text-driven version of my websites. I never liked the fact that the design only came out correctly on full-blown laptops or desktops - i.e. something with the screen real-estate to handle a page that scales to a minimum of 800x600. Something occurred to me this morning, though: as long as I provide full rss feeds (where the feed includes the full content of the posts), does it even matter? If someone wants to avoid my design choices (e.g. they don't like my choices of layout and/or color), they can simply read the feeds from the sites and mangle/mash/change it any way they wish (trust me, I wouldn't be insulted). What about handling mobile or custom devices the same way? If I were providing content like a news source or selling items like e-commerce sites, then I guess it would matter whether or not my site was accessible across every imaginable platform. That is not the case, though, and I am doubting that the work would be worth going through (besides the academic exercise in learning how to do it). Anyone else with thoughts or comments?

I have really grown to enjoy the service (i.e. Twitter) - not because I like to use it for messaging, but more for the fact (as stated in another post) that I am able to make shorter postings that really are in a no-man's land between blogging and ... nothing. The one problem that has consistently prevented me from using it to the extent that I would like (especially when taking notes for c.ogi.to essays), is that posting can be dreadfully slow. I realize, and so do many users, that Twitter is experiencing a huge growth spurt that is taxing its servers (and apparently its ability to scale was not known in the beginning - my speculation), but it still causes trouble for those who would really like to use it as a tool. I find that if I am in the mode of tweeting a lot, I can't get the service to keep up with me. I've been thinking of turning it off for the time being and relying on another method of note-taking, but I still can't find what and how. I need/want something to which I can make posts using SMS and plugins to Firefox (or Safari) and those are tall orders to fill. I also have difficulties with the 140 character limits, but at the same time, it has forced me to re-think what I am writing, which is a good thing at times - it forces me to write concisely. With all of the niche needs that Twitter is able to handle for my usage, it is hard to find or come up with a replacement solution and therein lies Twitter's power. I agree with many that the uses of Twitter can be ridiculously superfluous, but so are weblogs (for the most part) and yet the cream of the crop tend to take the power of the tool and rise above the average junk. I think the same will happen with Twitter - or continue happening. I just hope they resolve the current issues pretty quickly or the tool is going to be more difficult to use than it is worth.

Technorati Tags: twitter, random, technology

Here's a random comment while I wait for Steph's flight to arrive at O'Hare:
I've been playing with Twitter and Jaiku again. At first, I had made the commitment to Twitter because so many people I enjoyed following were using it. The problem is that I like the way of mashing RSS feeds with Jaiku better and their application for Symbian S60 (v3) devices has made updating or sending 'jaikus' so very, very easy. Since I'm really doing this for myself and not so much because I think anyone would ever follow my posts, why do I feel dirty about using Jaiku over Twitter? Anyone else see that Jaiku is superior and yet continue to use Twitter? (All opinion, of course...)

snfettig @ twitter

stevenfettig @ jaiku

(Oh... and Jaiku seems faster. Probably because fewer people use it, but nonetheless, faster.)

Technorati Tags: jaiku, public+im, short+posts, twitter

Sorry to those of you whose comments have been held up because I was sending notifications of those awaiting approval to a defunct email address. I fixed the problem and your comments will be published and responded to in a more timely manner.

Years back I asked myself the question of why I even try to maintain a weblog and host my own content. Obviously the topics I choose are random and span across the different interests I have (whether it be today's obsession with photography or tomorrow's problems with getting widget XYZ to operate the way I want), but when I do take the time to sit down and write something, I'm hoping that it will provide a tidbit of information or guidance to others. (That's the ego side of this venture.) Why do I put the effort, though, in controlling the bandwidth and machinery that hosts my site(s)? Why not use Blogger for my weblog, Flickr for all my photos, YouTube for videos, etc? Because they are all out of my control. I have no idea whether or not any of these services will be around in ten years. I've been blogging for over ten years. The internet archive only goes back to a site I had running in 2001, but this is quite a bit after I actually set up the first website and I'm not sure why the earlier ones don't show up. Every post I've made to my blog that has something to do with a picture or video requires that that specific picture or video (or whatever else) remains available to visitors. More importantly, because I use this weblog as a method of keeping a sort of exhibitionist diary, I want access to that content forever. If I were to take the time and go back through the archives, I'm sure I'd find many a place where I had posted something, linking to another site, and now that site is gone. That breaks the usefulness of this blog, in my opinion. What good is keeping the here and now intact and yet destroying the history? To me, that's a waste of the effort I've put into this all these years.

Today, I stumbled across a blog I hadn't visited for quite some time; jayallen.org, or more accurately, jay.vox.com. Jay linked to a hilarious video on YouTube that was a clip from Saturday Night Live's PUNCHED! bit. This is a screenshot of what I encountered:

Of course, this is not Jay's fault. How could he know that the video would be removed from YouTube? I encountered this all too often, though, when linking to articles, etc. If a website owner chooses to change their url style (which has undergone major shifts across the internet in blogging) - i.e. going from something like archive/category/000010.php to archive/url_now_is_readable_instead_of_cryptic - they break all of the links that were made to their website at one time. One solution I thought of is that instead of linking to specific urls, I should just link to a Google search term that will likely bring about the current url of the link I want people to access. The problem with this is the same as the problem with visual or audio content; what if Google disappears? Who would have thought in 1996 that Google was going to be a search giant monster and AltaVista would be nothing?

This is why I find it so important to host my own content. I hate it when things break. I don't understand why you would design a blog (or anything you put a lot of effort into) around a method that will naturally break as the years go on. If all you do is provide links to other stuff, then it is likely that some day, the content you worked to create will become meaningless. I like to have historical reference to who I am and what I do. Without working links, I can't. (This is my purpose, however, and I'm sure it does not match other's.) I limit what I put here even on the basis of whether or not I can quote or copy to embed someone else's content. I feel safe embedding the above screenshot because it is what I saw when I visited Jay's site and I'm not trying to blatantly steal his creativity. The line of stealing someone else's work becomes thinner, though, when you want to embed their complete thoughts and or creative works on your site. It is something one needs to be wary of. It is also the reason why the images I host on Flickr are there with the Creative Commons license of Share-Share Alike-Non Commercial (so is all the content I put on the web). I want people to feel comfortable taking and redistributing my works, as long as I am give credit and they do not use my works to make money. Why the last part? Because, I want to control making money with my content that I've worked hard to produce. It's that simple.

So, if you have any concern about the longevity of the work you do, it helps to think about these things. I'm certain that even since I became aware of this conundrum, there are plenty of items here that are broken. Every week, I search a bit for them and try to fix them. Since I don't want to be forced to do this for eternity (fixing past content every time I decide to change something or someone decides to remove what they have done), I'm going to be more cautious about what I post here and how I post it. And, I'm going to continue hosting my own content so I can retain this control.