Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I’ve been using Linux since 1992 or so. I don’t remember the date, but the distro was SLS 1.03 and the kernel was 0.99.14. Linux has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of usability since then, but it still has a LONG way to go. Mac OS X has gone from 0 to way, way better than Linux in the course of 3 or 4 years. It’s amazing.
Some Linux developer considered this a decent error dialog. Can I get a “Sheesh” from the crowd?
I spent this weekend in a welter of frustration, all caused by blog add-ons and content management systems.
First thing, I saw that Jen had installed a plugin to enable her WordPress blog to embed Gallery images both in the content and on the sidebar. I used to have a “WPGallery” plugin, but it didn’t really work well when I switched to Gallery 2, so I haven’t used it in a while. This one promised to work on my current versions of WordPress and Gallery.
Except it didn’t. The blog entry editor allowed me to pick a picture to embed in my entry, but when it appeared on the blog it just said “** NOT FOUND **” where the picture was supposed to be. And when I attempted to do the sidebar thing, I just got an “Error 1”. Plus it was screwing up the comment system – if you attempted to comment on a blog post, you saw what looked like a Gallery themed message that said “database error”.
Ok, fine, time to get rid of that. Next on the list was to try to get a different content management system (CMS) working for my Browncroft Neighborhood Association test site.
I’d decided that the CMS I’d picked, MODX, wasn’t going to let me do all the stuff I wanted, or at least not easily. Unfortunately, the “test site” is appearing high on Google ranks and people are using it for real, so I couldn’t just blow it away and leave it blank while I’m fooling around with another CMS. So first I tried installing the new CMS, Xoops, on my personal web space somewhere. But Xoops is a bare-bones CMS with a huge library of plugins to install, and I couldn’t seem to get any of the plugins working. So I thought that maybe they didn’t like not being on the docroot, so I made a fake domain on my local DNS and installed it on the docroot. I tried about 6 different plugins, but none of them worked. Some of them threw errors that indicated they were trying dangerous programming practices that my version of php explicitly warns you not to enable in the php.ini file. Others just would show an empty screen or a menu that didn’t actually do anything in the module configuration page.
That’s when I decided that I’d follow the recommendations of a few people the last time I’d asked about CMSes, and install typo3. The problem with typo3 is that the documentation is abysmal, and it basically sneers at you for needing it in the first place. It also tells you it’s going to take weeks to get your web site set up, and maybe you should consider hiring one of the many typo3 consultants instead.
I’m still struggling to get my first page up on typo3. I put in some content, and then it complained I didn’t have a template. So I chose one of the templates, and the content showed up, but there is no menu or anything else that I’d expect on a CMS page. Since the template choice page didn’t give you any indication which templates did what, I want to switch to a different one and it won’t let me. Every time I go back to the template page, it shows me stuff about the existing one, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to go back to the choice page.
All I want is a simple CMS that works the way it’s supposed to work and which is easier to set up than hand-coding an entire site. Is that so hard?
The same problem I mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Java Thread Locking cropped up again. This time it was quite random, but repeatable. I dreaded going through the crap I went through last time to find where the lockup was happening, until I discovered a nifty new trick – if you do a “kill -3” of the java process id, it dumps a stack trace of every thread, including what locks it’s holding, to stdout.
Going through the stack trace, I could see where one thread on the client had three locks and was calling an RMI method on the server that was locked waiting for the delete thread to finish. And the delete thread was calling a callback on the client that was waiting for one of those three locks, so the delete thread was locked as well. Not good. I removed most of the locks and things started working. Maybe eventually I will put some of the locks back.
Rohan suggests that I might have to rewrite parts of the server to take care of the next bug report on my list – the complaint is that deleting content takes too long. Unfortunately the bits he wants me to rewrite are his code, and it will take me 2 weeks just to understand it well enough to start to make the changes, and I’ve only got 10 days to clear all the bug reports off my list.
In general, how important is “crafting”? Does it vary from MMORPG to MMORPG? I read a bunch of web comics and blogs, and some of them are MMORPGers, and they talk about stuff like “I worked on my knitting craft last night and managed to finish this lovely sweater” (ok, that’s not quite right – it’s usually gloves or boots or something). But to me, the only thing more boring than actually knitting or fishing would be to sit in front of a computer watching a simulated “me” knitting or fishing.
If I decide to spend all my on-line time questing instead of doing boring crafting stuff, will I find myself unable to reach higher levels or to afford decent arms or otherwise held back?
How legitimate is it to “game the system”? If you exploit flaws in the AI, is that cheating or just making the best of the situation? Two instances from last night: