Category: Geekery

Back to the drawing board

In order to support a new product development I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I re-did my existing waypoint database as a PostGIS geographical database. I also added some foreign keys and some other cleanup that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. But obviously, I don’t want to support two databases, so today I’ve been converting one of my existing waypoint generator perl scripts to use the new PostGIS database instead of the MySQL database it was on before, but without any actual GIS functionality. And Houston? We have a problem. Doing a full US + Canada data load on the MySQL version takes about a minute and a half. Doing the same load on the PostGIS version takes twenty five minutes. Something tells me that I need to make some adjustments here.

That was close!

The theme I have been using for a couple of years on this blog (Maple) didn’t work very well with WordPress 2.5 and I can’t find an updated copy anywhere. Since I’ve hacked the shit out of it over the years, I decided it was time to make a fresh start with a theme that’s actually supported. So the first thing I did was copy the default theme, and try to make it look more like Maple. That wasn’t fun, and I’m not 100% satisfied with the results. So I decided to look at other themes.

I couldn’t find what I wanted at the official themes site, mostly because their search engine doesn’t categorize themes by category, and also because their “preview” function doesn’t work. But I found this other site, whose name I won’t mention but it had the word “free” in the URL. I found a bunch of nifty themes there, and downloaded them. I was just customizing one theme to add gravatar support and give the comments an alternating colour scheme, when I noticed something weird down at the bottom. It looked like spam. I grepped the theme code for the spammy urls, and couldn’t find them. But I figured the offending code must be in footer.php. Sure enough, all the themes I’d downloaded from this site had encrypted code in footer.php. I couldn’t read it or decrypt it, but it obviously was there to insert spam code in your blog. I tried replacing the footer.php with one from the default theme, and that broke other stuff. Crafty buggers.

Anyway, I’ve removed all traces of this crap, and I guess we’re all stuck with the psuedo-Maple theme until the official site starts working again.

Hmmm

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 because the damn thing was nagging me all the time about being back at 2.3.3. But now I discover that my theme doesn’t work right with the new code, and one of my favourite plugins, the LiveJournal CrossPoster, doesn’t work. Now I’ve either got to find a less ugly theme, or fix the old Maple theme to support the new comment code with the built-in Gravatars.

Update: I might have found the fix for LJXP!
In lj_crosspost.php, change

if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.1”, “< ")) { require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php'); }

to

if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.3”, “< ")) { require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/link-template.php'); } else if(version_compare($wp_version, "2.1", "<")) { require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php'); }

Update #2:
I officially hate this update. It keeps adding bogus </code> tags even though my tags are perfectly well closed before I saved them. Let’s try with block quotes instead?

And it just gets worse

On March 25th, I ranted about a developer who had checked in a bunch of stuff that required a special “upgrade DVD” without telling the other developer that this would be required in Rants and Revelations » Developer dumbassedness. Well, it turns out it’s worse than that. Far worse. Not only didn’t he not tell us about the magic DVD, but he hadn’t even tested the damn DVD. It’s now 2 weeks later, and his DVD *still* doesn’t work.

So now I’m caught in a vice – I had to “rebase” my development environment to the new build in order to deliver some bug fixes, and now my development environment and my test system are at different builds, which makes it hard to test things, and especially hard to use the remote debugger in Eclipse. And I can’t get them back in sync until this damn DVD is ready.

I’d also like to mention that I did a much more ambitious upgrade DVD a few years ago, where his DVD is upgrading from CentOS 5.0 to CentOS 5.1 and reformatting the content partition from ext3 to xfs, mine was upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to CentOS 3.3. And I didn’t leave the rest of the developers out to dry because I tested the hell out of it on my test system, reformatting it back to RedHat 7.3 and running versions of my upgrade script over and over for weeks before I put it into the development stream.