Category: Geekery

Getting there

After restoring my backup using
ssh ptomblin@192.168.1.1 "cat /media/usbdisk/albook/home.cpio.0" | ditto -xv - .
I’ve had a “fun” afternoon re-downloading and installing applications. Fortunately, the two I was most worried about, Quicken and TurboTax, I had left the .dmg disk image files on my Desktop for just this reason. I only have three gaps left in my Dock – one (Photoshop Elements 2.0) because the sticker with the serial number is mangled so I can’t read it, and the others because they weren’t 100% legal copies and I have no install media. Oh well. There’s a couple of things I decided not to reinstall, like iWork 2005 because that version of Pages sucked rocks. I understand the new version of Pages is better. And they’re up to 4.0 on Elements for Mac (but 5.0 for Windows) so maybe it was time to buy a new version anyway. I’m still debating whether to install fink.

I think when this is over, I’ll have a better system with fewer crap programs left over from days gone by, but it’s still no fun getting there.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

(I should probably stop using this as a title – Firefox actually filled it in after the first couple of letters)

I took my Powerbook into Apple to fix the problem with the DVD drive not ejecting. This is the second time I’ve brought it back – the first time they replaced the drive itself, but told me the frame of the laptop was twisted and they may have to replace some of the case if it happens again. And it happened again.

They gave me the usual spiel about how they can’t guarantee that they won’t wipe your hard drive, so make sure you’ve got a back up. I said “yeah, yeah, yeah” since I have a nightly cron job that backs up my home directory to my Linux server, and besides they worked on it before without killing my hard drive, so why should they wipe it this time?

And of course, they did wipe it. My restore restored the files, but of course now I have to find and re-download all my apps. Hope my iTunes Music Store purchases still work.

Can’t win, shouldn’t try

I got a notice that Gallery 2.2 is out, and they recommend upgrading. So I thought I’d try. And it seemed straightforward enough. I did all the steps, and when it got to the part in the automated upgrade about updating plugins, it start spewing hundreds of errors, both database and file system. And any attempt to continue the upgrade without updating the plugins got me to a page saying the theme I’m using wasn’t present, and when I attempted to change the theme it booted me back into the upgrade process.

I deleted the entire php directory and restored it from backup, and deleted the database and restored it from backup. But it told me that I was using a newer version of the Gallery core module than the rest of the program, and said I couldn’t do that. I have no idea where this “core module” is if it’s not in the gallery2 directory. So I’ve blown away the entire gallery, including the g2data directory, and am restoring it from backup. That includes all the picture files, so it’s probably going to take hours. Let’s hope it works.

Typical, just bloody typical

Last night I took my Powerbook into the Apple Store to get them to look at why my CD/DVD drive won’t eject. It’s been like this for months, but I waited until yesterday because I’d finally gotten my taxes sent off and so I wouldn’t be needing it for a few days. Except as soon as we got home, Vicki was comparing notes with her sister on their joint inheritance from her mom’s estate, and discovered that I’d entered the wrong value in some schedule or other and so missed a significant deduction. Which means that when I get the Powerbook back I have to figure out how I can file an amended return using TurboTax.

Plus it’s a real pain having to use Vicki’s spare iBook for normal web surfing and stuff – I don’t remember the passwords for web sites, Firefox remembers them for me!

OpenID getting even weirder

I thought I had it figured out – people using OpenID LiveJournal ids were being flagged by SpamKarma2 because their comments were missing the two SpamKarma2 “payloads”, which are hidden input fields in the comment field that are used by SK2 to make sure the commenter really did look at the post before posting the comment.

Investigation showed that the script “openid-comments-post.php” validates your id by passing the fields in the form off to the OpenID server which then calls the script back. It appeared to me that it was only passing the fields to the plugins that it knew about, and so it was missing these SK2 payloads. So I was planning to try adding those missing fields to the script. But first I did some further experiments. And that’s where it all fell apart. I’m not using my Powerbook, because it’s in the shop to get the DVD drive fixed. And I can’t use my Linux box either, because the X configuration on it is hosed. So I find myself using the old G4 which I’ve hardly used at all. And for some reason, every test I’ve tried on both Safari and Firefox has worked – SK2 is not complaining about missing fields.

So I’m left with a few possibilities:

  • It’s not the script, it’s Livejournal that sometimes swallows the SK2 fields.
  • The plugin architecture of WordPress doesn’t specify the order that the plugins run, and under some instances the SK2 plugin runs before the OpenID plugin and othertimes after, and that makes the difference.
  • It depends on a cookie on my other computers that isn’t on this one.

I’m baffled.

Update: It’s still complaining about the missing fields when I attempt to use OpenID commenting from work. Which means it might be the cookie thing, or it might be a Mac versus Linux thing.