Category: Rant

Bleargh

(Gee, how many times have I used that title that Firefox actually showed it as the first completion option once I typed the “B”!)

I have this curious pain running around my head.  Sometimes it seems to manifest itself like a hard little ball that lodges either just under the bridge of my nose or about an inch up from the bottom of my skull in the back.  Most of the time it’s just pressure on the back of my eyes.  Sometimes my eyes just won’t focus for a second or two.  I’m not sure if this is some sinus thing coming on, or a migraine about to pop.

Oh well, I guess we’ll see.  After all, there’s no better way to get expert medical advice than to post about it to your blog, right?

mod_rewrite is deep magic

When I moved this blog from MovableType to WordPress, the rss feed urls changed. Since I didn’t want the livejournal syndication to break, I put in mod_rewrite RewriteRules to redirect those feed urls. When I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, what had been an extremely long .htaccess became just a few lines long, and all the fancy stuff that they used to do in .htaccess with mod_rewrite are now evidently done in index.php itself. So I’m trying to figure out how to insert new RewriteRules to do what I did before, but everything I try either does nothing, or it causes the whole blog to break with a message in the error.log file saying “mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error.”

Here is the existing .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blogs/pt/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blogs/pt/index.php
</IfModule>

I would have thought that adding the following would be sufficient:

RewriteRule index.rdf /blogs/pt/feed/
RewriteRule index.xml /blogs/pt/feed/

or possibly, since /feed/ is evidently going to be passed to index.php as arguments, like this:

RewriteRule index.rdf /blogs/pt/index.php?&feed
RewriteRule index.xml /blogs/pt/index.php?&feed

I also tried with [L] and/or [R] conditions. No luck.

I’d like to get all those syndicators working again. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment or drop me an email.

Ok, that’s annoying

I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 a few days ago.  I just noticed today that the comment count isn’t incrementing when people post comments (although they do decrement when I delete a test comment).  So there’s all those posts on my main page that say “Comments (0)” even though they have comments.  And they’re not showing up in my “unread comments” plugin either.

I think I’m going to have to try turning off some plugins to see if that makes a difference.  I hope it’s not SpamKarma.

If you ever see me…

…pick up a pair of vice grips and head towards the bathroom, just shoot me. I just can’t seem to get it right.

The downstairs powder room sink drains really slowly, and Vicki says it started after the carolling party. I tried plungering it, and didn’t help. (Plungering sinks is a bit of a waste of time anyway, because all it does it blow water out of the overflow hole.) So I tried taking the trap off. Didn’t find anything blocking it, so I tried to put it back on. And I couldn’t get the damn thing to stop leaking no matter how hard I tightened it. Then I discovered that in tightening it, I’d managed to knock a big chunk out the the trap. So I went to the hardware store to buy a replacement trap.

While I was there, I picked up a replacment for the handle and arm of the upstairs en-suite toilet. The current one keeps falling off the arm thingy all the time.

When I got home, I put the trap on, but because I forgot to buy teflon tape it still leaks a bit. And of course it didn’t fix the real problem – the blockage is evidently further down.

Then I tried the replacement for the handle. The existing one has a bend in it, but when I tried to bend the new one, I bent it at one of the holes and broke it. So off I went to the hardware store, and bought the exact same type again. And when I carefully bent it at the non-hole part, it broke again. Of course it wasn’t until then that Vicki mentioned to me that there are bendy type arms and non-bendy type arms. Who knew?

Rather than making ANOTHER trip to Myers hardware, I pushed the existing handle on the existing arm on as hard as I could, and hoped that can hold for a while.