SirSpanky.com - The Secret Diary of James Pearce Aged 20-Something

I’ve just moved the blog onto the main root for this site so that www.sirspanky.com actually holds some information now. The transition seems to have gone smoothly following these instructions for moving a WP site on the same server. The transition seems to have gone smoothly, except that my login info was cached, and once I changed the URL within WordPress, it didn’t let me login anymore. This is a browser cache issue interfering with the credentials required by the form though, and using a different browser allows me to login and complete the transition. I suppose if you’re using Firefox you could always just delete the cookie, but using another browser that is already installed is much easier I think! At the same time I’ve also changed the permalink structure to be more friendly, so when a post is picked up in google it makes more sense. I’m now using a custom structure of “/%category%/%postname%/” so you can use www.sirspanky.com/funny/funny-post instead of www.sirspanky.com/2008/08/12/funny-post.

Basically I realised that I probably wasn’t even going to ‘complete’ a personal website, but I probably /was/ going to maintain the blog. Now Google will pick it up easier (yay), but at the same time it will break /all/ of the existing Google links (booo). On the upside that means that I won’t be getting so many hits to /my/ site for Hayden Panetiere (kinda yay), on the downside though I won’t be getting so many hits to my site (boo).

Heighdon Layton is my cousin-in-law. You know, your step-parents-siblings-kids. I mean, my step-mothers-brothers-son. I had to actually Google to see what people thought the difference was between step mother and mother in law…It’s kind of silly really; they’re both legal relations (as opposed to blood) but they mean different things. Sigh.

Anyway Heighdon is on the right with his pants down around his ass and my other cousin-in-law is Brett Roberts on the left. The photo looks a bit like they’re about to start a fight, but it’s just a good example of the photo not depicting the reality properly (I’d make good papparazi no?!?

They asked me to write something about them. Heighdon Layton is the motocross king of Perth (or something, right?). Brett Roberts is the ladies man of Quinns Rock (or something else). Now bring on the Google goodness YEAH!

Munin is a really nice light weight record keeper for pretty much anything. It stores the values of anything and generates graphs for those values and leaves interpretation up to us (the viewer). It’s primarily designed for server monitoring and it’s great because the abstractness of the program allows us to monitor hardware, software, and user activity as well as anything else we can think of !

The trick is that we have to write a plugin for Munin to understand what we want it to do. I haven’t actually written any myself, but I have modified others to tweak what they do. I installed an iostat plugin for Munin FreeBSD (it doesn’t come with one in FBSD for the iostat) but was having a hard time getting it to work. It worked on the command line and all but it wouldn’t show the graph. Yes I had restarted the node program but it still wasn’t showing up. I even went to the point of upgrading my munin-node on the server.

The problem? The iostat plugin was not owned by root:wheel and set to 755. I.e. the permissions were wrong and it was not executable. Munin appears to run ./plugin rather than $PERL ./plugin. A little annoying as long as you know about this; a lot annoying if you don’t! Changing the persmissions resulted in it showing up on the graph after 2 polling cycles.

I’m not sure if I’ve posted about this before, but I know that a lot of people have had various issues with the paragraphing in the WordPress editor. My problem with the editor (in WP 2.6, I haven’t upgraded yet) is that when I am in the Visual editor, and I hit enter to create a paragraph it creates it fine. When I save it, however, it disappears. That basically means I can’t do line breaks without editing the HTML. Great editor, but that one flaw makes it almost useless to anyone writing more than 1 paragraph!

Up to now I’ve been using a plugin for WP that replaces the visual editor. There are a couple around, but none of them beat the look of the WP editor in my opinion. I found a solution today (or maybe it’s a workaround) within WP though. If you hit the enter key in the editor, it gives you a large gap between the paragraph above and your new paragraph. Saving that makes it disappear for some reason, like I said above. If you hit enter and get the big space though, and then hit the backspace key, you will have a paragraph break without a huge line break. The important bit here is that it actually saves!

Hoo-rah!

Last night (well early hours of this morning actually; it’s nearly 2AM) I decided to play a buddy of mine at a game of chess. That’s my travel board and (nice German crafted) pieces in the picture. First game was good. It went for about 30 minutes, and then I started to lose interest a little bit and decided to take a risk and make a run for mate. I queued it up and had a good decoy to lure my opponent into helping me queue up the mate setting. It worked. He threw a spanner into the works because I wasn’t focussing on where he was able to move his queen, but I was still 1 move away from mate so I did check mate rather than defending mate own position (yay!).

2nd game is where it got interesting. My opponent messed up by moving his queen out too early, and I cornered it and took it. I also got a bonus bishop in the process. After that I basically took over the board. It ended up that I had taken all bar one knight, one bishop and rook and 3 pawns and I hadn’t even had to open up my king side of the board yet! I was in a position to take his rook and bishop anyway. We were both tired and he made his next move. I moved my queen out and took his rook. And then his bishop. And then I set to work taking his pawns and setting him up with my queen and my two bishops. Funny part? I wasn’t moving my queen; I was moving my king as if it was the queen! Neither of us noticed until I stopped and took a little longer for my move to figure out the mate movement. He had so much confidence in me playing correctly after winning the game that he trusted my moves and failed to check me.

So, to cheat at chess, just win the first game fairly and the other player will hold a false sense of confidence in you so that you can have your run of the board rules as you see fit! Actually I didn’t intend on cheating, we were just so tired that neither of us noticed. Suffice to say we both counted that game as my loss

I took some time out the week before Christmas to go down to Albany at the offer of some friends who were leasing a holiday home down there. The place is quite nice, and I think a 5 day stay for me is just right. I go a bit stir crazy if I don’t have work to do after a little while!

When I found out that one of the guys had not been to Bluff Knoll, we both felt it would be a good idea to take a trek out there (this was yesterday). It’s about 100km out to the Stirling Ranges where the mountain is so a little over an hour of driving. It’s a 3km or so trek up and around the mountain, and it took us just over 2 hours to reach the summit. We picked a great day to do it, it was sunny and all. Today is very very overcast in Albany!

For some reason, when we got to the top, we couldn’t see a sign to say “Bluff Knoll.”. I climbed the mountain about a dozen years ago and I know there was a sign. We went to the very very top, nothing was higher than us, so we certainly didn’t miss it. I feel a bit shortchanged not being able to take a photo of myself at that sign again though! Oh well, it was a good climb, being at the highest peak in the South West at 1.1km elevation.

[Editor note - this one turned out longer than I thought it would be. Scroll to the bottom for the link to the VMWare discount]

I’ve been using VMWare on and off since they started making the darn thing back in 2000. I initially tried pirate copies on Windows and Linux on a Celeron 333 with 128MB of RAM. It was slow. But it did run and emulate the x86 machine properly. Since then, I’ve adopted the free (Server) edition of VMWare as my test machine as most physical machines I use are Linux based. I use it to try out live CD’s and the like.

Unfortunately, VMWare decided that developing for Mac OS X was totally different to Linux. There’s some truth to that; it depends on what you’re trying to do. Regardless, it means there was no free version of VMWare to use legally. I didn’t bother with it much until Fusion 2.0 came out in Beta. Basically, using the Linux Server edition was driving me nuts with all of it’s problems. Not so much problems with VMWare, but problems with the fact that Linux is so fragmented in the way that distributions deploy software version that it’s hard to expect _anyone_ to come out with a product that worked flawlessly with all combinations! VMWare on my Ubuntu box did work, but when I changed software configurations it would often break, and I spent almost as much time reconfiguring it as I did using it.

So, I decided to start using my Macbook Pro as my primary VMWare device. Fusion 2.0 beta was free. Yay. I used it for about 6 months. I was still using it after it expired, because all you need to do is set the OS clock back and the serial number becomes logically valid. But I was starting to use the software to run my bootcamp partition to access Microsoft Activesync for my phone. The only reason I needed to use ActiveSync is because there is no free way that I know of to transfer files to a Windows Mobile phone. Anyway, setting the clock back in OS X results in the clock in the VMWare BIOS being set back, which results in the Windows clock being set back (internet time is not enabled by default in Windows XP). This was then passed on to my phone which messed up my appointments every time I plugged the phone in. Sheesh!

So I decided to buy it, kind of. I was watching the price for about a week. Yes, it’s US$89, but I’m in Australia, and our exchange rate moves. Actually, at the time, our exchange was about 0.80:1 to the US dollar on average for about 6 weeks. No problems. A little over AU$100 for the licence. Well, next time I build a website, and bank another cheque, I’ll fork over the money. No need to hurry right? Wrong. Our dollar plummetted to just over $0.50 to the US dollar. Suddenly it was over $150 to buy the licence. Well, I know it’s only $50 more, but I’m not paying $150 for a software licence. I think that’s just wrong. It’s not like I’m going to use it to make $50,000.

So I’ve been waiting for the Australian dollar to go back up, but it doesn’t seem to want to break that $0.70 mark for the past month or so. I had an idea tonight though: promotional codes! I scoured the web a little bit and found that most deals had expired. Actually VMWare themselves had a good one on Dec 1st, 50% off. But it was valid for that day only. Shame I missed that. The good news for me is that they were offering a 25% discount until the end of 2008. That’s under $100 for the license. Hooray! I just bought mine, checked out, and got my license key. Start up VMWare, get the complaining license screen, hit “Enter Serial”, and away I go!