It’s pretty obvious that I have been neglecting this space lately. It’s been well over 2 months since I last posted anything, and that was one of those annoying “updating things” updates.

Well, I’ve decided to partake in the Iron Man perl blogging challenge. Once a week, every week, I will post something, anything, about perl. This should be easy because it’s basically all I’ve been programming in lately and it’s easily my favorite language. My official start post is right now.

I’m working on an interesting new library that I’d like to think can change things in a big way for the open source community. I’m working on this with a fellow perl6 monger. Oh, you didn’t catch that? Yeah, I helped start the first Perl 6 Mongers group, right here in Dallas. DFW.pm is basically defunct; one of the problems that plagued it was the venue. Rather than trying to cater to everyone across this horribly sprawled metroplex, I think it would be best to just focus on a few key areas. We may rename it later, but Dallas.p6m seems fitting.

Speaking of which, I will be attending YAPC::NA 2009. My wife and I will treat this as our mini-vacation, since we haven’t taken one in 2 years! I contemplated giving a talk, but I decided I’m too new to this whole presentation thing and I’m not sure I have anything to really say. Hopefully next year I will have something interesting to give a lecture or talk over.

The semester is almost over and I’m still swamped to the gills. I’ve been neglecting everything lately due to the overwhelming amount of work I’ve been assigned. I will be really happy to make it through to the summer for some time off. I’ll still be working on my thesis, but that’s not nearly as pressing as normal class deadlines (unless you advisor makes you redo stuff right before you defend).

I’ve been busy lately with lots of technology related things, but I wanted to report that my feed URI has officially changed thanks to Google’s forced update process.

I’ll be posted more things this weekend about some of the really neat things I’ve been doing lately. Let me leave you with a small taste. I’ve unsuccessfully installed IPCop on a virtual machine; I’ve integrated more with the Rakudo development community because I have special permission to take a laptop to work. I received my results from the qualifier I took last semester. Lastly, I’m making my own GTK theme.

Lots of juicy bits that I can’t wait to blog about.

I am testing out the new QuickPress posting tool on the (finally) revamped Wordpress dashboard. This new dashboard looks much more useful than the unintuitive dash on the 2.6 release.

Anyways, it’s been hell getting everything setup. IPCop seemed to clear out my dyndns setting and wasn’t updating even though the site had been up for 2 weeks. I’ve been crammed with too much work in the last month for my current class, so I haven’t had time to do much.

We have moved into our house, but maybe 50% of stuff is unpacked, so we’ll have to finish that after the semester is over. I don’t have any pictures of the new house, but I will eventually post a curbside photo.

Back to the grind. Good to be back and up finally.

I don’t really have anything to blog about right now, but I did want to just say that I am still around and as busy as ever. School has started once again; I have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7-8:15pm and Sunshine has class on Mondays from 7-10pm. I’m also officially on “mandatory overtime,” which to you lucky stiffs in the non-government sector means nothing. To me, it means “we want the whole department to work overtime to pull in contract sales faster, so we want you to do 10% extra a month.”

On top of all of that, we are in the process of buying a house. I’ll do another write-up this weekend about my experiences doing so, since there may be some other first-timers out there who’d like a scientists’ point of view.

Anyways, I’ve got a few posts scheduled for the weekend. I also have regular maintenance on erebus scheduled (cleaning, updates, security, etc). Lastly, I am going to update zero-blog and finish setting up the photography section already. I’ve been screwing around with that for a year and it’s time I just hurried up with it (I spent the few hours organizing and labeling my photots, so I don’t have any good excuses not to finish).

Don’t touch that dial; it’s a three day weekend coming up!

So there’s several things on today’s discussion agenda. Let’s get right down to business.

First up, I made a minor change to the site. I am now sifting the main content feed through FeedBurner. This means I will hopefully get a better idea who’s reading the blog. All I know right now is the tiny bit of information from the WordPress Stats plugin and that Google Reader thinks my blog is the most obscure thing I read. You may have also noticed that I updated the plugins and fixed the obsocialbookmarker plugin to provide links to some of the aggregators I’ve heard of. If I’m missing your favorite, do tell.

Also, I hit a milestone with my last post; it marked my 500th blog! That’s right, I’ve written way too many words that way too few people read. I’ve had some ups and downs, a few contintributors who have long stopped contributing, even watched as my wife set up her third Blogger account. Here’s to the next 500 posts!

The reason why I have not posted recently was more out of a superstition. Monday night was an incredibly intense game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Red Wings and the Penguins. It lasted for well over 100 minutes, into three overtime periods, and ended with a disappointing goal by the Penguins. Fear not, the Red Wings went back to Pittsburg to steal the cup from them on the Pens’ own ice. The celebration afterwards was riddled with boos and hisses, but it was still a sweet victory to see my boys bring The Cup home for the 4th time in 11 years.

Lastly, I never got to posting last week’s pace charts. Monday was tough because I stupidly decided to run in the afternoon and it easily broke the 90’s. The other runs were tough but managable. I’m still struggling with the long run. I felt better than last week, but only slightly. I think I am going to try and focus on maintaining a pace for a long time because I see to have trouble beyond 3 miles. Hopefully, this is just a decreased stamina due to the extended break and not loss of ability. I also need to see about excluding the walk breaks during the intervals as it greatly skews the graphs, so I decided to change to a non-continuous bar graph so it would display something useful.

I’m blathering, so here are the charts:

File this one under just-in-case-your-run-into-this category. I have been running WordPress from the svn repository for a while now and was just recently burned. I found that I could no longer enable or disable plugins. I was just given a message that the action failed, with no reason whatsoever.

If you see this, the quick solution is to check if you have a wp-content/plugins/plugins.php file. For some reason, I had this lying around; it should instead be using the wp-admin/plugins.php. Removing this file gives you the new fancy plugin page.

The strange thing about this is I had to dig around in the code to find what the real file should have been. Why it was loading that incorrect file, I have no idea. No one else seemed to report this problem, so I figured I’d mention it here so perhaps the Google Sitemap would help others find this solution.

Update: As I posted that, I found out the hard way that ask.com is no longer working with the Google Sitemap. If you are using this plugin, disable this in the Settings page.

So I finally got around to upgrading WordPress, this time upgraded to 2.4-bleeding. That’s right, I’m now officially running svn sources for my WordPress install. I followed the instructions here, added a step for backing up the old install to a bzip2 (and subsequently a network-wide backup), and everything went smoothly. In fact, you may notice right now that this article has both categories and tags.

The next key step was to upgrade my necessary plugins. I tried to install an AJAX spell checker but it requires mbstring and I’m having a few things upgraded before I can continue using this. I also installed the AJAXed WordPress plugin to smooth out some user interactions. There are tons of options with this plugin, so I’ll continue playing with them in the future.

I removed the old PageViews plugin as it really wasn’t providing any useful information. I stripped that code out of the template and moved on to the WordPress.com Stats plugin. I’m not a huge fan of it either but I guess I better do something that that useless account I created.

The Tiger interface plugin is horribly broken though, so I had to roll that out. As far as the new WordPress interface (either 2.3 or 2.4-bleeding) is somewhat 1998 with better graphics. The creation page now has everything as expandable sections rather than draggable sidebar items. This is create for eliminating clutter unless I need to actually change a setting, at which point I’ll have to scroll.

I also installed NextGen Gallery and will be giving the auto tag generator a try. This of coarse means that I will have to eventually go through my pictures and finally tag all of them before I can make them available. This will finally give me the chance to provide feedback to the F-Spot developers.

I also installed a new social bookmarking plugin. This time, I went with obsocialbookmark instead of Greagarious. I liked Gregarious’ features, but it integrated with non-white background blogs like square peg and a round hole. I really just wanted something simple at the bottom of every post and obsocialbookmark seems to accomplish this better. Speaking of which, I may be updating the theme in the future.

I upgraded sshd because of some rather annoying brute-force break-in attempts. I made sure to lock down all of the machines in the hellkeep network. I installed and enabled DenyHosts on every machine. I highly recommend following those steps as DenyHosts actually works well enough to halt almost all break-in attempts on hellkeep. I could be more vicious (and probably should do this anyways) and report the wankers running compromised networks to get their ass in gear and close those holes (no pun intended). I should probably look into setting up a Tripwire scan.

Lastly, I finally was able to make the switch to Banshee. I figured out why gstreamer related packages were not installing. Apparently, if you set your PORTAGE_TMPDIR to something over an NFS share, then you’re bound to get trouble from time to time. With Banshee as my main DAAP, I can now handle all of my music with a somewhat intelligent playlist and podcast integration. I might even try hooking up my wife’s iPod to it later.

I love doing this huge upgrades every year; it’s like getting a new lease on your computer.