This is the end of this blog. I've moved to a new site, and I won't be blogging here anymore. You're welcome to come with me at the new place though :)
Sometimes I Confuse Myself
All done. Well, the PC is moved anyway. And configured finally to play live tv again. The table where it used to live is still sorta unavailable for use...but you get that.
After shot?
After shot.
w00ty t00ty.
Bugger me. It's time.
For the last....many...months, my media centre PC has been sitting on our dining table. Heat constraints meant I had to get it out of the entertainment cabinet, and here it has sat for time immemorial. Ok, not quite that long, but DAMN long, that's for sure.
You see (and stop me if I start boring you..no..don't...i'm talking, so nyah) the raid card that came with my raid box wasn't very good quality. A little bit of heat to the area, and it starting dropping bytes as it read them. Not good when you store about 3 TB worth of media on said raid box. So it came out and i hacked it better (dropped the raid card, ran 5 sata cables to the mobo instead of just one, and started using the onboard raid controller instead) and there it sat. I was scared of moving it back in case heat was still a problem - and time never seemed to allow us to get a multitude of fans installed in the entertainment cabinet. But I've got a solution now, and back we go to the unit...
This brings up something interesting. Crankgoblin (the website you're viewing now) actually runs on my media centre. I'm self hosted. w00t right? Right. But it does mean that when I have a power outage...or the net dies at the ISP end...or my router needs a reboot...or I mess with some setting or other...crankygoblin goes offline. Oops :) You guys will get over it I'm sure.
Also, I have a question to ask of those that care: I'm moving to a new blog engine. I'm going to do it real soon now. My question is this:
Do you want me to migrate all my old posts over to the new blog?
Option 2 is to keep the old blog up, and put the new blog up on a new address. Both options work for me...but I'll be swayed by popular opinion.
Leave me some comments, let me know. I'd be interested to hear what you think.
Anyway...I digressed a little. Time to move the PC back to the TV cabinet. W00t. (plus, it means I can watch live tv on the xbox again, since my antenna cable didn't reach the pc when it was on the dining table.
Here's the before shot (pre-move). After to shot to come afterwards (duh).
Yes. That's an Eric Rudder bobblehead I was sent many eons ago. He's there as a constant reminder that I need to clean up. Which I'm now doing.
Any want an Eric Rudder bobblehead? Is he worth anything on ebay perhaps? :)
Just noting this link coz its useful to me right now.
http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate/
I cant' remember if i can embed script in my blog posts or not. let's see...
I'm loath to do much blogging while I work on the transistion to the new blog backend. The new blog backend is coming along, but it's still got a little ways to go (GAPTCHA has been 50% implemented...while it generates the images and displays them, its not accepting new comments, regardless of your correctness of your image selection. and there's still no admin pages).
There's the whole wedding to organise too, so the migrate isn't going as fast as I would want it too.
It's funny, I never realised quite how much time it takes to get a wedding ready. Seriously, what's wrong with eloping? Sheesh.
As sad it sounds, I must admit, I do choose to actually try to get some sleep each night too.
So yes. I'm not dead yet. Come back thursday and we'll see.
I've done some reading up (thanks to Noonie and Nick for the links) and from what I've been reading, BlogEngine.net is the way to go. I've not run it yet to try it out, but there's a few things mkaing it look like the correct path to follow:
- It's open. This means I can hack my own changes in (coz there's no way i'm doing ANY captcha without GAPTCHA :)
- It's simple. I'm busy lately. I don't want to spend hours figuring out the code base. The theming support looks hella-easy.
- It'll talk to SQL. Haven't exactly figured out how to turn this on yet, but I like the idea of a DB backend...I think.
- Dave Burke uses it. Back in the day when I was actively hacking my Community Server (read: this) blog, he and I were often (well...sometimes) trading coding hacks and tricks for running CS. If he's moved that way, it makes sense (Dave, get ready, expect me to harassing you again soon!). He's even written some scripts for migrating CS content to the new platform! (Thanks buddy).
- It does't have multiple-blog support - but that's not really a big deal. From what I can tell, it's just a matter of cloning the site over several applications (basically, run a new instance of BlogEngine for each virtual-directory (each user gets a new vdir). I think you can make them all share the same DB backend too, which would be good.
In the coming days (probably weeks) I'll be setting up a test BlogEngine.net site at home and having a play. Once I get GAPTCHA implemented and my old content migrated, then I'll start putting this blog to bed. Don't worry though, the main URL won't change....at least, I don't think it will. Probably the biggest issue is blog posts i've done that link to each other...with the new engine if the urls look different, then the links will 404...
Yes, I've still got a fair bit more reading to do to figure out all the issues...but so far, it's looking good.
I would like to state categorically and unequivacally, right now, that the rumours you may have heard are completly unfounded.
I'm a little saddened that no one thought to simply ask me instead of wildly speculating. Please, just ignore what you may be hearing around the grapevine.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a dancing pony.
That is all.
In the two years since I was last seriously blogging* community server has gone under a few changes - to the point that community server doesn't even seem to exist anymore. Telligent still has products, but they're not for me. Hell, I'd been holding off on upgrading to the latest version as it was. So this blog is, like, massively old.
It still works, which I like. But it's old. And I've lost my copy of the source code too. Hell, I lost my source base probably 4 years ago in an eventful laptop upgrade where I forgot to backup the hard drive first...
My requirements: must be open source, and .net. Preferably uses an MS SQL backend. Even more importantly, must be easy to customise how it looks. And I want to re-implement GAPTCHA for that engine.
Simple really.
* Well...two years may well be an estimate a little on the conservative side, but I'm conservative by nature. Right?
If I may, just for a moment, quote the esteemed Martin Riggs..
We're back, we're bad, you're black and I'm mad.
I decided two months ago - yes, two full frickin months - that I wanted to start blogging again. It's taken this long for webhost4life to pull their fingers out of their asses and actually make the fricking site work once more (that's a lie, but more later). Long story. You don't care. You will, when I describe it in detail, but not right now. However, this site is called crankygoblin for a reason...man I'm cranky.
So anyway...I'm back. I have a few different projects on the boil all at once at the moment. These should start appearing soon - read: hopefully tomorrow. Until then, rest assured, I'm alive and things are starting to get back to normal now.
W00t? Oh yes. Very w00t. Wootlike.
I suspect that anyone reading this post has thought that I died. Or at minimum, that this blog has died. I suppose it's fair to say that I certainly put very much effort into it in the last...well, year or two.
However, I thought I'd post a little update on one of the things that's been keeping me busy. A long time ago (January 2008, in fact) I posted the first couple of chapters in a story that I'd been working on.
Well since then I've finished that story, and been working on the sequel. It updates regularly - as I write a chapter, I update the online version that is available for all to read. I try not to make changes to anything that's been released.
So anyway, for those who may be interested, it's being hosted on this very website. Feel free to check them out here - Escape From Fnordish.
Well turds. First George Carlin, now Don S Davis.
*sigh*
Be well, General Hammond :(
As anyone who knows me knows, I've got two gorgeous children.
It's time now to show you the new additions to my family. They're nowhere near as cute, but they're family, so you have to love them.
Last night I was at the doctors checking up on a problem with my wrist, and I mentioned that I'll be going overseas soon. Not long after that, I got jabbed in each arm getting boosters for both tetanus and polio. The doc was fine, but he certainly wasn't thinking when he put bandaids on my arms though.
I decided not to try to pull the bandaids off. Instead I cut them off. It was way less painful. So now I have bald spots on my arms to go with my head.
For some reason, my mother and sister had an idea.
So here they are, my two new babies. :)
Sad now :( I'll miss you.
