Ginny has been bugging me about the problem she’s been having posting to her blog from the iPhone and other third party tools that she uses.

The problem has been narrowed down to a bug in LIBXML2 that causes leading angle brackets “<” to be stripped off of posts when processed through the XMLRPC support in PHP.  I logged the issue in the Wordpress bug tracker, and the consensus is that the problem started manifesting after an automatic update applied by Fedora 8.

Well, to solve the problem I’ve moved Ginny’s blog to a temporary server running in a base Fedora 8 install in a VMWare instance.  Luckily Wordpress stores most of it’s content in the MySQL database (not the images, unfortunately).  A bit of NFS magic to mount the appropriate directory in the virtual system, and it’s working fine.  The server itself only has Apache, PHP, MySQL client, SSH, and a few other bits & pieces to keep it running.  No automatic updates, GUI, compilers, etc.

Once the bug is fixed (either Wordpress, using a different XML processing mechanism, or LIBXML2) I’ll move her server back to the main server.

In the mean time, her blog is going to run in the virtual machine ‘Hobbittown’ (named because it’s small).

I can’t wait for this iPhone application …

It’s not available on the iTunes App Store yet … so I’ll just have to cool my jets for a bit.

I converted Jon to Wordpress!

Wordpress’s domination of the world progresses.

I’ve move this blog over to www.geekyramblings.org … just for the heck of it.

Just need to check trackbacks to Ginny’s blog.

Well, it took a long time, but I finally wore her down … I got Ginny to convert her blog from MovableType to Wordpress. Not only did she convert her own blog, but her churches website too.

I’m pretty sure she got tired of having to manually manage all the comment and trackback spam she was getting. I kept singing the praises of SpamKarma 2, which reduced the amount of spam I get to next to zero.

It took a bit of work to get the blog converted … the Wordpress import didn’t do a perfect job, and Ginny tried out a bunch of themes (and tweaked them as she did), but in the end it seems to be a pretty smooth transition.

Oh yeah, another potential convert in the pipeline … I setup wordpress on my own machine at work as an internal blog … and commented on the VP of R&D’s internal blog that Wordpress has a much better commenting system than the Simpblog software they are currently using … he checked out my blog and agreed. They haven’t converted the internal blogs yet, but I think it’s just a mater of time.

[tags]wordpress, SpamKarma[/tags]

For those who haven’t noticed, I’m using a new theme on the blog … it’s called Giraffe2 and is really flexible and cool.

This theme, coupled with Wordpress Widgets, make this blog really slick looking (if I do say so myself).

I upgraded the blog software to Wordpress 2.0.

Might be a few glitches … I’ll fix ‘em as they are caught (assuming I can figure out the problem).

’nuff said.

Oh boy … it’s been a while since I did a serious post here. Time to do some catch up.

1. My blog feed is now handled through Feedburner. This will allow me to get some stats on my readership. I was quite surprised to see that there are 28 people reading my blog through various mechanims.
2. The people who are promoting intelligent design are total idiots. The idea that they would want to replace science with religion is total bullshit.
3. Work has been kind of crazy lately … the project I’ve been working on is in full swing and I’m pretty much heads down on it. I’ll be glad when it’s done … not only will it be a load off my mind … but it will be a very very cool feature. Also, I got a raise today!
4. Last Saturday, Ginny and I went to see “Beauty and the Beast” by the Highland Park Players … a local community theater group. Our friend Earle was playing Monsieur D’Arque. He only had one significant part, but it was prominent. The show was quite good. Didn’t have the polish that the Marriott Theater production did … but it was fun none the less.
5. Speaking of theater … we went to see “Footloose” at the Marriott two weeks ago … I was not impressed. The singing was so-so and the dancing was ‘eh’. There were a few good numbers, but as a whole it didn’t work for me.
6. Riley loves the laser pointer. He also likes lower tech toys like a piece of string. He doesn’t seem to go for the cat toys though.

Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print right now. I’ll try to keep more current in the future.