Had a relatively productive morning. But then went out for coffee/lunch, and started getting stressed about being out all day (which is what so often happens here on the weekends). So came home and planned and bought materials for my Lego cake topper :)
I was originally inspired by Eric Harschbarger (my hero), and have modified the design a bit.
It should look amazingly cool, aside from the extreme geekiness of it :)
Also did more work on the invitation designs (hampered by my complete lack of creativity).
Results matching “Weekend”
So Friday afternoon, we all meandered down to the coast. (If you're reading this in Google feed reader you might want to jump to the page as the page goes a bit screwy with the way MT4 does things..)
We arrived with enough time to wander down to the beach to play in the sand.
When we got back to the flat there were kangaroos in the front yard
Kerry cooked a nice stir fry for dinner, and we drank beer.
Saturday morning saw Kerry up before dawn to get photos of the sunrise.
And this nice shot of a seagull.
The flat has a bird feeder and visitors are encouraged to feed the birds.
So we did.
There were lots of birds.
After breakfast we all drove up to Myrtle Beach. It's a nice walk to the beach..
And we saw this cool lizard looking at us and catching ants.
Myrtle Beach.. covered in seaweed.
Unfortunately it was very rough, so we couldn't really swim there. So we went back to Maloney's Beach. Had a nice swim there. Saw this nifty hexagon-shaped house on the way back..
This is the view from the flat.. nice huh? :)
After unhealthy lunch of fish and chips, we headed down to the beach again.
Saw this.. thought it was a spider pushing a bug, but it was a bug dragging a spider!
Found a sand worm in the sand (strangely enough!)
And dug a big hole for Jake to play in.
Kerry and I went for a walk up to the end of the beach.
There were more birds back at the flat.
Kerry cooked dinner again Saturday night, this time pasta. And we drank beer.
Sunday morning still more birds. The most so far.
After bacon and eggs for brekky, we went up to the end of Long Beach again to go snorkelling, but couldn't see a thing due to all the crap in the water from the onshore wind.
But Scotty caught a couple of fish, which he let go.
And we dug another hole for Jake.
And then we came home.
A very pleasant and relaxing weekend. And cheap too - the place was only $85/night which we split between two families. Definitely need to go more often wethinks.
Went away to Bateman's Bay for the weekend with Scott and Kerry. Several hundred photos were taken, less than half of them by me :) I picked out thirty-odd of them, will blog them tomorrow night.
This little sparrow came up to us yesterday hoping for a handout..
Stu got this at Cancon. A word of warning though - these are incredibly "cheap" t-shirts (in quality if not in price - $25!), and this one split open (not even on a seam) after its first wear.
Some of my Australia Day weekend was spent built making models.
Hence the need for a trip to Fyshwick yesterday to get some paint.
This was what I needed it for:
Cute huh? A guy at work got it free at EB games, but wasn't going to build it, so I said I would. Hope it doesn't get smashed in the office.. Unfortunately it's Revell, which is a "cheap" brand, and badly designed - it's tail-heavy but there's no instructions to weight it down at the front, and by the time you notice after attaching the wheels it's too late :(
And here's something I saw when it first came out in 1990 and regretted for years afterwards not buying at the time. So a couple of years ago I got one on eBay :)
Stu got this at Cancon. A word of warning though - these are incredibly "cheap" t-shirts (in quality if not in price - $25!), and this one split open (not even on a seam) after its first wear.
Some of my Australia Day weekend was spent built making models.
Hence the need for a trip to Fyshwick yesterday to get some paint.
This was what I needed it for:
Cute huh? A guy at work got it free at EB games, but wasn't going to build it, so I said I would. Hope it doesn't get smashed in the office.. Unfortunately it's Revell, which is a "cheap" brand, and badly designed - it's tail-heavy but there's no instructions to weight it down at the front, and by the time you notice after attaching the wheels it's too late :(
And here's something I saw when it first came out in 1990 and regretted for years afterwards not buying at the time. So a couple of years ago I got one on eBay :)
#24. To buy a 10mL bottle of paint costs 50km on your car and four and a half hours of your life.
That's one reason I dislike Canberra. Stuff is just so far away. You can't just do anything "on the way home". You have to dedicate a whole day to it.
And of course by the time you actually get home (in this case after 4pm), you're too exhausted to actually do anything, and the day may as well be over. *blip* there goes half my weekend :(
*sigh*
That's one reason I dislike Canberra. Stuff is just so far away. You can't just do anything "on the way home". You have to dedicate a whole day to it.
And of course by the time you actually get home (in this case after 4pm), you're too exhausted to actually do anything, and the day may as well be over. *blip* there goes half my weekend :(
*sigh*
Well I had quite a pleasant long weekend. How about you? :)
Saturday morning I headed down to the lake for the F/A-18 flyby. Took a photo of cannons while I waited..
Right on time (I think), the F/A-18s flew up from the south east. They were very fast and very loud. I didn't trust myself with burst mode, but did get this nice shot of them just as they were separating.
Then they fired the cannons. I could feel the shockwave from them from where I was standing some distance back.
On the way back to the car snapped this pic of a duck..
Then I headed off to Cancon, where Stu was competing. I got there in time to see him finish his first battle.
Damien requested this photo of an army in the "ancient" section. I don't know who ended up winning, but the line held remarkably well, and they'd killed three of the four elephants at one point when I looked over..
At lunch, Damien and Stu and I headed off to "New Asia" in Dickson. Damien is a regular there and now is on first name terms with the staff :) We had some delicious (if slightly *warm*) food there before heading back to Cancon for the afternoon session.
The beginning of Stu's second battle
A close up of one of Stu's guns
And some more of his guns
After the games, we came home, and Natalie and Andrew came over for pizza and movies. I slightly overcooked the pizzas, whoops. We watched Dr Strangelove, and Shakespeare in Love. I think they had a nice time.. :)
Sunday morning Stu headed off to Cancon while I painted and built model aeroplanes, washed the sheets, did several days worth of washing up, etc.
For dinner we went to Mamak Corner in Garran with some of the other war gamers. More good food there. I had some fried ice cream for dessert - haven't had that in ages.
Stu played both these dudes on his first day
Today was more of the same for me, and indeed more of the same for Stu.
Stu won this trophy - the Captain-General's trophy for chivalrous behaviour (or something like that) :)
Have to go back to work tomorrow. Doh!!
Saturday morning I headed down to the lake for the F/A-18 flyby. Took a photo of cannons while I waited..
Right on time (I think), the F/A-18s flew up from the south east. They were very fast and very loud. I didn't trust myself with burst mode, but did get this nice shot of them just as they were separating.
Then they fired the cannons. I could feel the shockwave from them from where I was standing some distance back.
On the way back to the car snapped this pic of a duck..
Then I headed off to Cancon, where Stu was competing. I got there in time to see him finish his first battle.
Damien requested this photo of an army in the "ancient" section. I don't know who ended up winning, but the line held remarkably well, and they'd killed three of the four elephants at one point when I looked over..
At lunch, Damien and Stu and I headed off to "New Asia" in Dickson. Damien is a regular there and now is on first name terms with the staff :) We had some delicious (if slightly *warm*) food there before heading back to Cancon for the afternoon session.
The beginning of Stu's second battle
A close up of one of Stu's guns
And some more of his guns
After the games, we came home, and Natalie and Andrew came over for pizza and movies. I slightly overcooked the pizzas, whoops. We watched Dr Strangelove, and Shakespeare in Love. I think they had a nice time.. :)
Sunday morning Stu headed off to Cancon while I painted and built model aeroplanes, washed the sheets, did several days worth of washing up, etc.
For dinner we went to Mamak Corner in Garran with some of the other war gamers. More good food there. I had some fried ice cream for dessert - haven't had that in ages.
Stu played both these dudes on his first day
Today was more of the same for me, and indeed more of the same for Stu.
Stu won this trophy - the Captain-General's trophy for chivalrous behaviour (or something like that) :)
Have to go back to work tomorrow. Doh!!
Tonight Natalie and some friends invited us along to the Canberra Planetarium and Observatory, which is closing this weekend :(
Although first off, we had dinner at a Turkish place in Dickson that was selling Lezzo.. which amused all of us..
And then on to the Planetarium
This is the star projector
We saw the "Southern Skies" show, which was interesting enough, but really focussed on just the Southern Cross and a few things around it.
Although first off, we had dinner at a Turkish place in Dickson that was selling Lezzo.. which amused all of us..
And then on to the Planetarium
This is the star projector
We saw the "Southern Skies" show, which was interesting enough, but really focussed on just the Southern Cross and a few things around it.
After the show he turned the dome lights on, so we could see through it - very cool!
Then we ummed and ahhed about going to the observatory. The main telescope they use is actually the same as Michael's (a C-14). But the dude said they also have a bigger one they use. So we decided to go get a drink and come back for the 9:30 session (as it wasn't even dark yet at 8:30).
So we went in and had a look at Mars, Betelgeuse, the Trapezium of Orion and the moon. All good and all, but no different to seeing them through Michael's telescope. Then he took us into the bigger telescope to show us Rigel, but because it was so high in the sky we couldn't use the ladder, and so ended up just using the "finder scope". So that was all a little disappointing. Oh well.
Afterwards we debated the man in the moon, and other possible interpretations of the dark patches..
Definitely a fun night, and we both approve of Andrew.. :)
Then we ummed and ahhed about going to the observatory. The main telescope they use is actually the same as Michael's (a C-14). But the dude said they also have a bigger one they use. So we decided to go get a drink and come back for the 9:30 session (as it wasn't even dark yet at 8:30).
So we went in and had a look at Mars, Betelgeuse, the Trapezium of Orion and the moon. All good and all, but no different to seeing them through Michael's telescope. Then he took us into the bigger telescope to show us Rigel, but because it was so high in the sky we couldn't use the ladder, and so ended up just using the "finder scope". So that was all a little disappointing. Oh well.
Afterwards we debated the man in the moon, and other possible interpretations of the dark patches..
Definitely a fun night, and we both approve of Andrew.. :)
So as mentioned previously, it was my fifth Blogiversary this week. I decided last year that I wanted to update the style, and the version of Movable Type at the same time. And move it to a Webcity cPanel box. Unfortunately the weeks leading up to Christmas I was busy with getting ready for Christmas, and then we went to Queensland. So I basically had one weekend to work on it, which was a lot less than I'd hoped for!
So anyway. Here's some of my comments and traumas.
Install Wizard
The setup wizard was incredibly easy to setup and use - and it just worked! Soooo much easier that MT2, which required a tonne of hacking. I've not decided if I'll keep the default path where I just happened to dump the files, or see about changing it. My last blog didn't use MySQL - I used Movable Type's version 2.661 database, which I liked using as I could easily backup the database myself by just grabbing the files. I've still to write something to backup my MySQL database regularly.
File Permissions
In 2004 I hacked my old blog to change the file permissions that MT uses by default. For this version I followed these instructions to hack mt-config.cgi to include:
DBUmask 0022
HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022
This means that the files aren't written as being world writable - not good on a shared hosting site!
Style
The next step was to pick some sort of style for the site. I decided that I wanted Black Mountain Tower in the masthead somewhere, to indicate my new life. But I didn't have any good panorama type shots of it. So dragged Stu down to the lake last weekend after church to take some panorama photos. I used one of the "Cityscape" MT styles - the Sydney one actually! and then hacked that to bits. Well chunks really, not little bits ;) Found some actual bugs in the style sheet where Tiffany had misspelt tags so they weren't actually being used - tragic really for a professional.
Widgets
I don't know if these were included in version 3, as I skipped straight from 2 to 4. But they're pretty nifty. It took me a while to actually figure out the Movable Type interface to find them - hidden away in the footer templates!! - under your 2 or 3 column layouts includes. This site gives more info on changing the templates to use the drag and drop widget management bizzo - which I did and I can now drag and drop my widgets. But by doing that you do lose some of the MTif statements for whether things like the archive descriptions are displayed on the archive pages. I could hack all my widgets, or just have an index style and a non-index style column layout. Still thinking about that one.
Gravatar
Getting Gravatar working again involved simply downloading the plugin and not so simply hacking the style sheet for it to display ok (I'm not very good at style sheets!)
RSS Feed
MT4 has a full feed RSS feed by default now - I just use the rss.xml file. So anyone using my old rss url should use this one now.
Google Analytics
Inserted this into my footer template. Strangely visits have gone up heaps since the changeover. So either the old code wasn't being loaded properly, or visits are now working differently because of the broken image searches (see below for more on that). I'm thinking more likely the latter.
Captchas
Now included with Movable Type, but really really ugly. Will look at finding a friendlier one.
Importing my old blog
Strangely I left this til the last minute after doing my styles - after all you don't want to be rebuilding a site of my size too often - it takes a good five minutes each time!
I didn't do any research into this before I went ahead with it, assuming that I'd be able to figure it out. In the end the process was actually fairly simple, but it did take a few goes to get the formatting of the file right. The way I did it was to go to my old installation of MT on the other server, and do the export. Save that export to a text file (mine was about 3mb in size). Then import into the new blog. In the end used the unix format of the output file, and when importing using "Convert line breaks" and UTF-8 encoding. (Used this page for hints on this which worked)
Broken Images
Of course once everything was imported, all the links to my images were wrong. You see I'd decided not to use the old paths for my images. Although this means less hits from Google image searches, it'd also screw up anyone that's been direct linking my images for the past five years. Such people deserve to die. So I attempted the search and replace feature. But for some reason this worked really badly. So I think I've fixed up my images, but I can't really be sure, and some of my pages might still be missing images.
Broken Links
This one was going to take some work. Because in addition to the several hundred of my entries that refer to earlier entries, all external links were going to be broken. I decided to use the .htaccess method of redirecting people.
The biggest problem is that MT2 uses files in the format archives/002190.html while MT4 uses entry titles in the file name, and puts them in monthly directories. So I needed to convert the old links to the new format. In my old blog I downloaded Dirify Plus, then created another index template with the following in it:
<MTEntries lastn="2500">
RedirectMatch /mt-archives/<MTEntryID pad="1">.html /<MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m">/<MTEntryTitle trim_to="40" dirifyplus="pld">.html </MTEntries>
This generated a massive page of text that could be used directly in a .htaccess file. This worked well, except for the few hundred broken links where I'd had duplicate entries, and the couple of hundred pages that were more than 30 characters, which appears to be the limit MT4 uses. I tried setting my dirify to 30 characters, but that didn't seem to work, so I just hacked an excel file to rebuild the links for me. The duplicate entry titles are still a problem (the first one is whatever-1, then whatever-2 etc). I'm thinking I might have to hack the .htaccess file manually for those.
Pages
MT4 lets you create static pages that aren't part of the blog, which is a useful feature. I created a 404 error page, and put that in the .htaccess file, so people that come from broken image searches will see that.
Search Feature
The new search tool is a bit retarded in that it returns the entire page of a blog entry. If you put in something like "the" you'd probably end up returning the entire blog in one page. Will have to read up on how to change that.
Photo Uploading
My first attempts at uploading photos were a bit frustrating. It doesn't have the old feature to "show html" when uploading files, and wants to create a new entry every time. I barely spent any time looking at this though, as it wasn't a priority for going live. I might have a look at Better File Uploader, or do some more reading to find out if I've just missed something.
Comment Notifications
Haven't been able to get these to work, even though the test email when I was setting everything up worked. So I know sendmail will work with the blog, but I just can't figure out how to get it to email me whenever a comment is posted. Very annoying!
Todo
Still have a big todo list. Things like:
So anyway. Here's some of my comments and traumas.
Install Wizard
The setup wizard was incredibly easy to setup and use - and it just worked! Soooo much easier that MT2, which required a tonne of hacking. I've not decided if I'll keep the default path where I just happened to dump the files, or see about changing it. My last blog didn't use MySQL - I used Movable Type's version 2.661 database, which I liked using as I could easily backup the database myself by just grabbing the files. I've still to write something to backup my MySQL database regularly.
File Permissions
In 2004 I hacked my old blog to change the file permissions that MT uses by default. For this version I followed these instructions to hack mt-config.cgi to include:
DBUmask 0022
HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022
This means that the files aren't written as being world writable - not good on a shared hosting site!
Style
The next step was to pick some sort of style for the site. I decided that I wanted Black Mountain Tower in the masthead somewhere, to indicate my new life. But I didn't have any good panorama type shots of it. So dragged Stu down to the lake last weekend after church to take some panorama photos. I used one of the "Cityscape" MT styles - the Sydney one actually! and then hacked that to bits. Well chunks really, not little bits ;) Found some actual bugs in the style sheet where Tiffany had misspelt tags so they weren't actually being used - tragic really for a professional.
Widgets
I don't know if these were included in version 3, as I skipped straight from 2 to 4. But they're pretty nifty. It took me a while to actually figure out the Movable Type interface to find them - hidden away in the footer templates!! - under your 2 or 3 column layouts includes. This site gives more info on changing the templates to use the drag and drop widget management bizzo - which I did and I can now drag and drop my widgets. But by doing that you do lose some of the MTif statements for whether things like the archive descriptions are displayed on the archive pages. I could hack all my widgets, or just have an index style and a non-index style column layout. Still thinking about that one.
Gravatar
Getting Gravatar working again involved simply downloading the plugin and not so simply hacking the style sheet for it to display ok (I'm not very good at style sheets!)
RSS Feed
MT4 has a full feed RSS feed by default now - I just use the rss.xml file. So anyone using my old rss url should use this one now.
Google Analytics
Inserted this into my footer template. Strangely visits have gone up heaps since the changeover. So either the old code wasn't being loaded properly, or visits are now working differently because of the broken image searches (see below for more on that). I'm thinking more likely the latter.
Captchas
Now included with Movable Type, but really really ugly. Will look at finding a friendlier one.
Importing my old blog
Strangely I left this til the last minute after doing my styles - after all you don't want to be rebuilding a site of my size too often - it takes a good five minutes each time!
I didn't do any research into this before I went ahead with it, assuming that I'd be able to figure it out. In the end the process was actually fairly simple, but it did take a few goes to get the formatting of the file right. The way I did it was to go to my old installation of MT on the other server, and do the export. Save that export to a text file (mine was about 3mb in size). Then import into the new blog. In the end used the unix format of the output file, and when importing using "Convert line breaks" and UTF-8 encoding. (Used this page for hints on this which worked)
Broken Images
Of course once everything was imported, all the links to my images were wrong. You see I'd decided not to use the old paths for my images. Although this means less hits from Google image searches, it'd also screw up anyone that's been direct linking my images for the past five years. Such people deserve to die. So I attempted the search and replace feature. But for some reason this worked really badly. So I think I've fixed up my images, but I can't really be sure, and some of my pages might still be missing images.
Broken Links
This one was going to take some work. Because in addition to the several hundred of my entries that refer to earlier entries, all external links were going to be broken. I decided to use the .htaccess method of redirecting people.
The biggest problem is that MT2 uses files in the format archives/002190.html while MT4 uses entry titles in the file name, and puts them in monthly directories. So I needed to convert the old links to the new format. In my old blog I downloaded Dirify Plus, then created another index template with the following in it:
<MTEntries lastn="2500">
RedirectMatch /mt-archives/<MTEntryID pad="1">.html /<MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m">/<MTEntryTitle trim_to="40" dirifyplus="pld">.html </MTEntries>
This generated a massive page of text that could be used directly in a .htaccess file. This worked well, except for the few hundred broken links where I'd had duplicate entries, and the couple of hundred pages that were more than 30 characters, which appears to be the limit MT4 uses. I tried setting my dirify to 30 characters, but that didn't seem to work, so I just hacked an excel file to rebuild the links for me. The duplicate entry titles are still a problem (the first one is whatever-1, then whatever-2 etc). I'm thinking I might have to hack the .htaccess file manually for those.
Pages
MT4 lets you create static pages that aren't part of the blog, which is a useful feature. I created a 404 error page, and put that in the .htaccess file, so people that come from broken image searches will see that.
Search Feature
The new search tool is a bit retarded in that it returns the entire page of a blog entry. If you put in something like "the" you'd probably end up returning the entire blog in one page. Will have to read up on how to change that.
Photo Uploading
My first attempts at uploading photos were a bit frustrating. It doesn't have the old feature to "show html" when uploading files, and wants to create a new entry every time. I barely spent any time looking at this though, as it wasn't a priority for going live. I might have a look at Better File Uploader, or do some more reading to find out if I've just missed something.
Comment Notifications
Haven't been able to get these to work, even though the test email when I was setting everything up worked. So I know sendmail will work with the blog, but I just can't figure out how to get it to email me whenever a comment is posted. Very annoying!
Todo
Still have a big todo list. Things like:
- fix comment notification emails
- decide on sidebar widgets, and put Host1/CIA buttons back
- bring over my subblogs - Stoopid Quizzes, and the
10030 Star Destroyer pageand my USA 2004 page - create a new favicon.ico
fix up imood background colour- change my Gravatars to fit in with new style
- get a nicer captcha
- setup backups of the database
figure out how to upload multiple images- can do this, but the html is butt ugly- create a "Wishlist" widget - something I wanted as a plugin but noone seems to have ever written
- fix list of blogs style
- hack the link creator to put target="_blank" in
- fix up my Weather Pixie page
- fix search returns
- see if there's a simpler create entry form that'll work from the Blackberry
hack the image insertion code so it puts br clear=left tags in- edited lib/MT/Asset.pm and put the br clear=left stuff in this line - return qq{<form mt:asset-id="$id" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-$type">$html</form> <br clear="left">}; (discussion about this was found here).
July 2008: Hacked this further to completely remove the class bit from the form tag. Also hacked lib/MT/Asset/Image.pm to hash out the wrap_style line for left aligned images and just set $wrap_style to blank, so as to not have any extra nonsense around the images that cause them to render badly in Google news reader- put category and tags of entries in index template
We did a lamb roast tonight, thinking we'd have leftovers for at least another meal. Except Scotty came over and ate all our leftovers.. oops.. hehe :)
Other than that .. mostly a "catchup" kinda weekend.. and even then there were plenty of things that didn't get done... oh well.....