blogx
musings of mark since 2001

Got the Windows IIS7 web server running localhost the other day on the Vista partition of this HP laptop, and yesterday downloaded Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Web Developer to match and installed. Kept getting errors saying I must update with two patches and even a link to them, but downloading the patches and running brought compatibility errors.

Fired up again this morning, and there was a Window update and one of them was the two patches again along with a Defender signature file. This time the patches installed as expected and right clicking and choosing “Run as Administrator” on either VB program it starts up and runs with no problems.

Managed to get the first web site built out of the tutorial, creating a “Master” page which is basically a template file and somewhat getting the projects wire-frame that I’m actually supposed to be working on display like it should using VB and IIS and the whole .NET environment thingee. Not bad for a few hours in the morning; brain exploded just before lunch so went down to the Cove for a coffee and say hi to Norma for a break. Getting back to the dog and house, the afternoon was spent in the sunshine vacuuming out the car for all the dog hair and preparing for the owners to return tomorrow sometime.

Looks like the owner of “Bowen Online” chose someone that doesn’t know what they are doing after I finally was able to drop her as a client, (whew!), it has been down for many days now after an SQL injection attack, completely avoidable too. Not like it would be a big deal to fix either, it’s a known bug and there is a fix here, and here - already advised her years ago to upgrade the software, the proper thing to do. A Luddite though, just wants to drive the thing and never pay for putting oil or gas or any maintenance, nothing I can do about that and glad to not be affiliated with it anymore!

How about that, reinstalled Word Press then uploaded the old database and everything is there, including the template I was using. Not sure how that worked yet, but it’s working so let sleeping dogs lie.

Word Press has barfed once again on an important “security” upgrade. Seems to be a different admin interface here too. No warning that *everything* in the admin interface had changed, and the sad part is that there was nothing that needed to be changed in the first place, at least in my view of things.

Adding insult to injury, the template that was being used no longer works either! I’ve exported the posts via the phpMyAdmin database interface and created a little script that puts each post in a folder by date to make the fake file structure WP used into a real one (/blogx/2008/05/17/mypost.html). Haven’t determined how the navigation will work yet, probably something to do with the REQUEST_URI variable running in the index.html file, and will use the script I created for RSS feeds on a client site but for now there is just this single page.

A flurry of posts again from someone haven’t heard much from lately, (2006-ish) and the forum for it has noticed the return of Dean as well. Used the Textpattern software as a blogging tool based on his text generator for a couple years myself, and later as a CMS for a local group until they wanted more extensibility and it was easier to switch them over to Website Baker, which they are still using.

Anyhoo, there’s some good stuff coming off his keyboard often and linkyness to go with it including this recent interesting shell command history meme:
mark-laptop:~$ history|awk ‘{print $2}’|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

    162 sudo
     25 cd
     13 kdesu
      8 calc
      7 emerald
      4 wget
      4 ls
      4 locate
      4 compiz
      3 tar

With all the wonderful Compiz and Emerald GUI things happening, seems I still spend a fair amount of time on a terminal to root around this new machine. Reminds me that I wanted to redo the back-end of this blog too and get off the Wordpress wagon, and get back to some basics and hash over the pros and cons of using a relational database for the content or other means. Seem to recall the fastest way on Apache to stitch content together regardless of horsepower was using server side includes, so may start there and see where it takes me.