Joe Auricchio

It’s time for me to start contributing back to this Blogosphere thing. I should also get some practice in technical writing and commentary, and the kinds of critical thinking they encourage. Finally, I should do something to show anyone who finds this site what I’m like professionally, not just personally.

To that end, I’ve written the first in what I hope is a long series of articles on computer architecture, my area of focus and primary interest. In the inaugural entry, I respond to Jon Stokes’s recent article on the Intel Atom and opine on the ramifications of newfound x86 compatibility in embedded systems (to wit: who cares?)

To avoid annoying all the folks who know me in real life but aren’t as nerdy, or just don’t want to scroll through pages of essays, I’ve kept the architecture section off the main blog section, but added appropriate links to it. For the lazy: architecture category index, feed.

I moved back from TextPattern to WordPress. It sucks less than it used to. The theme (”Modern”) isn’t my work. I hacked it a little bit (narrower sidebar, tighter top, page template includes sidebar).

The TextPattern importer brought in all the posts and all the categories, but didn’t associate them. This is annoying.

I installed an OpenID plugin and poked it a bit. If you use OpenID, let me know if it works.

Update: Categories imported. Google told me I didn’t want to use the default TextPattern import script, I wanted to blah blah edit blah blah PHP blah blah I hate WordPress.

Here’s the script I ended up writing: do-categories.php.txt. It assumes both textpattern and wordpress tables are in the same MySQL database, to join across them. You should change the table names. First run the two queries interactively (phpMyAdmin?) to verify that everything looks right. Then put this in your wordpress top directory next to wp-config.php, fix the extension, and php do-categories.php. It’ll print out the things it does—another opportunity for sanity checking. No warranties express or implied yadda yadda. Thanks to Alex Brie’s script for guidance.

So I got tired of WordPress’s crap. Most of my friends from back home and I also got tired of 768kbps up on a good day. So I moved my site from lighttpd+WordPress on the Linux box under my stairs to TextPattern on DreamHost.

So far TextPattern is marvelous. I love the sections/pages/forms hierarchy, even though the default configuration is a bit dumb. I’ve made a few hacks and modifications, especially to the clean URL handler, which I’ll detail shortly.

I’m going to go back through all my old posts and reformat them to match the new theme and new environment. update: pretty much done, but I need to figure out a good way to tag multiple-participant quotations

Let me know if anything’s broken!

I’m blowing up the theme and rebuilding it from scratch. Expect hideous ugliness for the duration.

Why from scratch? I said it best on IRC.

<jauricchio> because, even though i don’t yet have a concrete vision of what i want, it’s different from everyone else’s

I’m open to suggestions, by which I mean, please help me making it non-hideous. I’m not good at this kind of design…

I’ve used & lt; and & gt; to create angle-brackets around speaker names in many of my quote posts. I upgraded to 2.05 the other day, and since then it seems Wordpress has been over-interpreting entities. I now have to use & amp;lt; and & amp;gt; to get the brackets to show up in browsers. The WP edit box shows the same as it used to; the change is in the processing between database and client. Anybody else seen this?

Palladium.

Massive update coming soon. Remind me.

Sorry folks, it seems comments were broken for a while. My fault. Thanks DJ for the heads-up. That DJ, always testing the limits of security systems =D

I’ve turned off pretty permalinks. This means no .htaccess with mod_rewrite, which means I can move this vhost to lighty/php-fcgi easily. Should be a transparent change to all of you out there in audience-land, but it means things will be Harder, Faster, Stronger, Better on this end. Which is good. This also means any links or bookmarks you may have are now broken.

Update: Moved. What is this, Staples? Seriously dudes, lighty is the way to go.

I’ve had some downtime recently. First, DNS problems - ZoneEdit’s nameservers are apparently under attack. One has been nullrouted by the ISP for a while, they’re working on it. The other goes down occasionally… and when they’re both down, no DNS for us. With a 2H time to live, you really feel that.

Also, I had to move this machine from a campus office VLAN to Resnet in my dorm room. They seem to be blocking all incoming traffic from half the world. So… anyone on campus, or at Yale, UC Davis, or Charter Cable in SLO county can get to the machine; but Roadrunner in Fullerton, SBC (i think?) in La Jolla, Mindspring/Earthlink DSL, Sprint in the bay area, and the EVDB office cannot. I’ve already poked Resnet about this, and I really really hope to have it resolved before break.

Update: Upgraded the poke to a sharp jab in the ribs with a “When can I expect a response on this issue?” email. If they haven’t replied by, oh, noon Thursday, I’m going to roll up in to APM and lay about with a broadsword until I gets me some answers. Or something. I heard that someplace…