do-release-upgrade

and even remember to press Enter afterwards! This Linux stuff is really too tough for us mere users…

Also, WordPress 2.5.1 on this blog and a couple others. Incidentally, if you’ve just upgraded to 2.5.1 and suddenly your RSS feed is empty, you were probably hit by this bug. That link includes info for fixing it, too (basically, you have to replace two files with newer development versions).

Meanwhile, I don’t want to give details here, but I’m officially on my last week on yet another job. I may stay here for some days afterwards, as the boss has asked me that, since they don’t have a replacement yet, nor I have a place to go right now (though I’m contacting a couple of my contacts). Another attempt at working at home is also an option.

In this job, I had no problems with anyone, and the company isn’t actually “going downhill” like some others I’ve worked at (no, I didn’t cause that! ), but I really didn’t enjoy the work itself, which isn’t anyone’s fault. After 10 years as a sysadmin, I’ve gotten used to a couple of things, such as:

1. almost every repeating task can be automated
2. needs intelligence and creativity, not patience
3. free time, if you’re a fast, efficient worker.

None of these exist in a job like the one I have now. I realize that I may sound “spoiled” (though that’s not my intention), but the idea of having repeating, non-automatable hard work is alien to me (at least since my helpdesk days, last century), and I don’t cope with it very well. I may have been lucky in my past jobs, in fact. A sysadmin can automate almost everything, and any new work is an interesting challenge (no matter how hard), one where you stay at it until late night because, well, it’s a challenge, because “the mountain is there”. A programmer, for instance, has to create and invent. Even an artist (which I’ve never been, but I’ve worked with some) or a writer has to use his or her creativity most of the time, instead of just doing the same old (but tough) things over and over. But many jobs aren’t like this… most of them, in fact, if you don’t restrict yourself to IT. I sometimes wonder how my life would be if I had been born a century ago or so. Well, there would always be science…

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of buying my first laptop. I’ve “had” a couple (including the one I’m typing this in right now), but they were always company-owned ones, and indeed I’ll have to return this one soon. A €600 would be more than enough for “serious” stuff (web browsing, email, blogging, writing, listening to music, watching movies, etc.), but there’s always that little thing called games… so the one I have in mind will cost twice as much. Crazy, I know…

While many of Firefox 3’s new features are mostly of interest to web developers, “the rest of us” can also find much to like in it. It’s faster, takes up less memory, looks better, seems incredibly to be more stable than the stable version (!), and I love the new URL bar, where you can start typing something and it usually suggests what you want after just a few characters. In Firefox 2 you had to start typing from the beggining of an URL (which is always the hostname), but now you can type any part of URLs (including paths after the hostname), site names, and it also looks through your bookmarks, so it can work even if you’ve just cleared your browsing history.

Try it — by using the portable version, it won’t affect your Firefox 2 installation in any way. You may find that soon you’ll be using it all the time, just like me.

Some people who know me believe I hate driving. I don’t. What I hate is being lost while driving, and have to deal with the terribly incoherent (and often non-existent) traffic signs in Portugal (which seem to champion the attitude that, if you don’t know your way around here, you’re a stinkin’ stranger and aren’t welcome anyway — or at least that’s what it feels like), the incompetent, rude, aggressive and impatient Portuguese drivers (some of the worst in Europe, from what I hear) who start honking if you slow down a couple of seconds to consider which way to turn or to read a street name, and the fact that the Portuguese just love to make streets one way for no apparent reason (again, I guess it’s so that the locals can feel superior to those dirty strangers from another part of town — never mind another town).

Due to the above, I get annoyed and irritated easily, and avoid driving unless really necessary. That’s why people easily believe I hate to drive, and I can’t fault them for getting that impression.

Well, if you’re anything like me, you won’t believe the feeling of relief that comes from having a toy like this in your car.

It’s not only the fact that I don’t get stressed out anymore when driving in an unknown place. It goes beyond that. While I used to be extremely conservative and stick to routes I already knew, even if they were not the most efficient ones, nowadays it’s the opposite: I keep surprising myself by being adventurous and impulsive. "Let’s see where this way leads." Or: "Let’s see if I can go this way instead" — even though the GPS is telling me to go another way; I know that it’ll adapt its route and lead me to where I want to go — or, if I’m just exploring, I can use it to get out of there.

Since it was my first GPS, I picked the cheapest TomTom (the brand I already knew about at the time; I’ve since learned about others such as Garmin and Mio), which is so cheap that it’s not even listed on their website. It’s a "One 3rd Edition Light"; the "light" part meaning that it comes with the map for Portugal only. On their site, the lowest model includes all of the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain), and it’s at least 50 euros more expensive. Mine can be upgraded, though — it’s just a case of buying the larger map.

As an introductory model, this is great. It only does the basics (navigation): no widescreen, no 3D terrain, no MP3 or video playing, no SD card slot, no real-time traffic (although that feature isn’t available in Portugal yet, even for the more expensive models), and no other bells and whistles. Its 512 MB of RAM may not look like much, but when you consider that the Portugal map is only about 1/10th of that, and that extra voices are only about 1 MB each… I don’t think I’ll ever fill that memory space, even if I upgrade to the Iberian map.

Unless you don’t drive, or only drive between a couple of places, or are a masochist who likes to drive aimlessly when you do want to get somewhere, or, even worse, have to (argh) ask for directions , I don’t think there’s a reason not to have one of these toys in your car. And they’re user friendly enough to give to parents or other non-geeky relatives.

You can’t make stuff like this up (any emphasis is mine):

A black conservative Christian pastor of an evangelical megachurch has vowed to take over Microsoft by packing it with new shareholders who will vote against the company’s policy of championing gay rights.

He told Microsoft executives at a shareholders’ meeting last week that he would be their “worst nightmare” if they continued to defy him.

Antioch Bible Church attracts around 3,500 worshippers for its services and Mr Hutcherson is a powerful figure in the Christian conservative movement.

And…

An advocate of a “biblical stance” against divorce and homosexuality, Mr Hutcherson, 55, is asking millions of evangelical activists, as well as Orthodox Jewish and other allies, to buy up Microsoft shares and demand a return to traditional values.

Microsoft, he declares, will be just the first company targeted in an escalation of the culture wars between evangelicals and corporate America.

“There are 256 Fortune 500 companies alone pouring millions upon millions of dollars into pushing the homosexual agenda,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“I consider myself a warrior for Christ. Microsoft don’t scare me. I got God with me.

Not to mention, of course…

“I told them that you need to work with me or we will put a firestorm on you like you have never seen in you life because I am your worst nightmare. I am a black man with a righteous cause with a whole host of powerful white people behind me.”

Mr Hutcherson’s office is decorated with the heads of deer, elk and a buffalo – “when I run into animals, I kill them and bring them home and eat them” – as well as invitations to the White House and signed pictures of himself with President George W. Bush.

It boggles the mind. Any sane mind, that is. I’m sure there are those out there to whom this is perfectly normal…

I also used the excuse to update Ubuntu to Gutsy (from Feisty) on this server. One command, one reboot, and all done.

Ahoy there, and all that.

That, I hope, is about to change.

For my next project (which is about 75% complete) is a site that may well have scalability problems. Which is good, because I’ll learn about them, and how to cope with them.

What’s that project about? It’s a surprise. Suffice to say that, as far as I know, there’s only another one out there, and, weeks ago, it had to shut down its “free” version because it couldn’t deal with its success. On its first days it was quick, then soon it changed into “don’t wait; we’ll email you when the report is ready” mode, and finally the free version went under.

Now, I’m not a full-blown company, I’m “just zis guy, you know”, and I don’t believe I’ll have as much success as that one has / had. But… there is a demand; what happened to it is proof of that. And it’s quite possible that my code won’t scale.

I kind of hope it doesn’t.

(With thanks to Non Credo Deus)

Thanks in advance.

P.S. – this is related to my new Nintendo forum, in case you’re curious. See, full disclosure.

A couple of days ago, NintendoPT, the biggest Nintendo-related forum in Portugal, closed down. I was already thinking (see here if you don’t believe me) about expanding my Nintendo DS forum, NDS-PT, either to add the Wii as an “equal partner console”, or to expand it to a full Nintendo forum, but was inclined toward the former because I didn’t want to compete directly with NintendoPT. But since the latter is no more, there is a big gap to fill, and…

… I am pleased to announce the transformation of NDS-PT into NintenForum-PT, possibly the biggest Nintendo forum in Portugal nowadays. More than 500 members, more than 16000 posts, and no longer invaded by Pokémon fans (who scared many of the NDS-PT old timers away in February, but who then moved en masse to a separate Pokémon forum).

Then again, Opera Mobile hasn’t been updated in a year, and it’s 8.x, while Mini (the version 4 betas) are based on 9.x. I have great hopes for Opera Mobile 9, with its Ajax support, among other new stuff.

Anyway, I installed Mini 4.0 beta 2 yesterday evening, and it “feels” even better than the first beta: quicker, a new small font (should be great for screens larger than mine), custom search engines, and it saves whether you want full screen or not; no need to enable it every time I open the browser.

Plus, it’s free. Go ahead, try it out.

I began by changing the most problematic site to Lighty (listening on port 81), and using Apache’s proxy module to redirect it there. After the results were promising, I went and changed each site at a time, dealing with the particular problems of each (I use lots of redirects, and the syntax is a bit different, and, furthermore, Lighty doesn’t support .htaccess files.

WordPress was relatively easy (just one line). MyBB would have been even easier (nothing to do), if not for the fact that I use an SEO mod which uses an .htaccess file for nicer URLs. But everything was easier than I expected.

After each site had been “moved”, it was just a matter of stopping Apache and moving Lighty to port 80.

Memory usage is way down, and so is swap file usage (basically, it’s not being used, and it was, before — a lot). Barring any future problems, I’m quite happy with this set-up, and would advise this change to anyone who’s never tried anything other than Apache on an Unix system. I’ll probably try doing the same thing on my home server, too.

Ah, the eighties.

You’ll never look at a blog that hasn’t had any new posts for a while the same way again.

Take the Dante’s Divine Comedy Inferno Test

“Lustful”? Moi?

Their justification? The fact that some time ago it was announced that Neo Geo games would be coming to the Wii, and, as they keep saying, “Neo Geo games can use up to 330 MB”.

Really?

I’m betting they’re taking that number from the Neo Geo common intro screen (you can see it using MAME, on older games), which says “MAX 330 MEGA”.

However, those are not megabytes, but megaBITS. 330 megabits = about 41 megabytes. Still bigger than all current virtual console games, but not more than half of the Wii’s flash memory.

Amazingly, I’ve seen about a dozen news sites repeating that mistake. It seems that nobody researches anything these days; “news reporting” is simply repeating what others already said, using different words so that it looks “original”.

Incidentally, the 330 megabits Neo Geo limit was passed some years ago. The biggest Neo Geo game I have on MAME (King of Fighters 2003) is about 100 megabytes (or 800 megabits).

If you’re interested, and what to know what’s coming next for that blog, or why it had been “zombified” for months, start here.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

You can now also click on any of the above column titles to sort the table by that particular value/rank. Incoming links and Pagerank are “the more, the merrier”, while Technorati rank and Alexa rank are “the lower, the better”, so sorting takes that into account.

A note of warning: I’ve mentioned before that you shouldn’t really take any of these ranks too seriously, and this is especially true for the Alexa ranks. Alexa is a nice idea (it’s the only one that measures traffic instead of incoming links), but it has the following problems:

• it only counts hits if the user has installed either the Alexa toolbar (for Internet Explorer) or the SearchStatus Firefox extension (I recommend the latter, since, as everyone knows, MSIE sucks), and
• it often lumps all subdomains for a particular domain together (i.e. doesn’t distinguish between aaa.domain.com and bbb.domain.com, even though they may be totally unrelated). It apparently has some hard coded exceptions for some (not all) blogspot.com blogs… but the values aren’t really reliable. Still, you can use it to measure the changes in traffic for one site.

Incidentally, the application I’ve coded (and have been improving) to generate this table from a list of blogs is almost ready for public release.

(By the way: no, this is not ready for release yet. But it will be. Soon.)

Initially, the data collecting part of my program started by clearing a table in a MySQL database, which would then be filled with the values it would get from Technorati and Google. However, this had two problems:

1. Technorati allows only a limited number of accesses per day. I discovered it when I was making several tests, and, after about half a dozen or so, it stopped giving me data. The problem, then, was that it had already cleared the table… so I ended up with an empty one.
2. From time to time, Technorati gives me “wrong” ranks / links for a blog – values much lower (but not absurd / “bogus”, just wrong) than what they should be. It’s weird, and not reproducible, and usually, by asking TR again, the correct value is then returned.

To solve the first problem, obviously, some form of keeping the data from the previous run while getting the new values was in order, so that, if Technorati told me to get stuffed, I would still have the data from the day before.

The second problem was a little more complicated, though, in a way, the solution to the first helped me crack it.

My method was this: when running the script, start by copying the original table to another (let’s call it temp1) and clearing the original table. Then get the new data to yet another table (temp2). Afterwards, regenerate the original table with data from temp1 and temp2, the following way:

• if an entry (identified by the site’s URL) exists in only one of the tables, use it.
• if an entry exists in both, use the common values (URL, site’s name), and for the 3 numeric values, choose the best value (from the two tables) for each. “Best” means the highest # of incoming links, the highest PageRank, and the lowest Technorati rank.

This way, if once in a while Technorati gives it a much worse value than it should (I’ve never seen it rate a blog better than the reality), it still has a more correct value to use instead.

Sounds fine, doesn’t it? But there’s a problem with this method… which I solved later, but which I’ll discuss the next post. Until then… any guesses as to what it was?

My ideal job, at the moment, would be a senior sysadmin / junior PHP programmer “hybrid”, but I’m open to alternatives.

As I’ve said here before: no outsourcing, no MS stuff, no helpdesk. I don’t see this as “arrogance” on my part, but simply as not wanting to waste both sides’ time.

For more details (in Portuguese), and the full CV, please visit www.pedrotimoteo.com/cv . Thank you.

Here it is: Technorati Ranks for Planet Atheism members

The implementation was ridiculously simple (and there’s a lot of room for improvement), but, other than Carlos’ tool, I didn’t find any scripts or utilities to do this. And, yes, I searched. Therefore I may release the code soon, as the 2nd project on software.dehumanizer.com, since this can be a fun “toy”.

[EDIT: added each blog's Google PageRank to the table. Why not? ]