Boy Meets World

Mike is currently…

snowboarding in Banff

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this is mike mason's weblog

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Sun, 27 Jul 2003

This is an archived blog post. I've switched to using WordPress as my blogging software and have not migrated all my old posts. I believe strongly in not letting an old link die, so this page continues to work. Please do visit mikemason.ca/blog to read newer posts.

Up and Running

Well, the blog finally made it up onto mikemason.ca, and I even have someone linking to it, so I guess that makes it real. Blosxom turned out to be dead easy to use, and took all the hard work out of programming and navigation logic. Blog entries are just text files, optionally organised into directories which become categories inside the blog. Customising the page layout is simple, with headers, footers and per-entry templates. I added a couple of plugins, calendar to display a MovableType style calendar, antispam to obscure email addresses, and smartypants which does some fancy quote and em-dash replacements on the text. Antispam and smartypants run on the blog text, in a kind of filter-servlet fashion, incrementally altering the content and passing it on to the next filter. Calendar provides specific extensions to generate content wherever you want it, with the calendar on this page created by adding the text $calendar::month_calendar to my “footer” template.

The hardest thing about doing a website seems to be getting CSS working properly. I’ve got the thing looking reasonable in IE, but Mozilla Firebird seems to miss half the formatting and just looks rubbish. Once more the world of dodgy, misimplemented, bastardised web-standards is causing me grief…

Posted 23:11, 27 Jul 2003.

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Sat, 26 Jul 2003

Distributed Backups

A while back I had a fairly nasty scare – my Linux machine at home went a little funky, and started refusing to mount its hard disks. The timing was pretty bad too, as I’d just backed up my laptop to it then wiped everything off the laptop. After a buying a replacement disk, getting no joy and replacing other bits and pieces, I found I had a defective motherboard on the box. By this time I’d decided to use my spanky new disk as primary, then backup everything to my older, smaller (but not actually broken) 80 gig disk. Sod’s law being what it was, the new drive actually went tits-up with real drive errors, leaving me recovering what I could from it and generally ending up with a mess of files everywhere. This kind of thing could drive a man to actually back things up properly…

In thinking about what I actually want to back up, it doesn’t come down to much. I think I’d like to make sure I have most of my working files, email would be nice, and mp3s are huge but I could re-rip them (of course I have all the original CDs). That leaves me with a few gigs of digital photos that I’d really be upset if I lost.

Having a spare hard disk lying around, me and another broadband-enabled buddy hatched a plan – I’d give him a hard disk, he’d stick it in his machine, and voila! Offsite backups. A little rsync over ssh in the wee small hours (or during office hours, just whenever I’m not using the connection) and my photos are safe from disk crashes, theft, and my house burning down. This’ll work between any two people who have the disk space and bandwidth for it. Maybe you set up ADSL for your Mum and just happen to put an extra disk in the box. The main drawback is that with simple rsync, you have to trust the person on the receiving end – the files aren’t encrypted or protected in any way, and doing so naievely would knacker the speedup you get from rsync.

Posted 09:33, 26 Jul 2003.

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Thu, 24 Jul 2003

Not Invented Here

I’m using Blosxom (pronounced “blossom”) to write my blog, rather than coding something up myself. I feel the need to to try to break my previous tendency to write everything from scratch instead of using something “out there”. I’ve seen this happen a lot – especially amongst ambitious young things kicking around at software companies. It’s been called Not Invented Here Syndrome and I’m going to avoid it on this blog.

There are a number of requirements I’ve got for blogging software, including static generation of pages and running without a database. Blosxom is a single Perl script, and blog entries are simple text files on disk. The file date is used as the date for the blog entry, and inside you just enter a title and start typing. Blosxom is extensible using plugins, and the real clincher is that there’s pretty much a line-for-line Python port. Why is this useful? I’m intending to port Blosxom to Ruby, using the two previous versions as a guide.

Posted 21:31, 24 Jul 2003.

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