MikeBrum.com

Tomorrow we’re leaving for the Bahamas for a week. I can’t wait. While today was “nice weather” in Boston (relative to how shitty it’s been), I’m happy to leave the mid-to-high 50′s and trade up to mid-to-high 70′s.

Packing was a bit of a bitch. I have all my photo stuff plus the underwater photo stuff. On top of that is dive gear for the two of us. On top of that is the normal everyday stuff that people need – such as clothes and toiletries. Ugh. Say hello to extra baggage fees. I’m totally going to invest in some bigger/more appropriate luggage once we’re back.

My on-call rotation ended this morning at 10:30am. Our rotations last for a week from 10:30am Wednesday to the following. I’m so glad that’s behind me. People on my team have been commenting on how bad my on-call week has been … since last Friday. All you can do is keep your head down and plow through. Still, it’s not as bad as the week where I spent 27+ hours over the weekend rebuilding data for a particularly large and influential customer. That was all sorts of shitty.

But that’s looking behind me – I want to look forwards… sunshine, scuba diving, sharks, tropical fish and generally doing little else.

Can you dig it?

I’ve added about 100 new photos to the galleries today. Most of them are macro shots and will show up in the above-linked gallery. I still need to process pretty much all of my underwater shots though, which will be a real PITA. Before I dive into that (no pun intended), I want to get a copy of Photoshop. Right now I’m just using Lightroom 2 – and it’s not cutting it for me.

I still need to decide on a good way to display all of my galleries, so a bunch of photos will be more difficult to access for a while.

In the meantime, I’ve added a nice random image bar at the top of the page that will pick from all images uploaded – not just the macro shots.

After working with NextGEN Gallery Plugin on DoctorLovington.com, I decided that instead of trying to hack together my own gallery code that I’d give this a shot. It turns out that it’s a lot more feature-rich than it initially looks – which is naturally great.

I started out by adding some macro stuff. I’m a bit limited since I don’t have PhotoShop right now, but I’m making due. Still plenty more to add, but I’ll keep on working on it and it’ll continue to trickle in.

I’m going to make a few strategic galleries as WordPress pages. Unfortunately, the default behavior of the galleries is to show just the thumbnail linking to the gallery. That’s not the mode that I wanted. If I’m providing a link to the gallery (as per a page in WP), I want you to go to the actual gallery. This requires that the page URL contain a few forward slashes. When you add these, WP sanitizes the URL and strips them out – defeating the exercise.

I discovered that you can trick WP into leaving them in the final URL by just url-encoding them (forward slashes are %2F, btw). If you later edit the URL again, you’ll have to re-encode them though – because they show up as forward slashes in the edit window. Not difficult, but a really nice option if needed – regardless of it being intended or not.

I’m truly and honestly excited about how this is coming together!

macro

125 Photos

It looks like we lost power not that long ago. I just went into the kitchen and various clocks are flashing. Since I primarily work on a laptop (and was at the time), I didn’t notice anything. I’ve been mostly working locally, so I didn’t evne notice that my router probably disconnected briefly.

I did notice my printer get a little wiggy and just thought that the machine it was attached to was acting strange. It’s headless, so I rarely even check on it.

Wiggy.

Aside from getting woken up at 9am this morning for work, I’ve been trying to work on getting some photos prepped and uploaded to start building out the gallery here. I should have a bunch to post by tonight. While it won’t be everything that I had up on my old site, I think these will actually be nicer overall (I’m being more selective). Though it’s safe to say that if you’ve gone through my photo library in the past, there’ll be very little that’s new.

Enough distractions, back to work.

I’m feeling pretty out of it right now. I stayed up until about 2:30 last night because there were some disruptive network changes at work and I wanted to make sure they didn’t break anything that I’d be called about (and thus woken up). That went smoothly and I went to bed. Unfortunately, about an hour later I got call for what amounted to a bunch of nonsense. It kept me up for about an hour and a half and I fixed a bunch of other stuff that was revealed to me after the original problem.

This means I got a late start on the day – rolling out of bed around noonish.

After convincing Corinne to make me pancakes, we went to the dive shop so I could get a tank for a few hours to make sure all of our gear was working fine. We haven’t dove since the end of September, so it’s good to give everything a once-over. The only thing that needed tending was getting new batteries for the dive computers.

I also trucked Corinne over to Target so she could get some warm weather clothes. Being oncall, I’m always hyper-aware of time and when some of our automated processes fire off (as problems will usually revolve around these set times more often than not). Luckily for me, she powered through the shopping and we were out of there in no time.

After dropping off the scuba tank, I grabbed some food and fell asleep on the couch for a little while. Nothing too crazy – maybe 20 minutes – but now I’m just foggy and want to sleep for a long time. I probably won’t – but that’s what I’m feeling like.

One thing that always bugged me about WordPress is that you need to keep the wp-config.php file in your document root.

I started digging a bit to see if there were any elegant solutions to this (some people had some decent hacks/options) but I found out that as of v2.6 that you can move your wp-config.php file up a level and WP should find it fine. That’s awesome! I’m surprised it took them that long to implement something like that – but better late than never and all that.

Upon discovering this news, I went through and moved all of my wp-config.php files up a level outside of the document root. I even modified some of the file structures on my server to better accommodate this change. I think the added security is worth it. The last thing I need is an open door for pwnage.

The only problem is for people that don’t install WP in their document root. If you install it deeper, then moving the wp-config.php up a level solves nothing. In those cases, users should definitely pay close attention to file permissions and consider other security measures – such as .htaccess edits to deny access to wp-config.php and modifying wp-config.php to include/require a file outside of your document root with your DB details in it.

You can never be too safe.

With all the work I’ve been putting into a local development environment, I decided it was about time to make some changes to my main site. Enough of the drag grey. Enough of the hand-written code that’s getting on 10 years old with a patchwork of hacks, patches and fixes. Some of the code looks like band-aids on top of duct tape.

After making some final decisions, I ended up writing an import script for my old diary entries (reaching back to 2001) last night. I polished it up a bit today and picked out a decent theme.

There’s some downsides, however:

• All links to images hosted on this site are (and will remain) broken
• This includes the gallery – which will start to get built back out over time
• All other pages (such as the few scripts that were available for download) are also unavailable – but some of them will be restored over time
• My auto-post feature that’s run from another blog won’t work – so I’m going to need to either A) rewrite it to work with wordpress or B) go without for a while

It’ll come together – and it should be more manageable and expandable over the long run.

Beyond watching movies (lots!), I haven’t done anything substantial this weekend.

That said, I’ve spent a bunch of time optimizing the database on my webserver. I’m going to be launching some blogs over the next few days and I didn’t want to just dump all the tables into the same database – as I have been doing up until now. It hasn’t been much of a problem, but I’ve been starting to see some slight performance hits and I wanted to clean it up before I became a real PITA.

Now all of the various sites have their own database and tables have migrated over to it – which is just nicer for an admin perspective and helps streamline things a bit.

All I have to do now is make some changes to my backup scripts – since they’re all set up to expect a single database to backup instead of multiple ones. Shouldn’t be hard – but it’s just another thing to do. Good thing it’s still early.

While it’s stuff that doesn’t affect anyone but me and stuff that nobody would ever notice, it’s all good to get done.

I didn’t have any work to do today – which was pretty awesome. It was nice to break that unfortunate streak that I was on. Despite having today off, I don’t really get a 4-day week. I have to work pretty much all day next Saturday. Suckage.

FedEx officially declared that package missing. I called the vendor yesterday and started the refund process. I decided to be moderately productive today and dug out my car (fuck snow) and drove to the store to get one of the things that I bought but was lost. I would reveal what it is, but it’s a present – and I don’t want to ruin the surprise.

Anyway, that was my big “not being in the house” adventure. I figure I haven’t had one of those since Friday, so it was probably good to do.

Much of the rest of the day has revolved around Legos. Seriously. It’s pretty awesome.

Oh, and eating lots of stuff that I probably shouldn’t eat in excess – like donuts, soda and crackers.

Besides the snow thing, today hasn’t been that bad.

Got more work to do tonight. It’ll be kicking off at about 10. I’ll probably have to stay up until at least 3 to make sure everything goes smoothly.

FedEx officially has no idea where my package is. I’m going to call again in the morning and see if they have any more information. If not, I’m going to contact the vendor and have them deal with FedEx. What a pain in the ass.

I have to work on Sunday, but don’t have anything to do on Monday since it’s a company holiday.

I’m watching Conan the Barbarian right now. Great stuff – though some parts of it are pretty bad…. like robotic vultures.

Anyhow – I need to juice myself up with sugar and caffeine if I expect to make it through tonight. I think I’ll start in on that currently.