Category: Computer bits

Computer stuff

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Imablog v4

Since MovableType 4.0 went gold yesterday, I decided to roll out a new look for the blog (it uses the Hills Dusk theme from Style Catcher). I’ve been working on it since beta 5 or so, figuring out the new templates and working out how to incorporate stuff from the old design into the new template scheme.

I managed to salvage most of the blocks I had on the old site and was able to use a few of them with the new layout. There is still some style related tweaking I want to do, but everything seems to be working (if you encounter something broken, let me know). Having a strange issue with getting the category dropdown list working, so in the meantime there’s just a big long list of categories in the sidebar.

Known issues

  • There’s a lot of inter-blog linkage that’s currently broken which is a side-effect of cloning the original blog. I’ll probably fix these on a ‘as I encounter them’ basis.
  • Hitting the archives is slow. This is an inherent problem with the new archive templates and the amount of processing required to build them on the fly. The 5 year old computer I’m using for a server probably isn’t helping any either. A little bit of template reorganizing and optimizing should help out with the slowness.
  • Category archives don’t show all the entries, which I suspect is related to the Entry Listing Default setting in Blog Settings. I’ll probably have to use a very large number for a lastn attribute to get all the entries in each category to show up.
  • “Can’t call method “ping_url_list” on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 1459.” happens to me at seemingly random times when trying to publish a new entry.
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Web designing

I’m terrible at web design. I make a pretty good webmaster though, but when it comes to design, I suck. As a result, most of what I come up with tends to be fairly simple, uncomplicated and non-flashy. It also fits with my tendency to prefer simple and low-bandwidth (a hold-over from my modem days I suppose).

Now that my role as webmaster for CSCLRC is official, my first duty was to clean up the horrid HTML generated by FrontPage. The site itself was fine, but the HTML behind it was characteristically messy FrontPage stuff. A little bit of new CSS and a lot of copy/pasting later, I pushed out a new much cleaned up variant of the site largely using the same graphics.

This week, after playing with Inkscape and Gimp, I rolled out a cleaner brighter looking (to me anyway) CSCLRC site. I’m quite pleased with what I’ve made, although there’s still a little tweaking here and there that needs to be done.

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Back to Typing Tutor

MS Natural 4000 keyboard
I’ve been thinking about getting one of these keyboards, a Microsoft Natural 4000. It’s a pretty slick design with decent key feel, although a little chunky. Plus it’s got lots of buttons, and it’s hard for me to pass up a gadget with lots of buttons.
I’ve used ergo keyboards in the past and liked them a lot, but one of the things that’s always bothered me about them is that the 6 and B keys are placed on the left side (for the left index finger to hit). My problem is that when I learned to touch type, I use my right index finger for those keys so my typing tends to come to a jarring halt when I go for those keys and hit nothing but air. Well, nothing a little bit of retraining won’t take care of. Touch typing habits die hard though.

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Switch over to MT4

I think I’ve managed to work out all the DB induced problems I was having, so after running the last few betas and RC versions without any problems on the test blog, I decided to switch my production blog over to MT4. The upgrade went off without a hitch and the templates rebuilt without any error messages. So far so good. I don’t expect any more breakage, and the known issues list has gotten pretty short now.

Haven’t made any changes to the templates yet, so the blog will look the same for now. Template work begins next. There are a lot of new MT tags that I’m interested in putting to work.

Everything should be functioning normally, but you discover anything broken, let me know.

Update: Excuse the breakage. I’m running into a few things with RC3 that I didn’t encounter with the test version.

  • Error accessing the archive templates: Can't call method "archive_label" on unblessed reference at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 5692. Fixed after cleaning out the plugins directory, something I forgot to do earlier.
  • Individual entry archives are broken: Smarty error: [in mt:355 line 170]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'mttinyturing' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 580) Fixed after removing the MTTinyTuring tag from the template. Hopefully a new MT4 version of the plugin comes out soon.
  • Category archive dropdown list is gone from the sidebar
  • Category archives are busted. The pages appear, but they’re either empty or there’s only one entry that shows. I bet it’s plugin related (catx.pl).
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Messed up blog DB

Well, it seems after years of schema upgrades, betas and life on MT’s bleeding edge in general, the schema of my MT blog DB is messed up and causes spurious errors with MT4 that nobody else can reproduce.

Update: Ok, managed to get things cleaned up enough for beta 6 to upgrade the database properly. Cleaned out a bunch of old unused and unneeded blogs along with cleaning up old junk out of the mt_templatemap and mt_template tables. Once I did all that, everything worked as expected.

So here’s what I tried.

Created a fresh new MT 3.35 database and used INSERT INTO [table “” not found /]
(...) SELECT ... FROM ... to repopulate the fresh database with the contents of the old one. But when I tried to get MT4 to upgrade the fresh database, I ended up with that same error at just before the end of the DB upgrade process

* Removing unused template maps…
Error during upgrade: Can’t call method “archive_type” on an undefined value at lib/MT/TemplateMap.pm line 99

Further attempts to get into MT just result in a blank error page.

So then I created a fresh MT4 database and use the same INSERT/SELECT method to copy data from the MT3.35 DB into the MT4 DB. This ended up being only partly successful. While everything appears to be intact, the dashboard is broken and the entry listing isn’t sorted by date. Ok, that’s fixed…the entry_authored_on and entry_authored_by fields weren’t populated. Filling them in with appropriate values seems to have done the trick.

Will be interesting to see what happens when I start messing with templates and rebuilding things.