After 5 years of limping along using an old Dell Latitude P120 laptop at work, (actually I haven’t even used it all that much ever since getting a PDA and keyboard), I was finally able to get work to buy me a new laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 5150 (most everything around here is a Dell…hard to buy anything but Dell), and it’s pretty sweet. Running at 1400×1050, it feels like there’s hectares of screen space. Takes some time to move the mouse around the screen with the touch pad though. I’m looking forward to experimenting with interfacing the laptop with some of my meters to expedite the data collection process. All I need to do is find a Serial to USB cable and I’ll be set.
The plunge into MT 3.1
Ok, since I’m trapped here at work while the wife is staying late to study Biochem, I thought I’d use the time to plunge into the MT 3.1 upgrade.
Upgrade process went pretty smoothly. Copied the files from the MT 3.1 upgrade package into my MT directory, ran mt-check.cgi to make sure everything was still ok, then ran mt-upgrade31.cgi. It did the DB schema upgrade and create a couple of new templates used for the dynamic publishing.
Next step was to enable the dynamic archives. Followed the steps in Movable Type 3.1 Guide, which are pretty straight forward. The only change I made was to put the stuff for the .htaccess file into my webserver httpd.conf file instead. Then did a rebuild. Since there are no archives to rebuild anymore, the rebuild process is so much faster now.
And then I ran into my first problem. I use Paginate for my category and date based archives. The Paginate tags don’t seem to get parsed when those archive files are accessed though. But, from the MT 3.1 guide, this is to be expected
Please note that at this time, only the standard Movable Type tags are supported with the dynamic rendering option. Existing plugins are not compatible with this new feature, since they are written in Perl and not PHP. If you are seeing errors due to using plugin tags, you will either need to remove the tag(s) or change that template to render statically.
Then I noticed my second problem: no side bar in the individual entry archives. The side bar gets brought in with a PHP include(). A view source showed everything there, but the PHP include() doesn’t seem to get parsed by the dynamic templating. Very odd. A post by Phil Ringnalda on the MT 3.1 beta blog indicated it should work. So in an act of desperation, I changed my PHP tags from <?PHP to <?php and surprise! In came the side bar! But inexplicably, this didn’t work for another entry that I have PHP embedded into. Perhaps there was something else that I did that fixed the first problem.
So I’m still having problems with PHP embedded in entries. But so far aside from that small issue MT 3.1 looks pretty good. Still need to play with it a little more though.
MT 3.1 is here!
Oooh, MT 3.1 is released! Fantastic, now I can go upgrade my 3.1 beta and upgrade my main installation. I’m really liking the dynamic publishing, which should really ease MT’s weblog storage requirements.
I have GMail!
Thanks to my friend Tom, I now have a GMail account. I don’t get much mail there yet, mostly because at the moment Tom’s the only one who knows the email address.
The interface to GMail is pretty simple and uncluttered. Haven’t spent a lot of time getting down to learning more of the details. For categorizing mail, you use labels instead of shuffling them around to different folders. I think I’ll like this because mail can have multiple labels. Stars let you flag mail for whatever purpose you want. And probably best of all, mail gets threaded, making it easier to keep track of things.
I’ve received all of 5 emails at my GMail account, and already I have 6 invites to dispose of. Oh, who to send them to…
The White Screen of Oblivion
With Windows, you have the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). On the Tungsten T3 (and probably other Palm models), you get what I call the White Screen of Oblivion. I’ve also seen it called just the White Screen of Death. That’s when while you’re doing something with your Palm OS PDA, and all of a sudden everything on the screen slowly fades away to a bright white. It invariably ends up with a hard reset of your PDA, although a lucky few survive with a warm reset.
Happened to me this morning when I inadvertently opened a 6 MB DOC file with DocsToGo. Meant to open another one, but my tap went awry. In the middle of opening, everything faded away to a blank white screen. Hitting the reset button brought me to the screen calibration dialog, meaning my T3 had just hard reset itself. My first non self-induced hard reset. And today of all days is when I leave my cradle at home. Just as well I suppose, since home is where my most recent sync is. Good thing I sync regularly and often. I suppose one of these days I ought to get an SD card and BackupBuddy or something.