Rubenerd

My workspace from this evening. Now all I have open is this browser window :)

Well after several long hours of debugging, cursing and several tall cups of coffee, my Perl script to import static pages from Google's cache, convert them to a WordPress WXR/RSS file and import here worked! This means all the blog posts from February 2009 to April 2009 that weren't part of my last good backup are now available again.

Had it not been for Google's cache, over 120 posts would have been lost.

I've started a cron job to make automatic backups every evening in both WXR/RSS and SQL formats and send them to a secret email address so this mess never happens again. I'll also be looking into checksumming/hashing said files before and after their transfer so I don't end up with the same invalid, messed up export files I had to deal with and piece back together this time around.

Aside from the changed webhost and URI, everything is now back to the way it was before. The only things missing are comments; if you left a comment on a post over the last two months feel free to write another if you could be bothered.

Next step is to finally implement my new theme I've been kicking around for a few months. As I said in the last post I've tried my best to set up correct redirects for search engines and people subscribed, as well as changing the URIs on all the posts here to speed things up. If you see something amiss, feel free to leave a comment.

UPDATE: If you see repeated posts in Google Reader, Bloglines or other blog readers, I’m sorry for bombarding you! I attempted to maintain the permalinks so this wouldn’t happen, but clearly Google Reader and Bloglines still thought they were new posts.

UPDATE: It seems a couple of posts are still missing because they were uploaded too recently to have been put into Google’s cache. Tomorrow morning I’ll go to trusty Google Reader and copy them back here. Google has been a real pal over these last few days!

I didn't think ABP was necessary to make the web usable until I went to a machine that didn't have it!

It's another case of someone else saying exactly what I've been thinking for a very long time, but because they're not Ruben Schade they're able to articulate what they mean in a few words instead of a bloated paragraph such as the one you're reading now. In fact this whole paragraph could have been condensed into one simple line: "look at what this person said on Twitter".

“monetization” is an evil, ugly word that has infested the internet with hollow promises and broken dreams

~BrainDouche

The way I see it, when people start thinking they need to monitise their weblog, their podcast, their time-shifted programming (I agree Jim, it's a silly name), their cat, the cold water tap on their kitchen sink and so on, except in a few select cases they inevitably cause more damage and in the long run hurt their chances of making money.

You know what most people appreciate online? Being treated line an adult, and being treated with respect. Huge flashy banner advertisements to me are a glowing sign that states they're more interested in making a quick buck than respecting you.

Common sense, we hardly knew thee…

Obviously if a site isn't interesting people won't go to it, so the chances for them to make money is reduced. Therefore even if we're just talking about the narrow view of making money, it's in their interest (I love pointless puns) to make their sites engaging and… not irritating!

I'd be interested to see the before and stats on sites that have put up splash screen advertisements you need to click before going to the rest of the site (I hate those!) and sites that have replaced discreet Google AdWords or something similar with huge banner ads. I'd hedge (another horrible financial pun) my bet that they've done themselves a disservice.

The extent of the advertising on my own site

As a real world example, since last year my site has had a silly "Buy Ruben a Cup of Coffee" button on the side for those to contribute to if they like something they've read here or if they've found something useful. I've had more than a dozen cups bought for me, which is far more money than I made from having text advertisements on my pages for a couple of years. The former is far less intrusive, and I like to think it means I treats my visitors like adults rather than just drones to market stuff to.

I also display a couple of banners gratis at the bottom of my page here for RichardDawkins.net and for FreeBSD, but that's because I appreciate their causes and want to help. Given the search queries people enter into Google to get here a large percentage of my readers would be interested in them anyway.

In a round about way, what I'm saying is: people like honesty. I guess despite my age group being one of the the "target demographics" I'm old fashioned in that regard.

I saw this page referral IP address in my brand new server logs and remembered that classic Simpsons episode where Homer inquisitively asks "wow, they have the Internet on computers now?".

Things like this make my day!

This is probably old news in the WordPress world since 2.6 and subsequent versions have been released, but given I've decided to stick around using it for a bit longer I thought it was worth getting right when I installed it fresh here since the [forced] move.

One feature I really don't use is Post Revisions. While I can see the benefit of using it on a Wiki, on a blog written by just one guy it doesn't really make much sense; plus it adds junk records to the database which makes backing up said blog a more time consuming process than it needs to be.

Courtesy of Lester Chan, if you want to turn Post Revisions off, just add the following line to your wp-config.php file.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

He also has instructions on how to delete existing entries made my Post Revisions if you've had it turned on for a while.

"A phoenix rising from its ashes"

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Yes, you're reading that correctly, according to this WordPress installation this is technically the first post!

On Wednesday my now-old webhost's database was compromised, resulting in ALL FIVE YEARS WORTH OF BLOG POSTS BEING WIPED! Because of the other problems I've had with Servage's lax security over these last few months I decided enough was enough and I instead restored my backups to my account with Segment Publishing.

I took the opportunity to also move back to my original domain which I registered back when I first started this blog when I was in early high school: //rubenerd.com/. If you don't believe me, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has some history on this domain. Brings back lots of happy memories, and in a silly emotional way it feels like I'm back home again. Back when I created that site my mum was still alive and my life had direction and meaning which I only just recently claimed back. But that's an entirely different topic.

I've set up .htaccess 301 redirects on the old URI so every blog post should be accessible from it's old address. This is the first time I've done this, and I'm not sure what effect it will have on people reading this in Google Reader. I hope you don't get pummelled with posts you've already read, if you do I apologise!

And now the bad news

Unfortunately for reasons I won't bore you with now my most recent backups were corrupted, meaning only posts dating from September 2004 to Feburary 2009 made it. I was able to download the rest from Google's cache (VERY cool!), now it's just a matter of writing a Perl script to extract the data and comments from those static HTML pages and dump them here.

This means posts I wrote from February 17th till now are unavailable, but I hope to have them back by tomorrow or Saturday. The site is also using the same crappy theme I hacked together back in 2006, but that's the next step. I'm working on getting those other posts back first!

The end is the best place for an ending

Thank you to everyone on Twitter and Google Reader for your encouraging words, this has definitely been a learning experience. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes I think this site will be better than it was before after this transition is done. Lots of scaffolding, incomplete walls and new paint smell going around, and my overalls are dirty as muck. That was for you Atuuschaaw :).

Peace, love and happiness,
Ruben

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

(Don't worry… click here for explanation!)

My Applications folder is one full beast!

Since I first picked up my first copies of Connectix Virtual PC for my Blueberry iMac DV I’ve been awestruck by the elegance of virtual machines and have had a ridiculous amount of fun tinkering with operating systems and software I probably would not have otherwise been able to use. Some like FreeBSD have even "graduated" and become primary operating systems on machines I use, others like DOS and earlier versions of Windows get to stick around for bouts of electronic nostalgia.

Given I’ve been so busy with other projects and studying I thought the long Easter weekend would be a great time to look into some lesser known virtual machine programs for Mac: Q and VirtualBox. I’ll be posting my full reviews in the next day or so, but suffice to say they both fill their intended rolls amazingly well and could give the commercial Mac virtualisation solutions a run for their money. They’re free and open source, so you can download them and give them a shot right now!

For the sake of completeness, I talked about Parallels Desktop a lot back in 2006 when I was first messing around with FreeBSD on my then-new Intel MacBook Pro, then switched to VMware Fusion in 2007 because of it’s superior support for Unix-like clients. It’s kind of fun to look back at those posts for me, at the time I thought such experimentation was fun but essentially pointless; I had no idea how much I was actually learning.

If you love tinkering with obscure and/or old operating systems, it’s a great time to be alive! Now all I need is time…

One of my latest outside projects was helping a family clean up their Windows 98 Second Edition desktop. I really pushed them to at least move over to Windows 2000 or a lightweight Linux distribution given all they used the machine for was the internet and word processing, but they were adamant about using 98. I guess you use what you’re used to.

If you’re still running 98 in some capacity, A Good Soporific has easy to download zipped archives of all the updates dated up to December 2008!

Hi there,

Welcome to the new home for Auto-Patcher for Windows 98. The program still points to MSFN as the ‘homepage’ but this will change by the next release. I will always have a presence on MSFN for as long as it plays the role it is currently playing now, so you don’t have to always check here for updates, I will always post to the page that is currently the program’s homepage.

Even though this isn't post 4000, WordPress in it’s infinite wisdom has assigned it the ID number of 4000. Another pointless milestone? Absolutely!

To save you the pain and anguish of reading another long and irrelevant pointless milestone post, I’m instead enclosing an image of a llama, courtesy of User:MilborneOne on Wikimedia Commons.

Sincerely,
Ruben

Marge: Homer… I’m on duty.
Homer: That’s okay, I’m supposed to be working too!