“Site News” has been in a stasis, if not a coma, since I migrated from my former CMS platform to TextPattern. As this proprietary and deprecated function was no longer applicable beyond a few homebrew extensions and updates beneath the hood, I have not used it.

However, with the upgrade to TXP 4.0.8, my ‘old redirect links’ that were automatically generated under Rollator have ceased to work properly; I’ve retooled the redirect parser to contend with this, and it functions as designed once again.

For those of you who are wondering about those ‘silly long garbage link urls’ above, it is simply a fully-qualified URI as a base64 hash with padding removed; in 2003 it was pretty spiffy – after all, this would allow you to link to other sites without losing PR in Google (remember, rel=‘nofollow’ did not yet exist – that was introduced in 2005)!

For the few interested in Rollator:

That was my homebrew CMS which I started work on late in 2001 and built upon through 2004ish – until eventually abandoning it because it had outgrown it’s usefulness in my mind, and I didn’t feel like maintaining a rather obnoxious code base or rewriting it – I decided that the world did not need yet another CMS.

However, in 2002 it touted RSS 0.9 and 2.0 feeds, Dynamic page generation (with content caching to use as few SQL calls as possible – it took 3 to build the final page if you had comments and QuickURLs enabled, and would generate a cached/rendered page every update so it was nearly as fast as static HTML content), A multiple-user administrative interface, redirect and URL masking, a simple ‘comment on this entry’ display/add subsystem, music-listening-to-now dynamic updates, the ability to make bookmarklets of sites you find interesting (which I called QuickURLs at the time), image/content upload and automatic linking, full SHA160 and GPG-protected dynamic checksumming (which was very CPU heavy, but allowed you to ensure that the content offered was that which you initially provided – rather, that it hasn’t been tampered with), XHTML 1.0 Strict templating (also HTML 4.01 transitional) – with a CSS based ‘format for printer’ display/print option for content, an archive browse, a full search system, a dynamic calendar which allowed you to see dates with entries and choose them for perusal, and very basic external function call-ability for importing/utilizing other code inline. You can see the very last stages of its’ development, if you really want to.

I’ll admit that I’ve been running nothing but Linux for years; it just makes my live doing dev and maintaining other unix based systems easier – however, when you’re in the Web 2.0 world, you’re expected to have some multimedia capabilities.

My laptop’s HD died with no warning (thankfully, I always keep a recent backup), and so I had to reinstall some tools. I generally use the bundled npwrapper which wraps the Netscape API for any shared library functions, but this time I found that it was oddly silent for Flash 10. I did an LDD on the binary, and discovered several support libraries required:

%ldd libflashplayer.so | wc -l
54

Yes, that’s 54 shared x86 (i386/32 bit) libraries required on my x86_64 install.

I went looking for the Adobe Flash 64 bit beta version, and found it here. Upon removing the 32 bit wrapper via npwrapper, and installing it into my /lib/lib64/browser-plugins directory, fixing permissions, and reloading Firefox, all works. Hope that helps the rest of you running 64 bit kernels who like to “keep multimedia up with The Joneses”.

This is what happens when you slide into home plate, and home plate happens to be beneath the washing machine.

Grotesque, isn’t it? Not the whole set are broken, but one has a clean break (second in from the left), and the middle one has a little crack in it. The pain is marginal, but it’s very difficult to sleep when there’s excessive pressure put on them.

I haven’t been updating this blog; I’ve been far, far too busy with work related issues:

This little utility should help cleanup the lingering issues with several of my global installations. There goes 0.0001% of the daily grind.

I’m going to do something I rarely do – plug a service I really like. I’ve been suggesting these guys for years when friends or associates have looked for excellent hosting with minimal efforts required. Enter ICDSoft.

To qualify this, I’ve been with them for going on seven years. That’s a darn long time, internet wise.

1) They have 24/7 knowledgable, dedicated support staff and their services are incredibly redundant.

As I am both a programmer and CIO of an Internet Marketing Firm, this means they know a heck of a lot more than what most people would require, or expect. I’ve asked them to do bizarre things (Install 64 bit Perl SSLeay support; upgrade packages they have on their system, and so forth.) It took them minutes.

When I asked them to migrate me from iAdvantage to Savvis, it took them a few minutes (and a couple of hours for DNS to propagate everywhere). When my email contact bounced, they actually called to reassure that my ticket was being handled.

2) They have a proprietary, functional administration panel.

If you enjoy cPanel, you’ll probably be a bit put off, because ICDSoft’s product actually works, and you don’t have to click through cumbersome half-brewed wrappers around GNU software.

It’s so intuitive – I was able to train my parents how to register domains to ICDsoft and setup subdomains in minutes. They’re is always adding features to it. They were the first to my knowledge to offer a fully-functional database upgrader; it took me one click to migrate my CMS. They also have the ability to automatically download and migrate your sitex from the control panel via FTP, and they even have a cPanel import system, just incase you decide that you’d prefer form and function.

3) They’re still incredibly thrifty.

When I initially signed up, I was paying $3.33/mo for 300MB of storage, and 2GB of transfer. Again, in 2002, that was a lot – and it’s still more than most folks need. Even when actively pursuing GNU projects (I spent a few years porting UNIX utilities to MacOS X when it was still young), I never paid more than $10/mo, and I used to host such things as DosBox.

So, there it is, my plug for ICDSoft. They’ve more than earned not only my praise, but my continued service. They’ve spoiled me; I wouldn’t consider hosting anywhere else.