I’m trying to test TrackBack between WordPress and MT, and I’m having trouble. MT seems to be completely choking when I try to ping an entry on my own blog. So I thought I’d trying pinging this entry on someone else’s WordPress blog:

Insults Unpunished – MT 3.0 And WordPress

to see if that works. Let’s hope so. I’m sure he won’t mind.

Definition of pointless rants: ones about spammers and/or spam promoters. You know, there’s no point talking to or about these people. They just need shooting. It’s quite simple. Though if one person in the universe reads that post and thinks “wow, I was going to buy some incest phentermine on my credit card but now I won’t” it will have been worthwhile, despite how foolish it makes me look.

I had recently injured my foot by stepping on a laptop plug.

No, I didn’t get enough sleep; I woke up at sevenish this morning and failed to nod off again, despite my half-broken BA blindfold. Now I can’t find my glasses, which means that they are twisted and bent somewhere inside one of my orifices, one which I can’t feel yet.

I’ve totally geeked out this evening doing research into WordPress – and there are still plenty of things I need to consider and work out.

My head hurts. My eyes hurt. I need to get some sleep. I should have slept earlier on today, but as soon as I start feeling like I could just lie down and doze off, I get a panicky feeling as if I need to achieve something first, and do something to spoil it and force myself awake.

This afternoon, for instance, I was slouching here on my futon when I felt more than the doziness that I’ve had all day, an actual feeling that I could very well go to sleep now. That, clearly, was unacceptable. I pulled myself out of the house and went out to get a coffee.

Some of this reluctance is vaguely rational (sleeping during the day does screw up your sleep patterns a bit) but the rest is simply dysfunctional. A couple of years ago when I recognised that I was deliberately staying up later than I really wanted to, not because I couldn’t sleep but because I’d convinced myself that if I refreshed my browser enough times it would make the day worthwhile. Going to bed was a marker of the day being over, and I didn’t want yet another wasted day, but I didn’t know how to have a day that I felt was worthwhile, so the only thing to do was to postpone ending it in the hope that something would happen that changed the entire character of the last twenty-four hours. At 2am, with me clutching a wineglass, hardly able to type from drink and fatigue. Yes fridge, very likely.

I’m a little better now, I rarely stay up that late, mostly because I don’t have the option of getting into work late the next morning. If I miss the 8am train I have to take the long route, which means an extra hour, and if I miss the 8.25, I might as well just phone in sick, because I’ll be there at lunchtime at the earliest.

I need to have eight hours between the nominal “going to bed” time and the nominal “waking up” time, to allow for a few false starts and random nocturnal panics. I can get by for a few days on six or seven hours and maybe one on five, but longer than that and I become Can’t-Remember-Where-I-Am-But-I-Hate-You Man, stumbling around my life losing track of sentences before I finish them but with a little homunculus core that knows that it hates, it hates everyone and everything.

And that’s not a lot of fun.

You see why I am reluctant to take overnight flights.

The “day must not finish” behaviour I think I understand the basis of at least, but I’m not quite sure about why I can’t bear to sleep or doze during the day. Even if I try, I get so anxious about it that the attempt lasts about five minutes. I suspect it’s something equally dysfunctional though.

It might be good if WordPress does reduce my Google ranking because I am getting fucking annoyed by spammers. It’s ironic that, although I manage to get very little spam by email through a combination of Spamassassin and Apple heuristic mail filtering, I get at least half a dozen spams a day through my filter. And half of them are on Pine Tree On Top Of A Bloody Water Tower, as I mentioned before.

I’m getting really, really sick of incest porn, phentermine, home improvement, everything.

First of all, if you buy diet drugs you are a moron. Diet drugs will not make you thin. Well, they will, for a short period of time, but you will get fat again when you stop taking them, or the hospital stops you taking them after you come in with your first hypertensive crisis or infarction, or the police take them away from you after you try to shoot somebody for stealing your parking space because you are fucked up on stimulants.

If you buy diet drugs online you are obviously still a moron. If you buy diet drugs online from spammers you are not only even more of a moron, because you will get ripped off, but also a traitor to the human race and deserving of a nice public show trial and a bullet in the back of the head.

The same, for different reasons, applies to people who buy penis enlargement pills. For fuck’s sake. I can barely believe that there are people who are so pathetic as to have hung onto their teenage insecurities, as well as so stupid as to actually believe any of this shit could work. I know, I know, people are stupid, but… really. Show trials for you too. We’re going to have to have a large courtroom here. Oh yeah, I don’t care if you want to buy vyahgrah either. It works, but I don’t see why I should be spammed because you think you need an eight-hour hard-on.

Debt consolidation. Morons. If you’re in debt and you can’t get out, either find some way of earning more money, find some way of spending less money, campaign for a fairer distribution of wealth in society or just go out and fucking rob someone for all I care. Don’t go to some bloody “consolidation” company and pretend that simple principles of economics will magically stop applying to you. How, exactly, do you think you are going to end up not paying back your loans? Oh, and these people spam my voicemail as well, which makes them even worse. At least nobody calls me up with fake messages pretending I called them to order some v1*gra.

I’m not going into the porn thing because it’s just going to attract even more spam. Garage doors, though. No, really, I got spam for a home improvement website. What? Are they the new printer cartridges?

It’s all very well to blame the spammers, and they are indeed cunts, but if you people weren’t such fucking idiots they wouldn’t exist. It’s not even as if it’s something subtle, like the negative social effects of buying things at Wal*mart. No, it’s really, really simple. You buy fake products from people online to perpetuate your problems and they not only rip you off, they bother everyone else on the off-chance that we, too, are as fucking idiotic as you.

Just stop it now.

I think I might start charging for advertising space, as seen elsewhere. $500 a link for URLs not related to the content of the post, by posting a comment you agree to my final decision on what links are unrelated, no guarantee that the links will remain at all, that sort of thing. At least I can have a bit of email banter.

I’ve been taking a look at WordPress recently, in preparation for the upgrade which should be coming in the next few days (when my contact at my hosts gets back from holiday – being the difficult chap I am, I want to physically change servers as well, and this needs some personal attention).

WordPress is a GPLed blogging system that uses PHP and MySQL. I’m not inherently opposed to PHP, but I don’t know it particularly well, and I find that whenever I try to learn bits I start getting the syntax mixed up with Perl syntax. Now, if I was going be writing in one or the other that would be okay, but I tend to write a reasonable amount of Perl, not just on my site but also offline on my computer for local use, shuffling files around, making image galleries and so on. You just can’t use PHP for that – well, not easily, anyway.

Movable Type is written in Perl but builds static files of whatever sort you want – HTML, SHTML which I use, PHP if you like. That does mean it’s a bit more adaptable. You can modify an MT blog only knowing HTML, as long as you’re familiar with MT’s internal language of tags as well, which is not complicated. You have to at least be familiar with PHP syntax to tinker with WordPress, though from what I can see you don’t have to learn any special syntax apart from that, just know how the WordPress PHP modules work and insert them in the correct places.

At first I thought the former setup was more adaptable but I’m coming round to the idea that the latter has elegance. You’re only using one language for the whole thing and the gap between the application and the blog itself is much smaller. If you know PHP it should be much easier to really hack into the way the blog operates – in MT you have to write Perl modules and understand how the MT system interacts with those.

I’ve also been thinking I should get more familiar with PHP anyway, it’s a useful skill and loads of people use it, and I’ve always said that the only way to learn a new language is to have a project to use it with, so using WordPress might be a good opportunity, if I can restrain myself from writing any Perl for a bit.

Amazing. I’ve managed to change my entire attitude in the course of three paragraphs. Don’t anyone call me inflexible. » Continue reading “Hmm – WordPress, MT, PHP, Perl, bleah”

I’m finding work particularly frustrating, meaningless and dull at the moment and so I wrote another bit of ho ho Bush satire – a Five Point Plan generator.

This one just grabs various verb and noun phrases from that particular speech and spits out five things to do to save Iraq that are just as meaningful as his were, and less boring. Needs a little graphical work.

It’s John Cage quiet again round here. I’m going up the fucking wall. My hangover has mostly vanished but I find it quite hard to tell whether I’m hungover or not sometimes. The environmental and psychosomatic effects of being here – nausea, anxiety, confusion, dizziness, general dysphoria – quickly overcome anything else you may be feeling, so you’re always worse at the end of the day than you were when you woke up in the morning, even if your first thoughts were “what the hell? why am I still wearing my trousers? hey, I don’t feel hungover at all! oh, hold on, here it comes… urgh“.

I find “sick building syndrome” a misnomer since sicknesses generally affect those who have them. It’s not the building that’s sick. I wish it was. Let the building sit there bitching about its job, chomping antacids and sneaking off for fags and to play Final Fantasy Tactics in the loo. You’d get to read the building’s blog, as well, which I think would be novel, though I bet someone’s going to now comment that there’s already a massive building blog community, and they’re actually considered a bit passé now everyone’s worked out that Wall de Jour is actually a jobbing screen door from the Standard.

Saw my first dragonfly of the year today. There are also Canada goslings around, which are not only fuzzy but haven’t yet developed the arrogance of their gangster parents.

Oh yeah, and I’m going to be upgrading my hosting so I have an SQL database, a better processor and a version of Perl written this century. I’m anticipating that this will happen on Monday or Tuesday, and the thing will be down for 24 hours or so. I’ll be on my livejournal and/or Mirrorball of course. What did you expect?

Apparently, textamerica lets you upload video. So I have been doing so. Not an awful lot, mind, and nothing interesting.

Oh yeah, there is one other function that the DiMAGE has – it has a “multiple frame” mode where, when you press the shutter button, it proceeds to take nine photos in succession and then puts them into a three-by-three grid.

It looks like this.

multiple frame picture (reduced in size)

There seems to be something not working with Mfop2 (the service I use to upload phonepics).

I’m going to send the guy mail about it, but in the meantime I’ve been changing the template of Through The Mirrorball away from the default. Right now it looks like… well, it looks quite a lot like this site in basic layout, actually. But I wasn’t going to change everything. Just puzzling out their weird template system is bad enough.

Last time mentioning this thing: here are some bad phonecam pictures showing just how dinky the DiMAGE is.

» Continue reading “Dinkiness”