Embiggened by the success I had installing Debian Sarge on my desktop machine, I upgraded to Movable Type 3.14 from 2.661 today.
So far, the upgrade has been mostly painless, but I have encountered a few headaches, which I may go into another time. I’m glad that I exported my entire blog before I started, that’s for sure.
It looks like the comments have vanished all the way back until December, and I don’t know if they’re even working right now, but I’ve been here for hours, and now it’s time for dinner. I kinda hate computers right now.
If anyone notices anything strange, post a comment (if you can) or drop me an e-mail, if you don’t mind.
Update: Comments don’t work. They time out for me, and I hear via e-mail from a lot of WWdN readers that they are encountering various errors that sound MT-Blacklist related.
I’d love to sit here for another few hours and figure it out, but I’m tired, my back is sore, and I have an audition tomorrow. I’ll try to fix it later this week if I get some time.
Other than this incredibly annoying problem (which is probably my fault, like I forgot to set some stupid file to 755 or something) and a massive slowdown (which is probably server-related) the upgrade looks great. I especially like how 3.14 handles plugins.
So if you’re having problems commenting, I know. No need to e-mail about it. However, if you’re an MT user, and you’ve had any problems like this upgrading, I’d love to hear how you got around it.
Oh, if you’re looking for actual weblog content, I recorded an audioblog on Friday called “Wanting . . . “.
Update the second: Comments are making it through, because MT-Blacklist (2.04b) is e-mailing them to me, which is weird because I didn’t configure it to force moderation of new comments . . . but even when I approve them, they’re still not showing up. Maybe it’s a template thing.
Tell you what, I’ve learned a whole lot about MT because of this little snag . . . sort of how I learned a whole lot about recompiling a kernel when my machine puked recently.
So to review — things breaking: bad. Learning stuff while you fix things: good.
Update the last: I converted my database from Berkeley db to MySQL, and everything seems to be magically working. Cool!
The conversion was 100% painless. I edited two lines of mt.cfg (with vim, of course) and ran a perl script to do the conversion. I have about sixteen billion entries and comments and stuff, though, so it took about three hours to convert . . . but I just sat here at my desk and watched the update scroll by while I worked on my audition.
By the way, this pilot I’m reading for today is the best pilot I’ve seen in ages. Maybe five years or so (I use five, six, and nine years as benchmarks, because that’s how long I’ve been married, lived in this house, and known Anne, respectively).
Update the last, for reals this time: Got back from the audition to find a blog positively overflowing with spam. Tried to login to MTBL, discovered that since I switched to the new database, MTBL thinks I have an invalid username. D’oh! Until I get that worked out, I’ve turned on a MT feature which will only allow comments from people who are registered Typekey users. It’s free, it’s not that big a hassle, and it could be a week or more before I finally work out all these issues . . . so if you’d like to post a comment, get yourself an account, just like my typekey profile whydontcha.
Author: Wil
Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.
moods for moderns
Can’t get enough of my sweet, sweet voice? You’re in luck!
(Hrm. That’s supposed to be mildly amusing . . . but it seems more creepy, doesn’t it? Oh well)
Anyway, I did an interview with The Dragon Page and it’s up on their website. You can podcast it, tune in online and listen to the stream, or just grab the damn mp3 file yourself and listen in xmms, or winamp, or whatever audio player you like.
Or not. I’m not the boss of you.
And while you’re there, you should take a second and read the review of Just A Geek by Evo Terra. The most important bit, I think, which I would appreciate everyone who reads my blog spreading around is:
Uber-geek Trek fans looking for the dirty nasties which happened behind-the-scenes of the show are going to be disappointed. There are no tales of late night coke-parties which ended with Dr. Crusher and Councilor Troy bumping uglies, no recitations of the time Picard stuck a flattened tribble on his head and ran around the set saying “I
this goes on the wishlist
I hope this is the most clever of clever pranks . . . because it’s much, much better that way.
“The JL421 Badonkadonk is a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank.
[snip]
Standard drive is an air-cooled, 6hp Tecumseh gasoline (unleaded only) engine, with centrifugal clutch, giving the Donk a top speed of 40 mph. This vehicle is not licensed for use on public roads, and is intended as a recreational vehicle only.
1 person recommended Star Wars A New Hope 12″ Figure: Obi-Wan Kenobi Tatooine Encounter instead of JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank”
Be sure to read the user reviews, for maximum enjoyment.
spend the night, watch the earth come up
Backstage West has a review of ACME Love Machine!
Acme Love Machine
Reviewed By Jenelle Riley
BACKSTAGE WEST
JAN. 19, 2005
Acme Love Machine
presented by and at the Acme Comedy Theatre, 135 N. La Brea Ave., L.A. Fri. 8 pm through Jan. 28, Sat. 8 pm through Feb. 26. $15. (323) 525-0202.
When watching sketch comedy, most of us inevitably finds ourselves hoping the percentages work in our favor. In other words, there’s probably bound to be a few groaners, but we hope there will be more good than bad. In the Acme Comedy Theatre’s latest offering, it’s a pleasant surprise to say the good far outweighs the bad. There’s a tendency for a few strong segments to run a little too long, and we can count on standard sketch fallbacks–funny voices, some easy bathroom humor–but overall this production packs triple the laughs of a typical episode of Saturday Night Live in roughly the same amount of time.
Director Travis Oates confidently helms a flawless ensemble of eight talented and distinctive actors in sketches that run the gamut of humor both high- and low-brow. It’s hard to miss with a great physical bit about three football fans (Kevin Small, Chris MacKenzie, and Greg Benson) shaking their groove with goofy choreography to hit songs, or the sight of a underwear inspector (MacKenzie) personally testing his product, but these bits are balanced with several moments of clever wordplay. In “Your Witness,” an undeservedly confident attorney (Matt Knudsen) is prone to spewing hilarious misinformation. And in the witty “Word Up,” the stellar Wil Wheaton plays a slow-witted suitor who manages to seduce a crisp and efficient accountant (Kimberly Lewis) with sweet talk provided by a thesaurus. Still, it’s the nonverbal “Untitled Office Sketch #9”–in which the most mundane activities turn into a beautifully staged musical number–that achieves a sublime absurdity.
It’s also worth mentioning the trio of female actors (Lewis, Kim Evey, and Jodi Miller) who prove that women don’t have to be relegated to the background in comedy. Although the cast is uniformly excellent, standouts include MacKenzie and Small, who can garner huge laughs with the simplest delivery or expression. Lighting and sound by Mike Cernicky are outstanding, with a production value far higher than any sketch show I’ve seen. And musical director Jonathan Green and drummer Christian Malmin keep the energy high with live musical accompaniment.
Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Okay, first off: I’ve got a massive MacWorld / Borders / Trip to SF and back report to write up. It’s coming, and I hope it will be worth the wait. Until I can get it done, there are some wonderful links in the comments for my previous entry, from other bloggers who came to MacWorld, Borders, or both.
My short version? It was awesome. It was everything I’d hoped it would be, and more than I could have ever expected. The drive up was great, and the drive home (without Anne, because she went over to Tahoe to spend the weekend with her friend) was lonely, but enjoyable because I listened to Jay Mohr’s book Gasping for Airtime most of the way. It’s a interesting story . . . but you have to hear him read it. It’s the difference between listening to Dark Side of the Moon and reading the sheet music.
Okay. Enough about the trip report that’s coming. Here’s the thing that made me fire up this nifty browser called “Epiphany,” and write these words: I totally, completely, utterly b0rked my Debian machine before I left for MacWorld. I don’t know what I did, exactly, but somehow it completely lost my mouse. modprobe psmouse and modprobe mousedev did nothing, and I couldn’t find anything in a single online forum that would help me make my goddamn mouse work again. I tried dpkg-reconfigure gpm. I tried mouseconfig I tried cursing in lots of different languages, and making Faustian bargains with gods I’m pretty sure I just made up . . . I even taught myself how to recompile a linux kernel (the debian way and the other way) . . . but no dice.
Finally, I gave up, and decided to just start over with a clean partition and a new install. So I did mv /home/wil /mnt/hda1/backedup/, did a diff to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and burned myself a copy of the latest Debian (Sarge) Network installer.
Oh. My. God. Becky. It was so easy.
Okay. Seriously. Back in the old days of 1999, everyone told me how easy it was to set Red Hat up, but how much cooler Debian was if you could just get past the nightmare install . . . well, this was about as easy an install of anything I’ve ever done. It was literally a handful of commands, and then a bunch of waiting while it grabbed a ton of packages and set them up.
I’m now sitting here with a honest-to-goodness Debian system, running kernel 2.6.8!
Check it out:
wil@bender:~$ uname -a
Linux bender 2.6.8-1-386 #1 Thu Nov 11 12:18:43 EST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
Okay, this is probably not as exciting to anyone else as it is to me . . . but the fact that I got this working, and took all the HAM radio and isdn stuff out of the kernel, and still got it to work . . . it’s a pretty big deal to me.
I’m logged into Gnome right now,( which I usually don’t use — I’m a KDE or Enlightenment kind of guy — but it looks beautiful) and I’ve got apt installing Firefox and Thunderbird in a terminal, and then I’ve got to restore some of the backups, but I’m very proud of myself. Until I totally screw something else up, I feel like I can put on my propeller hat and give it a mighty spin. *snort*
I’ve got an audition tomorrow morning, then I’m working on the audio book of Just A Geek in the afternoon. Check back around Friday for the full SF trip report, and some other cool news.
Oh, man! And if this moment needed to get any better . . . They Might Be Giants just started singing Ana Ng on the radio behind me.