Currently there is only one article in the section, Playing BitTorrent Downloads on a TiVo Series 3, reflecting a new trick that I figured out for my TiVo, namely downloading video from the Internet and playing it back, in high-definition (HD). It’s not nearly as easy-to-use as iTunes and an Apple TV, but it does work, and with the much wider variety of video content available on the Internet, something that iTunes can’t handle.

Playing BitTorrent Downloads on a TiVo Series 3

The article covers installing and configuring TiVo Desktop software on your computer, downloading video from the Internet using Miro, converting it to a TiVo-compatible format with VisualHub, and transferring it to your TiVo for playback.

Currently the instructions are Mac-only, but a reasonably savvy person could easily figure out how to use them on a PC, with slightly different software (pointers are given in the article).

Anyway, if you see anything that doesn’t work or look right, please do shoot me an email and let me know. Thanks!

I’m doing two things. One is get bids for doing all new whole house wiring, for both voice and data. That should happen later this month, and solve the immediate issue.

But I’ve also had multiple outages which were caused by a bad card in the data center at my DSL provider, something I have no control over. The most recent outage was four days, and was stupid, because when the service tech showed up at my house, he found no issues here, checked the data center card, found that I and four other customers were all down, and he reset the card remotely. There’s absolutely no reason why that shouldn’t have happened within 5 minutes of my first call, instead of waiting four days, and staying home from work for half a day to meet the tech.

So I’ve begun migrating my web sites and email to TextDrive, a provider with serious hardware and connectivity, starting with Aldoblog last weekend. More will move as I get time to do it, until I’m not hosting anything on the end of an unreliable (and slower) DSL connection.

The problem is the wiring. Our house is a 100+ year old Victorian, and all of our phone wiring (except for the actual phone jacks) is on the outside of the house. And it’s old, and it’s been abused, and so on. So with all the rain we’ve been having, apparently water is getting into the wiring.

We’ve had PacBell out, more than once, and about the only thing they’re consistent about is that it’s our problem, not theirs. Even thought it’s on the outside of the house, it’s “inside” wiring because it’s past the junction box, and so our responsibility.

Anyway, it’s sunny and working now, and it looks like we might be done with the rain for a while. In the meantime, I’m calling wiring contractors, because I can’t take it when we don’t have internet access. I must be a junkie…or then again, maybe I need to have internet access to, like, work and earn a living…

• readme.html
• wp-admin/
  • post.php
• wp-includes/
  • functions-post.php
  • version.php
• wp-login.php
• xmlrpc.php

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Given that I had just updated to 1.5.1, and this was supposed to be a tiny patch release, it seemed like a lot of trouble to run through the full upgrade process, so I just updated the changed files. I couldn’t find a changed files list, so I ran my own diff on the distribution, and came up with the following changed files in the core distribution:

• wp-blog-header.php
• xmlrpc.php
• wp-admin/
  • post.php
  • quicktags.js
• wp-includes/
  • functions-post.php
  • functions.php
  • pluggable-functions.php
  • template-functions-category.php
  • template-functions-links.php
  • template-functions-post.php
  • version.php
  • wp-db.php

In theory, if you already upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1, then updating just these files should get you the latest release, and take only a couple minutes to implement.

So I did a few things about it.

WordPress 1.5 has a number of new features that make dealing with comment spam a little easier, and I’ve adopted those, while also disabling all of the anti-spam plug-ins I had been using in WordPress 1.2. I also recently implemented some suggestions for making it a little harder for automated commenting, adopting a few of the ideas from “A short monograph on the theme of blog comment spam”:http://www.simong.org/index.php?p=739, and a couple from “Tom Raftery”:http://www.tomrafteryit.net/comment-spam-plugins-no-longer-required/.

I had a problem with the fake form I implemented, because of a misplaced “%”, which caused it to show up and screw up the regular form. That’s fixed, and I think the fake form should be invisible to everyone using a modern browser.

Hard to say how effective it really is at this point, too soon to tell. But at least so far, no spam comments have been left since I implemented the changes and new traps.

At any rate, I need to get back to work, instead of continuing to fuss. Bye!

Take screenshots of the current version of your weblog!

Once you convert to version 1.5, you won’t be able to view your old version any more. But if you are planning on keeping the same visual design, with the very significant reorganization (and improvement) of WordPress themes, you will have to make a lot of little changes in a lot of different places. How will you know if the new version successfully replicates the visual design of the old?

The only way is with screenshots. At the very least, take one of your home page and of a single story page. But you ought to take several of the single story pages, with differing comments situations (no comments, some comments, commenting open and closed, you logged in to WordPress and not logged in, etc.). And you should take shots of your archives pages, too.

You might also want to save some of these pages as static HTML, so you can review the hidden elements, in addition to the visuals that the screenshots preserve. I wanted to do comparisons of the meta elements in the head of the document, but it was too late for that, too.

Anyway, I’m 95% done now, but I suspect the last 5% will take as long as everything up to this point!

Took me a little over an hour to do the majority of the work. I think most things work now, even if it’s not exactly completely the same as the 1.2 version. I still have a few plug-ins to add and test, and then add to the templates, to get everything back to where it should be. But all the hard stuff is behind me.

Let me know if anything seems wrong…

First of all, I’m running WordPress 1.2.2 (and all of its prerequisites, e.g., Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.). After installing WordPress, the next thing I did was install the Kubrick template, which replaces the default index.php, wp-comments.php, and wp-layout.css files with new versions that use a much more attractive layout, design, etc.

Then I tweaked the fonts in the CSS file (I’m using Trebuchet for the body copy, and Georgia for the headers), moved a bunch of things around (like the syndication feed links), and deleted other things (like the monthly archive links) inside the index.php file. And I encoded my e-mail address with the Automatic Labs Enkoder, to protect it from spam harvest bots.

So far, none of this is rocket science, or hard to figure out what I did. A few of the less obvious things.

I have the Textile 1 plug-in, which is part of the WordPress 1.2 distribution, turned on (it defaults to off), which converts straight quotation marks and apostrophes to curly versions, double-dashes to “em”-dashes, etc., to make the text a little prettier. This improved typography and ease of formatting is one of the major reasons I switched to WordPress.

I changed the default format for permalinks (configured on the Options » Permalinks screen of the administrative console), to duplicate the link structure used by my old weblog software. Then I manually added a dozen additional rewrite rules to ones generated by WordPress, to handle all the different kinds of permalinks people were using with the old software. The details of all this will get its own post eventually.

For articles where I show only an excerpt on the front page, I am displaying a word count in the “Read the rest…” link. This is done with the Words In Post plug-in (which I hacked a little bit so it would work in the the_content() call in index.php).

On the permalinks pages, I use Binary Bonsai’s plug-in for Dunstan’s Time Since to do the relative dates (“posted X days, Y minutes ago”).

I am using the Related Posts plug-in to display links to posts which may possibly be related to the current post. I initially wasn’t happy with the related items it was finding, but I modified the plug-in’s code to slightly change the way the it uses keywords, and it seems to be doing a bit better at finding posts that are genuinely related.

For a really trivial tweak, I’m using the Nice Categories plug-in, which basically just adds an “and “ to the list of categories a posting is filed under in the metadata section at the end of the individual post page. (This is a perfect example of how I can spend a couple of hours dicking around on this site, with little visibly accomplished.)

I was using the Staticize Reloaded plug-in to do automatic caching of the web pages, but that caused problems with the relative date, and I haven’t converted that to use a JavaScript version of Time Since yet, so I’ve got Staticize turned off for the moment. But it’ll go back on in the future.

To control comment and trackback spam, in addition to filling WordPress’s built-in comment moderation watch list with almost 2000 keyword and IP addresses, I’ve got two plug-ins enabled, Kitten’s Spaminator and ThreeStrikesSPAM. So far, no comment or trackback spam has made it through. Knock wood.

That’s it for now, but I’m sure there will be more later…

For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.

That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.

After a frenzy of traveling in 2003, we mostly stayed at home in 2004. A short trip to Boston, where Rochelle was attending a conference and I was eating cannoli, was the furthest we went. We also made our traditional Thanksgiving visit to Rochelle’s family in Texas. And our longest trip was a road trip down to Palm Springs, where we stayed for two weeks in a condo, while Rochelle wrote the culminating papers for her Masters degree. (Which was Rochelle’s biggest accomplishment of 2004, successfully completing her Master’s program. All over but the paperwork. Yippee!) I mostly loafed around and read a couple of books; in fact I think that was the only fiction I read all year long.

I did get a chance to enjoy more fiction than those couple books, though, by finally giving Audible.com a try. Rochelle started her subscription to the service last year, and has really enjoyed listening to the audio books on her player. When I gave her an iPod mini for her birthday, I inherited the Audible.com Otis player she had been using, and started using it while I was driving. While the Otis sucked, the audio books are fantastic, and there is no better way to enjoy them than on a digital player; CDs and tapes are more expensive, and you have to constantly change them to keep going. Not with the iPod, or even the Otis, which can store almost nine hours — or hundreds of hours for the iPod.

We continued to improve our home with a number of projects, including replacing the solid wood back door with a wonderful wood door with glass panels that lets in far more light. In spite of the glass, with the redone (and now straight) door frame and new weather stripping, the kitchen is much warmer now than it was with the solid door we replaced.

Also in the kitchen we added a display shelf along one wall, to better show off the ridiculously large collection of champagne bottles we’ve amassed. I’m sure we’ll have to purge the collection at some point, but for now it’s fun to have them all in a row, and know that we’ve found and enjoyed some really fine wine in the last couple of years. The bottles on the shelf are only from the last two years, but it represents far more champagne than I drank in my entire life before Rochelle.

We painted our bedroom from top to bottom. Rochelle picked out three new colors that matched our antique bed frame, and over the course of a week, we stripped and repaired walls, and painted painted painted. The results are not perfect by a long shot, but it’s still a tremendous improvement for us.

Also in the bedroom we ended up replacing all but the headboard of that bed frame, which lowered the mattress and gave us a much more stable bed. The antique bed frame itself was quite solid, but the queen conversion kit that came with our McRoskey mattress replaced the solid side beams, and made the bed horribly shaky.

The biggest improvement we made was replacing the old, grim gray carpet that Rochelle picked out 10 years ago with new carpet that is warmer-toned, and coincidentally hides cat stains far better. That went into our parlor, office, and bedroom, as well as the hall closet, which we somehow omitted from the hardwood floors project a couple years ago.

In the office, we replaced almost all of our furniture, getting rid of our desks and a chrome shelving unit, and replacing with much bigger desks and some standard shelving from IKEA. They’re not perfect, but they look a lot nicer than what we had before, and work a whole hell of a lot better with the computers, etc., than the old stuff did.

We didn’t eat out as much this year, and so we discovered fewer new restaurants than we usually do. We still found a few, including Saha, where Rochelle’s favorite chef from last year went after he sold and left our favorite find of 2003 (which is no longer particularly special). The cuisine can best be described as Arabic fusion, and combines Middle Eastern spicing (the chef is from Yemen) with French technique. It’s extraordinary, and everyone we’ve taken there has agreed that the prix fixé dinner would be a bargain at twice the $27 it currently costs.

On the topic of food, I took HomeChef’s “essentials” cooking course (4 hours one night a week for 12 weeks), and had a blast. I made a lot of the food at home during the course, but haven’t cooked as much as I’d hoped to after the class ended. Still, I probably cooked more in 2004 than in 2003, which is a trend I’d like to continue in 2005.

We only threw one party in all of 2004, and it was on the last day of 2004 (more on that in another post). Shame on us. Look for that to change in 2005.

On the technology side, I got a new computer, my first laptop, and have really enjoyed the new mobility. Before the current generation of PowerBooks, I always felt that getting a laptop was too big a compromise. There’s still a big performance gap between the PowerBook I got and Apple’s professional desktop systems; and my hard drive size is limited compared to what’s available in full-size systems; and the PowerBook’s screen is quite a bit smaller than what I had before; etc. But with the current laptops, the hardware has advanced so far that what you get is more than good enough, and the trade-off of headroom I don’t need for mobility I want is now possible.

We also switched to a new DSL provider, Speakeasy, which is both saving us money and providing better service. We stuck with our reduced cable plan, which is $14 a month, and we (mostly) don’t miss the channels. At the end of the year, we signed up for Netflix, so we could get the movies back. Minimum cable plus Netflix is less than half what we were spending for our premium cable services, and gets us pretty much everything we want. Except for ESPN…

I made roughly 60 posts to this weblog. And I sold zero BeBoxes. Both of these numbers need to go up in 2005.

I gained back much of the weight I lost at the beginning of last year. That number needs to go down in 2005.

The cats all stayed healthy and happy, and we didn’t add any new ones. The number of cats in our house needs to stay the same in 2005.

And that was my 2004.

Here’s the details. On my permalinks pages, I display a relative publication time, e.g., “Posted 3 days 27 minutes ago”, using the Dunstan’s Time Since plug-in from Binary Bonsai. This works fine when the Staticize plug-in is disabled, and it works fine when Staticize is enabled, but only the first time the page is displayed, i.e., when it’s not served out of the cache. However, upon reloading, the page is served from cache, and the relative time displayed changes to the time since midnight.

Now, since this relative time will change, minute by minute, it has to be outside the cache, or it won’t update. Staticize has an easy way to accomplish this using simple tags. In my index.php page for WordPress, to display the relative time I have:

Posted <!--mclude timesince.php--><?php require('timesince.php'); ?><!--/mclude--> ago

The timesince.php file is also pretty simple, just a quick calculation to emit the relative time:

<?php $entry_datetime = abs(strtotime($post->post_date) - (60*60*8)); echo time_since($entry_datetime); ?>

This technique tells the Staticize plug-in to process the include file every time, not just the first time. In theory, this would allow the relative timestamp to be calculated each time the page is served, and thus always be correct.

But I think that when Staticize is enabled, and determines that a page is in the cache, $post isn’t fully set for that page, and so the value of $post->post_date is meaningless, or it actually has no value at all, and so the functions above just calculate from the current date.

At any rate, for now the site doesn’t need caching to keep up, so I’ve turned off Staticize until I can decide if I care more about displaying the time since or about being ready for a traffic spike.

It turned out the issue was a couple of the PHP “open” tags — the text tokens that are used to signal that what follows is PHP code, not HTML code. The Kubrick template (at least as of version 1.2.6) uses the standard “full” tags almost everywhere, but there were a few instances where the developer used the short versions. Since I have short tags disabled on my server, it was causing a parse error, the end result of which was that the comments form could not be displayed. Fixed.

Now that I’ve got comments working, I switched to allowing comments on postings by default, and letting them post without moderation first. We’ll see how that goes.

Because, the weblog world is dealing with a plague of comment spam these days, from “search engine optimization” scumbags who are trying to promote their (or their clients’) websites. So I’ve also installed and enabled a number of comment spam plug-ins. We’ll see how that goes, too, though I’m somewhat pessimistic, for a slew of reasons. Probably I’ll have to turn moderation back on at some point…

And I installed a new caching plug-in, which should theoretically improve the performance of this site. Not really a problem with the volume of visitors I’m getting today, but you never know, and having the plug-in active will hopefully prevent unpleasant surprises.