After a very long run with a customized Kubrick WordPress theme, I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading to a more modern theme, built on the Thesis Theme for WordPress. The visual design is currently pretty Spartan, I hope to dramatically improve that in the not-too-distant future. For now, the new theme improves the foundation of the site, and makes ongoing changes easier.

I plan to follow the visual refresh up with a refresh of most of the content in Aldo on Audiobooks. Look for the first updates over the weekend.

Hopefully with these monkeys off my back, I’ll get back to more frequent blog posts. We’ll see!

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Instead of working on updated versions of my instructions for importing audiobooks into iTunes, I have instead branched out, adding a new section covering a new topic. Announcing Aldo on TiVo!

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).

I am in the process of upgrading Aldoblog to the latest version of WordPress. I think I’ve finished most of the work, with just some cleanup remaining where the new version of my formatting plug-in is behaving differently. It seems to only be affecting my longer instructional pieces, mostly for numbered lists, so the scope is limited, but wrangling the formatting back to “correct” is likely to take a while.

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

I wrote previously about my DSL woes, which at the time seemed to be rain induced. But in the last two weeks I’ve started hearing increasing static on the phone line, and can only assume my wiring is disintegrating rapidly, in spite of the currently fabulous weather.

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.

That’s been my DSL connection over the last few weeks. And since I self-host this site, on a cheap PC sitting on a shelf, Aldoblog has been up and down, too. Very irritating.

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…

Yet another WordPress update, and once again, no list of the changed files to make the minor update a little easier to install. A quick multi-file Find Differences in BBEdit gave me the following list of six files with changes:

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

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Another update for WordPress, from 1.5.1 to 1.5.1.1.

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.

I updated to WordPress 1.5.1 on Friday, after drinking a cocktail with Rochelle. Maybe not the best strategy for preparing for a software upgrade, but everything seems to be working fine. Let me know if you see something funky…

When I converted this site to WordPress, I decided to turn on commenting, and see what happened. I have gotten a fair number of really good comments, and from people I didn’t know, which was cool. I also got a ton of comment spam (most of which never made it online). Not cool.

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, and a couple from Tom Raftery.

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.

OK, the new version of WordPress is going to get me into trouble. I’m having entirely too much fun playing with the new features, and finishing out the last few things that hadn’t made the transition. (I think on the public side, I’m 100% done. Still a couple of tweaks on the admin side, to make writing posts a little easier by bumping up the font size and so on for the editing form.)

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