John Hendow

This is the second week of a class that I’m taking in network principles and design. It’s an online class that offered via the UW and I enrolled in it because I want a better understanding of enterprise network design. My modest home computer network is pretty simple, with an unmanaged HP ProCurve doing most of the heavy lifting. My intent in taking the class is to fill in some gaps in my knowledge and I just happen to enjoy learning new things in general. I’ve already placed an advance request for remote support of upcoming questions that I’ll surely be sending to a few of my supergeek pals. Part of the fun of this class will be writing some code for tools and reporting. If I suddenly feel brave as a result of my new knowledge I might attempt something more geekily complex in my home network… 🙂

Recently I was putting together some documentation for a project that required a QR code generator, and I thought “why not make my own QR code?”. This way I can… um… do stuff with it. Well, I haven’t exactly figured out WHY I need this, but that has never stopped me from doing something geeky. Therefore, behold my personal QR code and be appropriately impressed / unimpressed. I think I might put it on some stickers and begin tagging my flight cases with it. If you don’t already have a QR code reader, there are a number of free apps for your cell phone that allow you to decode them.

Today WordPress announced the released of v2.7 “Coltrane”. It looks like a major step forward for the blogging engine, but I’m going to stick with v2.6.5 for another month. Last time I “early adopted” a release was v2.5 and it caused me some serious headaches. Those of us who installed the update on day 1 discovered a number of bugs that required multiple point-update patches to resolve. The whole experience amounted to an unplanned scramble to put our sites back into working order. All that being said, it looks like they’ve incorporated some attractive new features into this version of the engine, and I appreciate the WordPress crew for accomplishing two major revisions of the code base in 2008. It’s a great tool and I continue to enjoy it.

I’m especially intrigued by the statement:
“…this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.”
Yes indeed! The current site update process involves the careful deletion of certain files within the site folders, copying new files/folders onto the server, and hoping it worked. Building an automated updating system is big improvement and I’ll look forward to having it in place… that is… when I install this major update in a month or so…

Yesterday I was working on one of my band web sites and I decided what I need is a simple RSS feed mechanism that supports all my current gigs. This will be handy for inclusion in each of the bands’ individual web sites, and in my own overall view on this site (and some others, too). I decided it was something I want to write myself, so I started to stub out the code last night using PHP and MySQL. It’s going pretty well so far and I think I can finish the project before next weekend. The LAMP architecture is interesting and I’m looking forward to continuing this project in my spare time.

I’ve made another upgrade to my Drupal experiment site (www.sleestak.us) and discovered that it’s still not capable of properly managing images. Not terribly surprising since the 6.2 update addresses several security issues identified in the v6 engine. It’s disappointing, given that the current versions of Drupal and WordPress both have broken image upload capabilities that were functional in earlier code versions. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed before too long.

I’ve been exploring the capabilities of a different content management / blogging system called “Drupal”. It’s actually a lot more fully featured and powerful than WordPress, but takes longer to get configured properly. This week was spent trying to fix a persistent problem with the image uploading, and once I finally had a few hours to dedicate to this, I discovered it’s actually a bug in the current image uploading mechanism. With the help of a Drupal guru (and a whole lot of Googling) I figured out the nature of the bug, discovered the recently created patch, and figured out how to apply it to the source file.

At this point I’m not sure I’m going to switch this blog site over to Drupal, since it’s probably overkill for my own needs. But I am planning to set up a Drupal site for family use. I look forward to getting it ready for launch.

I finally got around to updating this installation of WordPress to version 2.3.1 today. This version of the code base has been available for several weeks, but I’ve been too busy to perform the upgrade. Looks like it was successful.

This site is powered by WordPress, an open-source blog engine. Last night I spent about 30 minutes upgrading to the most current version, which went smoothly. This process updates the database and most of the site’s back-end files are deleted and replaced. It’s a little unnerving to erase the important files supporting the site functionality, especially when some content in subfolders needs to be retained. Next time I perform this kind of update I might use a more sophisticated file management tool. At any rate, it was simple enough. Welcome to WordPress 2.3…

I’ve redesigned and relaunched my thinkasaurus.com web site. This is the site I use for business purposes and project-based work. I’m delighted with the work we’ve gotten and look forward to our next projects!

As of today, I am fully migrated from my previous code base to this new blog. I decided to move my posts along in the process. One of the major drivers in deciding to go with an open-source blog engine was the advantage of a larger user base, and thus a large development base for the platform.
My new blog is built on a PHP platform and is a fairly typical install of WordPress. So, welcome to my new blog.