i summon one kim

I really like WordPress!

I had made some tweaks (e.g. setting the charset in Content-Type headers) and hadn’t really heard back on my emails to the developers. This made me a little worried about upgrading the code on my site. As I run code from CVS as opposed to a release, there might be major issues after running cvs update.

As it turns out, there were some conflicts, but they were mostly mechanical differences around the Content-Type header. One or two were related to patches I’ve written about before, but nothing major.

Since I hadn’t really thought about what the procedure would be, here’s a quick outline for any other “daredevils” diving into it:

1. Fix any conflicts reported by cvs.
2. Goto http://yoursite.example.com/wp/readme.html
3. Click on the link in the “Upgrading” section (…/wp-admin/upgrade.php)
4. Goto the admin section and enable any plugins you were using. (Oh, yes, you could make a note of them before you start the whole process…)
5. If you use a custom URL scheme, cut & paste the .htaccess rules again — there are new rules to be added.
6. Update your custom index.php (if you have one) by looking at the index.php from CVS.

In that last step you can also add calls to posts_nav_link() to enable paged browsing. This is a really great feature: no more huge pages when browsing a category. Also, from the index page it is now possible to browse entries as far back as you want, one nice size page at a time.

Since my blog is rather small, I had not worried about this until recently, and here is the solution already. Perfect!

I was surprised to see a new version of the old IceS client — after all, it wasn’t supposedly developed anymore. The reason I’ve packaged it is that it supports streaming of MP3 data. My Audiotron doesn’t handle Ogg Vorbis, which is the only format supported by the new IceS client.

So, to stay current on the version, I’ve upgraded the ices-mp3 package to version 0.4. It adds FLAC support, actually, so that might be a reason to upgrade. Note that it transcodes the data, though, so you’ll need the CPU power to decode FLAC and encode it to MP3 (using LAME).

I recently had some time to go through all the packages I maintain to see what version upgrades would be needed. One long overdue one was www/wml.

It wasn’t an easy upgrade, though. Since the software apparently hasn’t been maintained for a couple of years, it took some work to make it work with the pkgsrc framework. It seems that we expect more recent behaviour from configure scripts than what was available 3-4 years ago.

I got the software to compile, finally. I just hope I didn’t break any functionality. I don’t have a wml-based website to test with anymore.

I have new versions of Firefox running on my computers, and I was busy adding block images rules on each one. I thought this was less than ideal, so I decided to give Privoxy a new try. I saw that a new version is out, so I updated the www/privoxy package as well. Apart from getting more up-to-date filters, there’s a memory leak fix and I could also enable threads for parallel request handling.

While people are commemorating the tragedy of 9/11/2001 today and certainly for years to come, this year it is also more “business as usual” regardless of the date. I’ve just finished setting up network connectivity to the NASD for a new application, and for this afternoon I’m on standby for (of all things) a Disaster Recovery Test conducted by ADP Brokerage Services Group. Since I was to be working today anyway, I also scheduled some hardware maintenance of my own.

I think this is a good development: things do move on — it doesn’t mean we would forget about the past.