The next step in the upgrade fiasco.

Hmm – good sign – I didn’t lose everything when I tried “Save and Continue Editing”.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 04:56 PST

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I tried installing the WordPress 2.1 upgrade again, thinking that maybe my problems were from a corrupted file. The first thing I noticed is that the error I was seeing in the admin pages is now gone. I have limited plugins enabled – I still need to go search for latest releases for all my favorite plugins.

Let’s see if I have any problems saving this post.

UPDATE: Well, publishing directly seems to work. But I’m still having problems with the “Save and Continue Editing” function. Since I often take a lot of time writing posts – most often because I like to research and provide links to my references – I like to save often. The old “Save and Continue Editing” button was great in that it saved my work as an unpublished draft, and it gave me a preview of what my post was going to look like.

But since I installed WP 2.1, and even just now, whenever I click the SaCE, I get a yes/no choice to save a blank post name, and when I click “Yes”, I get thrown into the Manage Posts section and my work to date has disappeared. The old admin setup used to keep me in the Write Posts section, leave my work open, and just update the Post Preview. Very discouraging.

UPDATE: I’ve narrowed down the offending behavior. The screwy SaCE problem only occurs after the post I’m writing has been Autosaved. What do I have to do, turn off Autosave?

Posted by Greg as My Website at 04:33 PST

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Enough!

I just spend two hours writing and researching a post to see it disappear in a puff of smoke. So much for the new autosave feature.

I gotta get this blog fixed.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 16:46 PST

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I’ve deactivated all my plugins to see if they are responsible for my new WordPress 2.1 installation screwing up like it is. This post is a test.

UPDATE: Well, it worked, and the page loaded a lot faster. But I’m still getting an error in the admin backend, so that’s not everything. Guess I need to start turning things on one by one.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 20:16 PST

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Last week, in conjunction with my blog’s name change, I upgraded the software that ran it to WordPress 2.1. Since then, I noticed some minor problems in the backend editor and that the blog loaded very slowly.

The severity of the problems grew when I tried posting. So far, everything I’ve tried has failed. So now my blog is completely broken. If you see this post, it means that my ultimate attempt has been the only one to succeed – hacking the database. Completely unacceptable.

I guess I’m going to have to roll back the software and try to restore the older version, which I won’t have time to even attempt until the weekend. Wish me luck!

Posted by Greg as My Website at 22:27 PST

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Recently, my father mentioned that, when visiting my blog, he was a little put off by the skull and crossbones logo.

The skull and crossbones goes back to my US Army days, when I encouraged the more aggressive side of myself to come out, and found great rewards in doing so. But that’s the third weigh-in that I’ve heard against the motif, which comes across as too heavy for a professional, and may sound its death-knell.

I’ve long considered how my blog is received on the Internet and seen how the name, which is not distinctive, rated in the search engines. I’ve long considering a new name and a new look. I originally picked “Ramblings” on a whim, since I didn’t know the direction I would take, and didn’t have a readily-available distinctive name and image that I could use to carve out my space on the Internet.

I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and the most most compelling theme that I can come up for myself is that I am constantly struggling to bring order to chaos. Since the laws of physics dictate that this is not natural, I have a feeling of impending doom in this effort. This effort is well documented in literature, so I’m comforted that I am not alone, and that we have a well-defined adjective for me – “quixotic“.

It took a while, but I finally settled on an antonym for entropy (the natural tendency towards disharmony.) It’s extropy – which makes me an extropicist. So I have a candidate for a new blog name – the Quixotic Extropicist. Distinctive, and literate. Better yet, there’s a compelling image of Don Quixote and his search for the noble – Picasso’s Don Quixote:

It would make a fine substitute for my skull-and-crossbones. In fact, it would make a fine tattoo, something I have also been searching for for almost twenty years. Its too complex for a brand; but then, we can’t have everything. My relationship with Cervantes goes back many years – when I left the US Army and moved to San Diego, my intention was to buy a boat and live on it while going back to school. The name I had selected was, following the unknowing example of Steinbeck, Don Quixote’s name for his mount – Rocinante – the nag.

So, pending protests of disapproval, I’m about to make a huge change. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 14:27 PST

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I’ve been keeping mum about personal stuff lately, even including simple things, like, Where the Hell is Greg? Which is a pity, because I’ve been doing some interesting stuff and traveling a lot, and normally I like to post my travels, as you could see when I occasionally mentioned where I was in the last few months. But recent events have lead me to conclude that I can start loosening up. So, I’ve taken the opportunity to install the Inline Google Maps plugin for WordPress, and now I’m going to give it a shot. Bear with me; I have only fooled around a little bit with the Google Maps API before, and could see that it was a very powerful (and complex) tool. So I’m trusting that Mike Kornieko got it right (and that my GM API key is correct.) Let’s find out!

Current meatspace coordinates: 32.26965, -107.73858 (latitude & longitude, WGS84)
Local appellation: Deming, NM

Deming, NM

Results: Well, I can see that there are a few kinks to be worked out!

First, the plugin takes a link to Google Maps and reinterprets it to place the inline map. So every previous post that links to Google Maps, such as my Minot, ND post, is now screwed up, because I don’t have it set up properly for the plugin. I can’t even see the original version in my WordPress editor, so I may have to turn to a database archive to recover the original.

Second, I found out by experimentation that the map will overwrite all text adjacent to it unless I make sure I have a blank line separating the text from the link in my WordPress Write Post editor.

Third, the displayed map looks quite different from the image I copied in Google Maps, and the marker is in the wrong place! Although I took pains to refine my coordinates to a resolution of a few meters, the marker is about 30 km (~20 miles) to the north of my location! That’s a pretty serious error. You can see just how much it’s off by cutting and pasting my coordinates in Google Maps, and comparing it to the image here.

Fourth, the map size is specified in pixels. Normally, I like to specify images in the width of the remaining space after my WordPress template stakes out the space needed for its left and right sidebars, which varies according to the screen resolution used by you, my visitor. I could deal with this by either modifying the plugin code to accept the percentage variable I want, or by trying to pass a calculated value for pixels using PHP variables to the plugin – either of which takes more work than I want to do. For now, I’ll leave the settings as they are, which makes the map a little too small for my preferred resolution (1024 x 768 on my laptop LCD screen, higher when I was using my 19″ at home.) But the smaller map is still comfortably visible, and I still get visitors using only 800 x 600, and believe it or not, in my second hat as IT support for my company, I’ve found users still stuck in lower resolutions that don’t want to change.

So there’s quite a bit of work to be done. But I really want this capability on my blog, so I guess when I find the time (ha, ha!), I’ll take a crack at it.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Posts About Me at 06:46 PST

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I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately, but today, instead of flying, I was driving. I was passing through the Galiuro Mountains east of Tucson, heading for New Mexico, and it was snowing lightly.

Snow in the high desert is just the icing on the cake of the beauty of this land. I’m sure there are places in the American Southwest that are even more spectacular, but it sure was nice being distracted from the things that are going on in my life by a few incredibly picturesque scenes.

Geography has a major consideration in my work of late – I’ve been tracking cathodic protection readings by GPS readings. Although I first started trying to get geographical coordinates on CP facilities (and by extension, the structures that they’re on) back in 1995, the available technology has improved substantially over the years to the point that very accurate information is easily obtained. The trouble is, the tools to manipulate this data have not been so forthcoming. I’ve been keeping my eye on GIS systems for a while now, but the software has been prohibitively expensive for me to use with what I’ve been doing. But that’s changing – GIS has become a foundation for all kinds of civil engineering work and other fields, and now corrosion control data analysis is being dragged into it. Clients are just now starting to demand their data in a GIS-importable format, and I’ve got a whole new skill set to acquire.

But this skill set combines a lot of things that I’ve already been interested in – map reading, computer graphics, and databases. I’ve been boning up lately on the fundamentals, particularly on the basics of geodesy (projections, datums and coordinate systems). I’ve been trying to get a high end open source GIS system installed on my computer, but the Windows version just doesn’t work, and the Linux version seems to be having a lot of problems with dependencies, which is also helping me get more familiar the nuts and bolts of Linux, because I’ve been trying to configure and compile source packages instead of installing rpms.

But if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, while researching the geography of the region, I couldn’t help but get drawn into the history. I ended up with a fascination in Sibley’s 1862 New Mexico Campaign, which turned out to be the historical setting for one of my favorite movies – Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Yeah. Distractions. May as well put them to good use.

Posted by Greg as Corrosion Control, General Science, OS, Posts About Me at 21:59 PST

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I’m currently going through a very, very serious life change on the domestic front. I haven’t wanted to write about it much on this public place, and at the same time I haven’t wanted to disrepect the seriousness of the situation by flippantly continuing on writing about other things that normally I would have found to be worth comment. Judging from at least one email, I have failed in that regard, but you can’t please everybody.

So I may as well throw this into the pot. One of my former Corrpro San Diego coworkers attempted to throw a little levity into the situation. I’ve often found that, in very serious situations, it can help to step back and take a little laugh. So without further ado, I present to you the Greg Perry milk carton:

I don’t know where this photo came from, but man I need a haircut. That’s the longest I’ve seen my hair in quite a while.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, My Website, Posts About Me at 17:14 PST

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I discovered science fiction in 1974 in fourth grade at the Karingal Primary School in Frankston, Victoria, Australia; soon after I had become such an avid reader that I was searching the shelves of the school library for anything and everything that might prove to be entertaining. I distinctly remember the first book – it was Catseye, by Andre Norton – a hell of a great introduction for the young reader to the genre. It was a natural fit – my fourth grade teacher (damn, I wish I could remember her name) had undertaken to read The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien to us all over the year – and she succeeded.

It didn’t take me long to fall into the grasp of the science fiction classicists. Because my family couldn’t afford to buy a lot of books, a trip to the local library on Saturday every two weeks (the length of the loan time) became a staple of our family life, thanks to the dedication of my mother. I suppose it’s still true today, but when you’re maxing your loan limit on every trip (even if I went through the dozen books in three days or so), it becomes statistically more probable that you’re reading books that had been published 20-30 years ago. So I became well acquainted with the works of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, the two granddaddies of a long list that, if I took the time to enumerate, would stifle any chance of me finishing this already drawn-out post.

Although I would later discover that I had mixed feelings about Heinlein and his entirely too-progressive social ideals, thanks to a twelve-grade English paper I set out to write (switched at the last minute to Roger Zelazny), early on I discovered a clear favorite that would endure – The Door into Summer. I’ll spare you the analysis, but a passage that struck an enduring chord in me was when the protagonist, Dan Davis, travels back in time to defeat his nemeses, and for some reason that I forget now, sees fit to draw the teenage girl Ricky, with whom he has some avuncular relationship, out of her girl scout camp and persuades her to leave everything behind in her own best interest. Putting aside the predatory nature of this summary (it seemed to make sense in the book), I was overwhelmed by Davis’ assertion that, in order to be true to oneself, one most be prepared at all times to forgo all worldly possessions and connections if circumstances dictate that doing so is the only way by which one can escape the influence of the manipulators that do not have his or her best interests at heart. (I hope I have presented this summary with the intent of the author.) I strongly remember this assertion as being one of the foundational principles to the most macho parts of my life – the time when I was encouraged to put my body in mortal danger, consider the lengths to which I would go to save to lives of my buddies (or recover their bodies), and, as best as I could, to face the volcano (catch the Firefly reference?) – in short, when I was in the US Army. So, with more elucidation than you could possibly desire, I have established the foundation for an otherwise quirky concept.

Thus we get to the point of my story.

On Sunday, 1 October 2006, my wife kicked me out of the house.

At the time, I was in shorts and a t-shirt, without shoes or wallet, but fortunately, I had some money in my pocket, about US$100. She locked me out of the house, and had just given me the key to the expired-registration truck that I had purchased for her a couple of years ago. Looking back, I would have to say that it was a maneuver on her part to try and make a point that I needed to look at our situation and rededicate myself to making the relationship work; in that instance, I evaluated the situation and decided whether the relationship was worth pursuing. I did not come up with the answer that she was hoping I would arrive at.

I left, and have not come back. Instead, I separated myself from our situation emotionally and geographically. No, I’m not in San Diego anymore. My meatspace coordinates can, at this point, considered to be classified. You may note that comments on my posts have become restricted to registered users – if you really want to comment, I invite you to register. It’s pretty easy.

My few regular readers and the search engines may have noted that my posting has dropped off of late. This is due to the crescendo that was building to this point and its aftermath. I hope to start writing regularly again about the same issues that I advertise in my blog’s subheader – Linux migration, security, corrosion engineering, surviving cancer, website construction, and life – in that order. I don’t see the benefit in publishing a “woe me” account of my travails through domestic separation – but I had to get some of this off my chest. If you are desperate for the other side of the story, my wife has started her own blog. For fans of my technical work, this can only mean that I have more time to dedicate to your issues.

(I can only hope hope that with this post, I have truly earned the appellation that I selected long ago. Ramblings. Be thoust forewarned!)

At this point in my life, just like Petronius the cat, I find myself checking all the doors, looking for the one that leads into summer.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, My Website, Posts About Me at 22:47 PST

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