Phase B is now complete!

The import from MT to WP went very quickly. The only ‘gotcha’ is that PHP hates importing text files of over 1MB (unless you screw with the php.ini settings), so I had to manually split the import.txt file into several smaller chunks.

As you can see, a few minor cosmetic glitches remain. I’m still not sure what’s up with the post title, but I’ll work on that later.

Phase One of the move to WordPress is complete: all MT entries are imported, and the site is mostly active, although the main Index redirector still sends people to the MT page.

Tomorrow I’ll start working on the templates and such.

I’ve removed mt-comments.cgi entirely, because MT eats shit.

Comment-spammers using a distributed denial-of-service technique effectively took down the server today.

I’ll be switching to WordPress this weekend.

If you use MoveableType, I seriously recommend removing it today.

iTunes stutters. Y-Yu-Y-You heard me. It didn’t always do this, though. When I first ran iTunes on my PC, it was a wondrous revelation… but recently, probably after a software update, it developed a stutter. I got fed up tonight and searched until I found the answer buried in an Apple messageboard, away from Google’s prying eyes. The culprit: DirectSound.

Yes, Apple is now using Microsoft’s pitiful DirectSound via QuickTime to play iTunes music. I don’t know if it’s always been this way (I don’t think so), but the way to remedy the stutter is to close iTunes, open QuickTime preferences, and change the ‘Sound Out’ from DirectSound to something more reasonable, like ‘Wave Out.’ Close QuickTime Preferences, open iTunes, and poof! Stutter banished.

GeekTool is a nice little prefpane applet that lets you display time-refreshed unix command outputs or Internet-based images on your desktop.

MenuMeters is a great set of system monitoring tools for OSX, displaying CPU, network, and disk utilization in the top menu bar. Sadly, menu real estate is pretty small on my iBook, so I only use it on my G4.

I tried out Bloglines with the OSX notifier, and was less than impressed. I like the persistency of a web-based aggregator, but I hate pretty much everything else. Bloglines doesn’t support importing from OPML, which makes setup a pain, and browsing via a standalone app like NewsFire is much faster [especially if you use keyboard shortcuts].

Wow! Holy crap! In a hat!

I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite for reading RSS feeds for the last several months [and if you don’t use a RSS feed-reader, please crawl out from under your rock and smell the sunlight] and though I’ve had no real problems with the application, I’ve not looked for other RSS readers either.

Today, though, I discovered NewsFire. Holy crap, this thing is cool. The UI is very slick and very easy to use, with good, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and the whole app is very integrated into the OS. You can easily import your old RSS bookmarks, and you can instruct the app to “discover feeds” for a given site, or even the site currently displayed in Safari.

Mom emailed:

“There was a girl in the hospital Friday that had to have part of her colon taken out due to a blockage. (When you get a blockage, the poop can’t move, the bowel dies and becomes rotten, and you have to have it taken out).

I saw the two blockages — they were dark brown, circular, about the size of a tennis ball and baseball, respectively. Guess what they were? Hair balls!

Synergy truly rocks.

For a while now I’ve been using osx2x along with UltraVNC, just so that I could use one keyboard and dual monitors on two computers — a Mac and a PC.

osx2x’s problems were many: the PC would detect a / as a ?, and vice versa; the number pad wouldn’t work, and sometimes the shift key would get stuck. Worse, it was impossible to play games on the PC and span over to the Mac’s monitor — osx2x would either completely garble the mouse commands, or would just crash. I had to put a KVM in place just so that I could switch the hardware keyboard to the PC when I wanted to game.

I’m really impressed with the latest version of Firefox.

One of the neater additions is Live Bookmarks.

Live Bookmarks let you bookmark an RSS feed, which will appear as a bookmark folder that contains all of the headlines in the feed.

On certain sites, you’ll see an orange RSS icon in the bottom right corner of the Firefox browser window. If you click it, it’ll give you an option to subscribe to the site’s feed.

In a fit of masochism, I decided to secure my Airport Express WLAN via WPA and Radius authentication.

RADIUS authentication lets you manage access to your wireless LAN from a central RADIUS server, making it much more secure than storing authentication info on your wireless access points.

I picked up a pre-compiled OSX package of FreeRadius from <a href=http://carpestellarem.com/Products/StellarRADIUSLite.php">Carpe Stellarem.

There are a few other ways to get FreeRadius, including via Fink package, and by Andreas Wolf’s installer.