Brain dump

It’s been over two weeks since my last update. I’m sure that it’s been terribly distressing to the three people who actually read this site. My only excuse is that I’ve been insanely busy, because a lot of things have been going on. Here’s a quick brain dump, which may or may not be in chronological order:

  • My wife and kids have already relocated to Georgia, but I’m still in Alabama, finishing out my employment here. I’m temporarily living with my brother-in-law. He lives too far from the main part of town to get broadband, so I haven’t been online much in the evenings. And I stay too busy at work trying to finish up projects and documentation to be able to spare time for posts from the office.
  • Since the time that I posted about looking for a job, I had an interview, and I’ve been hired for some contract work. I signed an NDA, so I can’t give any real details. I can say that I’ll be working on a web version of an upcoming software application. I’m joining the ranks of independent consultants, which is kind of scary. But the guy I’ll be working for seems to have a pretty good track record, and the project has great potential, so I feel like it’s worth the risk.
  • I’ve also just gotten another job lead, via LinkedIn (when it rains, it pours — I’m not complaining 🙂 ). I haven’t had an actual interview yet (just exchanged a couple of informal emails), so obviously I can’t say a whole lot about that yet, either. However, I will note that my work on WordPress is one of the things that the company finds useful, because their project may involve building a CMS.
  • At my current job, I’m scrambling to document processes and train my backup person before I leave. I’ve never enjoyed writing documentation. I’m better at explaining things orally and by example. It’s like my brain stores things in some sort of three-dimensional space, with related subjects connected in a complex mesh by invisible wires, and there’s no easy way to bring information from different parts of that space into a simple linear organization.

There’s more, but those are the major highlights. I’ve been too busy to do anything at all with WordPress over the past few weeks. However, I did finally make time to track down and fix an issue with Ping-O-Matic earlier today. Oh, and did I mention that Ping-O-Matic passed the 1 Million Pings milestone recently?

By this time next week, I should be moved to Georgia with the rest of my family again. Since I’ll be working from home, I’m going to have to make a concentrated effort to be more organized than usual. I’m hoping that this will have the side-effect of giving me more time to work on my open-source efforts, and some other projects of mine that have been sitting on the sidelines for a while.

I’m also hoping that I can make time to start up some sort of semi-regular exercise regimen. Since I’m still in Alabama, and my scale is in Georgia (and I’m not quite sure exactly where it ended up in the new house), I haven’t kept up with my weekly weight measurements. But I feel pretty sure that I’ve picked back up some of the pounds that I had lost before. :-/

Ping-O-Matic XML-RPC

We finally found time to do some more work on Ping-O-Matic, and have implemented an XML-RPC interface. You can now send a standard weblogs.com compatible ping to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and we will ping a subset of our services. Currently, this is a fixed subset of seven services:

  • Weblogs.com
  • Blo.gs
  • Technorati
  • MyYahoo!
  • BlogRolling
  • BlogChatter
  • PubSub

In the future, we will have ways for you to customize which services you would like us to ping on your behalf. Stay tuned!

Open Source to the Rescue

Hurray for Open Source projects. At my work, we recently underwent a major system change behind the scenes (moved our line-of-business from a mainframe to an iSeries). When we did, our web server (IIS4 under Windows NT4) started experiencing a lot of problems. Of course, I assumed that it was a problem on the other end, and just dealt with restarting the web services several times a day while we tried to narrow the problem down. But the problems kept getting worse and worse, to the point where the web service would not even stay up for two minutes at a time.

When I finally redirected requests for the main suspect applications to a static page, and the server still crashed and burned, I began to suspect a deeper problem, and I had to broaden my solution options. Fortunately, I had previously begun (and abandoned, due to time constraints) migrating our web site to a Windows 2000 server. I had the entire site functioning except for one of our web apps. Figuring that having 90% of our web site functioning was better than 0%, I suggested to my bosses that we go ahead and make the Win2K box the primary server now, instead of waiting until I worked out the problem with that one service.

The kink in that plan is that we have other services running on the old server, and other internal applications which are hardcoded to the IP address of that machine. So I couldn’t just swap the IP numbers of the two servers. And a DNS change would take too long to propogate, and our customers need to reach our web site now. What I needed was a way to transparently proxy web requests from the old server to the new server. I knew one solution right off the top of my head: Apache HTTPD running as a reverse proxy.

It was easier to get set up than I thought it would be, and seems to be doing the trick just fine.

In other open source rescue news, I know of at least two cases where Open Office was able to rescue corrupted Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, even when PowerPoint itself wouldn’t open the files.

Working Late

As mentioned previously, I came in late tonight (last night, technically) to work on our system conversion. It’s a good thing I showed up early, because they were running ahead of schedule on the data conversion, and they were ready for me to test the web applications around 11pm, rather than at 1am.

Things went pretty smoothly, except for a problem with the fax functions. It had us scratching our heads, but I finally came up with a kludge that fixed things up, so now it’s all good. And even with the time it took to come up with a solution, I should still be getting home an hour earlier than I had expected (which is to say, I’ll get home around 3am instead of 4am). Yay.

And now, it’s time for sleep. Good night.

WordPress 1.2 Beta

Oh, and speaking of WordPress, we have a new beta version out! WordPress 1.2 Beta is full of word pressing goodness, and it’s a part of this nutritious breakfast!

Those of you who keep track of such things, might wonder why we’re going from version 1.0.2 to version 1.2. What happened to version 1.1? Well, at some point during development, we had accomplished all of the 1.1 goals and had already begun working on features that we had planned for 1.2. So we decided to just keep going, and keep the version 1.2 label.

This latest release has a ton of new features, including sub-categories, custom fields, automatic thumbnail generation for images, and an improved admin interface. Plus the new plugin architecture will allow developers to create a whole new class of third-pary add-ins.