I tried to set up Lovd by Less on a subdomain hosted by Dreamhost, and enabled Passenger. Passenger claims it needs ruby 2.10, so it tells me to do sudo gem update ruby or something like that, and the dreamhost wiki recommends instead freezing Ruby into your vendor folder. Lovd doesn’t come with a copy of ruby, so I tried doing gem search ruby –both (the correct term, I’ve forgotten since doing it) and each time, it tries to build a copy of the gem list, and DH does an OOM kill as I’m using too much memory.

So basically, Dreamhost knows they have the wrong version, Dreamhost tells users to do something to fix it, but if they try to fix it, Dreamhost’s overzealous OOM killer stops it from happening.

Whenever I bring this up to jX, he tells me that’s Dreamhost’s way of telling me that ruby sucks, and that I should stick to PHP. I respond that’s too bad, if they didn’t want me to use ruby they shouldn’t be offering it in the first place. I’m told that Dreamhost won’t help with getting my software working, and since I don’t know how to properly set up and freeze ruby (other than using the automatic gem tool), I’m screwed. And usually the Dreamhost wiki is very detailed to help you get your problem solved on your own, it is surprisingly vague on this issue.

I’ve been interested in a open source invitation management and scheduling system for a while. I had ran across the twice announced project, “freevite”. Freevite.com/net/org are all owned (net and org by the same person), as well as freevites.com. None work. The RoR freevite project (“announced”, above) mentioned two projects on sourceforge that were dead, but I can’t find any ‘freevite’ project on sourceforge, so I searched ‘invites’ (then invite, because invites didn’t return anything relevant). phpinvitation was launched 3 days ago, but phpEventManager (main page, in german) is pretty mature and was updated about a year and a half ago. I’m going to try that out soon. I didn’t see any others that ever posted files.

I’ll probably update this post with my thoughts on php-eventman in the future, but I’m scared it’s all in German with no localization.

Edit: I can’t even get php-eventman running. 500 errors. Running php in interactive mode gave me an error that didn’t actually help, as the file containing the ‘bad line’ didn’t actually have the undefined function even called. I might hack at it later.

I have had a few blogs over the years, for various things, and never really used them to be too serious. I don’t think MBILF sounds that serious, which is the true beauty of it. I could easily just “censor” the F word by replacing the F with a * and not lose much. I mentioned this in my previous post on Blosxom, that some people can get away with “obscene” language in their blog titles and still be well respected individuals. We’ll see.

In good news, the awesome site iUseThis is planning on a webapps directory, something I’ve been dreaming of for a while. I hope I can eventually make something to list there.

A friend of mine (who I hope to convince to move off his shitty hosting) has been using Blosxom for a while and wants to move off it. I googled for a bloxsom to wordpress importer, and found a variety of information. The consensus seems to be that your nested categories (but perhaps not main ones?) won’t be moved, unless you use the RSS importer (which is what halvorsen.org recommends and gives instructions on). There’s another thing, a bloxsom posts and comments importer on insanum.com that nobody has referenced as far as I can tell. A few sites link to the nozell method, but it looks pretty hackish from first glance (unto.net agreed and made a better importer because of this). (Note: The previous two links, unto.net and insanum, are linked from the codex) A selfish bastard at serpentine.com wrote a post about how he wrote a python script to do it, but didn’t share.

While I knew about the codex (which was sadly very far down in google results, considering how authoritative it should be on the subject), I like to make sure that I’m not missing something just because I went straight to the codex. Sometimes good things can be missed, and after doing this digging, I can approach it with a little more confidence than before. I don’t wanna fuck up someone’s work, I take even a free favor seriously because I want good word of mouth. Of course, having a blog titled MBILF might make me look like a bad guy (hopefully the content can speak for itself, it’s not like my blog’s title is motherfucker, right Mike Lee?).

I use parentheses way too goddamn much. I’m going to investigate the two linked from codex (since they do seem to be the best) a little more, determine the differences, and go from there. Too bad python guy didn’t share his script, it might have imported categories properly, but maybe the ones that I haven’t looked into deep enough do as well, so… yeah. I’ll try to update this later (unlike forgetful Adam).

edit: i have to use the insanum one, because the unto one is a perl script and he doesn’t have shell access

On using the Insanium script (I might end up trying the other one on my own server using a copy of his backup later, as this appears written by a madman):

To even get to see the screen where it tells you that you need to set up your special rss20 theme (which the official page on flavours doesn’t even detail very well), you have to have the script in a directory below the directory holding wp-config.php. I’d have fixed this in the script, but it doesn’t matter, so I stuck it and the saved rss.xml in wp-content.

I found out soon after that the reason I shouldn’t have used /index.cgi/index.rss to generate a file and save it as rss.xml, is because all the title fields were empty (no titles!) and there were no dates.

I tried setting up a copy of the backup on my dreamhost server so I could use the perl script from unto.net, and the way it works is you run the perl script against the blosxom directory holding all your .txt files (this is great). It is supposed to then output the data in a well formed rss file. I got a blank RSS file:

[dalitz]$ ./bloxwp.pl blosxom/
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"><channel></channel></rss>

Oh well. Now I’m going to keep trying to work on the Insanium stuff to try to get Bloxsom to use the flavour, this is going to be a bitch.

I DID IT! Here’s how.

I used the Insanium php file, because it worked once (but didn’t get titles or dates). I was trying to figure out how to set up flavors, but knew that /index.cgi/index.rss (where the main Blosxom cgi file creates the alternate RSS) was generated by index.cgi. I checked the bottom and there were several lines starting with RSS. I added a pubDate section after description in the RSS area, and changed the title from $title to $fn since that’s the file name (and no titles were set). This worked!

Here’s the line, it’s right above rss date \n which happens to do nothing apparently:

rss story   <item>\n    <title>$fn</title>\n    <link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn</link>\n    <description>$body</description>\n  <pubDate>$dw, $da $mo $yr $hr:$min:00 EST</pubDate>  </item>\n

After that, I saved the results of going to index.cgi/index.rss to rss.xml, put that into the wp-content directory along with the import-blosxom.php from insanium, and ran the import. It worked beautifully. That was much easier than figuring out how flavours work.

http://twurl.nl/8m6mbp LEGOLAND California — planning on going tomorrow. Talk about a real-world virtual world. Actually, the “theme park”
12:19 PM August 25, 2008 from web

is the perfect metaphor for virtual worlds, especially when considering the branding angle. It amazes me that so few corporate types get it.
12:20 PM August 25, 2008 from web

Of course, Walt Disney “got it” as a natural way to extend the brand way before the Internet. Walt Disney World was probably the first and
12:20 PM August 25, 2008 from web

most memorable ‘virtual world’ in the sense that he literally built a world around his intellectual property-Not rocket science conceptually
12:21 PM August 25, 2008 from web

But I think that when people are faced with technology (like computers and the Internet) it creates an artificial break in consciousness and
12:22 PM August 25, 2008 from web

maybe things are made more complex and disjointed than they need to be.
12:22 PM August 25, 2008 from web

What amazes me is that Disney still doesn’t have a compelling virtual world presence. Lego is working on a virtual world, whose success
12:23 PM August 25, 2008 from web

still remains to be seen, but I do have high hopes for them, since they are a very design driven organization, so…we shall see.
12:23 PM August 25, 2008 from web

That’s probably Second Life’s biggest challenge — a park looking for a theme. Trying to be everything to everyone makes you a platform…
12:28 PM August 25, 2008 from web

Not sure if Second Life sees itself as a platform (certainly doesn’t position itself as such). Platform is like an operating system.
12:29 PM August 25, 2008 from web

Platforms aren’t sexy (you can try to make them so as Apple has) but we see how quickly OSX loses sex appeal to the iPod, for example.
12:29 PM August 25, 2008 from web

iPod is 1 theme in Apple’s park.
12:30 PM August 25, 2008 from web

I bet if George Lucas built a “Star Wars Galaxies” theme park tomorrow, it would rock the world of all theme parks combined, if done right.
12:38 PM August 25, 2008 from web

That is, if he got out of the way and let the talent do their thing, but what are the chances of that? lol.
12:38 PM August 25, 2008 from web

This concludes this, the first edition of Books on Twitter, a series where I highlight long series of tweets comprising of a monologue on one topic. @raymondpirouz made this Book on Twitter between 12:19 and 12:38 PM EST, or 19:19 and 19:38 UTC (according to Twitter). These are made without the authors permission.