I’ve updated to 2.3.3. Unfortunatly this ended up deleting the openid to account links so if you logged on via openid you may need to log on manually once and then reassociate your openid URL. If you have a problem with this let me know and I can fix things for you. Once things calm down with jobs and stuff expect to see some improvements around here.

Ohh, I also fixed the dropdown menus at top so they aren’t so annoying.

Hmm, it appears that I’ve been having some issues with Akismet catching valid comments as spam. I can’t find any option to send me an email whenever I get a spam comment so the best I can do for now is turn off the option to discard spam comments after 15 days and actually look at the supposed spam more frequently.

If anyone has advice on a more flexible anti-spam plugin than akismet that is as effective and easy to use I’d love to hear it.

Anyway I apologize if you submitted a comment and it was deleted. It shouldn’t happen again.

Is it just me or does the idea of a blog action day where all bloggers write about the same topic seem like a really dumb idea. I mean aside from boring the readers what is this supposed to accomplish? Presumably forced blog posts about the topic of the day are going to be even worse than the usual crap people make.

So after I went to a great deal of effort to compile a custom version of php on dreamhost to support GMP (long integer library) and jumped through several other hoops just to get openid support working I forgot to change the trust_root after I changed the URL. Anyway long story short openid logins are now working.

If you don’t know what that means check out a site like myopenid.com which will explain all about it. However, if you have a livejournal or other sixapart hosted blog you may already have your own openid. Google will reveal all if you ask.

So apparently I had a stupid error in my HTML (probably the result of a bungled plugin customization) which was causing lots of trouble for IE 7 and Opera. I fixed this problem and (through the magic of conditional comments) fixed the navigation menus for IE 7. I don’t have a clue if the navigation menus work in IE 6 or below but you shouldn’t be using IE 6. It’s on window’s update so just select the windows update icon from your start menu and install it.

Even better get firefox. Or opera or even safari. This site now works in IE 7 but it isn’t as pretty. For instance the list elements on the sidebar don’t have the nice little » marker since li:before doesn’t seem to work in IE 7. Before someone jumps on me I know I could use a marker image or some other technique but it just doesn’t seem worth the effort when things look acceptably good in IE 7 and just right in all the other browsers. Also the navigation menus are a bit of a hack in IE so they may look less perfect.

Unfortunately it is not easily possible to make all the links from my old blog work totally properly. I have redirects set up that will take you to the general area of previous links to individual articles but I just don’t think it’s worth the massive effort to force my new links into the old link style or the annoyance.

Through the wonders of regular expressions and a huge list of mod_alias rewrite directives the old links now redirect to the correct places.

First an explanation of the name. No it’s not some lame reference violence/badassness it’s a type of mathematical argument in recursion theory. I’m not going to really explain it right here but I (will) give a brief description on the about page. In any case I needed a new name for my unified blog and this had something to do with what I do and sounded cool. It doesn’t have too much to do with the current events, policy, social issues and other random cruft I tend to discuss on my blog but that’s too broad a swath to really be captured by any name so I might as well pick something that sounds cool and is related to what I do

I’ve been meaning to revamp my blog presence for awhile now and I’m using my looming job search as an excuse to do so. Don’t worry (or celebrate) my views won’t change the presentation and organization will just be better. Apart from the obvious change in looks (and hopefully increased readability) I’ve integrated my blogs. If you just want to see my philosophical entries you can view them in the philosophy category.

I’ve imported all the posts from my prior blogs and I will try to set up redirects for the old links. Dealing with all the comments from the old blog is a bit of a pain as their was some spam I hadn’t bothered to clean up as well as some cruft from my old movable type threaded comment hack (though it did help with the spam) so I won’t import those unless I see that there is interest. Besides it’s an excuse to play with the nifty pole functionality.

Since a fair bit of this blog displays with custom CSS and javascript I wrote it’s quite likely their will be issues on non-gecko browsers. So if you notice anything or just want to say hi drop me an email at truepath@InfiniteInjury.org.

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I’ve been avoiding doing anything with my blogs for a long time. I’d come to dislike the look of my blogs and the nasty fragile hacks that held my movable type system together so I started putting off doing things with my blog until I could change the system. After my experiences hacking movabletype to support threaded comments (version 4 might be better) I decided I wanted an open source blogging system written in a more appropriate language than perl¹ with a well designed extension system. Ruby on rails still seems like the right way to go but I didn’t like the typo codebase and mephisto just isn’t mature enough yet to have the extensions I need, e.g., openid, and it’s API still seems to be in flux.

The fact that I’m going to be applying for jobs soon finally inspired me to do something about my web presence and despite being written in php I settled on wordpress based on it’s ease of modification and the amazingly comprehensive list of open source plugins availible. Someday I may still switch to mephisto² or my own custom code but at the moment wordpress can’t be beat as a practical blogging solution for those of us who want extensive customizations and non-standard features.

For anyone who is interested in the code I’ve written to customize this blog or other related issues I’ll be posting them on my wordpress page.