It started with this hint -- marking up Highway 88 to show where the fiber leaves the right of way and heads over the wetland on its way to the house (no, that white building isn't the house...).

Dale Goss of Nelson Telephone and Bob Travis of Finley Engineering came by this morning and took a look at the path the fiber will take from the road across the wetland.  We were a little worried, 'cause when they plowed in the phone line they had a pretty rough time getting across the sedge meadow that's right behind them.  But this time we're plotted a course that will bypass that stuff -- all smiles.  Thanks guys!

I gave the guy marking out the electric-wires a hard time about putting his cones out -- he's the only vehicle that's been down our driveway THIS WEEK. 

The plow is coming!  The plow is coming!  This gizmo turned up at our neighbor Emmit's place, just up the road.  I'm so excited I did my first-ever McPlank to celebrate.

Here's a video of the Day of the Plough. It compresses a 10-hour day into 4 minutes. The lads did great -- they avoided all the places we were worried about only got a little bit stuck in the mud. Way to go!

Click HERE for the ICANN press-release.

Click HERE for a starter-page at Wikipedia.

Click HERE to watch him on an episode of Cranky Geeks (with John Dvorak) to get a feel for what's he's like in person.

I'm really glad to hear that he's joining the ICANN gang.  It'll give us some depth that we badly need in this area.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/

The big deal?  The sentence that really catches it for me is "we ad WORT don wanna tred up on the wee miroridy vuponts, so we jus wade undill eberyone am finely agreed."  Still works for me today, some 35 years later.  Thanks Jeff!

Here's my translation, since many of you aren't native-English speakers and might find this pretty tough to read in Jeff's native Pogo-style language.  Apologies to Jeff for any mistranslations.

Yes, it's a curious fact, that nobody is ever able to quite explain, how decisions get made at this particular radio station.  But they do.  This is a grievous hard and ticklesum thing for newcomers to digest.  Take, for example, the familiar caller who, in a fever pitch of excitement, has phoned up the station with his or her (or "it's" for that matter) idea for a program.   Rnnng.  He (let's just say it's a "he") says "My dog can bark heavy metal rock n'roll -- can he have 5 hours on Tuesday nights?"   Well, the person at the station (say it is a person) says "Isn't that the same thing as what's on WBRK every night?"  The caller replies "Yes, but my dog barks badder!"  Then that, says the person, is a question for the Program Committee.

The best thing then is if the caller hangs up, thinking all is well for the Program Committee will do its duty.  But if the caller says "Oh, what's the Program Committee?" then the person has to explain: The Program Committee are all the people that come to the Program Committee Meeting.  You can come.  So can your mother.  It's Friday at 8pm.  No, they never vote on anything.  Voting is against the rules.  So is parliamentary procedure. They just talk about things until everyone is agreed, and that is consensus -- the highest form of unanimity.

Then the caller says "oh."

Then the person at the radio station should continue: "Yes, it's a curious fact, but it seems to work.  So far, at least.  We at WORT don't want to tread on the wee minority viewpoints, so we just wait until everyone is finally agreed.  Nope, it's never failed yet...  which just goes to prove: you can make some of the decisions all of the time, and all of the decisions some of the time..."

Then the caller says, "can you put me through to the general manager?"

"No, there isn't a general manager.  Would you like to talk to Sarah-Gene?"

"She the owner?"

"Nope.  She's just another volunteer."

This first one is the deck we used in Saint Paul to rally people around the "get ready for Y2k" initiative.  It's an example of how to do non-scary, what's-in-it-for-me? conversation around a pretty tough topic.  Maybe some of this kind of thinking can help the security folks when they're pitching to their customers.  Click HERE for the file (no warrantees -- scan it before you open it).

This next file is a huge deck I put together when I was first briefing the Big Kids at MnSCU about their enterprise security initiative.  This was the basis of selling senior management that this was a Good Thing and showed them how security could make them more money, make them more nimble, improve quality and oh by the way reduce costs.  This is an "everything including the kitchen sink" deck that might have a few ideas for people to steal.  Click HERE for the file (same warrantee as above).

There.  I feel like I've lived up to my advance-billing now.  Hopefully some security mavens will find some useful stuff in these.

Here's a link to the article and here's a link to the muni-WiFi financial model I built to go with it.

Here's the deal -- let's get these models out of the hands of the VooDoo consulting expert type people and into the hands of the people. "Open source financial modeling" if you will. Let's beat on this model -- or write a new one if this one is hopeless -- and get to the point where we ALL understand the economics that underpin these projects.

That way, we can either rejoice in bridging the digital divide, solving the problems of the world and putting a chicken in every pot (as advocates claim) or we can avoid the mess that comes with yet another technology project that over-promises and under-delivers.

What say you? Let's have at it.

Marcie was trying to find the path through Northwest Airline's patented "Voice Prompts From Hell" system to book a seat for me on an existing reservation. She finally gave up. I remembered reading about GetHuman somewhere, Googled it, looked up NWA and tried it out. Tarnation! Worked perfectly.

I'm sold. It's even got the incredibly-secret path to Amazon customer-service reps!

Better yet, register for the site and help us out!

Read on for the geek stuff...

I like Word Press and probably would have done all the family blogs in that environment had it been around when I got started a few years back. It's open source, free, has a very active user community and it works better as a pure blogging platform than Xoops does. Xoops hasn't gotten hip to search-engine-friendly URL's yet, and for a blog is kinda like trying to drive to the grocery store in a 747.

Getting Word Press running under IIS

IIS is, of course, a little quirky for Word Press -- which is built with Linux in mind. But it's not bad. Here's the stuff to tweak to get IIS and Word Press to cooperate with each other (at least in my case).

-- Set the permissions on the server folder to give read access by your Internet Guest account before copying the WP files into it. In general, most of the problems I've encountered are due to differences in the way that IIS handles file permissions.

-- Ignore the "don't have permission to create folder" error message during the installation process - it's trying to do something dumb with themes. No worries.

-- set the cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 variable in the PHP.ini file in the Windows directory. This will make search-friendly URLs work when you tweak it in the Permalink settings (I was getting "no input file specified" errors when I tweaked the Permalink setting until I changed that). Check to make sure this doesn't break anything in your OTHER PHP applications (like Xoops). Didn't for me.

-- set the [mail function] parameters in php.ini to point at the SMTP server of my email provider. That's it. No patches, no SMTP emulators.

Here is the "before" version of the file;

SMTP = localhost ; for Win32 only
smtp_port = 25
sendmail_from= me@localhost ; for Win32 only

Here's the "after" version;

SMTP = SMTP.mail-server-name.Example.com ; for Win32 only
smtp_port = 25

sendmail_from= MyEmail@Example.com ; for Win32 only

Task 2 - importing the entries from the Xoops blog to the WP blog

This turned out to be easy because of the way I had the original blog set up. I had no posts "below the fold" and used the RSS-feed import process to pull the posts in. If you have stuff "below the fold" an approach might be to edit that stuff up above the fold I suppose. That would be a serious pain in the neck though...

My conversion involved editing the rss-import.php file to point at the Feedburner feed from the old blog. It doesn't indicate this in the documentation, but the import works fine if you point it at a feed-URL rather than a local XML file.

Note: make sure to set your Xoops RSS feed to export ALL of your posts. I used RSSfit to do this. This could present a problem if you have more than 100 news entries, as RSSfit only allows a maximum of 99 entries in the feed. I workaround might be to export the first batch of 100, then delete them, export the next, etc. I didn't need to do this because I only had about 40 entries when I did this stuff.

Migrating the URLs

I set the Word Press site up in a separate directory from the Xoops stuff. My approach was to get all the of the kinks out of the new site and then use IIS to point the domain at the new site. So I set everything up, using WP.sexandpodcasting.com as the URL, and then changed the host headers around in IIS so that www.sexandpodcasting.com pointed at the new site when I was ready to go.

In order to preserve the URL of the RSS feed for subscribers, I created a directory/document in the new site that mimicked the RSS feed URL in the old site. In my case, the feeds were as follows;

www.sexandpodcasting.com/rss.xml -- the "public" URL that people subscribe to -- in reality a redirect to...

feeds.feedburner.com/SexAndPodcasting -- the Feedburner-feed URL. Feedburner is looking at...

www.sexandpodcasting.com/modules/rss/rss.php -- the RSSfit-generated RSS feed on the Xoops site, which I mimicked by creating stub directories and a document in the new site, which was redirected (in IIS) to...

http://www.sexandpodcasting.com/wp-rss2.php -- the RSS feed generated by the new Word Press software. Thus, I was able to spoof Feedburner into looking at the new feed, and not disturb either my historical statistics, or the users who'd subscribed to the feed.

http://www.sexandpodcasting.com/modules/news/ -- I set up a dummy directory in the WP folder and redirected it to the root (http://www.sexandpodcasting.com) -- so's to provide a place for search entries to land.

Bug (or "feature") fixes

Bug -- enclosures don't work correctly, and don't delete, in WP

Word Press 1.5.2 doesn't do enclosures correctly -- I discovered this when I cut the new site in and it broke my Feedburner feed. WP had added an enclosure for each of the MP3 links I had in the article -- which violates the standard, results in an invalid RSS 2.0 feed and cause Feedburner to choke and stutter a little bit. The fix was twofold. First, I used mySQL Control Center to go into the "wp_postmeta" table and delete all the "enclosure" rows that WP had created during the import process. Second, I "broke" the auto-enclosure function in WP by using this hack by user "andper" on the WP site;

"Well, if any of you are like me and don't want the "enclosure" feature *at all*, here's an amateur solution.

All you have to do is open your wp-includes/functions.php file and take a look at line no. 766. There's a preg_match_all function which is responsible for "discovering" the audio or video file(s) linked in your post. You have to "break" that function somehow, for instance, add an additional "p" after "http" so it'll read "httpp".

Now WP won't find any of your media files linked in your post anymore, nor will it include them in your blog's feed, plus the delete button for the "enclosure" custom field in the administration panel will automagically start working."

Users get dumped into a weird place when they log in after they register

I dunno, maybe it's just me -- but the way WP handles registered users after they log in just isn't right. So I edited wp-login.php to dump users into the "write a post" page instead of the dopey Dashboard page:

change line 159 from
$redirect_to = 'wp-admin/';
to
$redirect_to = 'wp-admin/post.php';

Surprises

Sex and Podcasting is a podcast site which has about 1200 users as I write this -- so one of the things I was trying to do was avoid disturbing the RSS feed. I thought I had it nailed. All the entries were the same, the dates were the same, etc. But I didn't, and as a result the whole RSS feed was republished as "new stuff" for people who had subscribed.

This probably isn't a real big deal for most folks, but because I have almost 30 shows in the RSS feed, and each show is about 10 mBytes, I launched a storm of downloads against my server. Mostly this is because the bulk of my subscribers are using iTunes as their RSS reader and lots of those folks have iTunes set to the "download everything that's new" setting. So I kicked off about 200 GIGA bytes of downloads. Argh. My abject thanks to the folks at IP House (IPHouse?) for their patience.

Getting images to upload in a Windows environment

I had all kinds of trouble getting the "upload" function to work in my Windows environment. I got a message that included the string "upload.php on line 170 can't open stream" which turned out to be a permissions problem -- the folder that gets the uploaded files needs to have Write permissions assigned to the Internet Guest Account (IUSR_blahblahblah). I spent a whole hour banging away on the same directory in a different blog (mine instead of Richard's -- gah).

I didn't like the native upload module -- it works, but it's really bare bones so I went hunting for a plug-in and came across PhotoPress which did all the stuff I wanted. But both the native module and Photopress had all kinds of trouble creating the thumbnails -- bombing with errors like "Filetype not supported. Image not resized". Turns out that was caused by my PHP configuration. I didn't have an extension called the GD library turned on. Here's the post that got me squared away. In my case I didn't have an "extensions" subdirectory of C:/PHP directory on my machine so I had to;

-- create the "extensions" directory,

-- go grab the php_gd2.dll file from my PHP distribution download,

-- put it in the new directory,

-- edit c:/windows/php.ini to uncomment that php_gd2.dll extension, and

-- edit the extension_dir = "c:/php/extensions"

All good now.

Getting the whole post into the in the RSS feed

I ran into a problem with the tags in the RSS feed -- it was always using the excerpt even when I wanted the whole post to be in there.

Turned out to be a bug int the wp-rss2.php code. Note to self; must remember to reapply the patch contained at the bottom of this thread on FeedBurner's site -- if the thread is gone, search on "rss_use_excerpt".

Getting rid of goofy treatment of quote characters in the RSS feed

The RSS feeds have all kinds of numeric substitutions for quote characters. Got rid of them by editing the wp-includes/default-filters.php file and comenting out these two lines;

#add_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
#add_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');

that wptexturize stuff is no good for RSS feeds

Namely -- how can I make it easy to put BitTorrant versions of big files (like my Sex and Podcasting podcasts) up on my sites.

These sites of mine are built on Xoops, a very nifty, very flexible open-source content management system that can do all kinda cool stuff. But blogging isn't it's strong suit -- not terrible, but it's a little clunky at things like track-backs, RSS, etc.

I solved the "how do I do enclosures?" problem by using FeedBurner to generate the RSS feeds that you're seeing -- one of the nice things about that system is way it auto-magically does all the enclosure stuff for podcasting.

This BlogTorrant gizmo looks like it might be the add-on that will make it easy to do BitTorrants in the Xoops environment -- I will do some tinkering and update this post with a cookbook if things work out.