Weiqi Gao's Observations - pebble tag

Upgraded Weblog Software To Pebble 2.3.1

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:51:15 GMT

You won't feel it too much, but I have migrated this blog from gao-2002 (a.k.a my wife's workstation) to gao-2006 (my workstation), in order to give gao-2002 a much needed OS upgrade, from Fedora Core 6 to something newer, maybe Fedora 9.

I had a false start on Sunday when my first attempt resulted in some errors. I spent the last few evenings experimenting with different migration procedures. The final move this evening took me about 27 minutes, from 8:43pm to 9:10pm, most of the time was spent on customizing the page templates.

Here's some parameters of the new setup of this blog:

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+
cpu MHz: 2210.216
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0
Java 6 OpenJDK
Apache Web Server 2.2.3
apache2.2-common including proxy_ajp
Tomcat 5.5.26
Pebble 2.3.1
JavaMail 1.4.1

[Update] I'm having some additional challenges with the new setup. When I saved this blog entry, I received an error page. I'll see if I can get this blog entry published by some other means. The worse thing that can happen is this blog may become unreadable for a short time.

[Update] The above attempt did result in the home page not rendering correctly. I reindexed the whole blog. I hope this time it works.

[Update] OK. It finally worked. It's 11:46pm now. Time for bed.

WordPress Experiment Finished

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 14:17:45 GMT

I started a WordPress experiment 199 days ago. A couple of days ago, I quietly shut it down. I apologize to the 7 people who have subscribed to its feeds. I do appreciate the comments people have made on the two blog entries I have over there, and I will summerize those and publish them on my Pebble blog some time soon.

The main reason I shut it down is that I haven't posted any new blog entries to it, and it has become a spam magnet. The day I shut it down I received 35 comment spams (all waiting moderation, of course.)

The main reason I hadn't blogged there is that the user interface of WordPress, compared to Pebble, is not as Weiqi-friendly.

To understand the last claim, you have to understand who Weiqi is. As far as blogging is concerned, Weiqi is what you programmers call a power user. Weiqi blogs once every couple of days, and would like to get it done with the minimal amount of fuss. Weiqi doesn't read the documentation unless confronted with less than clear user interface elements, at which time Weiqi demands ultra high quality documentation that leads him to the answer very quickly. Weiqi hates unnecessarily high number of clickings above all other user interface evils. Weiqi won't mess with the configuration stuff unless he knows exactly what he gets in return. Weiqi's philosophy of personal software evaluation is "Don't hyper-analyze. Just install both, wait for a few months, and see which one you reach for when you want to get something done. The choice doesn't have to be binary."

Well, after half a year, WordPress didn't become the tool I reach for when I want to blog. About the only interaction I have with it is to go in and manage spams. And in that regard the UI is very inconvenient. I have to check the "Spam" check box for each of the 35 spams and then click on "Manage" button. The one time I went for the documentation, when I attempted to customize the UI a bit very early on, the documentation is no help at all. It's a headless mess of wiki style linksoup.

Of course all these are very subjective. WordPress may very well be the most wonderful blogging software in the world. However it has succeeded in showing me only its inconvenient side over a six months period.

I'm sorry.

Upgraded To Pebble 2.0.0-M1

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 04:41:31 GMT

I have upgraded my weblog software to Pebble version 2.0.0-M1.

I followed Simon Brown's blog entry to the letter. And the upgrade took less than two minutes. (This includes the time to open pebble.jar in Emacs to figure out the new package names for the various listeners.)

Great job Simon.

The biggest change, aside from the new theme, is that article titles are no longer hyperlinks. To view a single article, you have to click on the "#" sign near the end of the post.

Let me know of any problems you may encounter with reading this blog.

My tasks for the next few days:

Bring back Google AdSense
Re-integrate Glen Smith’s Maths Captcha patch for Pebble 1.9
Bring back my blogroll (Are blogrolls still hip?)