Some borkage cured

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

OK, I think I’ve at least partially deborked the upgrade. There are still some problems with comments needing moderation. Holler if you notice any remaining problems. I still can’t figure out how to assign a category to a new post. I’m not sure if that’s remaining borkage or the new blog interface. (OK, got it: it’s the interface.)

The proximate cause was that the WordPress scripts did not have permission to create and drop tables. The underlying cause was a combination of classic programmer errors:
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Upgraded WordPress

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

I’ve upgraded WordPress on this site to version 2.5.1. For the first time, things did not go perfectly smoothly so please holler if you notice any problems.
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Black-necked Stilt

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

Black-necked Stilt
Black-necked Stilt, Himantopus mexicanus
San Joaquin Wildlife Refuge, 2008-04-27

Beijing Evening 7

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

Dateline: Beijing, Wednesday, April 23. We ate an early dinner at the Rathskellar again (not its real name, but I don’t know what else to call it.) We had the fish hot pot again. Then we grabbed a cab for the other side of town to catch the “Peking Opera for Dummies” at the Liyuan Theatre. We planned to wander around a bit before the show, but we hit the worst traffic we’d seen the whole trip, and got there with not so much time to spare. The folks we were planning to go with never showed up. I hope they just didn’t come instead of being stuck in traffic for two hours and still missing the show.
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Beijing Freedom and Security

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Reflecting back on my recent trip to Beijing (more on that still to come as I get time to write up my thoughts) one of the most striking things was the contrast between personal, day-to-day freedom in Beijing and the United States (especially NYC/Los Angeles/Orange County). I’m not talking about political representation or freedom to read whatever I felt like, but just the simple ability to go whereever I felt like going without being hassled. To my surprise, by that measure Beijing came off way better than the United States does these days, and that doesn’t speak well for the U.S.
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Wireless Menu Icons

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Sometimes when trying several wireless networks before finding one that works, I connect to one that gives me an icon like this in my menu bar:

classic Mac in a gray piece of pie in the Finder’s menu bar at the top right of screen

Basically it looks like a small classic Mac in a gray piece of pie. Does anyone know what this means? All I’ve figured out is that the connection usually (always?) doesn’t work.