Major Mike’s Musings

Da da da.

I changed the disk drive, loaded the original operating system, booted it up and it worked.

I decided to upgrade the operating system and in the process, the upgrade failed because the DVD quit reading the OS 10.4 DVD. After that I couldn’t boot the iBook. I tried everything, which I won’t go into here. I even booted the iBook in target mode, booted using the iBook’s drive on my very old iMac and it worked. 

Looks like the iBook is dead. It’s old enough that it would not be worth it to take to Apple dudes for them to fix.

Da da da. Oh, well.

I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.6. It was a pretty painless upgrade. We’ll see what all that means in the days to come.

Mrs Major continues to improve. She’s ditched the cane and now walks around even better than before the surgery. She’s still a little tentative, but she doesn’t waddle any more like her knees hurt. She’s cut way down on the pain meds. Maybe she’ll take back some of the household chores.

My golf game continues to improve. I’m pleased with that.

It’s hot. 98º with 50% humidity (5:30 p.m.).¹ It seems cooler, now. Around noon it was 91º with 80% humidity. At least we’re not burning down like California. Or flooding like the midwest did.

Is it just me or are our choices for President getting worse each election? I’ve got my clothespin for my nose all ready. I haven’t missed an election since I was 21 (yes we had to be 21 to vote once upon a time) and I don’t plan to miss this one, but I’m really tempted to stay in bed on election day.

I just upgraded my main Mac to OSX 10.5. I like it. It seems to run faster and has lots of new features I like. I ran into some trouble because all of my web sites I test locally on this Mac before I do major revisions to the Internet ones. When I upgraded, none of them worked. Turns out you have to turn on the programming language and databases with 10.5. Earlier versions were automatically turned on. No big deal…just a few edits to some configuration files, but it drove me crazy for about a day and a half.

1. I’m not complaining. I love the heat [↩]

I got bored again so I changed the theme of Musings. I had to modify it a little because I didn’t like the way some stuff was displayed and it didn’t accommodate all of the plugins I have installed.

I’d also love to do a countdown for Mrs. Major’s knee replacement and for Son Major and The Major’s trip to California to work at the U.S. Open Golf Championship, but the plugin that handles that doesn’t work with this version of Wordpress. I guess I’ll keep looking for a compatible one.

I added a plugin to Major Mike’s Musings that requires that anyone making comments must be a real human. You’ve seen this on other sites. This feature displays two words from a book which you will be required to enter in order to comment. One of the works a computer can’t read.

I’m getting tired of reviewing spam posts. I’ve had over 17,000 of them. 

UPDATE: It looks like the feature wasn’t working and people couldn’t post comments. So I disabled it. It worked fine on my home server test system. Hmmmm.

First, here are some statistics from my email spam catcher, SpamSieve, for the month of March:

Filtered Mail

• 1,040 Good Messages
• 14,076 Spam Messages (93%)
• 438 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy

• 2 False Positives
• 61 False Negatives (97%)
• 99.6% Correct

To be honest, I administer two domains that get mail and I review all the misaddressed mail. Unfortunately, spammers will take a domain, like majormike.net and add a bunch of fake names in the hope that they will get lucky and come up with a real address. This tends to proliferate the number of bogus messages I have to review. But you can be sure I won’t let bzjz@majormike.net pass.

Second, I just converted the underlying software that supports this site to the latest version: Wordpress 2.5. Now aren’t you impressed? I has a few glitches, but it looks like a good product.

I did upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.2 (the latest version of the software that publishes this blog) today. The transition went smoothly with no problems.

I perceived by my earlier post that I get the most comments when I publish stuff that’s incomprehensible to most of my readers. So in an effort to generate more comments I respectfully submit the following:

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Today I made some code changes to the template that displays this site. That little guitar that displays below each post is now part of the background code instead of code in each post. The advantage is that (1) I don’t have to cut code from a text editor and paste it into each post and (2) if I want to change the icon, I can just change it on the server by uploading a graphic with the name post_bullet.png. The disadvantage is that if I change the template, I have to make code changes to a few files in the new template.

Tomorrow we upgrade to Wordpress 2.3 (If I have time).

As advertised by my host, IX Web Hosting, we were only off the air for a short while. Less than a day by my calculations. So now I can regale you with more nonsense.

I’m getting ready to change this site to newer servers at IX Webhosting. So if we go offline for a couple of days, you’ll know the reason why. Hopefully, all will go well and we’ll be offline only a short while.