Category: Site News

Something… for nothing!

The first person WHO HAS A PAYPAL ACCOUNT and types a comment in this post can have the remaining balance of my current account.
That’s right, you will be a whopping four dollars and six cents (minus transfer fees) richer, unless there is a minimum transfer amount or some such shit I’m neither aware of nor inclined to look up at this particular moment.
FREE MONEY! FREE MONEY! FREE MONEY!
…so don’t ever say I never gave you anything!
///////////////////////////////
The reason I’m doing this, according to PayPal’s help page:

Q: I’m moving to another country. How do I change my street address?
A: When moving from country to country, you will need to close your existing account and open a new account in the country where you will be residing.
For example, if you move from the U.S. to Canada, you will need to close your U.S. account and open a Canadian account. If you move from Canada to the U.S., you will need to close your Canadian account and open a U.S. account.

So fuckin’ lame… The terrorists have already won (as if this wasn’t proof enough).

For you. Who me? Yes, you.

You asked for all of my Thai-related posts; this category contains most of them: Thai Society/Culture
This is a chronological listing starting from around the time I came to Thailand to ask for Nam’s hand in marriage (spring ’05).
The other Thai-related category on my site is Our Wedding in Thailand, which is just aptly-named as hell, if I do say so myself. It contains the exploits of two elephants, several hundred wedding guests, and the imaginary Jennifer Lopez living in my head, so proceed with caution.

A quick note regarding comments

My shared server is sick, or my blogging software is messed up. It’s hard to tell, because my “country road” DSL connection is so spotty. In any case, what this means for you, loyal reader, is that comments may seem like they aren’t going through. Most of the time, however, they are. If you want to make sure your comment went through even though it’s seemed to have timed out, go ahead and hit the back button on your browser and try posting it again. I’ll clean up any double-posted comments for you afterwards. Sorry for this inefficient way of doing things, but it won’t last forever.

Ctrl + F5 are friends…

So this is the theme I have chosen after trying out 30+. I am, unfortunately, too lazy to write my own all over again. If you are having trouble loading this page or the design looks funny, hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard while pressing F5.
Note: After the upgrade, I noticed that the search function of this blog times out quite a bit. I’ll iron out the bugs eventually. In the meantime, if your search for “naked fat men” times out, hit the back button on your browser and try again.

time for a new look

Having tackled core software issues, it’s time to work on our design. I’m having a great time screwing around with different themes, and I hope Adam does, too (sorry dude, I hosed your previous theme when I overwrote the MT directory).
It might be, um… colorful around here for awhile, until we decide on our designs.

Installing MT 3.34 on Dreamhost

After spending a whole day trying to figure out the right combination of fcgi wrappers, Movable Type core file extensions, and .htaccess voodoo, I think I got it figured out. All of my problems were due to 2 main reasons:

  1. There is no version 3.34-specific documentation easily available, including on the sixapart website
  2. As always, I made mountains out of molehills. In my defense, I can’t help it – shell access and the command line get me excited…

Therefore, I offer the following advice for the installation/upgrading of MT to version 3.34 on a Dreamhost shared server:

  1. Change your domain settings to run PHP 5.2.1 and enable FastCGI support via the DreamHost Web Panel (under Domains > Manage Domains > Edit button under heading “Web Hosting”)
  2. Ignore all of the instructions on the web for enabling fastcgi for MT 3.33 (specifically, don’t change file extensions from .cgi to .fcgi or .fpl)
  3. Perform a standard MT install/upgrade (choose your own adventure: easier method that takes longer / 1337 h4xx0r)
  4. Create/modify .htaccess file in your MT core directory with the following 2 lines:

#AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler fastcgi-script .cgi
(.htaccess tip taken from here)
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Now, this seems to have worked for me, but obviously I cannot guarantee it will work for you. Also, I’m by no means an expert, I just wanted to share my experience with getting this particular version of MT running on DreamHost (who, by the way, will not help you with any 3rd party software problems that are not “One-click installs” via the Web Panel, including MT – which I totally understand but feels a bit cold when it’s 3:30 AM and you’re just sure the problem is server-related and has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.)