One of the “fun” things about build/release work is double-checking that your change hasn’t screwed-the-pooch and left out whole directory branches as a result of a late-night one-last-change change :)

The following command has become a staple in my toolkit:

diff -rbq directory1 directory2

This runs diff recursively (-r) across two directories opening files in binary mode (-b) and only spits out differences (-q)

So when I goof, it shows up quickly :)

I was listening to one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts (can’t remember if it was net@nite or MacBreak Weekly) and one of his regulars Merlin Mann was talking about wanting to try out a tumblelog.

Tumblelogs are not new in any sense of the word as they have been around in their “modern” form since 2005 (see Red Handed for a brief intro or even the first that I know of Anarchaia and also Projectionist.

The last one, Projectionist, I would have to say is one of my favorites and it’s one of the few that are in my daily feed-reader hit list.

I think that the idea for tumblelogs can be traced to a number of bots that have been used to post to a website from IRC – a good example of that is The Daily Chump bot (started around 2001 as far as I can tell) and on their page they credit the idea to a bot written in Squeak (which looks to go back to 1999).

Anyway, back to my original point.

Basically I found it very interesting that early in the week one of the Internet “celebs” hits on something they think is new and within a couple of days it’s spreading across the blogosphere. I guess I was privy to seeing this meme take shape and, for me, it was odd seeing something spread that has been around a while. I guess I’m missing what the tipping point was in this case.

The really crazy part is that I’ve been working on some personal code that does some of what tumblelogs do – only my code isn’t limited to pushing text to a weblog.

After spending more time than I wanted trying to get pyblosxom to work the way I wanted it to, I finally just broke down and installed Wordpress.

Not because of any major failing of pyblosxom – heck it handled my journal needs for 3 years now and I’m sure it would have continued to do so if my needs hadn’t changed.

Wordpress *just works* and is very actively supported — I’m getting to the point in my life/career where I need to *do* things with my tools, not tweak and poke the tools to do things.

p.s. oh yea, trying to post this with ecto :)

Lately I’ve been meaning to increase the frequency of my blog entries but I have been hitting a wall when it comes to pushing the new entries to my web server. Up until recently I would have to do the following to create a new entry:

1. ssh to server where blog mirror is located
2. create a text file with the entry (named a certain way)
3. push the file to the web server
4. spot silly typos, edit and do #3 again

All of this is rather tedious and has been solved any number of ways so I finally decided to upgrade pybloxsom to the latest version so I can take advantage of the metaWeblog API and the fact that Ecto understands that API.

Now that pybloxsom has been updated I’ve been trying to convince ecto to play nice with the server with varying degrees of luck.

p.s. this is the second time I’ve created this entry – it seems that while ecto *thought* it had published the entry, it wasn’t actually *on* the server.

p.p.s still have no idea why it won’t post – I see the apache log entries but no file is created. Going to have to dig into pyblosxom logging.

Now I know why it won’t post – permissions on the category directory was preventing it!! Who knows why an error wasn’t generated but I suspect a very liberal try:except: that I’m looking at right now.

I just spent the last 30 or so minutes scanning the Pyblosxom user list archives trying to figure out what plugin to use to get a post-date *and* an update-date metadata item for an entry. I wanted to use this because I noticed that when I edited the previous entry with ecto the Atom feed shows both values as the same!

I had solved this in a way using the filename-is-mtime plugin (I forget the real name) but using ecto I don’t have any control over the filename (or at least I haven’t found out how.)

This just means I need to make sure all my entries are good ones ;)