Journal de Jacques

I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Today (Saturday) I will be moving Troppo to a new server. During the day you will see intermittent connectivity. Once we’ve moved across I’ll update this announcement.

Update: Ahem. The move will take longer than anticipated — it will probably happen Sunday instead.

Update 2: To prevent people being from being upset by their bon mots going missing, I’ve temporarily suspended commenting while the posts and comments are moved to the new server.

Update 3: Failure. Attempt 1 used the native Wordpress WXR export/import toolset, which didn’t work. Attempt 2 (today) broke the export/import down per author, which didn’t work. Most annoyingly it strips out <embed> tags of the sort used for YouTube videos.

It looks like I will need to do it “the hard way”, which involves dumping and loading databases after passing them through some data-munging gymnastics. So it looks like troppo will be staying where it is for another week.

I’ve re-enabled comments.

Given that Troppo has relaxed its comments policy, some of you may be puzzled as to why your comments weren’t being posted.

Well there’s two things. First, the Akismet anti-spam service still sometimes comes up with false positives which need to be fetched from the spam bin.

The second thing is that the Wordpress default is to require at least one comment from a ‘new’ commenter to be approved before they go through “on the nod” in future.

I’ve just cleared out about 14 comments from the moderation queue and will keep an eye on it over the next few days.

A while ago I asked my loyal readers (both of you) to help me decide on the best course for the next few years of my life.

The results are in: I have accepted a fulltime position at the Frontier Group here in Perth, and I have accepted a position at UWA as an Honours student. It’s going to be an exciting year.

If you are allowing larger-than-default files to be uploaded to an nginx server with PHP FCGI, you need to alter both the php.ini and the nginx.conf.

In particular, for nginx.conf, you need to use the client_max_body_size directive to set the permissible maximum upload size.

A lot of folks on Facebook have been sending me links for a new website called “Menzies House”. According to the blurb, it’s the “leading Australian blog for conservative, centre-right and libertarian thinkers and activists”, which must come as news to the mob at Catallaxy (which is still in technical exile).

A perfunctory investigation reveals that the domain name is registered to one Henry Marsh on behalf of the Dallan Investment Trust. Who they are, Google doesn’t know. The Australian Business Register says they’re in SA.

I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down a good initiative, but nevertheless I will wait to see how it pans out. I dislike inorganic ventures, website-wise, and pre-emptively declaring yourself “the leading” anything before you even launch is suspiciously marketer-esque. Not my favourite profession.

Update: Tim Andrew spills the beans.

I’ve changed my main programming font from Bitstream Vera Sans Mono to Inconsolata.

The latter is slightly neater and more compact than the former, but I will always retain fond memories of Vera.

For so long as I can remember, Darwin has been a cosmopolitan small city. Of Australia’s capital cities it has the highest fraction of people born overseas. In particular there are large contingents of Darwinites from south east asia.

I saw this item in on the NT News website about Darwin’s burgeoning Indian community getting called by their relatives in the old country. This part struck me first:

Territory residents have had to explain how Darwin is actually a long way from Melbourne, where a series of attacks on people of Indian heritage has led to threats of reprisals from extremists in India.

I was tempted to make a snide comment, but in fairness I don’t know any Indian geography. I know that they have cities called Mumbai and Dehli, but I wouldn’t know where to point to on a map of India. So I can understand the confusion about Darwin and Melbourne.

This part rang true:

While Indian media has been attacking Australia over the bashings, Dr Sharma saw positives in the situation for the Territory – particularly for attracting Indian students to Charles Darwin University, where he works.

“I guess there will be positive spinoffs if Darwin is seen as a safe place,” he said.

He’s right. Charles Darwin University is still a small underachiever in Australia’s education market. Part of this is the simple realities of being in a remote capital and having a poor reputation. It doesn’t help that the administration is so Kafkaesque at times. But it already attracts a lot of students from overseas and a bit of carefully targeted advertising in India might attract some more. Perhaps they could link up with the local Indian community to work out how best to go about it.

My calculations say that between expected expenses, required savings and HECS debt payments, I need about 90 weeks to “clear the deck” and get into positive net worth territory.

At which point I need to salary sacrifice like a madman, because my super is way behind the average.

Google’s announced that they were the subject of a precise and sophisticated attack, apparently aimed at getting access to the GMail accounts of pro-democracy critics of the Chinese Communist regime, both living in China and abroad.

Google don’t think that the accounts were compromised but can’t be sure.

In response Google have said that they are considering pulling out of China entirely — shutting down the self-censored Google.cn website and closing their China office.

It’s about bloody time they realised they’re dealing with gangsters and thugs.

Update: Google arch-rival Microsoft have said that the attack may have exploited a hitherto unknown flaw in Internet Explorer. They’ve been working with Google on the whole situation. It’s heartening.