Jason’s Random Thoughts

Sitting in the crowded room, the candidate is just a number. Yet another who awaits the opportunity to be brought out of the shadows and into the light. Waiting to prove their worth. Waiting to share their story. Having both a name and potential, it lies in a constant state of wait.

Yet sitting in this purgatory for too long can lead to something quite devastating. Their prime long past, the potential is gone. Usurped by the endless passage of time. Once this happens there is no hope remaining for the idle rookie. Instead it’s pushed out of the way. Away from the eyes of those who control the fate of all draft picks. Away, that is, until they’re lost to the sands of time … recorded only in the backup of some database. Likely never to be seen again.

How many picks have been left behind? How many have been forgotten. Given enough time, a million monkeys on a million keyboards could create something better, but the candidate isn’t waiting for a monkey; it’s waiting for it’s creator. It’s waiting for me.

It’s a dangerous thing to be a draft.

Okay, perhaps the intro is a little melodramatic, but if our drafts were sentient, they might just feel this way.

A few months ago I had shared some numbers involving the number of drafts I have at any given time and, although I’m no longer writing for four websites, I hate to say that there are currently 182 drafts stored in my database, and another 73 on my PDA. On top of this, there’s also a list of potential topics that I keep with various notes on each one. The list for this site contains 27 items, with about three thousand words in notes.

やばい やばい。

It’s almost embarrassing when I think of how many posts lie in a half-written state. So much content has been created, yet something else would often come up or stand in the way of turning these incomplete or unpublished works into drafts waiting for their eventual escape from the purgatory that is unpublication. The list includes topics such as why I could never marry a Japanese man (if I were a woman), the impact of perception in the senseless “War on Carbon”, the best place to buy computer equipment in Japan, the 10 reasons Doraemon would make a better Prime Minister than Yasuo Fukuda … the list goes on and on.

So why aren’t any of these articles being published?

The Three Rules

There are very few rules that I follow on j2fi.net, but three are quite important in the grand scheme of things: timing, timing and timing.

Most of the posts I’ve written for this site have been composed anywhere from a day to a month in advance. This gives me the advantage of having posts appear semi-regularly on here, while freeing up my weekdays for important tasks like studying Japanese import laws, the Japanese language, or just relaxing with my wife. However, the drawback to this is that time-sensitive posts (something discussing current events) can appear several days after an event, or could push other posts to later release dates. While this is usually a non-issue, having two or more time-sensitive posts interfere with each other can be a problem. This often results in a post I consider less interesting to be put off for a day, or pulled back to being a draft. If a post is yanked off the release track, though, chances for re-scheduling are somewhere between slim and none. Multiply this by two years and an erratic writing schedule, and it’s very easy to rack up over 250 unpublished or incomplete posts.

The Three R’s

So with so much incomplete data hogging the database, what is a blogger to do? Well, if you’re like me, there’s always the Three-R’s method: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Reduce - When in doubt, delete. It’s the fastest way to manage a ballooning draft post count. On top of this, you don’t have to waste time worrying about cleaning the posts for a future release date.

Reuse - If you’ve written a post on a subject, but the content isn’t quite what you want, scrap the content and reuse the topic. There’s no need to waste a perfectly good talking point.

Recycle - The content has been written. The ideas recorded. Why not use them at some point in the future? If you can reuse a subject, reusing sections of unpublished posts and pages should be no problem as well. Even if something is written for a particular moment in time, it can be adapted to suit most new requirements.

The Three Posts

Putting these Three R’s to good use, I plan on deleting, re-writing and recycling three of the aging articles I’ve written and left unpublished over the last two years. At first, the idea to have a poll embedded in this post had crossed my mind. However, it would be difficult for anyone to suggest which articles should be deleted, re-written or recycled without first publishing them. So, after using a quick random number program with the draft numbers inserted, here are the lucky winners:

Reduced - False Advertising is SOP In Japan
Reused - Changing the ISS from Space Station to Space Ship?
Recycled - 10 Reasons Doraemon Would Be a Better Prime Minister Than Yasuo Fukuda

I’ll get these cleaned up in the next few days, and eliminate the depressing post on the extent of false advertising in this country. This could also be a good time to examine the other 252 drafts awaiting a decision.

How many drafts do you have patiently waiting in the background? How do you decide what can stay and what must go?

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Despite my seemingly endless criticisms of the platform, WordPress is still one of the easiest and most versatile platforms available for companies and individuals who want to host their own website. That said, one criticism that many people have had over the last few years involves the number of hoops a person must go through when upgrading to the next release. While the developers at Automattic have certainly done their part to simplify the process, many people opt to use their older, and still reliable, releases. But what can a person do when they attack an upgrade using a “Scorched Earth” methodology?

I recently faced a number of complications after bringing a heavily modified 2.1 WordPress installation up to the most current 2.6 but, after a 48-hour “time out”, I managed to approach the problem in a rational fashion to solve some of the frustrations I encountered. These issues ranged from something as minor as having my Akismet spam counter set to zero, to a major issue regarding the uploading and insertion of images.

Hopefully this quick little ‘How To’ will help others experiencing the same hiccups.

Starting From Scratch (Scorched Earth)

Before getting too far into this, I should tell you that many of these issues had occurred because I decided to create a new installation of WordPress with a fresh database, then migrate the data over. I’ve done this on a few occasions in the past without so much as a beep, but it was quite a bit different when I decided to upgrade my personal blog.

The reason I had approached the upgrade with a blank database was to accomplish two very important goals: switching from a PHP 4.2 database to a 5.0, and to prevent any unreversable changes that would have occurred had I updated my WordPress database.

By going this route, I needed to first export my existing WordPress data as an XML file. This is done via the Manage / Export screen and takes about 3 minutes. I had 625 posts and 1,492 comments to export, so it wasn’t too much data … about 8 megabytes.

If you plan on doing the same, please keep in mind that the export screen only covers posts, pages, categories and comments. If your database carries any other information you’d like to keep, that will need to be done manually via PHPmyAdmin, Query Browser, or your MySQL tool of choice.

All in all, building a new WordPress blog with a fresh database and importing the existing data was pretty quick. It was all set and running in under 5 minutes.

Why Can’t I Upload Pictures?

The first issue I had uncovered was the fact that I couldn’t upload pictures when writing posts. Regardless of which image uploader I used, nothing wanted to work. No error message was given, and few people had an idea as to what might be causing it. Luckily, I stumbled upon this article on the WordPress forums where some others were having a similar problem. In their case, though, they were putting media uploads in an alternate directory … most commonly called /images/. I was using the default /wp-content/uploads/ directory, though? So would their reported fix work for me as well?

Oddly enough, yes.

The solution is to specify the full path of your uploads directory. Although this should not be necessary for default folders, my image problem quickly became a thing of the past after setting the option.

Where the Heck Is My RSS?

The next infuriating issue I had noticed had to do with my RSS feeds, or rather, the lack of. This mess up was of my own doing, though.

It seems that FeedBurner doesn’t like it when feeds are longer than 512 KB. I had made the foolish mistake of increasing my feed to show the last 25 posts but, thanks to the length of the articles, this was far more info than FB was willing to take. After bringing this back down to the default of 10, the problem disappeared.

Akismet Shows Zero Spam Captured

If you love numbers, seeing something reset to zero can be a little disheartening. This is something that will only happen if you’re starting with a blank database but, luckily, this can be corrected with a simple SQL query. Simply run the following code against your WordPress database:

UPDATE {Database Name} SET `option_value` = ‘{Spam Count}‘ WHERE `wp_options`.`blog_id` =0 AND CONVERT( `wp_options`.`option_name` USING utf8 ) = ‘akismet_spam_count’ LIMIT 1 ;

Replace the database name with your own, and the spam count to whatever you’d like. Be sure to set your spam count to a number between 0 and 4,200,000,000 (give or take) to avoid counting issues.

Not Done, Yet

There are a few issues that remain, but I think these will be resolved pretty soon. One that bothers me quite a bit is the fact that I couldn’t update my FireStats installation. I haven’t yet invested too much time into the matter but, without FireStats, I’m now mostly dependent on the less accurate statistics provided by Google Analytics. On top of this, I’m no longer able to log in to the admin screens with Opera Mobile. I hope to find a solution to this relatively soon, but might not need one if I can update Embink to display this data quickly enough.

Have you upgraded to 2.6? Were there any complications?

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Along with the unrelenting summer heat, news stories are often replete with strange tales and even stranger people. This summer is no different as former NASA astronaut and 6th human on the moon, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, claims that extra-terrestrial beings have visited the Earth on several occasions and there is a global cover-up of the situation in progress. Naturally, representatives at NASA were quick to play down the comments saying that they neither track nor communicate with non-human on this planet or anywhere in the universe. However, who are we to believe? A man who holds the (human) record for longest-ever moon walk, or a huge government funded organization that seems to be so cash strapped they can hardly afford to keep their vending machines stocked?

It really depends on whether you believe God stopped making intelligent creatures after Adam and Eve disappointed Him by eating from the Tree of Knowledge or not.

I wrote about this topic back in February when an abnormal number of UFO’s were reported in Japan, so I won’t discuss the same topics as I did then. Instead, it would be much more interesting to look at the types of comments people are leaving on News.com’s Australian website. Of the 104 responses that were recorded at the time, only four types of responses seem to exist for the subject: aliens don’t exist because it’s not in my preferred religious text, aliens have a strong probability of existing, aliens should help us clean up the mess we’ve created in the name of progress and, aliens are here and have been here for quite some time.

Aliens Don’t Exist, Dammit!

Of all the people that wrote comments adamantly refusing to believe that aliens exist, I think I could sit down and have a conversation with only one of them. This isn’t because I strongly believe that alien life exists in some form somewhere in the universe, but because I have a really hard time carrying on a conversation with someone who can believe something so passionately while backing it up with zero information … refutable or not. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for people that can take the words contained in a religious text and keep them close to their heart. However, for someone who has “learned” how to read a Bible, Qur’an, Torah or another text in a very particular fashion to glean meaning and insight into how we should treat ourselves and each other, I’m surprised that they cannot see the potential for something a little more fantastic.

Nowhere does it explicitly say in any (respected) religious text that I’ve read that extra-terrestrial life does not exist anywhere. Nowhere does it say that we are the sole intelligent beings in the universe, either. We were given domain over the Earth and all the creatures that swim, crawl, slither, walk or fly on it … but that’s about it. It says nothing (specifically) about other planets, star systems or galaxies. So to think that God was so impressed with His work that he stopped after the “colonization” of Earth would be a little egotistical.

If anyone knows of a religious text that explicitly states otherwise, please enlighten me. I’ve studied religions for years and not found direct evidence against the possibility of extra-terrestrial beings.

Aliens Should Help Us

The next group of people are the ones that I respect the least. They claim that aliens should help us with global warming, wars, famines, disease and just about everything else that has caused a headache or two for the human race. While some non-human entities may be capable of something approaching empathy and performing ideological acts for the betterment of a given species, why should it be the responsibility of another intelligence to correct our own mistakes? Unless they’re responsible for creating disease, floating islands of trash, or depleting the ozone layer, we should not be interfered with. How the heck can we expect to be taken seriously on an inter-planetary level if we’re just seeking bailouts?

The last thing Earth would want to do is become the Zimbabwe of the Milky Way. It’s bad enough we haven’t learned from our own recent past, so why complicate things by inviting non-humans to “guide us towards a higher degree of enlightenment.” While there could be some immediate benefits for the human race, the long term effects of such dependence would be our undoing.

Aliens Have Been Here All Along

Since before the written word, civilizations have claimed to have been visited by strange people who claimed to be from the stars, or would leave behind intriguing items. The Mayans mentioned the Popol Vuh. The Chinese met the Dropa. Other cultures met beings they referred to as giants who would often mate with the locals in exchange for agricultural tools, mathematics or other bits of knowledge. Are aliens truly responsible for the development and advancement of human kind?

Let me bust out my trusty Delorean and find out.

Seriously, though. To think that human advancement is completely dependent on the table scraps of another species would be an insult to every inventor and deep-thinker that has ever lived. While it’s true that some of our discoveries seem to have cropped up all over the world at roughly the same time (within 500 years of each other in most cases), to think that we’d still be living in caves and hunting animals with sharpened sticks without the aid of sexually promiscuous visitors who continue to steal us away to probe the asses of our species’ verbally challenged population is little more than fantasy.

Ah, but that’s just what “they” want us to believe, right?

Aliens Exist, But They’re Not On Earth

This is the camp that I fall into. I strongly believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, but I don’t think there’s a foreign entity on this planet right now. This isn’t because of the technical challenges involved with sending a crewed vehicle through the void of space, or even the logistical challenges involved in dealing with an unfortunate death or discovery. Instead it’s because it wouldn’t make logical sense for any species that has come this far to stay put on our planet. We can be observed from the moon. We can be observed from somewhere beyond that point, too.

There’s plenty of information leaking from our satellite transmissions that, unless they needed a living and breathing sample of our species, they would not need to risk being spotted by our sensitive and oh-so-paranoid detection systems. We have countless examples of what happens when we interfere with another culture … even if it’s with good intentions or in the name of science. Anyone from a species that has conquered interstellar will, hopefully, not want to pollute their research with such a dangerous interaction between the observer and the observed.

The Secret’s In The Pudding, But I’ll Never Tell…

The conversations that often ensue as a result of mentioning UFOs or alien life are often all the same. In each case, you have someone from one of the four categories stating their opinion, followed by very little (if any) fact. The proof is in the pudding. While I believe that aliens exist, not once did I state a fact that proves such a thing. Which leaves us right back at square one.

When we don’t know something, we make something up that fits into our viewpoint of the universe around us. When we do find intelligent life in the depths of space one day, perhaps they can shed some light on our paranoia. Until then, we should focus on fixing our own problems rather than talking down to those who have a different opinion.

What’s your stance on the existence of E.T.s? Do they exist? Have they visited us?

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I didn’t think it was going to happen … but I’ve finally upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. It wasn’t easy, and I’ve been swearing like an Irishman as issue after issue was uncovered when I started to bring all of my data over. What was the root cause of all my problems? It seems I has having some severe troubles with my database.

Yesterday I had gone through the upgrade process a total of four times, each time with varying degrees of success. Late last night, I managed to get most of the site operational after several hours of downtime, but I had lost all my categories, some of my Japanese characters, and a good portion of my hair. This morning, I decided to do something I should have done in the first place: upgrade my dev environment for the new version with my live data, copy the stuff right over, update where necessary, then just push the whole thing over the existing website.

Dev Loves 2.6

I’m usually testing the new releases of various software packages in enclosed environments, and seeing just how easy it will be to upgrade some of the sites that I’m responsible for. In 95% of all cases, upgrades with backup data go flawlessly. The only time I’ve run into some major issues is when I’m trying to upgrade something that needs very particular settings in the php.ini file (but I’ve recently discovered how to get around that on my server). For this reason, I’ve often reported that an updated version of some software is great, and that there were no issues when testing the updates while in the Dev environment. But, when it comes time to actually make the change, my site is down for too long, Google takes me out of their SERPs, and I spend the better part of a weekend in a foul mood as the things I want to be doing just aren’t getting done.

Fun?  Wow!

As I had mentioned earlier, the main problem appears to have involved the database itself.  I had been using a heavily modified version of WordPress 2.1 and, aside from some problems with the newly released plugins, it was working great.  I had modified WordPress 2.1 whenever a new security release would be made available for the various versions.  If 2.1 was affected by the same problem (which I would find out through various forums or sheer dumb luck), then I would update the code accordingly.  Although the 2.1.x line is supposed to receive security patches regularly, this does not seem to be a high priority for the Automattic team.  Considering how many other projects they’ve been working on, I can certainly understand the issue.  So my problem stemmed from some of the stuff I had done way back in June of last year, and it’s carried forward without many problems ever since.

So How Did I Fix It?

When a database goes awry, it’s a terrible time for anyone.  Luckily, I have lots of database tools to work with and lots of backups to restore and play with.  For me, the solution that worked the best is often lovingly referred to as “Scorched Earth.”  This essentially involves killing the database and starting from scratch.

And that’s just what I did.

Starting with a completely empty database, I installed 2.6 and then, using WordPress’ Import Utility, I imported all of my posts, pages, comments and categories to the new database.  This is a great way to quickly restore data to a new database, and it keeps any extra characters that you might be using intact.  From here, I needed to pull in all the other database tables that were used by various plugins.  This has always been the hardest part, but it’s made a trivial task with MySQL Query Browser.

Of all the plugins, the one I had the most trouble with was FireStats.  I love this application, and I had been using a really old version (with database version 6 — the current release uses 14) as it had worked perfectly for my needs.  That said, after updating the site, I wanted to have an updated stats package, too.  I have done this several times for other people’s sites without hassle, so it shouldn’t have been too much trouble for me.  Well … that was the initial idea.

After three failed attempts to upgrade my existing data, I decided to throw caution to the wind and create a seperate database just for FireStats to use.  This was incredibly simple and, after the system had created all the necessary tables, I simply forced my existing data into the new tables.  This allowed me to keep my two years of data while accepting new.

Lucky Day!

Once all of this was complete, I shut off all the plugins, re-directed the database (done in the settings), deleted the live website, moved the dev data over, and logged in to the admin screens.  Done and done.

Final Result?

It seems that everything is now working just as I would expect … except for one big area: I can’t insert images.

Once again, I can’t put images in my posts.  This is incredibly frustrating as I use at least one image in every post.  I can upload.  I can specify attributes.  But, when I go to put that image in the post, I don’t get an image.  Instead, I get an ugly depressed box that tells me it should be seeing an image.  What gives?

That said, I don’t have the time nor the energy to mess about with this right now.  I’ll take a look at correcting the matter tomorrow night while battling insomnia.

Has anyone else had problems with images in WordPress 2.6?  I’ve tried both the flash and non-flash versions to see if it was a browser issue, and I’ve tried both Opera and FireFox.  No luck for either

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The Chicago Tribune recently posted an opinion piece (Blah, blah, blog, blog) that tried to rip into microblogging, microbloggers, and pretty much everyone born after 1982. While I might not be big on the whole microblogging segment, I really don’t see why a paper that was once viewed as being one of the better publications in North America would resort to putting something of this quality on their site.

It starts out with a rather apt attempt at emulating what we might find on a person’s Twitter page or something of the sort, then gets right into the whining by saying how people that microblog think they’re more special than anyone else because we were told so right from the they were born. The unnamed author then goes on to say that pretty much every blogger is the same, and we all write the same unnecessarily boring crap with the misconception that people actually care about what we’re doing in the world. While some of us might actually post something now and again to say what we’re doing, it’s really just the younger generation that’s filling their pages with such trivial information.

But is this really something that can be put in the Chicago Tribune as an Op-Ed? Before people could put the mundane details, the exciting developments, the hopes and ambitions, or anything else that’s distinctly human online, we had the telephone. Girls would spend hours on end talking on the phone to friends, despite having just spent the better part of the day with them at school or some other location. Before the telephone was the letter. Before the letter was the face to face. But in every case, the previous methods for communicating have always played a strong part in how we communicate with each other. The newer media just let us do it differently.

What’s particularly interesting is this person’s incredibly narrow view of what blogging actually is. One glaring example of the author’s tunnel vision comes in the following paragraph:

So why blog? A. Bloggers find their lives fascinating; B. They find their lives more fascinating than others do; and C. They want to prove it—by blogging.

Wow … I find my life more fascinating than anyone else’s, which is why I post articles of semi-questionable quality on this obscure and unadvertised website? How interesting that a person who knows nothing about me could be so utterly incorrect. Of all the blogs that I read, there is only one that would fall into the category being painted with such broad strokes, and it belongs to a 32 year old man from Malaysia. Hardly the “Generation Y”, holier-than-thou, more-trendy-than-j00 kind of person that’s described in the very American editorial.

Who’s Number One?

But the unknown author does have a point: a few people do write blogs that talk about absolutely nothing, and these same blog authors are incredibly self-absorbed.

He or she then goes on to talk about a study conducted at San Diego State University that concludes that today’s young people are more narcissistic than any generation before them.

Really? I mean … REALLY?

We had a group of people less than 60 years ago who claimed to be from “The Greatest Generation” and carried the right to go gallivanting about the globe while polluting the planet with Styrofoam cups, 8 cylinder muscle cars, and disposing of just about anything once something better came out. The Greatest Generation made keeping up with the Jones’ a national pastime, for God’s sake. This same group of people then have the nerve to procreate like mad, creating a huge baby boom that will have long-lasting implications for the entire human race, all while believing they did something better than anyone else.

Did I forget to mention that this same “Greatest Generation” are also responsible for making the education system more lax, which has lead to the millions of “dumb youth” they’ve complained about? Did I also forget to mention that this same generation is responsible for first planting the concept of “you can do anything” into our brain?

How foolish we must have seemed! We listened to our elders! Those who said that we’re special and can do great things in the world!

But if we hadn’t listened to those who came before us, we wouldn’t be called “narcissistic.” We’d be called “distant”, “solitary”, “isolationists” or some other term that would grant the Greatest Generation the leave to wipe their hands of the mess they’ve created.

Ah, foolish me for saying anything bad about those who fought in the bloodiest and most preventable war in Human history. Perhaps it’s the result of the piss-poor education they’ve allowed, despite the $20,000 I paid after high school to become the anal-retentive prick that I all-too-often appear to be. Next time I’ll just make racial or sexually-oriented slurs to keep those who came before me happy.

It’s Not All About Us

Whether this person likes or dislikes blogs is really none of my concern. My main beef is with the misconception this paper allows by passing on such ill-researched articles of personal opinion. Heck, the author of this editorial is probably pissed off because they see the younger journalists and average person has a greater reach and more influence than the once great Chicago Tribune.

Print media is dying a slow and painful death, but not because of the internet. Rather than leverage the potential of this information super-highway, a large number of editors and boards of directors are sticking their head in the sand over their coming extinction.

People have blogs for any number of reasons. People post their content for any number of reasons. To say that every single blogger or micro-blogger is just talking about themselves is like saying that every Baby-boomer is selfishly taking advantage of health care. While there are some that certainly reduce the credibility of the masses, they are the exception rather than the rule.

Either way, the Chicago Tribune certainly got what it was looking for. Lots of back-links, and lots of traffic from us so-called self-absorbed and narcissistic fools.

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