a blab by idle

There were snowflakes, beautiful large heavy snowflakes, coming down as I waited for the train this evening.

You can't help but smile with snowflakes like those.

–§–

In other news, daily babble 2.0 is definitely making progress. The metablog client has been running completely stable on the new server for weeks now; soon it will be time to test the server out there. From there, it's only a matter of confidence in the DSL link before I can cut over daily babble itself.

Hopefully, there will be some extra things coming online — both old and new — when I cut over to the new server. I'm really excited about the possibilities of what I can do. As is ever the case, sometimes it's just the inspiration that's a little muddled in the meanwhile.

And, of course, I stayed up waaaaay too late hacking on the templates. You think after this many years I'd learn something….

Okay. The web server encoding is utf8. The default MT character set is utf8. The database default character set is utf8. Now, the server and connection default charactersets are even utf8. And yet, though I can hand-insert kana into the database, and cleanly input and preview kana in a blog comment, any communication between MT 3.121 and MySQL 4.1.7 seems to mangle multibyte Unicode.

So close. And yet so far away.

くそ。

Well, between a quirk in the configure arguments allowed for MySQL 4.1.7 and a bad assumption made in MT 3.1, I found the place the bug in Unicode translation was creeping in. I even came up with a workaround, but it causes a cardinal sin for me: it requires modification of MT source code, something I absolutely loathe doing.

I'll be posting that to the MT dev list soon to ask if anyone else has had to do this. (Plenty of people using PHP5 have had to do this; I just didn't find any record of other MT3 users needing this hack.)

Oh, the trick itself? Just after the DBD::mysql handle is built in lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm, you have to force a SET NAMES 'utf8' down the line. And, no, you can't override it anywhere in my.cnf; I tried seven ways to Sunday, and it just doesn't work.

If you're interested in the change in patch format, check out the extended part below.

Mad props go to Sergei Golubchik from MySQL AB (from this article) and Angie Ahl for her post last week to Web Server Talk.

Thanks to Mira for this little gem:

What do you want to do with your life?

(and, yes, I already made my list….)

Sometimes you see something beautiful, fluid and graceful, a nearly perfect capturing of a series of moments in time… you realize that this is the essence what you wish you could do, but all you can do is marvel at this brilliant execution and bow your head in tribute.

Check out Nowhere Under the Sky.

Thanks again, Mira.

BITTER is as BITTER does.

Part art, part science, part bloody stump.

Welcome back to the BITTER.

I've been having a problem with MT-Blacklist 2.x for a while now; it stopped saving my preferences.

After loads of fruitless and frustrated (and frustrating) Google and code searches, I finally found an oblique reference to the same problem with someone using Postgres — and a workaround.

It turns out that it's another bug in MT 3.1: in the mt_plugindata table, the plugindata_data column is of type mediumtext. However, there's no binary-to-text conversion performed on a Storable freeze/thaw of this data inside MT::PluginData, so any plugin using binary data has a data loss.

David had a replacement for MT::PluginData::data already written that worked like a charm for mysql as well. In effect, all it does is perform a simple pack/unpack to convert the data.

David Raynes: Thank you, dude. Seriously.

Sixapart: That's two codebase mods I've made to 3.121. Please don't let this continue! I really hope at least the Storable fix is present in the forthcoming release (3.13) that Jay announced regarding the resource drain bugs on comment firehosing.

It appears that Celebrex, the #1 prescribed COX-2 inhibitor, may not be so safe after all.

Interestingly, there is now a prescription product out to address rheumatoid arthritis that is not a COX-2 inhibitor, but rather a collection of supplements: Animi-3.

The question is, do we see this as good, as it indicates that allopathic practitioners are finally getting alternative options for treatments of systemic/pernicious conditions, or do we see this as bad, as the potential first step towards the regulation of all of our herbs and nutritional supplement choices?

Mira (responsible, it seems, for at least 30% of the nutritive content of this blog) has pointed out a visual gem from a blog entry two days ago about the fact that people will sign anything.

Right, so, apparently the dynamic address updater on fungus doesn't actually work correctly quite yet….

I think I need to fix that. Today. Even before I upgrade the BITTER.

Thanks to Crystal for getting us back on track in an IP sense.

Since the 80s, I have loved all the Art of Noise albums except for one: "In No Sense? Nonsense!" I had always felt that it was a complete walk-away from everything artful and good that they had ever done.

So why is it that I suddenly hear it as a completely different album, and can't seem to get enough of it? That I find "Opus For Four" actually the richest, most textured of that entire series of works?

One might ask if I also had a dislike of "The Seduction of Claude Debussy" the first time I heard it. Yet, no; I emphatically loved that album and was mesmerized from the first spin. Still, no love lost back then for Nonsense.

Until now.

Funny how that happens sometimes.