OK, the upgrade seems to have worked – but be careful

I think this blog is back to a working state now after a slightly worrying upgrade process. Those of you who plan to upgrade tp WordPress 2.1 need to be careful. In particular, if you use the Sidebar Widgets feature, you must pay particular attention to the order in which you deactivate your plugins. I’m not exactly sure what I did, but I usually run about a dozen plugins, and halfway through the process of deactivation the WordPress dashboard stopped working. Oops. I worked around the problem by going into the httpdocs/wp-content directory and renaming plugins as Xplugins. Then I unpacked the new distribution, which overwrote the existing WP files and created a new plugins directory. (WP 2.1 ships with a new version of the Akismet spam-blocker.) Next I ran the upgrade script, activated Akismet, and verified that baseline operation was correct. Only then did I restore my old plugins from Xplugins to plugins, activating and testing each one. I didn’t restore those plugins that I wasn’t planning to use. (Before I began the upgrade, I printed out the Plugins dashboard page, so that I could see exactly which plugins were in use.)
The only other oddity was that I had previously organized my blogroll using a set of pseudo-categories that didn’t show up in the category list. Somehow the upgrade process merged these pseudo-categories into my main category list. I took the opportunity to recategorize my blogroll, and everything looks OK. I decided not to reactivate a few features that weren’t much used by my readers – things like registering for comment notification. Let me know if you run into any problems.
There are some nice features in the new release. The one that is most immediately obvious to me (as a Mac user) is that the HTML formatting controls which used to work only in Firefox now appear in Safari. Comment and post management is also substantially improved.
UPDATE: One last warning. If you use the “bookmarklet” technique [a fragment of Javascript invoked via a browser bookmark] to blog from your web browser, you’ll need to replace your old script with a new one. Delete the old one from your bookmark bar, then log in to the dashboard, choose Write, and scroll down. Then just follow the instructions.

Al Stewart reissues

For all Al fans out there: all of Al’s albums are being reissued with bonus tracks. Every one. They should be available in May-June. I think I have them all, but the remastering is likely to make me go for an update….
UPDATE: They may be out as soon as February – we’re getting conflicting information. And there are 32 bonus tracks altogether, and I know that there are some I don’t have, so…

Distractions

I had planned to get up this morning and write a blog piece about the wonderful Al Stewart show that I attended in Bellevue last night. However when I woke up I realized that my “dream match” was on TV – Arsenal vs. Manchester United. Two great teams, both on top of their game. (I don’t follow one particular team, but I really like Arsenal, Manchester United, and Liverpool.) So blogging has had to wait until half time (i.e. now). At this point it’s scoreless, but the action has been spellbinding.
As for the Al Stewart show, here’s the setlist, taken from the Al mailing list:
Dave Nachmanoff
=====
GEORGE’S CORNER
JUDAS KISS
EL NINO
THE LOYALIST
Al Stewart with Dave Nachmanoff
=========
HOUSE OF CLOCKS
MR LEAR
PALACE OF VERSAILLES
ON THE BORDER
MARION THE CHATELEINE
NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH
MERLIN’S TIME
PRINCESS OLIVIA
BROADWAY HOTEL
(intermission)
PAINT BY NUMBERS
THE DARK & THE ROLLING SEA
MIDAS SHADOW
FIELDS OF FRANCE — Dave on piano
THE COLDEST WINTER IN MEMORY — Dave on piano
SOHO (NEEDLESS TO SAY)
YEAR OF THE CAT — intro by Dave on piano, then a key change for the rest of it on guitars!
END OF THE DAY
OK, I’ve got to get back to the second half of the match. More later.
UPDATE: What a wonderful game. The final: Arsenal 2, Manchester United 1. Excellent goals from Rooney and Van Persie, then a confident winner from Thierry Henry 2 minutes into stoppage time. (And of course Chelsea will be really glad about this after their drubbing by Liverpool yesterday.)

HDTV

I was thinking about blogging on the subject of HDTV, but Andrew beat me to the punch with a piece that says pretty much everything I was going to say. Some of the content on the Discovery Channel is mesmerising in its beauty.
And despite the fact that the set-top box, TV, home theatre, and game console all come from different vendors, it all plays together tolerably well. In fact my only complaint is with the RCA home theatre box: when I’m watching cable TV, I route the audio through the AUX1 input of the home theatre, so I’m regularly switching the unit between DVD and AUX1 modes. Every time I do this, the box forgets its settings! This means that the next time I want to watch a DVD I have to remember to wait until the disc is loaded and then reconfigure from the default (4:3/480i) to 16:9/1080i. Oh, well. At least it plays both NTSC and PAL DVDs.

Thought for the day

From a letter to The Guardian about the recent protests in London against legislation banning discrimination against homosexuals:

If those Christians protesting outside parliament against the sexual orientation regulations were the exception, why did four out of the five bishops inside parliament vote against the rules?
Andrew Copson
British Humanist Association

Random 10

  • “Night Comes On” by Leonard Cohen (from Various Positions) I’ve been listening to lots of Leonard Cohen recently.
  • “Suzanne” by Judy Collins (from Colors Of The Day)
  • “The Ballad Of Ron And Popo” by the Legendary Pink Dots (from Chemical Playschool Volume 9) Just to prove I don’t usually edit these lists: this is probably the most obscure and inaccessible track of all 398 LPD tracks in my library – and that’s saying something!
  • “Dan Solo (Album Edit)” by Groove Armada (from Northern Star) Bossa nova groove…
  • “In Formaldehyde” by Porcupine Tree (from Recordings) Interesting… this is a really nice (7/10) track that I tend to overlook, because it’s in the middle of an album of stunning tracks, all 9/10 or 10/10.
  • “Flatlands” by Delerium (from Semantic Spaces) I was discussing Delerium with Hannah just now… I like Semantic Spaces, but it’s a bit too Enigma-like to really stand out…. She recommends Chimera to see what Rhys Fulber and Bill Leeb are really doing with this project.
  • “Fly Like An Eagle” by the Steve Miller Band (from King Biscuit Flower Hour Presents…) I prefer Steve Miller’s earlier work – from Children Of The Future to Number 5, but this is a good live version of his biggest hit.
  • “All The Roadrunning” by Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris (from All The Roadrunning)
  • “Step” by Patrick O’Hearn (from THe Private Music Of Patrick O’Hearn)
  • “The Weeping Song” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (from The Best Of Nick Cave) I bought this album years ago, but I still feel that I haven’t got into it yet. I’m not sure what I need to do to make contact, but several friends assure me that it’s worth the effort.

Most compelling opening paragraph for a blog entry

How could anyone read the first few sentences of this piece in Good Math, Bad Math and not be hooked?

I decided that for today, I’d show the most thoroughly evil programming language ever devised. This is a language so thoroughly evil that it’s named Malbolge after a circle of hell. It’s so evil that it’s own designer was not able to write a hello world program! In fact, the only way that anyone managed to write a “Hello World” was by designing a genetic algorithm to create one.

Be sure to read the comments, because the author admits that he made several mistakes when writing the piece. I think that these were clearly self-protective attempts by his unconscious mind to deflect the full force of the evil….

Blackburn on Bernard Williams

While I’m on the subject of Simon Blackburn, here’s his review in TNR of the posthumous collections of essays by one of the most important philosophers of the last 100 years, Bernard Williams. I was particularly struck by Williams’ elegant treatment of the difference between science and the humanities. For example… but no, I shall resist the temptation to excerpt the piece. It’s worth reading in full.