Work bought me a Kinesis Advantage keyboard in May. (Manufacturer’s Page) These are hard enough to get used to in a qwerty layout. It has a native Dvorak mode on it so I made the Kinesis my Dvorak keyboard and the keyboard I was using my qwerty. I had been using both since May. Unplugged the qwerty keyboard the first of September.

This pic is from before I unplugged the qwerty keyboard:

Not too long ago our power supply for our macbook died. Just wouldn’t charge anymore. Go a new on on eBay for $30. Problem is that one broke this past weekend at the magnetic connection that connects to the laptop. I had the old one still and the connector was still in good shape. Naturally I just took a pair of wirer cutters to both of them. Free fix! Now I have a working power supply and a power supply cord that twice the length of the original one.

http://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/b/b8/Artwork_T%282d%29Shirt_love.png

[bp@ocean ~]# find /keywest -type f -name ‘*.tar’ -depth -exec rm -f {} \;

There are already some configuration-generation apps out there (notably Loki),

http://buildbot.net/trac/wiki/Meeting29April2010#BuildCoordination

Also, Mozilla recorded the meeting: http://videos.mozilla.org/serv/air_mozilla/buildbot080event.ogg
Loki is referenced in this video just after the 0:28:50 mark.

Thanks for the plug!

You can reconfigure your keyboard to use this layout regardless of it’s labelling. I’ve got my fedora and mac configured so I can swap between qwerty and dvorak very easily. There’s plenty of info on google on how to set this up. Once it’s setup on a mac just select your layout from the keyboard notification icon near the date/time on your menu bar. On fedora I use L-shift+Caps-Lock and it switches in and out of dvorak. I assume you can do it on windows too, but I don’t have a windows machine to try it on.

Still on lesson 17 in the tutorial so I can’t really do anything with it other than the tutorial yet… but I’m sure I’ll post a blog post in dvorak when I get to that level

ABCD: A Basic Course in Dvorak :: http://gigliwood.com/abcd/

Back up you’re data!

I need to have multiple wordpress instances installed, but I want them each to have their own vhost, I also want an easy way to maintain them (upgrades and such). I thought wordpress mu could do this… but out of the box it only supports wildecards on a single domain. (blog1.example.com and blog2.example.com and blog3.example.com) Turns out you can change 2 lines (3 if you want to clean up a view cosmetically) and you seemingly can use wordpress-mu to host multiple domains. www.blog1.com and www.blog2.com and www.blog3.com

I’ve not deployed this yet… so use at your own risk. I’ll post again later with results after I’ve migrated a couple sites to it.

The problem: wp-mu assumes in vhost mode that all your blogs are of convention {something_here}.example.com. It does this by concatenating the domain you configure at install time onto the name of any new wordpress site you setup.

The solution: tell it not to append your installed time configured domain when you setup a new site. No special magic seems to happen with a new wordpress site’s configured domain after install time.

To show how this works this we’ll setup an example.com instance of wordpress mu and replace the wildcard magic so that not-example.com is hosted by the same code base.
1. download and and install wp-mu just as they tell you to, use example.com (set a hosts record to point example.com to your localhost) You’ll now have a fresh new wp-mu blog at example.com.
2. patch the files to remove the wildcard vhost magic
a. This change will remove the hardcoded base domain and will assume the domain name you’re accessing wordpress with is the current domain. Without amking this dynamic the authentication would fail on some or all of the configured sites.

wp-config.php
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@
-define(‘DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE’, ‘example.com’);
+define(‘DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE’, getenv(‘HTTP_HOST’));

b. This is the concatenation magic that we want to prevent from happening. It undoes the “force append install-time configured domain” or in our example case, don’t force .example.com on the back of my new blog.

wp-admin/wpmu-edit.php
@@ -147,7 +147,7 @@
if( constant(‘VHOST’) == ‘yes’ ) {
-                       $newdomain = $domain.”.”.$current_site->domain;
+                       $newdomain = $domain;

c. This last one is optional. It’s just removes the domain name below the test box on the form for a new blog. This is a pure cosmetic change.

wp-admin/wpmu-blogs.php
@@ -582,7 +582,7 @@
<?php if ( constant( “VHOST” ) == ‘yes’ ) { ?>
-                                                       <input name=”blog[domain]” type=”text” title=”<?php _e(‘Domain’) ?>”/>.<?php echo $current_site->domain;?>
+                                                       <input name=”blog[domain]” type=”text” title=”<?php _e(‘Domain’) ?>”/>

3. Add a new wp site at not-example.com (add the hosts record that points to localhost again to test)
4. use the dashboard -> tools -> export to get an xml dump of a single instance blog that you can import into a wp-mu managed blog.

Like I said I’ve not actually deployed this yet, but authentication in and out of the two domains dashboard and frontend seem happy. I’ll be sure to update this post with any other issues I come across. let me know if you try it and if it works!

I don’t feel so much like and island in nowhere land any more.