Apparently, it really does taste like penguin pee (and not of the blessed variety), so I’m keeping this one in the cellar as a collector’s item only.

Holy Penguin Pee
by jdubflickr

I’ve been a very happy Linode customer for two years, enjoying excellent network and host reliability, and their occasional loyalty upgrades. You know, 20% RAM here, 20% HDD there. They’re very good to us.

So imagine my surprise and pleasure this afternoon when I noticed their 100% RAM and HDD plan upgrade… which they’ve passed on to all their loyal customers too! HOLY COW!

On Wednesday, Pia celebrated my birthday by making beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes for dinner. Being a vegetarian, she ate fake plastic bangers and mash. Heresy! She gave me a mighty-fucking-huge-lump-of-granite mortar and pestle. It mashes, it squishes, and makes pesto in three different ways! The Ubuntu team didn’t give me a final release to play with (as planned six months ago), but managed to push out a beta instead. It’s the thought that counts, right?

We picked up our LoveSac today. The soft and scrumptious mocha corduroy cover has been taunting us for a few weeks now, so it was very satisfying to finally get our hands on the innards. All the massaging, fluffing (not that kind!), kneading, rolling, stomping and diving provided some much needed physical activity and entertainment after a day of planning the lca2007 web presence. Jaq took a bunch of great action (and luxurious inaction) shots.

Right now, I’m curled up in 8’ of pure SuperSac bliss!

Holy shit! These awesome looking Australian-made DomeShells have been tested against the Building Code of Australia, and have a C1 cyclone rating. Pretty sweet specs given recent experiences in Queensland and the USA. Oddly enough, the project comes out of the Queensland University of Technology.

I totally want one. Two, actually — I’d attach a 7 to a 10, and put some kind of awning over the gaps at either side — though the three-dome design pictured here looks pretty rad. The on-site construction is clever: The shell is made by spraying foam on an inflated mold, then they apply concrete to the inside and outside. Pneumatic house production! Neat-o and futuristic.

Next, I want a flying car to put in my DomeShell garage.

Pia kissed me goodbye this morning and flew to Hobart. By lunch time, it was just Another Busy Day at Pants Palais.

It has also been suggested that I go and “do something to make opensource competitive”. So, stay tuned for an interesting announcement from the GNOME Foundation in the coming weeks.

We’re going to be using mod_rewrite, and it’s often very helpful to watch the rewrite logs to make sure you’re doing the right thing, so I always put commented out rewrite log settings in my configurations.

RewriteEngine On
#RewriteLog /srv/example.com/log/rewrite.log
#RewriteLogLevel 5

Jaq directed me to mod_rewrite’s very cute RewriteMap feature, when I was trying to translate pyblosxom’s three-letter month strings to numeric months.

RewriteMap monthmap txt:/srv/wordpress/monthmap
RewriteRule  ^/blog/([0-9]{4})/([A-Z][a-z]{2})(/?.*)$  /blog/$1/${monthmap:$2}$3 [R=permanent]

The monthmap file looks like this:

Jan             01
Feb             02
Mar             03

… and so on.

Then we get into the meat of each post’s URL redirection. My pyblosxom posts were given UNIX timestamp names, so this ends up being very simple. I tweaked the WordPress RSS importer to make sure that each post slug (or ‘post_name’ in the database) was set to the UNIX timestamp filename I had used in pyblosxom. That means I can pretty well rely on any 10 digit string to be the name of one of my posts, so figuring out the redirects is just a matter of handling all the strange pyblosxom URL forms, and passing the 10 digit string to WordPress.

RedirectMatch permanent  /([0-9]{10})$  /blog/index.php?name=$1
RedirectMatch permanent  /([0-9]{10}).html$  /blog/index.php?name=$1
RedirectMatch permanent  ^/blog/category/.*?/([0-9]{10}).*$  /blog/index.php?name=$1

If you didn’t use easily machine readable post names, you will probably have to change the URL base of your blog, especially if you’d used pyblosxom categories. I found it quite difficult to handle my categories, so I had to do some ugly custom redirects for each base category name:

RedirectMatch permanent  ^/blog/((issues|people|projects).*?)/index.html$  /blog/category/$1/
RedirectMatch permanent  ^/blog/((issues|people|projects).*?)/?$  /blog/category/$1/

Hopefully, like Pia, you didn’t use categories in pyblosxom at all, so you don’t have to worry about this crap.

Finally, we have to handle the RSS feed. pyblosxom (by default) uses a query string to indicate the ‘flavour’, so we have to do some funky mod_rewrite foo:

RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/blog
RewriteCond  %{QUERY_STRING}  flav=rss
RewriteRule  ^(.*?)/?$  $1/feed/? [R=permanent]

(Very astute readers will understand the semantic difference between what that means in pyblosxom, and what you’d get in WordPress. I wasn’t too concerned about such a tiny edge case, myself.)

I had to use some tricks to get everything imported into WordPress in a useful way. Firstly, I modified rss2renderer.py to spit out my entire blog history. Then I modified the RSS importer to set ‘post_name’ from the imported <guid> element, allowing me to redirect based on the pyblosxom entry name.

Why bother? Because cool URIs don’t change.