Michael Schubart's Weblog

Favorite line from Futurama: In the episode The Deep South, Fry is sitting on the bottom of the ocean, flirting with Umbriel, a mermaid.

Fry:

You know what I like best about you, Umbriel? You find me fascinating, even when I'm not claiming to be a jewel thief or a lion tamer...

Umbriel:

Lions? There are sealions on the land!?

Fry:

Yup. We call them "land-sealions". I tame them.

Seen in Canary Wharf area.

Doctor Fun was a great webcomic by David Farley. It ran from 1993 to 2006. It's a bit reminiscent of Gary Larson's The Far Side: Lots of cavemen, mad scientists, heads floating in jars, bears mauling campers, talking amoebae, etc. The archives are still online.

Here are three good ones I remember off the top of my head:

• 1996-10-10
• 1996-12-20
• 1994-04-08

I finally managed to stop using WordPress for my blog.

WordPress suffers (suffered?) from a stream of security holes, which require constant software upgrades. In the end, since I didn't have time to deal with all these issues, I ended up removing write permissions from the WordPress MySQL user account. This way, even if the code was broken into, at least nobody could add hidden spam posts. Every time I wanted to actually post something, I temporarily gave write permissions back, just long enough to post...

I need a setup that's just keeps working, even if I'm too busy for web site maintenance and even if I can't look after my blog for some months or even a year. WordPress is definitely not that solution, at least not if you run your own installation.

The last time I read some WordPress source code and tried to hack it, I found its quality quite low: It suffered from duplicated magic numbers and similar beginner's mistakes. Every little change I tried to make required altering the code in multiple places. Being written in a language with plenty of known issues does not help. Overall, it's software that I no longer want running on my server. I don't trust it enough.

Also, WordPress is much too complex for me because it does much more than what is really needed for a low-volume, one-person blog: A sign-up form? Mailing replacement passwords? An XML RPC interface? I don't need any of these, but they are enabled by default and each is a potential security hole.

So what do I use instead?

A very simple setup: The web server has only static files. No CGI, no PHP. I keep the blog posts in a plain text file and edit it with Emacs. I can search-and-replace in old posts without having to fiddle with SQL. The file format is org-mode compatible, so later on I might add org-mode tags to blog posts. (The format is similar to blorg's, but I'm not using that.)

A short Perl script generates the HTML pages. It runs on my notebook, not on the web server. Most of the work is done by Template Toolkit. I upload the rendered pages using rsync.

Managing comments (which is the only dynamic feature of my blog) is done by Disqus. The new setup stopped displaying any comments from before I started using Disqus. Perhaps I'll still be able to import these old comments, using this method.

Everything, including the source of my blog posts, is kept in a git repository, so if you're curious about the Perl scripts or the templates, go ahead and take a look.

This was a fun Christmas hacking project and I'm glad I don't have to deal with WordPress anymore. Maybe the new setup will even motivate me to crank up my posting frequency to more than once a year....

Seen in Meguro.

家でやろう。
Please do it at home
Please refrain from putting on make-up in the train.

Seen on the Hibiya-line.

I’ve re-enabled comments on this blog. I had to disable them a while ago because the spam was getting out of control. This time the comments will be hosted by Disqus.

What I like about Disqus so far:

• In order to leave a comment, you can create a Disqus account and edit your profile, but you don’t have to. Casual, anonymous comments are still possible. Disqus calls them “unverified”. I find this important because I never felt like creating an account for commenting on somebody else’s blog, so my readers shouldn’t have to do this, either.
• Disqus lets me export all comments, so if I decide to stop using the service, I should be able to migrate all comments into whatever I’ll use next.
• It has avatars, threaded comments, RSS feeds, mail notification, etc.
• It has an API and plug-ins for various blog systems.
• Alternatively, it supports integrating comments using JavaScript. This way, it’s possible to have comments even on a completely static web site. No CGI needs to run on the web-server. I’m planning to get rid of WordPress and make my blog completely static (more about that later), so this feature will be essential.
• Hopefully I won’t have to deal with comment spam. Let’s see how that works out…

What I don’t like:

• Disqus doesn’t have an import function yet, so for now I’ll have to live with a mix of old comments in WordPress and new comments in Disqus, such as in this post. Actually, it’s really not as bad as I first thought. In any case, this feature has been requested and promised, so we’ll see.

So, why don’t you give it a try, I’m looking forward to your comments!

Yakatabune (roofed pleasure boats) on Tokyo Bay, near Odaiba.

Elmar Wepper in einem Spiegel Online Interview über Dreharbeiten in Japan zum Film “Kirschblüten”:

Da fällt mir zum Beispiel ein Besuch in einer Nudelküche ein. Dort trifft man nur Japaner an und man sitzt dichtgedrängt, Schulter an Schulter. Dein Nachbar rechts von dir liest Mangas und hört gleichzeitig Musik mit seinem MP3-Player, und der links vor dir telefoniert ununterbrochen, während er seine Suppe schlürft. Das Land ist schon wahnsinnig.

Wahnsinn!

I made a typo while trying to reach the home page of Richard Dawkins and landed on this amusing typosquatting page:

Seen at a supermarket in Osaki, Tokyo.

From the JAL in-flight entertainment guide.

Tian Tan Buddha near Po Lin Monastery, Lantau Island, Hong Kong.

I just came accross this quote on Google’s help page about “search engine optimization” (SEO):

Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

“Dear google.com,

I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”