Isotropic

My About page currently states “I plan on actually producing content in 2008, lol”. You may wonder why I bother. Steve Yegge’s You Should Write Blogs (even if nobody reads them) probably contributed to pushing me over the edge, so for convenience, you can blame him.
I’m calling this a half-year review despite the [...]

Yeah, Isotropic was basically unreadable for a couple days again. I don’t recall ever seeing a load average over 1000 before. In theory, once the old cluster hardware and configuration is replaced, things will be much better. However, expect more downtime in the near future as my hosting provider gets the new [...]

According to Akismet, 89% of all comments are spam.
For some peculiar reason, 90% of the spam I get shows up as comments on a single post — my ancient Wikipedia and Nupedia. (Ancient is ambiguous; although the permalink is from 2001, this blog didn’t exist before January 2008, when I dumped several items from [...]

Sorry for the very slow site the last day or two. This is unfortunately shared hosting and the load average has been getting high the last few days; it was over 130 earlier this morning. For now I’m assuming it’s a similar problem to the one in March — no details from provider [...]

According to jake at Third Rail, Thursday at noon (PST) is the best time to post. He goes on to say ‘It’s pretty clear that Tues - Friday between 10am - 2pm PST are the “hot times” for popular blog posts.’
That explains a lot, lol. I tend to post when I get around [...]

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 yesterday, using the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. When finished, it looped back to the beginning, starting the upgrade over again, leaving my plugins disabled. Next time I’ll just upgrade manually — it’s not difficult; I was just trying to avoid a little work.

Well, here goes….
… that was easy. Untar’d on my local machine to check things out, disabled all my plugins, renamed the includes and admin directories on the live site, and rsync’d things over. Spent a while checking settings, reenabling plugins, etc.

Unfortunately, my hosting provider, DreamHost, is having some issues. Thus, this site has been extremely slow, sometimes entirely down, for the last week. It’s unclear just when this will be resolved. Because this is only a personal blog, I’ll try to weather the storm — it’s too much hassle to change hosts [...]

In spite of my tagline “where ever you go, there you are”, I’m in the process of moving bits and pieces of old stuff from my original site to here.
Over the next few days you’ll see some clutter and broken links, and some really old dates on posts.
It’s really just an excuse to put off [...]

As my friends know, I’m not a particularly social person. However, over time I’ve accumulated a few profiles here and there for various reasons: curiosity; those “you’ve gotta read my post” links (registration required) from friends; evaluating a site for work; and even, tragically, to view information about funeral arrangements for a long-ago friend.
Also, [...]