Four Island

I've often wondered about what I should blog about on my blog. Stuff, right? I asked about it in a poll a few weeks ago. Programming stuff won, but is that really all yo you people care about? Last year, I did a few randomish posts such as Cakefile and A Short Tribute To Doctor Who and they were received well. Random stuff is fun and hopefully you'll be seeing more of it on this blog.

However, note that when I say random stuff, I do not mean like My Weird Social Commentary. I'm trying to pretend that never happened. It actually only happened because I was in this same situation--it was late at night, I was tired and I need a post so I wouldn't fail my annual goal. This is why I like posting earlier in the week, so even if I don't post again later, I'm safe.

Also, I wanted to mention that I've been thinking about it and, really, this is my personal blog. I can write whatever I want to on it. If you haven't noticed, all I ever write about is programming or a project I'm "working" on. I could write about some insane book I'm reading or the most fantabulous singer evar. In fact, you know what would be cool? I buy an album once a month because I like collecting things and CDs are just freaking awesome. So, what I could do is, after purchasing my monthly album, listen to it for about a week and then write a review of it.

That would actually be a really cool thing to do. I actually just came up with that while writing the previous paragraph. Writing does stuff for you :). Anyway, I think I'll be writing more often on my blog because I realized that I don't have to restrict myself to formalish stuff. I mean, look at Drifty's blog, or Pyro's blog. Now, I'm logging off so I can get some sleep. Bye. :P

Love your indecisiveness people. Just love it.

Yeah, it was fun but it's dead. - 1 vote(s)! No! I'm feeling.... PRODUCTIVE!!!! - 2 vote(s)! I... don't know. - 6 vote(s)! Indifferent. - 3 vote(s)!

I don't know either. I think I won't freeze True Falsities. I think it's extremely unlikely that anyone'll ever post on it again (except for me, possibly, randomly, infrequently), but it's still awesome. True Falsities is a very important part of Four Island, having spawned numerous memes and Pillowcase. Anyway, cheeze.

EDIT: OH MY GOD. I can't believe I forgot to mention this! I've been thinking about it all week and was originally planning to write a longer article that included this on Wednesday, but then suddenly it was Thursday and whatever.... THIS IS THE 300TH POST ON FOUR ISLAND. OMG! Three hundred blog posts! Wow! Omg! And Four Island isn't even three years old yet! Wow! ....wow! :D

I quite clearly have a problem. I call myself a programmer, but really, when was the last time that I programmed? My project management system tells me that the last commit on The TGS Website, my current project, was on March 16th. The most recent thing that I've released was probably Layout 7 back in August. Therefore, I'm a fail.

What do I blame my current programming laziness on? My extreme obsession with archiving. I'm sure that's a mental disorder or at least a byproduct of my obsessive-compulsive disorder because it's really unhealthy. My music library has the have the exact date I started listening to a song and it has to have the exact number of times I listened to it. When I chat with someone, I must be able to access some form of log. And when I started the revival of the TGS website project, I started to track the time I program.

I have an extremely tight procedure when it comes to programming: write a ticket, start the timer, implement the feature, commit the code, close the ticket and log the time. This is very unhealthy as it puts me off from coding because I feel that it's too much work to fix a simple bug or implement a simple feature. While I know that source control and issue tracking are very good practices, I am very strict with my implementation of them and the addition of time tracking is too much.

Therefore, I need to come up with a new strategy. I think the best thing to do would be to eradicate the time tracking part of the process. While that doesn't resolve everything, it would get me back to where I was before, and didn't I manage to release Layout 7 for Four Island last year? I think that if I try to maintain a healthier programming strategy, this laziness streak would end. I sure hope so, anyway.

If anyone has any suggestions for a healthier programming procedure, I'd be very happy to hear about it. Leave a comment! :P And new commits should start appearing in the TGS Website repository before long if this decision works :).

Lol, a lot of variety with this poll! I guess Valentine's Day (for all its Conversation Heart goodness) is not looked upon happily by everyone.

YES I AM IN LOVE WITH MATS - 3 vote(s)! No. There is no love. Go buy a cat. - 3 vote(s)! Yo/Nes - I maybe would have - 6 vote(s)! Indifferent - 2 vote(s)!

Whether you like Valentine's Day or not, however, something special happened on Four Island that day! At 3:36 in the morning on February 14th, Four Island received its 50,000th hit! It is just amazing that we've gone so far. I remember when I went crazy because of my 100th hit. 50,000 is more than 100. :P

Anyway, as I mentioned previously, the 2008 Christmas post has been missing for a quite a while. I don't even know how the row got mutilated like that. Anyway, I finally got over my laziness and looked through where I thought I had a backup. It turned out that I actually had three backups (two from January and one from April) and one of them contained Frasty tha Snaman! Yay! :P

Well, technically it was a virus, but you get the point. For those of you that have noticed that Four Island has been down for three days (I'm insulted if you didn't! :P), the reason is that we got a virus. Not me, no! Not any of my WONDERTASTIC LINUX COMPUTERS. NO, HOW DARE YOU SAY SUCH A THING? :P

No, it was a Windows XP computer. And the virus it had made the poor computer impetuously spam people. They complained and Optimum suspended our service until we could fix the problem. That was easy: flash the drive and reinstall Windows. There were a few teething problems with getting the correct drivers, but soon enough, our Internet was restored. After 3 days.

Anyway, FOUR ISLAND IS BACK UP NAO, YAY. :P Just in case anyone was worrying. :P Wow, this was a very short post, but it wasn't really meant to contain much substance anyway. :P

This is mainly just a message for the people whose sites I host, but if you aren't one of those people, you may still read this post. Don't worry, I won't hurt you. Come back! What are you doing? :P

Anyway, for those of you who I'm in contact with, you may know of a dilemma with my server. Specifically, it's running under Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition when Ubunto 9.10 came out months ago. So yes, it's running an old version of Ubuntu SE.

So, in lieu of the fact that, due to complications, my monthly server backup was not run on January 1st, January 31st became The Grand Upgrade day. I backed up the server and then I upgraded every out-of-date piece of software on my server. Then, tomorrow, February 1st, I will backup the server again. Sound fun?

It's just amazing how much old software was sitting on my server. First of all, Ubuntu 9.04. Second, all of the Wordpress blogs (including hosted sites and my website projects) were running 2.8.4 instead of the latest, 2.9.1. And I just discovered the other day that The Projects Site ran Redmine 0.7.3 when the latest version is 0.9.1. Gasp! Possibly the worst is that Wikipinia ran MediaWiki 1.11.0 while the latest version is 1.15.1! Yes, that's right, most of my hosted sites were using web software that was two or three years old.

Upgrade was horrendous, though. It took a total of seven hours (start to finish) which included installing Ubuntu 9.10 TWICE, running back and forth between rooms two floors apart to download RubyGems and a lot of near-panic moments. Possibly the worst was during the first Ubuntu install: because of the disgustingly restrictive environment that my server is in, it couldn't download any of the files that msttcorefonts needed to upgrade and I didn't even need that package! Because of that, the upgrade failed and the server was, for want of a better word, bricked.

Anyway, The Grand Upgrade is now complete and my server is running up-to-date software! Hooray! It was a success! Hopefully, the next time a new version of Wordpress or Ubuntu comes out, I'll upgrade ASAP instead of waiting for January 31st three years later. :P

Lol, it's nice how much faith everyone has in me :P

Yes. You fail at life. - 8 vote(s)! No! PRODUCTIVITY IS EVERYTHING, HATKIRBY, DON'T GIVE UP!!!!!!!!!! - 0 vote(s)! I don't even know who you are. - 1 vote(s)! I am ignorant/apathetic/indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

Now, this week's poll is one of those ones that I actually care about the results for. True Falsities has been dying ever since guest posts started declining in May. My posting twice a month will not save True Falsities, in my opinion. So now I ask you, the readers of Four Island, to please vote on whether you want to keep True Falsities, or retire it to The Four Island Archive (currently unreleased). Please vote!

Anyway, remember some two years ago when I announced that my server couldn't email Hotmail accounts? Well, I do believe I've finally fixed that. By relaying my email through my ISP's email server. Incidentally, that's the solution I suggested two years ago that I was too lazy to implement until Tuesday.... :P

Lastly, I would like to announce a fix. For the longest time, Four Island has been having Unicode troubles that I've attributed to other sources and I've had to removed Unicode from quotes and comments before and it's been very annoying. On Wednesday, I finally discovered that the source of the Unicode mangling was my homegrown BBCode parser that we've been using since December 10th 2008. The bug has been fixed and Unicode should now look normal. You know what that means!!!! I can finally use the interrobang everywhere!!!! :D

However, I would like to ask a question to those interested in the development of Four Island 3.0. Do you think I should drop my homegrown BBCode system and switch to something else such as Markdown, or whitelisted HTML with a shortcode system? There would have to be a way to either maintain backwards compatibility or to convert all of the old system to the new system, though.

It's January 1st once again! And before we go anywhere, let me wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR YAYS! :P I like the repetition thing. So, anyway, exactly 1 year ago, I wrote a post about my 2009 goals. I'm going to write a list of goals for this year as well, but first, let's see if I successfully completed last year's goals!

• Increase RSS subscribers to 10 - Yes! This is surprising, but I've been noticing all year that my RSS subscriber count has been around my goal level. I requested at least 10 subscribers and the count has been flucuating between 9 and 11 for a while. Currently, it's at 11, so I consider this a pass!
• Write popular posts - I don't know exactly how to grade this one. For one thing, I barely posted last year (poll posts don't count!), but I did write some posts which were long....ish. Some inspirations such as Kirby Week and The Bet helped me to do so. The goal, however, quotes the Popular Posts module, and as you may have noticed, there is a 2009 post in the list: The Mystery Of The Ancient Fountain Of Dreams. Odd. :P So, for this one, I'm just going to say NEUTRAL and I'll make this year's goals clearer. :)
• Average around 1 comment per post - Comments? There were 68 comments posted by people other than me last year. How many posts did I post last year? 92. That's right, even with my dismal posting frequency last year, there were less comments than posts. Sad.
• Update the POTW on time - Wow, I seriously failed the late poll posting goal. For a while in the last quater of 2009, I was updating the POTW on a bi-weekly basis. Fail.
• Don't post random polls - Yes, I made random polls. I really need to come up with some good ideas for this year. Fail.
• The final goal was a joke, if no one noticed. :P

So, I passed 1 of 5 goals and failed 3 of 5. Wow, I did really badly last year. I hope I can do better this year. So, without further ado, here's my 2010 goals!

• Increase my RSS subscriber count to approx. 15 subscribers.
• Write at least one non-poll post every week. This is important because I am ashamed at my non-postiness in 2009. In 2008, I posted nearly every day!
• On that note, don't neglect to update the Poll Of The Week! It must be updated once a week on Saturday.
• Try not to post random poll posts. Make a list of upcoming polls if you have to.
• Get people to comment! Once again, I'm aiming for, on average, 1 comment per post. This allows for unpopular posts because people may comment frequently on popular posts.
• Revive The Fourm! Get people posting! I'm aiming for us to pass the 9000th post sometime this year. I mean, it's definitely possible. We had around 6000 posts posted in 2008. I think we can manage 700.
• Revive Fouripedia! There's a lot of new content that hasn't been added yet. I expect to see at least 10 new non-stub articles on Fouripedia by the end of the year. I know, it's not that big of a goal, but I was seriously lazy last year.
• Revive True Falsities! True Falsities was actually a 2009 project, so I can't compare it to 2008, but in the first half of the year we had so many people writing stories. Nowadays, there's one or two stories a month. I want at least two stories every month on True Falsities this year!
• Omg. Freaking. Revive. Pillowcase. I've been promising Season 3 for so long now and I've postponed it many times. Finish the season and post the comics! 2009 saw two seasons of Pillowcase, and I expect the same this year. And no cop-outs!

Wow, I'm really being harsh with myself this year. Well, I was incredibly lazy last year and I didn't get anything done. Anyway, 2009 is over and it is now 2010! Welcome to the new decade! I hope you all had a wonderful New Year and I hope 2010 is a good year for everyone!

Do you think I fail at updating on a normal schedule? Yes, I do. Clearly. It's been a week.

You totally do - 1 vote(s)! Yes, you kind of do - 1 vote(s)! I would have to agree with the above two options - 0 vote(s)! I'm legally required to add a "No" option here - 0 vote(s)!

I actually had an excuse for not updating last week, though. Due to a bug in my coding, I couldn't actually access the Poll Update page in the Admin Panel because of the quotation mark in the fourth option. Wait, that's still my fault, and I was being lazy by not fixing it earlier. Oh well. :)

Anyway, now that's out of they way, let me introduce you to an amazing new feature on Four Island that I spent all night working on! It's the Theme Switcher! YAY!

I often get nostalgic about old layouts (as evidenced by every time I release a new one) and I would like to go back to said layout, but I can't without changing the entire website. I've found a solution!

You may have noticed the "Theme Switcher" combo box in the Hatbar. You can use that to choose which Four Island Layout you would like to see. Currently you can choose 7 (the current), 6.2 and 4.5. It actually works! :)

I doubt I'll ever implement 6 or 6.1, as they're not so different from 6.2 (well, the original 6 was kind of weird, as it had no background picture) unless people want me to, but I'm think I might want to implement layout 3. It would be very hard, though, because Layout 3 is from before The New Four Island so it doesn't conform to the templating system and other stuff. Plus, the site was different then, The Fourm and the Quotes DB weren't integrated into the rest of the site and most stuff was accessed from the "Misc" page.

So, choose your favorite layout and get Four Islanding! If you notice any bugs in any of the layouts, please let me know. :)

I'm feeling awesome. Why? Because I just set up an automated database backup script for Four Island!

Yes, you heard me right, Four Island didn't previously have any automated backups. Shock, horror, I know. What's worse is that Four Island isn't even one of those lucky websites that never loses data. Remember (or not) False? That would've never been lost if I had backups. And how about Color Pencils before the Great Color Pencils Purge of '08? I know Drifty initiated that, but not all of those posts deserved to die. Some of them were awesome. :)

Anyway, yes, I've set up an automated database backup script. Now, all of the databases on the Four Island server (which includes those of my hosted sites) gets backed up weekly and sent to a remote email address (which, I might add, has enough free storage to last me for 15 years :) ) Awesomeness :)

The only problem I have is that only the database is being backed up. I want to create some kind of monthly backing up plan where I manually back up the all of the server data on my server (including VCS repositories, non-source-controlled data, configuration files and the databases) to a portable drive. The only problem is, I don't have a portable drive. The only thing close is my memory stick, FourStar, but she only has 4GB and I need that space. Maybe I'll save up money to buy a memory stick with more space :) OR A RAID 6 SETUP WITH A SERVER FARM AND MANY MANY DOLLARS. lol, jk :)

Anyways, as a sidenote, about Color Pencils, I made an awesome discovery the other day. I found that searching "inurl:gryph.fourisland.com" at Google Blog Search came up with excerpts of the old Color Pencils posts. Which means that they might have the full posts buried in there somewhere :D I is hoping to revive them. (I actually have already revived one post, Time Of You Life, because I happened to have 6 hard copies of it so I transcribed it back onto her blog)