As you may have noticed, there is a new theme about the site. This is because I have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4 from *cough* 1.2.2, and, yeah. It was needed.

Naturally, this took a lot longer than it should have, so the site was down for most of the day. I followed the simple five steps outlined on the WordPress site and that was fine. The problem was that the files were a pain to get on the server. Granted, we have “high speed” internet here in sunny Iraq (or at least I do), and granted it is prone to finicky behavior. Since it is satellite, it is susceptible to environmental considerations, like sand, wind, and mortars. For whatever reason, I simply could not FTP the files to the server reliably. Dropped connections, socket errors, and all manner of Very Frustrating Things.

In the end, I simply put them up via a web based interface that my servers have. And that took two plus hours with all the files involved. Fortunately, I missed only one that I know of, and that has been corrected. If you notice anything amiss, please leave a comment.

With all the time available to me, I noticed a couple of things. One, recursion is difficult for the human mind to grasp beyond a few levels. I think this has to do with memory, and that called to mind the paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” dealing with the inability of the human mind to grasp large quantities of data for a given channel. So, tracking which files had to go up, which directory was the next one to recurse, and so on, was a bit of a challenge at times.

Two: as I did this, I noticed that I got into a rhythm with keystrokes and the like. Never one to leave well enough alone, I would switch hands with the mouse pad and which hand was doing what keystroke. Without fail, the process would suddenly stall, since now a lot of mental processing was being shifted. While I can and do often mouse left handed, switching in mid-stream would throw a wrench into everything. And I would lose my mental pointers of where I was at and what I was doing. Now, I would recover, and get back into “the zone,” but it was an interesting observation to me of what the costs are of interrupting the flow of things and how long it takes to get back into the groove of things. Nothing like learning things for yourself, which is usually how I learn lessons in life. (Just ask The Wife.)

But things are running now, and all of this was to combat spam. What? Well, the blogging needs of mine were pretty much met with the old version, but I really didn’t have an effective way to trash all the comment spam in a timely manner. I was getting literally thousands of spam comments a week. Too much to do by hand, so I needed some code to limit it, or at least help me throw it out. Nor could I use a handy tool that I wanted to use on the site. It (the version I used) was simply Too Old To Begin The Training. So, I upgraded. And we’ll see if the New Cool Toy I wanted lives up to my expectations.

In the meantime, I’m tinkering with the newer features that I have. I’m undecided about the new theme, though. I kind of liked the older one better, but maybe it was time for a change. There are definitely some parts that I know I want from the other theme, like the calendar display of archives, but with a little toying, I’m sure that can be arranged.

Until then, enjoy!