Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I have just upgraded this blog’s WordPress version to recently released 2.5. I waited for this moment for a long time. WordPerss 2.5 brings quite a few improvements such as better administration (new interface, tag management, easier uploads, improved post editor), speed improvements, security enhancements (prepared SQL queries, password strength indicator, better hashing for passwords), and more.

But, as always, I was a bit worried about the upgrade path. My blog uses a heavily customized theme, plenty of plugins, and resides on a web host to which I have very limited access. It also contains more than 4,000 posts and numerous comments and attachments, which makes bakups and restores a lengthy process.

Now that I’m done with the upgrade and everything seems to work just fine, I have to say that this was the easiest upgrade so far. I didn’t need to fix one single thing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything just went through OK and simply worked.

Oh, and the new WordPress is every bit as good as it was promised and expected, and even better than that. I love the new administration. The Dashboard is much more useful now and makes more sense even out of the box, not to mention all those plugins which will appear in the next few days. I like the way the post editing has been modified (although I am still waiting for a better date picker). Especially nice to see how easy permalinks editing has become (forget the old slugs, now you have the full URL in front of you). Media management (uploads) is indeed much improved with some extra functionality, such as progress reports, multiple file uploads, thumbnail management, galleries, etc. Also, there is a way now to manage tags, which were getting out of control. In short, it’s great!

A big thank you is due to everyone who made this release possible, so - Thank You. And, for those of you who are waiting for something to upgrade, wait no longer!

A new version of my favorite Linux distribution has been released recently - Fedora 8.  I got my hands on the installation DVD (thanks bro!) and tried it straight away.

It didn’t go very well - the installation was hanging up during dependencies check.  I thought maybe it was something simple to fix and checked it with strace, which showed that the installation was looping constantly creating some temporary files and then removing them.  I tried to create these files by hand, but they were immediately removed.  I asked around on #fedora IRC channel, but it was over a weekend and it was rather empty.  No tips were given.

Then I came across Michael’s post that reminded me that I could do an upgrade using Yum package manager, bypassing the installation altogether.   Following the steps in the guide was simple and soon yum started downloading the new packages.  But my Internet connection is pretty slow, it would have taken me about two days just to get the files.   Not much fun to wait.  Instead I decided to copy files from the DVD to /var/cache/yum/fedora/packages/ directory and restart the upgrade process.  Now all I needed to download were the updates that were released since the distribution went public.

A couple of hours later I rebooted into Fedora 8, running the new tick-less kernel (the biggest reason for me to upgrade).  I also noticed that a few fonts packages were updated - fonts are sharper and cleaner.  NetworkManager was upgraded.  And a few other things improved.

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about sound problems due to a new sound server, but I didn’t have a chance to test it yet.  Other than this though everything seems to be running just fine.

Finally, my prayers have been heard and my Gmail account was upgraded to the newer version.  It is as sweet as was promised.  Message pre-loading makes sorting through mail in morning extremely fast.  New contact manager is indeed much better than the old, dare I say, address book.   It still misses a few things, like fields for URLs.

Now I’m waiting for all those Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts that I use to beautify and customize Gmail to get updated and work with the new version.

I am planning to bring the server down today for a few minutes. The reason for the downtime is the upgrade of the system. The machine is almost out of disk space and its hard disks urgently need replacement.

It’s been a while since I ugpraded hard disks and therefor it runs on a bunch of really outdated disks like 40 and 60 GBytes. I will pass by the computer shop today to see what’s the current situation with hardware and if the prices are good I am planning to get at least a 200 GByte disk. Maybe even a 300 GByte disk. Or maybe even a couple of 200 GByte ones.

This upgrade should also free up some space in the server’s case. At this moment there are five IDE devices installed in the room designed to hold only three of them.

Update: I’ve just purchased Seagate Barracuda 200 GByte hard disk in ComputerLand Center for a mere 68 CYP. It will be installed shortly.

Update: The old 40 GByte hard disk that was hosting root filesystem has been replaced by the new 200 GByte disk. Some hard disk tetris is yet to be played though. I still have to free up some space in the case and disconnect some old junky hardware. But all this will be done later. I am tired of the noise and dust at the moment.

I’ve been very lazy with site changes these days. It’s been almost a month since Wordpress 1.5.2 was released. I have updated the site only today. There shouldn’t be any visible changes as most of the improvements are under the hood. If you see any problems with the new version - let me know.