Dossy's Blog

My friend Regina has started a new project, Things I’ve Learned from Wikipedia. She’s only just started, but she’s already uncovered some real gems.

If you’re interested in learning more useless trivia and obscure facts but don’t have the time to surf around yourself, go and read her blog. As she says herself, “One day you’ll be on Jeopardy and remember something you read on this blog. And then you’ll thank me.”

Last week, I upgraded from Movable Type to WordPress. Since then, I’ve received a bunch of comments on various entries, some old, some new. What’s surprising is the fact that in a week I probably received more comments (not even counting the spammy ones) than I have in the past three months! Wow!

I don’t get why, though. I did clean up the design a bit, but it’s fundamentally the same. I replaced my home-grown CAPTCHA implementation with reCAPTCHA. The comment form is pretty much the same. I can’t think of anything that I would attribute to this increase in activity.

Regardless of why, I’m thrilled that more folks are sharing their feedback with me. It’s one of the reasons I love blogging: being able to interact with people. Thanks, everyone.

Tags: blogging

So, after years of hacking custom changes into Movable Type 2.6, I’ve finally had enough. I’ve switched to WordPress 2.6.

Part of the move included exporting my old posts and comments from MT and importing them into WP. For that, I wrote a small Tcl script that reads the MT database and writes it out in WXR format. I stored my MT data in a SQLite database, so the script expects its input from a SQLite DB–it would be a bit more work to read the data from a MySQL DB, but it’s definitely possible.

I’ve kept the essence of the previous blog design in my WP theme, but it’s cleaner markup and CSS and I’ve tried to make the ads less intrusive.

I haven’t been actively reading my feeds, so when I fired up the reader today, I saw Bill Kocik’s pro-gun essay in his blog.

Personally, I:

• Do not own my own firearm.
• Do not like the idea of anyone using firearms.
• Recognize that firearms exist and will never go away.
• Believe that someone is less likely to perpetuate a violent crime if the odds that they will get shot in retaliation increases.
• Believe that in a world where guns are readily available, a steady equilibrium of safety will eventually be reached–perhaps, unfortunately, after much death by guns. Those left remaining and still alive will learn to co-exist safely together.
• Do not believe that fewer guns is the answer. As long as the balance of power leans in favor of criminals, no one can be safe.
• Am thankful that there are people who responsibly own and carry firearms, so that I don’t have to.

Wishing that we could live in a world without firearms is just that: wishful thinking. The reality is that guns have been invented and that can never be undone. The only rational path to safety is reaching the point where enough people are carrying firearms so that using one inappropriately will be dealt with swiftly and abruptly: with deadly force.

Tags: liberty, safety, firearms, guns, violence, crime

I’ve always wanted to blog about more personal things but always wondered who would bother to read it or even care. I’ve tried to stick to more technical subjects that might be useful and looking at my web traffic, this has definitely worked out. But, looking at the 160-odd subscribers to my blog makes it clear that there aren’t many people who care to read it regularly enough to subscribe to it.

But, there still are 160 or so out there, who have subscribed. I’d like to ask you: why? Do we know each other? Are you generally curious about me? Are you hoping I’ll post something useful for you and you don’t want to miss it?

I really want to know. Either leave a comment on this entry, or email me or catch me on IM and lets talk.