Author: isaac

I like cats and compost.

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Mmmm… ribs

Mmmm... ribs

Grilling pork ribs is so easy I wonder why I don’t do it more often. Get either baby back or spare ribs – country style are much better braised. Baby back are meatier and more tender I think. While getting the charcoal hot cut the rib racks into manageable sections and rub them down with a mixture of herbs, spices, and salt. I like cumin, oregano, pepper, coriander, allspice, cayenne, and so on. Pile the charcoal to one side of the grill and let it get good and hot, then sear the ribs right over the coals for a couple minutes. Once they’re a little browned I move them to the side opposite the coals and put the lid on with the vents wide open. If I have fresh herbs like thyme and rosemary I throw some of that on the ribs too. Turn them every 15 minutes or so, and I think they’re done after about 45 minutes.

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General

Alaska trip photos

Orca and AugustineCrabbingGlassy calmFoggy Homer harborFilling upReviewing footage

I went fishing twice and saw whales both times – the orca with Augustine happened on the second trip, when I’d figured out that you just have to take a LOT of shots and hope you get lucky. Even though it was very calm for the middle of Cook Inlet, with the boat moving and the whales moving it’s hard to get them in the frame and in focus, so getting one lined up with the mountain was crazy lucky.

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WordPress + IIS = Suck

I’d heard it’s difficult to get WordPress working well on an IIS host but had never experienced it myself. In my case the install appeared to be working, but then looked like it’d failed on step 2. Browsing to the site, the text was all there, but clearly the style sheet hadn’t been loaded. The internal links were also all messed up, with “?step=2” thrown in instead of the folder name where I’d installed the blog. A bunch of browsing of the WordPress forums revealed widespread IIS problems and a few proposed solutions. I tried a couple, involving editing wp-settings.php, but without effect.

I thought maybe the fixes I found were specific IIS server setups, but not necessarily mine. So, I looked at my sorry IIS server’s phpinfo() output, which revealed some obvious problems with my wp-settings.php. Apparently IIS/PHP doesn’t set some of the variables that WordPress wants, so WordPress attempts to create those variables, based on variables it supposes IIS/PHP ought to set. But my server’s variables weren’t named quite right for WordPress to suss out the variables it wanted. I changed the variable names in wp-settings.php to match my phpinfo() output and it worked.

I did end up having to delete the database tables for each install attempt. I don’t know how many people run into install issues, but if there are a lot maybe it’d make sense for WordPress to do some sort of post-install sanity check. Even better if that sanity check involved a form where one could hardcode in those problematic server variables.

Update: I should have seen this coming based on what I saw browsing the forums earlier, but the admin emails from WordPress wouldn’t work out of the box. I’d guess that the dear IIS host I’m working with has had issues with spam so they don’t allow PHP to send unauthorized mail. Fortunately, there’s a plugin that lets you manually set WordPress to use an arbitrary SMTP server. There are actually a couple, but WP Mail SMTP is working for me.

Another update: I just installed another instance of WP on the same IIS host and had a little different experience. First I tried installing without changing anything in wp-settings.php. The install failed when I went to the install page through index.php, but I thought I’d try going directly to wp-admin/install.php before editing anything. For some reason that worked just fine, maybe because then the relative paths worked?

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Getting Flash working in Liferea on Fedora 9

Seems like Flash stuff in Liferea was working fine in Fedora 8, but in F9 a worthless popup appears, asking to download a plugin but doing nothing. I already had the evil Flash plugin installed, but Liferea didn’t know about it. Maybe I did this same procedure a few months ago and didn’t remember to do it this time. Here’s what fixed it for me (based on the instructions found here):

# ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9pre/plugins/libflashplayer.so

YMMV, depending on what version(s) you’ve got installed. I’d imagine it’ll be necessary to do this again if/when the xulrunner version changes.

Update: This works great for me in i386-land, but not in x86_64. I’m not sure, but it looks like x86_64 liferea isn’t using xulrunner, and I haven’t figured out if gtkhtml supports plugins at all.

Update²: As Dylan notes below, you can get an x86_64 version of Flash Player 10 from Adobe now, which will let you view videos of cats right in Liferea, and also seems to make Flash suck less in Firefox. I don’t remember having to do the linking thing – I think I just dropped the plugin in Firefox’s plugins folder and Liferea found it automagically.

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General

Mmmm…Crawfish!

Jazz Fest Crawfish

I ate a bunch of these at Jazz Fest. I’m not a huge fan of the crowds and dirt at Jazz Fest, so the crawfish make the thing tolerable. We ate some awesome food outside of Jazz Fest too, including some crawfish at Restaurant August that were loaded with cream and cognac – even better than the usual Old Bay-ish stuff.

Back in DC, Acadiana’s news page says they do crawfish boils every Friday 3:30 to 6:30p on their patio “weather permitting.” So, I guess not today – maybe next week if the weather cooperates. On the phone they said they also do the boils Sundays 2-5p.

Update: Even though the weather looked bad to me they were still boiling crawfish outside and serving them in the bar. We’ve been a few times now – they’re pretty expensive but worth it if you’ve gotta have some crawfish.