Here’s the top 25 artists that I’ve spent the most time listening to this year (as taken from my Last.FM page:

Recently, Facebook started rolling out a new look for user profiles and along with this change is an update to the various links that get automatically created in the areas for things like favorite books, favorite movies, favorite activities, etc. Instead of links to a page showing results for searching on the linked term, they now point to Facebook Pages matching the linked term.

When Facebook rolls this change out to a given profile, they offer the user a dialog that shows the Page links that Facebook has automatically generated so that the user has a chance to make any corrections.

I’m guessing that the algorithm for matching terms to pages is a little off when it comes to some unidentified book that is popular with lots of Christians.

If you visit the Facebook page for Joseph Stalin, you’ll see that he has over a thousand people on Facebook that like him and if you click on any of these people at random, most likely you’ll find that they like The Bible and have other Christian interests. In addition, you’ll find that they apparently like a book called “Joseph Stalin” which sticks out like a sore thumb.

This amusing example of string matching gone wrong makes me mildly curious what the real title is.

In the several months since I first started blogging, I have enjoyed using Mephisto. It’s a nice blogging tool and was a great way for me to play around with a bonafide Ruby on Rails application. However, thanks to my new job at a Rails shop, I will soon be getting all the Rails action that I need on a daily basis without any need for an alternative outlet.

In addition, I have found the almost complete lack of activity on the Mephisto website disconcerting. I understand that the developers of Mephisto are busy and that Mephisto is just a side project for them, so it’s not that I expect anything from them. It’s not as if I or other Mephisto users are paying them for the wonderful work that they do. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable producing a growing body of blog posts here at the wrathful dove on a system that may simply stagnate should its developers lose interest in further development.

For this last reason, I have been toying with the idea for several months of switching my blogging software. I have considered Typo and WordPress on numerous occasions. WordPress seems the obvious standard by which other blogging software is judged and is a fine product, but every time that I considered moving to WordPress, I ran into a roadblock that I had constructed for myself: I wanted a playground for Rails development and so was committed to maintaining my blog in Ruby. Thus, instead of WordPress, I focused my attention on Typo.

I went so far as to install Typo on a Linux machine on my home network, and I definitely liked what I saw. In many ways, I was puzzled why so many people had left Typo for Mephisto. I had heard a lot of talk about Mephisto’s supposedly cleaner and simpler admin interface, but I found myself preferring the power and features available with Typo. In my estimation, Typo’s admin interface seems quite adequate in the simplicity department, too. The only other complaint that I had heard about Typo was that it was flaky and slow. I never did enough experimentation to determine whether I would experience these problems with Typo, so I have nothing to say about Typo’s stability. However, the possibility having been raised did give me pause about moving to Typo.

Still, I suspect I may have moved to Typo if it hadn’t been for my new Rails job combined with one other significant detail.

My blog runs on a Slicehost account that I share with my friend Josh. He runs WordPress and some other PHP based sites. He has grown to share my distaste for PHP and was interested in the possibility of running a Rails application for one of his projects. When we started looking into this idea, we noticed for the first time how much of a memory hog a Rails application is. As discussed in this blog post, Rails doesn’t “scale down”. It’s great for large web applications, but it doesn’t work so nicely for small web sites. Sure, it can provide the backbone for a small website, but the cost in memory footprint just isn’t worth it when you can develop the same kinds of small web sites in PHP and not run out of resources so rapidly.

There was one final issue that weighed in on my blogging software setup. I had chosen to run my Mephisto based blog on top of a PostgreSQL database because it is my database preference. However, Josh’s web applications were all base upon MySQL databases and so it seemed wasteful of our limited Slice resources to be running two different database servers.

All these factors came together in my decision to migrate my blog from Mephisto with PostgreSQL to WordPress with MySQL.

The move has been very smooth, and in all honesty, I’m loving the excellent features that WordPress brings to the table out of the box. It truly is the gold standard of blog software even if it is apparently written in crufty PHP.

Last weekend, I purchased myself a domain for this blog, finally. It was actually part of an exercise in testing the practical length of time it takes for a DNS server change to propogate successfully. I had originally been planning on purchasing a different domain for a different purpose altogether, but I was sort of luke warm about it. However, my lovely and brilliant wife thought it made sense to buy one for this blog which I slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner – especially with domain prices on GoDaddy so cheap!

Now all my faithful readers (all 2-3 of you) can find me at http://wrathfuldove.org or http://www.wrathfuldove.org.

Ever since I started looking into using Mephisto for my blog and reading about the various ways of deploying a production Rails site, I had heard about the company Slicehost and how it was an excellent hosting company that was among other things friendly to Rails development. Later, when it came time to develop a website for some aquaintances I ran across Slicehost’s name again and continued to read good things about them, but their price range and my acquaintances’ needs didn’t fit with what Slicehost offered.

But the prospect of having a virtual dedicated server with full root access and complete control over the system right down to the responsibility for the security and maintenance of the box along with complete control of the ports was quite alluring. I kept returning to the Slicehost page hungry for a Slice of my own.

Everytime I looked, I could never really justify the cost for my own modest needs, i.e. this blog. But then, I started getting back in touch with a local anarchist group whose website had become stagnant. They were hoping to some new things with it and I was planning on helping them out. When I saw the hosting plan that the group currently uses and considered the kind of site that the group really wanted and needed, I thought that a hosting upgrade for their site was definitely in order. While considering options for their site, I thought that perhaps if I had a Slicehost account then perhaps I could offer the group free hosting for their website.

Which set wheels turning in my head…

I knew that my friend Josh was running into difficulties with his family blog and his wife’s photography business site because his ISP had started blocking various ports. The same possibility loomed over my blog as it too resided on a home based server that was fully at the mercy of the Charter Cable powers that be.

So it occurred to me that Josh and I might together have enough needs to justify splitting the costs.

Fortunately, Josh agreed with my idea, and so we purchased ourselves a 256slice and have been quite happy with the results! So for the last two months, this blog has been happily running on our new Slice instead of a Virtual Ubuntu Feisty server running on top of my old Athlon 64 2800 Windows box.

This move actually fixed several problems for me. First, my Windows box has always been pretty flaky. I purchased it from a local shop that puts together systems, and it has exhibited all sorts of problems including the motherboard burning out two sticks of RAM and one catestrophic failure to boot that led to an OS corruption and a complete reinstall. It’s been fairly stable for awhile now, but it does have two persistant flukes: the front USB port appears to short circuit and cause a shutdown of the machine if used and whenever the house experiences a short power flicker, the computer shut offs and requires me to unplug and replug it in before the power button will successfully boot the machine again. Thanks to this last issue, I would more often than I like find my blog down during the day and not be able to fix the problem until I returned home.

Another problem was that the DynamicDNS service that had mapped theweatherses.org to my home network did not offer the free email forwarding that my domain registar had offered when we were using its DNS servers. As a result, the email aliases that my wife had set up suddenly stopped working when I began to point our domain to our home machines. I had gotten around this problem by running my own mail server, but then one day my ISP decided to start blocking port 25.

Now with the Slicehost, I no longer need to pay for the DynamicDNS service that mapped my domain to a server. Instead, I have returned to my registar’s DNS servers and the email aliases have become functional once more. Problem solved!

The only lingering issue was connecting to my home network via a static domain now that theweatherses.org no longer pointed home, but fortunately, I could now simply make use of a free DynamicDNS service to map to a less spiffy domain that is just as useful for the simple purpose of providing a static means of connecting to my home network.

So far the Slicehost has been a wonderful experience! It’s nice to have a spot on the Internet with which one can pretty much do anything.