Rosio Pavoris

I say Scandinavian rather than Swedish because it’s not actually from Ikea, but from some Norwegian company.
And I guess it’s not actually this chair but a chair very like it, only I couldn’t find a picture of this one, presumably because it’s fifteen or so years old. It’s made of wood rather than steel, and the seat is actually not curved to hold a butt, but rigid and full of hate.

It’s completely impossible to adjust the tilt of the seat or the leg rests, or the distance to the leg rests, and apparently their reference human was a three-legged midget.
The end result is that five minutes in this chair will make your back explode with discomfort and physically force your buttocks into your spine, and because the seat is tilted you can’t even just consign it to a corner of the room and stack junk on it, because it will slide off.

The company that made the chair still exists, but apparently doesn’t make them anymore. Even so, most of the products they do still make have at one point or another in their lifetime been recalled for health reasons, so they don’t appear to have mended their ways.
It’s actually more comfortable to just sit on the leg rests.

I should probably get rid of it, but it’s one of the things I inherited from my grandfather.

Anyway.
In completely unrelated news, I deleted Quhan’s blog because it was full of exploit. This makes it the third of our blogs to be compromised.
WordPress is absolute crap when it comes to security, but unless you’re Maia, it’s your own responsibility to keep your installs up to date, people. You have FTP accounts for a reason.

In further unrelated news, I’m never going to finish this Monopoly game. It’s due this Friday.

I set up a blog for Livia/IcLubYou two weeks ago, and she’s finally made her first post.
So go visit and welcome her to the Rota Hall fold, would you?

I’ve changed the permalinks the blog uses to the “pretty” ones. They’re uglier, but GET data gets stripped from URLs in a lot of contexts, and at least they’re more informative.
If you’ve linked to something I’ve posted in the past, the old links will still work, so don’t worry.

(If you have a Rota Hall blog and want to change your own permalinks, you’ll have to mess around with .htaccess. WordPress can do this for you, but it’ll tend to break. If anything goes wrong, just delete whatever .htaccess you’ve created and ask me for help.)

(Also, this will make the last fifteen posts show up again in your RSS feed. Sorry ’bout that.)

I’ve updated the blog theme to the latest version. Not as easy as it sounds, since I’ve edited most files myself for great awesome.
Beccary fixed some bugs I had already found and fixed myself, and one that I got used to so I unfixed it (a class=”commentmeta” that should have been class=”postmeta”, but which I like better as class=”commentmeta”), and left in a bug I’d found and fixed before, which I had to refix (permalinks on the index page; she forgot to properly close a tag).
Basically, the changes are that there are optional CSS classes for images now (which I’d meant to write myself but hadn’t gotten around to), and some extra things at the bottom of the individual post pages (some of which I removed because it was too cluttery).

If you notice any other changes, let me know, because that means I screwed up somewhere.
(You might ask why I updated everything, then, if I just want most things to stay the same. In doing so, you would demonstrate that you do not understand how my mind works.)

Also, I rewrote the simple disemvoweler plugin on the WordPress wiki to suit my needs better. It just retains the [troll] thing from the modification there, since disemvoweling by IP isn’t something I’m very likely to do.
Here’s the code, if you want it. Simple desu~

<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Better Disemvoweler
Plugin URI: http://wordpress.org/#
Description: Use [troll] to disemvowel comments.
Version: 0.0
Author: Some Guy
*/

function disemvowel($content) {
	if (ereg(”^\\[troll\\]“, $content)) {
		$content = substr($content, 7);
		$content = preg_replace(”/[aeiou]/i”, ”, $content);
	}
	return $content;
}

add_filter(’comment_text’, ‘disemvowel’);

?>

Gülseren is a really funny name. She’s on my team for Systems Analysis. She’s of the headscarf persuasion, so that may not work out.
TCP/IP is more interesting to me than anticipated.

Also, new blog! Say hi to saythings. Also encourage her to pick a different skin, since the WordPress default is kind of fail.

I’m going to take a nap. Until Sunday morning. Identify this mantis for me while I’m asleep.

Everyone, say hi to Quhan. He’s a RL friend of mine and Coren’s.

In unrelated news, Chirac doesn’t suck too much. I doubt that’ll go anywhere, but it’s important that people stop letting the US bully the rest of the world, especially with these psychopaths at the helm.

Try to guess what this is. It shouldn’t be too hard. (Click for bigger picture.)

Rednwhite finally moved to Rotahall.org. He imported his posts from his WordPress.com blog, which is probably cheating.

In unrelated news, these visualisations are cool.

In more unrelated news, apparently petshops in Belgia are no longer allowed to sell cats and dogs, in an effort to combat impulsive pet-buyery. A few years ago they made it illegal to sell them on the market (which is where we got our dog), for the same reason.
Breeders and humane society things are still allowed, but so, apparently, are internet-based petshops. Kind of bizarre~

In more unrelated news yet, this is an orchid mantis. It’s not actually interesting enough to warrant its own Weird Creatures post (it’s just mimicry), and it’s not actually cute enough to qualify as a cute animal picture, but it’s still an orchid mantis.

Apparently WordPress 2.1 is available now. I’ll be upgrading our blogs soon. Some of the new features look pretty handy.

Edit: I upgraded mine. If you want me to upgrade yours, let me know, but I think everyone has an FTP account to do it themselves, no?

I do think I need a new FTP client, though. SmartFTP is annoying me with its “REGISTER NOW!” screens and its refusal to start half the time and to throw errors and crash occasionally (which I think is a specific feature of the unregistered version) and its throttled bandwidth (which actually is an acknowledged feature for unregistered users) and its history of bundling malware.

Anyway. Here’s your daily animal, courtesy of /an/. Most of my animal pictures are, actually. I should probably check for copyright before posting them.
I think it’s a (possibly adolescent) kangaroo mouse (more specifically, a pale kangaroo mouse—Microdipodops pallidus), but it might be a type of kangaroo rat. They’re both in the same subfamily (Dipodomyinae), and native to the same general region (Nevada-ish).

Dotts will be moving to a blog hosted on Rotahall.org soon, but it would seem our delightfully incompetent host has once again broken something. DNS is fucked, so I can’t give him his own subdomain.

Bind reloading on gonzo using rndc zone: [rotahall.org]
Error reloading bind on gonzo: /usr/sbin/rndc: relocation error: /usr/sbin/rndc: undefined symbol: isc_net_pton

Bah.
Anyway, keep an eye on dotts.rotahall.org, just in case.

Update: For the time being, he can be found here.

In unrelated news, Rouge is gay and isn’t sure how to tell his parents. Share your own experience on this matter with him, if you have any.

It’s interesting how often the problems atheists face are compared with the problems homosexuals had and have. Richard Dawkins did this a few times as well, when talking about the Brights.
I suppose there are many parallels, and it’s not like people who would object to gays would be particularly receptive of atheists, so I doubt it’s counterproductive.

Possibly I need to figure out Technorati. I’m pretty sure I’m C-list.

I think this blog needs a new name. Rosio Pavoris is vaguely emo, but I mostly picked it because it sounded neatly erudite, in that it’s Latin and the choice of words is archaic enough that a lot of smaller Latin dictionaries won’t be able to translate it.
Of course, if I make the politics and religion posts a recurring theme, it’s pretty apt. Dunno.

It’s interesting how people don’t register anymore. I guess I don’t require registration for commenting, but I never did, and in the first few days something like half a dozen people (my loyal readerbase twice over, at that point) registered, while after that, literally nobody has. Go register, kids, and log in before commenting. It makes controlling spambots a little bit easier for me.

I’ve enabled pingbacks and trackbacks from other blogs (edit: apparently these are standardised protocols, and should be capitalised as Pingback and TrackBack, respectively; live and learn). I wonder if that will change anything. I don’t do pingbacks and trackbacks myself, and I’d assume most people don’t. Either way, there shouldn’t be a huge number of people linking to my posts.

I upgraded to a newer version of WordPress, which takes forever because of the large number of files being transferred over a protocol that’s relatively unsuited to handling it (namely, FTP), and after starting over a few times (because FTP likes to crap out, of course without remembering where it left off) managed to get the update script running.
Of course, something broke. Blah. Now I get a notice telling me some template or other can’t be found whenever I access my post-writing pages. I can’t imagine this isn’t a common error that is documented somewhere on some WordPress forum, but I can’t be bothered to look for a solution.

There should be upgrade packets that only include the files that were changed, instead of the entire thing. If that already exists, someone should point it out to me.

Dunno if the option to password-protect a post is new, but I can imagine that could be handy.

I managed to fix my blog, apparently. In the wp_option table, updating option_ids 1 and 105. Uploading is still broken, though I’m not sure that was ever possible.

Anyway. Our DNS records are bork, and Yourspace seems to be on vacation. I’ve sent an email. If it isn’t resolved soon, I guess I’ll find a lawyer. -_-

I’m debating adding a shared WordPress blog for staff, to keep tracks of updates to subdomains and whatnot. Thoughts?