August 2003 Archives

After getting new 16" alloy wheels for my as-of-yet unmodded civic, i splurged a bit more to get an XM radio for my car. Holy shit, this thing rocks! At the risk of sounding like an informercial, this thing has everything you'd ever want to listen to under your fingertips. I was so sick of listening to the same crappy CDs that have been sitting in my car for the past three years, and the top 40 hits on FM radio pretty much all suck.

My favorite channels are Ethel XM (alternative tracks) and The Loft which plays mainly acoustic songs. The dance channels are great, too, like BPM and The System, which pretty much play techno and trance 24/7 (no retarded house stuff, for the most part). Anyway, I think the best part of it all is how cool it makes my car looks, check it out!

Yeah, it's kind of homemade looking sitting there taped to my dash, but cool nonetheless! Oh, this picture reminds I have to mail off a priority mail package to my bro...

Too many times have I putzed around in Linux trying to install a program or get a device driver work without ever writing down what I did, only to come back to the same goddam problem three months later... well, I think the three hours it took to set this thing up warrants writing down *something*. So, as simple as it sounds, here are eight eeaassy steps to get your very own MovableType blogger on your Linux box!

1. Download the distro (duh!).
2. Unzip files into the cgi-bin of the web directory, assuming perl is setup to run only from there (which it typically is, i think.)
3. Move the static directory and files (images/, docs/, style.css) into another location, made public to the world (i.e. outside cgi-bin).
4. Edit the mt.cfg file according to the documentation. Follow the Berkeley DB method.
5. Install the Berkeley DB distro at http://www.sleepycat.com.
6. Download the perl-DB_File RPM and install. For some reason, the DB_File perl script found at http://search.cpan.org didn't work with 5.8.0.
7. Copy DB_File from perl directory to cgi-bin/db/, or whatever was specified in the mt.cfg file.
8. run mt-check.cgi, and all should be well!

Finally! After hours and hours of setting up MovableType (inspired by wilwheaton.net), I've managed to get this blasted blogging tool to work! Actually, it's an amazing tangle of CGI scripts that seem to miraculously work. If only I weren't such an idiot and wasted pretty much the entire night trying to compile a tiny little file that seems to glue the whole thing together. Now, the question remains... am I going to be one of those people who spills every mundane detail of his/her life into the web for everyone to fall asleep to? I guess time will tell.

Alright, time to give this dawg some class... a nice title on the top, a picture to the right, and I should be set!