Thus Spoke Herman

why cannot we all see that we are not we
you are not really you and me is not me.
i cannot judge, i cannot complain
i cannot preach, my words are in vain.
i sometimes too, find it impossible to see
past myself and our beautiful hypocrisy
we live now, we cannot live then
but all the past becomes the future again and again.
time swirls all around us, and we are held firm
once in its slick grasp, there is just no place to turn.
the sweet sense of self and the arrow of time
the power of us, that sense of divine.
we go to bed exhausted and tumble asleep
our dreams very fleeting and sometime we keep
a little sense of what was just seen
a little memory of what could have been.
but identity is always locked down so tight
defended with false valour, there is no respite,
we wake and are straight back,
the same feeling again
the endless struggle to become so much more than just men.

I recently bought EROL v4 to get an e-commerce site up and running fast. The client side is .NET and I installed on XP. Lo and behold, the store doesn’t open because….. there is a space in the directory path. Wow. Honestly. Check the date of this post. I kid you not. Seriously guys, fix it, that is an embarassment.

once more my thoughts seethe and froth,
surfacing for an instant in magnificence,
crashing down on melodramatic shores of pretentiousness
the tide of my overelaborate ego and self aggrandizement,
rising and falling as my words get longer and longer.
my mind fills with grand thoughts
but what good comes of this,
an education battered and bought.
my feelings are fake i am sure
i have my honesty laid out on the floor.
it creeps around, arid and burnt
sucking deep breaths, choking on what i have learnt.
each new thing that i seek
can i keep offering the other cheek?
as truth vanishes so i must call
out at the night
even if it was ever there at all.

Trying to switch on nice urls.

I tried switching the Permalinks functionality on. I like the date and name one. However, it said I needed to update my .htaccess file as it is not writable.

I added the suggested changes and lo and behold:

Internal Server Error

The same happened when I removed the .htaccess file and made an empty one and granted permissions for the webserver to change it. Wordpress did just add the same code to the file, so not a real surprise.

I have the mod_rewrite option in the httpd.conf file, so what is going on?

First stop, apache error log:
/home/sites/home/web/blog/.htaccess: RewriteEngine not allowed here

Aha, we need to configure apache properly.

I added this to the virtual host section (shared server) and put in the full actual path (not symlinked one) and a quick apache restart later everything is now lovely

<Directory “/home/sites/home/web/blog”>
AllowOverride AuthConfig Options FileInfo
</Directory>

Upgrading wordpress to 2.3.3

While i wouldn’t normally bother documenting something like this, i have been getting into the habit of documenting all my steps in my job, so why not here.

Downloaded the tar.gz and uploaded to my webserver.

I checked the wp-admin/upgrade.php page and do not need a DB upgrade.

untared the tarball:

tar -zvx -C $SITE_PATH/web/blog/ -f wordpress-2.3.3.tar.gz
cp -R $SITE_PATH/web/blog/wordpress/* $SITE_PATH/web/blog/

All worked. Genius :). Short post…