Posting about upgrading your incredibly common blogging software isn’t very interesting. But I’m going to take this opportunity to suggest that this time, if you are able, switch to using subversion for wordpress. Installing wordpress is pretty easy. Upgrading it is also easy, but you still have to move your plugins, themes, and wp-config.php around, or delete stuff that gets in the way. Using subversion makes all of that that go away. Yay!

Today, I figured out how to get DBD::Oracle to work on Mac OS X Leopard (intel). Since it isn’t (yet) entirely straightforward, I thought I’d describe the process here:

1. Install instantclient. You will need the basic and sdk modules. I suggest also getting the sqlplus module while you are at it. I put this in /usr/local/instantclient_10_2.

2. Modify your .bashrc (or whatever) to set ORACLE_HOME and DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH to /usr/local/instanclient_10_2.

After a mere 2.5 hour wait in line, assisted by jet-lag, I have acquired the 3G iPhone. More later.

Back in 2003, as an exercise to help me learn Python, I wrote python-rwhoisd. Why an RWhois server? I had been the main developer and sole maintainer of the C reference version since 1996, and I had been thinking about writing a replacement in a nicer language ever since. So I pretty familiar with the protocol and problem space, and it was complicated enough to be able to sink your teeth into it, yet not so hard that you couldn’t do it fairly quickly. Basically, a great learning project.

I finally got around the setting up unbound as my home resolver. I should have done this months ago, when it was in beta or before, since I had access to it. I kick myself. I feel bad. Oh well, let’s get on with it. My initial impressions:

1. It will be nice once there are distribution packages for unbound. I spent more time that I would like (which is zero) figuring out where to put the log file, pid file, etc. Of course, I was installing it on a machine running Fedora Core 5…
2. I was forwarding a zone to a nameserver running on localhost:20053. There is a gotcha to doing this, as, by default unbound won’t send any queries to localhost. You have to add a ‘do-not-query-localhost: no’ config line to fix it. Maybe this is something unbound-checkconf could detect?
3. unbound’s configuration defaults leave it locked down fairly tightly. I had it running, but on my other machines, it seemed so slow – turns out, my queries were timing out and I was hitting my ISP nameserver. Make sure you add your networks to the ‘access-control:’ config parameters.
4. I turned up the logging to debug some of my issues. Looking at the log was uncanny.

Anyway, it didn’t take all that long to set up. Hopefully relatively soon I (or someone else) will write up how to configure unbound to run in a few different scenarios.

I realized that I was running a now-ancient version of wordpress, so I upgraded. It was easy. Yay wordpress 2.5!