mushinnoshin

Well, when I wrote that last post, I hadn’t considered it actually being the closing post here, yet it seems so very fitting.

So yes, it’s time to move on from this blog. Some of you already know where I’m at now. As the subject matter on the new site is somewhat sensitive, I won’t link from here publicly, but if you haven’t already been invited and want to be, just drop me a comment or ping me by whatever means you prefer.

This site’s archives will remain active at: http://mushinnoshin.neuralspace.com.

The mushinnoshin.com domain will redirect for a time, until I relinquish or repurpose it.

It’s been real, y’all. Jon out.

can’t end the thought, much less the holiday, without the requisite epilogue.

Everything Ends In Judgement

I don’t know if I’ve ever posted this one before. I think probably not.

Downshift

I dunno, it’s hard. Songwriting and production it’s one of the best things I’ve done. But the vocal track is an embarrassing, maudlin mess, lyrics and performance. In fairness though, she was supposed to sing the song, not be its subject.

• Biggest bummer: losing Feingold. Wisconsin, you’re on notice. I’d threaten to boycott you, but I already brew my own beer and eat very little cheese, so I don’t really know what else I can do.
• The TN Governor’s race was a joke of course. Did you vote for the homophobic, xenophobic, right-wing creationist nutjob… or the Republican? I went with the Green Party’s Howard Switzer.
• I’ll give my regular spiel about Jim Cooper: I like him, I actually think he’s one of the better reps out there, and I’m glad he got re-elected, but I do wish he represented a more conservative district, so Nashville could elect a better civil libertarian. Of course this wasn’t the year for that.
• Sestak… well, I sorta wanted him to pull out a victory just as vindication after taking on the party apparatus and ousting Specter … but the truth is, I didn’t really like him that much either. Every time I saw him interviewed, he was just way too good at the sleazy “I’m going to ignore your question and redirect back into my talking points” game that so many politicians play. So, meh. Of course I say that while knowing next to nothing about Toomey — if Toomey turns out to be whipped from the same frothy mix of lube and fecal matter as a certain former PA Senator, I will have to retract that ‘meh’.
• I’ve no love lost for Harry Reid, but I’m glad to see the racist wingnut go down in flames. I think maybe there’s some instruction for conservatives in that it looks like the more libertarian-ish (Rand Paul) wing of the tea party generally had more success than the reactionary, fill-in-the-blank-a-phobic and theocratic wing (Angle, O’Donnell), at least in the Senate. Will they take the lesson? I doubt it.
• Speaking of Paul, I guess it’s nice to have some sort of Buddhist representation, though I’m still not sure what an AquaBuddhist is.
• Rubio v Crist didn’t really seem like much of a choice, so I pretty much tuned that race out. But I will say that when you’re a closet case making your career on the wrong side of gay rights, karma will eventually catch up with you.
• Being a cantankerous curmudgeon who doesn’t much like anybody can be either liberating or exasperating depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, I’m not terribly distraught about the Democrats losing the house. On the other hand, I’m horrified that the Republicans won it, especially with Boehner & Cantor in charge — two of the most vile, slimy, intellectually dishonest ratfuckers up there. Take my comments about Sestak times about a thousand.
• The best news of the night I think is Jerry Brown winning in CA — only because it makes California Uber Alles timely again. When our band used to cover that song back in the 90s, I tried to replace Jerry Brown with Al Gore just to make it more relevant, but it didn’t really work.

As you’re probably aware, most people live their lives dominated by one hemisphere of the brain or the other — the logical left or the intuitive right *. But there exists a small number of weirdos like myself whose brains function nearly equi-hemispherically.

It’s sort of a blessing and a curse.

Anyway I was tickled to find out that Lora has the same peculiarity, and she posted a link to a quiz you can take on the matter.

So here’s my result. I’m sure like any online quiz it’s not scientifically rigid, but it’s fun… and we equi-brains get to fully appreciate both halves of that sentence ;)

Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others. Left Brain Dominance: (16) Right Brain Dominance: (16) Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz

* This is of course a gross oversimplification, since the hemispheres actually control different functions and generally have to work together to make for a functioning person — but let’s not quibble, we’re just talking about a vague general dominance or preference here.

** Heh. Weird City. Hemispheres. Get it? I crack me up.

Go read this brilliant treatise on the pathology of the workplace as demonstrated by The Office. I think the breakdown of the workplace heierarchy into sociopaths, the clueless, and the losers is spot on.

As for myself, I think I’ve always been at a weird spot, counting myself among the bare-minimum performers (the “losers” who are cognizant of the shitty deal), while yet actually producing more like an overperformer — only because I’ve set my “bare minimums” too high, not for ever having had any delusions about the value of oveperforming. I need to work on that, if I’m going to have any hope of holding on until I can figure a way off of this infernal hamster wheel.

(For that, I’m looking really hard at what this dude has to say)

@AuntB pointed out this revealing article. Apparently xenophobes protesting whenever the scary foreign people want to build a new church is a proud Rutherford County tradition:

This plan to construct the county’s first Catholic Church was the target of a local KKK protest march. Woods was only 7 or 8 years old when he and his brother watched the “torch light” KKK march through downtown Murfreesboro.

Just got through loading the freezer after a grocery trip and thought this was sorta funny.

Awesome… all my futzing around with Gallery has led me to release my first perl CPAN module — Gallery::Remote::API, a perl module for interacting with a Gallery installation via Gallery’s remote protocol.

Funny thing was, halfway through writing it I realized the remote protocol itself didn’t let me do what I set out to do in the first place … it actually doesn’t let you do much besides fetch info and add images. Oh well, maybe someone will find it useful. It was a good exercise for me just to get a handle on packaging a module for distribution.

I just know you wanna know what sort of fun I’ve been having this morning.

OK, so I’m playing around with an installation of WordPress featuring an embedded installation of Gallery2 via the excellent WPG2 plugin. And I’ve got all my fancy url rewriting set up on both platforms.

So what happens is, when you go to “site.com/galleries”, you’re going to a wordpress page, at which point wpg2 does some fancy footwork to embed the appropriate gallery page, so when you go to “site.com/galleries/myalbum/” it shows that album’s page, and “site.com/galleries/myalbum/myphoto.html” shows that photo’s page, etc., all wrapped up inside your usual WordPress header, sidebar, and footer. So far so good.

Here’s the thing: Gallery’s url-permalink stuff correctly writes out the album links as “site.com/galleries/myalbum/”, but I kept getting 301 redirects to “site.com/galleries/myalbum” (notice the trailing slash difference). Now that’s not a completely insufferable thing — it does get you the correct content. But there are both performance and SEO considerations. On the one hand, you don’t want to 301 if you don’t have to (waste of bandwidth and slows down the user experience); on the other hand, you do only want one version, whichever it is, to be the “accepted” version, while the other 301s back to the first, otherwise you split your ranking juice between the two urls, and may get penalized for duplicate content.

So the easy solution would probably have been to hack Gallery and remove the slash wherever it generates links (and where it generates the rel=”canonical” link in the header [which Gallery itself doesn't actually do, I had to put that in my custom theme myself]). Except that IMHO, the slash should be there in this case — in my mind, an album is a directory, as evidenced by the fact that “files” (photo pages) exist beneath it.

So I set about trying to figure out who was redirecting my slash back to no-slash by poking around in all my redirect rules. Now that’s not an easy task, given that wordpress and gallery both write their own .htaccess files, wpg2 writes a modified version of gallery’s mod_rewrite rules into the wordpress .htaccess, and on top of that, apparently WordPress ALSO has a whole set of “virtual” rewrite rules that don’t show up in the .htaccess file. Compound this by the fact that Dreamhost doesn’t seem to let me turn on mod_rewrite’s RewriteLog, and by the fact that the galllery links have to go through some valid rewrites to get them first in a form that wpg2 can understand, and then into a form that gallery itself can understand — well I drove myself nuts trying to figure out where it was happening.

Finally out of sheer frustration I grepped for “301″ in the wordpress source code — and sure enough, I found a sneaky little wordpress function called redirect_canonical was the culprit. Apparently anytime it gets a “site.com/url/” (at least one that doesn’t actually point to a real live directory — I think), it removes that slash and 301s.

Now, normally, that’s probably the right thing to do. If someone goes to “site.com/myblogpost/”, it probably should redirect to “site.com/myblogpost”, and consider the slashless version canonical — since a single blog post/page/whatever is really more like a file than a directory. But it’s not appropriate in this embedded gallery situation. Luckily, wordpress does provide a whole system of filters and hooks with which you can fix this.

So, if you’re in a similar situation, you can add something like the following to your theme’s “functions.php” file, and that should do the trick:

//don't let wordpress "canonicalize" gallery virtual directories
function g2_reverse_canonical($rd_url,$rq_url) {

    global $user_url;

    $pattern1 = "~^$user_url\/galleries\/([^.]+\/)+(\?[^?]*)?$~";
    $pattern2 = "~^($user_url\/galleries\/([^.]+\/)*([^.]+))(\?[^?]*)?$~";

    if (!empty($rd_url) &&
        preg_match($pattern1,$rq_url)
    ) {
        #don't do it!
        return false;
    }
    elseif (empty($rd_url) &&
        preg_match($pattern2,$rq_url)
    ) {
        #reverse it!
        return preg_replace("~(\?[^?]*)?$~","\/${1}",$rq_url);
    }
    #otherwise, let wp do what it wants
    return $rd_url;
}
add_filter('redirect_canonical','g2_reverse_canonical',10,2);

Of course you’ll want to replace “galleries” in those regex patterns with whatever path you chose for your gallery permalinks. It seems to work for me — at least, I haven’t found any bugs so far (if anyone who knows more about this stuff than I sees an issue, I’m all ears). Notice that in addition to stopping wordpress from removing the slash, I also do the reverse and add the slash when it isn’t present. It might be more efficient to move that part to an .htaccess mod_rewrite rule, but I wanted both actions in the same place for the sake of my sanity.

Further, note that it does NOT apply if the final token (prior to any query string) contains a “.” — this lets wordpress correctly do it’s thing and canonicalize the “site.com/myalbum/myphoto.html” pages without the slash. Of course the downside is that you can’t have a “.” in your album names (but since gallery album names — as far as the url is concerned — are the actual directory names where the data is stored, hopefully it’s not a problem. Yeah, you can create directory names that have a “.” in them, but hopefully you’re sane enough not to do so :)

Finally, I also let wordpress take it slashless when just going to “site.com/galleries”. Personally, I think that too should be treated like a directory, but since it’s technically a wordpress “page”, and since in this case Gallery is also generating links without the slash, I’m just going to let that one be.

And I still hate PHP.