However, my unflagging interest in technology requires that I learn more about how these things work. The site www.optiniche.com that has an excellent post on trackbacks in general – probably the best simple explanation I’ve seen. There’s another page that has a pretty good HOWTO at tamba2.org.uk. There is a more complete Guide to Wordpress Pingbacks and Trackbacks at the Untwisted Vortex site.

Apparently there’s no good/easy uprade path from wordpress 2.0.something to whatever version this is… so I’ve been hacking on the database for a few hours. Almost there, though I haven’t copied over any images or custom CSS. Maybe this weekend.

Since my last box was completely toasted, I just started my MythTV installation over from scratch — abandoning all of my previously recorded material. I started by trying to boo the Gentoo install-amd64-2006.1 ISO — no luck. Some significant Google-time paid off, though.  It turns out that the motherboard in my little system (an Asus M2NPV-VM) is missing a bug that some previous nVidia-based Asus boards exhibited. The work-around present in the Linux kernel created a race condition that caused the system to deadlock when booting. Whee!

So I used an older CD to boot, and just installed the 2006.1 stage3 tarball anyway. I wanted to use a 2.6.18 kernel, so I could use the 0.8 branch of IVTV. Before compiling, I applied a patch to circumvent the lack-of-bug problem with the nVidia chipset. Once I got the system to boot (and figured out how to compile a kernel that actually worked) the thing was up pretty quickly.

The one that ticks me off the most is my MythTV system. I built it myself, in an Antec Overture case with a Tyan dual Opteron board, running a single Opteron 246. The thing is beautiful, and served me well for almost a year.

The system disk started to have unrecoverable errors, so I was already looking at it pretty closely. I had started to move data around on the disk to avoid the bad area when the DVD+RW drive stopped working. That was too much of a coincidence — neither of these devices were near their MTBF — so I opened up the case and started to look around. Seeing nothing unusual, I tried to power it up again. Hmmm… Nothing.

So I did what any engineer would do: unplug it, reseat the components, examine it closely, and try it again.

Holy crow! I can only describe the next sequence of events as “a catastrophic power supply failure”. There was a very large arc, and a very small ball of plasma. Given this, I’m just going to assume that the entire system is compromised and start from scratch…

I’m annoyed that some of the nicely styled pages from the old site just don’t seem to look good any more. In fact, I had to add a few style attributes here and there just to make them not ugly. I view this as a defeat, since I had everything in the CSS before. Owell. I’ll just have to learn more about the CMS.

I’d love to be able to import existing, valid xhtml in some way other than “cut ‘n paste”. Also, the built-in HTML editor is pretty impressive — given that it runs in my web browser — but it mangles the formatting of what I think of as source code.

So I figured, “Might as well do something with the website.” I emerged Wordpress, and I’m off to the races. Now I’ve just got to figure out how to import the content that previously existed on the website and make “permalinks” for those pages that match their old location. Whee!