I think the blog is back now. Six months ago it got hacked, in a very minor way; but I was very busy at the time. When my repair attempts stumbled it went onto the back burner. Something weird about mysql character set encodings, or word press evolution’s in that area. In short when I exported the database and then initialized a new one with the exported data things got wonky. Most noticably sequences between sentences, but other things as well.

One way to address the very busy problem is to lose your job (yes I’ve checked under the bed – thank God it’s not there!).

So lots of chores are getting my attention.

Of course I had to waste a few days trying to puzzle out what actually happen. That devolved into archeology. This blog is more than a decade old. It had a lot of curious character set anomalies, not just the recent damage. Some of which, at least, appears to be the result of copy paste from other blogs.

I wrote some code to visit all the text in the database and heuristically repair the character encodings. FYI clsql and asdf don’t play together very well. I didn’t really want to learn about how many different kinds of quotation marks there are, or that occasionally people use the double-prime character (U+2033) as a quotation mark; etc. etc. And did you know there is both a character for degree (U+00B0), as in temperature, and one for marking a numeral as a Feminine_Ordinal_Indicator (U+00AA). Ah, diversity!

The blog’s still not quite right. There are some broken links, some missing images, and I’m not happy with the color scheme or the layout yet, etc. etc. But yeah; it’s somewhat presentable.