« "It says we're lost." | Main | Instant Mangling »

This is an outdated page we've kept in place for your convenience. Please do not link to it as we can't guarantee it will still be here in the future. If you're looking for something specific on PuddingTime!, please use this search form, which will return results on the new site:


October 04, 2003

All You Can Eat


At some point in the past year, I picked up the habit of renting or borrowing entire t.v. series seasons. I think it started when a few episodes of "Angel" got us interested in making sure we knew everything there was to know about the Buffyverse. Since then, we've been through the available seasons of "Angel," most of a season of "Bablyon 5" (I'm sorry... I just don't get the appeal), the first season of "The Simpsons," "Six Feet Under," and "Dark Angel." We're also nursing a fairly hefty "Sopranos" jones, and that's what motivated me to go ahead and subscribe to Netflix. We're in line for the fourth season, which will beat kicking and scratching at the video store. They'll come when they come.

So I've got a new sidebar item down there on the left, powered by Oscar Hill's Netflix Suite plugin, which shows what's in my movie queue. As a sidenote, if you google for "netflix movable type," you'll probably end up with Ben Trott's plugin, which appears to be broken at the moment. Oscar's works. He really oughta go ahead and either submit it to plugins directory or at least tell Ben what he did to fix it.

Update: Well, Oscar's plugin spews a lot of error messages when the indexes are rebuilt with a script I've got to do that. I won't call my endorsement complete until I can debug, or see what Oscar knows about it.

Update redux: Yes, there's a fix for Ben's plugin posted in the directory. Yes, I applied it. No, it did not work for me. Also, the error messages I'm getting as a result of running an index rebuild with mt-rebuild.pl can be fixed by adding a simple redirect of stderr to /dev/null, like so:

mt-rebuild.pl -mode=index -blog_id=2 -template="Main Index" > /dev/null 2>&1

This has the effect of killing all error messages, so it's a good idea to perhaps run one ringer rebuild at a specific and odd time now and then just to make sure other problems haven't crept in over the course of adding plugins or making changes.

Posted by mph at October 4, 2003 10:53 PM

Comments

Errors? I haven't heard about them from anyone else, and the plugins are about as simple as they come, but do let me know if you think I need to take a closer look at them.

Also, I submitted them all to the plugins directory weeks ago, but they are very slow to update the thing. I suspect Kristine does it all by herself.

Anyway, keep me posted.

Posted by: Oscar at October 5, 2003 04:50 AM

the mt-plugins listing has a link to the fix for ben's plugin.

and yes, kristine does mt-plugins all by herself.

Posted by: sungo at October 5, 2003 09:27 AM

Oscar: The issue is the way the script interacts with mt-rebuild.pl and mt-rebuild-index.pl, which I use to update several of the more dynamic elements of the page. I get this error:

Useless use of a constant in void context at /www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/plugins/netflix-queue.pl line 54.

I've suppressed it by just sending stderr to /dev/null when I run the rebuild scripts, and the indexes rebuild despite the error, but that's what I'm getting. When I have the other two plugins in the suite installed, I get even more errors, even though I don't invoke them anywhere on the site:

/www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/plugins/netflix-history.pl did not return a true value at /www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/lib/MT.pm line 117.

Useless use of a constant in void context at /www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/plugins/netflix-outstanding.pl line 55.

Subroutine shuffle redefined at /www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/plugins/netflix-queue.pl line 147.

Subroutine queue redefined at /www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/plugins/netflix-queue.pl line 70.

Subroutine queue_info redefined at /www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/plugins/netflix-queue.pl line 159.

Useless use of a constant in void context at /www/www.puddingbowl.org/mt/plugins/netflix-queue.pl line 54.


Re: Ben's fix: I'm afraid that fix, provided we're talking about the one involving this line:

while ($c =~ m!(.*?)!sg) {

didn't work for me when I applied it just last night.

Posted by: mph at October 5, 2003 10:43 AM

They seem to be working for me now. I rebuilt all my blogs with all three plugins using tim's mt-rebuild script and they all worked with no error messages. The problem was that I had left out a "package" declaration. What an idiot! But it doesn't cause a problem with a web-based rebuild. Thanks for alerting me!

Posted by: Oscar at October 8, 2003 05:01 PM