…but I’m right!…and coming to you live, at times
Why haven’t we heard more about google.org? Have you heard about it? I would think that with the negative “Big Brother” reputation that a big company like Google gets, merely for being big, it would be a breath of fresh air to see some of the good that can come out of them.
Well, there is someone out there who wants us to be able to get to some of those lost pages. Go to Reocities. Go check it out if you want to see what some people try to do for the rest of us.
…but this site was unavailable for most of the day. I have yet to find out from my host what their problem was, but I will find out.
I found out what it was. More on that later. I’ve taken this opportunity to review the security of my WordPress installation and have taken some measures last night that should close the biggest possible holes. One of them was to rename the tables on the database from a copy that I saved earlier, so I lost a few comments on this post. Thank you for them, folks. I appreciate it, really. I hadn’t realized how big the database had grown. I’m going to have to cull through it and see if there are some things i can remove.
So, in the Atlantic Standard Time zone, its now officially 2010. Welcome to the next year, which promises to be better than the last,’cos I said so!
So, for od and RT Cunningham, who is already 12 hours into 2010, what is it like?
For hari, who is already 10 hours into 2010, what is it like?
For Ray and Richard, who are already 4 hours into 2010, what is it like?
For Diane and Drew, who have still 3 hours left in 2009, what do you think the future holds?
Same goes for Dragonlady, Jeremy, and SeLiNa. How does it feel with 1 hour left in 2009?
BTW, WordPress has a bug with scheduled posts. I intended this to post at midnight and it didn’t. WordPress failed. Boo!. Repost at 12:19am, Jan 1, 2010.]
Boo. Wordpress fails big time. This is a pasted repost of what I already wrote. WordPress fail.
MacBros wants to feel wanted, despite partying it up with his family, knowing full well that he is wanted. So, to avoid having to close comments on this post, I mention him.
RT Cunningham recently wrote about his woes with Windows and his desire to kick Microsoft and its encumbered software to the curb. He is going to try and replace Windows with Ubuntu Linux.
I think that this is great, sort of.
You see, I’ve been using some form of GNU and Linux (or *Bsd) on my desktop compute since I first tried that Storm Linux 2000 disk that a neighbor gave me to play with. I had a hard time with it, as I couldn’t get my Wintel modem to connect to the internet.
Lately, although I am still a true distro-hopper, I have been using Ubuntu as my desktop of choice. The computer I currently have has not had Windows installed on it since I put the parts together. My hard drive was not new when I acquired it and has developed a few bad sectors, so I replaced it. I was running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the long term support stable release, on my computer, which had bee upgraded from 6.10 or 7.04, as the releases arrived.
On the new hard drive, I put on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which was sometime around September or October. This was just before the release of 9.10 in November. All of the bugs that had presented themselves in the early months seemed to have been ironed out, except for a sound/video issue in which the sound would totally crap out on me for no apparent reason, freezing up .avi videos. I resolved that by changing a configuration file to not choose the frequency (44,100 or 48,000) and set it at one. Taking the auto off seemed to fix the problem.
9.04 had Firefox 3.0, though, and I really prefer Firefox 3.5, so for that reason alone, I “upgraded” to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I don’t know why I did this, as I had already tried to install Karmic on its own partition to test it, along about beta 1 or so. It began with sound, but now it has no sound. The desktop is stunning and the themes are improving. Everything seems to work with a nice, fluid flow, but it has no sound. This time I can’t fix it.
The “upgrade” had preserved the sound, but I’ve found a few little glitches that I don’t like at all and, even with diligent googling for the cure, I cannot solve these issues.
This is unacceptable, so my 9.10 spare test distro is now being upgraded to the alpha of 10.4 Lucid Lynx so that I can see if it can be repaired by “progress”. Its happening underneath this browser, as I type. I hope nothing breaks too badly before I submit the article. So far, its down to “about 4 minutes remaining”. I began this about 1/2 hour ago. That is amazing. The time that I upgraded to 8.04, it took all night (as in many hours). Of course, the new policy on upgrades is to disable 3rd party repositories during the upgrade, which likely makes it a lot tidier.
We’ll see. Hopefully, this experiment bears the fruit that I am looking for. Then I might be able to watch a video from beginning to end again.
Update: This didn’t work at all. Lucid Lynx totally broke and now kernel panics when booting into multi user mode. I’ve been updating, hoping that there will be some fix that will miraculously fix it, but I don’t have much hope.
After coming up against a stumbling block, such as it was, I looked elsewhere as a temporary fix. I must say that the newest Mepis is well-appointed, sporting a KDE4 desktop that is beginning to show the shine that we once saw in the older versions. I can view and hear video well and outputting the video to my TV set is resolve in a slightly nicer way, with a “widened” desktop, like Twinview did, but without fullscreen windows stretching across both screens.
Ubuntu did do a kernel update with 9.10 and it didn’t seem to have made any difference. Video seemed to play a bit longer before the sound got lost, but that is all. What did make a difference, though, was removing pulse audio from my system. Now, without that buggy piece of crap on my machine, video plays from beginning to end without problem. There’s still an issue with Flash freezing up the browser, but Flash is buggy and a resource hog anyways.
That is a wish of mine, whether you celebrate this holiday today or not. Please try to be happy, if you can. I know that our kids will be when they get up. And, no, I’m not up right now. Its magic!
I have not changed the look of this website for quite some time. I worked fairly diligently on the current theme, adapting from the most excellent Evanescence theme, using as a palate, a pile of maple leaves that Abby and I collected while walking back from Caleb’s school, which was before she was of school age.
There have been some exciting changes in the WordPress engine since, incorporating gallery functionality and threaded comments. These things aren’t worked into my current theme and I’d like to update it a bit.
Should I keep the same look? Or, should I go with something totally different?
