Another Opinion Among Many

Wow! What a nasty  headache I’ve had today! I woke up with my head just throbbing with pain (an hour before I wanted to get up - so, I took Tylenol and went back to bed, hoping this trick would work - didn’t).  It didn’t let up at all.  Putting my water bottle to my forhead elped to relieve it a small amount, but it didn’t go away completely.

UNTIL NOW!!!

Horray! Its gone! The wicked headache is dead! I thought that I’d share, so there.

Today, April 9, is CSS Naked day.  Today, you see my site as it would be seen in a text browser or a screen reader.  We should try to make our websites as accessible as we can.  Does your site still look good naked?

Although I am far from rich, I just donated $10.00USD to BellyUp4Blues, as they are low on funds (I had $13.xx CDN in my Paypal balance).  This station is run by volunteers and funded by listeners.  Its got some of the best blues playing on any Shoutcast feed.  If you like blues, consider donating to this site, as they produce quality stuff on a volunteer staff.

And, hey, what a birthday present! In 3 days, the station will be 5 years old!

I thought that I’d follow up on my complaint about the non-working PenguinTV on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. From a forum post, I found a workaround:

In a terminal, type export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox and then export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox and then execute PenguinTV: PenguinTV &, which allows the program to find what its looking for.

That’s a bit arduous, so why not automate it? I did so, and it is really a hack, but I thought that I’d share it with you. Anyone who has created bash scripts before (or batch files in Windows/DOS) will find this to be quite trivial, but there are many out there who still haven’t “gotten their feet wet”.

So, the first thing that you’ll want to do is open your favorite editor. For quick and dirty scripts like this one, I use nano, as many systems have it included and the learning curve is quite small. So, for nano, you would open a terminal and type nano -w Pengi. I use Pengi as the name for my script. you can use whatever you want. The -w flag for nano causes it to continue beyond the border of your terminal when writing a line, keeping you from truncating a long command. Its not really necessary for this script because the commands are quite short, but its a good habit.

Here’s what you put in your editor:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox

PenguinTV

Save the file.  Ensure that you’ve typed each command on a new line.  Then change it to executable with a quick chmod: chmod a+rwx Pengi

You can now open PenguinTV on the command prompt by typing /home/your-username/Pengi
That’s not the end of it, though, right?  You want your nice little icon to execute the file when you click it, I am sure.  Whether I use Gnome, KDE, or XFCE, I’ve become accustomed to putting a quick launch for my favorite applications on the taskbar for easy access.  This is the case for PenguinTV as well.

Its quite easy, in these desktop environments, to change the attributes of an application launcher.  Its even a tad easier than when using Microsoft Windows, as you don’t have to remember to put quotes around the application path.  So, you would right-click the PenguinTV icon and select “properties” from the menu.  In the “path to executable”, you would replace “PenguinTV” with “/home/your-username/Pengi" (without the quotes, of course) and click OK.  You should be in business and PenguinTV should open with the right environment variables to launch successfully.

I found a nice entry today that you might like if you want to speed up your Ubuntu. Its pretty much common sense, but its a nice collation of tips. Here’s the article: A Quick Way to Improve Ubuntu Linux Operating Speed Performance.

Wow! I could feel it come on last night, creeping up on me. I had no where to hide. Whammo! I got sick! My mom had told me that everyone was sick back home and to expect to take it back with me.

Well, I did. I’ve been up every hour all night. This morning, I’d just love to step out of my skin, as its just crawling. Should I attempt to go to work? Sure, what the hell!

So, the puddle at the end of our driveway is becoming the lake that is swallowing our driveway. I hope that we have a few days in a row of really sunny weather so that the snow will melt off some more, and, with any luck, the ground will thaw a bit and absorb some of the wet stuff. It would be nice if this was truly spring. After all, it IS April. I remember that this time last year, the utility that I work for was waiting for the run of warm enough days so that they could go and shut off the delinquents. Its amazing what you can scam out of your local utility in Ontario. No wonder the prices are going up, thanks to those who know how to fleece the system repeatedly.

My grandfather’s funeral consumed the weekend, of course, so we (Angela and I) spent much of Saturday and Sunday traveling. Despite the short stay in Nova Scotia, it was a pleasant time, with the exception of the funeral itself, of course. Saying all that, the minister who did the ceremony was excellent and his eulogy was that of a family friend, rather than that of a stranger making up encouraging words, which really made a big difference. He stirred up some memories with his own recollections, which was nice. Something that I didn’t know is that my grandfather (and great uncle) had two deceased infant sisters. I wonder how they coped with that as kids. I don’t really want to find out personally, though.

My brother gave me an old camera of his, a Kodak DX4900. Its not a bad camera - not quite as sleek as the Olympus, but it actually works as intended. I went to Future Shop and got a replacement Compact Flash card for it so that I won’t be limited to the piddly 16MB card that it came with. So, now instead of taking 24 pictures on my regular card, I can take 999 pictures on my Sandisk 2GB Ultra II card, which is supposed to be faster than a normal Compact Flash card. Its too bad that the camera doesn’t get recognized under Linux as a flash drive. At least gPhoto picks it up and wants to import your photos for you. Perhaps I should get a card reader for a situation like this.

Wow, what a buzz about Wordpress 2.5. I’m not going to say anything new about it, as the net is saturated with goop about everyone’s new installations. One thing I will warn, though, is the same thing that I warn every time. Back up your site before doing a major change to it! With Wordpress sites, that means, for sure, backing up your database. If you have cPanel, use its convenient backup feature, as its just a mouse click. Do the same for your home directory if you’ve had a lot of changes since you last backed up. At the very least, back up your /wp-content directory, so that your customizations on your theme and plugins will remain intact elsewhere in case a back up is needed. It can’t hurt to export your Wordpress blog via the built in export facility. There’s a lot of goodness in that .xml file.

Do you need a job? Do you live in the Fredericton area? My employer is still hiring. If you want the details, email me. I will refer you and you’ll make me rich! (okay, not rich, but their is an incentive, like a head hunter’s bounty). You’ll also get the chance to work hard and make lots of your own money, of course.