Another Opinion Among Many

To answer your question, Macbros,

I am hosted with a company called DSTinternet, and yes they’re fast! I did a lot of research before I unleashed my wallet on them and I couldn’t find enough negative about this company to not use them. The pricing seems to fit my budget and the features are fantastic! The company responds to support requests nearly instantly via the chat box off the site. I haven’t tried phone support yet, so I don’t know if the number will be reachable from Canada. My only gripe is that the use the Plesk control panel and I’m used to cPanel. I’ll have to see if I can simply add IP addresses to a ban list, as I can with cPanel, or if I have to add them to my .htaccess file manually (which I will, you spammers!). They allow FTP access so whatever!

As far as the rest,

This site runs on Wordpress. I usually am running a nightly build from the development repository. I’m not quite nutso enough (but close) to go with SVN commits, but the snapshot may not work for me every time either. I test the installation with similar plugins and theming on my own computer before I replace what’s working on this site. I don’t “upgrade” every night - more likely every 10 days or so. The current version is 2.3 alpha.

I am using a completely hacked and modified version of the Fresh theme, which was ported to Wordpress by LEMONed from the original design by Wolfgang Bartelme. I haven’t even left the structure intact, as I’ve moved stuff all over the place. The theme is based on a header, footer, body, subfooter, and sidebar. It has 3 sidebars (2 custom ones for individual pages, to which I employ the Page Template function) and 3 footer/subfooters. It will not always be the one I use. There’s something being cooked up in the background…

This site uses these plugins:

• Antileech - Prevent errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth. By Owen Winkler.
• Archivist - Selects a defined number of (random) posts from the archive and shows them on the front page By Martin Chlupáč.
• Bad Behaviour - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. By Michael Hampton.
• Compact Monthly Archive - Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
• Digital Fingerprint - adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts. By Kirk Montgomery.
• DoFollow - Disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. By Kimmo Suominen.
• Extended Comment Options - This plugin allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. By Mark Kenny.
• Extended Live Archives - Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe. By Arnaud Froment.
• Fancy Pullquotes - Creates pullquotes of given text to appear with a magazine-like style By Giorgio Gilestro.
• Google AJAX Search - Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site. By http://dancameron.org.
• myQuote - myQuote is a simple and small Wordpress plugin which enables you to place a Quote or Text on your website. By Jesper Avôt.
• Photopress - Photopress adds some image handling tools to Wordpress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. By Isaac Wedin.
• Recent Comments - Retrieves a list of the most recent comments. By Nick Momrik.
• Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
• The Excerpt Reloaded - This mod of WordPress’ template function the_excerpt() knows there is no spoon. By Kaf Oseo.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualisation. I Like Pi! By Christine Davis.
• Wayback - generate a list of posts from a previous period. By Chris Goringe.
• WP Grins - A Clickable Smilies hack for WordPress. By Alex King.
• WS Tooltips - Let’s you display cool JavaScript fading tooltips! By Christopher Hartmann.

For the moment, that’s all, but I will be changing and moving things around now and then. I have more plugins installed but not activated.

That’s about it for now.  If I’ve left anything out, I may add to this post later.

Some folks like peanut butter.  Some like bananas.  Some even like putting the two together in a sandwich, which is yummy!  I introduced Abby to this combination this morning and she liked it enough to make her own later.  Instead of slicing the banana, though, she had a different idea:

Continue reading ‘Peanut Butter and Bananas’ »

Here’s the most recent portrait of our family:

“They say that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. I only know this: it has to make you better. It has to.” - Tommy at the end of the movie.

I watched 10th and Wolf tonight, after long wanting to see it. It was an entertaining watch. It wasn’t the best movie that I’ve seen, but it was certainly one of the better ones that I’ve seen lately. If I had to give it a numerical rating, it would get a strong 7. It seems that my assessment is in line with what the “reviewers” at IMDB think as well.

The movie stars James Marsden (Tommy) as a tough, sullen Gulf War vet who comes home to his old neighborhood with a mission given to him by federal agents, played by Brian Dennehy (Horvath) and Leo Rossi (Thornton).

Tommy is faced with the decision to help his cousin, Joey (Giovanni Ribisi), with whom he grew up with as a brother, after Tommy’s Mob father was shot when he was 12. Joey has followed in the path of his father and uncle and still rules his corner of town with force.

Synopsis:

February, 1991. Tommy, a Desert Storm marine dismayed that the US isn’t taking out Saddam, breaks some rules and faces hard labor. An FBI agent offers him an out: go home to his gritty, dockside home in Pennsylvania and help get the goods on an Italian heroine dealer; in return, no prison time and no arrest of Tommy’s brother Vincent and cousin Joey. Loyalty to family conflicts with loyalty to the code of the street. Can Tommy sort it out, protect his brother and cousin, and stay true? Do young men die - in the sands of the Middle East and on the mean streets of the US - for no reason?

There’s lots of violence, strong language, and one shot of nudity, so its got (pull)all the particulars of a feature film(/pull). I think that the film certainly portrayed a gritty picture. It was reasonably convincing. Certainly Ribisi carried the show. He played the character of Joey perfectly, introducing just enough recklessness and unpredictability to make his character the most believable. The movie was somewhat predictable, but had some good twists and turns that kept you thinking. If I wasn’t cleaning the floors at the time, I probably would have been closer to the edge of my seat (as I would have been sitting). This movie is worth a rental.

My brother is a saint, whether he owns up to it or not. This Christmas has been a thin one and I did not expect to receive much. I didn’t. That’s all in good stride. Thank you to all my family members that did not embarrass the poor guy by giving gifts when he could not give any to you. You got it. Right on.

My brother (and my sister, in a different way) is different. Without talking constantly or keeping up all the time, our family, especially me and my siblings, are close. We can go a long time without any contact and resume as if there was no break. I don’t know what contributes to this intimacy with distance, but I can only attribute our parents for it.

Back to the geeky stuff. My Frankenputer will be getting a bit of a boost (OK, a large one). I stuffed the first video card I could get into the AGP slot, which was an ATI Rage Pro Turbo with 8 MB of memory. This card is really getting long in the tooth and doesn’t really seem to have proper 3D support and won’t run glxgears with any more than 4 or 5 FPS. Enter Ian’s Radeon 9500 Pro. Gidddeyup! The 128MB of memory and the arm’s length list of features will be fun to explore. This is a card that will allow cool games to be played on my poor little Franken-puter. I may even start to like them. Getting the flgrx driver installed is my next fun task, I guess. Who wants to stick with 60FPS, when you can get more, etc? Thanks, bro, for the Christmas gift that you didn’t likely realize that you gave me.

update: I’ve installed Linux on this machine, so I’ve been working with Kubuntu, Gentoo, Kororaa, and Freespire. I’ve not had a chance to check out the performance of this card with Kororaa or Kubuntu yet, but with Gentoo (a fresh GRP install yesterday from the 2006.1 Live C), I tried to get 3D Accelleration working with the x.org/DRI drivers. I get it, but glxgears locks up the computer hard after about 7 seconds running. I don’t install ssh by default, so I can’t access the machine remotely to see if I can kill the offending process or debug it. Freespire installed with the proprietary ATI fglrx driver and this problem doesn’t seem to have presented itself, and the FPS are insane!

corey@frankenfreespire:~$ glxgears
16261 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3252.183 FPS
16295 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3258.937 FPS
16427 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3285.261 FPS
16463 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3292.429 FPS

corey@frankenfreespire:~$ fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
1942 frames in 5.0 seconds = 388.400 FPS
1663 frames in 5.0 seconds = 332.600 FPS
2159 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.800 FPS
2156 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.200 FPS
2157 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.400 FPS

What an insane difference between this setup and the old one @ around 1100FPS

…and to all a good night, etc.

So, its Christmas, the day that signifies the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, born unto the Virgin. Its the day that signifies sharing and family. Usually, food is good and company is better. I hope that this is the case for you. See you after the holiday.

I write pretty well when I’m gone, huh?

I will be “off the map” as far as the internet goes, as of the time I go to sleep tonight.  I’m going to be visiting family for the next few days and I doubt if I’ll even check my email.  Have a Merry Christmas, to those who celebrate it.  And, Happy Hollidays for those who don’t.  Cya in a few days.  Comments are still welcome, of course.