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I won’t feel hurt if you didn’t listen.

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This isn’t a very good history. It’s only been a few days since I’ve last re-installed, and it doesn’t seem to be collecting all the commands I’ve been using. Oh well.

(From Tim)

“What the hell?” I thought, “It’s not like I get that much traffic. I’ll just host the whole thing myself. ” I was already running a mirror of the site under a different domain. I only had to make a quick change in DNS, and I was running it myself.

That was when my computer died.

Something is going on with my primary computer where it won’t detect that there are any IDE devices attached. I have a perfectly good 500 gig new hard drive, but it was still giving me intermittant problems.

In the meantime, I have dug out my old 1 ghz. computer. I threw my hard drive in there and it was immediately detected. But it won’t log into Windows.

So Linux it is.

When I installed Windows way back a short time after I got this new hard drive, it overwrote my MBR. It’s a simple fix to restore this from linux, but it involves booting up with my Ubuntu live CD. Due to the aformentioned problem with my IDE connections, I’ve never had much luck using my DVD drive in my other computer. On the new, old computer, I logged in, fixed the MBR, and begun using Ubuntu again.

Then I made the same stupid mistake I’ve made many times before: I tried to upgrade.

It seems that without fail, every time I try to upgrade Ubuntu, it will fail halfway leaving my installation corrupted. I repartitioned my linux partition so I could save my /home directory, and re-installed Ubuntu once again.

I needed my Jabber server back.Installing Openfire under linux was pretty easy, but in order to get it to work, I needed my MySQL server first.

I had a little trouble getting my MySQL server transfered. I had problems getting the permissions set right. The second time I tried it, I was able to log in and see all of my precious little tables.

Back to Openfire.

I have had my Openfire database for some time now. It appears that at some point, they changed the way the tables were named. Instead of using jiveuser, they were now using jiveUser. This required stopping the server, dropping all the new tables, renaming all the old tables to the new name, and restarting the server. I had jabber back!

Next comes this site.

This was a pain. I got it serving the files, but it wanted to serve the PHP files instead of parsing and running them. Major security flaw. I removed everything, and re-installed Apache and PHP. It was now parsing the PHP, but it was bitching that it didn’t have MySQL support. I checked to make sure that all the settings were right, but still nothing. One more complete uninstall/re-install cycle and that was working.

So that’s where I am right now. The next step is to get Tomcat running and put Mycyclopedia back up. And from there on to re-writing it… possibly in rails.

Eventually, I will get my other computer working, and all this work will have been for nothing.

Oh well.

Gmail

I’m actually using the Google Apps for Your Domain, but it’s close enough to being GMail for me. GMail’s support of the IMAP protocol makes using a desktop client to read my email easy.

Thunderbird

My email client of choice. For a long while, I was simply using Gmail’s web interface, until I decided that I wanted to get myself a PGP key and start signing my outgoing messages. Enigmail makes that easy.

Lightning

A plugin for Thunderbird. This gives me my calendar in the same program I read my email.

Outlook

I wanted to give outlook a try. I wanted to like it. I used to use it for work. It supports IMAP. Unfortunately, I found it to be way too slow for my tastes. I could jump from message to message in Thunderbird way faster than I ever could in Outlook. Still, I need it if I want to synch my contacts and my calendar to my Creative Zen Vision:M.

Chandler Hub

I needed an online place where I could send my calendar. I am constantly running the latest nightly build of Lightning, thanks to the nightly updater, so the Provider for Google Calendar wasn’t working for me. Also, GCal doesn’t support To-Do’s. Chandler Hub was the best service I have thus found that would allow me to do a 2-way sync of my calendar.

Plaxo

A great service. They have plugins for both Outlook and Thunderbird. This keeps my address book in sync between the two, as well as several of my other online address books. Unfortunately, Plaxo for Thunderbird doesn’t sync my calendar. If they did, I could probably get rid of a lot of the other tools I use.

Schedule World

This is a new service I have been trying. Thunderbird syncs it’s calendar with Chandler. Outlook syncs with Plaxo. Outlook won’t read Chandler properly, so I had no way to get the stuff in my calendar over to Outlook. This is where Schedule World steps in. I have been having a little trouble getting it to synch my calendar with Outlook, but it is doing the To-Do’s fine.

It has now taken me 3 days to get this post written, so I’m going to stop right now. There are other links of my chain of getting things synched, but they are not as important as these pieces.

Do you have a suggestion for a tool that helps you stay in sync? Feel free to contact me.

Toby has actually gotten pretty good at going to bed at a decent time. He used to be pretty much of a night owl, but (thanks to the efforts of my wife) has been managing to go to sleep at a normal time for a 2 1/2 year old boy on most nights.

Then there is Random… Much like her brother when he was younger, she tends to stay up fairly late. I am pretty good at getting her to sleep by standing up with her and rocking her, but that does not always work. I can only hope that in time, we will be able to get her to bed at an earlier time.

This will become very important to them as they get older and start going to school. I have always felt that school starts entirely too early. I understand most of the reasoning behind it. They try to get the kids to school before their parents would traditionally have to go to work, but it was always so early. I have always felt that my grades in school would have been better had I started even 2 hours later. Then again, maybe I should have just studied harder.

I will be starting my new job this coming Monday. I will be required to be in Ann Arbor by 8:00. My current wake time of 7:00 most likely won’t be sufficient. I plan on eventually pushing my alarm clock back another half hour tomorrow to get my body used to being a morning person once again. Once I have acclimated to 6:30, I’ll probably push it back again to 6:00. That should give me plenty of time to lollygag before having to go to work.

Previously, my site was separated into two sections. My WordPress blog, and everything else. At one time, I had my blog matching the theme of the rest of my site.

When I updated my install a while back I pretty much lost that. Considering that I hate the visual look of my site as it is, I didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to bring down the prettiness of WP’s default theme with my horrid artistic sensibilities. So now I have the task of copying and pasting a bunch of text from my custom PHP content management system (if you could call it that) into WordPress’s online page editing page.

I was really hoping that Windows Live Writer would give me the ability to compose and edit pages in adition to blog posts, but as far as I can tell, I don’t believe they do.

In other WordPress related news, I’ve updated the template to create better RDFa for this site. I don’t know exactly how many other sites out there give the complete SIOC information for their blog in RDFa, but this one does. I’m actually not sure how good my attempt at RDFa is. I use an extension for Firefox called Operator. It’s a really great program for identifying microformats in a page, but the current release isn’t fully updated to the new RDFa spec. Because of that, I can’t tell if some of the things I’ve tried to do (like using @instanceof) are actually producing the desired triples.

Did I mention that at least some of these pages should be showing up as hAtom enabled? Well they are. I really wish that WordPress would include a lot of this stuff by default. I’ve been thinking of taking my changes to the default install of WordPress and publishing a patch file that people could apply. If there is any interest out there, let me know.

No Parking on Cement

Originally uploaded by duck1123
This was a sign that my wife spotted at a gas station when we were coming home from my mom’s house.

Now, I have been occasionally been known to say the odd phrase in German. I took two years of German in high school, so I know just a little bit. The rare case that I write something in German, I could easily change the language selector to German. This should be sent out as xml:lang="de" in the case of Jabber.

This would be good, for one, because it would allow us to file the messages appropriately w.r.t. language. Second, you could then get tools to sit between the message and you. Imagine that I am an English speaker for a moment. (Really stretch that imagination.) Now say that I am speaking via IM someone that has set their preferred language to Spanish. It would be easy to set a processor on my end to take the message I have received, automatically run it through a translation service, and display it to me. I would of course still want to have the original message available to me as well.

All these things could be easily done if clients routinely sent correct language information. Since this information is currently almost universally unreliable, it’s hard to really make use of it.