Internet Problems

This is a quick post to say that I have basically lost connectivity to the internet except through my blackberry. Email still gets to me and I might turn on google talk if anyone wants to message me. Other than that, no updates will come to any project I am working on until this is resolved. I’m currently borrowing internet to make this post.

Name server keeps giving me problems. I think i’ll remove cvs and install subversion and see if that helps. If not, I might have to downgrade to php 5.0.5 instead of 5.1.2. This will all happen once I have a connection. For now, I’ll just restart bind from my blackberry when it goes down. Sorry for the problems.

Zimbio update, server talk, and Russ has a new site

So title’s are too hard to come up with. Big deal. Now you can tell what this is about a little faster…

Anyway, my little addiction (that I could only pray could become something like MySpace for popularity but not evilness) at Zimbio.com has been updated. It’s great. They added support to change your layout including adding custom “rolls” to the front page (you have to use it to understand. If you want to, you can sign up or contact me and I can provide). It really gives it a new edge. I find it to be a great improvement and shows how this is coming along. I am truly excited for it. Hopefully I can implement my Xapian set up into my file server and add some posts about it.

I don’t know if anyone remembers any of the times where I warned about downtime and changing servers and all that jazz, but just look them up so I don’t have to warn you again. This is more of a need than just a desire this time, though. The music mirror (which I’m more than happy to run) is taking up a bit much of my bandwidth to stay with the current set up. I loved Host Rocket when I had them last, so I think I’ll go with them. I’ll be more definitive when I figure it all out (but bandwidth will no longer be a consideration)

Oh and Russ has a new site. He calls it Adept Designs. He made a little web-badge (like) picture:

News!

Hey! I can’t think of a good title for this generic idea… so it’s just news. Here goes:

There’s this site, Zimbio.com, that is setting up community portals and such. It’s kinda cool except that it is a hard core portal only. This means that there is very little static content. I would like to contribute tutorials and the like, but have no real place to put it. I’ll keep playing with it when i find time again. I am a guru of the PHP one. They give you this handy code to show it off:

In more important news (to me at least), I found that The Mirror Formula by Xerxes was delaied to add another track that is apparently awesome. I can’t wait for my cds to come. If you have any interest in it, get yours now. Cardamar reported only 34 remaining of the 300 produced and it will not be reprinted.

The file server seems to be running well. Now just have to load it. I’m also looking to set up a relational database of the information including Xapian… but I have to figure out a good way to update from file lists to the database. I’m thinking of using a temp table to save already entered data and copy back the files that exist and enter those that don’t. The rest are deleted since the files no longer exist. I’ll have to hammer out the details later.

End note: I did order something from organic records. It was… psymeditations or something like that. Not sure. I’ll remember when it gets here. It’s a VA album, so I hope it to be good.

What a lovely week

I swear everything has gone wrong once or more. This makes updates a bit slower.

Today I finished setting up a fileserver. It’s an old P3 800 (running at 824) with 384 mb pc 100 memory and 3 harddrives. The 15 gb one is where the OS lives and nothing else. Then we have a Promise ATA card (one that we got free with a WD hard drive a while ago) running 2 Seagate 300 gb drives in a JBOD set up. My os on this is Fedora Core 5. Reason is as follows: It’s very well supported and has a huge community, it runs faster than win2k or otherwise even with a full gui, and biggest, I wasn’t aware of the GLI in Gentoo 2006.0 and didn’t want to spend that long on set up.

So I also have been distracted by The Godfather, the EA Game. Awesome game though short (for my taste) and a bit easy or just frustrating. Needed more rifles or something with a scope. Good game though. Also got my flash books so I will probably start playing with it soon. I’m so tired…

On a frustrating note: I still haven’t recieved my Mirror Formula CDs nor my Orange DVD. This is angering. I did find out there is a place called Organic Records. I love chill out especially with an organic feel. This is considered psy-trance and some is chill out. I’ll probably order something from there to see how it is. I’m thinking a various artists compolation to get a feel for them all…

Damn you lightning

I’m cursing far too many things.  I really should be more positive, but this is just sad:

 OK, some of you know that a couple years ago, my house was stuck by lightning (or struck close enough to cause MASSIVE problems).  It went through basically every wire in the house. This was particularly bad since our network printer/fax has a phone line running to it.  this meant  that even though every computer was protected from the powerline as was the printer, it came in through the phone line and got into the network. Among the deceased devices were a few network cards, the printer itself, a switch, a router, a tv, two stereo systems, some phones and probably some more stuff I don’t want to remember. This time wasn’t as bad, but it still hurt the network. I’m pretty sure it got in the power lines and then got into the network through the switch in the basement. We were out another switch and lost one NIC thus far.  This kinda took me offline while we tried various components of the network and rewired the important computers back in. Gah.

On a more positive note, I installed Vida Linux on a virtual computer (Version 1.2.1 R2). I installed it back in version 1 also and was not impressed. I’ve used Gentoo since 2003 on an off. I loved the operating system but had problems with it. I went 64-bit when they just added the support and had terrible application support. It also takes one hell of a long time to compile Gnome on Gentoo, so that’s a lot of downtime waiting. But I loved it every time I compiled it (I actually compiled it from a network install on my laptop once. It ran as well as I could expect, but I couldn’t get it to recognize 1024×768 and that caused major annoyances when my laptop does not stretch the video). Vida Linux is based on Gentoo, but it uses Anaconda to install Stage 3 on your machine (for those who aren’t as Linux savvy (not that I am, really), that means easy install of precompiled software. That’s a lot faster). The install was very painless.  I think it took approximately a half hour to forty-five minutes for it to partition and install everything available. That’s pretty good (note, i’m using the free download version, not the "complete" pay version). I like Gnome and there was a quite pretty background to greet me when I logged in.

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Been Sick… Just messing around

Hey, I looked around a bit and got rid of tiny-mce. I’m so much happier. It’s a great feature, but if it would just stop helping me for once, I would be a lot happier. now if only I hadn’t just editted that one post that had php tags in it… oh well. i could fix it later if anyone cared.

I changed my template’s dtd to refer to xhtml strict instead of transitional. I never really noticed until i went and did a bit of validating. I’m happier this way. Standards are very useful though they still seem to be resisted. Why can’t you just throw an <i> tag in the middle of your code? (The discussion goes something like this for those types of questions:
What is that i actually doing? If it’s to mark a title, that would actually permit it. I misspoke to someone earlier: they are not depreciated, they are not encouraged though. Generally, you use tags to explain what the text is. Bolding something doesn’t explain that it’s important. em or strong would because those are emphasis. It all has to do with purpose of the code).

Oh and my mac made me angry. The wireless isn’t that good (at least doens’t seem very fast) as far as I can tell. my laptop stays connected perfectly and windows repings for available networks. since i couldn’t remote connect to my main desktop, i couldn’t stand to be using it as much. and it had no bass in its sound. annoyed me. i now vnc back into it to use it.

i also kind of want to play around with skyos but don’t want to invest the thirty dollars for it. It’s not compatible with anything. I kind of would like to have vida linux set up as well… but there’s not really a reason for that. It’s gentoo… just I don’t have to recompile. That means that I would only care to install in on something like my athlon xp. Whatever. Windows has the most programs available and does more than everything I need. And the new messenger 8 beta is really nice too.

Mac things that I forgot (or just did)

I forgot a couple things on my last post (that i split onto another page because it’s … long). I also did a couple more things.

I forgot to mention auto-updates.  Windows gives you choices on how you want these to work.  Mac says that notifying you by having the update manager bounce in the bottom of the screen is the best way. It is the way that i like my auto-updates, but a choice would be nice.  and the bouncing icon just makes me think of the happynowhere apple switch movie.

I was thinking of reformatting my mac to get all the unix tools installed in the right order and such, so i went to look through what i had for software.  I found two things strange: i have a more up to date version of iLife (media stuff) on a disc in the box… and no disc for appleworks. Hm… well, i can update iLife safely i guess. Well, that’s what i thought.  It took about a half hour to install (there might have been a lot, so that’s not what annoyed me) and then killed my dock menu (that did). Now, the doc menu is a pretty useful little thing to have running so you can get to your applications easily… and minimize… and more things than you might have thought.  Considering finder was still running and i couldn’t see any easy way to start the dock again, i rebooted.  this fixed it, but it shouldn’t have happened. but now i have iWeb!

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My feelings about a Mac

This is one of those posts that probably will show my non-biasedness. Hopefully it will come off that way, at least, since i really don’t want to be biased in any way.

So i got this mac thing. And honestly? It does do its claim to fame. It works out of the box. You don’t have to fiddle with a whole lot (and looking through the preferences doesn’t even give you a whole lot that you will want). It has one hell of a lot of features out of the box. It saves you the time of installing a lot of software that you might want and can configure things such as samba and the like.

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New Mix

In an effort to post all additions to the mixes list, here’s the latest:

Cardamar has put together an awesome mix called Globespinning.  Between the expert track selection and impressive transitions, this mix should really take you away.  Between the last two additions (of both I really enjoy, don’t get me wrong), I would have to say that Cardamar’s experience gives him the edge that puts him on top for the moment.  With S. Zeilenga‘s mix being so good with his first, though, I don’t know how long that will last.  Make sure you check them out!

Not written on a BlackBerry

Note to self: you can’t write blog posts from your blackberry. I tried once. It was a little overview of my mac mini. Yes, i have a mac mini and it’s impressive. I might even write about it again. We’ll see.

Latest little project has been playing with phpBB 2.1.2 (the pre alpha stage of phpBB3. you have to grab a cvs snapshot to play with it at the moment). It breaks during install. I hacked that into working and have since found a few more errors. After I get mine completely set up, I’ll post all of my hacks to make it run.

On another note, there’s a new mix from S. Zeilenga on the mirror here. It’s a really nice mix. Be on the look out for a new one from Cardamar later this week or next also. Cardamar Music is going to have a limited release of Xerxes latest album, the mirror formula, in march. It’s more ambiant than Cardamar, but is far from boring. It’s a beautiful album.

I have more work to get done. Will update more later.