Still need to do the wanted update to Fedora 6, but Joshua is once again living with mostly new hardware (carried over one of the NICs, the SCSI card and the hard drive as a primary slave now). As soon as I can upgrade the OS, I’ll copy off the files from the old drive and probably trash it – it’s been making unhealthy noises for years now. Then again, I’ll have to weigh the unhealthy noises against the pain in the neck (literally) of reaching into that cabinet to pull out and reattach all the cables…
Joshua Is Dead
After I can’t remember how many years of service, my desktop computer – which originally was purchased in the early 1990s and was upgraded in some way a few times over the last decade – has quit altogether. It might just be a power supply, but since the machine is so old I’m not sure I want to try to find a replacement power supply or just take this opportunity to replace the machine.
In the mean time, there’s limited Internet access at home, since Joshua was not only my desktop computer but acted as the gateway and router for the house as well.
This Is Only A Test
Well, Dreamhost is upgrading PHP on all their machines over the next few days/weeks, and one of the issues with the upgrade is that versions of WordPress less than 2.1 will be broken. So, they suggest two possible fixes; either upgrade your WordPress installation to 2.1 or higher, or downgrade from PHP5 to PHP4. Turns out that all the sites I have WordPress running on are using PHP4 already, so I didn’t have to do anything. But looking through, there’s some new features and functions of WordPress 2.1 that would (or could) be nice. Only problem is, there’s a lack of information about what plugins or themes will be broken after the upgrade. So instead of upgrading a site to find out things don’t work, I’m going to setup a test site running WordPress 2.1, and install all the plugins and themes that I use elsewhere to see that it’s running properly. Since Dreamhost makes it simple to setup subdomains, and it doesn’t cost anything, this seems like a simpler solution than upgrading one of the sites I maintain and finding out things are broken – and I might be able to find fixes for the problems and get things running anyway, and either submit patches upstream or at least know what needs to be changed on the sites so that they’ll work after the upgrade.
Of course, the data center that houses a good chunk of their servers is going down this evening for about 5 hours, so who knows how much of this work I’ll get done before the connection to the machine goes bye bye. 😛
Massive Gallery Updates
Spent a good chunk of today going through iPhoto and editing/captioning photos, and when I was finished I uploaded the vast majority of them to the gallery. So if you’re interested in photos that Stephanie and I took, have a look at http://gallery.srhuston.net. There’s now plenty to see there :>
Pushme Pullyou? Nah, Just Chilly
Saw this cute fuzz ball on the tree outside the house in the back yard, and had to snap a couple photos.
Antennae
Reached another milestone this weekend. Earlier in the week, I’d mounted the NEMA enclosure inside the shack which would serve as the coax passthrough (a way to get the coax connections into the house, without running them through the window as I had done since the antenna was first setup). This Saturday afternoon, David (N0YMV) and I decided – almost spur-of-the-moment – that now was a good time to mount the dualbander on the house as I’d wanted to do since quite awhile ago. I had stopped short of doing it before because I wanted the coax passthrough done first (so I could close and lock the shack window again). But now that the box was mounted and working out, there was no excuse. Not even the slight cold and mild wind 😛
Photos available in the gallery as usual. Next project, mounting the 5/8 groundplane antenna for APRS on the garage peak. Stay tuned…
APRS? Whazzat?
For those that might be interested in APRS, here’s a bit of information. If you just want to look at pretty pictures, you can see a couple screen grabs in my gallery, or a snapshot which is updated every ~5 minutes of the live Xastir station running at home. The image on that snapshot will change not only based on what stations are nearby and heard, but also on what maps I have loaded at the time and what area I was looking at.
APRS, or Automatic Position Reporting System, is a neat thing in Amateur Radio where you connect your radio to a TNC (Terminal Node Controller, a modem for on-air use) and optionally a GPS receiver. The GPS spits out messages to the TNC to tell it where you are, and the TNC will format those messages and send them out over the air. What’s neat about this is other setups, called digipeaters (for “digital repeater”) will hear your message and echo it; since digis usually have a wide coverage area, this means your small signal can be heard for quite a ways. I’m now running this at home, using the TNC-X kit that I built a little while ago and a new Yaesu FT-2800M, which is currently hooked to my old magmount antenna sitting on the grill. Have a new 5/8 groundplane antenna which I’m going to mount on the peak of the garage, possibly this weekend – the NEMA box I’m using for passing coax in/out of the house should arrive Friday, and I hope to spend a good chunk of Saturday getting that mounted and holes drilled so the window in the shack can finally be closed all the way.
Beware of Street Shysters
This is kinda scary, but it’s happening in all sorts of places. Seems to be the latest gang “thing”. It’s usually 3-5 members in a team, with one older one hanging back from the younger ones. While the target is paying attention to the youths, the older member slips behind the mark and goes for their money and/or valuables.
Here’s a photo of this in action:
Not It!
A long time ago, I wrote an open source plugin for Eggdrop IRC bots. It was a hack, wrapping the functions for talking in channel around an “artificial intelligence” program. I named it after the original program, MegaHAL, and released it with no warranty, no support.. just a “hey, works for me, enjoy.” Until my email account at my former university was finally closed, I still would get emails from people, now 7 or so years later, asking for help getting it to compile. Others have taken up the torch in keeping it current (and I run one on irc.srhuston.net too).
Seems I’m not the only one that deals with this kind of support nightmare – though in Steve Brown‘s case, he’s even a few more steps removed from the “problem”. Either way, this makes for good reading. And a note to all the users of programs and services out there: Read the documentation (henceforth known as “RTFM”) before emailing people for support. The documentation is there for a reason. You might even learn something – like how to go about finding a solution to your problem, or that a web based IMAP client has nothing to do with your ISP’s quotas.
Another Hooray For Akismet
I’ve mentioned Akismet a few times before – it’s the plugin I installed here which looks at comments for spam, and automatically flags them as such (and deletes them after 15 days) for me. I mentioned a couple times how it’s doing, and today is another landmark. As of right now it’s caught 1001 spams for me. Yay, no more going through comments one by one to get rid of the junk!
I’ll probably not mention this again (at least until I hit 10,000). Just figured the first 100 and first 1000 were pretty good milestones.