I’m a bit of a geek (bit of? my wife laughs). I read slashdot and found a link today to a great list linking diferent programming languages to religions. I laughed.
If Programming Languages were Religions.
I’ve been doing quite a bit with php lately, so that would make me a cafeteria Christian. Hmmm.
… H A R D D R I V E F A I L U R E
3 days ago, the linux box that has served me so well for years decided that it needed a lot of attention. So it stopped working. Then while trying to figure out what it was doing one of my two old hard drives (8 Gigs, really big when I bought it) started going ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. Those are not good sounds coming from a hard drive. This was amplified by the sounds of my power supply fan screeching from time to time.
The good news is that it did not hold any of my personal files. The bad news is that it did hold most of the /usr directory tree for linux. For those of you who don’t know, that is basically all of the functioning files.
I’ve ordered a new hard drive and a new power supply. I do not want to wait until the other more important drive starts going ka-thunk, ka-thunk. And I’ve been trying to get a basic linux server back up and running until that arrives when I will do a good clean install.
It took a full day to realize that the kernel that Ubuntu was wanting to install did not like my older CPU. That came this morning when I finally asked for help. Email is working, the web server is working. My wordpress is working. But my mailing lists are not working. I have already started to get emails from family members who are wondering what is happening.
I don’t know. Somehow I can’t get exim4 to talk with mailman even though I have read through every possible help message or FAQ I could find on the subject. Right now I will sleep. I won’t have a chance to get back to messing with it until later tomorrow.
Sometimes that is how it goes.
Good thing the first thing I am doing tomorrow is talking with my counselor.
If you haven’t noticed, for a while now I haven’t felt the drive to blog much. There a lot of things I have been reading and I bookmark other people’s articles, but then I can’t find the incentive to actually sit down and write.
Part of that is a result of the complex of symptoms I am facing at the moment: depression still being worked through, anxiety still trying to be defused, and now the possibility of sleep apnea being a major energy drain lately. In a few weeks I am going in for a sleep study to hopefully confirm that and start treatment for it.
But there is another issue behind my blog block: no focus. I guess when I started this I thought it would be a good way for me to formulate and share my perspective on things in the world and life. However, I have been feeling lately that there is too much to write on and other people write so much better about those things than I would. As I think of the blogs I keep going back to and reading, they are the ones where the writers are knowledgeable about some issues and areas and focus on interpreting that experience in their own way.
So today, I began thinking about where I want to focus. I know there are some issues and areas that I get passionate about, but I have lost touch with those in the pursuit of generality. I won’t be a one-trick pony, but I need to choose a couple favorite lenses that I can use to look at the world. I want lenses that can help to bring some creativity and some benefit to you the reader and to the world the context.
I don’t think this will take long, and you will be the first to know about it.
I’m open to suggestions.
This is an idea for a regular feature here, to try on Friday to find something that made me laugh and hopefully will make you laugh.
In light of Bill Gates changing his relationship with Microsoft (”retiring?”) The David Letterman show put together this little tribute. Note: it will take you to another site and I do need to offer a medium language warning. (remember Letterman is “late night”)
DevilDucky - Bill Gates Steps Down: Blue Screen of Death
Then Laugh and Cry and Laugh and Cry. … if your computer allows you to watch it.
I’ve been on vacation for the last week. Went to spent a few days with my Father, one of my sisters, and her family in Arkansas. It was good to see him and to be shown the sights in his town. It was fun to play golf, attempt to pretend like I knew how to play golf and then to start to play golf again.
My brother and I are the two computer hardware gurus of the family and I had to finish the installation of a new computer for my Dad, complete with wireless router so those of us with wireless laptops can stay connected when we visit.
On Wednesday, I noticed that my blog was not updating in my rss reader. So I logged into my linux box and noticed that mysql was running a little wild (over 100 tasks running). So, I told it to reboot knowing that it had been a few months and a major upgrade in software since I had rebooted. 9 times out of 10, within 5 minutes I can login again and complete some work.
Well, this was that one time out of ten. There have been times when it does take a little longer, especially if it has to check all the hard drives for errors. No such luck.
It stayed off line.
I suppose for most people that is no big deal. But most of my email goes to that box, my blog and a couple other websites are served by that box, plus I host a few listserves from that box.
All that had stopped.
I could have gotten really mad, but mad at what? I could have done all kinds of things in frustration, but what was the point. Nothing good would come of it unless I could actually be at home and do some things with the actual computer that was affected. So I decided to not worry about it.
It was not that hard of a choice to make. I had to accept the fact that the computer was not working, because I couldn’t do anything to change the situation. So today, I was able to see the type of error that was a fatal error to the kernel. Turn the machine off and turn the machine on and then watch the boot messages to make sure everything was working. And for the moment it is fine.
Not sure really what happened, maybe the computer got a little warm with no air conditioning on in a stale room with no air movement. I think the power supply might be starting to flake out on me (I don’t like the noise it is making). Or it could be just one of those many random electronic things that happens with computers.
It actually has proven to be a good exercise for me in looking at various frustration inducing situations. If I can’t change it, if I can’t avoid it, then I must learn to accept it until I can do something else with it.
If that is true in the fragile web of computer connections it is certainly true in life.
Now I’m tired from my trip and I need to rest.
Over the next couple days I will be playing with my site design. This last week, WordPress announced the arrival of the Widgets plugin. And that type of control over my design is something that sounds like a lot of fun. I’ve also been wanting to use a three column theme instead of the two column.
There aren’t too many out there. From my previous experience with WordPress, I had a couple three column themes that I still had on my hard drive. That is a good thing, because they cannot be found any longer, even though they are still listed in the theme directories, due to the fact that the author’s domain has lapsed and cannot be found. So I am working to modify Aesthetic to fit a couple things that I want it to do, including using the widgets plug-in. So over the next few days expect things to change somewhat as I mess with themes and css files and header graphics. I’m looking forward to having things looking fine when I am done.
Updated (April 3): Well, I haven’t had a lot of luck modifying that one theme I started with (very complicated and few comments), so I am going to start from scratch in coming up with my own 3 column theme. So it will be a while. In testing you might see a strange arrangement for a time, but it won’t last long until I get it doing just what I want.
Technorati Tags: wordpress, widgets, theme
One of those important activitities in the blogosphere: self-congratulation. This is post number 100 for me. [big cheer]
Okay, that is enough.
Hard to tell if anyone is really out there reading them or not, though. My hit counter tells me that yesterday I had over 800 hits to these pages, but it is clear from the pattern of what pages are hit and the fact that just yesterday my Akismet spam filter caught over 300 comment spams that most of those hits are from trolling spambots.
It can be disheartening and discouraging. On the one hand, the purpose for my keeping my blog is to make myself reflect and practice putting thoughts and reflections into words whether that is wading carefully into political or social commentary (something I do not do well) or lately trying to be transparent with my journey through chronic depression (so that I can maybe be helpful to someone else who also might be struggling). But on the other hand, I can do that within the safety of my own journaling. A writer does want to be read otherwise why go through the bother of giving birth to words for thoughts and feelings.
So, those of you who are real people, thanks for listening, I trust you are out there. I will keep it up if that is okay with you.
In the course of wanting to switch back from b2evolution to WordPress I found a little problem. The script that I found for importing was written for an earlier version of b2evolution than I was running. I had installed the Phoenix alpha/beta version which changed quite a few field names. So I used some spare time to work my way through the importing script and update the links.
After that I discovered that the categories count was not updated so that meant that none of the categories showed up on the page. But I was able to find a little snippet of code in the collection of functions in WordPress that I could quickly modify to work. So, having just run it again (after deleting previous imports) this script should work.
Download the text file. and place in your wp-admin directory. Please read the beginning part of the file.It is mostly work of many other people, I just updated it for Phoenix.
UPDATE: I realized after I published this that this really isn’t a plugin. An unrelated headache clouded my brain briefly.
Well, I finally got tired of all the comment and referral spammers (200 just last night) that have too easily figured out how to mess with b2evolution Phoenix. So I have returned to WordPress. The main reason I left WordPress was that it didn’t work with the upgrade to php and mysql that I installed on my Debian Linux box. But the latest version of WordPress (2.0.2 at this writing) seems to work wonderfully. Still a few things to do to get things just the way I wanted, but everything imported (with some tweaking of the script) and it is up and running.
