Archive for April, 2006

Tada List Clone

Published by Nathan Powell on April 30, 2006 under tlc

I whipped up a tada list clone. It mostly does what tada list does, however there is currently no security and it is single user, 1 list ATM. I may add other lists in the near future. However I wrote it for myself and offer it in case others want it.

As it says in the install, if you really want to use it and it doesn’t have the feature you want (within reason) let me know and I will add it.

You can download it by going to the Code link above.

** If some how you downloaded that in the last five minutes, I forgot something in the INSTALL file and have added it. You have to have smarty installed :) **

What Micorsoft doesn’t get

Published by Nathan Powell on April 26, 2006 under computers

The laptop I have is dual boot. XP pro and Gentoo. Last night I decided to reinstall windows. Popped in the cd and installed over the windows partition. Windows of course doesn’t need to concern itself with the possibility that you have a real bootloader installed to the MBR, so without asking it blows that away and promptly plops it’s code in there. That’s cool, whatever. So I get my getoo disk out, boot up and resinstall grub (this didn’t go quite that smoothly, but the details are boring so I’ll spare you). At any rate I eventually got that to work and booted into windows to start the update process.

Then I noticed something funny. The first time I ran windows update it added itself to the short list of programs in the start menu’s intial panel. Cool, makes sense. However, I of course had to run the updater over and over again (I should really consider putting together a disk with SP2 on it). Each time I ran it windows assumes it’s more popualr and so it gets “ranked”. But what they do then is, move it UP the short list. In effect each time you run it, it gets further and further away from the Start button. WTF, that makes no sense at all. I am no usablitily guru, but a child must have been in on that decsion.

The Missing

Published by Nathan Powell on April 16, 2006 under computers

Just watched the movie The Missing. Not bad, not bad at all. Ron Howard film staring Tommy Lee Jones. How can you go wrong with that.

Plus…Ron Howard’s brother was in it…go figure. That poor bastard would never get work if not for his talented brother.

Fixing the web…again

Published by Nathan Powell on April 16, 2006 under computers

Love it or hate it, Web2.0 has some things to offer us. The most significant one being: People with some sense of style are getting in on the game. I like the looks of a lot more sites now than I did a few years ago. People that know what looks good are hacking away at css.

This is cool, becuase those of us who are not good at these things can steal their ideas!

I have been using Ruby On Rails (though most of that is for another post), and one of the first things I noticed is that the fonts in a rails app are the typical Web2.0 looking things. Crisp clear, sweet! It’s just CSS, ripp it out of there and put it in a greasemonkey script and viola! The whole web gets a face lift!

// ==UserScript==
// @namespace http://nathanpowell.org
// @name I hate everyones fonts!
// @description use my fonts!
// @include *
// ==/UserScript==
var newCss = 'body {' +
                           'font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;' +
                           '}';

function overRideCSS( newCss ) {
    var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];
    var styleTag = document.createElement("style");
    styleTag.setAttribute("type", 'text/css');
    styleTag.innerHTML = newCss;
    head.appendChild(styleTag);
}

overRideCSS( newCss );

I have used this script before to fix other sites CSS, but this one I let execute on every site I visit. Try it, it's sweet!

How to “use” Gentoo

Published by Nathan Powell on April 16, 2006 under computers

I love gentoo, I really do.  Every time I get angry with it and try something else I am always dissappointed in the package managers.  Portage, while slow as dirt, does package management right.  Sure it has drawbacks, and I’ll get to those, but first let’s look at how it does things right.

The biggest boon to portage is the exaustive list of packages available to it.  How do they do that, you ask??  They do it by decentralizing the packages.  Because the only thing they need offer are the ebuilds and not a binary, they can house a lot of stuff.  Doesn’t sound decentralized to me?  Well it is.  See they don’t need to compile a binary and place that on a publicly available server.  Just a few text files that tell make (and as a result gcc, or other) what it needs to do after it gets the source.  And that source doesn’t need to be maintained on gentoo mirrors either (though some packages are), it can stay on the authors website and be downloaded from there.  Genius!  However that brings us to the drawbacks.

Namely, well, everything has to be compiled (there are some binary packages available for unbearably large programs, and of course if you are installing an interpreted program, those source files will just be installed).  After installation it’s really not that bad.  On modern hardware it doesn’t take that long to install most things.  However the install…well that is another story.  I have gotten fairly deft at intalling gentoo.  I can go from bare metal to an XFCE4 desktop in around 4 hours (yes that is wicked fast).  However that doesn’t include A LOT of apps.  That is just a base install, and the packages that come with XFCE4.  And none of us could just get by on that (not for a desktop anyway).  So it takes the better part of a day to get all my other apps installed.  And then in the week following a new installation I am forever running into things I haven’t installed or configured yet.  So that can be a bummer.

However, there are somethings we can do to minimize that.  One is “Don’t reinstall that often”.  Probably fair advice.  However I have a tendency to install lots of crazy software, try it out and discard it.  After a while I start to get the heebee jeebees about my crufty file system.  Then…well I tend to install a lot of unstable software.  I can’t ever leave well enough alone.  “There has to be something  better!!!”.  And that can lead to general instability (just two weeks ago I was hell bent on installing XGL…that led to a complete reinstall ;).  For some, not reinstalling often could be a viable choice, it doesn’t really work for me though.

Second, and the one that actually *does* work for me is making a backup.  A simple rsync after a fresh install to the server and I have essentially a base system just sitting there waiting on me should tragedy befall my machine.  I rsync the entire system to the server after I do a new install.  Something bad happens, rsync it back using a live cd, install grub to the MBR, reboot.  Takes all of 30 minutes.

So what is the down side to that?  Well you have to know what you are doing.  Reinstalling grub isn’t hard, but the first time you do it you may get it wrong, and that can be frustrating.  The second drawback concerns how you handle the rsync.  You have two choices and neither are perfect.  One, you can rsync off the fresh install and let it alone.  Let it sit and wait patiently for you to come calling in a time of dire need.  Or two, you continue to rsync overtop of that at incremental periods (nightly?, weekley?, up to you).

The first choice will leave you out of date and without things you have installed, or created (code, pictures, text files), since that intial install.  The second falls a bit short as well, as it tends to make the system just a crufty in the first place, and as a result is really only good for emergencies.  Plus linux has this bad habit of not needing rebooted all the time.  If you hose something, and it’s effects won’t be scene until the next reboot…and your backup script runs…well you can see where that is headed.

At any rate.  I think I like the first option best.  rsync it, let it alone.  It’s there if I need to get back to square one.  Use some version control software for created files and then do a complete reinstall every 6 months or so anyway…I mean it’s only a day right? :)

This is what gets to me

Published by Nathan Powell on April 15, 2006 under computers

So, a few months ago I bought a few movies and watched all but one of them.  Tonite I was in the mood for a movie so I walked over and picked it up.  I saw that it was sealed.  Sure I can see that.  I took off the outer plastic.  Then I see that there is a seal on the main opening.  I pick at it.  finally a few seconds later I coax it off (this is the sort of thing that Erika usually does for me, since I get annoyed quickly).  I tried to pry it open, dang there is a seal at the top too.  I start picking at that when I realize there is one on the bottom as well. ARGH.  I take the case to the kitchen and get a knife.  Finally it’s open.  When I get it open I see that there is a magnetic tag inside.

The only thing I can think is…these people went to all this trouble to keep out the criminals and all they served to do was annoy me to no end (note:  I have a short fuse :).  This is what really gets to me.  DRM, magnetic strips, seals,  they all make no difference.  Criminals will steal it no matter what.  Does it matter to the kid that pocketed the whole thing that he had to use a knife to open it?  No!  Of course not.  It has no value to him, he paid nothing for it.  I however did.

I pop the DVD in.  I hit FFWD to go through the previews (yes after I paid for a movie, they took the opportunity to advertize to me) .  However the FFWD stops and can’t be restarted while the FBI warning sits on my screen for a full 15 seconds (it’s longer than you think…sit still and count to 15 mississippis).

Again, what does the criminal care.  If he was going to rip it and put it up on a bittorrent site, that warning isn’t going to stop him.  But it annoyed the hell out of me, the customer.

This is similar to the situation with software.  If someone is going to steal it, they weren’t going to be your cutomer in the first place.  Who cares, let them take it.  The people who would buy it will buy it.  If nothing else, the person who stole it increased mind share in the application.  they are using it, they may even recommend it to a paying cutomer.

I am not defending stealing of others hard work.  However I have to wonder what good can come of treating paying customers like this.  A backlash?  People who would pay if things were priced appropriately stealing?  I don’t know, and I don’t pretend to be an expert on things of this nature…but that movie case was making me mental!

Use css in an email signature?

Published by Nathan Powell on April 15, 2006 under computers

No, please, for the love of all that is good, don’t!

Testing wordpress upgrade

Published by Nathan Powell on April 11, 2006 under computers

Looks like it worked. w00t!

move complete

Published by Nathan Powell on April 9, 2006 under computers

Well almost, still have to get my mail finished, but the site is up.

moving

Published by Nathan Powell on April 9, 2006 under computers

I am in the process of moving servers. If you can see this, DNS either hasn’t propagated, I actually moved it and fixed the configs, or you have this cached :)

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