SporkBomb

Ignore the title. It’s random. Random times.

So I returned from Cancun, Mexico last weekend. I went to an all-inclusive resort in the hotel area. It was nice. People were cleaning up my messes and feeding me. I usually do these things for myself, usually. Overall, not bad for my first real vacation in several years. I should do it again. I will.

Now, what to do for school? I’m torn between three different colleges. All have their pros and cons. The biggest con in my situation is that I can’t actually *go* to college. It has to be either fully online or mostly online (i.e. some UCF night classes). The colleges in the running are FSU, UWF, and UCF.

Wish there were three sided coins.

My blog broke and I didn’t even know about it. All the pages were coming up blank. Turns out wp-super-cache was not updated and, well, it messed up a bit. I haven’t visited my own blog in so long. Wonder how long it was broken. No one reported it. Ha-ha! No one reported it. Good one.

asdf.

Manchester United lost to Burnley today. That makes me angry and sad.

Ate at a Japanese steak house today with department folks from work. I think what I ate made me sick. Either that or dinner.

George Carlin has died from heart failure. The man who made famous the “seven words you can never say on television” passed away at 5:55 p.m. Sunday at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, his longtime publicist said. He was 71.

My only regret is that I passed on a chance to see him live.

He’s in a better place now-playing cards with Joe Pesci.

If thoughts could write blog posts, this blog would be updated every 15 minutes with relevant technological goodness. Unfortunately for me, this isn’t the case; at least not yet. I have to find time, sit down in front of my MacBook Pro (which I got off of eBay and am very happy with except for the fact that I overpaid), and try to recall what happened to me during the day. This kind of situation is not very common for me.

So what do I do? In general, I want to keep this blog updated and yet I can’t ever get into a specific situation where this is the case. I don’t have a solution to this dilemma yet. Perhaps I’ll also post about this issue on this blog.

If you have a SharePoint 2.0 server and you have installed SharePoint Services 2.0 SP3, you may have notices a few issues. Among the several issues with the service part there are two which stand out.

1. Data view web parts cause users with access to SharePoint sites to be denied access. When users attempt to access sites, they receive an authentication prompt, which fails after being filled out with correct information. The quick workaround for this issue is adding users to the local Administrators group. This was the best (so to speak) solution to this problem before a hotfix was released.

2. The edit in datasheet View feature in lists does not work correctly. It redirects the users back to the standard view. The fix for this issue was quickly released by the community, and later corrected by Microsoft via a hotfix.

The above issues are addressed in hotfixes 948919 and 941412. You will need to fill out a request for these hotfixes.

IMPORTANT: When you apply the fix for issue 1, an immediate rebuild of your portal and non-portal content will follow. On some setups this is known to slow down normal SharePoint access to a crawl. Always backup your SharePoint database before applying hotfixes.

As of today at 4:30PM EST, this blog is running on the second release candidate of WordPress 2.5. On the 26th of this month, Matt Mullenweg posted a short screencast of WP 2.5’s new features. This screencast inspired me to give the new version a try. On a side note, I hope Matt gets better in his dental situation (watch the screencast for more info).

In case you’re thinking about testing the new WP 2.5 RC2, here are the answers to some questions I had, that may not be intuitive to find.

1. No matter what you’re changing on your blog, always, always backup. You’ll find detailed backup instructions here.
2. The upgrade process is the same as the usual process you go through for any 2.X.X version. Use the upgrade instructions here for a short description of what you need to do; the instructions here for more detailed instructions.
3. Check the compatibility of your plugins by visiting this place. If you have lots of plugins which you depend on, I would advise you to hold the deployment of this upgrade. Wait until version 2.5 has been released and the authors of the plugins have had a chance to revise their code. One good thing about 2.5 is that it hasn’t modified the internals of WordPress too heavily⁽¹⁾.
4. Theme operation has also not been affected. See the point above.

I’d like to thank Matt Mullenweg, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, Liz Danzico, and the WordPress community for making this release happen.

–
^{(1) Matt Mullenweg states that WordPress 2.5 has a redesigned look in order to improve interaction, but that it has not heavily modified the internal structure of the software. “Finally with regards to theme and plugin compatibility, we’ve had no reports of any broken themes in this upgrade, which makes sense because we didn’t really change anything core about themes, just added new optional capabilities like Gravatars. Plugins that work with the admin may require updating to take advantage of the new, cleaner UI in WordPress 2.5.”}

First things first–the transfer is complete. This’ll be the domain I use from now on. I’ve setup the server myself. The specs are fairly respectable and the pipe is good. I’ll be continually playing with my LAMP and OS setup in order to achieve maximum performance with what I have.

I’ve also chosen a new template, which will allow me to better utilize the screen space. I don’t believe it’s wise to only have a 500-700 pixel sliver on the screen for content. It forces the visitors the scroll down a lot, which in turn makes it hard to follow guides or even read. I’ll modify this template by darkening it a bit in order to not blind my visitors, remove all the German text (for obvious reasons), and finally, making the text a bit smaller (not too small). If you have any suggestions about any of this stuff, feel free to drop me a line.

Finally, I’m changing the concept, or main driving idea behind this blog. I’ll mostly dedicate it to writing about my experience with computers, programming, and technology in general. I’ll leave the social commentary to order venues.

Ever since 1995 I have been a user of Windows. It all started with my mother bringing a Windows 95 computer into the house. Long story short: I know Windows inside out. I wasn’t satisfied with this. I wanted more toys. There is only so deep you can go with Windows. The innards of the operating system are always hidden from you; you cannot change them in any sensible and easy way. What’s in the NT kernel? Can I read the source code? Legally? Nope, I cannot.

So in 2002, I went into a CompUSA store and purchased (or was it a gift?) a copy of RedHat 7.3. I tried installing it and it didn’t work! I tried again and it didn’t work again. I got frustrated and quit trying for four whole years.

In 2006, I discovered Ubuntu. I liked it, but I wanted to keep exploring. I tried everything I could get my hands on. Debian, Slackware, Knoppix, DSL, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Mint, PCLinuxOS, and many, many others. I remember the days when I reinstalled Gentoo over 40 times in a row. Compiling that thing over 40 times and then emerging X11 + KDE was great.

The thing is, I never switched to Linux. I tried, but it never lasted. I have one Dell Vostro laptop and a huge tower (dual core opteron, 3 GB of Ram, 1 TB of storage) at home. Up to now, I have been dual booting the laptop between Windows XP and Ubuntu and the only thing I have on the tower is Windows. Why do I keep living like this? I know what I’m doing (well, I do reasonably well) when it comes to Linux and BSD. I guess old habits die hard. Between running a Windows environment at work and doing the same at home, I never wanted to get off my rhythm. Well, that’s over folks.

The reason why I’m writing this is because my case is by no means an anomaly. There are thousands upon thousands of folks out there who like Linux–who use Linux! Yet, they never got around to switching. Do it now! Learn! Grow!

In a future post (hopefully tomorrow), I will outline the reasons why I believe free, libre and/or open source software is superior to commercial software (in certain situations).

Note: Linux = GNU/Linux and vice versa. I won’t want to bother with this argument… yet.