Sunday, October 26, 2003

Zap your what? From Scripting News: "I'm at the Zap Your PRAM conference in Cavendish, PEI. " That sounds like quite the get-together. Several friends and collegues have kicked around the idea for years that we need to have a conference and not invite attendees, just speakers, or participants. Sounds like what these folks are doing. I'll be interested in how they get the dynamics to work out. It can be difficult when everyone in the group is a Type A extrovert. 12:00:00 PM    comment []

Linux Work So, this weekend I've got some time to spare and dedicated it to restoring my Linux laptop to life. I foolishly tried to update to RedHat 9 from 8 without considering the limitations of a 6 Gb hard drive with 2 Gb already dedicated to another OS. I was surprised that RedHat crashed the machine, rather than gracefully declined, but it left the machine a mess, with two hard drive partitions full to overflowing, and an OS that would boot and then lock up attempting to start X Windows. My first urge was to just blow away everything and start again. However, that really isn't the way to learn anything. Instead, I took it as a learning experience. What if a client had a locked-up or corrupted machine, but needed to recover some precious files? Looked at in this light, I hadn't encountered a problem, but rather an educational opportunity. I used a Knoppix 3.3 CD to boot into a working Linux OS, and then followed the Repair FAQ on the Knoppix site to clean some space off each partition. I also used the RedHat 9 CDs in "repair" mode to clear off still more files, test the file systems for integrity, and get the system to restart. There were a number of problems with my last set of installs, and I set off to fix them. First, I got a few of the basic services restarted. I reconfigured the networking software to use the docking station's ethernet rather than the wireless card. Once I was satisfied that was working properly, I reconfigured TCP/IP for a static address and programmed the router to allow minimal services to be exposed to the outside world - port 8080 for Apache and 23 for SSH. Over Apache, I'm running Twiki, a wiki written in Perl, and I use port 23 for a secure tunnel for shell work and also to run a remote graphical session via VNC. Next, I tried to set up Samba, and ran into some problems. The RedHat Network insists the latest Samba for my distribution is 2.2.7-5.8.0, while I had somehow installed a 2.2.8a on the system, I suspect by downloading the wrong version directly from the Samba site. The installer wanted the Redhat 8 CDs, which I had given away, so BitTorrent to the rescue, and I was able to download and burn a new set of disks from rpmfind.net. Uninstalling the wrong version and finally getting the correct version installed was an education in the Redhat Package Manager (RPM) command line, but I am up and running. Today, the goal is to configure MySQL and the MyODBC software so that I can read and write MySQL data from my Windows workstation. Onward and upward! 10:08:28 AM    comment []

Blogging Blues I've been encountering a couple of problems with my Radio Userland blogging software, and I've changed a few things in hopes of fixing them: 1) Posts were not appearing in a timely manner. I had switched to the three-button "Post", "Post and Publish", "Publish" format, and it appears that some articles I _thought_ I published never appeared. Could be operator error, could be software problems. 2) Graphical stuff was all messed up. This probably isn't me. The graphical editor in Mozilla is still flaky - displaying the cursor in one place and having keystrokes appear in another, mangling HTML and adding spurious break tags. Back to plain old text. Let me know if you see improvement or not. Of course, if you aren't seeing posts, how do you know they are not supposed to be there? Ask me. 8:24:21 AM    comment []

You cannot imagine the Power... of blogging What a great lead-in line to an article: "The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog." The article, by Ed Cone in Baseline, goes on to describe the potential power of blogging for businesses. A good read, but a great opening. It certainly snagged me. 8:19:54 AM    comment []

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