A Random Pattern

I finally got the WordPress software (that I use to publish this website) installed on my local computer.  It’s in a nice sandbox, so I can turn it on whenever I want.  The issues I ran into were mostly permission-based errors, so I’m going to be learning more about setting and managing permissions.

Full write-up will come later.  The good news is, I can now test changes without subjecting you, my imaginary readers ;), to being the guinea-pigs!

It’s worth noting that command-line-use really makes things easy – if you already know what you’re doing!  If you don’t , welll…..

Work has gotten realllly busy.  I’ll be back blogging this weekend.  Posting may be a little light until then, but rest assured some interesting content is coming up.

Upcoming posts:

• Ubuntu: How-Tos, WordPress and XAMPP setup, and screencast software reviews
• Puzzles: final n.nfshost.com hints, then on to new puzzles.
• WordPress: neat plug-ins, more Rubric theme, how to get help when you need it
• Personal: Pictures, kitchen update, maybe some video
• Other: who knows?

Come back this weekend for great stuff! 

So I found what looked like some good instructions for setting up a WordPress (WP) sandbox on your local Ubuntu machine.  Unfortunately, the instructions I found are only good if you DON’T SCREW ANYTHING UP AT ALL.

That includes if, before you found the instructions, you had already tried some other instructions and sort of already maybe done some of the stuff (looks innocently away…)

I would provide helpful tips on how to recover here, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet myself.  What seems to be the key, though, is to get MySQL set up properly, then don’t mess with it and DEFINITELY don’t delete it and try to start over without fully cleaning up.

More to come once I figure out how to recover….

Seth reminds us why we get paid. This guy has quickly become one of my favorite bloggers in my RSS feed, even though the rest of my regular feeds are mostly very tech-heavy. Today he reminds us that the thorn in our side is the reason we get paid to do the job – puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

If you don’t think you deal with customers, remember that whoever you have to deliver results to is your customer. They may be internal (the manufacturing group, the sales group, the employees if you’re in HR), or they may be external, but either way they’re your customer. If you’ve got a difficult customer, well, that’s why you get paid the big bucks.

Google and Skype – interoperability a possibility?

Unfortunately, I share the concern of others that the wording is “explore”. I had hopes for a more aggressive position, but it’s too early in the relationship and the companies involved don’t want to ‘over-promise, under-deliver’.

Still, this means good things for all of us. For example, some of the IT folks in my company are quite hostile to Skype. I’m with them on this, as I don’t like all the resources it eats up, or other problems it causes. It’s not just my company that has a problem with this either.

On the other hand, I’m a big fan of Google Talk, and would like to see it used more. One really great way for it to grow is for it to inter-communicate with other IM clients / networks. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but think of it this way: I would like to use Google Talk instead of Gaim, Skype, etc. Unfortunately all my contacts are already on those other networks, so I either try to force them all to change (yeah right), run several clients (hello slow computer), or don’t get to use Google Talk because I don’t have friends on the network. If I could talk to the other networks through Google Talk, suddenly I can decide which client I prefer, and other people can choose something different that meets their needs, and we can still talk!

The other thing to note is that this announcement goes beyond the XMPP support Google already brought with GTalk’s introduction. Not only do they have a commitment to an open standard for IM (text chat), and not only are they helping define an open standard for voice / other interaction (Jingle), but now here’s another step towards real interoperability BETWEEN VOIP CLIENTS, WITHOUT THE ‘OLD’ PHONE NETWORK INVOLVED AT ALL.

Imagine a world where IM or VOIP is just like email or the telephone. It doesn’t matter if your friend uses Cingular or Verizon, you can still call her from your AT & T phone. It doesn’t matter if your business partner has an @comcast.com email, or an @mylastname.com email.

Speaking of which, along with my own domain, I have a new IM name: step@ransomedhome.com.  It’s mine, I own it, I can take it with me as long as I own my domain name.  So if you want to email or IM me, you can use the same contact information.  :)  See how great having an open IM network would be?!

Hopefully by the time you read this I will have uploaded the newly cleaned-up Rubric theme. Changes are minor:

• Vkaryl came to my rescue again and fixed the navigation issue on single post pages, which was due to a few missing styles in the stylesheet.
• extra images (not related to the theme currently) were removed.
• sidebar has been added to single post pages.

I’m really happy to have a widgetized Rubric theme.  There’s a lot of work to be done to get my blog set up exactly how I want it, but that’s part of the fun too (at least for a geek like me). 

What do you think? Do you like it? Is it too complicated? What information do you want easily available on the front page. I’m all ears.

The ever-useful Ubuntu blog led me to a top-10 list on Ubuntu apps, posted on the also always-useful Lifehacker site. There was also a link from the Ubuntu blog to a write-up on the Washington Post.

There are some different views on software philosophy presented in the articles. I often see GNU/Linux users expressing this philosophy of “the CLI (Command Line Interface) method is better because …”, the truth is not so simple. I guess it depends on where you want GNU/Linux to go, though. I’m coming from the Windows world, yet fairly familiar with command-line, since I use it regularly at work. So in one sense I appreciate the power and speed of just typing in what I need done so that I can move on. I also love that if someone knows how to fix your problem, or wants to share an app, they can just say “type ‘blah blah blah’ and tell me what you see”. It’s much more definitive, powerful, and effective, not to mention faster, than trying to talk through a GUI (Graphical User Interface, which is what you stare at every day on the computer screen). At the same time, perhaps 80% of the commands are worthless to me long-term. I do too many varied tasks with the computer, and I want to enjoy and be effective in certain of those things. The best way to enable that? Eliminate the memory issue, by providing a GUI.
GNU/Linux – if you’re involved in Linux, you ought to read the attached link. I’ve seen the term GNU many times, knew what it stood for (GNU’s Not Linux), had some vague idea what it was…. I didn’t realize that what we mistakenly call Linux is really just the kernel, just one part of the whole GNU/Linux package. One thing I haven’t done is verified the facts in the linked article, so let me know if it’s actually wrong. Seems hard to imagine someone fighting that battle without the facts behind them, though.

After much hard work, I’ve gotten my index page back to valid CSS and (almost) valid XHTML.  This is good, though I’ve still got a lot of errors to fix.

The next step is to finish getting WP up and running on my Ubuntu box, so I’m not hacking on my website and breaking it while you’re trying to read it.  Then I’ll fix some of the issues there, and as soon as I’ve got them working I’ll upload the files and we can all enjoy my nice, new, shiny blog. 

Weird Al Yankovic e-card for his new song and album
The pre-released song is called “Don’t Download This Song”, which, as you know, means you absolutely MUST download it. He’s got a MySpace page too…see, all the cool kids are doing it.

Gotta love well-done viral marketing. Plus fun parody songs. Especially ones that mock the sickness that is the RIAA, MPAA, DRM… ok, I’ll stop for now.

http://xkcd.com/c148.html, a web comic: so glad to see I’m not the only one with this problem.

note: be careful viewing other pages of this web-comic, some of them are very disturbing.  I’m not kidding about that.