A Random Pattern

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.

I’ve been thinking about one of the fun little extras Steve Jobs showed off at WWDC not too long ago: The ability to replace backgrounds in iChat video chats. Here are some ideas that I’m sure someone will play around with as soon as Leopard is available:

• Wear a t-shirt that matches the background. Presto, there’s a hole in your stomach! (Don’t know if this will work, depends on how they implemented the algorithm.
• Take a screenshot with your head in the picture. Does your head now disappear?
• Create a fake background with yourself, then “walk in” on yourself while chatting with someone else.

Remember, folks, you heard it here first. Here’s the site that gave me the idea, with a rundown on Leopard:

… In addition, a sophisticated chroma key algorithm was added so that a user can do a snapshot of the background he is chatting in front of, and it will remove the background and key in a background image or video of the user’s choice. For corporate presentations, podcasts or just plain having fun, this is a great feature. …

Update:  Links to WWDC, the Leopard sneek peek iChat page, and a picture from Apple showing the new backdrop effect:

With the fixes I implemented last night, careful inspection later (read: today) reveal that I partially broke my page in IE. Yet another reason that you should be browsing the web in style. A fix is in progress, and I’ll document it here when I get it actually working.

I also verified that the sidebar on single pages goes right over the footer. I found one suggestion for fixing it, but that didn’t seem to work. Anyone have any ideas?

My fix for navigation links on single posts didn’t fix anything. So back to the drawing board for that too…

Update:  The breakage on IE was worse than I thought, so I’ve moved the subscription block back to the bottom right for now.  Hopefully the fix for that is easy.

What do you think? A new look for me?

Generate your own Web 2.0 label here, and join the clueless throng of internet devotees in celebrating and mocking something you don’t quite understand…

If you don’t get the joke, don’t worry. Most of the people who do get it don’t realize the joke they’re laughing at is on them. If that’s too meta for you, just skip this whole post. Or you can reference the word I made up and it’s definition:

dis-coordinated: unharmonious clumbsiness

Here are a few links on getting Ubuntu up and running with all the little goodies you might want:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-14062.html This is a forum where airtonix has a post (near the bottom) on getting WordPress up and running on Ubuntu. I’m still struggling with this, but realized I went about it the wrong way. There’s an option when you first install Ubuntu to install a “LAMP” stack. Choose this if you want to use your installation as a server for WP publishing, even privately.

http://torrez.us/myubuntu/ Someone writes on going “cold turkey” Ubuntu. Interesting, if a bit scary at first, with a ton of CLI (command line interface) stuff. My recommendations: 1. Don’t read this unless you’re a big geek. 2. Just install Ubuntu, and do things the nice easy graphical way. When you run into a problem, then worry about solving it. It’s much easier to take things one challenge at a time, and every issue you face is solvable one way or another.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=186792 Similar to above, but a little more friendly. This is an Ubuntu “customization guide”, and the idea is to make sure you can use all the proprietary stuff that you also used on Windows or Mac, probably without realizing it. Stuff like Adobe reader, Flash, mp3s, all those are licensed and somebody has to pay for you to use a copy. Luckily there are easy ways to get this set up on Ubuntu. Again, my recommendations: Try easyUbuntu and automatix first.

List of what’s fixed, what needs to be fixed, and other changes to my blog:

Fixed:

• Sidebar now displays (mostly) as intended, with each section / widget displaying in it’s own floating white box.
• Sidebar shows up on single (post) pages.
• Unfortunately, I think that’s it. But I *felt* productive!

Need to be fixed or added (please add to this list in the comments!):

• Make sure Sidebar doesn’t extend past/over footer.
• Next / previous hyperlinks on individual pages too close to header title.
• Better integrated “pages” functionality (in header?).
• rotating header capability.
• more code cleanup, such as pulling out the sidenote javascript and extra images from the package.
• Figure out how/if to have a different Sidebar (shorter, simpler?) for single post pages.

Other changes:

• I created a cool widget, see it at the bottom of my sidebar. It has links to subscribe to my blog, and to explain what “subscribe to my blog” even means. It’s also got a way to get my new posts in your email, automagically! Yay for magic internet stuff!  (This was partially motivated by a reminder of a post from Robert Scoble, whose posts I keep running into lately.)
• In order to make the cool stuff above happen, I cleaned up my feeds and autodirecting for my feeds. If you subscribed to this blog before tonight – No Worries! It will automagically forward you to the feed I want you to use (grin) so I can count how many people are (not) reading my blog. This means you don’t have to do anything! But I’m still excited about it…

I think that’s it, at least that’s all I can remember.  If the blog doesn’t look or work much differently as far as you notice, that should mean I’m doing a good job.  And if something’s broken, please tell me.  I’ll fix it if I can.

Quick list:

-Fix sidebar to look like old sidebar, or like posts.  That is, white boxed instead of transparent.

-Get rotating header or Admin panel options to change header picture working.

That’s all I got.  Edits to come, I have no doubt.