This morning at church, my wife asked one of the little girls in our ‘Lil’K’ class “How do you talk to God?” The girl’s response:
“In Spanish.”
Not sure where that came from, but it’s always funny to get unfiltered answers from children. They have such a fresh outlook on life. 
(note: I’ve got no idea whether the girl was bilingual, race, or anything like that. I don’t think it matters for the story, either. So don’t ask, please. )
You, my dear reader, may not have seen many changes yet. But I assure you, things are coming along nicely. DreamHost has twice supported me quickly (quickly enough for me, anyways – within a few hours). I hope not to bother them too much more, at least not with any ‘newbie’ issues.Â
One thing that is fixed: if you tried to subscribe before to my blog, and were unsuccessful, please try again. The feed, as well as many other links, should all direct properly now.
Next up: actually getting different themes to work, a favicon up, and cleaning up the sidebar, since LESS IS MORE. By the time you read this, I will have also tested post scheduling.
After that, I’ll return to my regularly scheduled posts, including some screencasts from Ubuntu. Yay!
Thanks for reading!
The Regulus theme by Binary Moon seems nice, so I’ll try that out too. Now if I could just figure out how to get my main address to redirect to my blog page….
I’ve imported all my old posts from Blogger, as well as my posts on WordPress.com. The importer for Blogger was…wow! Amazing! If you are using WordPress 2.0, ignore the links you’ll find from Google on using scripts, Justinsomnia, etc. Instead, just use the importer built into your WordPress (WP) dashboard.
I also found the theme I liked from WordPress.com, Rubrics. It took a little searching, but Tom Raftery updated it for WP 1.5 and it seems to work fine on my WP 2.0 installation. I don’t know that it will be my final theme, but it’s certainly way better than the default. 
I also found HemingwayBright, which looks like it might be really nice, as well as a modified version called Hemmed (included by default with Dreamhost hosting, among other themes). Expect to see these themes tried out, but hopefully I’ll decide and clean one up pretty quickly.
Speaking of WP Themes, I’ve found some really good reading material for newbies on this wordpress site. Seems to be someone who writes a lot about WP, as far as I can tell.
Final thing: for now at least, I’m offering a nice discount on Dreamhost hosting. Use the promo code “randompattern” (without the quote marks) for a 10% discount (capped at $30). Why would I do that? Well, Dreamhost will give me money for referring people, and I’m just sharing it. So, good deal for you if you’re going to host anyways, and good deal for me because I’ll make some money – which will certainly help me to produce better content.
I’ll return to my regularly scheduled Ubuntu posts shortly. 
I’m a little traumatized right now. Selah just fell down the stairs again (all the way from the top this time, head first!). This is the third time in probably as many weeks – the first time I actually fell down stairs while carrying her.
She seems to be fine, which is a relief. The last two times she had trouble walking for awhile after the fall, and the first time Sara actually took her to the ER. She’s probably fine, but it really scares me.
I guess this is one benefit of living in a split-level – the staircases have half the stairs. That, or you could say that there are twice as many staircases…
I haven’t posted much this week, but a lot’s happened in the background. Here’s a quick summary, and you can expect me to return to a more normal posting schedule.
The Ubuntu box is back up – I ran a memory test, then rebooted a few times and it started up fine. During the memory test I discovered my RAM is bad, so that’s probably the reason for all the startup issues with that computer.
I also had a little trouble getting Remote Desktop working again, until I remembered to check my configuration for Firestarter (the firewall). Sure enough, I had momentarily lost power, so my laptop had a new IP address. I learned how to allow access to a whole range of IP’s through firestarter’s help site (though it was a little hard to understand). Here’s the short version: IP address/netmask. So if you want everything on 192.168.0.x to have access, add 192.168.0.1/255.255.255.0 to Firestarter’s “allow” list.
The frequent (brief) losses of power here probably don’t help any of my computers, so time to look into a UPS. Any recommendations for home use?
Today I finally got my own domain: ransomedhome.com. It’s a little raw right now, but I’ll be cleaning it up over the next few weeks, and moving everything there. In fact, I’m already importing my posts from here, and this may be my last post here (so update your bookmarks / feeds!) I will post a few more times to remind everyone of the move…
If you’re curious about string theory, or what in the world 10 dimensions mean, here’s a really nice graphical demonstration to confuse you explain everything.
That’s it, folks. More to follow soon.
Testing complete, and Applets
Not only was it successful, but I’ve discovered Applets! Now I’m blogging, through Remote Desktop, from a button on my taskbar (bar across bottom of desktop), without any difficulty. Very nice – I really like this tool, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.
I’ve also got a funny screenshot for you. I just grabbed this off my desktop and dragged it into my post, so we’ll see how well it uploads to Blogger.
Take a look at the last line of the description. Although monkey-bubble is a decent game, in the vein (though not nearly as good as) Snood, the description by the open-source authors displays one of the weaknesses of most linux geeks. 
testing, testing, 1 2 3
test from Ubuntu using a “blog entry poster” application for Gnome. This is kind of cool, though I’m not sure how useful it will be. Depends on how well it works, I guess.
uh oh. I came back from a trip to D.C. and Pittsburgh to discover my old PC, the one with Ubuntu installed, wasn’t on. When I tried to turn it on, it gives me a boot manager with a choice of 2 kernels, plus recovery mode for each, as well as my Win XP installation. The first time, I wasn’t even paying attention, until I saw a blue Kubuntu boot up screen. It’s supposed to boot into regular Ubuntu, though I had switched sessions temporarily to a KDE session. Anyways, trying any of the 4 kernel options results in weird display followed by restarting. I guess I really am going to have to fix what’s wrong with this pc. ;) Only I have no idea what that is, at the moment.
Mark Shuttleworth, benevolent sponsor and launcher of Ubuntu, posted an email discussing what went wrong with communication / setting of expectations for what the latest Ubuntu release would deliver. He also points out the very good “problem” of Ubuntu being compared to Windows.
Among other linux-y items, Jorge has this response:
I think that it’s difficult to gauge exactly what users expect. Pre-warty’s users (like me) were usually experienced Linux users who enjoyed being lazy and having things Just Work(tm). By the time Dapper rolled around, if it wasn’t doing your laundry, then it’s game over. I’m sure those of us that advocate Ubuntu regularly run into this all the time …
I think people on the web just get their expectations set too high regardless – some high profile blogger makes a small, unsubstantiated statement with no real concrete communication, and next thing you know the whole blogosphere undergoes a severe case of speaker feedback, until one of the speakers blows. The next round of feedback starts, since the blogosphere is recursive in nature, and …
Anyways, back to my topic.  Oh, yeah, Ubuntu and Dapper Drake. Well, I think Mark’s right about “polished” not being a good word to use. For example I, as a new user to Ubuntu (and Linux), just assumed that of course there was a graphical installer. It didn’t cross my mind that there wouldn’t be, and I certainly didn’t know it was the first time one had been included!
I’m a fairly technical person, so it’s not an issue for me. But I’m really interested in seeing (at least one) mainstream challenger to Windows, with significant market share (preferably two or more).  So when I hear that Dapper Drake is “LTS” (Long Term Support) and “polished”, I’m thinking Windows and Mac (and hoping as good or better in all areas). Some might laugh to see Windows and polished in the same sentence, as I am. But you have to remember that the world sees computers as Windows. Linux is better in myriad ways, as is Mac OS X. And each is good for specific purposes. But unless Ubuntu has immediate, short-term benefits over Windows, you are going to be hard-pressed to get Windows users to switch. (I’ve got a screenshot I’ll put up later illustrating how an old-school linux user’s worldview differs from your average citizen, and why it has been hard for linux to take over the desktop market.)
This, by the way, is the reason that the first thing I did on Ubuntu was check out the games, looking for Spider in particular. That’s because that’s what my mother-in-law does on the computer – plays Spider. If she can do that as well or better on Ubuntu, fine. If not, go away.
One last comment, since I brought up Apple and inflated expectations earlier. I was quite pleased with WWDC, and I suspect anyone who was displeased wasn’t really grounded in this universe before the keynote. The indications were all over the place from most respectable bloggers on what to expect (linked post is from after the keynote, but reflects my thoughts). I’m happy, because it sounds like Apple will again deliver things I actually need (eeeaasy backup) and want (spaces). They seem to be pretty good at doing that.
