Category: Technical

I upgraded MovableType last night and now im totally regretting it. First, a plugin that I installed because of its “features” in relation to the new version managed to totally fry my theme on my blog, even after I removed the pesky thing. Second issue, my /images/ directory is GONE! Don’t know where it went, but it went. Third, the BACKUP folder I created, containing a backup copy of my MovableType installation was overwritten by the thing when it rebuilt the site. I am not amused, I just hope I can get all of those images restored somehow, I think I kept some backups in various locations, but damn, what a pain in the ass.
UPDATE: ok, finally got my theme reapplied from database, from now on, no more lazy-blogger!

I think for the first time I have just become really pissed at UNCC’s information systems management department. I have had my @uncc.edu email account for over a year now and have been faithfully logging into 49er Express at least once per week. I had never been informed of any way to check that account other than to log in and use the damn web mail console, but now I have run across a document from the college of engineering that states that an IMAP option is availible. I configured it in my client and assumed it wouldn’t function, but it propogated folders and listed all of my mail. Why would UNCC hide this very valueble tool? I can’t believe that this has been hidden from me for over a year.

This is from an Amazon search I was performing while trying to find a replacement clip for my cordless phone. It would appear that A9 is more capable of searching Amazon.com than Amazon.com’s bult-in search utility.

The inevitable finally happened tonight, about 15 minutes ago I managed to kill my Kensington WebRacer touchpad pointing device (kinda like a mouse, but much cooler). Unforunately I can no longer find decent touchpads anywhere, so thus I am doomed to find a replacement that isn’t a touchpad. Up until a few days ago I was still thinking of rejoining the rest of the world with their regular mice, but I am now rethinking that… I just looked on Amazon with a hope in my heart that I would find just one Kensington WebRacer availible, but no luck, however, a very nice subsitute did cross my path. A Kensington Trackball! At this moment I am giving it very real consideration as it is a very nice piece of hardware that meets my reasons for not wanting a “typical” mouse. I am giving the brand itself a lot of consideration because of the duration that the WebRacer had lasted, almost 5 years. The WebRacer’s “dieing issue” is the primary left button, which refuses to click. The redundant nature of the WebRacer eliminates the need for an IMMEDIATE replacement, but it does certainly put pressure on me to prepare to move on, especially since I had the spare left button, it requires my thumb to bend (yes people, I use my thumb to left click and pinky to right click while using the index to move the cursor).
I have been accused of being a packrat when it comes to my hardware, with the way I feel at this moment I understand why I am. While the thought of removing the WebRacer from active duty doesn’t cause me any pain, I can barely stand the thought of throwing it out, it has been with me through so many things over the years, sort of like an old friend.
The end of my computing era with the desktop touchpad is upon me, I shall now move on… or try to at least.

Recently I decided to stop adding more individual card readers to my growing collection wired gadgets, and go for an “all in one” reader. As I sit here looking at this thing in my hand, I realize that while it resembles a floppy in its size and shape, there is a large amount of history that has been lost between the floppy and this device. A floppy disk was a fairly standard method for file exchange/transport. Now that the need for large capacity storage has come about so quickly, it would appear that any hope of ever getting back to anything “standardized” is fading fast. For most uses there is no advantage to using one type of card over another. I can see why CompactFlash is no longer used for digital cameras that much, but there is still a great amount of similarity between all of the medias availible. My old digital camera will write an image in about 5 seconds, this is due to limitations with both the media and the camera, but my new camera will write an image in less time than it takes you to blink, but still slower than the ability of its media, which has theoretical limits of 9 MB/s for reading and 10 MB/s for writing.
With the new device I purchased to consolidate all of my mess into a single form I find only a few disappointments. The first major disappointment is that each media has its own way of being inserted because of the design for handling multiple media types per bay. The next thing that bothers me is that the bays aren’t recessed far enough, because all of my cards stick out really far and this would require me to leave my computer’s case door open when the media is in the bay because of a lack of clearance.

Lately i’ve been digging in the RFC archives for my pleasure and im finding that the series itself has no real standard upon which it was built, it is a giant document collection of anything that might be relevant to the Internet.
Some of my favorites from the recent adventure are:
RFC-1855: Really straight-forward specification of Internet rules of kindness, but I find that this document is really too verbose and “standard-like” to be useful to the modern Internet user, especially since most of the newbies are so stupid.
RFC-822: Old government document, but is really a cool into to SMTP. I find it helpful when diagnosing weird things happening in email transactions. The most unfortunate thing about this document is that it hasn’t been obsoleted by a post-DNS document.
RFC-2150: This document says it is for those with limited knowledge of the Internet. Would anyone with limited knowledge of the Internet know how to get this document? The document makes a strong delcaration about the Internet opinion towards ‘The Arts’. Im really suprised that this document isn’t really more prevailant than it is. I love the fact that this document does welcome artists of all varieties to The Network.
Those three are the most interesting that ive read in the past week, but there are about 3000 more to read and try to find good in. I am finding that these documents are really becoming over-complicated, even though they never were meant to be.

With so many of my blog entries I usually post images, especially those that are about my ceramic work. I have decided that most of my images need to be part of my blog in some way. Because of that decision I will most likely end up having the images reside on the blog’s domain, as opposed to my personal domain. This series of decisions could end up changing things a lot, or hardly at all, depending upon how far I take it. There are methods that integrate directly into MovableType, then there are some that are external. I have spent some time in the last few days looking at the different options, coming up with many I hate and a few I like. This could be a very big step for my blog, in moving towards where I would like to see it as an expression of myself. There is a sample of something similar to what I would like to do at http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery for now (link is likely to expire in the near future if I scrap the use of this utility). I would really like some feedback on the concept and the tool itself. For me it doens’t seem to be close enough to the blog itself, which is something that could be changed with styling or with using a plug-in to the blog.

For the first time in over a year I have fax service again. My new fax number is (866) 502-9243. That is toll-free to all US and Canadian residents.
I decided ths morning that I needed a fax number when I realized I needed to fax something and the only way I could do it was via Windows Fax Services. I only wanted outgoing fax service this morning, but that isn’t an option, so I ended up with a full-service fax account, might be useful, might suck, we shall see.

For the first time in several years I now have opened a web hosting account with an outside provider. DreamHost. I opened the account because it was a good deal and thought I could find some usefulness for it, plus Chris and I had been playing with the idea previously.
So far nothing has been done with the space, except for a little bit of playtime with the one-click installation stuff. I installed Wiki as well as WordPress and some other toys to play with. So far nothing really impressive, but it is kind of cool to have all of these things at my fingertips like this. It is so simple to go in and have the server to self configure for these applications.
I have come to the conclusion that I need to revise my naming system for my server/workstations. My old straight-forward naming system is boring and sometimes redundant. My externally hosted site is on khan.dreamhost.com, which I consider to be a cool name. Other motivations for this feeling are the 30 or so servers owned by Mozilla Foundation which all have unique and distinctive names, even though it seems like half are named after some type of sexually arounsed anphibian….
Anyway.. back to the topic at hand… my new vacancy area. The space is fully equipped for Perl, PHP and other technologies, which makes it perfect for anything I could want to do. One idea I had, at least for the summer, was to have a GITI development area for migrating all modules to v2. Since I am not doing anything this summer I can actually work on GITI and enjoy what I am doing. At the end of the summer I don’t know what I would do with the space (or the extraneous domain that came with it).
I fear moving something that already exists to a new host because of the long time since I trusted someone external with MY websites/domains.

This evening I signed up for a new trial account with an old email service provider of mine, MailSnare, for the purpose of having an email account that I can use with my personal website once its redesign is complete. After doing so I realized how many email addresses I actually have. I have 2 or so real addresses locally (on my server), 2 at Gmail and now 1 at MailSnare (temporary for now though). Does a person truely need so many email addresses? I seem to be able to find justification for each account, but can I really? All email accounts are essentially the same in functionality, and I definately have enough capacity to serve all of my needs on 1 account…. so whats up with this? My latest aquisition is justified as being clear of most SPAM, so it can be used publicly without much hassle. The other 4 could truely and logicly be 1 account…. probably a single Gmail account. I could sort the different classifications or whatever and from what i’ve heard, it also is low-SPAM. I seem to feel attached to each and every email address I have, so convinving myself that I only need 1 account is a loss, but this is still something that bothers me. If email is such an advanced commucation form, then why can we not consolidate to 1 and have our lives totally together on that address? As an electronic identity method email isn’t very analogous to the real world.
Do we really need a spare address for every possible presenting self?
john@bussiness.com
john@church.org
john@porno.us
john@poker.net
john@personal.info
it really is excessive…. but we do it… all for our own various reasons