I’m finally undertaking the effort of moving my main web domain from a box hosted by a friend to a commercial server in California. This mirgation, while filling me with a sense of dread (I can’t afford any downtime) will allow for such technologically advance features as FTP access (I’ve been limping along with AFP/Samba, which is cool but slow as shit and unreachable from my PC), multiple subdomains, WebDAV, includes, MySQL, PHP and Perl. Plus, I can migrate over to Mail.app and abandon Eudora on the side of the road like the broke-down ’75 Pacer it is. Sweet zombie Jesus, I’m excited.
Right now I’m making a master backup of the site, which will take an hour or two (there’s a ton of old content there—I don’t even want to look at the old weblog right now) and then I have to push it all live to the new server, then point the DNS over and pray for success.
When things slow down a bit in the future, I’ll add a weblog to the illustration directory, clean up the link rot, set up some web calendars, and have a personalized sandbox for each of my clients to use.
Now, it’s back to the grind.
You should go fuck yourselves, because your “installation instructions” are for shit!
Oh, and thanks, Apple, for messing with the standard install for DBD::mysql, so that I can’t run it on my iBook without knowing how to write the fucking thing myself.
I’m about to throw my stupid PC laptop out the window. When I was in San Francisco, I started having problems getting it to shut down (it would say, “Saving Your Personal Settings” or something like that for about ten minutes, kick the fan on, and do nothing) and then it began having problems starting up.
Now, I can’t get into the stupid thing at all. When it’s working, it’s great, but why can’t IBM design a laptop to reliably go to sleep without hosing itself? Or is it a software issue? I mean, come on.
Update: Looks like it might have something to do with ZoneAlarm, which suddenly started sucking CPU cycles and refusing to load. After uninstalling it completely, I have Windows Firewall activated. Which is a lot like using an umbrella to prepare for an F5 tornado. Fucking PCs.
24″ iMac. The way I’d configure it, it’d be $2,500, though. To quote Napoleon Dynamite: “Flippin’ sweet.”
I’m doing the legwork to build a new website for my illustration portfolio, in the hopes that I can make it more of a weekly (or even daily) endeavor. My dream is to have a site where I post sketches and finals of my work as well as other articles and sites I’m looking at, and have a place for comments and an RSS feed. Because I’d like to make it as easy as possible, I’ve been looking at a lot of photoblog software, which is a more specialized version of traditional weblog software—the emphasis is on ease of uploading and immediate posting, as opposed to the hassle of adding a photo to one’s Flickr account, hunting down the URL, and pasting it into a Movable Type window, repeat, repeat. In essence with a lot of these apps, the photo is the central unit, and the title/caption becomes secondary, almost metadata.
I started with some of the lighter applications, and looked at Folderblog, which has ease of installation and lightweight footprint as two of its key features. Instead of a true content management system, it acts as a PHP script running in the background, processing photos as they are added to a central folder and tying them to text files with metadata. Some of its drawbacks are that it has no allowance for .GIF files (which are central to the work I do), it has a gloopy UI, it has questionable support, and it has a very small community. I was able to modify the templates to get a layout that was more in line with what I wanted, but it’s not perfect. I’m shelving this one for the time being.
The next application I’m looking at is PixelPost, which (shudder) requires a MySQL database backend. Having navigated the myriad websites to find the information I need and the link to the required file (a binary installer, thank CHRIST) I got it installed and running under OS X last night. I then found a handy utility called Navicat to administer the database, something I’ve only been able to do previously with arcane command-line jujitsu found buried in pages of lousy open source documentation. And speaking of lousy documentation, how about providing a screenshot, people? Or simply a better website, that, um, lists some of the features of the application? I’m going on reviews here, and looking at other websites for an approximation of what I might get, and that’s just not enough. I do like the database backend, and there seems to be a healthy community building helpful tools (captcha, clean URL, and ratings, for example).
As I continue with the experiment, I’ll keep writing about it here. I’m hopeful I’ll find a robust enough application that I can use for a real-world website, and finally get the site I want running.
SEATTLE, July 6, 2006: (AP) Cingular Wireless Corp. promised to provide uninterrupted service to AT&T Wireless customers when it acquired that company in 2004, but instead it nickel-and-dimed them and degraded their reception in an effort to persuade them to sign new contracts, a federal lawsuit said.
…Yeah, and how about my lousy reception now that I have a Cingular account? Jen and I are seriously considering switching our service and phones.
Looks like my business server is down a couple days ahead of schedule—it’s getting an overhaul this weekend. Until further notice, use the idiot address if you need to get in touch with me.
Yesterday, I worked on a pair of laptops. The first is the battered G4 Powerbook of a client of mine; it’s about four years old, and it’s been through the ringer. When I first started working with her, it was intermittently hanging and crashing, and I was able to resuscitate it twice (once with FireWire disk mode after a particularly hair-raising death), so she bought a new hard drive for it and handed it off to me yesterday. After following some remarkably clear directions on Apple’s website, I had the bottom of the case cracked and the drive installed in about ten minutes; an hour later I had a brand-new, up to date install of OS X happily humming on the machine. Case closed.
The other laptop is my Thinkpad, which has been running a ghosted copy of Windows 98—which is about as useful as a hatchet in my neck. Every other time I start up the machine I have to go through some kind of recovery process to get it to work, half the applications I own don’t run on it, and the network support is abysmal. I picked up a copy of Win XP yesterday in the hopes that I could upgrade the OS to something from this century. I popped the disk in and loaded the installer, which helpfully informed me that it needed a CD to “verify” my upgrade path, something the back of the box failed to mention. It listed pretty much every lousy OS Microsoft has published except the one I have a legal copy of (Windows NT Server), and refused to recognize that disk altogether. So I decided I’d upgrade the OS I have, figuring it would be better than nothing.
I was wrong.
Three hours after I started the “upgrade”, I found myself in Windows XP, and figured things had gone smoothly. There were various driver issues to be resolved, so I went to the Lenovo site and started downloading the updates for my particular system, installed one, and rebooted. It was then that I knew I was in trouble, because I got some screen that mentioned something about the FAT file system, windows/DUMP.temp, and that my “first allocation unit is not valid”, and then sent me into some kind of a low-res Windows XP screen, and then I got a blue screen that showed up for about one second, and then I went right back to the black BIOS screen for another cycle of the same crap all over again. I resisted the urge to scream, because it was 1AM and Jen was asleep upstairs.
This morning I booted off the install CD and chose “repair installation” from the menu, thinking I’d get something that would help me troubleshoot the problem. Again, I was too optimistic. I was greeted with a black command-line screen full of cryptic commands that were supposed to “help” me with my problem. CHKDSK is the one I recognize, so I ran that, and it told me there are errors on my disk. Yeah, no kidding. So what do I do about it? Got any suggestions, you stupid piece of shit? All the other “utilities” wanted to do stuff like repartition my drive or re-order my boot sequence, something I can do in BIOS already. Where’s the command for “fix that shit you told me was broke?”
I put a call into my Dad, who has several Win 98 discs laying around, and hopefully he can send me one so I can spoof this shit software into thinking it’s OK to do a clean installation instead of doing it ghetto-style on top of Win 98.
It’s not that I’m mad at Microsoft for making piracy hard; I understand, to a point, where they’re coming from. My anger lies in the incomprehensible installation process, made difficult for people who are not CS majors or CompUSA employees. Would I be able to walk my mother through this process remotely if I was trying to troubleshoot her PC (If I was stupid enough to recommend a PC to my Mother in the first place)? Not a chance. Would I recommend this software to anyone else? Not on your life. One of the reasons I decided to install it myself was because I’d heard that the big computer manufacturers are bundling spyware and other crap on the computers they sell, and I want to have as little of that shit to deal with as possible. It looks like I have a whole other mess I have to deal with instead.
Tonight’s guest: Everybody’s favorite character and evil-voice actor Clancy Brown!
A quote from the IMDB: “All the movies where I play nice guys don’t seem to do very well.”
Yesterday I deposited a freelance check that was pretty small by normal standards, but large in rewards. Around the Lockardugan studios, we have an assortment of old and new equipment, bought as time, money, and projects allow, and our PC is one of the oldest relics in the shop. (Number one would be our circa 1994 LaserWriter 630.) It’s a no-name clone box with a Celeron 433—I think—built for me by my former business partner Dan when this blazing speed might have impressed somebody. It’s beige, and it contains remnants of my first-ever PC (the floppy drive) as well as cast-off components donated to me by friends who took pity on my spendthrift ways. It’s been a reliable, dependable workhorse of a computer, and it’s allowed me to make money and stay viable for longer than I would have imagined.
However, its time is due. Switching between Photoshop, web browsers, and HomeSite (the main reason I own a PC) is painfully slow. The hard drive, which dates back to the Clinton Administration, has begun to sound wonky. I’m sure it draws gigawatts of electrical power, between the ancient power supply and the hand-me-down Voodoo 5 video card, which features two cooling fans and sounds like a hovering Russian helicopter. And frankly, it’s very big and bulky. Recent events and upcoming plans have illustrated the need for something faster, smaller, and more portable to work on.
I found an outfit in a hole-in-the-wall shopping center in Glen Burnie that sells off-lease computer equipment for relatively cheap prices [Name withheld.] I dragged Jen there yesterday after a lunchtime client meeting to look over the selection, and found a basic IBM R30 Thinkpad for what I thought was a reasonable price. After standing around and waiting for one employee to get off the phone with what I assumed was his lawyer (a discussion about divorce papers and who would retain possession of the house had my mind spinning all sorts of stories about this kid) I was waited on by another, younger, walleyed kid who turned out to be the store manager. He broke out a power supply and I waited patiently for him to test out the unit while concentrating on not passing out from A. the heat and B. the overwhelming stench of mothballs, geeksweat, tapioca, and baby powder. After enduring the checkout and an anti-AOL diatribe by a distraught, shrieking female customer, I was given a matching IBM notebook bag and a swappable floppy drive, paid my money, and escaped back into the fresh air.
Because the company is not Microsoft certified, they are not allowed to install anything but the original system, so I am stuck with Windows 98, which is a little like riding a tricycle again. After installing a firewall, I spent a good part of last night looking up basic functions like file sharing, installing fonts, and DHCP setup, but it’s gone smoothly and easily. It feels lighter, faster, and more responsive already, and I’m almost finished getting it set up for heavy usage. At some point I’ll have to upgrade it (or, alternatively, buy a MacBook and set up a dual-boot environment, but I don’t see that kind of scratch headed my way for some time now) and actually learn how to maintain a PC without hosing everything.
So, does anybody have a copy of Windows 2000 laying around? Heh heh, just kidding, Mr. Gates.