Either my next car, or possibly the next paint job on my current car, will be gassy green like this one:
(I refer to the green one in back. Mine is the black-and-bare-metal one in front.)
I don’t think a new car is in my budget any time soon, but this one looks pretty sweet. It looks a lot faster than mine, sure, with that high hood and close-to-the-bumper front wheel placement. But most of all, it’s chartreuse.
The other day I tried to create a view of one of my tables, and I got some weird message (not able to fork lock file PID on /tmp, or something like that, that appealed to the vestigial *ix programmer lobe in my brain).
Anyway, I believed what I read on the internet and did all kinds of things to fix it, all unsuccessfully. I wound up deleting my entire MySQL installation and reinstalling. I did that several times, in fact, because there’s no MySQL uninstaller, just lore distributed across various people’s blogs. I found this post helpful, but what I eventually used was this one.
But I have a little bit of wisdom of my own to contribute, and it is as follows:
Soon after installing MySQL, I created a file .my.cnf in my $HOME directory. It looks like this:
[client] # The following password will be sent to all standard MySQL clients password="abc123"
(where abc123 is the real password, of course.)
Long story short: get rid of that file while you’re installing and testing the initial installation of MySQL.
Check out this video from one of the next generation of churches. It’s Contemporvant, which is the cool way of saying it has everything I’m looking for in my next church:
I showed this to the people in my Pastor’s Bible study today, and we had some fun with it. So, obviously, did the people who made it. (Take a really close look at the tattoo, for example.)
I wonder if my church could make fun of itself in that same way. And, if we could, what would we say about ourselves and the way we do worship?
Well, my laptop won’t be the only functioning computer at church any more. I got the secretary’s new computer set up today.
It’s an Inspiron Desktop 570 MiniTower, and features:
All that plus a 1-year warranty of sorts. And the amazing thing, to an old duffer like me, was the cost. We didn’t buy a monitor, so the total, including tax and free shipping was $368.66 from the Dell Outlet.
It only took me about an hour to get the software configured. XP used to took forever. Partly this is because Dell seems to be including substantially less crapware that has to be removed.
It would have taken forever, though, if not for Ninite.com. If you still run Windows and you’re not using Ninite, you’re wasting your time.
My secretary’s machine blue-screened a couple of days ago with a STOP 24 message, which tells you (or rather, doesn’t tell you) that either the disk or the filesystem is broken.
Fortunately(!) we’d just gone through a couple of weeks restoring everything after a virus infestation, so there wasn’t much on it of value, except for the Quicken bookkeeping data.
I spent awhile learning about Windows recovery disks, and made a WinPE disk that I ought to have been able to boot off. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t, and — honestly — I don’t have time to figure out how to route around Microsoft stupidity.
Today, finally, I had a half hour to spare, so I extracted the hard drive from the Windows box, slapped it into an external USB housing, and connected it to my linux backup server. (Elapsed time: about 10 minutes. That’s too long, but I didn’t have a good phillips screwdriver and had to use my leatherman. Also I was flummoxed briefly by the easy-to-open case on the Dell Dimension 3000.)
Sadly, it didn’t automount on my desktop. I run Ubuntu 9.10, and have become accustomed to it “just working” no matter what I need doing. But apparently support for NTFS USB drives doesn’t come in the out-of-box configuration.
No matter. I hit the internet (specifically, I did a single Google search for “ubuntu external drive ntfs“) and found out I needed to install ntfs-config. The search and subsequent installation took about 2 minutes. I cycled the power on the external drive, and — voila! — there was the drive. I popped into terminal, ran a quick find|cpio, and Bob’s your uncle.
I really enjoyed the Catalyst (West) conference again this year. I’m too old and its target audience is younger, etc., but there it is: I still enjoyed it.
One of the reasons I enjoyed it was Tripp and Tyler.
When a series of speakers challenge everything you think you know about a series of important topics, it’s useful to have some court-jester emcee types between them, to lighten things up. Otherwise you’ll just hunker down and miss everything the following speaker is saying.
Here’s an example of how it works: before Donald Miller came out to talk about whatever he had to say, Tripp and Tyler ran this video about him.
My secretary’s PC crashed today. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, and didn’t have time to investigate. So I made some obnoxious Mac fanboy-type remarks about silly Microsoft and its sad excuses for operating systems. (Then I told her to make do as well as she could with a pencil and calculator.)
So this afternoon, my MacBook Pro BSOD’d on me:
Ah, snap! I really liked that email!
Which is pretty shocking. I’m not sure if this might be the first time it’s done that. I know I’ve seen this BSOD screen before today, but it might have been on the iMac at work, or the other Mac at home.
But I just got a second chance to study the phenomenon. Just as I was blogging the above, it panicked again:
A BSOD, Apple-style
Twice. In one day. The day my secretary’s ancient PC belly-upped and I made superior remarks about the sad, sad mistake called Windows XP. Oh the irony of it all.
What the heck did Apple put in that last Security Update? Or was it Snow Leopard 10.6.3?
Man, I’m sick of Windows. The secretary’s machine at church got infected with something a couple of weeks ago. I was only able to get rid of it by reinstalling Windows. I got an antivirus solution set-up and spent, well, a couple of hours, but it seemed like a month, uninstalling all the crap-ware and getting everything down to the bare minimum. My next project was to make a Ghost-type image, to avoid all that work the next time. But I don’t know how to make a Ghost image on Windows, so I put it off until I had a couple of hours to figure out what to do.
That was a bad decision. Today, we got this:
The infamous Blue Screen of Death
And we got it every time we rebooted, early in the boot process. So early, I don’t know any way past it. So now I need to come up with some kind of recovery media and boot off that, and save all her data.
Then I need to migrate us away from using Quicken and replace it with some kind of cloud-based Web 2.0 service in its place.
And, honestly, if I get that far, then we’re replacing Windows with Linux, because Quicken is the last Windows-only app we use.
It’s been popular for 2 years, so I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth getting excited about Evernote.
I like Dropbox a lot. (A whole lot, but that’s another story.)
I’ve experimented with Google and Yahoo sites as a way of storing information online, and it’s just too much, because they’re not really filing systems as much as authoring systems. I want something like Dropbox, but for odds and ends.
Posterous and Tumblr aren’t really filing systems either, and, at a glance, they don’t really work for private information.
So I’m experimenting with Evernote. I’m intrigued with its purported ability to OCR text off the images I upload.
(D’oh! that reminds me: I figured out, eventually, how to get Tesseract working. It was about a half day of work, but when I finished, for the sample documents I fed it, it did better than I.R.I.S. Your mileage may vary. I need to locate and write up my notes.)
Well, actually, no. We still have it. But it’s unplugged. At the next garage sale, we’ll get rid of the carcass.
I replaced my Linksys WRT-54G wireless router with an ASUS WL-520GU. Out of box, the ASUS is a better deal with far superior features. These include using static IPs, so I can permit individual machines rather than allowing all my neighbors to crack my WPA key at their leisure. Another useful feature is meaningful logging. The Linksys and my Westel DSL modem don’t work well together; I have to reboot the pair of them about 2-3 times a week. If the Linksys had logs, I could tell whether the problem was in it or in the Westel modem. Now I can find out.
But that’s the out-of-box firmware. The ASUS router also works with Tomato, an aftermarket firmware upgrade, that provides a slew of additional features. There are similar projects for Linksys routers, but all the Linksys routers I’ve ever found are cost-reduced emasculated versions too lacking in RAM or Flash memory to work with any of the replacement firmware.
So. I’m a happy ASUS customer for three reasons: better out of box features, the potential for even more features when or if I get around to upgrading the firmware, and (best of all) I get to retire a blue Linksys router. What’s not to like?