Category Archives: Technology

Do you like the new server?

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I’m not dead, just pretending.

Actually, I’m busy. Busy at work and at home. Even my hobbies like this one are busy, it’s just that you can’t tell. For example, this domain is now hosted on a new system. (You might have noticed I was offline a couple of times in the past week or so.) I’m working on a new project (a wiki for my non-blog site) and the server I was on didn’t have a feature I needed, so I had to have them migrate me to one that did.

I also set up a mailing list, but you’re not on it so what do you care?

(Huh. I just noticed that WP is up to 2.0.5. I suppose I ought to upgrade; the blog shouldn’t just be the victim of unrelated system configuration changes. It should be the victim of related changes.)

Blog administrative notes

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I set up my first mailing list. Like many webserver accounts, this one comes with a certain number of mailing lists, but I never had a use for one until now. One of my associates back at seminary suggested that we all keep in touch now that all but the real sluggards have graduated. (Some of us even have jobs!) I didn’t want to maintain a bunch of email addresses for all these people as they move around (e.g., when/if the sluggards graduate and lose their seminary email accounts) so I knew that a mailing list was just the ticket.

Also, the blog is working again. (This one. Which you’re reading.) I asked the tech support people here for a feature upgrade and something went wrong so I was down for a day. (The feature upgrade was moving from PHP 4.x to 5.x and it broke something. I thought that WordPress was unhappy with PHP 5 so I reinstalled it so it could be introduced properly to its new hosting environment, but the problem persisted, thus fingering the PHP setup as the culprit. The tech support people here immediately fixed the problem, and everything was hunky-dory.) A small price to pay, since I routinely go more than a day between page-views, and that’s counting the search-engine spiders and the ‘bots trying to push comment-spam on me.

The reason I went through feature-upgrade heck (although that term is too strong) was so I could install MediaWiki, the engine that powers mighty WikiPedia. I have great plans for it. Watch this space for coming announcements.

Thunderbird

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I moved all my Mail.app files from the iBook to my Linux machine, and imported them into Thunderbird.

So far, my reaction is “Feh.” Say what you will about Apple’s i-Apps, but they look pretty. Which is pretty important when most of what you do is look at it. Firefox isn’t as pretty as Safari, but its advantages are obvious. (To me. By “obvious” I mean I won’t explain — at least, not hear and now. Write me off as a troll if you wish.) But Thunderbird isn’t obviously better than Mail.app (mbox-format storage notwithstanding) and it is fabulously uglier.

So now I’m thinking about going to Mutt, which I used for years (1997-2003) on Linux. And that was in the fetchmail era. I remember how much better its message-threading was even then than Mail.app’s is today. Nowadays, it would appear that mutt can do POP and IMAP all by itself, and there are a variety of SMTP-pretenders suitable for sending stuff off your machine to someplace with a a real SMTP server. Plus, I suppose, spam-filtering of some kind or another.

(Maybe instead of Mutt I should use Sylpheed. It’s supposed to be like Mutt but with a GUI like Thunderbird. (Note I didn’t say a GUI like Mail.app.)

(Mail is step 237 of the ongoing migration. When I get this step done, there will only be two steps left: getting sound working, and being able to read and write DVDs. Then I can dump the iBook. Then I can buy a larger hard drive, and begin backing up the eMac.)

(Update: while writing the next post, I remembered that I need to configure my Wacom tablet to work under Linux. I’m not looking forward to it.)

UPDATE: Mail.app apparently speeds up a lot when you do this.

New PC at work.

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My beautiful new 17″ iMac arrived this afternoon. Demonstrating a fine grasp of priorities, I immediately quit writing my sermon and set it up. Unfortunately, it didn’t take too long, because (in my experience) Macs “just work.” It found the wireless network without being asked, and the drivers for my printer were installed with the part of the OS.

I installed Xcode so I could compile macports (nee darwinports), neither of which took very long, so within an hour I was all out of excuses and had to get back to work on my sermon.

Tomorrow I have to install Office and Accordance. (I’m bringing them in from home. No, I’m not pirating software. I’m discontinuing the iBook, since my linux box has become the main home machine.)

Ultimate Productivity Desktop

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The machine I’m writing this on will be five years old by the end of the summer. I bought it as a treat when I got hired by my last regular employer. It’s spent the last three years as a file server. Most of that time it was turned off; for the most part I only powered it up to do backups.

It’s pretty underpowered by today’s standards, but in its prime it was a beast: an AMD Athlon processor running at 1 GHz, 512 MB of RAM, and two 40 GB drives (one of which has subsequently been replaced by a 120 GB drive). It’s been running Linux since I put it together, starting with Red Hat 7.0, iirc, and now Fedora Core 5.

I still have my laptop, but since graduating I’ve been using this machine to do most of my work. My work, of course, is getting a job, or, as we say, finding a call. Some church somewhere is going to call me as their pastor. My work, as long as it takes, is figuring out where they are, and letting them know about me so they can do their part.

This task requires me to:

  1. look at the PC(USA) web site that lists opportunities
  2. investigate these on the web (consulting the sites for the church and its presbytery, if they exist, as well as things like Google Maps and City-Data).
  3. hand-craft a letter to the PNC explaining what it is about a particular church I find attractive, and highlighting some reasons why I think I might be suited to be its pastor.
  4. email that to the PNC
  5. attach to the email an official form, called a PIF.

    The PIF is a sort of ugly resume designed by a committee. It is maintained in a database by the PC(USA) but it can’t be viewed by anybody but me and the computer program that (allegedly) matches candidates to opportunities. So I can’t just send the PNC a pointer to my PIF. Instead I have to send them a copy of it. I call up my PIF in a web browser and “print” a copy to PDF.

    The PDF is what I attach to my email “cover letter.”

  6. If the church is interested in me, they usually ask for a sample tape of one of my sermons. I send them a DVD made in-house by my many-talented wife on our eMac using iMovie and iDVD. In the package I include a hardcopy cover letter explaining why they just received this disc, viz., it is in response to their request. I’m able to write these letters in AbiWord and print to PDF (or save as RTF) and print them on the eMac, to which the printer is attached.
  7. I also have to keep track of what I’ve sent to whom and why.

And the surprising thing is that I’m doing this all on my old Linux PC. It’s office work, and because I’m (essentially) marketing myself to strangers, there’s an emphasis not only on content but form as well. But between the web browser, AbiWord, and ubiquitous PDF-generation capability — and virtual desktops — I’m finding that my 5 year-old Linux machine is, pretty much, the ultimate productivity desktop.

Mac OS X apps I’m looking at

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I’d like to find a decent outliner for the Mac. I’ve already found an outstanding outliner, but it’s not free. In fact, it’s a little pricey for a starving seminarian. But what I really don’t like is the way they want to squeeze every penny out of the transaction. You can run it on multiple machines, or multiple users, but not both. So I can’t have it on both my laptop and the eMac at home in such a way that my son and I can both use it, without buying multiple licenses. Nuts to that. (Probably. I may give in because so far I haven’t found anything better.)

I’ve also been looking for a Todo-list manager that’s better than the bolt-on feature of iCal, which is what you get by default. I don’t want my calendar cluttered up with a zillion minor items, but I’d like to keep track of them in case I ever have a chance to work on them. I forget how I found it, but VoodooPad looks pretty impressive. (So does their FlySketch, but that’s a separate issue.)

That, in turn, led me somehow to a Todo manager called ShadowPlan, which also looks pretty impressive.

One tool that didn’t cost me anything is the venerable enscript. There’s a darwinport for it so it installed in a jiffy, and it works just as good today as it did in 1995.

VOIP ‘n’ stuff

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This Kerry Garrison tells how to build a full-featured PBX for less than $20 using rubber bands and other things you already have laying around the house. There is also a nice list of free office software. I noticed this Ultra@VNC because I keep telling myself that I need to use VNC, since there is still a Windows box in the house. But it’s easier just to ignore it and wait for it to go away. (From the free office apps it was only a click and a jump to MacMP3Gain, which looks so useful that I think I’ll actually give it a try.)