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January 31, 2006

WiFi and Linux

In the beginning of January of this year, I purchased a Linksys WUSB54G wireless network adapter for my computer. I really haven't had a chance to try it out in Linux as I've been so busy. These days, I tend to stay more in my Windows partition mostly because of my work and the unfortunate need for Internet Explorer and and MSFT Office.

When my hard drive failed, I looked at it as an opportunity to start fresh. I have a clean install of Windows XP and a clean install of Suse 10 on my drive. The Windows partition has 20GB of space and the Suse partition has 20GB as well. The rest of the hard drive is a shared partition for both operating systems to use.

Anyhow, I re-installed Suse 10 on my machine tonight to a bit of a surprise. My WUSB54G (version 3.1) worked right out of the box. I didn't have to do anything special to get the device working at all. Suse automatically detected it, found an IP address and here I am on the Internet writing about it. Although it may not seem like much to Windows or Mac users, this is a huge leap forward for my use of Linux.

As much as I love Linux, the lack of built in support for most wireless networking devices has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. I've spent countless hours working on complicated configurations to get a simple wireless device to get an IP address and access the Internet. This time, I clicked a few buttons to accept the default configuration that Suse gave me and that was it. I'm on the Internet and I'm networking wirelessly.

Makes me wish I had made the effort to configure this thing a bit sooner, but then again I wouldn't have known that the thing worked immediately, out of the box with no required updates of any sort.

~out...

Posted by ed at 01:10 AM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2006

Falling behind my peers

I find myself drooling over the Mac product line almost on a daily basis. And why not? Their products are cool, sleek and extremely functional. In addition, my friends have been purchasing them as well and I'm just a tad jealous.

Everyone has their reasons for wanting a Mac. I have mine too. After all, as a Web developer, I have a responsability to look at a design through multiple operating systems and Web browsers to make sure that a design looks and operates the same. I want a user who visits one of my sites to have the same experience despite their OS and browser of choice.

I have access to Windows and Linux ... that's never been a problem for me. I know that the pages that I create will work for these operating systems and the browsers that can be used on them. But access to a Mac, well, that's always been a little bit out of my reach. I don't have anything to make sure that my designs look right or are as functional on a Mac.

Now, I am aware that the Safari Web browser, which is the defacto standard of Web browsers in Mac OS, is based on the Konqueror Web browser core. But there are other variables that may or may not be available in Linux and Konqueror that are or are not available on a Mac. It's these variables that make my designs on a Mac unknown to me, and it's extremely frustrating.

With that said, I'm looking very very hard at aquiring a new Mac. What will I get? Well, I've been looking at a couple:

Intel iMac
* 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x512
* 250GB Serial ATA drive
* ATI Radeon X1600/256MB VRAM
* SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD+RW/CD-RW)
* Keyboard & Mighty Mouse + Mac OS X - U.S. English
* Accessory kit
* 20-inch widescreen LCD
* 2GHz Intel Core Duo
* AirPort Extreme
* Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
Price: $1900.00 (without tax and shipping)

Mac Mini
* 1GB DDR333 SDRAM - 1 DIMM
* 100GB Ultra ATA drive
* 4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
* Internal Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card
* No modem
* Mac OS X - U.S. English
* 1.42GHz PowerPC G4
Price: $900.00 (without tax and shipping)

Now, I've discussed my desire to purchase a Mac with Kyle, who already owns two Mac machines (desktop and laptop). He's telling me that I should only go for the Intel chipset Macs, as I will get more bang for my hard earned buck. This is frustrating to me, because I'm really wanting to purchase a Mac Mini, but I don't know if I can wait for the Intel version of these machines to be released. Heck, they may not even make an Intel version of the Mac Mini for all I know.

I'm so screwed.

Ultimately, the main reason why I would like to get a Mac is simple: I can run Windows and Linux on it with no problem at all using emulators. This will give me access to three operating systems and multiple browsers without having to have three computers at my desk.

Not to mention that I may finally catch up with my peers.

Update - February 5th, 2006: According to Mac OS Rumors, there could be a Mac Mini with an Intel Core Duo chip by July:

"The Mac Mini will indeed transition to Intel in July, according to reliable sources responding to our inquiries about recent rumblings on the grapevine...."

~out...

Posted by ed at 03:35 PM | Comments (3)

January 29, 2006

News from the week

Well, it's definately been an interesting week here at the old homestead. Let's start out with the positive things that have happened.

1. Amanda and I re-arranged our bedroom for the new furniture. We have a place to put our clothes now and it all looks really good. The old plastic drawers are now working as a functional storage unit in the home office.

2. Our new king size mattress with pillow-top has been delivered. I surprised Amanda with the mattress on either Wednesday or Thursday. I took apart the old bed and cleaned up all of the junk that was under it that the cats had knocked under there (i.e. cat toys). I also was able to do something that I've been meaning to do for the past three years: I attached the headboard to the bed frame. It doesn't move now.

... now for the things that didn't go so well.

3. Both Amanda and my cars had problems that needed repair. My exhaust went out and ended up costing me $170 to fix. Amanda's cover to her air intake where the air filter lives cracked and needed to be replaced. That was an additional $50.

4. My home computer decided that it wanted to die on me. The first thing to go was the power supply. I turned the machine off on Friday night and it refused to come back on. I tested the power supply in both my and Amanda's machines, and it was the same ol' story: nothing. After I was able to get the power supply replaced, my hard drive started acting weird. Actually, I had noticed the weird behavior beginning about a week ago, so I backed up all of the data in case I needed to reformat. I'm glad that I did that, because I didn't loose anything of importance. I finally got everything backup and running roughly around 6PM on Saturday.

That's not everything that went wrong, but it's everything that I want to cover today.

~out...

Posted by ed at 12:50 PM | Comments (2)

January 22, 2006

New furniture

Amanda and I made a purchase over the weekend that I'm very proud of. Before I tell you what it is, I feel as if I should explain our bedroom furniture situation up to this point in our relationship together.

When Amanda and I first got together, we took over her existing full size bed (if you could call it that) as "our bed". I only had a twin size, which just didn't fit us very well. Her bed was OK at first, but after a period of time it began to cave in in the center. I often found myself waking up in the dead center of the bed with Amanda on top of me.

We aquired a king size bed in early 2000, but it didn't have a great box spring with it. As a matter of fact, we gave up on the existing box spring and just slept with the bed on the floor for a long time. In 2002 we decided that we were tired of being on the floor so we bought a box spring to go with the mattress. We've had this arrangement up till now.

As far as other furniture is concerned, we have never had any "real" bedroom hardware with the exception of the bed. All of our clothing has been placed in a closet. In 2001 or 2002, we had a need for more storage space, but were low on money, so we purchased some plastic drawers and used them to store our socks and underwear. Needless to say, we've had this furniture up until now as well.

Until this weekend, we've never actually had anything that you could call "quality bedroom furniture".

I came across a killer deal at a consignment shop on Friday that I just couldn't pass up. It was a chest of drawers and a sub-chest that matched. They were asking for about $300 bucks for the set, but I managed to aquire them for $150.00.

That's both units ... and with delivery.

In addition, our king size bed has gotten to a point to where it's worn out as well. I also managed to land a deal where I got a brand new king size pillow-top mattress. So, hopefully within a week, we'll also have a new mattress for our existing bed frame and box spring in addition to our new chest of drawers.

And now, for some pictures:


The Chest of Drawers it all its glory.


The sub chest ... or whatever you'd call it.

By the way, both pieces are the exact same color. It's just that the room where the chest of drawers had its picture taken is very light, so it came out very dark. I had to lighten the picture so that people could see the features. It's actual color is like the sub chest, a nice deep dark reddish color. I'm not sure what the stain is, but it's really nice. On top is black marble with some fine white/light gray streaks. I'm really digging the way it all looks in the bedroom.

Anyhow, as you can see, they're both really nice pieces of furniture. The color of the furniture doesn't match our existing color scheme however, so we're going to have to re-do alot of things ... including our existing headboard that is currently a kinda green color (it looked good originally). That means we may be doing some stripping here in the near future.

Maybe I should give Pete a call ...

~out...

Posted by ed at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2006

And he came home

Mike came home today. Mom had told me that it could be as early as today for him to be back, but I was skeptical. No one called me to say that he was home either, which irritates me, but that's the way that things tend to work for me and my family.

I was in Frankfort today finishing up a job that Solarity began about two weeks ago. We handed over the documentation that I worked on and helped them out with a few additional remaining items. When I left around 7:30PM tonight, I was only planning on calling the house and asking how Mike was ... but something told me to go there instead. I stopped in, much to mom's surprise, where she was fixing a drink to take back to him.

Seeing Mike back in his bed made me feel a lot better. Better than I had in several days.

I asked him how he was, and once again he was in good spirts and trying his damnest to piss off mom. She was harping on him about needing to get out of bed and move around, which I made her back down on. Yeah, she's the nurse and all ... but I know how my father thinks: he wanted to rest. I explained to mom that he was wanting to just lay there for the evening and that he's already had a long day as it was ... there was no need to push him on right after he gets home. It worked and she backed down and went into her room.

Mike and I talked about this coming weekend and his desire to play Clue. I told him that I'd most likely be back on Friday and we could play then. I really think that he's looking forward to playing, but I worry if he'll be able to play comfortably. I guess I'll have to make sure that he can.

It's kinda funny ... when I was a kid, I was the one who kept going after Mike asking him to play Clue with me. I know that I made him sick of it. It's his fault tho. Heck, he's the one that brought the game to me, after all. I find it nice that the roles have kind of changed a bit, he's the one asking to play now.

I'll play as long as he wants. :)

~out...

Posted by ed at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)

A long weekend that has poured into a week

I got a call last Thursday from mom as she was on her way to the hospital in Lexingon: Mike was once again in conjestive heart failure. He had been short of breath for about three days, but neglected to mention it mom until Thursday. She took him to their doctor where they did some tests and they directed him to go to Lexington. They admitted him Thursday night.

The doctors in Lexington determined that he would need a defilbilator. However, they couldn't do the surgery on Friday as his blood pressure was really off. Instead, they gave him some different medicines and sent him home Saturday evening with surgery looming on Monday at St. Joeseph in Lexington.

Michael's wife, Danna, took mom and Mike up to Lexington EARLY Monday morning as they were supposed to start surgery at 6AM. He didn't get into surgery until almost 10AM. He was done and in recovery by noon and according to mom and Danna was just being pissy. I told mom that if someone was trying to wake me up from surgery, I'd prolly be pissy too.

I wasn't too sure about going to see him last night, as I really wanted him to have his rest. But, after speaking with Michael around 3PM, he made a point to me that really drove the situation home: he may not be around tomorrow. I told Michael that I needed to finish up some things with work and I headed to Frankfort around 4PM.

We made it to Lexington around 6PM (we had a bite to eat as I hadn't eaten all day). Mike was in good spirits and was very talkative. He was still doped up on some pretty powerful pain killers, which I was thankful for as mom told me that he was hurting around 4PM when the medicine from surgery began to wear off.

Michael and I stayed with our father for 2 hours before he began to look a bit tired and worn. I told my brother that it was time for us to let him rest a bit and said our goodbyes. Afterwards, we discussed how he looked and his attitude, which both seemed to be pretty good ... and gave me some much needed relief.

Now, we're waiting on news from his doctor to determine when he gets to come home. It could be as early as today or as late as Thursday. I told Mike that it didn't matter how long it took, the important thing was for him to listen to his doctors and to rest as much as possible.

When he gets back, Amanda and I are going to speed the weekend in Frankfort to spend some time with him. He told me while Michael and I were visiting that he and Corey have been playing some Clue, and really wanted to get in a larger game with Amanda and I playing too. Apparently Corey has gotten much better since I first played him and is also eager to play me again.

Let's hope that this weekend will hold more fun and joy than the previous.

~out...

Posted by ed at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2006

The CMS development continues

I've been actively working on the CMS as time permits. I've been sick over the past few days, and I was working all weekend, so I really haven't had the time to devote to the project as I would like to have.

But, with that said, I'll go over what I've finished with recently:

1. Posting content to the site.
Administrators have the ability to post content to the site *only* if they're authenticated.
2. Administrator authentication.
This was one of the most important features that really needed to be completed, in my opinion. As it stands now, there is a authentication process in place for the administrative section of the Web site.
3. Administrator bios.
As administrator accounts are created, they are added to the bio list.
4. Editable administrator information.
Any good CMS allows administrators to edit their own information, including name, bio, website address and password.
5. Delete posted content.
Authenticated users have the ability to delete posted content on the homepage of the CMS system by clicking on a "X" that only appears to authenticated users.
6. Logout feature.
This kills the session of the current administrator and resets their browser to null for all sessions throughout the site.

Things that need to be completed:

1. Administrators creation page.
Since the bio edit page is in place, it should be pretty simple to modify this to actually create a user instead of modifying one.
2. Modifying user passwords.
Currently, the only way to mofidy the user password is to edit it on the bio page. This is going to become a separate page for security purposes.
3. Content topic and search.
As content falls off the homepage, it will need to be categorized in a way that will make it easy to find. A search feature will also help in regards to finding content throughout the site.

I think that these are the only three major obsticles that stand in my way of launching the CMS on the Guru Web site.

~out...

Posted by ed at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

Add this to my wish list

I've been waiting to see what the first machines from Apple would be like after their huge announcment last year that they would be moving to the Intel platform. After Steve Job's keynote today, the wait is over.

This thing speaks for itself. I know that it's going to be impossible to get one before the middle part of this year for most people, as the enthusiasts are going to lock up the availability of this new laptop. The specs are pretty impressive, as are some of the innovations:

MacBook Pro At a Glance

The new iMac specs are impressive too ... but I still want the laptop more.

Or maybe I should just wait for the Mac Mini to go Intel too...

~out...

Posted by ed at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)

Something for someone who has everything

I came across this today: The Optimus Keyboard.

Needless to say, if it does become a reality and hits stores here in the US, I will be required to purchase one. The concept is just too damn cool, and it's hard to believe that no one had thought of something like this before now.

I guess it would've been a bit to expensive to produce ...

~out...

Posted by ed at 08:06 AM | Comments (1)

January 05, 2006

I need more hubs

I made a decision today that will affect the way that I compute from this point forward: I'm going legacy free.

That's right, no more older hardware will be making its way into my desktop or laptop computers. Everything from this point forward will be either USB or FireWire (aka IEEE1394 or iLink or whatever it's called). The only thing that will be going into my machine are the two things that they haven't found a way to take out as of yet: the video card and true surround sound (7.1) cards.

Think about it, everything else is external and USB driven these days. Below is a list of what I currently have:

Belkin USB 1.1/2.0 Hub
Maxtor USB 2.0 Hard Drive
Logitech Wireless Mouse
ViewSonic USB Keyboard
Logitech USB Microphone
Linksys Wireless-G USB Network Adapter
Logitech USB Gamepad

I only need two additional things to round out my collection. These items are:

External USB 2.0 CD/DVD-RW Enclosure
Another Belkin USB 1.1/2.0 Hub

I want the enclosure to put my DVD-RW in. I could just go and purchase a pre-enclosed DVD-RW, but that seems like a waste of a good burner in my opinion. Besides, the USB enclosures are pretty cheap.

I'm also going to need another USB 1.1/2.0 Hub so that I can hook up more items. Right now, the one that I have is pretty much full with the keyboard, mouse and network adapter. I want to get another Belkin because I like them so much, but I haven't decided if I want to get another 4-port or the 7-port model. I like the look of my current model, as it's white and matches my iPod Shuffle (it's the reason why I bought it), but I like the idea of having more ports available for the rest of my equipment. I guess it would make sense to get the 7-port model considering that I'm going legacy free ... but then again, I could always get two 4-port models for about $10.00 more and get an extra USB port to boot.

Decisions decisions ...

~out...

Posted by ed at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2006

The CMS I'm building ...

... is really starting to come along. I spend the other night putting some things together to give it a look and feel that more resembles the PC Guru Web site that's currently up. The RSS feeds are looking really nice and I'm totally digging the way the content flows.

At this point, I have a few things left to put together before I launch this thing on the actual PC Guru Web site.

1. Admin authentication.
2. Ability to delete content.
3. Sorting content by topics.
4. Searching? (not too sure about that one yet)

I'm also thinking about putting up an announcement section that would live above the RSS feeds, but I don't see that as being totally critical at this time. There's also some other pages that are in process of being populated as well, such as the Guru bio page, but I need to get the rest of the admins on the site before I actively publish that area of the site.

What's really neat about doing this CMS from the ground up is that I can make it do exactly what I want it to do. The php code isn't terribly complicated (at least not at this point) and I can feel safe that our content is totally secure and unhackable (for the most part, anyhow).

Why not go have a look and see for yourself how it's coming along?

~out...

Posted by ed at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2006

Happy New Year

So here it is, another New Year.

Amanda and I spent our New Year's Eve with the VanderEspt family, in addition to some of David and Patty's friends: Mark and Clide and their spouses. We spent the evening drinking and playing a game called Cranium.

Now, let me tell you about this so-called game. According to the Web site, it takes 4 or more players and takes about an hour to play. Here's my thoughts on it:

1. The instructions are too vague for people who're drinking.
2. Drawing while blindfolded is stupid.
3. Trying to create something with dried out play-dough like stuff in under 60 seconds is damn near impossible.

When we started playing this game, I thought it would go quickly, as Zack managed to get the VanderEspt team around the board with much speed. However, when they reached the last portion of the game, they stalled and weren't able to complete the game. Mark and Karen go to the same point as they were and stalled too. Clide and Anna got there eventually as well, leaving Amanda and I stuck on the last seat on the short bus ... we couldn't get anything right.

This supposedly hour game took 8 adults and 1 teenager roughly 3 hours to complete. We had to stop in the middle of the game to go and watch the ball drop and come back to it. At this point, I was more interested in having a few more drinks to pass the night along. Eventually, the VanderEspt family won and we all cheered as the game was over.

And I think I found someone more compeditive in game playing than Amanda ... which I honestly thought to be impossible.

Anyhow, Happy New Year to everyone. Let's hope that 2006 is a much better year than 2005 was.

~out...

Posted by ed at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)