Archive for June, 2008
Winbuntu
Sunday, June 29th, 2008Now that I have a an iMac for my personal use at home, my old Dell Inspiron e1505 laptop has been tucked away in a bag, neglected, collecting dust.
This weekend I decided to make it useful again…by installing Ubuntu on it.
Well, actually I kept Windows on it as well. Well, actually I wiped the hard drive first then did a clean install of Windows XP followed by the Ubuntu installation. Yep, dual-boot to the max!
The Ubuntu installation was easy and functioned seamlessly with my Dell upon initial boot up. Of course, that wasn’t the case for the Windows XP installation.
Most of the drivers included in the Dell drivers disk didn’t work with my system which meant searching the internet for the correct ones. I found most on the Dell website, but there was at least one that I had to hunt elsewhere for. Blah. So after I got that mess figured out, I happily logged out of Windows to start working on the fun part.
I found some good resources on creating a dual-boot Windows/Ubuntu system, including a forum post with a good layout of partitioning proportions. Like I said, the Ubuntu installation went flawlessly. I even got Compiz Fusion up and running, bringing the sexiness level close to that of my iMac.
Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be booting up Windows XP anytime soon.
Scary moment.
Friday, June 27th, 2008At approximately 10:15pm PDT I attempted to publish a blog post. At the same time, Bluehost decided to run some administrative work on my server (and attempt to login to my Bluehost account verified this). The overlapping of these two events yielded a short moment of minor panic.
As you would expect, the post wasn’t published. But that was the least of my concerns. Upon attempting to load my blog, I was greeted with this:
That’s never a good sign.
No blog posts. Not a single one. They didn’t even show up when I logged into my WordPress account management.
I stare at the screen for about three minutes or so. When was the last time I backed up my WordPress database? Have I ever backed up my WordPress database?? All of those extremely insightful mikeleotta.com blog posts could be gone forever. An internet tragedy!
Maybe I can still save my internet legacy. I log into phpMyAdmin to check out my database. This is what I see:
Nope, not a good sign either. phpMyAdmin thinks my wp_posts table is “in use.” It’s not in use. I wish it was in use. Something is corrupted. Luckily Bluehost MySQL DB management has a “repair database” option. Worth a shot…
Success! Now all five of you can continue to reference my previous blog posts. Scary, you almost lost that privilege. I think I’ll back up my database right now.
Right after I publish this blog post…what could possibly go wrong?
Your house may contain a memory erasing vortex
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Ever noticed how a flight of stairs acts as a really good memory eraser? I completely forgot about this fact, since I’ve been living in a one floor apartment for the past year and a half. But now I live in a house again, like I have most of my life.
Stairs erase my memory at least once a day.
You’re downstairs in the living room and you say to yourself “oh yeah, I need X from upstairs.” By all means, this is a simple task that you’ve given yourself. There’s no reason for you to think that you could possibly let yourself down. Your goal is still fresh in your mind when you hit that first step. Things are looking up. Onward!
But then you hit the second floor. Something isn’t quite right. You know where you are, but why are you there? You know there was a reason you made this voyage, but you’ve lost it.
You’ve let yourself down once again. No reason stay where you are. Defeated, you turn around and go back downstairs. That creaking noise the stairs make is their way of laughing at your failure.
Four minutes later you remember. Sigh…
It works both ways of course. You could be upstairs and need X from downstairs. Even worse, your house could have a basement (you probably don’t live in California) and you could be all the way on the top floor. You don’t stand a chance now. It’s not even worth it to make the trip. X isn’t that important anyway.
I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s the change in air pressure?
Maybe I’m just an idiot.
Getting carried away…
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008So for the third night in a row I’ve updated the design of my website. What’s new?
- More random pencil scribbles. Separators, bullet points, etc.
- Recent blog posts are now being displayed on the sticky note on all non-blog pages. Some character escaping still needed.
- Somewhat renders ok in IE. But then again, what sites ever really render properly in IE?
All this time spend and still no real content on my site…
Complete redesign! …sort of.
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008I redesigned my website. All of it except the blog part. While I only have about 100 or so lines of CSS on most pages of my site, the blog section has a lot more. And it’s laid out to fit my current modified wordpress template, which doesn’t exactly fit with my new website design. Arg. I’ll get around to updating it this week.
Why did I redesign it? Because I was sick of the old design after about a week. The same thing will happen with this one. Oh well.
Now I just have to put some actual content on my site.
Update (6.25.08 1:25am)
Blog redesigned as well. Now I’m going to sleep.
