I tried the version of the installer that was text based and that almost installed, but once I finally got to the point where X starts up, the system stopped responding.

The solution: 1Gb of memory. That made everything work very well and I'm staring to get used to Gnome. I normally use KDE but Gnome seems to work pretty well. It just seems a bit too much like Windows.

What I really like about the Ubuntu system is actually what I like about Gentoo. It is really easy to get packages and customize your installation just the way you like it. Unlike Gentoo, you don't compile the packages so you are not getting the best overall performance, but you are getting packages that will probably play to together.

So what didn't work? The biggest issue I had was with the Broadcom wireless card. In order to get things working, I had to get the original windows based drivers and rip the firmware out of the driver, and externally load it into the wireless card. It seems there was some licensing issue with Broadcom and to avoid problems the Ubuntu folks just decided to leave the drivers out of the distribution.

There are a number of different packages that are not supported or get blacklisted for different somewhat arbitrary reasons, but all and all I was able to create a pretty good portable we development platform.

If you look at the site they have a bunch of different different specialized versions of the OS for LAMP servers, education support, thin clients, kde users... It all seemed so promising. I decided I needed to do some testing and tried loading the latest version of the workstation installation on my dell laptop. The installation hung... Hmmm... not to cool. I then thought, I'll load the server installation on the notebook and then add the X packages later. The server loaded, but when I tried to boot the finished product I got this message "The cpu is too old for this kernel". Now that bit of info would have been helpful before I decided to go forward with the load. So I thought I'll step back one release just to check it out. I loaded the 6.0x version of the server, it loaded and then on reboot it hung expanding the kernel. I'm not very impressed.

What can I tell you, Ubuntu might work for some people, but I must be one of the totally unlucky people that can't use the Linux for the masses. At any rate, all I can say is that Ubuntu is a smelly stinky waste of time.

Well, I have a server that is still running RedHat 7.3. The main reason for this is that, well... i suppose i was just too lazy or scared to update it. I mean, if it's not broke don't fix it right? So I decided I wanted to upgrade it and found out that waiting a couple years to do an update was really not the best idea. There was no clear upgrade path for me and I was pretty stuck.

I looked around for alternatives (RedHat was now Fedora, there were some new distros), and I decided that Gentoo was a pretty good alternative. It had the stability, features, and packages of a mature distro and provided this hot update feature using emerge. Ok, I was sold and loaded an old notbook to try it out. Well it wasn't easy or simple to get things working. It took about a week to work out all the small details and at least a day to install KDE. Once it was done, I was once again golden.

Now I suppose I am a Gentoo guy. I like the idea that I can configure the system exactly the way I want (control freak) and i can update the old system with an emerge world command. Sweet.

I must say that over the last week i've been updating an old notebook computer I had lying around to be a gentoo server and now after 4 days and about 42 hours of compiling source code, I still don't have much of a system. I'm not sure when it will be done, but when it is I will be totally golden.

I did find it funny that this article What Your Linux Distro Says About You did seem pretty accurate, but it does paint me as a super geek (not the case I assure you). I haven't gotten a tattoo yet :)

I do plan to look into some of the other distros just to see if I'm missing anything. I'll probably start with Ubuntu (I used to be a MS Windows guy)

We decided to stay at the Wawona Hotel since we had never been there and it seemed quite and tucked away. We opted for a room with a privy and were happy to have reserved such a room in advance. When we checked in there were many people surprised to find that they would have to share a bathroom with others.

The hotel was great but there is only a single dining room and it only servers food at certain hours. Since we were staying there for the week we were going the have everything on the menu at least twice. The other problem with the hotel being tucked away was that we had to drive at least an hour to most of the major attractions, trails, etc. It was cool, but after 4 days of driving at least 2-3 hours we decided to hang around the hotel and take some of the more civilized hikes that were nearby. We also bought a cooler and packed it with sandwich and snack items so we could eat when we wanted and have a bit of variety.

We did take a bunch of pictures, check out the photostream

I'm pretty excited about the site and I really like the way it turned out. We will be adding features new metro areas over time so be sure you check back and see what we're working on.

What really broke my heart was the way Eric Byrnes (former Oakland A) hit a very weak check swing bloop on the first pitch to end the inning and the season for the D-Backs. I figured he would have been a little more patient.

So the other day I was adding tinyMCE to one of my pages and the textarea i was trying to convert to an edit control didn't change and FireFox had this error. "tinyMCE.baseURL has no properties". Very strange indeed.

After hours of endless digging and searching on the web i found that another javascript library that I am using on the page scriptaculous doesn't work well with tinyMCE.

The fix is to have the tinyMCE code pulled in after prototype.js (required by both packages) but before scriptaculous.

Here are a couple writeups I found
tinyMCE forum Discussion
Recipe from Scriptacuous

I was doing some development for a new website and I wanted to do something a little special on the user profile page. This required me to use some AJAX to add user defined links to the profile page. I wanted the user to be able to add, delete and edit the links using a single set of controls and when a link was added, i needed the javascript to add the new link into the page HTML (along with newly created edit control) each time.

I developed the code using firefox since i really love the web development and javascript support that is provided as browser extensions. I also wanted to use prototype.js and scriptaculous.js to handle the AJAX and cool visual effects (i might have gotten a bit carried away).

Anyway, the page worked perfectly under firefox, but it broke in a very strange way under IE. The page worked fine right until i needed to add a newly created link. What was really odd is scriptaculous function calls to toggle control behavior became broken with "the object does not support this property" error. The calls worked fine right before the html was created for the link.

I messed with it for a while and even tried the MS Script debugger (usable but a little clunky) and debugbar (lots of eye candy, but not really usable) but ended up using the old standby: commenting out code and adding alert() calls.

In the end I was able to fix the problem by encapsalating the set of links in a div and then modifying the smaller div that only contained links and image tags. The original div contained the edit form for adding and modifying the link and a bit of javascript (but not much).

At any rate this has fixed the IE problem and now function is the same for both browsers. I'm just letting people know what I ran into to perhaps save somebody hours of poking around. I found very little useful help online.

What is odd is that I could talk to the device, but it has somehow had it's memory erased and I can't figure out how to get it to take new settings. I even tried upgrading the firmware, but the upgrade complained that i had the wrong hardware. I am at a bit of a loss since it seems the device 'could' work, but somehow, it's gotten amneisia.

If anyone has any idea how I can make this thing remember what it is, let me know. The print server is a Netgear PS121.

This of course was a little odd, and my son hefito told me he was have a lag problem playing xbox live. I poked around and found that if i disconnected one leg of my network that was connecting a part of the house via homeplug (a technique for sending data through elecltrical outlets) i could get the network back up and running.

I figured the problem was with the homeplug hardware, so i started swapping it out and testing different units to isolate the failure. I found that all of the units were bad so i decided that something had happened with my home power. I figured it had become a bit noisy or something.

I consolodated all the equipment into a single room and started connecting bits and pieces. I have 3 router/hubs (2 wireless) a set of 5 homeplugs (one wireless) and various computers, print servers, etc.

I started testing all these bits and pieces and after a bunch of configuring and swapping i found that the problem was a single port on my linksys router. The port that was connected to the homeplug port went bonkers whenever a cable was plugged into it. It started sending packets all over the network, flooding the network with useless traffic and making it unusable. Sort of a self initiated Denial of Service attack. I unplugged the the device from the bad port and gave the trusty linksys router a secondary role in the network infrastructure as it was once the main firewall protecting all my equipment from the evil outside world.

Now all is well at the manor house and i can still control the Internet to do my evil bidding.

What exactly did i learn from this? Well the most important lesson i learned is to not trust the stongest link in a system because sometimes even that breaks. The router that caused the whole problem had been a trusted part of my network for about 10 years and never caused any problem. The homepugs on the otherhand have been bothersome so it was easy to blame them. Also, look at the lites on the front of the router. They aren't just pretty, they can tell you something important, like you have a broadcast storm.

One thing is certain, MT got a little weird on licensing and I think a true open source solution would be a good idea. As most of my readers know, I am a big talker when it comes to stuff like this and chances are good that I simply won't find the time to change, but at least I am "thinking about thinking about" doing it which I suppose is a step in the right direction.

So if you come back around and don't recognize the place, it's because I decided to take the plunge. You have been warned

It's still pretty early in the season, but the numbers speak for themselves... Go Brew Crew!

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