It's strange and unusual, but I think I've actually had a good weekend and got enough things done to be allround happy about it. Yesterday I ran, took a long walk on town, finished a long-dragging book and found time for two movies, one of which was the excellent The man from earth. Wholeheartedly recommended if you can stand a movie which is all good dialogue, and a reason to learn to stand that if you don't.

Today I slept late but not too late, got up and did a bit of Sproutcore coding/reading/exploration. It went well, and it's exactly the (okay, okay, yet another) kind of thing I would like to do more often; just sit down and play around with things, get some small stuff going and see what it feels like. Exploratory coding, or something like that.

Really, what I want to do more often can be neatly summed up like this: creative things. Create stuff. Be it code or images or text (or something completely different). Create stuff, and preferably finish what I start in one form or the other. (But then, starting and throwing away or restarting or getting a different idea isn't so bad either.) Not so difficult, really.

Then, somewhere around noon, I headed down to the basement to fetch my Christmas decorations (lights mostly, as you will see below). Having found what I came for I suddenly found myself going through and sorting all the other stuff down there. It was as unexpected as it was good, and I emerged from the underground an hour or two later with Christmas decorations, perfectly good computer speakers, some books and a load of game boxes. No point in keeping those things down there when I have space and/or use for them up here.

Then I went around, put up all the electric chandeliers and filled up my shelves a bit more.

(I will leave the question of how many electric chandeliers one man can decently have unaddressed.)

It turns out that when you haven't had garlic in a while it isn't too difficult to get what you percieve to be a high dose. Surprise.

Now I'm going to settle down for a while with hot cocoa (on proper cream and with honey, yum!) and another good film or two. Oh, and gingerbread.

Be good, but not too good.

Last night it was Rocky horror picture show.

Tonight it's been Sproutcore, Couchdb and Openajax.

Ever-wider views ...

(I'm trying out more standardized, less trademark-y ways of spelling things, again. It tends to last until my mind gets too focused on the actual content of what I'm writing.)

Frustrated by some bug fixing and a mysterious breakage of my Java 1.6 installation, I headed home a bit earlier than usual and got some running done before it got too dark. It worked wonders for my mood, as usual. Exercise is the great natural mood-evener.

I've been at work early several days recently, which has felt pretty nice. What's a little odd, though, is two things: my average bedtime is exactly the same as usual, and I don't seem any more tired despite getting up and about earlier (and the afternoons and mornings getting ever darker).

Perhaps I sleep better at night.

Perhaps I'm stressing myself.

Perhaps it's just a phase which I'll be out of after a sixteen hour sleep some Saturday noon ...

Or perhaps it's really time to pull down on the coffee ...

In any case, a weekend is coming up Real Soon Now, and I have long lists of fun stuff I could do with it.

(I just realized I ought to put somewhat less exciting things like vacuum cleaning on that list too ... But hey, I'm not expecing any guests!)

... this time subtle removals of unneeded things from the top and bottom menus.

The day has somehow sort of flown by, all the while managing not to feel stressful or too busy. To compensate I assume I'll be a living dead, dragging myself through ever-increasing pressure until it's finally bedtime again.

But not today! Today we worked, and also managed to get Otto to consider furnishing his next office according to basig feng shui principles.

But now it's just about time for a shave and some bed ...

There I was, in the shower after a pretty decent run.

(Side note, running through short outbreaks of hail can be surprisingly okay as long as the wind is in your back.)

Suddenly, it struck me:

Barack Obama won the U.S. elections.

Cool, man. There is, like, hope for the world.

It's amazing how things you already know can just hit you like that all of a sudden.

Myself, I just try to keep fewer windows open at once. And eyes off the keyboard.

Peace!

Whopeee, another mini-project on the site finished. No more dual uploading to bjoreman.com of images I've already sent to Flickr. Now I have a tool so I can link them, relatively, conveniently. The only real downside is the increased page size. Seems I'm quite a bit tougher on my image compression than those Flickr people. The next step is to save them locally after first use.

What could it be, another five lines?

Status

Life is feeling really good, the stress last week brought is gone, people are great all round, interesting stuff is planned at work ... Even finding out the actual sums I'll be spending on loans/my home doesn't worry me.

(The numbers by themselves still look a bit frightening, but margin-wise it looks very much okay with my current spending habits.)

I was at work only a few minutes past seven this morning, and I liked it quite a bit. Perhaps it's time to start bringing breakfast to work again and get more done in the mornings? Now that we're getting all wintery it can give me a bit more daylight time too.

Poor iPod touch ...

... the iPhone sounds better than it, too. It really isn't getting much use these days. But then, I suppose it saw this coming just like everyone else ...

But the real shame is that my iMac has so much background noise that I prefer listening to music from my phone or iPod for that reason alone ...

Perhaps I should read something educational now?

There is little to surprise you when you come to the iPhone from a iPod touch. Calling is nice, as is GPS and the other differences, but they all you know ... just work the way you expect them to. Which is all good.

The physical feel of the devices is rather different though. The touch, being thinner and having a back of metal, feels more solid and wonderfully slim. Something in the way of the Macbook Air. The iPhone by comparison makes me think of the iBooks; a rugged plastic mobile device made for being brought everywhere and used rather than shown off. I'm curious if the first generation iPhone would have given me a different feeling in person.

The iPhone not only has more physical buttons, compared to the touch it's moved the headphone jack to the top left and the on/off button to the top right. I think I'll keep my touch in use for my music, and it'll be endless fun to always be feeling for the on/off button in the wrong place ...

Not strictly a device thing, but rather a note on getting a suitable plan: Yes, the feeling of having flat-rate and sometimes even fast internet access anywhere you go is pretty cool.

Transfering from iPod touch to iPhone

Just connecting and syncing the phone with the same iTunes as the iPod puts many things in the right places. Contacts, videos, applications, what have you. However, many things do not show up, like any login information or other settings you've entered into those applications. Yes, that includes all notes you've made. The order of all your applications is lost too. And any web pages you've put on your home screen are completely MIA. As are all network authentication settings, as far as I can see.

I can sum this up pretty easily: what I got is syncing of everything which goes through iTunes, but what I really wanted was the transfer system you get when setting up a new Mac. Surely I can't be the only one who started with a touch, got an iPhone and would like everything to be the same between the two?

Other little annoyances

I can't decide if I should figure out some subset of my music to put on the phone. Until I do, it all stays off. Anticipating this problem, Apple made not syncing any music the default option.

Making a song of your choice a ringtone is a hassle, with the 30 second length limit being my pet peeve. Longer "tones" show up and work in iTunes just fine, but they don't sync to the phone and nothing indicates the fact. At least it's all pretty easy once you learn the steps.

Setting custom sounds for SMS alert ... no can do at all. I do miss my old Settlers sample and hope they make it possible some day.

I do miss MMS functionality, but email and Flickr uploading (through ShoZu) tides me over for now. We'll see what happens to my mood when I run across something funny I'd like to send to someon else's mobile.

3G reception still appears suspiciously poor very, very often, even with the latest firmware. Still more work to do in that area I guess.

Some sort of keychain for web usernames and passwords wouldn't hurt.

Not yet annoyed by

Lack of meaningful Bluetooth functionality.

Lack of cut and paste (but getting there when it comes to login forms).

Lack of video recording ability.

The sound of music

My second generation iPhone actually sounds somewhat better than my firrst generation iPod touch as well. Possibly-imagined warmness and other psychological aspects aside, the iPhone seems dead silent when there's no sound playing. That is, it completely lacks background noise/hissing on the headphone jack. Which is just wonderful if you ask me. I guess it's a generational evolution, I would guess that the second generation touch is just as quiet (I seem to recall reading somewhere that it's the best sounding iPod ever as well).

The Enlightenment is a book-shaped lamp made by Dutch Studiomeiboom. It looks cool, uses a low-energy bulb, and part of the profits go to charity. What's not to like? When I first read about it sometime in spring of 2008 I found it a fun idea and made a mental note about it. After accidentaly breaking one of my mom's lamps and realizing I could use some more fun decorations I went ahead and ordered two. At the time of typing I haven't actually given the second one away yet, but it's good to get impressions down while they're fresh, right?

Getting it

I had some trouble ordering my lamps as the good Studio's credit card processing partner either had some kind of problem or was improperly configured. Whatever the reason, I simply couldn't pay by credit card and instead went through the new experience of making an international money transfer through my online bank. Fortunately both I, my bank and the provided instructions were up to the task and it didn't take long until it was all done. After a quick email exchange to check that I had done everything right, I just sat back and waited for delivery. I can't say how long it actually took to arrive because the postal service somehow lost the first delivery notice before it reached me. I only got the second, rather stern, warning telling me I had five days or something similar left to pick up my package in. Counting backward, I guesstimate that my lamps got here within a week or so. I rushed out and picked them up and all was well.

Opening it - not feeling enlightened

Lamp package safely home, I eagerly unpacked my own lamp. The package contained a paper (literally, it's one A4) in Dutch, the lamp itself and one low-energy bulb.

Nice and simple, just what a lamp should be.

So, I unpacked the bulb, undid the screw on the underside of the lamp, and ...

Hm.

Got stuck. No part of the lamp seemed to want to give way to allow lamp insertion. Worse, there were no instructions or indications as to where one should push or pull. Nothing apart from the power cord provided an obvious grip either.

Not wanting to start my enlightened life by accidentally breaking my designer lamp, I got myself together and went online to search for ... enlightenment.

Sidetrack - the lack of content and repetition in gadget blogs

It turned out that this was one of those cases where the net let me down. The official site provided no instructions. And all the whole rest of the web had to offer were countless gadget blogs repeating the same single press release with accompanying product shots. Oh, and insightful comments along the lines of "Cool idea!" of course. I can't help but wonder: how long do all those press-release blogs last? How long does anyone follow one of them? Do they make anyone any money? If not, why are they there? Most importantly, wouldn't everyone be better off just finding something with actual content to surf? There really didn't seem to be a single person out there who had bought an Enlightenement and bothered to tell anyone about it.

This actually makes me feel like I'm contributing something here ...

Back from the detour - the truth about opening

I quickly dismissed any hopes of finding an answer online and simply emailed Studiomeiboom for help. They quickly responded, mailing me a PDF (the text of which for some reason rendered amusingly wrong on the iPhone) which described with both text and photos how to open the lamp.

Simply undo the screw and pull the bottom out, tugging a bit at the power cord if needed to get it moving.

Easy enough, but shouldn't a design studio feel a sense of failure when they manage to both make the process non-obvious and miss including instructions?

Using it - at long last

It's a lamp, it works really well. I think it looks good.

Figuring actual images may be more useful in this case, I snapped a whole bunch and put up on Flickr.

I am so tired. Luckily, it's Saturday night and I don't have a single thing planned for tomorrow, so I should be able to recover a bit before next week begins.

In any case, I've had a pretty good Friday and a really good Saturday.

Thursday, by the, and in its own, way, was kind of miserable.
Good motivation to never end up there again.

Right after work I was whisked away northward, to people who effortlessly re-balance my life again by just being there.

On Saturday, they were there and showed me how to make family-traditional Christmas cheese ...

... as well as gift wrappings inspired by box jellyfish.

I can confidently say that you don't know shit about box jellyfish compared to the wrapper of that gift. This fact somehow fascinates me.

I have also got a more intensive happiness-kick out of an expression involving the word "economy" than I ever would have thought possible.

But now I'm back home again, feeling tired, cold, alone and semi-miserable. Something to eat would probably be in order, and there's a lot of good stuff to choose from too. And then a good night's sleep, perhaps some exercise tomorrow (health permitting) and possibly even a serious think-through of work-related things. We'll see.

Food first!

Food in the shape of sandwiches, it turns out. Not much motivation for cooking right now ... I've finally taken a clue from just about every other site on the net and replaced my old static start page with my actual news page. It is after all, as so many people have pointed out, what people most often come looking for. And the welcome texts are still relatively easy to find if you indeed want them. So it's all for the best.

• The day brought three more lunches for work. I think I'm set for the coming two weeks.
• My little news-exclusion-flagging manouvre had the fun side effect of shuffling around the order of all existing posts. (It changed the last-edited date to right now, and so random stuff came out as the top ten.) Good to have learned that before I try to make an alteration like that on an important database ...
• The flowers on my balcony still grow like it was summer, or at least warm and plant-comforting.
• Other greens, too, are growing well:

  

• (The combination of my camera and my rechargable batteries (still not sure which is to blame) keeps annoying me greatly. It is not rare that I want more quality than my phone can offer, and it would be even more often if I could rely on my camera powering up ...)
• I did read a bit between the last post and this one. This is writing, it's not a bad pastime either.
• Okay, I think my evening bread is about ready. Back to Last chance to see?

... make to do items out of every little task, and check them off afterwards!

Now, time to add one for sorting all my notes in Evernote ...

And there, another thing to check off; I can now mark pages so that they don't get included on the news page. Good for minor edits and keeping things off the news until I'm done editing them.

I've had a somewhat itchy throat for most of the weekend, and so I haven't been out much. But today I feel pretty much normal again, so I took a long afternoon walk. It was nice and cool and autumn-y and my body seemed to act normally when up to speed. So tomorrow I say it's time for some running again. But walking certainly has its own charm too, keeping yourself moving and warm, getting a bit of air and giving your brain some time to run things through.

I had a sudden vision while walking of what it's like to play Halo on the Xbox when it's going well and you're feeling really into it. It reminded me, again, of how rarely I feel really into a game these days, and how rarely I give a game the chance to really engross me. Anyway, the feeling of playing on a powerful console, moving expertly using the controller, feeling you're on top of your game. That sort of thing. The surroundings being a dark autumn night, of course.

Then, like clockwork, I remembered how pretty much everything about the Halo franchise after the first half of the Silent cartographer level has been more or less of a letdown ...

I'm feeling a bit I'm-not-quite-sure-what, but I'm wondering if spending the evening reading might be the right thing to do.

October is over, November begins and the chance of real winter keeps increasing ...

Latest news on the news page

Welcome, dear visitor, to this my humble website. This site contains a carefully chosen selection of information on various topics that have happened to interest me at some point in time. To proceed, please make your selection from the menus on the left.

Comments, constructive criticism and corrections are always welcome, see the contact page. You are also highly encouraged to leave a note on the noteboard!

For a quick overview of current events, click NEWS in the menu. For more in-depth exploration of site contents, use the links in the second group of options. The time displayed is GMT on current posts, Swedish time (GMT 1) on recent posts and most often GMT -6 on older ones (before the autumn of 2004).

This site looks best in resolutions of 800*600 or more and should work well in just about any browser. It currently looks best in browsers supporting png transparency however (that is, anyone but Internet Explorer).

The site is built with nice CSS-based design and php connecting to a mySql database. See the INFO section for more, well, info ...

Among the available information is a site FAQ.

Some points of interest may be the Mac pages, computer games' area, the page of nice stuff or why not the penguin page?

Then there's my old site too, still a very much more extensive collection of things typed in by me. Click here to visit it.

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Ah, one of the great games of all time ...

One of the few games out there which, as PC Format reviewer Jim McCauley puts it, "got it right the first time round". You can't really improve the basic formula of Tetris without damaging the feel or simplicity of the game. It's the perfect "between-work-and-more-work-game", you can pop in and play for a few minutes and then (maybe) get back to work. No extreme loading times or hard drive requirements. It even fits on a single floppy disk, how about that, Unreal?

My favourite versions are the original versions for the Commodore 64 and the Gameboy. Both versions have that important feel, and also great music that sticks like glue.

Addition on March 10, 1999.

Isn't Tetris the ultimate single-player game, all categories? I mean, it's easy to learn, difficult to master and it never repeats itself. It's not bound by a story line or anything, and it consumes practically no space or processor power at all. Anyone owning anything even vaugely computer-like (like consoles, ick! ;-) can probably use it to play Tetris. It's said to be inspired by some old greek puzzle, does anyone know anything else about that?

Have another suggestion about the best single-player game (I'm including board and card games for one player too)? Mail me and tell me I'm wrong!

Addition on March 31, 2000.

Discovered another great version of Tetris: Tetris! for Uwindows. Uwindows is the Unreal Tournament interface in case you didn't know. Anyway, this version features several different skins with somewhat different difficulty. One version, LCD (which looks like Tetris for a Gameboy or mobile phone), just goes on forever with you scoring ludicrous amounts of points while Permutation gets difficult pretty fast and requires some skill to master. The skins also have different sound effects, which are a bit loud compared to the rest of the game sounds, making you want to turn down the sound a few steps when playing. The only thing I miss in Tetris! for Uwindows is a line count, I don't see why they haven't included one when everything else you want is there. Oh well, can't have it all I guess ... Anyway, you can get it at The Mutation Device.

Addition on May 8, 2000.

Isn't that more than a little bit ironic? That the Tetris-version I play the most is the one which only works inside Unreal Tournament ...

Addition on November 2nd, 2002.

This whole section is a straight import from my old website. Realized the other day, to my surprise, that I hadn't written a word about Tetris on this site. Of course I couldn't go on just ignoring a problem like that, so here they are. All the old pages about different Tetris versions in their complete glory!

20/12

Martin has a point, I did move the externals to the right. That's what I meant all along, of course :-P ...

18/12

Moved the externals menu to the left of pages, right below the sub page menu. I think I like the change. Have also worked on the search page, it now enables you to search externals and noteboard messages as well, and hopefully more is to come soon.

16/9

My personal trustworthy computing effort takes another step forward. Knocked a bit more on various security issues today, with the result that you can no longer view a hidden category without access even if you know the ID for it. Not only that, I got around to enable hiding of individual pages and proper handling of that in menus as well. Security is cool, right? Reports of any issues/side effects/general nastyness are of course thankfully recieved.

Also optimized away one database call on the main page. Compensated by adding a few more for the new security measures though :-) ...

20/8

Enhanced the logging features of the site. Now I should be able to catch every new visitor, regardless of where they enter the site, just the way I want it. I'm curious to see if many people come in other ways. Also found out that there's not much effect in trying to execute queries before you've connected to the database :-) ...

19/8

Ever since the menuId work described below there's been some minor strangeness going on with the menus. Overly observant visitors may have noticed that (most of the time, sometimes testing produced even stranger results) the option "Welcome" in the top menu didn't seem to produce any bottom menu. Today that was solved. Martin solved it to be more exact. By checking the length of a string in the right place everything suddenly worked. None of us were sure why though. But then, mid-message, Martin suddenly realized why as well, which was even cooler. Huge thanks Martin!

A little later, I also made the autolinker behave enough not to link things it can't find matches for into nothingness.

17/8

Have hammered on things concerning menuId and suddenly reached what seems to be complete success when I removed my "debug" printouts. Now I no longer (with reservations for anything that comes up in further testing) need to pass menuId along everywhere, meaning somewhat nicer links and a suddenly fully working autolinker! Victory is here! Also noted some quite horrendous and ugly code in the process, which I hope to fix one day or the other. Tonight's work has already cleaned up some things in nice ways.

13/8

Have done serious work on the autolinker, actual coding and stuff like that. It actually works! Well, sort of ... The only problem is that the result doesn't seem to get saved into the database for some reason. If I echo it out it's all there just like I want it to be (well, except passing menuId along of course. Don't know if that's even possible, but I need to find some kind of solution to that too before I'll start using this), but it doesn't seem to make its way down into storage. I don't get it at all, but it must have something to do with the changes I make when replacing my link characters with the real stuff. But, it's all right if I echo ... Stuck in a logical circle, if you see what I mean :-) ...

About 15 minutes later ...

Yes! It works! Just had to throw in backslashes before the quotation marks in the links to make everyone happy. Now all that remains is getting menuId along for the ride somehow ... We'll see about that tomorrow!

11/8

Rather long between updates here right now, don't you think? Anyway, felt too tired to do any actual coding and experimentation tonight, but thought I'd at least sit down and browse/think a little bit about how to do the "auto-linking" I've always wanted for internal site links. Surprisingly, I think I've almost got it all figured out by now. As usual, it's not quite as difficult as it might seem initially once you sit down and really think it through and look at some php manuals complete with examples of course :-) ... Seems like I might manage to become friends with regular expressions with time ... Of course, all this feeling of progress could in part be that I've decieved myself by not doing any testing, we'll see about that tomorrow or so ...

20/7

Picked up and finished kicking on the statistics page. Still nothing that an average unpriviliged user can see, but for us roots that can view log files on that page things just got a lot more maneagable. Nice links let me click on them to display the 20 latest entries in a log, another click can let me see the whole log, and only one log at a time is being viewed (or dragged out of the database for that matter). Much better.

14/7

Kicked around a bit with the statistics page. Nothing that ordinary users will be able to notice (only for root users!), but if I get things done nicely I might be able to adjust other pages in a similar way. Has to do with displaying larger amounts of database content in a less massive way.

10/7

Made the edit page for pages display a combobox of available categories instead of allowing you to type any number on your own. Also made the "add page" link in the subpage menu set the menuId to the category of the page. Otherwise hitting that link would add a page with the category initially set to the current menuId, which probably isn't what you wanted if you click it after going to a page directly, I.E. via the news page.

1/7

Moved the code that connects to the database to its own include file instead of having it in each and every page. This site loves includes!

30/6

Back to editing the code after what feels like a long break (think it's shorter than it seems when you look at this page though). Implemented a quick fix that gives pages their headline as subject if you forget to enter a subject. This previously made the pages rather hard to find ...

More important today: fixed (by splitting into different pages) so that hitting reload after posting on the noteboard doesn't post again. That was about time. Also there is now a button to preview and further edit your post before actually posting it. Threw in a nice questionmark next to each external as well. Clicking it brings up the more detailed information about the link on a nice page of its own. Thought it might be nice to have ... A very good day for site updates in all.

9/6

Finally fixed a problem with ids getting lost in the process of editing access levels, and of course it was the most classic of classic simple mistakes; forgetting to send the ids in the first place ... So, now I think the ids never get lost at all, what a grand day for the site!

3/6

Yauza, I can't believe it's June already! Anyway, I'm polishing everything I can find to polish related to the project work as much as I can, in the hope that everything will just radiate on Wednesday. Need to go through things more logged in as less priviliged users to see if I've missed changing any controls, Martin quickly found some yesterday by being logged in for about 3 minutes :-) ...

29/5

Lots of development is going on connected to creating a nice multiuser environment, most of it invisible to normal visitors of course. The changes to the top left menu are easily spotted by everyone though. It's now generated dynamically from the categories in the database, and the order of it has changed so that all the dynamic stuff comes in a group after the static ones. Even further down some links for logged in people turn up but that, again, is in the area invisible to casual browsers.

16/5

Fixed a bug in the fix of the logging lie, a classic "right replacement, wrong thing replaced"-mistake. Also made the login page a little more informative for logged in users (doesn't say you're not logged in when you actually are).

15/5

Fixed a slight logging lie yesterday. Apparently the proxy server Telia is using gave away its own IP as REMOTE_ADDR, not mine. So that's what HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR is good for, that gives my real IP and nothing else. I wonder how many times it has changed without me noticing :-) ... Anyway, the logging now checks for HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR first and logs that as IP if it exists, otherwise it goes for REMOTE_ADDR as usual.

Have started work on creating documentation for the site as well (big part of the school project), and have already come up with old things that would be nice to improve. Oh yes, and I think I should move and/or secure the delete button for pages a bit more, can't believe I've never hit it by accident before :-) ...

14/5

So, now I've set myself up with a nice school assignment, documenting this site's inner workings, then making and executing a plan for supporting multiple users/access levels for it. Oh yeah, and editing the look of the site through nice web based functions was a possible feature as well. Will be fun!

3/5

Reorganized code a bit, moved some things common to all pages into the include file it was right above. Also changed around the admin-only statistics page a bit. Making one showing interesting stuff to everyone is on the list for nice future updates.

1/5

Made today's date appear by default as headline and subject when you add something in the diary category. One less thing you need to remember when updating ...

15/4 2003

Changed the layout and functionality of the top left menu a bit, now you've got one of those nice search fields right there. Defaults to full text search of content pages (thus excluding news, guestbook entries and externals).

In other news, slightly odd things seem to happen every time my host has to restore the site from backups. The database user has lost priviliges, and last time the welcome page got assigned a new ID value as well. Very odd, especially since all other pages seem to have kept their ID values (and that's a relief, imagine the mess otherwise, with all internal links pointing to the wrong place!).

14/4 2003

Nothing large happening lately, except for the famous new server going up and down a little more often than we'd all like. During the time things were partly up, while the database wasn't accessible, I got around to creating an error page to inform users of such problems. It looks a little nicer than just throwing up a short error message on an otherwise empty page.

Yesterday I also fixed a silly error when people get redirected from pages they don't have access to. I may not have changed it in all places redirects happen, but at least I've realized it's there. The fix consists of deleting two lines of code :-) ...

5/3 2003

Migration to a new server (leaving my kitchen and entering the real world) was nice and easy. The hard part was getting some knowledge on exporting and importing MySQL databases, and even that procedure was laughably easy once you knew how. As for the site code, I think I changed it in ... five places, and two of those were just for looks (the header/footer text and the title tag). Just one more piece of evidence on the advantages of keeping things modular ... Oh, I had to adjust the ID of the welcome page by hand as well, but that was about it. Haven't noticed any other strangeness yet, but make sure to tell me if you find any!

If you're sufficiently sharp-eyed, you might notice a change in general posting times. This is going up very early in the morning for example. The reason is of course that the server is hanging out in one of those US timezones, 7 hours west of me to be picky about it. I haven't decided yet if this matters to me or not, as far as I know no lives depend on it and a grand total of one news post ended up looking posted before an earlier one. We'll see, for now I suppose I'll note it in the todo list.

Activity: burning Red Hat Linux 8.0 for replacing semi-functional 7.1 installation.

Music: Chumbawamba, Tubthumper.

In the time it's taken to type this, the first disc has finished. I never want to go back to an 8x burner ...

Lately things haven't worked the way I want in Red Hat the times I've booted it. The main problem being a certain unwillingness of X (that's the graphics server, that gives you anything that isn't a command line) to start at all. Since I got Red Hat 8 for Bonnie and still had the ISO files sitting around on Pigbox it wasn't too hard a decision to upgrade a bit ...

Palmnotes made during install ...

Which is easier, installing LiteStep or a modern Linux? Very hard to say ... The only thing that really makes Linux more difficult than Windows to a beginner is that Windows is there first, and most people prefer to keep it around. That might even be a sort of benefit to Linux, distro installers have learnt to deal with the problem in as user-friendly ways as possible. Knowing how to present complicated stuff to people without scaring them off can't be anything but good.

I picked a /boot partition smaller than recommended, we'll see what happens ... Last time I looked in 7.1 it wasn't even near full. No complaints so far anyway ...

If you're the slightest bit geeky you'll like Anaconda more than any old Windows installer. All the options you want, and plenty of automation and instructions if you're feeling uncertain.

Everything's coming along perfectly, my one question is how and if I'll be able to get both monitors going. I don't think it's impossible by any means, and I won't be surprised if it's really easy either. I just don't expect it, to avoid needless frustration :-) ...

Right, we're installed, rebooted and fetching updates. About to log in as soon as that's done ...

Hmmm, may not be that soon, plenty of updates to get ... Maybe I should take a walk to Willys while that's being worked on ...

End of Palmnotes ...

Everything finished without problems, except I get no sound (just like Bonnie!) and haven't figured out how to get multimonitor support working. I still don't think it's impossible, because Red Hat detects both video cards without any problems, but I haven't figured out yet. Clues are welcome!

March 9th 2003, 12:17

Wow, it only took a few hours to get the knowledge and courage to the multi monitors working at least as good as in Windows! Support for it was built right in, like so many other things, but apparently nobody has fixed a graphical frontend for the process. The Xinerama howto I've linked held all the information I needed, all you need to bring is a little courage to edit your config files. I managed to get it working without ruining anything, and that's a new record for me in Linux :-) ...

When the big screen first came on (it's the secondary one, so it's the one that started off) it was at the right resolution, but at a horrible 60 Hz. I thought I'd be stuck with that at least for a while since I couldn't find any information about setting the refresh rate in the howto. However, I noticed the setting "viewport" in the example configurations. Including it for the relevant resolution(s) did the trick, and the screen came on with a lovely 85 Hz!

Okay, when I think about it I can't be 100% sure it's the viewport that did it. I did update the monitor information with some more correct values for horizontal and vertical scan. The previous ones weren't wrong though, just a little lower max values.

So, after just 24 hours all that remains of issues is the lack of sound, and that's not annoying me half as much as squinting at a 14 inch monitor when a 17 inch one is sitting right next to it ...

One of the easier and more secure ways to reach me is through email. ICQ (#12597862), Phones, signal flares, snailmail and other types of communication are known to work as well, but for one thing email is often quicker and easier and for another you won't get the location info required for that type of contact here.

So, to get in touch, use the link on the left to send an email. It's a classic "mailto" link, so brace yourself for launch of you email software! Email is usually checked plenty of times every day, but it isn't 100% guaranteed, nor is a reply immediately after reading.