Archive for January, 2006
I really need to skip town sooner or later and just go somewhere, splurge some cash and get a hotel, travel a bit, if I was really wild, maybe a road trip to Washington to visit my grandparents and other family up there, though Colorado does sound inviting as well, and I enjoy my visiting Aunt Margie - who knows, maybe someplace tottaly random where no one knows me, and I can disappear.
Why the sudden desire for a get away? Oh just the signs of a very busy year ahead, and considering I have sort of laxed a bit on Jan. thus far, I know it’s all going to be fast forward at some level, just boom boom boom, thing after thing, and yet I have enjoyed catching up with old friends, and spending time outside of the office.
So what to do? What can I afford to do? Will my car survive it? Why does life have so many questions? 
If any one has any suggestions or a personal jet they can lend me, do let me know, zip me around the country a bit… the only other thing that sounds like fun (sadly continuing my nerdiness) is a new iMac Intel Duo - I need better hobbies lol.
One thing that is a downside of being in the hosting business, is definately applications - don’t get me wrong, I love things like Wordpress, 4Images, and various other PHP and Perl based apps (testing Ruby here on the home office server & soon on the dev machine at the Downtown office) - but the ol saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” really doesnt apply to the web, just because a application is still doing XYZ for you, doesn’t mean it’s safe and secure.
This morning I got the classic email “Hacked?” needless to say your heart drops, you begin thinking about last backups made, meetings you have to cancel for the day, and how quickly you can get on the box and see the amount of damage - well in this case it was 3 files, 2 html’s, and a php, nothing else seemed touched or damaged - the process was probably automated via Google no less - in this case search for “Wordpress” and then run the attempt against the possible exploit (1.2.x builds XMLRPC exploit) - and if it works, just blast the index page and let the world know, “I WAS HERE!”.
So since data was in tact for the client and my heart rate was returning to a normal almost-resting rate, he got to work on the process of upgrading Wordpress from 1.2.2 -> 2.0 - but in my reading I saw you had to step up, 1.2.x->1.5.x->2.0 - so I jumped in and did the remainder of the upgrade, as I had the 1.5.2 files still and I could really do things like, backing up files, folders, databases faster from command line, and just whipped through the upgrades - and now the client is playing around in a new Wordpress 2.0 playground
So if your a software user - be it Wordpress, Gallery, 4Images, MovableType, etc. etc. etc. - do yourself a favor, subscribe to the site’s update announcement list - could very well save your blog, your server, and your friendly neighborhood nerd some stress 
(I still love you Josh, your like the Crazy Canadian Cousin I never had!) - if ANYONE needs help upgrading an application, even if you don’t host with me, hit up discuss and ask for help - always glad to lend a hand if I can.
Needed air! Which in California itself is hard to do sometimes But went for a drive past my house further outside of Bakersfield City Limits, just aimed myself at the mountains, and ended up on this smmmmmaaaaaaallllllll road that was really winding back and forth a lot, but got me some fun shots, and was much cooler as I was nearing the mountains so delightful. Enjoy!
Posted on 18 January '06 by Chuck Brown, under basic goodness. 1 Comment.
I have been looking for the best way to manage my photo’s:
MAC METHOD
While the iBook and iPhoto give me some good organization and a great flickr plugin the downside is the average file size is 5MB for the E-500, and the iBook has a small drive, so throw in the fact I had a thousand or so already in there, it was filling up fast - secondly, the E-500’s RAW format (ORF) is not supported, so iPhoto was confused as to what the other files were on the camera, iPhoto can support AVI/MOV now from cameras, however the E-500 is video free, just stills.
Lastly as the camera is USB 1.1 speeds, 5MB takes a LONG time to import, but solved that with a card reader (which I now use on all systems).
So that left me leaning away from the Mac - maybe if you guys get me that Quad G5 for my Birthday… well a guy can dream can’t he?
WINDOWS METHOD
Windows aka one of my main workstations, a collective 450GB on a single setup - lots of space, but again, the same issue as iPhoto, lack of RAW support in Picasa - again while great tools to manage the photos, in the end I can’t keep my digital negatives, there is an app that came with the camera, but it was slow, felt like a poorly written Java application - but it just wasn’t doing it.
So scratch windows, lots of storage, but no bang for my buck, the only thing it had going for it was Flickr Upload (similar to the iBook) but there was a catch, the reason it uploads so quickly, it scales my photos down some - hince leading me to the last method, which I half use.
UBUNTU LINUX METHOD
Ah yes, F-Spot your truly a beautiful program - iPhoto-ish workings, linux greatness all in all it works great to organize, the thing that scared me was the Flickr export from within it, slow slow slow, well after comparing some photos uploaded with Flickr upload (which uploads MUCH quicker) the Export function from within F-Spot by default leaves re-size unchecked, thus a 8MP original is uploaded, but in the case of the photos I just put up, that’d of been 168MB of uploading later! But in the final run, F-Spot (and assorted other Linux apps) understand the E-500’s RAW format! So I can do quick-re-touches, and plus use Photoshop (as needed) to re-touch things as well - very lovely setup.
All in all for me it really boils down to Windows vs Linux, however I find myself on my linux console more and more, while I still turn my chair towards this monitor (aka the Windows rig) - the tasks I can do more and more on the linux box are becoming more and more enjoyable - now I just need 1-2Mbps upload speeds and I am set.
Come on folks, feb 28th is coming - think about it, every 26 year old needs something like this:
Come on folks, maybe chip in together If you really really have to, cut back to 1 monitor
Posted on 16 January '06 by Chuck Brown, under basic goodness. 1 Comment.
Awesome! Stuff, wonderful clouds today, helped me mellow out from random server IP issues on about 4 boxes (networking issues) and some random mini-drama from elsewhere…. life goes on I suppose.
Posted on 15 January '06 by Chuck Brown, under basic goodness. 1 Comment.
Let’s hope not. For starters in this post, I wanna say to Xanga users, if you read the start of some of my posts and they simply don’t make sense, it’s because of the lack of a post title for instance this post’s title on my actual site says “The party is over?” just thought I’d clarify that.
Anywhoo - this week has been a fun one, granted I can’t have too much fun or I’ll stop working lol - but this week got to hang out with old friends, Adam, Maggie (saw her briefly as she was heading to work), Matt, Jake, Courtney and Rosie - twas a ton of fun, a very nice change of pace! Heck Courtney and me talked for 5hrs as we have for one thing not seen each other since highschool, but have known each other since we were in kindergarden I believe - so it was fun to cover pretty much all bases from K->12->College->Real Life A fun time hanging out, and hopefully I can manage some crazy mad planning skills and get everyone together to hang out, if only the weather would decide what it is doing, we could so easily do something at the lake as Rosie and I have always wanted!
Anywho - this coming week is mixed with meetings, code, and “bug hunting” that SHOULD of happened over a year ago, is at least finally starting on a program I wrote long ago - but at least it’s happening - but I started on converting the designs for FH and TN to a new CMS, I had tried Mambo and Joomla, but both feel like overkill, they are essientally the same in many ways, but at the same time just more than I need, so I am going even simpler, and working to accomidate my layouts into a easier to manage template system.
Billing I am going to have to make some modifications to this year, probably in the next month, and make some suspenions, and or cancelations, and I guess it’s time to find a collections agency… always a bummer - but I can only afford to be nice so long, but I also want to get a friend server setup, if we are truly keeping the office long term, I may bust out sputnik from the closet, put some Ubuntu love, and do ISPConfig as a easy control panel (and free to boot) - 2.3mbps or as previously discussed going to 4.6mbps might not be so bad, still not tottaly sure, but it’d be nice to have a server next to me again that I could physically tweak/adjust/add-on to (donations welcome) as needed.
Anywhoo - thats my rant/rundown for today, a good week, and good things still on the way, I am sure coming weeks I’ll slow down some on posting, but such is life! Off to the rest of the day… waking up at 4:45am every morning… odd.
