floodgate.blog

I decided today to write three posts instead of a three-part post — so here’s part three. The reason I was checking out the Habari Project was that their ideology is fantastic, and I feel that they will have a fantastic product when the project matures a little more. I was also attracted to it as they claimed to support SQLite through PDO, which I only discovered in the last month or so (I had heard the name, but never stopped to investigate what it was, partly due to having a mysql server to use as I see fit).

After my mishaps with Habari, I started investigating sqlite as an alternative to needing mysql.  It looks promising — guess I need to read up on PDO and see what it can do..

I have been trying out a new blogging platform this week, Habari.  Well, I suppose I should say I “tried” it.. I never could get it to fully install.  Whether I tried the last “release” (yes, in OSS-land, everything is beta.. forEVER) or did a svn checkout, my install never actually took.  I’ve searched online (google, and through the habari mailing lists), and found nothing. Some advice to the habari crew — if you’re going to have a svn checkout as part of your up-front installation instructions (up front meaning the link on the homepage), then you’d better have some serious QA or developers that check their work.  I couldn’t even get through the installation start to finish.  I know I had all required parts of php, apache, etc installed (mysql, sqlite, and sqlite2 drivers for PDO), and chose sqlite.  I will not accept “use mysql instead” as a fix to this, unfortunately.  Perhaps this is the minimalist in me coming out.

I have been following this project and am excited, but until someone steps up and ensures that either the installation instructions link to pre-packaged tar’s or zip’s and is checked, or to run serious interference between developers and the testing world… again a moot point for me, as their 0.3.3 download also failed to install for me.  I will continue to investigate, but with the ease of install of something like Wordpress (as bloated and mysql-ish as it is) or the plethora of online services that work very well.. I won’t be hanging around very long.

Keep trying guys — I like the direction you’ve chosen, and will check in again soon.

I’ve started working on the first characters of my online cartoon: Fresh, and Sweet.  I haven’t done much more than just some doodles on a paper, but I had to start somewhere!

I’m in the process of finding the “online home” that this upcoming cartoon deserves, so stay tuned (probably to the next post — or if you read both at the same time… the post above this one).

Ahhh, a return to the multi-post style I used to use…

Bring on the OSS

After the burning-resistor-dead-laptop episode, I’ve been thinking about what the next laptop will be, and what will be on it.  I am borrowing a relatively ancient laptop (still a 1.4ghz p4, but… yea… ancient), and will be giving XP the heave-ho for some ubuntu magic.  I will start with regular ole ubuntu, and then look to pimping it out (on my list are the apps contained within Ubuntu Studio, and to run e17 instead of gnome).  I want it to look a little like gOS, which is ubuntu-based.  My biggest goal/project/hope with my transition to OSS is that my scanner will work in Gimp.  See the next section for the “why”.  I’m sure everything else I need is available.

Sticking it to the.. figures?

On my drive home this afternoon I got to thinking about starting an online cartoon.  I had just spent over an hour reading the xkcd.com entries, and was inspired.  I remember drawing the same set of “guys” on papers in college and will continue that on a semi-regular basis.  I just need a way to scan those puppies in, as I refuse to use a mouse to draw, and don’t feel like splurging on a tablet.  In semi-related news — the engine that will power this new adventure will NOT depend on mysql, like wordpress does.  I was inspired by the payment scheme on NearlyFreeSpeech.Net which charged per mysql process, and started investigating alternatives (sqlite came to mind).  A couple fledgling publishing platforms “fit the bill”, and I will consider them along with my ongoing desire for my own platform!

i suppose it was only a matter of time before this happened…

1. my digital camera has been going psycho for a while now, where randomly it has a motor problem with the zoom lens and cannot focus until zoomed in to 1.7x.. between that, and constantly misplacing the damn thing, i consider the camera dead.
2. I was on the way home from work last week, made my usual phone call to let my wife know that I was on the way.  I was about half way home, and tried to make another call only to discover that all of the “soft” buttons (i have an LG chocolate, so all those crappy buttons that are so touchy that they are useless) were dead.. including buttons like send, menu, contacts, etc.  FORTUNATELY verizon doesn’t suck as bad as usual this go around and is shipping out another one.
3. The next day I was trying to get my laptop to charge up — I’d been having intermittent problems with the charger and the socket in the laptop not “connecting” periodically.. sometimes there was a weird noise coming from that part of the laptop, but it sounded like a fan with whacked-out bearings… apparently that noise was part of the power circuit in my laptop, and it popped… I had a nostalgic moment while frantically yanking the power cord from the wall at the smell of burning electronics (ahhh Electronics Lab… how I miss you).  I am now considering that laptop dead, as it would cost too much to repair the laptop (5 years old, and the USB is already dead on it).

The laptop is what pisses me off the most — fortunately the disk drive is in tact, and I can recover that later on.  I’ve got a loaner on the way, and am hoping that I can scrounge up some cash to get a new one by summer time… ugh!   Normally I would say “expect fewer posts”, but I post so infrequently that I will end by saying “expect more of the same”.