Tag: Software

If you’ve been involved in the WP community at all for the past couple of months; you couldn’t have missed that Root and Michael Heilemann have been… bickering back and forth about Kubrick and designs and usability and whatnot. From what I saw in the various threads on the WP Support forums, on both’s blogs and elsewhere they both need a good smack to the head. I’m too tired of the whole deal to really care who started it or who’s currently at fault.

Why bring it up then? Michael’s got a thread up that’s continuing the spat. Normally that wouldn’t be enough for me to bother putting a note up here but one of the people commenting on Michael’s thread said:

Quoting Root:

IMHO that is going to make WP less accessible to the self design end user than it is now. Some of us are quite interested in these things.

That means they’ll have to pay a designer to do it for them, hopefully. To that I say, “Bravo!” (There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.)

Another person commenting replied:

There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.

Hear hear

And that just pisses me off. I’m not a designer and make no claims to be one. I do have a very rudimentary grasp of CSS and a slightly better one of HTML. I’ve borrowed a book from a friend of mine and am learning a bit about PHP/MySQL. I do all my coding either in Bluefish1 or Notepad2. I looked at the template WP shipped with in v1.02 and realized it was beyond my skills to really modify at the time. So I grabbed a couple of styles from the Alex King style competition but I saw that under some circumstances they’d break. I wasn’t happy about that and I didn’t like that my blog’s style wasn’t something I’d crafted. I kept looking around for something better to use and then Root came out with his Trident template. I was able to drop that in and make a few modifications so that I had a style that’s my own. It’s ugly as all get out but I could alter it as I need it without having to shell out more money to indulge in my blogging hobby. And the idea that just because I’m not a designer that I must be using a pirated copy of Frontpage3 in order to work on my site is insulting! I also think that if WP v1.3 does make it substantially more difficult to create new themes for my site then I will have to an alternative platform.

1 When working on my desktop and booted into Linux.
2 When working on my laptop, whose CD-ROM drive sucks so bad I can’t get windows off the machine.
3 Frontpage is a piece of crap! I’ve had to use it at work a few times and it writes the most horrific code! If you’re going to claim that people are pirating web design software; why not credit them with pirating something that’s actually useful.

As I’ve mentioned before I run SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro for my desktop OS. My PC is one that I home-built with a bit of help from my local hardware guru (Eric). For my video card, I’ve got a BFG GeForce 5600 SE (or was did they call it an Ultra? *shrug*) with 256MB of Video RAM. I’m subscribed to the SuSE-Linux-e mailing list and it seems that I frequently see messages coming into the list about people having all sorts of problems installing the NVidia video card drivers. Now, I know that you can supposedly get the newest drivers from SuSE via YOU and that NVidia has some special instructions for SuSE users on their linux driver download page but really what’s all the fuss about? The first time I installed the drivers the special instructions were out of date and YOU wasn’t showing the current driver; so this is what I did then and do everytime I need to install the NVIDIA drivers1:

  1. Hit Crtl-Alt-F1 to get a text console.
  2. Logged on to my system as root.
  3. Typed in init 3.
  4. Waited for my system to finish rebooting into text-only mode2
  5. Once I’m in text-only mode and logged in as root; if I haven’t downloaded the newest driver yet, I fire up lynx go to NVIDIA’s site and get the driver.
  6. Once I have the driver, I exit lynx (if necessary) and then type sh ./NIVIDA-Linux-x86-1.0-XXXX-pkg1.run, where XXXX is the version of the driver.
  7. This launches NVIDIA’s special driver installer and I follow all the prompts in it. Their installer will check to see if it can download some extra files that it might be able to use instead of compiling them on the fly, but those files have yet to be out there. Then it works its magic and drops me back to the prompt.3
  8. Back at the prompt, I type sax2. This launches SuSE’s utility for configuring your video card and monitor settings.
  9. I go into the monitor settings and confirm that it’s detecting my monitor correctly (it has every time so far).
  10. Then I go into the video card settings and reselect my card. sax2 always defaults my card to the nv driver and it needs to be the driver for my specific card.
  11. After reselecting my card, I setup my display settings (24-bit color at 1600×12004).
  12. Once I’m satisfied with all my settings; I click Finish.
  13. sax2 then prompts me to see if I want to test my settings before I accept them and I click Yes.
  14. I think it’s while I’m in this test mode that sax2 allows me to adjust the how big of an image that my video card throws onto the monitor. Not the resolution but the actual displayed image; a software version of the controls on the bottom of the monitor that allow you to adjust the image size, orientation and what not. I use sax2 to adjust my screen until the display is centered and fits completely on my monitor (no cut-off edges).
  15. Then I click Ok.
  16. This throws me back to the prompt where I type reboot -n.
  17. When my system comes back up; the new drivers are installed and I’m back in runlevel 5 (graphical, multi-user). Everything looks sharp and my 3D stuff works. End of story. It sounds more complicated than it actually is but from what I’ve been reading on the mailing list; this sure beats the stuffing out of how other people do it. 🙂

1 I’m writing these instructions up from memory so there’s no guarantee that they’re 100% accurate; however they should be close enough for most people to figure out what they’re doing.
2 For some reason my system always hangs at one point during this process; I think it’s while it’s trying to shut down a specific process but the name of that process currently is eluding my memory. When I get to that point, I just hit Crtl-C and my PC will skip past the bad process.
3 Newer versions of the Nvidia driver complain that my kernel was built with RIVAFB support and say that if the RIVAFB module gets loaded that it’ll cause me problems but I just ignore that because I know the module never gets loaded. One of these days, I’ll have to figure out how to reconfigure my kernel so that support isn’t in there. *shrug* That’s a project for another time.
4 Why yes, I do love having a 21″ monitor. *shameless grin*

AOL hasn’t tried darkening my mailbox in quite some time but when I checked the mail today; there it was another “free trial offer”. Normally, I would have just tossed it directly into the trash since they no longer send their software out on floppies. However as I walked back up to my apartment, the packaging the CD was in reminded me of something I’d seen previously online.

In short, it looked rather much like Jewelboxing’s Kings, Movie-Sized Cases. I tore the case apart to remove all of AOL’s crappy marketing and to examine the case for manufacturing marks. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything on the case that positively identified it as a one of Jewelboxing’s cases. Is it the real thing? A cheap knock-off? Heck if I know!

What I do know is that I just got a nice DVD size case for free that goes for $49 per pack of 20 ($2.45 each). This will work great for storing some DVDs I’ve burned of fan-subbed anime. *keen*