Category: Computers

Be it a discussion of software or hardware; it will be under here.

The library issues I was having appear to be resolved. When I upgraded WordPress, I simply overwrote the existing files (‘cuz I’m lazy) and then I went into my permalink settings and hit the update button (without actually making any changes). This is supposed to be enough to get the plugin I use for the library to reset the permalinks but that didn’t happen this time. I ended up deleting all of WordPress’ core file, re-uploading them, changing my webhost’s configuration to support PHP5, upgrading to the very latest copy of the plugin and re-saving my permalink settings before I was able to get the library working correctly again.

Other Changes

I also noticed when I upgraded/changed themes last time I forgot to add back in the magic codes to have ads from Google AdSense appear in a couple of places on my site. Those are ads are now back, though I do use another plugin to hide them from regular readers and on current content. Basically, if you are just stopping by (e.g. found me via a search engine) you will see ads. If you’ve been here a few times in the past couple of weeks, then you most likely won’t. Mind you these ads aren’t making me rich1, but they do help offset the costs of my online addiction webhosting.

New Theme

Yeah, I wasn’t a big fan of the previous theme I was using but it was good enough for a short term solution. The current theme2 is better but still needs more tweaks to make it mine. Things are likely to be in a state of flux until further notice around here. Things I still need to do:

  • Add one or more random photos to the sidebar or possibly the footer.
  • Work up a better header image.
  • Style the footer more to my liking.
  • Fix the sidebar formatting issues in IE3

1 I haven’t even had enough clicks on the silly Google AdSense ads to get paid yet
2 In case you happen to be curious, it’s a slightly tweaked version of the Shades of Gray style for the Sandbox theme.
3 Odds of this happening are tiny. I only use IE at work and then only rarely. If the slight offsets in the sidebar offends your design sensibilites, get Firefox!

I’ve finally upgraded CoffeeBear.net to WordPress 2.5. I’m in the process of getting everything settled in properly and at the moment my library is working quite so nicely. At the moment the link for the library at the top of the page does not work (you’ll get a blank page) however if you go to any of the books in my sidebar you’ll find a working link to the actual library page on the individual book page. Also the nicely rewritten links for the library aren’t working correctly either. *shrug* Not sure what’s going on there, but I’ll post again and/or update this post once I’ve sorted it out. If you happen to notice any other problems with this site, please leave a comment under this post so I know to look into it.

Thanks!

I finished up all the upgrades to my home PC putting me on Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Unfortunately none of the auto-magical upgrade tools provided by Canonical worked for me, so all my upgrades were done via cli, using aptitude. Mostly this means I had to repeatedly run “sudo aptitude dist-upgrade”, interspersed with removing/installing specific packages based on errors thrown up by apititude, with a couple “sudo aptitude -f install” and “sudo dpkg –configure -a” thrown in for good measure.

I’ve been running Gutsy for a day now and the apps I normally use1 seems to be working fine. A couple of tweaks I made almost immediately after upgrading to Gusty:

  • Removed Strigi. From what I understand Strigi is supposed to be some sort of indexer to allow for quick searching of your computer. Only I found it had a horribly impact performance. Everything became extremely sluggish.
  • Switch the default file manager to Konqueror from Dolphin. Dolphin looks like it might be useful and it did feel faster. But I’m used to Konqueror and don’t feel like making the switch right now.
  • Installed Compiz. I found it interesting but different enough from my normal preferences that I’ve disabled it for now. Though I do plan to look at it more another day.

1 Kontact, Firefox, Konsole, KMyMoney, Kaffeine, Digikam, and Amarok

KDE Logo I’ve been running Kubuntu 6.06 LTS as my main OS on my home PC since it was released. Along the way, I’ve upgraded to KDE 3.5.5 and Amarok 1.4.3 and installed a variety of packages from unofficial sources. When I Edgy 6.10 was first released I looked into upgrading, but held off. This was due to all the complaints and problems I had been reading about where people had done similar things to myself (e.g. installed apps using unofficial sources). While I was no longer living on the edge, I still have been keeping up with the community by reading Planet KDE. A lot of changes and new features sounded really cool but with all the horror stories out there and Dapper being a Long Term Support release, I figured I was better off waiting to upgrade until I absolutely had to.

Last night, I decided I’d held off long enough. So I backed up all my data and started the upgrade. As expected, upgrading from Dapper to Edgy was painful. Fortunately I’ve gotten some experience with the cli and was able to work past my problems. I might still be missing a few things (e.g. Flash player doesn’t seem to work at the moment) but overall I’m rather impressed. My computer feels a bit more speedy and the fonts look enormously better. It’s really quite extraordinary how much better things look.

I’ve already started the upgrade to take me from Edgy to Feisty 7.04 and am very much looking forward to being on Gutsy 7.10 (not to mention Hardy 8.04 later this month). For now though, my eyes are burning with sleepiness, so I’ll post this and catch some shut-eye while my computer downloads all the packages it needs to upgrade me to Feisty.

Sometimes when you’re staring the bash prompt, you want to be able to see if a specific program is currently running. There are a couple of ways to do this; generally I run:
ps -ef | grep ProgramName

However I once saw a tip for doing something similar with top but I lost the link and for a long time couldn’t find it again. Truth be told, I still haven’t found that specific link but I did some googling and found the right cli switches to do it. Since I want to make sure I remember in the future, I’m posting it here:
top -b -n 1 | grep ProgramName