Got Wills

Now, I know this can’t be intentional, but it’s very annoying, and I can’t see any easy way to make it go away. It looks like this is being caused by some Microsoft style CSS, as the page loads fine in Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3, however, renders the ad right over the top of other content. I sure hope they get this fixed over at lifehacker. I do like a lot of their articles.

UPDATE: It looks like this is happening all over the web with these annoying “Mojave Experiment” ads. A refresh usually fixes it. I haven’t really looked into the CSS that is creating this issue, but I’m sure it something Microsoft designed for IE and threw in compatibility with Firefox as an afterthought.

Well, I thought it was kind of weird that I stopped getting comments all of the sudden… even spam comments have been absent (for quite some time, now that I think about it). Well, Frank, from futtta’s blog informed me earlier tonight that my comments weren’t working. It was claiming that all the required fields weren’t filled (name and email).

Well, I got to work investigating the offending code, and it seems there was a name attribute missing from the input tag for email in comments.php for the finestripes theme. I simply added the attribute name="email" to the necessary input tag and it started working. Now, I guess it’s time to get Akismet up to date.

Sorry, Frank, for misspelling your blog’s name in my last post.

After my recent upgrade to Wordpress 2.6, I tried hitting the upgrade.php script, but was met with a blank page… That’s weird. So, I tried the home page… same thing… weird. Okay, I open my server log and find a php error:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 464

After googling, I found a post on futtta’s blog that described the same error. I fixed it the same way as he describes, by downloading the tarball and copying the a fresh copy of widgets.php over my offending copy. Viola, everything works as it should now, cept my search box seems a bit tweaked. I’ll have to check that out after I feed the kids.

The Motorola Q9c is awesome. The keys are really easy to hit… I rarely fat-finger it, even with my big ole thumbs. In fact, I’m typing this post on it right now. Pocket IE still sucks in WM6, but Opera mobile is great on the Q9c, definitely worth the money.

My only real peeve about it is that Verizon locked the GPS. Currently, in order to use it, you have to pay $10/month for VZNavigator. However, there is a forum, http://www.everythingq.com/forum/moto-q-hacks/verizon-q9c-gps-hack-21606.html, full of people hard at work trying to open it up for Google Maps and Live Search.

One more difficulty that I just noticed… creating links. Maybe there is a good blog writing tool for Windows Mobile 6 out there somewhere. We’ll see.

I think I’ve finally gotten all set up again. I’m now running OpenSuse 10.3 on VMware Server. I upgraded my computer. I’ve got the latest release of Wordpress running and a theme that I really like. Isn’t it great looking… and yes, those are my three beautiful children in the header image. For those that have slow connections, I apologize for the large size of the picture (almost 100K), I couldn’t justify reducing the quality of the picture.

I had too much trouble with Microsoft Virtual Server to keep it around after my hard drive change. Almost everytime my computer had an unscheduled reboot (my power went out), it dropped the virtual network card and created a new one which drove opensuse crazy.  I’ve had no such problems with VMware server. It was also a lot easier getting the VMware tools running than it was getting Virtual Machine Additions to work properly. So now my time is syncing and all (my clock was running a little slow before I installed it). Getting the mail setup correctly threw me a little. Opensuse 10.3 uses Postfix by default, and I had only setup sendmail, and my ISP requires authentication for outgoing mail now. I eventually found the necessary instructions. It was actually a lot easier to set up than I thought it would be. I ended up using my ISP’s SMTP server as a relay and SMTP AUTH to get me logged into it. (Continue reading…)

Well, I just signed up for pownce today (I forgot my usb drive and have little to do in class because of it). The service looks good, but there are still a lot of missing features. For instance, while they do let you choose your theme, you have like 4 to choose from, and it’s not customizable beyond that. Also, there is still no way to send a message via text or email (just as effective as text, of course). I like that you are able to link to your social networks from the page, but right now it really lacks anything noteworthy. Sure, they have a multi-platform Adobe AIR desktop client, so what, if I’m sitting at my desktop, I’ve usually got a browser open anyway.

Another real downer is that there are going to be ads mixed in with the messages. IMHO, this is always a bad idea (mixing the ads with the content). The ads should have their place on the page and stay there. I hate it when I’m trying to view a page and accidentally click an ad, when I’m trying to view content (although, it can’t be as bad as the mouseover popups in some blogs and forums).

I was really excited about this beta at first, but, as most things, it’s not all I thought it was cracked up to be. There is some chance it can develop into a great service, but I don’t see it gaining much traction.

Well, I got an invite to GrandCentral a few weeks ago and finally found time to set it up. There were no Holbrook phone numbers available. In fact, as far as I can tell, there were no numbers in the local Frontier calling area (Show Low, Snowflake, Heber, Pinetop, Lakeside, etc…). So I went with a Winslow number. The features on this service sound really great, so far (would have been better if I’d have found a Holbrook number). I can get any calls sent to any of my phones that I choose. I can even have them sent to a hotel phone if I choose. Also, I can listen to my voicemail online and choose to have all calls go to voicemail.

If you use the link on the right hand side of my blog, you can call me for free. It will call your phone, then mine. No charge for the connection at all. You can use it to record calls (both parties are notified when you turn the feature on) and you can use it to keep a call log. All in all, it sounds like a great tool. Maybe I’ll even start giving out this phone number to my students, since it’ll be easier to check the messages. Then I can have it go to my office phone only when I’m in the office.

You can also send emails to my phone number at grandcentral.com and they will come to me. Of course, I will not be giving out my number on this blog, but if you would like to know my number and have a good reason to know it, please use the button to leave me a voicemail.

I don’t know how this will work in the RSS, but here’s a call link in the post.

It sure is, even if it is a small kingdom… I’m not talking about my house, I don’t claim to be able to manage that. No, I am talking about my Web space. I love having control of phillipwills.com… including a blog (this), a web site, and a web site in development (it’s not much yet, but like I said, it’s in development.

I’ve just had a new idea for a web service today. I’ll not give any clues today about what it will be, but I’ll be registering the domain name in the next week or so, but I’m pretty excited about this. It could be a great service… if other people decide they need it, which they may not. Anyway, more details to come.

Update: Since Microsoft has removed the scripted install from the VMA for Linux package, I’ll make the one I used when writing this article available. Keep in mind that Microsoft claims that the new RPM’s are compatible with Suse 10, so you may want to try those first. Virtual Machine Additions for Linux

This started as a simple project of keeping the time on my server correct. This would not only ensure that the post times were accurate, but also, I would be able to tell when people were reading my blog and such. NTP wouldn’t work, it might work once, but soon the clock was way off again. I found the reason to be that some algorythm for detecting lost ticks causes NTP to make the clock run much faster on the virtual machine than it should. I also found another NTP-ish utility that polled the chosen NTP server every couple of minutes, or so. This looked promising, but they noted that you should own the NTP server that you are polling as this will generate a lot of traffic.

After searching for hours I found that Microsoft had a beta Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. This is just what I was looking for… it includes time synchronization, not to mention the better hardware virtualization, offline shutdown, and the heartbeat (sort of a status monitor). Suse 10.2 wasn’t in the list of supported operating systems, but Suse 10.0 was… how different could they be, right? Yea, right. Further confusing the issue, the readme file states, “The Additions installation is guarenteed to work only on target systems where no manual changes have been performed to the system configuration after installation of the virtual machine.” Well, I was making manual changes within an hour of installing the virtual machine. Just another obstacle, if it were easy, everyone would have suse 10.2 running their web server from a virtual machine :).

Well, I got onto the Virtual Server configuration page and told it to install virtual machine additions (after upgrading to Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 Beta and running the msi file that came for VMA for linux… of course). Now don’t get me wrong… I had no delusions that it would be as easy as checking a little box in a browser page, and right I was.

Well that little checkbox is pretty stupid… there must be very little logic behind it, since it was fairly obvious that Virtual Server knew I wasn’t running Windows as my guest OS, it still loaded the Windows VMAdditions iso in the virtual drive. Of course, I had to figure out how to mount the CD-Rom before I found that out. Did I mention, I’m still a newbie with linux, sure I can get around the command line some, but with most things, I am clueless. I added the necessary line to my fstab and mounted it… all as root… of course. However, I had left my limited account logged in and on the mount point. This wasn’t a big deal until I found out that simply inserting the correct iso would not give me access to it. So naturally, I try to umount… it fails. After trying unmount for about an hour, unsuccessfully. I am giving up for now. Wait a minute, after exiting the root login, I found the problem I noted above. So, I cd home, su and try again… SUCCESS! I have access to 5 or 6 rpm’s and a shell script. I instinctively try to run the shell script, but don’t have execute permissions, so I move it to the hard disk and set the permissions. Okay, now I’m ready to try again.

Well, I got a kernel error, hmph. Okay, that’s to be expected… afterall, I’m not using a supported version of linux. I tried the rpm and got excited when it didn’t show any errors, this excitement was quickly followed by disappointment when I checked the log and found the same error. Well, the error said I may not have my kernel source, so I say to myself, “Self, if you were the kernel source, how would you like to be installed?” Why, Yast… of course. After a quick little yast2 -i kernel-source, I had the source files. Great, but the error remains.

Okay, okay, there was also a reference to a file in the error message, /lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/build/MAKEFILE. Well, let’s see what’s there. Just a single file existed in the build directory… and it wasn’t called MAKEFILE, so began my search of the web, which continued for days. I was trying all kinds of things that various sites said to try. In most of the forums that I saw suggestions, the person having trouble did eventually get it to work, but they were also using supported distributions of linux. Needless to say, their suggestions only helped by helping me to eliminate possible problem/solution scenarios.

I was just about ready to give up and had already started researching other ways to help my server keep time, when I decided to look around and try to find the MAKEFILE myself. It took a ls -laF in the /lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default directory for me to realize that the build directory is just a symbolic link… wait, I’m not looking in the right place. So I skip on over to /usr/src/linux-2.6.18.2-34-obj/i386/default (where the link was pointing).

Well, there’s nothing of note here. So I start checking the parent directories and lo and behold, in /usr/src there is another linux source directory, 2.6.18.8-0.1-obj. So, I look and sure enough, there is an i386/default, as well… and it has a MAKEFILE. WOOHOO! Hold on now, don’t get too excited, we still need to find a way to make the install script look here for it.

Altering the script is out… it’s CRC’d and MD5′d, and I don’t know enough about it to take the checks out, or even update them to be correct. Oh yea, it’s a symbolic link… I can make a new one. Well, after mv build build1, I needed to create the symbolic link, something I’ve never done before. I tried different commands for an hour before I finally came up with ln -T /usr/src/linux-2.6.18.8-0.1-obj/i386/default -s /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build. Nice, I got a symbolic link. So, I cross my fingers and run the install script… SUCCESS. Now, there are still a lot of warnings in the log file, but it installed. A simple /etc/init.d/vmadd start verified it.

In Yast, once again. I navigated to the System Menu, then to System Service (runlevel). In there I was able to see 5 services that started with vmadd. The start at runlevel for all of them is set to 3 and 5… looks good, except vmadd-scsi, which I don’t need, so I unchecked the 3 and 5. Then, I proceeded to start each of the other services. As soon as I had, I saw the Virtual Server admin screen change to accomodate for the installation. I quit yast and issued the date command… IT’S RIGHT, the time and date are right on. WOOHOO!

So, while it wasn’t easy, it is certainly very possible, even for a linux beginner like myself. I’ll give as full of a list of commands to get it working as I can. Just click the link if you don’t see the code section below. (Continue reading…)

Well, we’re all moved and finally back online… actually, we’ve been online since Thursday afternoon. After tweaking my settings for half the night, my blog was back up the following morning. I’ve been trying to get to it all weekend, but it’s been extremely busy. We’ve upgraded from DSL to Cable which doubled our speed, so the site should be a bit faster.