Rantings of a Lunatic

When I got up this morning, I went through all the upgrade guides, and change logs, and did my backups. Then I upgraded from R5f27 to 5.5, and I am much happier already. I don’t have it working 100% yet, and there were some glitches, but in all its up and seems to be far superior to the previous version. [Read more]

So, I have some plans for some different pieces of computer equipment, and this has caused me to realize that I need to backup my external HD to DVD and reformat it to better use it. It is currently storing about 400Gb of data from OS X, and is formatted HFS+. I went over a couple of different options, and then on a whim figured I would just plug it into my linux box, and see if it would read it. The good news is that it popped right up and is fully readable, I didn’t check if its writable, but I don’t care, as long as I can read it to burn the DVDs from I will be fine. I am a little worried about the files still being readable on a mac after burning them, because I doubt the meta-data will transfer correctly, but thats really only a concern for Apps, which are all inside DMGs as far as I have checked. [Read more]

Apparently I have been running one of the most insecure versions of Wordpress for a long time. I had done a manual install before I had been exposed to fantastico, and the version of WP I was running predated the auto-update features that are present today, and it was still working, so I had neglected to update it. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it right? Well, anyway, I got a call the other day from Matt, who proceeded to let me in on a little secret. I was apparently being link farmed out to Carnegie Mellon’s CS department’s DB Wiki, which must have been trashed because they have thousands of casino pages up. I won’t provide a link, mostly because I deleted it with extreme prejudice. What had caught me with this was that I had seen those links about a month ago, and had cleaned them out then, expecting that they were embedded in the theme I was using, and I had just never noticed them.
So, after he told me that, (he had been hit on two of his sites as well), I also found a nifty little javascript in the header that was a function that just did character substitution to do a meta redirect to a windowze-antivirus-2008 like dot com site if the referrer was from a search engine, and had an enumerated list in it. Needless to say I eradicated that as well.
[Read more]

So, I go through and blog about my computing opinions yesterday, and today I find this, kde goes cross-platform with windows mac os x support. Maybe I will have to give it a shot at work as long as I can still access all of the web apps I deal with on a daily basis. I will also have to make sure that Jeff, our company’s IT guy, won’t care or notice. I did actually write “Its been a while since I used KDE, but version 4 came out recently, and I am considering giving it a shot.” yesterday, so I probably will jump right on it. Plus if that means that Kate will run on Windows, that could be helpful. Its not Bluefish, but I have heard a lot of good things about Kate even though I haven’t run it myself. Being a K app is the only thing that has been holding me back from trying it out. Though that shouldn’t have been holding me back, I have the K libs installed so that I can use K3B, because nothing on Gnome comes close to burning discs anywhere near as well.
Although, I have to wonder about a 600Mb install size. I find it difficult to understand why it requires that much space to host a desktop environment, though I am sure that includes other packages that aren’t really necessary. And, I don’t have a Windows Explorer frame of reference. I am sure that IE shouldn’t too terrible, but it can’t be that great either. I had somewhere around 13 tabs open at one point yesterday, and IE was using well over 150Mb of “Virtual Memory” and was swapping to disk. I will keep my progression noted on here.

So, I had planned on doing some theme work on the old blog tonight, but I got sucked into something else. I sat down at my desktop, and realized that my server, which is using RRDtool to create graphs of its preformance/statistics, was only calculating the information for /dev/hda and not the two raid arrays which are mapped at /dev/sda and /dev/sdb respectively. So, I started looking into fixing that. Well, 2.5 hours later, I have done my first little bit of Perl scripting, just modifying a perl script that existed, but I added in the appropriate codes to expand the RRD database, get the data from the 4 new sources, and configured the system to draw the appropriate lines in the graphs. Now, because I had to reset the DB I lost all of my historical data, or I can’t see it at the moment. But, because its a realtime system I started copying all of my Bond Movies over from the server to the desktop, that should give me a spike in the Read on sda at least, and combined with the writes to sdb from my recording of The Colbert Report, I should be able to see some data on the graphs in the morning and know that I programmed it all in correctly. I can already see that the graphs are updated, with the legends, but thats the easy part, getting the correct data from the monitors and into the database correctly are the more tricky parts. Anyway, its getting late, so I am going to bed. Maybe I will post-pone my theme work until Friday, when I have the day off. It will feel like work, because that is a task I have been doing at work recently, as I am administering the new blog site, but it will be personal so it won’t be that bad.