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Theme Upgraded

Upgraded to the latest and greatest K2 theme – and now comes with the Vader style. Back to a black theme, yay!

Even better, comes with AJAX commenting. Sweet.

Mike and Chris are writing some rockin’ code.

Drupal Woes

Over the last month or so since I migrated Silwenae.com over to [Site5][1] for hosting, and transferred the silwenae.com content to [Apatheia.org][2] I’ve been working on the image module in [Drupal][3] as it stopped working during the site migration.

I’ve been through the code, I’ve re-installed the module, and nothing has worked. I decided to tackle it this weekend, with mixed results.

I upgraded Apatheia.org’s Druapl installation from 4.5.5 to 4.6.3 so it was running the latest version. (No problems there).

I downloaded the image.module for 4.6 and installed it. (No problems there).

In reviewing the images in the website, the root web directory of apatheia.org does not have an images directory. Looking at my backup of silwenae.com, it had an images directory with all the images stored in it, including all the re-sized images that the image.module made. Where did they go?

To further complicate things, when you look at the images stored on Apatheia.org, take a look at the Majordomo story on the frontpage. According to the image properties, it’s at: http://www.apatheia.org/images/majordomo2-312_800x600.jpg , but there is no images directory when I ssh in to the website, or FTP in. Is Drupal doing something via mod_rewrite? Per one post on the forums, I turned clean URLs on, but it didn’t fix my image upload problem.

In the image.module settings, I changed from using ImageMagick to GD, and I could now upload a picture, though the thumbnail wouldn’t store, and it errored out upon submitting.

I did a chmod on the tmp directory, and pointed the settings a few different ways at the current tmp directory with mixed results. I re-created an images directory.

You can now upload images, with some caveats:

Upon selecting an image to upload and hitting preview, you see the image with the following error at the top of the screen:

warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/apatheia/public_html/modules/image/image.module on line 623.

Hitting submit off this preview results in an error page with the errors:

`warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/apatheia/public_html/modules/image/image.module on line 623.

warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/apatheia/public_html/includes/common.inc:348) in /home/apatheia/public_html/includes/common.inc on line 159.` However, then going back to Apatheia.org (use a bookmark or something) you’ll see the image uploaded just fine. So it’s working – it spits out errors, but it’s working. The image properties still show in apatheia.org/images – _but there are no files in that directory_! I’d love to know where they are. The image.module in Drupal is notoriously buggy – the number of threads in the forums looking for help with the module are staggering. There aren’t a lot of good alternatives. Gallery2 integration exists, but I don’t think it’s quite what I’m looking for. It’s frustrating as the functionality that was there in 4.5 was perfect – it was great for the users of the site, the re-sizing functionality was very cool. My only beef with it then was it was a little difficult to post stories around the pictures (though you could bump pictures up to the front page) but this one has me beat. [1]: http://www.site5.com [2]: http://www.apatheia.org [3]: http://www.drupal.org

Stupid Local TV Broadcasters

I missed 45 minutes of Destination: Lost Wednesday night because of a major storm that ripped through the Twin Cities. (It was no Category 3 or higher storm, but it did a little damage).

The local ABC affiliate, Channel 5 KSTP, used the hurricane system and people’s fears of those storms to sensationalize the storm reporting for as long as they could, including 45 minutes of Destination: Lost and the first 20 minutes of the season premiere of Lost.

I have it on my TiVo – it’s just them repeating themselves for an hour – high winds, look at the radar, blah blah blah.

But that gets me to my point: ABC is unwilling to re-broadcast the premiere this weekend, due to cast contracts and the residual payouts. At least they’re admitting it’s about the money, so they can screw over their viewers.

Being technologically aware, I just went out and downloaded it from an HDTV rip and burned it to DVD. 42 minutes long now and no commercials – just because my local affiliate wouldn’t broadcast it.

And the television industry considers this an illegal act. An over the air television show, currently stored on my TiVo, and I can’t go download a copy and watch it on my TV. I purchased Lost Season One on DVD a week and a half ago. I’ll spend money where it’s deserved, for a quality and innovative program like Lost.

But yet, god forbid you miss one show in a series, you are not supposed to download them. What if it’s a show like Lost, Alias or 24 where you miss one episode and it can seriously set you back in understanding the plot?

The TV industry needs to get with the times then and offer a technological solution if they want to make this illegal. They should be ashamed of themselves for being the Luddites they are. Sony Betamax vs. Universal was settled over 20 years ago and yet here is history repeating itself.

Last.fm Follow-Up

I signed up for an account at Last.fm and downloaded and installed the XMMS plug-in. (I manually downloaded the plugin from their site, and then thought to check Synaptic. Sure enough, it was in the Ubuntu repository!)

It’s pretty cool so far – after listening to only two or three different artists it already had Weezer at the top of the recommended list for me, and I’m a huge Weezer fan. It will be really interesting to see it when it really kicks in with other users in addition to just figuring out my listening habits.

If you’re really curious about my musical tastes, you can see my Last.fm user page here.

Last.fm

I’m very intrigued by Last.fm, formerly Audioscrobbler.

Download a plugin for your favorite music player (Linux players included!) and start listening to music. From there Last.fm will start recommending music to you based on what you and others listened to that’s similar.

I can’t do justice to explaining it, so go read the FAQ. I’m very intrigued in Last.fm as a way to get introduced to more music, but not sold on using XMMS as my music player as I love Muine and am starting to test Banshee.

But I love the concept of Last.fm. Social networking tools own me.

Ubuntu Blog

I was taking a peek at WordPress.com (more on that in a minute) and it showed one of the top hosted blogs there is the Ubuntu weblog.

It already has some nice tips and tricks posted (like the bash command append). I’ll definitely be adding that to my blogroll.

WordPress.com is similar to Movable Type – hosted blog solution for users who don’t want or have a server to host their own blog on.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Update

I had mentioned in my Colony 4 upgrade post some of the problems I was having. It turns out the icons weren’t appearing because I had a custom theme chosen. Choosing Clearlooks set everything right again, though Ubuntu seems to have changed the Tomboy icons in the panel and in the Applications menu.

Doing an apt-get upgrade after getting home from traveling resulted in 24 hours of panic. Upon upgrading, my networking stopped working. It seems I wasn’t the only one with this problem, but thankfully one of the posters in that thread mentioned how the upgrade seemed to have stopped half way through. Going to a terminal and doing another apt-get upgrade and a reboot fixed the problem, thank god.

Overall, I’m still very happy with Breezy Badger. I’m waiting for the X.org packages to get a bit more stable as it seems I upgrade them almost daily and then I’ll get my monitor and ATI drivers working properly.

Just a few weeks from Breezy Badger going final!

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Colony 4 Upgrade

I upgraded my main computer with Ubuntu’s Hoary Hedgehog release from May ’04 to the latest version of testing (Colony 4) Tuesday night. I wanted to perform the upgrade with the release of GNOME 2.12 Wed., and Breezy Badger about a month out.

I used apt-get to perform the install, and considering it’s not even to preview version, some things went right and some things went wrong.

The Good:

  • Updated my /etc/apt/sources.list and replaced all instances of “Hoary” with “Breezy”

  • It took about 20 minutes to install and upgrade, had a few instances where I had to force (-f) the packages

The Bad:

  • ATI binary drivers aren’t in Breezy yet

  • My xorg.conf file is pretty messed up. My original Hoary xorg.conf included the actual scan lines for my Dell 2405 monitor. I ran through the manual setup script and removed one bad resolution (1920 x 1440) and am using DRI to draw the desktop. At least I get to the desktop to that way, though I currently have no 3d acceleration.

The Ugly:

  • My icons are pretty messed up – I’ll post a screenshot tonight. Including icons on the panel (Tomboy specifically) and on the desktop.

  • I keep my desktop clean of icons, with the exception of my Samba and SSH links to my remote servers. Those icons are messed up, as is Nautilus, including the new spatial tree view.

Overall, GNOME still feels snappy, even in DRI mode, and I’m fairly excited about some of the new features, especially the spatial tree view in Nautilus.

Bandwidth Oops

After all the problems I’ve had getting my Vonage up and running to interact properly with my TiVo, I thought I had it totally fixed.

Yet all last week, I had horrible latency on my network, that was resulting in long pauses when on the phone, and then my web browsing became very, very slow. Not quite dial-up quality, but definitely not broadband. It was very frustrating, especially as I needed to get some stuff fixed on Apatheia.org.

Friday I brought home a different router to see if that would work. First I upgraded the firmware on my current router, and then went to check a website on my 2nd machine that does all my email and IM that I don’t use a lot for web browsing.

Wait – what’s that in the bottom corner of the screen below Firefox? Sure enough, it was a Bittorrent client I had open from the previous Saturday downloading OpenSuse. It had started really, really slow – 1 – 2k download. But it had definitely finished strong as it was now uploading at 40k / second – using all of my available 384k upload speed. Turn that off, and voila – all my latency problems fixed.

Whoops.