Skip to content

Blog

  • in General
  • 1 min read

How-To Shave Your Head

Courtesy of Headshaver.org.

2 and a half years ago I debuted my new haircut, when I just had the stylist use the clippers on one all the way around. I’ve stuck with that since then, though I’ve gone no guard for the last few haircuts.

That haircut debuted right before a LAN party in Chicago 2 years ago sponsored by BFG. Their third annual one is next weekend, and in honor of that, I took the dive I’ve been talking about for the last year, and actually shaved my head.

We shall see what the reactions are this time.

Ubuntu changes GNOME Taskbar

This week’s updates to the upcoming Breezy Badger release contain an “uh-oh”. The Ubuntu team has changed some of the default GNOME artwork, specifically replacing the GNOME foot with an Ubuntu logo.

Old Ubuntu taskbar:

Old Ubuntu Desktop Taskbar

New Ubuntu taskbar:

Old Ubuntu Desktop Taskbar

I can’t say I’m very happy about it. Sure, it’s extremely minor. But one of the things I love about Ubuntu is how close they’ve stayed to GNOME. Re-branding bits of it I can see, but I struggle with this one. The taskbar, to me, feels like it should be off limits.

This Week in Music

A few new releases came out this week I just had to pickup:

I enjoyed Fiona’s first release, what, 10 years ago? Her second was good, but not as good. I’m looking forward to this after all the press about Fiona over the last two years. (Free Fiona!)

I’m a huge Liz Phair – have been since Exile in Guyville and have bought everything she’s done. 2003’s self-titled album was a bit of a shock as she transitioned to pop, and Somebody’s Miracle is in the same vein. Listened to the album almost twice now, and while her last album had 3 or 4 songs that popped at me right away, so far the new one only has one, which is her current release, Everything to Me, which is catchy as hell.

Public Enemy’s newest album in quite some time, New Whirl Order, was another must have. Other than the Beastie Boys, they’re the only rap group I’ve ever really, really gotten in to. I picked up their greatest hits disc a month or so back, and that was phenomenal. I’m looking forward to New Whirl Order.

Spam Karma 2

I continue to be impressed with Spam Karma 2 for WordPress since I installed in a couple weeks ago.

I was getting about 50 spam comments a day in the blog, and Spam Karma 2 has cut that down to nothing. Zero. Zilch. I think I’ve had to moderate 3 comments so far it wasn’t sure of (which were spam), but that’s nothing compared to the daily maintenance hell I used to go through in deleting comments.

Kudos to the developers.

The Minnewiki

Minnesota Public Radio has launched the Minnewiki, a Wiki page dedicated to the music scene past and present in Minnesota.

Users have the opportunity to add to the articles on the Minnewiki, discussing musical acts, venues and the various musical history of Minnesota.

As with any Wiki, some pages are more comprehensive, but it’s off to a nice start.

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.

Toyota Sienna



DSC00191, originally uploaded by silwenae.

I officially feel old – we bought a 2005 Toyota Sienna minivan Saturday.

With the baby on the way, that will make 3, and 3 kids do not sit comfortably in a row in the back of my 2000 Ford Explorer, which we traded in.

We bought the XLE Sienna, which has a bunch of features, including heated leather seats, JBL sound system, power everything, and worst of all, some minor woodgrain in the center panel and on the inside front doors. Not too much thank god, but we bought the car sight unseen, as they were quickly running out of 2005s, and it was one of the few left in the state with the features we wanted. It’s nice enough, and drives nice.

But I miss my explorer, and now have to drive my wife’s 2001 Ford Escape while she drives the minivan. She’s about as excited to drive the Sienna as I am the Escape.

Obligatory Escape photo:

DSC00193

  • in Politics
  • 1 min read

Entrepeneur or Scam Artist?

The Star Tribune has a story up about E. Adam Web, a man who scans city ordinances around signs and billboards and petitions cities to put up huge billboards, up to 672 feet high. When the city declines the request, he goes after them in court pointing out that the local ordinances are so confusing and outdated that a homeowner couldn’t even put up a “Go Vikings” sign in their own yard.

This causes the entire ordinance to be struck down, and he gets his sign – which he then turns around and flips at a huge profit to someone who wants that advertising.

Mr. Webb claims he’s never lost a case yet out 110 completed or pending cases.

So the business model looks like:

  1. Find confusing city signage laws

  2. Request a huge sign

  3. Sue the city

  4. Profit!

This is the American legal system at work.

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

  • in General
  • 1 min read

High Resolution Wallpapers

Via WeblogTools Collection at WordPress Planet:

Here is a collection of high resolution wallpapers for folks with very normal to very large monitors. With resolutions of up to 2560×1600, including my default resolution of 1920×1200 (which can be very hard to find wallpapers for without streteching) the collections include a lot of high-res photo’s, as well as a few abstract art pieces.

I downloaded a couple and am currently using Feathers. Pretty.