Blog, Ubu, Blog! Good Doggy. (Ruff!)

So apparently I'm a dedicated blogger. Why is that? Cuz a quiz told me so!

"You are a dedicated weblogger. You post frequently because you enjoy weblogging a lot, yet you still manage to have a social life. You're the best kind of weblogger. Way to go!"

LOL!!! That cracks me up. It's too bad that the quiz doesn't ask what I do when I'm not blogging, as 80% of my remaining time is spent on the computer making web sites, reading blogs, emailing, surfing, playing Ultima Online, chatting... that "social life" thing? Hmmm I'll have to work on that :)

Take the quiz yourself over at http://wannabe.catharsis.org/bin/quiz.cgi?quiz=one
Not a whole lot else new here! Just downloaded a bunch of new Firefox extensions. Man do I love Mozilla Firefox! And I'm glad to see it doing so well. They'd hoped to hit a million downloads of Preview Release 1.0 within a week and, what was it - 100 hours or something? Fantastic. Love it love it love it.

Haven't tried Firefox yet? GO GET U SOME!

I came across an article at NewsForge.com today about Mozilla's trouncing of IE, and how web developers who chose to write code only for Internet Explorer are now scrambling to make their sites compatible with other browsers now that IE is taking a massive downslide in the market. Tsk tsk - they should have stuck to the W3C standards in the first place!!!! I harp on the issue of web standards like a broken record to my students (I teach a couple web programming classes), and I'm sure they tire of hearing me up on my soapbox - but I'm glad to see I'm not alone! If you've got that web standards soapbox-climbing tendency in you, go check out this article. It's a good read (if only to pat yourself on the back and purr about how much you love Mozilla!)
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/17/1436256

That's it for me today... oh and by the way, I busted out of my online poker account. I'm taking this time to do some studying of the game and the err of my ways. Though I think the err of my ways has a lot to do with the fact that when playing el-cheapo games, you get el-cheapo no-foldem-holdem players who play inappropriate starting hands, call down crap and catch, and chase goofy draws. The err of my ways is not having enough money to play in the more expensive higher level games, where the real card players play. My broke arse will be not playing online anytime soon....

But my birthday is coming up soon, so donations to my poker stake are welcome! LOL :)

Purple Penguins Rule!

After what seems like an eternity (in reality, about 3 weeks) I've finished up my new web site for my freelance web development work. Check it out over at www.PurplePenguins.com. The coolest thing I've found lately is Cafe Press - they make stuff for you with your images or logos (like T-shirts and coffee mugs), and you pay nothing up front. When someone orders something, Cafe Press takes the base price, and you get to keep the profit (which you determine yourself - you set the retail prices on everything). Pretty cool. My Purple Penguins store is up at www.cafepress.com/purplepenguins.

Pretty cool stuff. I'm excited to get the site out there!

Poker or Bust

How about a non-techie post on this here blog? My description does mention life, love, and the pursuit of happiness, after all. Well... you may or may not know that I'm a blog junkie. Or - more specifically, an RSS feed junkie. I use Bloglines.com to manage my feeds, and visit the site constantly to read up on all of my blog and news feeds. I have many categories... tech, hardware, web design, web programming, linux, general news... I spend a couple hours a day reading all about those things on the web. It's kind of how I get my news.

This morning I came to realize that there are probably blogs about poker out there! (Duh!) I like to play poker. Particularly, Texas hold'em and Omaha (hi). I like to play the random weekend home games. I like to play tourneys. I like to play online. I just like to play. So I started searching the web for some poker blogs, and sure enough, got sucked into a few good ones (coincidentally written by girls). Someday when I move off of Blogspot here to my own domain with a better blog manager, I'll organize things into nice categories and post more about poker, but for now, here's a story.

For the first time since I started playing online (6 or 7 months ago, maybe? I learned to play poker less than a year ago, thank to my wonderful boyfriend Randy, who has no idea how much I look up to him and admire his poker game), I'm about to go bust. Granted, I only invested $50, but playing el-cheapo games, I had grown it up around $300 for a while. So I suppose that having my $50 last me half a year, I only spent $10 a month or so for the hours and hours of entertainment. But, I think it's my ego that is hurting!! I did double my money today (wooooo I'm back up to $15!) and it'll be a rough comeback, but I am determined not to put any more cash into it, and to build back up from what I've got. I prefer to save my cash for live games. One of these days I may even get the guts to play in a casino tournament.

Any other poker players out there?

Migrating from KMail to Mozilla Thunderbird

Last night, I migrated my email and calendar from KDE's KMail to Mozilla's Thunderbird. While it wasn't the most intuitive process, it was simple once I figured it out, and everything transferred over smoothly.

Why did I want to make the change, after the pain-in-the-butt migration a month or so ago from Evolution to Kontact? Well.... it's all about features. I really like how Thunderbird organizes email, separating it by account. I use several addresses, and it's much easier to send mail from different addresses and manage incoming mail from different addresses in TBird than in KMail.

First of all, here are the links:
Mozilla Calendar Project: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Mozilla Thunderbird Email: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

First, the email migration. There's a little bit of work to be done in KMail to prepare for the move. First, you have to make sure that your email is stored in mbox format. Find this under Settings - Configure KMail - Misc. The line is: "By default, message folders on disk are:" Choose the dropdown for "flat files ("mbox format")"." Now, if your messages are already set up to use mbox format, you've got a bit less work to do. Mine weren't, and sadly, simply changing that dropdown does not convert your existing message folders. But, it will then create any new folders with the mbox format.

If your folders are already in mbox format, skip to the next paragraph. Otherwise, hang here! What I found to be the easiest way to do this was to create new folders for any folder I wanted to move over. So, I created them with the same name and added the number 2, like: Yahoo became Yahoo2, and so forth. Then I copied all messages from each folder into the new "2" folder. (If you plan to totally ditch KMail, you can move the messages to the new folders - I chose to copy, and then go back and delete the "2" folders when I was finished, just in case I go back to KMail. Now you should have a "2" version of every folder you want to migrate, each containing the email messages you want to move. (If you don't use subfolders to organize your mail, it's a much easier task - just copy all of your email into one new folder).

Now it's time to copy your mbox files from KMail to Thunderbird. By default, your local mail folders in Tbird are stored in your home directory. Mine were here:
/home/shelly/.thunderbird/default.r25/Mail/Local Folders

Your KMail mbox files should be in your home directory as well - mine were here:
/home/shelly/.Mail/

Copy the mbox files for the new email folders you created in KMail from your .Mail directory to your Tbird Local Folders directory. (Make sure Thunderbird is not running at the time). Now, open up Tbird, and you should see all of your mail folders listed under "Local Folders" in the left-hand navigation tree. Sweet! Feel free to move your messages around, rename folders, and organize to your heart's content.

If you'd like to move your address book over, simply export your address book from Kontact via File - Export - LDIF, save that file, and then import that file into Thunderbird via Address Book - Tools - Import.

And that's it! :)

Killing a Crashing App

Coming from the Windoze world, the solution to killing a crashing app (if it hasn't already hosed the operating system itself) is to reboot the machine. In the Linux world, it is not so. But - if rebooting is not necessary, what is the trick??

My SuperKaramba app crashed yesterday, causing an ugly blank square on my desktop where my Liquid Weather theme had been sitting. I wanted to kill the crashing SuperKaramba and restart it.

First, I ran the command:
ps ax

to view the currently running processes on my system. Then, I scrolled through the list to find SuperKaramba and made a note of its process ID (pid).

Then, I killed it with:
kill -9 pid

like,
kill -9 1234

Bye bye SuperKaramba! I restarted it and all is well.

Bringing up USB devices

Today's tidbit... bringing up USB devices. I had booted up my machine and did not realize that my USB printer was not plugged in. I did not want to reboot just to print, but for the life of me couldn't find a way to "start" my printer. This did the trick - from the command line:

modprobe usbcore

My printer was detected as idle, and I could print. If there are other ways to get a USB device detected post-bootup, please post a comment and let me know :)

Hard Drive Crash... Maybe

What a fiasco this weekend has been - I have to go back to work tomorrow, and have tons of stuff I need to do on the computer, and of course - it's time for a crash. My brand new Maxtor 250gb drive started clicking and locking up on me the other day, and to my dismay failed all diagnostic tests. So, I started rebooting, dragging off data, rebooting, backing up... Randomly the drive wouldn't even be detected in my BIOS. Then, as the drive locked up sooner and sooner, BOTH of my hard drives stopped detecting in the BIOS. Hmmm... IDE controller gone bad? Flaky ribbon cable? Power issue? I unplugged 2 of the extra fans in my case, which were coincidentally plugged in via the same power chain as the hard drives. I haven't locked up since, and the drive passed the Maxtor PowerMax diagnostic after being disconnected from the fans. Not sure if it's the fans themselves causing the problem, or if I just need a new/more powerful power supply (likely the case - I have a lot of stuff in this system sucking power).

The drive is under warranty till November, so I'm going to keep my eye on it, but hopefully I've found the problem without doing actual damage to the drive. Sadly I'll probably have to wipe it out and do a low level format on it anyway, assuming the power glitches caused some bad sectors, but I'll look into that another day. For now I'm just glad my computer is running so I can get some work done!

Autostart Apps in KDE

Hi all -

Today, I finally got SuperKaramba working, and with that, the Liquid Weather theme (the whole reason I wanted SK in the first place!) I'm a weather junkie, what can I say.

Anyhoooo I learned how to make applications auto-run in KDE today (similar to putting things in the "startup" folder in Windows). There are probably multiple ways to do this, but here's what worked for me. My example - configuring SuperKaramba and the Liquid Weather theme to run automatically at startup.


1. Create a file in the .kde/Autostart directory in your home directory (/home/whoeveruare/.kde/Autostart). I called mine start_karamba.

2. Paste the following script into that file. Change paths to match your system's configuration.

#!/bin/sh
KARAMBA_PATH=/usr/local/kde/bin/superkaramba #path to the superkaramba program
THEME=/usr/local/kde/themes/liquid_weather_plus/liquid_weather.theme #path to the theme file

$KARAMBA_PATH $THEME


3. Save file.

4. Make the file executable. Such as:
chmod +x start_karamba

5. Test it out by executing your script from the command line, or just log out of your kde session and log back in. (You may want to close liquid weather/superkaramba if it's running before logging out, to be sure you aren't just reloading your previous session).

Another thing to note - if you've just started using liquid weather, your user configuration changes (like your city) will not "stick" unless you either close the theme or reload the theme. That's when the config file is actually written. So, if you haven't already at least once closed or reloaded the weather theme, liquid weather will restart with the default options. reload the theme once after you've configured it with your city (right-click on the weather panel and choose configure theme, reload) to be sure you've saved your settings.

Now I've got the weather forecast on my desktop - hoooraah!

Running Windoze apps in Linux

I love VMWare!!! I've got VMWare Workstation (4.51 I think it is?), and finally got around to installing it. I set up Windows 2000 Pro as a virtual machine on my Linux box (didn't feel like messing around with XP's activation process, AGAIN). So far it's running everything I've thrown at it just fine.

One little tidbit of a hassle I had - I had enabled "legacy emulation" for my CDROM drives when first setting it up, in the process of trying to troubleshoot another issue (my CD was dirty so it wasn't booting from CD for installation). When I finally got Windows up and running in VMWare, I found that I couldn't install some programs from CD (namely, anything that didn't have auto-run enabled - anything I had to double-click the executable to start). That bummed me out - until I realized that un-checking the "legacy emulation" setting on the CDROM drive made everything work snazzy again.

I'm doing what I hope is my last round of Windows Update... reboot... Windows Update... reboot (UGH!!!) and then I'll be attempting to install Ultima Online. If it works, I will officially have everything I need running my Linux box. Then I'll have the joy of figuring out how to wipe my original XP install, re-configure lilo to only boot Mandy, and use that 80gb drive for more stuff woohooo!

All hail VMWare!

Opening email links with Mozilla

Mozilla under Linux has a bug that has been driving me crazy. When I have my browser running, and try to open a URL link from an email message, I get a dialog box from Mozilla asking me to choose a profile to use. When I choose one, it throws an error that the profile is already in use, and I cannot load the browser. I found that this is due to a session locking feature in Mozilla. There's a lock file you can delete to allow the browser to run, but it'll only run once, as the lock file is recreated when you open the browser the second time.

This has been quite annoying, as it means I either can't open URL's from email messages, OR I must close my browser completely before attempting to click on an email URL. And that sucks!

In my research, I finally found a couple workarounds involving scripts that check and see if mozilla is already running, and if so, just open the URL in a new window in the current session. If it's not already running, it just opens normally.

Check out this link on linuxquestions.org - there are several scripts. I got smither's script to work fine under Mozilla 1.7 and Mandrake 10.

Mozilla thread at linuxquestions.org

Screenshots in KDE

Today's little Linux tidbit... I'm a big fan of screenshots. You know, taking a snapshot of your computer screen and saving it as an image file. I use them in my teaching handouts, to save photo scrapbooks of the online game I play (Ultima Online), lots of stuff. In Windows, taking screenshots is easy - hit the PrintScreen key (or Alt-PrintScreen to capture only the current active window). Or you can use a fancy prog like Snag-It ($$$$). But how do you take screenshots in Linux?

Well, if you're running KDE, there's a neat little program (and it's free!) called Ksnapshot. I found it under my main menu, under Multimedia - Graphics.
Good stuff!

Gosh I love Linux!

Back From Hawaii

Hi all -

I'm back from Hawaii and put up some pics:
http://photos.yahoo.com/s_hokanson

Got a tattoo while I was there - it's tattoo #4, of a goldfish. I got it for my dad, who passed away almost 5 years ago. He was a fisherman, but there was no way I was going to put a bass on my body! (His favorite fish). So I settled on a cute goldfish, on my lower back. I'll post a pic later on, when I get it off my laptop.

Aloha! :)

Going to Hawaii...

Yeah baby - I'm going to Hawaii :) I will be away from my newly beloved Linux box for the next 10 days, enjoying the ocean breezes of Honolulu. We're staying on Waikiki Beach (I think?) - rented a Mustang Convertible to tool around in (we're cool now!) I'm leaving tomorrow morning, and don't expect to have any updates till I get back. I'll have my new laptop with me, and after another 10 days on Windows I'm sure I'll have plenty of ranting to do when I get home. So, have a great week, everybody! I will :) WoohoooO!

Configuring Auto-Eject

Many thanks to Ellyaht over at LinuxQuestions.org for the answer to this question that has been baffling me!

I'm using Mandrake 10, and I was configuring my RPM media sources using the easy-urpmi web site. In the process, I accidentally wiped out my previously configured media - the original Mandrake install CD's. I was able to add them back in manually through the Software Media Manager in MDK's config area, but when I ran an update or an install, and a CD was needed, instead of informing me to insert the CD and auto-ejecting my CD drive tray, the installer would fail saying it couldn't read from the media.

The mission: make auto eject work again!

The solution: Edit the media sources for the CD's, and instead of pointing them to:

file://mnt/cdrom (etc - path to RPM's)

point them to:

removable://mnt/cdrom (etc - path to RPM's)

Rock on! Life is good...

Saturday's Tip of the Day

Here's a useful tidbit I learned today. I decided to move my mail/calendar over to KDE's Kontact, as I was having way too many problems with crashing and irregularities in Ximian's Evolution organizer. What I noticed though was that in Kontact, when I clicked a hyperlink in an email message, it would open it in the Konquerer browser. I would prefer Mozilla - so, today's tip is how to change your default applications and file associations in KDE. (I'm using Mandrake 10 with KDE 3.2).

From the application menu, click System - Configuration - KDE - Components - File Associations. Expand the tree under "text" to display text-type files, and highlight "html." You should now see on the right side of the window which programs you have installed to handle html files, and what order of preference they are in. Move the programs up and down in the list until your "most preferred" program is first in the list (at the top), and your least preferred program is last on the list (at the bottom).

Tada! Now my links are again opening in Mozilla. (Now if only the Mozilla people would fix the profile bug that is driving me mad!)

Networking Linux and Windows

Who'da thought it would be so easy??

So, this afternoon I settled in for what I thought would be the biggest struggle of all times. My goal: set up a network between my Linux box and the new XP laptop, so I could access all of the files on the old XP drive on the Linux box. (Eventually I'll probably wipe XP off the desktop system completely and use the laptop as my Windows machine.... I need somewhere to play Ultima Online and poker, right?!)

So, I used the Mandrake GUI package manager to install samba. That went a-ok. But where to go from there? Documentation on the web seems spotty at best, which surprised me considering I would think samba configuration is a big topic. I grabbed my O'Reilly "Running Linux" book, and that helped to fill in the blanks. I also got good mileage from this web site:
http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/samba/install.html

My laptop and Linux box both connect wirelessly to a WAP in my basement (where the cable modem comes in). My third computer in the basement (an old Win2000 machine) is connected to the WAP (which has a built-in 4 port switch) via a CAT5 cable.

On Mandrake 10, I found my samba configuration files to be in: /etc/samba
This differed from where the book thought they'd be.

Anyhoo, I edited smb.conf with the basics - making sure to put the right workgroup name in there - and set up some data shares. Be careful to put the right path to each share - typing the wrong path will end up giving you a login error when you try to access the share from your Windows box.

Here's an example of what my shares look like:

[Shelly]
comment = /home/Shelly
path = /home/Shelly
public = yes
guest ok = yes
browseable = yes
writeable = yes

After configuring the file, I started up samba with: /usr/sbin/samba start
It also accepts stop and restart as options. I didn't have to worry about making a script to auto-start, as samba is already set to start automatically in my init.d file.

Moment of truth! I fired up the laptop, changed the workgroup name to match what I'd configured in smb.conf, and went to My Network Places. (Why oh why couldn't they just keep the name "Network Neighborhood"?? MNP drives me nuts - I don't know why. Too cheesy sounding, maybe?)

Voila! I saw all of the shares I'd set up, and my printer. I was able to browse them with no problems, and copy/write files to and from them. Woohoo!

Consider me networked :)

Got a New Laptop

Wahooo! I finally bought a laptop :) It's only been like 3 years that I've been waffling over the decision. Now that I have had opportunity to travel and have the need for it, and have also realized that it would make my life a zillion times easier at work to be able to bring my laptop from class to class instead of emailing myself files to work/to home/to the classrooms, I took the plunge. (Really, I bought it because I'm going to Hawaii in 6 days and must guarantee connectivity. Why? Oh, no reason. I just can't stand to be away from my computer!)

I bought a Toshiba A75-S206 system. $1399 with 12 months free financing at Circuit City. (It's the same price everywhere I checked, but Best Buy had only 6 months free financing).

The specs:

Pentium 4 2.80 gHz processor
512mb ram
60gb hdd
128mb ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 graphics
Built-in wi-fi 802.11 b/g
Win XP Home (I'd like Pro, but Home will do for now)

I love it love it love it!

I get about 3 hours of battery life under "normal" usage (browsing the web, email, word processing, basic stuff). When I'm doing a lot with the CD drive, it seems to suck power quicker.

I picked up a Logitech cordless optical notebook mouse for it, and I'm digging that too. It's got the tiny USB stick for a wireless receiver, and the mouse is big enough where I don't feel like it's a pebble in my hand. (Why on earth do they make notebook mice so tiny??) It's a nice size - small enough to pack away easily but big enough to be comfortable. It plays nice with my other wireless mouse too - I have the laptop on my desk here in front of me, and the desktop system monitor just behind that. So my Linux system and WinXP system have side-by-side wireless mice, and no conflicts. Hoorah for that!

Anyway that's my big news for today...

RPM's and Circular Dependencies

A little tidbit I picked up today... has to do with that familiar yet undesirable place in the psyche called "rpm hell" in the Linux world.

Ever tried installing a software package with RPM, only to find that it has a dependency on package #2? So you try installing package #2, and it fails because it depends on package #1? So neither package installs, because they keep running in a big dependency circle!

What to do, what to do?!

You can install BOTH applications at the same time by including them both in one RPM command. Like:

rpm -ivh package1.rpm package2.rpm

Well, how about that! Neither one should complain now, and the flames of your rpm hell have been doused and extinguished (at least for the moment).

Tuesday's Tips

Some things I learned today in Linux...

- Hiding application buttons in the taskbar from other desktops:

In KDE, I wanted to use the multiple desktop feature to reduce clutter as I'm working on my machine. I had worked on a Linux box recently where each desktop had its own open program icons on the taskbar. But in my Mandrake 10 KDE installation, this wasn't happening. I could send applications to another desktop, but I still saw them on my taskbar. Sure enough, there's a way to change that!

Right-click on the taskbar and choose "configure panel." From that configuration window, choose "taskbar" on the left, then un-check the box that says "show windows from all desktops."

Done! Ahhh... nice organized uncluttered interface...

- Keyboard shortcut for switching between desktops: CTRL-SHIFT-Tab

- Keyboard shortcut for walking through the list of desktops: CTRL-Tab

Until Next Time....

Free Linux CD's from Novell

Found a great link over at KevinRose.com - Novell is giving away some free Linux stuff in exchange for filling out a little survey (I mean, little - less than a page long).

You get:

- SUSE LINUX Standard Server 8.0 (ISO Installation Images)
- SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional (Bootable Installation DVD)
- Ximian Desktop 2.0 Evaluation (ISO Image)
- Ximian Red Carpet 2.0.2 Evaluation (ISO Image)
- Novell Linux Services 1.0 (ISO Image & NLS Companion CD)
- Novell GroupWise for Linux 6.5.1 - Server, Client & Messenger
- and more...

Go get U some!