Sid Boswell – Page 8

Virtual Hosts

On August 3, 2008

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In an effort to clean up my URLs for my personal Web site as well as the wiki I have been running, I decided to add virtual hosting to my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) box. The most difficult and time consuming part of it was keeping what I was doing straight. I was frustrated as hell with it until I realized that I had to continualy clear my cache of my Firefox broswer when I wanted to test a new setting in the /etc/apache2/sites-available directory.
The process included:

enabling the virtual hosting module (a2enmod vhost_alias)
creating virtual host config files in /etc/apache2/sites-available
enabling the new virtual sites (a2ensite sitename)
restarting apache (apache2ctl restart)

iWeb to WordPress

By Sid Boswell

On August 3, 2008

In Blog, Linux

Wordpress

So, I decided that I would move my blog from iWeb to WordPress. One of the reasons I decided to do this is it will give me the capability of hosting more blogs and even doing content based blogging. I also was dumping my iWeb folder onto my Ubuntu box and therefore didn’t have the ability to allow comments on my blog. I will still keep my personal Web site based on iWeb (at least for now), and will work on integrating them together if at all possible.
I installed WordPress on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) installation. I initially used the package from the ubuntu repositories (apt-get) but after my initial spin, I decided to go with the most recent tarball from WordPress itself. Installation was a breeze and consisted of:

unpacking the tarball (tar -xvf filename)
changing the ownership of the wordpress directory to allow the Apache user write privileges (chown -R user:group wordpress)
creating a wordpress user and database in phpMyAdmin
browsing to the wordpress directory

Oops…my pictures are gone.

By Sid Boswell

On July 22, 2008

In Blog, Life

Pictures

I just happened to notice that all the photographs on my website were missing.
Apparently this is a known bug in Firefox 3.0+. I don’t advocate it, but use IE or Safari (or Opera or something other than firefox) if you want to see the photos.

Bookstores

By Sid Boswell

On June 29, 2008

In Blog, Life

Bookstore

Over the past few years I’ve been buying a lot of my books online at amazon.com or even on eBay. I’ve also been going to the public library here in Blacksburg which as public libraries go is a pretty decent library. However, when shopping online or even at the library, I tend to pick up books that are challenging reads, and many of them take me a long time to get through. If I bought them, that’s not a problem, however I’ve racked up a few late fees at the library (no more than what it would have cost me to purchase the book outright). I’ve also tended to pick up books that spend a long time on my bedside table as I have been known to start reading something else and at times have had as many as four or five books ongoing at once. An example of these are (all of which I’ve started and will eventually finish):

The Baroque Cycle by Neal Steaphenfon of which I’m about half way through The System of the World
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
April 1865 by Jay Winik

Just blogging around….

By Sid Boswell

On April 12, 2008

In Blog, Life, Linux

Parent's pond in Brunswick

So, I haven’t blogged in a long time. Since the family vacation in Maine I got a job, but that’s probably not the only or even the main reason. I just haven’t thought about it much and never made the time. I’m doing it now as I’m setting up a new server to replace my old Pentium HT that I bought in 2001.
Elvis has been up and running for almost a year and a half and I started thinking about all the energy it has been burning just sitting there responding to the occasional HTTP request. I also happened to have the need for a laptop on a temporary basis so I figured the two would dovetail nicely.
The laptop is a Dell Inspiron D410 subnotebook (Blackcow) that I bought used for a few hundred duckets. It’s more than capable of hosting this site as well as about a half dozen other sites that Elvis has been hosting. Some do get quite a few visits, but not enough to tax the Apache2 webserver nor the MySQL database on which most of the sites (this one not included as it’s an output of Mac OS X iWeb) use.

Family Vacation in Maine

By Sid Boswell

On August 22, 2007

In Blog, Life

Big house

Finally getting around to updating the site. I’ve installed iLife’08 so there may be some different behaviors and I’m getting around to figuring all of those out. I think overall iLife’08 is a nice improvement. iMovie seems a major improvement, but it did take me a bit to get used to the new features and I am a little annoyed at so many missing features that may still be present, but are much harder to find. With that said, I did create a nice youtube video of me cooking a brisket on my new Big Green Egg and it didn’t even take me that long to break down an hour or so of video into a 3 minute youtube. Likewise iPhoto has some major improvements, but I’m still using Aperture for most of my photography. This is my first foray into iWeb and I haven’t noticed too many differences, with the exception to the photo albums, and I’m not sure how they will export to my site (as opposed to .mac, more on that later).

Lazy, good for nothing, beach bum…..

By Sid Boswell

On June 11, 2007

In Blog, Life

Surfer

No, that picture isn’t me nor anyone I know nor is it where I went to the beach. It’s the default picture for this blog template so I figured I’d leave it as it fits with the topic at hand. Sadly, I did take three cameras with me, yet didn’t take a single picture nor video. I was too busy laying on the beach soaking up the sun to be bothered with any other hobbies of mine.
Stacie and I recently spent a week and a half on St. Simons Island for out annual Beachweek. We invited friends (as per usual) and had some show up. We stayed in my extended families’ “historic” beach cottage on St. Simons and we try to make it down every year around Memorial Day (a “historic” beach cottage is a quaint name for an old beach cottage on an island that is rapidly losing it’s character to $M condos). Sadly, this may have been the last of the Boz Beachweeks as the cottage is on the market. However, I said the same thing last year when it was listed then too. Personally, I’d like to have more Boz Beachweeks in the future. If the cottage sells, we may be forced to rent a condo for a week or just quit with the Beachweeks and do a Boz Maineweek up in Boothbay, Maine.

Messing around in Photoshop

By Sid Boswell

On May 15, 2007

In Blog, Life

Color hat

It was hot today. I worked out in the garden until it got too hot to continue. I will take some pictures and post my garden later this summer as it shapes up.
This afternoon I was bored and started playing in Adobe Photoshop. I’ve decided to create a photo album dedicated to Photoshop. I haven’t used it much beyond the standard cropping and some color image adjustment, but I would like to play around in it more and learn some of the cool features. My initial series is just a series of hats (like the one above). I’m not sure what else I want to do, but I’m sure that it will come to me eventually. My thoughts are that if I want to do some fun editing in Photoshop, I first need to start taking pictures that will be fun to edit. I browsed through a lot of my photos and nothing really jumped out at me as something that would be fun to edit and colorize. I do have one from Amsterdam of a bunch of eggs at the market. I started to colorize each egg differently and realized that it just looked like a display of easter eggs, so I ditched my effort.
If you didn’t notice it above, here is the link to the Photoshop album.
More later……

Upgrade made easy …. Ubuntu

By Sid Boswell

On April 20, 2007

In Blog, Linux

Ubuntu Screenshot

I have to admit that the upgrade procedure in Ubuntu is yet another tick in the positive column in regards to the distribution. My install isn’t even a standard install and using the upgrade tool to upgrade from 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) was a breeze.
I’m not sure why Ubuntu chooses to use these strange monikers to refer to releases, as most other linux distributions still use release version numbers. Even Apple still uses (mostly) version numbers (10.4.9) with the exception to the huge releases which are usually major version number changes (i.e. Panther, Tiger (10.4), Leopard (10.5?) (now delayed until June or August due to developers being pulled from OS X and put on iPhone)). I think back to the changes of naming of major releases and I can’t help starting to think about Microsoft and their changes from Windoze 3.1 and 3.11 to using years (95, 98) to using names (me, XP, and of course Vista (and all it’s various flavors). Likewise, we somewhere seem to have lost the use of version numbers in most Microsoft products (Office used to have version numbers, then years (2003), then names (XP (can’t remember which one came first … the banana or the egg)), and I now they are just moving to marketing terms (to try to keep Google and other “software as a service” models from gaining (more) market share) like Office Live (ROFLMAO) and yet they are back to (or continuing to) use years (Office 2007).

Server migration

By Sid Boswell

On April 12, 2007

In Blog, Linux

Ubuntu Logo

I’ve migrated just about everything from my iMac to Elvis (my Ubuntu Linux server running on my old Pentium desktop). If there are any gaping holes in any of my information please let me know (i.e. if there is anything that did not get migrated).
Now that I am (mostly) migrated, I’ll start to play around with some other LAMP based services for fun (forums, blogs, etc.).
I’ll usually post my updates to this blog or the news page on the wiki.

My WordPress Blog

Author: Sid Boswell Page 8 of 9

Virtual Hosts

iWeb to WordPress

Oops…my pictures are gone.

Bookstores

Just blogging around….

Family Vacation in Maine

Lazy, good for nothing, beach bum…..

Messing around in Photoshop

Upgrade made easy …. Ubuntu

Server migration