Linuxlore

Isn’t Facebook a wonderful thing? When I first signed up I wasn’t entirely convinced it was really worth the effort, after all I’m not really that into the ’social networking’ thing. After a few visits the site code behind it showed itself to be a bit on the unpredictable side with some very strange actions when navigating around it, which left me less than enthusiastic. That said, I get some very odd behaviour on eBay too. Both sites will insist that I download the php or cgi instead of actually executing it every now and then.

Still, Facebook is proving that it isn’t the quality of the code that is important, but that it’s all about who uses the site. Back in late November I, for some reason, got the urge to set up a few groups on Facebook to see who dropped by. One in particular has taken off, and that is the Polydrama one. For those that read this and don’t know, Polydrama was the drama group from the days when it was Portsmouth Polytechnic and not a University. Yes, this geek has other leanings too

So the main purpose of this post is to try and get a decent placing in Google for Polydrama, with a reference to Facebook and see who else can be found from the dim, distant and no doubt embarrassing past! If you don’t want to join Facebook, drop me a line directly to find out what’s happening.

As an aside, it is interesting to see that Facebook has managed something that Friends Reunited failed to do. I assume that there are those keen to track down old friends and willing to invest in doing so, who found Friends Reunited a good vehicle, whereas others find the free nature of Facebook suites the initial idle curiosity that then snowballs… or maybe it’s just a matter of timing

Now what I need to do is dig through the boxes of old photos and get to work with the scanner. I think I’ve got a video somewhere too, so more stuff to try transferring onto DVD!

I have to be honest and state up front that I haven’t yet given Windows Vista a serious workout, so Microsoft may have actually produced a system that properly manages multiple users and multitasks sensibly. As of Windows XP patched up to date they haven’t managed it though. Let’s look at a few of examples of things that still niggle me on a daily basis when using XP.

1. First off let’s start with something simple. Whatever a window on the screen is doing you should be able to move it around so you can get it out of the way if necessary. Well sadly Windows XP still cannot manage this properly. You will frequently find that when a Windows pops up another window for a sub task of the parent window will be locked in place, unable to move until the task has finished. Perhaps the most annoying example of locking a window in place is the Winzip self extractor. If you happen to be unzipping a large file using this and click on it to drag it somewhere out of the way it asks you if you want to ‘Abort unzip operation?’.
2. Next let’s look at drivers, specifically a wireless networking driver from USR. Now unfortunately the driver in question, and other wireless networking drivers I’ve tried on Windows, run under a user account and not as a service. Presumably this is to allow the security information to be secured, but in practice it can cause problems in a multi user system. In this case the problem is if a non-privileged user logs on the networking will not work, so you are forced to give at least some administrative privileges to the user, thereby reducing the security of the system. Either that or you have to log on as an administrator to start the networking each time the system is used
3. Lastly a quick look at internal messaging. I have a wireless print server from 3Com that has one of my printers attached to it. When it there is a problem with it things can get a bit confusing, and the first few times I had problems it took me a while to work out what was going on. Basically if there is a message to pop up to tell you about an error, usually the fact that the server is not responding for some reason (often I’ve forgotten to switch it on!), you don’t always see it. The reason for this, I’ve found out, is that the pop up message will appear on whichever user desktop logged onto the machine first, and not necessarily the one that sent the print job. I spent a good while trying to debug why a print job wasn’t printing before I stumbled across the reason by switching to the user account that had the message popped up on the desktop!

Now clearly there will be those that consider that these problems are down to the individual applications or drivers and nothing to do with Windows itself. The fact remains, though, that there are many such badly written applications, so at least some of the blame has to lay at the feet of Microsoft. I’ve not covered applications that don’t seem to be able to decide which screen to use
when using multiple monitors, or the nightmare of windows sitting underneath the taskbar if you dare to put it at the top of the screen! There must be something inherent in Windows programming that encourages these errors. Some of it is probably the way it has grown up from DOS and is based on a system that had no concept of networks, users or even a GUI. There is a lot of Windows legacy holding it back. That said, Linux, BSD, Unix, etc. have managed to evolve better, to my mind anyway, all be it they had a much more solid foundation on which to build.

OK, so that should be catch 22, but this is a Windows 98 problem so…

So the starting point is that I have a machine that I am reinstalling Windows 98 onto. That’s a bad start already, even if you ignore the fact that it is Windows Anyway, the machine is not currently networked, it’s safer that way, so anything I need to get onto the machine in terms of drivers is heading across from my Linux box on a USB key. So far so good. Until we get to the graphics driver that is. The card in question is an old ATI Rage 128, and I tracked down the driver and transferred it onto the machine ready to install. Unfortunately the install required DirectX. I don’t since the machine is only an office machine to do a bit of word processing on and run some old DOS and Windows accounting software on.

Read the rest…

Right, all has been thoroughly tested and bedded in on my test server. All content has been migrated from my old Blosxom installation to my new Wordpress one. I’ve even had the chance to take it through an upgrade before going live

I’ve spent quite a bit of time mapping out the links in the old Blosxom setup to put together a set of Apache mod_rewrite rules to map the content across. Partly this will manage any Google search matches into the correct place following the migration, but since I don’t see this as a high traffic site attracting tons of interest it was mainly an exercise how closely I could match the content across in as few rules as possible. It’s amazing what some people will do for fun!

So far I’ve been very impressed with Wordpress, well, so much so that I’ve put a good chunk of work into migrating across and will probably be looking to migrate another site across. The other site is not a blog as such, so this will be another interesting exercise. This time testing the flexibility of Wordpress

So now it is time to upload the database and web directory to my main web server, and as the post title says, here goes nothing…