Archive for February, 2009
Boredom #1
Posted by Ken in Uncategorized on February 23, 2009
Boredom with a license to suck at GIMP produces strange creations. This is one such creation… if only I had a tablet.
The attack
OpenOffice Header Annoyances
Yeah, yeah, I know there’s going to be tons of people who are going to immediately exclaim “You should be using LaTeX instead of OpenOffice!”, but it is not always an option. I try to write some of my papers in LaTeX but often I am unable to as either my teacher wants a slightly modified MLA format which is near impossible to do easily (that i’m aware of such as a separate title page with the included MLA template) or I need to digitally upload the document in Microsoft Word format. Neither of these are exactly ideal scenarios to be using LaTeX and fudging with it hours before a deadline. Another possibility is the teacher will accept nothing out of the ordinary of how Word formats things which is the cause of this current rant: the header.
OpenOffice implements headers in a very different way than Word does relating to margins. Word traditionally has always written its headers inside the top margin where text is not normally printed, which is what my teacher expects to see. OpenOffice, however, does not follow this behavior as it takes the meaning of margins literally. In OpenOffice having a top margin of say 1-inch means that the inserted header will start below that 1-inch mark where one would traditionally type. Many people will argue that OpenOffice actually gets this “right”, but what’s right isn’t helpful when my grade depends on it.
So my problem basically boils down to the following issue of getting OpenOffice to mimic Word’s behavior with respect to headers and margins. I suppose I could set a fixed height for the header field and make the top margin really small to compensate for this, but that seems like a royal pain to do. Thankfully for the time being I’ve not hit any teachers that have really nailed me on the incorrect formatting. I have to say that this is one of the only current issues I have against OpenOffice and I find it a life saver in college otherwise.
Blog Fail and Migration
So earlier today I went to update my now dead Movable Type blog and massive fail ensued. I tried to edit a widget with the web interface and clicked the text box to edit the current widget. The box instantly cleared itself and then autosaved. awesome! I couldn’t find anywhere in my backups of the site where to restore this widget (which was the main home widget) and frankly even if I restored it the editor is still a complete fail in my browser.
So once again, I have migrated back to wordpress and I must say.. it has gotten significantly better. The administration interface finally seems intuitively and cleanly organized to use. The migration was almost completely painless and took even less then 5 minutes. I logged in to my crippled Movable Type blog and exported the posts. Installed wordpress to the server, filled out the database details and then then went to import. From there all what was necessary was to click on Movable Type and upload the exported file on my desktop. Within second my entire site was restored. (more or less…)
I used markdown heavily on Movable Type which didn’t migrate so gracefully as I would have liked. I have installed the plugin for wordpress which seemed to fix some issues but almost all of my old posts have wonk formatting. I’m frankly to lazy to fix it at this point and am just calling it a day in having a working site still. I’m really digging wordpress’s new interface, I’d argue it’s even cleaner than Movable Type’s interface now.
Now I’ve just gotta spend an eternity getting a good theme, updating the blogroll, and adding/fixing pages. Huzzah!
Banshee and the Zen
As some of you may remember from an earlier post I was in pursuit of a new mp3 player. I’m happy to report that a few weeks ago I was gifted a shiny new Creative Zen 4GB and it has been awesome. It features an additional SD slot for when I fill up the 4GB’s of space it comes with.(which is already almost full…) It has pretty much all the basic features I wanted, decent battery life, and a fm radio. Nothing exotic required really. Came with a plastic case that has saved the screen from a million scratches already as well. Pity it can’t play ogg files. Syncing the Zen with Linux has been the fun part. After failure or just dissatisfaction of gnomad2 and rhythmbox I decided to use banshee. Yes, that evil mono based music player. I have to admit though that it is pretty snazzy and awesome. It’s last.fm plugin has been superb for me which was a huge bonus. Banshee syncs my entire music collection to the Zen in one click which is awesome. I was unable to do that with the other stuff I tried. (Yes I’m sure amarok would have worked, but I run GNOME and KDE stuff doesn’t really compile here… I busted something related to not finding the installed kdelibs). Overall I’m quite satisfied with how Banshee has performed and the layout of its interface. The only current problem I have so far with Banshee and my Creative Zen is that when I sync my music library over it does not sync the album art. This is somewhat disappointing, but definitely not any kind of a show stopper. I assume it could possibly be that it is not supported with banshee+zen, or it’s because I do not have banshee set up to copy/organize music to ~/Music. If anyone knows I would greatly appreciate it if someone dropped some hints.
Random Server Panic
So a few days back I was ssh’d into my server as usual for IRC and when I got around to looking at it I noticed I had been dropped back to my zsh shell on my laptop disconnected. At first I thought maybe I just lost connection due to a random network failure so I tried to reconnect. Timed out. So I pull up opera and try to load its cacti status page and it seemed apache was dead and not responding. Awesome. At this point I wasn’t sure what to make of the situation. I get a bunch of power failures so that could have been the cause, but usually my server reboots itself after the power is restored. Perhaps the network interfaces went down, or my psu blew out I thought. Unlikely, so I assume it had a kernel panic. I sent off an email about it and was told the server was still running, so no power or psu failure. I had the machine rebooted as there was nothing I could do and everything came back up as expected. Looking through all of the logs didn’t reveal anything to indicate the cause of the downtime. Temperatures were all within normal range according to cacti so it wasn’t an overheating problem. Logs didn’t show anything about the network interface being disabled or failures of any kind, so I believe it just outright had a panic. It is slightly irritating that nothing at all in the logs gives an indication of why it had a kernel panic. I assume if I had physical access the console would have given some information but unfortunately it was a remote machine. For now I’ve enabled an automatic reboot on kernel panics so I don’t have to get it manually rebooted if it ever happens again. Guess I’ll never know why it randomly went down in flames after 50 days of running perfectly fine.