Political Bloviation » Site News

Lack of Posts Lately

Sonny — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:35:05 +0000

I haven’t been posting much lately. Last Friday my sister Maria died suddenly at age 48. She left behind a 23 year old daughter, a 16 year old son and a 9 year old son. I watched as my family members shuffled in and out of the curtained ER bay and clustered around the gurney she was on. We clutched her cold hand, kissed her forehead and cried. I watched my mother wrestle with her grief from the death of her eldest daughter. Parents should never have to greive the loss of a child. I watched the raw outpouring from my niece as she tried and failed to come to grips with the loss of her mother. It was and is still heartwrenching.

The breathing tube used to try to resuscitate Maria was still in place and filled with her dried blood. They really should remove those and the IV lines before letting the family in. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to have all the accoutrements of medical failure still surrounding her after death. It’s been difficult weekend as arrangements have been negotiated, made and paid for. After the ordeal at the funeral home all I can say is make your wishes know and get a pre-need plan. It’s an added burden for those who remain to try guess what a realtive might have wanted.

The funeral is this Wednesday ay 12:30 PM at Stower’s Funeral Home in Brandon, FL. We will have a family gathering, as is our custom, afterwards. We try to remember the good times and share our tears and gather what comfort family and friends can bring at times like theses.

Hold close those that you love, while you can…

Site Upgrade

Sonny — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 03:53:07 +0000

I upgraded to WordPress 2.1, we’ll see how that works. I need to do some work to update plugins, like the one that caused my sidebar customizations to vanish. And where’s my spell chrcker? Arrggggh!!!!

UPDATE:
I got my sidebar to work again and also got the WPG2 plug-in working with Gallery 2.1.2. Also found some nifty new Widgetized themes for the blog. Now if I could just find a WordPress 2.1 compatible spell check my life would be complete and I could die happy.

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 10285 *

Example of an inserted gallery thumbnail using WPG2

Example of an inserted gallery album using WPG2

UPDATE2:
Ajax Spell Checker to the rescue! I need all help I can get

I’m Back

Sonny — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 20:30:58 +0000

Life has been hectic recently and I’ve been neglecting the blog. Let’s see, there was an extended trip to the far east, moving and getting married. In short I’ve been busy. Since life seems to be settling down I’ll resume making more or less regular posts.

On a Break….

Sonny — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 02:48:46 +0000

I won’t be doing much blogging for the next 2 weeks. I’ll be in the Philippines for about a month. I’m getting married to a wonderful lady, taking a few weeks off, then I’ll be working from Manila for a few more weeks. I may make a post or two after I get back to work.

Site News: Upgrade Double Header

Sonny — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 23:32:56 +0000

I spent some time improving the server that hosts my site. I upgraded the operating system to the recently released SME Linux 7.0. I also added a RAID 1 mirror set using a pair of Segate 160 GB IDE drives. One of these days when I get some spare change I’ll bump the memory up to 2GB. Right now the server, imaginatively named “server”, is resting comfortably after major sugery. There are a couple of minor kinks to work out, like why does awstats web statistics reporting no longer functions, why it regenerates an SSL cert every night and why server reboots hang during the shutdown.

New Pictures from Puerto Galera and Taal Volcano

Sonny — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:49:52 +0000

Taal Volcano and Puerto Galera

Off on Vacation…

Sonny — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 05:21:45 +0000

I’ll be taking two weeks off for a trip to Manila to spend some time with my sweetie. I probably won’t be doing a lot of blogging, except for maybe posting some pictures of Puerto Galera, Coco Beach and Tagatay. Take care, I’m off to loaf around on a South China Sea Beach for a while.

What makes the site work?

Sonny — Sat, 21 May 2005 17:43:00 +0000

An explanation of how this site came to be and what I used to build it.

First of all, I’m not a developer. I don’t write code beyond the most basic scripts. I’ve had this domain for about 5 years and never really did much with it, until recently. When I first purchased the domain it was because I was supporting a web based application for creating small business e-commerce sites. I wanted one to play around and learn to use our site creation java application. I used the domain for re-creating customer problems and trying out solutions.

I’ve long since moved on to other things in my professional life, thankfully. That site creation java app was a huge, stinking, bug laden, piece of crap. The site languished on a free web-host provided by the domain registrar for several years. At the time it had a few low-res pictures and static pages with a DHTML navigation menu. Nothing to write home about or visit a second time.

I was looking for a way of collecting POP3 mail from a bunch of different personal and business e-mail accounts for myself and my family. Another requirement was filtering viruses and spam out before it got to the desktop. I like the idea of using a linux box because of what I heard about it’s security and scalability. I figured I could use it as a network gateway and web server as well. I had no linux experience. So, I began trying out different distributions.

I tried a few distros including Redhat, SUSE and Linspire, I didn’t really want a fancy GUI with a KDE or Gnome desktop. I wanted a box I could tuck away in a corner someplace and forget about. I had the parts for a couple of “doorstop” class PCs gathering dust in the garage, and needed something that didn’t have very steep hardware requirements. I didn’t want to spend sleepless nights learning the pitfalls of configuring a messaging and gateway server.

Found an article on Distrowatch about something called E-smith, then owned by Mitel. It sounded like an easy to install and use messaging platform built from a modified Redhat 7.3 platform. No GUI, no x-windows driver issues, no monitor, keyboard or mouse needed. It’s configured using a webpage accessible only on the LAN side of the network. Since then it’s changed hands from Mitel to Lycoris to Ruffdogs.com and morphed into SME Linux.

I got SME 6.0.1 up and running on a PII-350 with 128MB of mismatched RAM, with an 10GB HD and a noisy CD-ROM, and a couple of old network cards, all salvaged from my box of parts. I installed all of that in an old case a friend gave me. I knew I kept all those old parts I upgraded for some reason.

It took maybe 45 minutes to install and do some basic configuration and I booted to a fully functioning linux server. Beyond my orginal requirements it added file, print and domain services from samba for my little 4 client LAN, as well as a fully functioning Apache web server with MySQL and PHP. SME also has iptables setup and locked down with very secure firewall settings out of the box, allowing it to act as the network gateway replacing a router.

After a few visits to the SME Linux support forums, I got fetchmail, Spamassassin and ClamAV retrieving and filtering the mail as desired. It also runs remote black lists to slap back virus laden spam before it gets in the door and sucks up system resources reading and filtering unwanted messages.

Once the mail and gateway stuff was in place and running stable, I started looking at the web server. I noticed that SME supported dynamic DNS services. This would allow me to run my own mail server and web server from the dynamic IP provided by my cable modem. I promptly changed my domain registrar to yi.org. I picked them from the list of dynamic DNS services supported out of the box by SME. My web server happily chugs along on a dynamic IP.

Being free of my free web host meant no more piddling storage limits. Hi-res photos were now a possiblilty. First I added Gallery to better manage photos. It’s a nice stand alone product I orginally found out about on the SME forums.

I coasted along for nearly a year with my static homepage, DHTML menus, and Gallery running on SME linux. After my mostly positive experience with PHP pages in Gallery I started looking for other cool php applications. I found Geeklog, also on the SME forums, and installed it. I also added Netjuke to stream MP3 audio to the client PCs on my LAN. I currently run my SME server, 1 Mac Mini and 2 Wintel PCs on a hardwired 100 Mb ethernet cabling. Plus 802.11g Wireless from a Linksys WRT54GS router for an additional Wintel PC and my IBM T21 work laptop.

Getting Geeklog to work with a pre-existing installation of Gallery proved to be a major nightmare. Eventually I took the path of least resistance and saved my Gallery album directory and removed the application entirely, then re-installed it as sub-directory in the Geeklog public html folder. The developers of Geeklog and Gallery worked together to create a very good integration of the two, as long as you install Geeklog first, then Gallery.

Other than Geeklog and Gallery I’ve added a blocks for Google Adsense, Blogroll links, Geeklog User Statistics plugin, Menu plugin and Galleryblock to display the most recent albums and the most popular albums. I also added a custom banner to one of the Geeklog themes to display the site name without the limitiations of text.

Currently, I’m running the server on upgraded hardware:

Antec Solution Series SLK2650-BQE Case
Biostar M7NCD Motherboard
Generic 768MB PC-2700 DDR
Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB HDD
APC Back-UPS BE350U Back-up Power Supply
Samsung DVD-R

The software for the site is as follows:

SME Linux 6.0.1 with a variety of add-ons
MySQL 4.0.22
PHP 4.3.11
Geeklog 1.3.9
Gallery 1.4.4-pl6

Now I’m working on driving some traffic to my site.

Update:
I’m now running the blog on WordPress. I siwtched because WordPress is easier to manage for a blog and has better bloggy features, like pingback and trackback support, easier plugin installation and much better themes. Geeklog does security better, so I’m still using it for my music lyrics site. The Lyrics site gets a lot more hits and actually turns a few dollars from google banners. It’s not a really blog, I just post lyrics from a few of the billboard.com. But seems to be drawing 400-500 visitors a day.

I may have to write another post about what to do when you acyually start getting hits. Stay tuned…

The Battle was Won, Eventually…

Sonny — Wed, 18 May 2005 15:51:00 +0000

After much pulling of the hair and gnashing of the teeth, I’ve finally got Geeklog and Gallery to Play Nice.

All I wanted was to include some family pictures. I already had Gallery up and running for sometime. It was one of the first things I learned to install when I started playing around with SME Linux about a year ago. There was mention of direct integration into Geeklog on the Gallery setup page. How hard could it be, right?

It makes it a great quick to install and easy to use linux server with firewall services, e-mail, web, file and print sharing across Windows and Macs. It also makes it hard for a noob to understand the how and where of making permanent changes.

After sorting through all that, accidentally deleting my gallery install, restoring from backup, learning more than I ever wanted to know about OpenBaseDir limitation errors in PHP, I finally got it working. I posted most of the gory details on the SME Linux Forum.

There was some weirdness in creating thumbnail images and intermediate images when new photos are imported. All the stuff that was there before looked good. I thought it had something to do with copying an existing gallery v1.5.1 install. I resolved it by saving my albums directory that contiains all the photos, removing the existing gallery install, then making a fresh gallery v1.4.4-pl6 install into the geeklog html directory. I then copied the old albums directory, and installed the galleryblock add-on for geeklog. It’s all working together without throwing php errors to my messages log. Whew, it was more than I bargained for. But I learned some stuff en route.

New and Improved Geeklog CMS

Sonny — Thu, 12 May 2005 21:39:00 +0000

This is a trial run for using Geeklog. I played with some others, but this looked like the simplest content management system solution for my po’ little solo blog.

Update 6/21/2005:
I’m trying out WordPress these days. It has better integration with important blog features like pingback and trackback. It’s also easier to install plugins and the themes look better.