Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

Ubuntu’s latest release will be available for download this evening at or around 12:00 AM. Normally, I would go through the upgrade process, but this time, I would feel better installing it fresh to ensure I’ve done everything correctly. In the past, the upgrades have been a simple 3-4 step process that takes all of an hour (including download time), but I’ve always been left wondering, are some of the issues I have had due to me screwing an upgrade up? Perhaps even an old screw up has now made its presence known. Either way, I’ll be doing a fresh install. The machine, I’m currently using for Ubuntu is an old Pentium 4 1.8GHz HP Pavilion with 1GB RAM and two 40GB hard drives.

Okay, first things first. I was able to get the Wifi working with my new Mac. The issue was the WEP Settings. In the original setup, there is a dropdown list, but since it defaulted to WEP Password, I assumed I was in the only WEP option. It wasn’t until my second go around that I found there were three options: 1. WEP Password, 2. WEP Hex, and 3. WEP Ascii. Once I setup my correct WEP option with the correct security string, everything worked great. One less wire is very nice. I’ve got most of my apps installed, but I’ve had some issues with getting my Mozilla Thunderbird profile migrated over. The messages won’t show up under the new Inbox. I assume there is an issue with the paths in one of the profile settings files. I’ve already adjusted the prefs.js file which had four different references that had to be updated. Essentially, Linux keeps everything in /home/[username]/.mozilla-thunderbird/ and OS X keeps everything in /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/. Everything under the Preferences Menu of Thunderbird seems to be pointing to the correct paths, but still no emails. The profile I’ve copied over is about 1.2GB, so there should definitely be some messages somewhere. Other than this, I’m very impressed with this operating system. I can see how Mac lovers are so hard to switch back. The only thing that I find odd, but only because I’ve not read the details is why there isn’t more free software available. Almost everything is available, but for a price. I’ll post more later.

Apparently, I hadn’t thought out my system wiring prior to making this purchase as I was shy one DVI cable and an ethernet cable. For the setup, I went ahead and shutdown two other machines and used their cabling to satisfy my requirements. My initial thoughts were of how beautiful this piece of art really was. Apple’s design team gets major kudos from me. Besides telling it to use American English for all of its language configurations, I was prompted for an Internet connection. I remembered that the Mac mini had built-in wireless so I decided to give that a shot. It found my access point and 2 others in the neighborhood, but when I tried to connect using my WEP key, it failed… and it failed… and it failed again. To eager to see the system, I decided to go with the easy route. I reconnected the ethernet cable and started configuration with that. The OS wanted to grab the first available IP address from the router despite having been allocated to another machine via SDHCP (that machine was off at the time). Since this IP was taken, it was told not to get it. I added a SDHCP entry to my router for the Mac and its MAC address, and after selecting DHCP with manual entry of IP Address, it worked. So far the wireless keyboard and mouse, both using Bluetooth, were the easiest part of the setup. At this point, I’m connected to the Internet and went straight to Mozilla to get Firefox, and a little familiarity. This is my first experience with a Mac of my own, so I’ll be climbing the learning curve for the next month or so, I’m sure. If I was an average user, I would probably be set to go now, but I’m a web developer, so on I go to install FTP tools, web editors, graphics tools, etc.

For now, my Mac is sitting on my shelf, powered off and disconnected, but once I get my cabling plan established, I’ll be reconnecting again. The one thing that is hindering me the most is my busy schedule. It doesn’t allow for much time to toy around with a computer without using it to make money. The only catch is, if I wasn’t doing this work, I wouldn’t have the ‘toys’ to begin with. This may be a life rethink for some other time. For now, all of my other computers are running, and the Mac will soon be my development machine.

Well, I did it. I ordered my Mac Mini on Sunday and it should be delivered today. I’m very anxious. This is my first attempt at using a Mac of my own, and to try to use it whilest shutting down my Windows box completely. Not that I’m attached to Windows. I primarily use my Ubuntu Linux box for the everyday mundane tasks and web development. From what I’ve read and seen, using my Mac will be a breeze and a pleasure. I purchased the top of the line without upgrades, so I’ll be running the 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo with 512MB RAM and the SuperDrive. With the computer, I also ordered the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and today I’ll buy the Logitech V270 Bluetooth Mouse to complete the wireless I/O package. If only DVI and Audio came with a wireless option. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be posting about my experiences.

Every year it seems that we have a single insect that has become overpopulated. One year it was ants, the next crickets, then love bugs and so on. Well, this year, it seems flies are the predominant insect. This makes eating outside almost impossible without being attacked, not literally, by these flying pests. I assume they must smell the food because they really don’t bother us until the food is out. This makes me wonder if I still worked in restaurants and came home smelling like food, would they eat me alive? Anyway, at least 3 each day find their way into our home, which is all the more pestering. Anyone out there know of a good way to keep flies away from the home? Is this just a southern thing, a Texas thing, or perhaps just a Houston thing? I don’t know, but I don’t like it.

Last Sunday, I decided to put to use some ingredients we had on hand and made shrimp skewers to be grilled. On each 12″ skewer I placed shrimp, onion slices, jalapeno pepper slices, and red bell pepper slices. I put them on in this order: S-O-J-R-S-O-J-R-S-O-J-R-S-O-J-R-S. Each sliced vegetable should be roughly the same size (about 1″ x 2″) to provide uniform cooking. To add extra flavor to the skewers, I made some compound butter using chives and garlic. For this I simply put a small stick of real butter in a small food processor with a small bunch of green onions and some fresh garlic and gave it a whirl until smooth. These skewers grilled up nicely and my youngest daughter even sang me a little ‘I Love Shrimp’ song. It was an original piece so I was very impressed. Below you can see what the shrimp looked like after preparation and ready for the grill.

I’m usually not too keen to running Windows software on Mac hardware, but I was curious of one thing. Since Apple likes to claim they can better support their systems because of hardware uniformity, then has someone created a SlipStream install of Windows XP that will work flawlessly on Mac Hardware since all of their hardware is the same?

I think Mac hardware is great, but their bread and butter is their design team especially when it comes to their UIs. I’m waiting for the day when Mac OSX becomes available for the standard x86 machine. I would buy 4 copies Opening Day! Meanwhile, I’ll be tempting myself with the new MacMinis.

Here is a pic showing XP Running on a MacBook Pro.

Is it only me who thinks David Blaine is a publicity hound who draws everyone’s attention on things that aren’t really magic? Drowning in a bubble, standing on a post, sitting in a cube… how is this magic? ABC is nuts for allowing this bubble thing to be broadcast for two hours last night only to have him wear himself out too early to break the breathholding record, which was the whole point, right? I’ve heard several radio stations mentioning how the two hours was a big waste of time. I didn’t actually watch any TV last night, so I can’t really say for sure whether it was a waste of time or a BIG waste of time. Do some magic, David. Anyway, that is my rant.

I did some updates using the auto update feature in Ubuntu a couple of days ago and noticed some xorg updates going through the pipe. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but when I rebooted yesterday, my X Server failed to start. I searched around the Internet (I mean Google) and only found things related to this issue that took place over a year ago. One thing I did notice on a couple of the posts was a thing called vesa. I’m not sure what it really is and cannot find any quick answers, but it appears to be some sort of fallback driver or something. Some ATI users have used it and some NVidia users have implemented it, so it is definitely not card specific. To use it, just replace the Driver value in the Device section of xorg.conf with “vesa” and restart X. This is working for me now, but I don’t like not know what it is or the feeling that I’ve somehow disabled the proper NVidia driver. In June, I’ll be rebuilding my machine using Ubuntu new Dapper release from scratch, so for the time being, I’ll deal with the driver issue and begin backing up my profile data.

UPDATE:
vesa is an Xorg driver for generic VESA video cards. It can drive most VESA-compatible video cards, but only makes use of the basic standard VESA core that is common to these cards. The driver supports depths 8, 15, 16, and 24.
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man4/vesa.4.html