Myside's Spew - Blog of Spontaneous Combustible Spew

Team FreeBSD has a new home page.

06 May, 2006 19:56 CST6CDT

EINSTEIN@HOME - Team FreeBSD has a new home page.

The previous direct link for this team, pointed to a forum, was rather (in my opinion) dirty and receptive to abuse.

On the new team page, there are a couple short descriptions of the project with links to resources for crunchers using FreeBSD. On the right side of the web page there are shrunk graphical stats that can be clicked on to show informative team statistics.

I feel a bit better now.

Technology  Software  Article & Comments

Yahoo! Mail Beta - I am here to stay.

08 April, 2006 11:38 CST6CDT

I have been switching back and forth occasionally between Yahoo Mail Beta and the original interface. Up until now, I have been leaning towards the original interface for my e-mail collaboration. However, I am now permanently hooked on the beta. It is now fast enough for my day to day use, and the interface is a dream come true.

I am still on an older build on server 365, but I am sure when they get around to updating it to current, I will be just as pleased, and hopefully confronted with some new features and performance enhancements.

It makes using e-mail fun again. Thanks Yahoo!

Software  Article & Comments (4)

longing for pine once more

05 April, 2006 18:47 CST6CDT

A recent Slashdot article made me contemplate about the various e-mail applications I have used since my introduction to the Internet, and through my introduction and use of Linux. After actually pausing to list each one, I became aware of the applications that I used regularly, and the ones that I used briefly and then dumped. The Slashdot post was about Pine, and after reading the post, I was instantly motivated to switch, almost like a drug addict relapse to an highly addictive drug.

Long before my Linux journey began, I was using a mix of DOS and Windows 3.11. I occasionally used OS/2 which gave me a god like feeling of some sort. Back then I relied on bulletin board systems for e-mail communication; FIDO Net as a backbone, with a mix of UUCP collaboration. I am not sure, but I think I remember myself leaning towards Ice Mail as my favorite on-line communication editor. There wasn't a whole lot of prettiness with other applications, and Ice Mail was not only attractive and new, but it was as powerful as any ANSI BBS tool. Just for a side note, I ran a couple bulletin board systems for a period of about three years. Shortly after obtaining a FIDO Net membership and address of my own, I was in a position where I could no longer maintain the service. For some strange reason, right about this time, there was a huge BANG in other Internet server applications that appealed to my curiosity. If you search back far enough, you can see my BBS in the FIDO list. Although not used, much, it is a proud feeling having my presence in that elite list of administrators (sorry, sysops). -Electric Dreams BBS-

Fast forward, just a tad, and I find myself using Netscape Communicator for e-mail and newsgroups. It wasn't very stable on Windows for Workgroups (3.1 aside), and later even less stable when I used it with Slackware Linux.

Communicator was pretty hot, as I remember my impressions. However, I was somewhat vain to the alternatives I could have taken advantage of. In any case, using DOS as a operating system didn't last long.

I was turned on to Linux by a couple friends of mine, Brian and Eric. Eric appeared to be the expert with this new platform and thankfully had a lot of patience with my constant abuse of inappropriate changes I made to the installations he performed. I later got the hang of it, and was able to install most any distribution of that time, on my own. Guess what? The first e-mail application was Netscape Communicator (take a wild guess on the version).

So it has been said, Netscape was my first communication tool. However, shortly after getting the hang of using Linux, I decided to get DSL. Now now, it wasn't just a few years ago; this was way before ADSL. In fact, I was one of the first group of customers to get the service in my home town. How much did this cost? Someone hit me with a large wet trout!

Now I had more bandwidth than most people in the area, and I was using an operating system that allowed me to play with a various number of e-mail applications. My second e-mail client was Pine.

I wouldn't say Pine is an e-mail client in it's whole, but rather an interface to Unix style mail storage. I used a combination of Pine, and I used fetchmail to fetch mail from my pop3 servers.

Pine was a glorious outlet for my Internet communication. E-Mail communication back then was strictly text. If I received an occasional web based link, I could easily navigate to the website with Lynx configurable by Pine's complex, mind numbing, aphrodisiac style configuration file.

The ability to navigate menus, folders, and messages with the use of one, two, or a few key strokes showed me the doors to e-mail happiness. It was a fruitful client with all the functionality of communicator (including newsgroups). He he, setting up a personal UUCP server is something to laugh about also, since when I finally got it figured out, I asked myself WTF, and decided to connect to a dedicated resource.

On a side note, I started using Pine before it was distributed with pico. I absolutely hated VI, and my impressions of it lives on to this day. Yes, I know, all powerful, but belittled by it's use of functions, and overwhelmed by its' functions complexity. I sometimes use VI for quick line edits, and had to learn a few tricks in my 'alternative operating systems classes' at my college, but I am more attracted to the alternatives. Holly shit you say, there are alternatives? Yes you blow fish! Go have sex!

So there I was, happy, purring, and loving life. Ah, pine and fetchmail; oh man, the both are what I lived for in the day. BTW, I was also a member of the Linux kernel mailing list back then. It was such a pleasure getting hundreds of e-mails a day. Although, most of the socializing was a geek a head of me, it is good to know you may be able to search the archive and find a post or two from me. :)

I used pine for many years, and now you are probably wondering where I went from there. The web based e-mail applications started to have a grab hold on the Internet community.

Instead of telling you which web based service I divulged my whole hearted attention into, let me allow you to think about the scope of the accessibility to the world wide web communication medium.

Slashdot just posted an article about the still massive amount of people who use pine, or have used pine and have now just switched to the likes of Google or Yahoo. Web based Internet services have been around for a long long time. You probably also expected me to get into the features, interface, functionality, and performance of Pine. Take a step back and contemplate the idea that there are a faithful group of followers of Pine, and the features and functionality allowed these followers to use Pine to this day. Some may use it forever. That is reason enough for you to take interest into discovering the application on your own, and truly realize why it is still, to this day, one of the most popular terminal based e-mail interfaces available; and it now includes pico. When you take that stance, there is no reason for a list of features / functionality, but rather you will gain a persuasion to use it as your own, realizing that if a technology such as this can surely test the time of even today, as it has, than that is reason enough to give it the respect it deserves.

I miss it. Maybe I will use it again.

Software  Article & Comments

gallery to gallery

25 February, 2006 15:51 CST6CDT

I migrated from Gallery 1 to Gallery 2. The initial setup of the application was pleasantly painless. The installation wizard is one of the best I have used.

However, the migration of data was not much fun. First of all, godaddy doesn't seem to like a script running for more than a couple of minutes. I tried changing a php variable inside .htaccess, but that was a no-go and made my content inaccesible. The reason I needed the script to run longer, is the integration of some 2000 pictures from Gallery 1.

After several attempts at importing them at once, I set out to seperate the pictures in batches of 300 in seperate directories. I then imported the pictures with the local directory feature, one directory at a time.

This had worked for the most part, but I started getting a lot of file locking errors, to many files open, and the likes. I switched over to SQL indexed file locks, and the problem went away.

After several attempts at getting everything fine and dandy, my last successful attempt I declined from making the mod_rewrite declerations. I am not about to do this over, and create them. Sorry if the absolute links are no longer absolute.

In any case, I have a pretty stable picture gallery that will be able to support the amount of pictures and video clips I plan on throwing at it.

Software  Article & Comments

sour lemons

12 February, 2006 14:54 CST6CDT

Compiling bash on a slow mips processor is like being stuck in the desert with your only source of water located in the most sour tasting lemon available in the world.

The most sour part about it, is I only need it for one script. Too much work to convert to c shell (not a csh expert).

That's my rant, thanks...

Software  Article & Comments

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