Geocities is dead. I don't miss it at all. I avoided Geocities like the plague like MySpace. The clashing colors, the blinking and scrolling text, the chance that some horrid  tune would start playing, and worst of all, finding a site that hadn't been updated since the 90's made me want to claw my eyes out. Just like MySpace does.

There are so many ways for someone to "be on the Internet" and at the same time prove that they are completely ignorant of technology. Its like Yahoo bought Geocities just to laugh at all the users' sites created there. I hope it was worth it Yahoo! Now we can cross out having a Geocities site as one of the havens for the technologically ignorant. Don't worry! All you lost Geocities luddites! MySpace is still around, at least for now. Sign up quickly so you can update your "Internet presense" with more vommit inducing colors and ear piercing music. It will take some getting used to. But I'm sure you can handle moving from 1998 to 2003 technology. 

Wow! This nasty virus I have is really making me grumpy. 

I purchased a Macbook Pro about 6 weeks ago. Its been great for the most part. Rather than immediately putting Kubuntu on it, I've been forcing myself to learn OSX. I like it, but its not all that much different than my Linux user experience has been. In fact, when it comes to USB audio devices, its been worse. Linux was 100% plug and play for all of my audio devices. Two of which are my Belkin TuneStudio and my SoundBlaster Extigy. I use the TuneStudio  to record podcasts on Skype. It works awesome! Just plug in your iPod and you have a very reliable, simple, almost pro quality device for recording with your computer. The Extigy is just a play awesome usb device. Even though its old it just rocks. Lots of digital options and very high quality sound.

On my Macbook, the TuneStudio worked, but the Extigy didn't. I tried one fix found at this thread on the Apple Support forums. Basically you replace the AppleUSBAudio.kext file with an older version. But it didn't seem to work and, in fact, made the problem worse because now both the TuneStudio and the Extigy didn't work. I kept looking and found a related post that also replaces the IOAudioFamily.kext file as well. Once I did that everything worked. I didn't even need a reboot. Here are the steps that I took.

One of the sites that I run (http://lordsoftyr.com) has been getting hammered lately. It was a real mess. I use Dreamhost to host all of my sites. They were good price wise and their support wiki and their techn support are really great. My site was taking up 90% of the shared server resources that I was on. Drupal was dying on about 70% of all the pages because the server just could not keep up. I had already slowed down the search engines with robots.txt and by telling google to crawl at the slowest possible speed. But none of that helped. It was time to move to a virtual server.

Dreamhost's PS server is priced based on memory usage. So it is vital to keep your usage at the minimum possible level. Drupal has some built in caching, but it is only really useful for anonymous users and even then, its still hitting the database for stuff. I decided to check out some of the caching modules available for Drupal. There are a number of modules, but none of them seemed as read for production usage as cachestatic-6.x-1.2-beta1. It requires some changes to your .htaccess file in the mod_rewrite section. Simple stuff reallly. Dreamhost has a monitoring page for your private server (PS). The first week they let you use all the memory you want so you can "right size" your server memory usage. I let the server run until the afternoon and then installed Cache Static. I pretty much just took all the defaults for this module.

Is the US CIO scamming us? Check it out over at Dvorak Uncensored.  From the sounds of it, with the right contacts I could have had the US CIO job! At least I have 15 years of actual IT experience. Yes I was an art major in College, but IT is one of those industries where a computer degree of some kind doesn't really mean much. I vividly remember helping all the so called "computer majors" at my college who had to ask me, a computer tech in the lab, how to format disks and save their files. 

Our basement remodel is done. We've got an awesome family room with bamboo flooring (bought at half price at the Habitat store - environmentally friendly!), recessed dimmable lighting (using CFL's – also environmentally friendly), and all the wires for speakers and such run through the walls! I also just ditched Comcast for Dish. I ordered a second Dish receiver just for the MythTV box.

Now I have the perfect place for my MythTV! I've purchased updated hardware for it and its going to be a really awesome family entertainment computer.

I've replaced my old MythTV guts and used it for the playroom/living room MythTV box. It still works great for all the basics, but it just wasn't going to cut it for my plans for the new MythTV box. It is going to be running all of our daily file and media server needs. I'm going to shut down our old file server to save the electricity. All of its functions (mostly file sharing and backups) will move to the new MythTV.

Yesterday I was waiting... and waiting... and waiting for the patching to complete. I am pretty sure that it just completely downloaded the entire game again. What is the point of having 8GB of install files sitting around if the whole game is just going to completely re-download itself?

The good news is that the patching completed successfully. I'm now backing up the ~/.darkfall directory before I mess with anything further. I do NOT want to go through that patching horror again! :). My next step after backup is complete will be to install gecko and try logging back in to see if I get an improved character creation screen or not. Then maybe I'll try IE6 if that doesn't work. I'll also try installing the latest DirectX9 to see if that has any improvements over the default DirectX support in WINE.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Darkfall Online. My next task once that was done was to try and get it to work with WINE on my Kubuntu 8.10 laptop. Well it's not quite as smooth as I would like, but I did manage to find a web page that got me started on the right path. But in the end I pretty much just started from scratch and I think I'm close.

Because I was going through so many iterations, I created a script that deletes the .darkfall wine directory and then reinstalls. With this script I'm able to get the client to login and patch. I say that because at the moment it is downloading about 9GB of data and its going to take a while to finish. I'll post a follow up to let everyone know if I managed to get it in a playable state.

Here is what I posted over at Max's page in his comments section.

I switched to Dreamhost this week. A few of my sites were down for a few days while I transfered everything around, but everything is up and running and seems fine now.

I decided to go with Dreamhost.com because they had a great price... better than the already good price at IXWebhosting. But they also had shell access with SSH. Wow is that a nice breath of fresh air! 

I was able to wget my old sites directly to the new ones. I was able to import my databases on the command line instead of having to deal with file size limitations in PHPMyAdmin. I was able to easily created a shared .htaccess file for all my sites with a few "ln -s" commands to a single .htaccess file. I've done the same thing with my php-cgi directory.

I even have bzr installed on Dreamhost. That will let me do some really nice backup, versioning, and change control for the sites. All told its not just a cheaper price, but the shell access and the tools that I'm able to use are going to make my life much easier.

Oh! One last thing. Dreamhost is carbon neutral! They have taken a number of steps to reduce power consumption and they purchase carbon credits to offset the rest. I'll post more about that later.

So once you have your MythTV setup and connected to your TV, how do you continue to manage it with just a remote control? Well there are lots of options. There is the obvious solutions like VNC. VNC is nice, but it can be cumbersome, even on a local network segment.

But for things that don't require a "desktop" I like to use X over SSH. It's faster and more responsive than VNC. One of my favorites is when I have to run mythtv-setup. It works great using ssh. To run it remotely from my Mythtv I run the following

ssh user@mythtvbox -CX mythtv-setup

The "-C" turns on compression, which generally speeds things up. The "X" tells ssh to forward an X Windows session for the app to your desktop. It works really nicely. 

You can even do this with the mythfrontend as well. Its just faster if you have some configuring to do than to run around and plug in a mouse and keyboard and sit on the floor 3 feet in front of your 50' LCD TV. But don't expect to be able to stream video that way! :)

WICD is a python based network manager. I first started hacking around with it on my Sharp Zaurus, running Zubuntu. In the meantime, I've updated to Kubuntu 8.10 which implements KDE4. The knetworkmanager app, which in KDE3 was lightyears ahead of Gnome's networkmanager for quite some time, has become a horrid completely unusable hunk of crap in KDE4. 

I can't even imagine how someone thought it was a good idea to change it. It stopped using kwallet, which meant that all of my current wireless keys had to be reentered. On top of that, the interface changed, requiring more mouse clicks and extra hassle. Then on top of that, it hardly ever shows the available wireless networks properly. I've heard that there is a lot more work being put into a new KDE4 version of knetworkmanager. I just hope they don't base it off of the current version. It is beyond crappy.

So here I was using a perfectly good wireless manager on my PDA and a perfectly crappy wireless manager on my laptop. Now who is the idiot? So today I switched to using WICD. I don't know why it took this long to get my butt in gear on this but now that I've done it, I'm very happy with my wireless management in KDE4 now.