There is an irritating problem with my hosting server that’s beginning to annoy me – it always seems to be down in the mornings around the time I either collect my e-mail, send out replies or try to publish this journal. I’ve noticed this for about three or four days running and it’s beginning to become a problem. I don’t relish another move but if this continues to be a problem, I might have to move. I guess I’ll wait and see. In the meantime, KuhnDog told me yesterday that he was moving his domain to his own box and that he would be able to host my own domain since he didn’t know that I’d got hosting – that was really nice of him since he’s not getting anything back from me at all in return except for loss of bandwidth. I’m beginning to realize how much of a drain my site must be on his server since now I can actually see the bandwidth stats for this domain :p

I had quite a bit of fun yesterday trying to upload the QBoard project changes that I’d made to SourceForge CVS :p First, I had to checkout from CVS and the network at work was so abysmally slow that it took about two to three hours to simply do a checkout. I then tried to do a commit of the changes I’d made and couldn’t since I kept on getting an error message about not having write access. I’d worked with CVS before while doing the LiteStep project but not with SourceForge and so I went back and did some reading and it turns out that SourceForge gives you write access only if you have SSH authentication and that meant installing an SSH client. I did that and then found out that SourceForge takes up to six hours or more to update your account with your public SSH key and that meant that I couldn’t commit to CVS yesterday. Oh boy, that was a trip and a half but I did learn a lot of things in the process :p

I also worked on the latest layout idea I had for this site. I still am not totally satisfied with it the way I was with the layout for SM and so it’s again here. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I was sort of in the zone yesterday :p I sat down at my computer around 7:00am, turned the music on and started coding and the next thing I know, my Mom is asking me if I wasn’t going to have breakfast. I looked at the clock and it was 10:30am! So I go downstairs, eat breakfast and come back and start coding again and my Mom’s again calling me and this time she wants to know if I want lunch and I look at the clock and it’s 1:00pm 🙂 I guess time sure flies when you’re having fun. I did manage to get all the changes I wanted to implement (well, almost all the changes – I think I might add a few more today that I was too lazy to put in yesterday) for the QBoard system done yesterday and I think I tested every aspect of it to make sure that it does not blow up. Of course, since the development and testing was done on my machine, on my webserver, I am not 100% sure that it is OK and so I’m going to upload it to my domain (where I already have it running using a slightly older version of the source) and test it again. If it works out, then I guess I’ll commit to SourceForge and then switch over to using the system for my own tagboard.

Of course, the system was designed to provide not just a simple tagboard for your domain or your site but to provide a remote “tagboard farm” for multiple users. I don’t know if I want to open up my server so that others can use the tagboard system too since that’s going to use up bandwidth and generate a lot of traffic. Joel (who is the main developer on the project at SourceForge) tells me that the system grew so much on his server that it was swamping everything else and I neither want nor need that. So, I am still debating about the whole QBoard thing – I do want to use it personally since I love the features it offers but I don’t know if I will open it up to the public. Maybe to a few friends but probably not generally .. at least not till I know what kind of traffic my site generates per month so that I have a rough idea as to the cut off limits :p

Of work, vampires and various other things …

I stayed at home since I felt like a little bit of rest since I’ve not been feeling too well the last few days – plus, I’ve been at work for almost everyday for the last month or so. So it was time for a little break :p Incidentally, I need to learn to keep my mouth shut – or at least not be totally honest all the time <vbg> This friend of mine from work asked me about my site since he’d seen some of the PhotoShop work I was doing for the SM layout and I gave him the URL – I didn’t realize till after I’d given him the URL that I talk about work and the current situation with the boss etc. here. Of course, it’s no big deal since he’s a very good friend but the problem is that there is the possibility that somebody else from work will visit next and then somebody else and so on till the site becomes an open secret and before I know it, the boss himself will be reading it :p Ah well …

Since I was at home today, I actually managed to get a lot of work done on this new project that I got started on. It’s basically a tagboard system which runs on your server but anybody can sign up for their own tagboard off your server 🙂 The source is based off an existing system called QBoard but they decided to opensource it and put it up as a project on SourceForge. I had picked up the source a while back but couldn’t install it at first because the installer was a bit clunky – I began cleaning up the installer to suit my need, then spoke to the main developer and offered to give him my changes and he added me to the SourceForge project and so I actually sat down today and wrote a full-blown installer for it in PHP :p It all seems to work pretty well but I’ll probably have to do a little more testing and then it’ll probably get released on SourceForge.

Other than that, I’ve been watching the DVD collection of "Kindred: the Embraced". When I first saw the show (must have been five or six years ago) I thought that it was pretty cool but when I saw it this time, I was struck by how bad the show looked and how cheesy the acting was :p At first, I wasn’t sure if it was the second viewing or if it was just the mood I was in but now I think maybe it was just the original show which was so bad. I don’t think I’d seen the original the first time but it was on the DVD collection and I watched it. Of course, I watched the original yesterday (when I was feeling really bad) and I watched three more episodes today (when I was feeling better) and so I am not so sure if my frame of mind had something to do with it or not :p But I kind of like the three episodes I watched today and am again becoming hooked on the story …

I probably will be home for at least today or maybe even tomorrow as well since I am not feeling too well. Of course, I knew this bout of sickness was on it’s way and so I went into work yesterday and downloaded PHP Triad. Who or what is PHP Triad you may ask? It’s a cumulative installer which installs the Apache web server, mySQL and PHP on your machine – and it’s for the Windows platform. Since I’ve been working on the QBoard project, this seemed like the perfect development environment for me when I’m at home since then I won’t need to be online to test out my changes. I installed PHP Triad yesterday evening and it seemed to work well enough but the default PHP Triad installer comes with PHP 4.0.5 but I wanted a later version since my host server runs PHP 4.2.x. Fortunately, I’d also downloaded PHP 4.3.0 as a separate download and it was the work of a matter of few minutes to replace the PHP 4.0.5 installation with PHP 4.3.0 and I was all set.

I still have not started work on actual QBoard development from home but I did bring the source with me and Joel (who is the guy who originally coded QBoard and released the source and put it on SourceForge) wrote to me today to tell me that I’d been added to the SourceForge project and that he was waiting for me to finish my changes so that he could get a new release out that has a built-in installer. So I guess I should better get cracking :p

Under the weather …

I’m not feeling too well – both my parents are sick at home and I think they’ve passed on the virus to me too :p My parents left for the other house in Kurunegala on Friday and I’ve been fending for myself over the weekend <g> They’ll be coming back today though and I will probably take the next few days off from work and stay at home since I have a feeling that I’m going to be even more sick than I am already. Ah well – this is the problem with not being sick more than about once a year – when it hits you, it hits you bad :p I am hoping to get some work done while I’m at home – either on the layout for The Developer’s Corner or on the freeqboard project (which is an opensource project at SourceForge) since I’ve been asked to come onboard as a developer for the project. I’ve not done much PHP and mySQL development work (except to do the usual hacks to pre-created scripts to get them working) and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can do something there. There’s so much work to be done in this world that it’s simply amazing that I get anything done at all 🙂

The world she is a changing …

I watched Cliff Richard’s millennium count-down concert (yeah, I know about two years late :p) last night on TV and he did these songs which counted up the decades from the fifties. Incidentally, he had Hank Marvin on guitar and the guitar-work was beautiful but that’s beside the point. While listening to the songs, I was struck by the fact that they did a lot of songs about peace and harmony and helping other people those days – is it just me or has that become rare today? Maybe I just don’t listen to music enough these days but I just don’t think there are enough artists talking about world peace or better understanding among people. Maybe it’s because of the fact that most of the successful artists today are either very young or subject to the one-hit-wonder phenomenon? They just want to enjoy their fame and fortune while they can and don’t feel like working on world peace? Or am I just not up-to-date? But where is this decade’s Bob Geldof with Live Aid or Quincy Jones, Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson with USA for Africa or even Willie Nelson with Farm Aid? Are people just too blase about such efforts now or is it just that it’s not big news anymore and I don’t hear about it though it still goes on?

I see you …

I don’t know where I heard this story but I heard somewhere that when a hunter comes at a monkey with a gun that the monkey closes its eyes because it believes that the hunter can’t see it since it can’t see the hunter. Jen seems to be in the same category since she has redirected both the domains I pointed to yesterday to her other domain – probably in the hope that if the evidence isn’t there, then she didn’t do it :p OK, this is the last time I’m going to drag up the subject of Jen (hopefully, unless she finds somebody stupid enough to hijack this domain – as she has been trying to do …) but since she took out her sites, most of what I wrote yesterday probably makes no sense – so I’ve updated the entry for yesterday with a link to a page which contains the actual entry that Jen had up on her site – along with a screen capture in case she claims she never wrote any of it (you never know with her :p) That’s it about Jen … No more 🙂

Thank you all for your kind support and comments yesterday 🙂 As I’ve remarked before, it is great to have such good friends and none of you have even met me! It can never be a bad world with people such as you in it 🙂

As I think I mentioned a while back, I’ve been reading "The Early Del Rey" and while his work reflects a lot of those times (it was around World War II), it has such a lot of characters that I liked that I found myself drawn into the stories over and over again. It makes me wish (again!) that I could write like that or that I lived in those times – though I probably would have hated it since I wouldn’t have had access to computers :p I’m reading a set of five short novels by Lester Del Rey now called "Gods and Golems" and that too seems to be very, very interesting. I’ll probably write more about it eventually 🙂

I’ve decided to switch over the tagboard to my own installation of QBoard since I do love the features of QBoard and I might as well make use of the QBoard installation since I’ve spent so much time on it already :p

OK, the new layout for this site’s just not coming up the way I want it to :p Maybe I should give up on the layout ideas and go back to coding as I should be doing (especially since there is this BOB related problem that a user is waiting on but for which I can’t seem to find a straight answer since he’s running BOB off a CD-ROM) but I am not happy with the current layout either. I know it is nice and it has served me well over the years but the site is now expanding and growing and I feel that the front page should provide easy navigation to all sections of the site. So I guess I’ll work at it a little bit longer but admit defeat if I am still stumped :p

Speaking of the site growing, I have ideas for two new sections 🙂 One I would like to call “hookup” <g> and is to be a help site along the lines of the GroupHug mailing list – basically a bulletin board where people can ask for any sort of help – not just my application related help. It might be that they have a problem with their Windows (the software – not the glass paned ones <g>) or they might want to change a window (the glass paned one <vbg>) and are looking for somebody to help. If somebody can help, then they can offer to do so. Of course, most of it will be remote access kind of stuff but I’m hoping that it could even lead to people in the same area assisting each other. What do you think? Workable? Too unrealistic? Too idealistic? :p

The idea is along similar lines but for writers – I want to set up a site which can be used by small cells of authors to work on stories. At the moment, I”m thinking of using MT for it and the initial user who wants to set up the cell will have to be registered as an admin for a new blog by me and then they can add new users for their own blog. At least, that’s the way I’m looking at it though I don’t know if MT works exactly that way. If not, I guess I’ll just have to look around for something which works that way. This idea actually came up because Edward and I want to collaborate on a story – and Edward actually has been doing a lot of work on the story whereas I’ve done nothing except say “I’d like to collaborate with you” – but then again, that’s me – all ideas and not enough execution :p

The old order changeth …

As you may have noticed, all things Jen have disappeared from these pages except for her old entries :p I was going to remain silent about her departure since I would have had to talk about somebody else in here if I were to talk about the reasons and the events behind her departure. But now Jen has seen fit to publish a set of lies, half-truths and slander at her site [Update: guess she doesn’t like it when somebody else talks about her :p Here’s what she originally had to say] about me and I am getting tired of her doing this whole oh-look-poor-Jenni-all-alone-in-the-world-and-so-put-upon shtick and am going to say my side of the piece 🙂 Incidentally (this is for Jen’s benefit :p) she might see fit to revise certain bits of her entry after reading this (she has a habit of doing that but more on that later) to make herself look good but I have to warn her that I have screen shots and copies of her page as it stands now and will publish them here if she does do so :p

First of all, I didn’t need to "run a script for my password" as she says because she gave me her GoDaddy password to do name server setup for her hosting business since she couldn’t figure out how to do that herself – I have no idea why she needs to lie about me having her passwords, unless of course, it makes her statements look stupid and a blatant bunch of lies :p Secondly, she gets so drunk at night she can hardly remember what she did towards the early hours of morning (such as asking me to transfer farook.org over to my own name since *it’s my domain that she bought for me*) and incidentally, she does not stay up for my sake – if you really want to know why she stays up, you might want to go over to her other domain. It’s just interesting that somebody who keeps on saying that she hates liars, turns out to be such a big liar herself but then again maybe she just hates the competition :p

I realized she was lying about almost everything during the recent *hacker incident*. She had originally plagiarized an entry from an online source and the hacker caught her at it (read the comments). Then she goes and edits the entry to look as if she had had the link to the original entry all along. I would have been taken in myself except for the fact that I was using BlogMan and had the original entry (without the link) on my machine and I asked her casually if she’d had the link there originally because I didn’t remember seeing it and she tells me brazenly that yes, she’d always had the entry there. I then realized that I couldn’t trust her to be truthful and when she wanted to move and wanted me to pay for the UHaul (knowing full well that I didn’t have a credit card) and then got angry at me for not paying, I decided that it was time to get out. Weirdly enough, my credit card arrived the next day and I got my own hosting and moved my domain over to my new host since I knew she would be vindictive enough to shut down the domain if she could.

True to form, she sends out an e-mail (ostensibly to all her hostees) saying that anybody who uses MT on their site will have their account deleted on Wednesday (today over there in the US) if they don’t remove MT or move – and I was the only one who was using MT on her server (or at least she thought I was still on her server :p). Then she sends out the same e-mail again a couple of days later *in case somebody didn’t get it* – probably because she saw that my site was still up. She must have gone to delete my account today and found that she couldn’t get offline and then gets even more vindictive and starts a whole bunch of lies. Ah well …
They have a saying here in Sri Lanka that "if you lie with dogs, you wake up with fleas" – I guess the same holds true for the female of the species … I’m just glad that I never did :p

I think the verdict is in – nobody (as well as nobodyspecial – sorry internal joke :p) likes the new design for The Developer’s Corner :p But then again, I didn’t like it either since it seemed just not to fit in – unlike the SM design which I liked as soon as I completed it – hence that being up and the design for this page being in the test folder. Oh well, I’ve had another idea for a layout for this site so you might see something again up in the test folder or simply see the layout change depending on how it comes out :p It’s again going to be blue-based but I want to make it a lot more subtle. However, I seem to be stuck with this idea of frames like I used in SM, and so I keep on feeling the need to use graphical frames around the text here too but I am not sure that will come out the way I’m thinking of it. Ah well, the only way to see is to do it 🙂

In the mean time, I’m thinking of hosting a few people here since I have a lot of space and am hardly using any of it even after trying to several CMS installations and moving over all the bits and pieces from other sites. So if you are interested in being hosted, let me know and I can set up a sub-domain for you. So many people have been kind enough to provide me a space on the web in the past and the least I can do in return is to pass on the favour. I’ve already asked a few people but I think I should be able to host a few more. Oh yeah, there is a catch – my hosting company does not want any multimedia (audio or video) on their servers even if it was created by you. It’s in their terms of service and so I cannot have MP3, WAV, AVI files but other than that, it’s all fine. So if you are OK with that, I can host you 🙂

There is one further thing going on sitewise at the moment but that’s a bit ugly and personal. So I don’t want to discuss that here but expect a later post today on SM all about it …