ChinnoDog's blog

I finally set up Gallery on my VPS so I can share photos.  I know, I could use any of a number of photo sharing sites, but I wanted to it myself, and, well, Gallery is cool!  I will permalink it on the front page later.  It still needs some work but it has a few photos from Australia on it.  That is for another post though.

http://gallery.chinnodog.com

Screen shot of gallery.chinnodog.com in Chrome

On Monday Jen and I pulled in at home around 7 in the evening along side some other cars on the street. As Jen walked down the walkway towards the front door a cat appeared and walked up to greet her.  I followed with the items I was bringing inside from the car and the cat walked up to say hi to me as well.  After we had walked inside and I was unloading my cargo the cat walked up to the front door where Jen was standing and poked its head in, but we shooed it away.  A neighbor happened to be outside and said the cat had been wandering the complex for a week and tried to go into someone else’s house too, only to get kicked and left on the porch.  She was a very friendly cat, so after some debate we let it in.  On Tuesday we took her to the vet and on Wednesday she got spayed (to avert risk she was pregnant).  She is home now.  She is a very friendly cat, even after everything we have subjected to her to.  She doesn’t have a name yet.  Here are pics!  The picture at the left is from today not long after I gave her pain medication.   The picture on the right is from yesterday after she came home from the vet.

Annoyed cat at back door

Cat in Jen's lap chilling out

After some headache I got Wordpress moved over from Dreamhost to my VPS.  The theme got broken somehow, and the encoding was messed up but it is fixed now.  To fix the theme I deleted it and downloaded a newer version.  To fix the encoding I reproduced the conventional database with Sweedish collation and imported my text as latin1, not UTF-8.  I will resume adding posts now.

I finally purchased a VPS plan.  Dreamhost has been pretty great, and there is no denying that having a web site at Dreamhost is low cost and low maintanence.  And, getting unlimited bandwidth and hosting space as compensation for the one time the server went down was more than I could ask for.  And those one click installs… I will miss you.  I will surely have more issues managing my own server, but the experience will be invaluable and I want the benefits that come with it.  At Digital Linx I get 2GB of RAM, 60GB of disk space, and 600GB of bandwidth for as low as $18.42 a month!  I think this is pretty good compared to some of the others out there.  I don’t think it gets much better than this.

	Reliable web hosting with great features and service for a low price.
	Digital Linx – Soon to be hosting this blog in Ubuntu 9.04 server with OpenVZ. See some great deals they posted on the WebHosting Talk Forums!

Front of Car

On May 7th my wife was in a car accident. I have not taken much time to post anything on here since then, so this post is long overdue. She was driving southbound on I-222 in the left lane at around 9pm and a collided with a pickup truck that was traveling north in the southbound lane.
Location of Accident (approximate)

About a week after the accident I was able to see the car. It was a 2000 Hyundai Accent. Jen swerved to avoid the oncoming truck at the last minute and the two drivers sides collided. Jen broke her humerous, ulna, femur, fibula, and left toe all on her left side. She also had hip fractures on both sides. Her left upper arm was damaged and was closed up with a skin graft. Luckily it is cosmetic only, and the arm is expected to function normally after she recovers. Here is what is left of the car. Note the roof was cut off by the emergency crew in order to get her out of the car.

There have been some articles online about the accident. The latest one from the Reading Eagle details the most recent developments.

Jen was in Reading Hospital for about 4 weeks before going to Manorcare in Sinking Spring. I have since rented us a first floor apartment and moved us both there. She gets around with a walker for now. We have a lot of things to unpack yet, but I hope to have a fully functional apartment within a month or so. Read the rest of this entry »

The early versions of Adobe Air wouldn’t open links in twirl in Chrome when I ran it on Windows.  The current version won’t open links in Chromium when I run it in Ubuntu.  I found this article that indicates the problem and fix. Here is the two line version of the fix. Adjust it if you aren’t running Ubuntu 9.04 (Intrepid) or wish to use a different browser.

sudo perl -i.bak -p -e 's/firefox/browser/g' /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/chromium-browser /usr/bin/browser

Note: This modifies part of Adobe Air, and you will probably have to rerun the first line if you install an Air upgrade. If this blows up your Air install just delete libCore.so and rename libCore.so.bak to libCore.so.

I am totally slacking on blog postings.  I recently started using Ubuntu on my laptop as my main operating system and have a ton of things to figure out yet.  Here is an important one.  I figured out printing to PDFs though.  To print to PDFs:

apt-get install cups-pdf
mkdir ~/PDF
sudo chmod u+x,a+x,+s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf

You might have to

sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart

after that.

Bitlbee is a IRC proxy that allows you to connect to instant messenger services using an IRC client.  It emulates an IRC server so you can connect to it from your favorite IRC client and then plug in your account information.  You can install it on a server for shared use or install it on a workstation to connect to locally.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out of the box in Ubuntu.  Here is what I did to install it.

1. Install bitlbee (duh).
   sudo apt-get install bitlbee
2. Install xinetd if you don’t already have it.
   sudo apt-get install xinetd
3. Now we need to copy bitlbee.xinetd into /etc/xinetd.d per the instructions.  Oops, we don’t seem to have that.  Make a temporary directory and download the source to get it.
   cd ~
   mkdir bitlbeesrc
   cd bitlbeesrc
   sudo apt-get source bitlbee
   cd bitlbee-1.2.3/doc
   sudo cp bitlbee.xinetd /etc/xinetd.d
   
   (you are done with the source)
   cd ~
   rm -rf bitlbeesrc
4. The /etc/xinetd.d/bitlbee.xinetd we just copied still has its default settings.   Open it up in nano or your favorite editor and set “user = bitlbee” and “server = /usr/sbin/bitlbee”
5. Restart xinetd.
   sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart
6. Almost done.  If you connected to bitlbee now you would get permissions errors though.
   sudo chmod 777 /etc/bitlbee/bitlbee.conf
   sudo chmod 777 /var/lib/bitlbee
   (I would like to point out here that I KNOW that you don’t want to be setting 777 permissions everywhere.  I don’t think its particularly dangerous here.  I’m a noob. gimme a break. :-p )
7. Everything is ready.  Connect to localhost on the default IRC port (6667).  Proceed with the quickstart guide written by pleia2 to add accounts.

Once upon a time whenever I would move or rearrange I would get out my graph paper and draw each room to scale with doors and windows and outlets and the whole nine yards.  Then, I would measure all my furniture and I would draw that to scale on another sheet and cut out all the pieces.  I could then move them around the drawing of my room until everything fit nicely and I could see that yes, there was actually walking space in the room!  (Ok, maybe that says more about my shortcomings in interior design than anything else.)  Anyway, I didn’t do it this time when I moved into the house and I regret it.  I always wanted a faster way to do it but there wasn’t one.  Drawing it in a full fledged CAD package would take too long and it was difficult to get measurements right using drawing programs like Visio.

Awhile back I found Google Sketchup online.  Its a free 3D design package that is kind of a hybrid of the above mentioned application types.  Once you get used to the controls its pretty easy to build 3D objects.  It uses a very intuitive interface that allows you to draw things on the screen and then extrude them.  Its almost magic!  I have only recreated my office thus far, using crude blocks to represent most things that take up space.  This is sufficient for my purposes, though SketchUp is certainly capable of more.  Next: draw doors and build furniture!

This is a major improvement over my graph paper cutouts!  Though, there is some additional design time required for planning out the additional dimension.  This technique should be particularly useful in my office since it is so small.  I will be building up as well as out in order to be sure I have enough space.  I have included the actual SketchUp drawing below for anyone that would like to have a peek.  My sister used to put things in my cutouts that didn’t belong there.  I anxiously await the edited copy with a toilet where my desk is supposed to go. Sketchup Drawing Office.zip

I’m testing remote control solutions at work for the next couple weeks.  For the moment I’m testing the small business solution from Bomgar.  It seems to be fully featured.  It supports everything!  Win / Mac / Linux / Win Mobile and soon Blackberry!  Anyway, anyone that has wanted my help in the past, now is your chance.  I will probably be testing a competitor product soon as well but it probably won’t have anything but Windows support.