technology | mashby

March 18, 2004

Settling In With SuSE

SuSE - Simply Change You may have noticed that in past entries, I’ve referred to the fact that I’m running SuSE9 (Linux) on my laptop. In the past, I’ve always referred to Red Hat as my preferred distribution of Linux, so why the change? Well, Red Hat announced that they were no longer going to provide a free distribution of their software. Technically, you could still acquire a copy of Red Hat, but without paying a support fee, you would not be given access to the updates to keep your Operating System updated and secure. In a nutshell, Red Hat has gone corporate and it makes perfect sense for them to do this. At the end of the day, no one wants to see them go out of business and if this is a necessary step for them to stay profitable, then so be it.. However, there are a lot of home users and small businesses that were disappointed that Red Hat was no longer going to be available for free and I was one of those people.

So what version of Linux was I going to switch to? Red Hat isn’t totally getting out of the free Open Source market. They have a version of their desktop called Fedora. This is an open source, free desktop whose goal is “to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software” However, the impression I got when looking at Fedora was it was too new and a bit of an unknown at the moment. So I decided to look around and explore a few other distributions and see if there wasn’t something else that could fit the bill. If I’m going to have to swtich my OS, I might as well trying something new.

March 15, 2004

I Guess I Should Be Flattered

Robert Downey, Jr. surprised by a photographer SPAM is now just a daily part of my life. I get so much of it, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have piles of SPAM to wade through every day. Yes I have SPAM filters setup, yadda yadda, yadda, but you still have to sift through them for false positives. Anyway, one of the things that I’ve always been mindful of is that when a new site I’m involved in launches, I know it’s gaining in popularity when the level of SPAM increases. My assumption is that the spammers find me the same as regular users, so I’m now appearing on the radar. SPAM is just a part of the equation, a negative one to be sure, but I have to admit a little thrill when I see SPAM increasing on a new web site. 🙂

Recently, my weblog has been getting increasing numbers of SPAM and as is normally the case, I was a little bit happy to see it. However there’s a new type of SPAM that I’m having to deal with that I don’t care for at all. It’s called comment spam. If you run a MoveableType weblog then you’ve probably heard about this new type of SPAM, but for those of you that don’t allow me to explain.

March 14, 2004

As Close As I Can Get

As I’ve written in past entries, I have been pretty taken with the Macintosh OS X operating system. In fact, I’m anticipating making the move to having my main workstation and laptop become a Mac. The delay in making this change is that I have to purchase all new hardware and I’ll state it again, just in case anyone is listening – if Apple would release the Mac OS for PC based systems, they’d take over the world. Ok, I just had to get that off of my chest. So where was I? Oh yeah. With this desire to switch tugging at me and the fact that I don’t have the cash to make it happen yet, I decided to see what I could do to “Macify” my PC experience. It all started when I screwed up the partitions on my laptop. I was installing SuSE 9 on the Linux partition and something went horribly wrong and I lost my Windows partition in the process. Given the last time I tried to reformat, I was pretty ticked at myself that I had to start over from scratch. You see, the problem is that you have to install Windows XP, before you install Linux. Since I blew out my Windows partition, I had to start all over. I won’t go into all the details, because it would be long and boring, but suffice to say that I got Windows XP installed and then SuSE 9 and they are both working wonderfully. As the last of the Windows updates were being installed, I started dreaming of having a Mac laptop again and that’s when the idea hit me, “I wonder if I can skin my desktop so that it at least ‘acts’ like a mac?” I had seen plenty of screen shots on DeviantArt and other web sites that emulated a Mac, so it’s couldn’t be that hard. Lucky for me, it wasn’t. Continue Reading

March 9, 2004

IMAP – E-mail Made Easy And Flexible

Mailbox With E-mail On an average day, I’m usually working in at least 3 different operating systems and sometimes 4. Thus far today, I’ve been working in Windows XP, SuSE Linux, and Palm OS. I’ll be working in those 3 OSs off and on all day. Having such a varied work environment makes certain tasks, such as maintaining e-mail a pain in the butt. So a few month ago, I switched all of my e-mail accounts to something called IMAP. You may not be jumping OSs like I do, but if you use a desktop and a laptop, or want to check e-mail from home and work, you might want to consider using an IMAP account and here’s why.

A Tale Of Two Protocols
There are two main types of e-mail accounts that you can have: POP3 or IMAP. The difference between the two is how e-mail is transferred to the desktop. If you have an e-mail account, chances are it’s probably a POP3 type. With POP3, when your e-mail client retrieves your e-mail it downloads the mail to your desktop and then deletes the e-mails from the server. All of your e-mail is managed on the desktop. The folders you create to file e-mail for example are stored on your PC. For most people, this works just fine.

March 5, 2004

My New Online RSS Reader – Bloglines

Webmonkey Over the past year, I’ve become a big fan of RSS Feeds. I find that it’s an easy way for me to stay up-to-date with all the many web sites I frequent. I currently keep up with approximately 50 weblogs, news sites, as well as software updates all via RSS. During this past year, I’ve tried a bevy of RSS Readers, such as Trillian, SharpReader, NewsDesk, klipfolio, FeedDemon, and most recently FeedReader. While each application had it’s own merits, I found that because I use so many different computers, I needed something more flexible. The only solution that seemed to make sense to me was to use an online RSS reader – enter Bloglines.

Bloglines is a simple and easy to use web based RSS system. You simply enter the URL of the RSS you’d like to subscribe to and the feed now appears in your “My Blogs” section. You can add folders to help organize your various subscriptions and for the most part, Bloglines is just like any other RSS reader you may have tried. The main difference is that it lives on the web, so you can view your subscriptions from any browser, on any computer.

March 4, 2004

You Never Forget Your First

Webmonkey I read in the news today where a favorite web site of mine is going away. Seems like a lot of sites that I used to visit are no longer with us. I know that times change and blah blah blah, but it’s sad when an old favorite from your early days on the web hangs up it’s hat and calls it a day. Since getting on “the net” back in 1995, there’s been a lot of sites come and go, but this most recent one will truly be missed. The web site I’m speaking of is Webmonkey.

Back when Wired Magazine was in it’s hey day, they ran a series of sites and it seemed that one of the more popular ones that they ran was Webmonkey. The main reason for its popularity was the fact that so often you wanted to know “how did they do that?” and Webmonkey showed you how. From their groundbreaking design skills to their off the cuff humor, Webmonkey was one of those sites that I “cut my teeth” on. I learned a lot about what I know regarding web design from this site. Their articles were detailed and full of information on how to get things done on the web. Even to this day, I visit Webmonkey on a regular basis, if for nothing else than to use their Special Characters cheat sheet.

January 7, 2004

Make Your Voice Heard

I’m a member of the Palm OS User Council and we’ve recently launched a new survey called the 2004 Handheld Users Survey. The purpose of the survey is to help the consumer electronics industry produce improved mobile devices, which better fit our lives. The answers you give in the survey will be provided (anonymously) to […]

January 6, 2004

How To Add Smileys To Your Weblog

Recently I was looking for a solution to a problem I was having displaying HTML in my entries. While I was searching for a solution, I found a cool way to display smileys on my weblog. I like having little smileys on my web site, like this 🙂 , and in the past I was adding them manually. w.bloggar allows for custom tags, so this wasn’t much of a big deal to add them to my entries. However, I’m now using Zempt to post most of my entries, (great program BTW, you should really check it out) but Zempt doesn’t support custom tags. Having to enter them by hand was turning into quite the pain in the derriere – besides, I never liked the fact that I couldn’t have smileys in the comments. So when I stumbled across a way to add smileys any where I wanted on my weblog, I was ecstatic! All it takes is a plugin in and a few template changes and you’re off to the races. Here’s the lowdown on how you can add this feature to your weblog.

Step One: Find Some Smileys
Before anything else, you need to find some smileys that you can use on your web site. Mine came from a custom set that I use on the NPUG forums, but I found a great resource with tons of smileys to choose from. Jason has a huge collection of them, but I found his Basic Sets to include the best selections. There are even some holiday versions that I could see using for special holidays just for fun.

December 31, 2003

Adding A Little Chaos

PHP Code For Random Image Picker Earlier this month, I got a wild hair and decided to change the name of the site to “That Reminds Me Of A Story…” In making this change, I changed the description of the site (which appears in the upper right corner of the page) to “Ask me what time it is and I’ll tell you how to build a watch.” I initially liked the change, but in the comments to that post Chris suggested that the title and description were too similar and that he preferred mashby.com as the title. I felt the same way and decided to revert back to the original title.

After the change back, I kind of missed the saying “Ask me what time it is and I’ll tell you how to build a watch.”, yet I didn’t want to lose the main description of the site “Michael Ashby’s (aka mashby) weblog regarding technology, movies, travel and other odd rants and ramblings.” That gave me the idea of adding a little chaos to the site by adding a PHP script to select random text and display it where the description is. The entry explains how I did it.

December 22, 2003

Managing Links With MovableType

Links In my last entry, I hinted at the fact that I was going to create a Wish List utilizing MovableType (MT). I had this idea to create this feature of this site based on some work I had done for the Palm OS User Council web site. I had just completed installing MT not as a weblog tool, but as a full fledged Content Management System (CMS) for the entire web site. Yes, that’s right, MT can be used for a lot more than just weblogging. 8)

Since I began using MT for the weblogging software for mashby.com, I’ve found all sorts of interesting applications for it’s use. Anything from links management to task lists, to total content management. I’m still anxiously awaiting the release of MovableType Pro, but until then, I’ll keep bending MT to my will. 😉 To help illustrate just how flexible MT can be, today I’ll show you how you can manage your Links page through some small changes in how you normally use MT.

Category / technology