Friday September 24th, 2004

That Was Fun

Wednesday night, just before bed, I decided to update the web-server. The update failed with a file error. Apt-get normally doesn’t have file errors so I opened up the system logs and noticed some disturbing news. The log was filled with

hda: dmaintr: status=0×51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } hda: dmaintr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=69, sector=4 end_request: I/O error, dev 16:01 (hdc), sector 4

hard drive errors. D’oh!

Right about that time Fredd called to say my site was “jacked.” I copied all the files that I could read to my local machine, then Fredd entered a ticket to have the machine re-kicked.

The hard drive in the server was replaced and the machine reimaged while I slept the night away. I woke up with a fresh install of Debian Woody. Unfortunately, Debian Woody isn’t new enough for me and the hosting company doesn’t do the testing releases. So I had to upgrade to Sarge and reconfigure the machine before I went to work.

Mail is the most important thing, it was configured first. All I had to do was install the mail packages and copy over my configuration files. I moved on to the web-server. This should have been easy too.

But, yes there is a but, that is why the web-site has been unavailable. First, I wanted to take this chance to upgrade to Apache 2 and move all the configuration files to one location. I had everything set up and ready to go. I needed to leave for work and only had to start the web-server before I left. Unfortunately, WordPress just keep displaying a blank page. No errors, no warnings, just a blank page.

I was out of time, so I decided to fix it later. I still couldn’t fix Apache 2 so I decided to go back to good ol’ Apache 1.3. This didn’t work either. The same packages that worked days before, no longer functioned.

Two days later I found a post that described the problem and gave a solution. Turns out Debian’s PHP package doesn’t enable the module for mysql by default. You have to edit

/etc/php/apache2/php.ini

or

/etc/php/apache/php.ini

and change the line that says

;mysql.so

to

mysql.so

restart apache, or apache2, using

/etc/init.d/apache restart

or

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and you are back in business.

Saturday July 17th, 2004

Spam, Spam, Spam

I moved all my e-mail accounts to Fredd’s server and set up SpamAssassin to capture spam. So far, I have received very little spam despite using these accounts for all of my mail correspondence. Meanwhile, the account that I never use any more over at Time Warner is getting one hundred plus spam messages a day. SpamAssassin is doing a good job of filtering out that crap but I still have abandoned usage of the Road Runner mail account. I only have the account set up so I can find any service related mails from Time Warner that I may need..

32

Today is Dusty Jones Day, I am the ripe old age of 32 and can begin my journey through the Rolling Rock™ year.

Thursday July 15th, 2004

Four

Fredd’s wonderful employer, offered him an amazing deal on a server. I talked Fredd into getting a Linux server and have taken on the admin responsibilities. My limited availability, time-wise, has meant that set-up has taken a lot longer than it should have. But finally I have configured Exim and Apache to my liking, and have moved all my domains over to their new permanent home.

Wednesday June 23rd, 2004

PHP Markdown

John Gruber wrote an awesome Perl script called Markdown that allows blog entries to be written in the old school usenet and plain text e-mail way.

A PHPified Wordpress plugin of the same is included with Wordpress or, for the latest and greatest, look to the official home of the PHP Markdown plugin.

Note: The preceding announcement is to help me remember where I found the latest and greatest PHP Markdown plugin, you my technophobic reader, may disregard this post.

Tuesday June 22nd, 2004

We’ve Moved

Easy things are easy and hard things are possible.

That is the Perl mantra. The easy thing of moving my site from a custom Template::Toolkit based site over to the CMS d’jour was much more difficult than anticipated.

I wrote scripts to parse my articles, photgraphs, and photo albums. Then I learned enough PHP to write a custom plug-in to manage all my photographs and photo galleries.

I like how easy it was to learn PHP and create my “Ansel” plug-in, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing I could have written it in Perl.

All the links, articles, and photographs should be here. All the links should work. If you “clicky-clicky” on something and it doesn’t work, please let me know.

Thank you, that is all.

Wednesday June 2nd, 2004

Wow

It’s been almost 30 days since I last updated this site. Some may think that I have simply fallen off earth. Others may think, or are hoping, that I have been abducted by space aliens. The truth is that none of the aforementioned doomsday scenarios have come to pass. Instead, I am my own victim.

At work I have been busy getting my unrulely and overwhelming project back on the road to success. At times, coding this project is tedious and mind numbingly boring. Other times doing something clever and non-obvious makes the job fun again.

At home I have been busy with household chores. We have moved the office from upstairs to downstairs. This move has resulted in more space in Hailey’s room because the big person’s bed has been moved to the Longhorn Guest Room (fka the old office). We are now ready to accommodate guests, should any decide to venture to this area. We now have more space in the office for books and can begin to purchase reading material once more.

Hailey continues to change at her incredibly alarming pace. She can understand complete and complex phrases. Pick up the paper and take it to the trash, results in an action that resembles the phrase. She can tell you, with her albeit limited vocabulary, what she wants. “Up please,” is my current favorite phrase. To hear it would absolutely melt your heart.

Hailey has moved from her crib to a toddler bed. Going to bed now seems to take forever. Eventually this too will be easy and second nature. For now though, going to bed seems to be the most difficult thing in our day.

Over the weekend we were outside in the back yard when Hailey started saying ball, ball, ball. I had to tell Hailey that there is no ball back here. I shouldn’t have been so quick to jump to my conclusion. When I looked up from what I was doing I noticed that one of the neighbors kids had lobed a beach ball over the fence and there was, in fact, a ball in the backyard. I guess she told me, I’m sure it won’t be the only time that she is right and I am wrong.

Saturday March 20th, 2004

Hailey’s Swag

Now you can buy Hailey gear and merchandise from the exclusive and private Shop Dustacio store. No really. Choose the t-shirt or the lunch box. Each is under $20.

Sunday February 8th, 2004

OK!

Canon has notified me that my camera repair is not covered under warranty, but they will fix it for free as a one-time courtesy repair. I’ll take that.

Hailey has been able to stand unsupported for a while now, but tonight she stood on her own in the middle of the living room for the longest that I have ever seen. We might have reached 45 seconds. What makes this remarkable is what she was doing while she stood there. She was shaking her butt up and down, just as she does when she dances, and she wasn’t losing her balance. She finally fell down when she took a step towards the couch.

Any day now she will be walking and we won’t be able to keep up.

Saturday February 7th, 2004

Debian Sid

It has been a while since I have switched Linux distributions, so today I installed Debian Sid. I have over 21GB of data in my home directory and don’t have a good way to back that up, so I installed Sid on top of Fedora Core 1. This was not the standard run of the mill install and created some problems I wouldn’t have had if I was able to format the drive and start from scratch. After figuring out the way the new Debian installer named disks I was able to move the old fedora root partition information into a safe backup directory. Then I allowed the installer to do its thing. I had to abort the default options a couple of times, mainly to manually update the apt/sources.list to install Sid instead of Sarge, and to install grub instead of lilo. So far I’m digging the apt-get way of installing packages, and the fact that almost everything I have ever wanted to install is available as a Debian package including XGalaga.

I went with Sid over Potato, or Sarge because the others don’t don’t have new enough packages for my taste. I thought about installing Gentoo again, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit through the compilation process again. My machine isn’s fast enough to wait through an entire Gnome build.

Tuesday January 6th, 2004

Ha Ha Ha!

As you know web servers keep logs of who accesses a page, what operating system they use, what browser they are using, and the referring site. When the referring site is a search engine, the referring URL includes what the user was searching for. According to my logs, at least one person came to my site looking for a “how to change a diaper video”. After searching for this on Google, I think the searcher had bad intentions.If you really wanted a diaper changing video I wish could help you out. I have changed enough diapers to really be a pro at it.

Another popular term is the “genie excellerator”; an awesome garage door opener with difficult to install safety devices. I have a new easier way to make sure the obstacle beams are aligned properly. As soon as I can buy another garage door opener for my side of the garage I will post instructions.

Tuesday April 22nd, 2003

Netscape 4.7!

As I sit here listening to mp3s on xmms Hailey is getting fussy, then content, then fussy as the songs change. I have her laying on my desk as I type, and she seems to like it, as long as a good song is playing.

I restarted my access stats program and the logs are quite interesting. Since yesterday, 4.6% of the browsers accessing my site are Konqueror, which one of you is using KDE? and 21% are using Netscape. The problem is that 9.3% of those using Netscape are using version 4.7. If you are using Netscape 4.x, you should upgrade, ask me how if you don’t know.

Saturday April 12th, 2003

Finally an Update

[ 00:00 - 04:00 hrs ] After much absence, this site is now updated again. I have generated some new scripts that will help me keep things more up to date. You will notice that the articles are now different. Each one appears on its own page (as it moves off the index page) and you can link to it with the permanent link at the bottom of the article. The gallery section has been replaced by a photo album feature. The photo albums are generated automatically so it should be easier to keep new pictures on the site. The good news is there are a bunch of new pictures, the bad news is that the quality is limited to what the photo processor gave me on the photo disk.

News About Hailey On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday we were in Houston for an appointment with a Pediatric Neurological Surgeon, or children’s brain surgeon. We went to see this doctor because we needed him to refer us to his colleague, perhaps the last Pediatric Neurologist who specializes in Epilepsy in the state of Texas. The doctor we saw on Tuesday suggested putting Hailey on Phenobarbital to control the different types of seizures that he believes she is having.

This doctor’s office consulted with his colleague, and after three days, they have decided that Hailey should take part in his study. They should call us back within two weeks to arrange the time. This study will take place in Houston. During the study Hailey will stay in the hospital and will be monitored by CCTV and EEG to help determine what exactly is going on in her head.

Hailey has been on the Phenobarbital, the drug of choice for infants with her condition, for only two day, but she already seems like a different baby. It doesn’t seem like it is possible for a drug to work this fast at changing her behavior but, she spends more time playing and talking and less time fussing, than she did before.

As of Tuesday Hailey weighed 10 lbs. 6 oz

[ 12:00 hrs ] Brianna is off helping Tina with her dance squad, so I can think of nothing better to do than post a picture of Brianna with the Easter Bunny. This is from around 2001, I think.

Sunday February 23rd, 2003

And the winner is …

So The Grammy Award show is on tonight and Hailey is sleeping with her mom on the couch, so I have a little time to see my office again. First a side note about the show, why do the presenters seem like this is the first time they have ever read their lines? Do people not rehearse anymore?

Finally the office is clean and things are falling back into order. The only outstanding pile of junk are all the pictures that I have stacked against the wall in the corner. I have three or four rolls of film that have been developed, but I haven’t had a chance to get them posted yet.

I re-installed Linux this weekend. Red Hat is going to a policy of requiring a survey every two months to continue to use their Red Hat Network service. RHN is needed to keep packages up-to-date. I could pay them a monthly charge and open a real account, I could take the survey every two months, or I could try a different distribution. I took, door number three. Debian Sid (the unstable, leading edge branch) is now installed on my computer.

I have been looking for a blogging tool but haven’t found one that I really like yet. Most people use Movable Type but I don’t really want to use it. I may just re-write my template files. Those worked well for most things. The picture gallery still requires much manual work.

Hailey had her second eye-exam on Friday. Premature babies can have a problem with blood vessels not forming properly in their eyes. This problem is most evident in babies that are very early twenty-something weeks and babies that are on high concentrations of oxygen. Hailey had none of those factors but was premature so they had to check her progress twice. Both exams went without incident and Hailey will not need to return until age two.

Hailey may have a problem with colic. She seems pretty miserable during most nights now. That means less sleep for all those involved. Hopefully, we will move past this stage very soon.

Monday January 27th, 2003

Return Merchandise Authorization

Brianna mailed off the broken hard drive for warranty repairs, new pictures can’t be posted until it returns.

Friday November 22nd, 2002

Sickos!

So I use this really great program called awstats to generate web-statistics for this site. Using this program, I can tell how much bandwidth I’m using, which pages people visit, their browser, country of origin, etc. One neat feature is * Search Keyphrases*. This is what people type into search engines to find my site. I have been visited by Yahoo and Google. They send people to my site based on these phrases. Note number 11.

  1. dingos
  2. 16 weeks gestation
  3. photographs week 10 fetus
  4. sonogram images at 18 weeks
  5. how my baby looks in the womb
  6. fetus 12 weeks test
  7. 18 weeks gestation
  8. fetus 11 weeks image
  9. garage door alignment
  10. sonagrams at 4 weeks
  11. how to steal a baby
  12. pictures of fetus at 11 weeks
  13. pictures dingos
  14. sonogram at 12 weeks

So I go to Google and try number 11. Number one and two of the results set point here.

Monday August 26th, 2002

Practical Improvements

The look has been tweaked. I have finally found a copy of Eric Meyer on CSS at Bookstop. Expect some more subtle additions later.

Wednesday August 14th, 2002

CanoScan Fu

We picked up a CanoScan D1230U scanner at Fry’s. It doesn’t work in Linux (yet), but I took the opportunity to reboot into Windows so I could regenerate all the sonogram scans.

Visit the photo_album page.

Wednesday July 17th, 2002

Dusty Jones Day

Today is the official celebration day of ‘Dusty Jones Day’. Celebrate the day responsibly with a cold refreshing bottle of Rolling Rock(R) and a tasty slice of Tollhouse(TM) Pie. (Special thanks to Mom, Roxanne, and Brianna for pie (yes three of them)).