I’m absolutely stunned. On a whim (and out of boredom ) I set up lighttpd on my little laptop (an AMD64 X2 with 2GB of RAM), along with XCache, and thanks to lots of digging already done by this guy (and others referenced there) I got a test Drupal site up and running, too. It took a bit of nudging here and there (disabling the CGI module so that FastCGI support can take over, so that XCache works ) but it’s up and running. It’s just a wee bit … fast.

Technorati Tags: Geeky Happy

We’ve returned from Las Vegas. Big writeup coming; lots of good fun stuff happened and very little bad (though Rio loses points for killing their Masquerade Show in the Sky on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays — booooo!) happened. It’s always nice to see my family, and you really never do get tired of the weather out there

More to come!

Technorati Tags: Happy Life Vacation

Color me impressed. The laptop’s already back in my grubby paws, with a new motherboard, and all is in working order again. The timeline:

• Sunday (July 13, 2008): First noticed funky behavior in the wireless card.
• Monday: It actually died; found HP’s support article about the problem. Called HP, scheduled a repair pickup.
• Tuesday: HP ships out an empty box to me.
• Wednesday: Empty box arrives, via FedEx Standard Overnight. I disassemble the notebook (removing hard disk, memory, and battery as instructed), pack it in the box, and drop it off for shipment.
• Thursday: It arrives at HP. HP evaluates, repairs, and ships it back to me, all in the same day.
• Friday: The repaired unit arrives back at the house. Purrs like a kitten now.

Damn. That’s good service — two day turnaround, and they actually fixed it. Spiffy. Great job, HP!

Technorati Tags: Dead Hardware Parade Geeky Happy

After two weeks of waiting, faxing paperwork back and forth, and gently “nudging” the agent, I finally received the phone call I’ve been waiting to receive since we toured the apartment complex and filled out the first round of forms. It almost seems anticlimactic after days of phone tag and last-minute “quick, can you initial this little spot where you crossed out something and fax it back to me?” to receive the simple news I got this afternoon. We’ve been approved, and we’ll be given our permanent address and details on August’s move-in specials in a week or two. Since the move is still over a month away, this next dose of waiting isn’t going to sting nearly as much.

Woohoo!

Technorati Tags: Happy Life

We’ve returned from Tallahassee, Florida, having successfully found a good apartment to hurl ourselves into (we decided on Banyan Bay in case you’re curious), and with my friends surviving the ordeal that is Florida State University’s (mandatory) orientation program. In honor of my buddy Shannon formally joining Florida State University’s Class of 2012, I’ve updated the site’s theme to use the school’s colors. Yeah, I know the logo doesn’t match, but trust me, it looks better than the green one did. I’ll work on finding a better graphic for the corner logo in a day or two

Congratulations one more time, Shannon, for your achievement in getting into the university!

Technorati Tags: Florida Happy Life Site Tallahassee

George Carlin, who passed away yesterday deserved better than this lightweight, lame obituary in the local news. Ignoring completely the brilliance of his comedy and the intensity he brought to every performance, this wimpy obituary (brought to us by the puppets at “Central Florida News 13,” who serve as little more than shills for Bright House Networks) instead wastes three whopping four sentences they gave him by alluding to problems with drug abuse and heart disease.

Technorati Tags: Happy Sad

As a graduation gift, I gave my buddy Shannon (congrats, by the way!) a Wii Fit this morning. We’ve been using the living hell out of it ever since. This is by far the most entertaining peripheral for a game system I’ve ever used, and it’s definitely an absolute blast to exercise with.

We’ve both put in 60 minutes of “exercise time” (i.e. it’s given us 60 “Fit Credits” each) on the game so far. This thing is kicking our asses (probably mine more than hers, as she’s in better shape than I am). Unlike the folks who got offended when this thing called their kids “obese,” I blinked and realized it’s officially time to lose some weight when this thing sized me up and said “overweight,” with the line just barely hovering beneath “obese” (less than 1 point away from the obese line according to its BMI calculation).

The way this game is put together and presented in a lighthearted, goofy, and entirely non-threatening style. It permits multiple participants to create their own profiles, and the game tracks daily progress (your recorded weight and your daily activity in the game) for everybody. Each player can set a weight loss goal and track their progress towards it.

It does a pretty good job of creating incentives and motivation to keep going, both by unlocking new games and modes as you put in more time (it doles these bonuses out pretty frequently, too — in just a “credit hour” of exercise, at least five things opened up for us) and by unlocking more difficult/advanced options for the modes already available (more reps, longer routes, etc.).

This is definitely worth the price of admission. And yes, I lucked out in finding one — Wal-Mart had just set out a whopping two of them (ugh) during the nightly restock and I happened to be looking around that section at the right moment to spot it. I scooped it up the instant I saw it. I am proud to report I did not scoop up the other one to scalp on eBay

Technorati Tags: Happy Life Video Games

In the coming days, I plan to document this arcane process a bit more clearly (though admittedly it didn’t ultimately take all that much fidgeting around to get it working — it turns out that when you assume features labeled “advanced” won’t work because even the basics aren’t working, you are sometimes wrong ), but I made a series of really happy discoveries today regarding my HTC Excalibur (the “T-Mobile Dash” in the United States) and my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04:

• Synchronization now works (calendar, contacts, e-mail, and files) with Evolution on the laptop and the phone’s own native apps
• Network sharing works in both directions
  • If my laptop has a network connection and my phone is connected, the phone can happily share the laptop’s connection
  • If my laptop does not have a network connection and my phone is connected, if I enable the phone’s “Internet Sharing” app (just standard practice here — no special tricks), my laptop can snag an IP address from the phone via DHCP (again, all automatically) and share its connection
• Though it is an absolute pain in the ass (no recursion, and no wildcards), files can also be manually copied from anywhere on the device (storage card, root folder, etc.). Regular file synchronization in the device’s internal memory “My Documents” area works correctly.

Right now, synce-gnomevfs doesn’t seem to work (the damned binaries don’t seem to understand where to find each other):

will@prometheus:~$ synce-in-computer-folder install
Failed to open input file: '${prefix}/share/synce/synce-in-computer-folder.sh'.

(if I can get this piece fixed, it will mean the file browser (Nautilus) will let me skim around in the phone’s filesystem which will help sidestep the command-line “one file at a time” thing)

Update: It’s fixed. Ubuntu 8.04’s GNOME uses an entirely different system in Nautilus for plugging in new devices; building the experimental gvfs support for synce fixed this whole thing and now I can browse files on my phone via Nautilus. File operations work too. Woohoo!

But this has got to just piss off somebody in Redmond, Washington something fierce — a Windows-based phone is cheerfully talking to and working with a “lowly” Linux box. Nyah, nyah! This was the last thing I “needed” Windows for (though the phone is capable of installing apps on its own, which made that issue much less itchy).

Technorati Tags: Geeky Happy

My birthday brought an assortment of happiness this year, and despite my brooding about turning the “big” 30 (yeesh — talk about drama queen … my life is likely less than a third over, and “30” isn’t so big; hell, my voice cracked today as I was singing a song at karaoke, and I was told puberty ended in the teens ) I got all the warm fuzzies I needed given what happened that same week.

Friends and family both conspired to make the event memorable, and they succeeded. Despite that I’m over there all the friggin’ time, they managed to sneak around and snag some gifts for me without my having even a single clue they were doing it. My folks sent a very nice gift as well (it arrived a bit late since apparently the first attempt to buy it saw the merchant claim the beast was “damaged” at the warehouse before it could be shipped).

There was a big, nice leather computer bag (the gadgets and stuff I carry around finally outgrew the one I’d received last year from a former coworker), and within it were two books I’d expressed interest in (paperbacks, both science fiction works) and a gift card to snag some more once I burn through these (heh, not bloody likely anytime soon, as you’ll understand in a moment). The shipment from my parents was a 23-pound monster — the Complete Calvin & Hobbes, a three-tome compilation of every Calvin & Hobbes comic strip ever published.

Technorati Tags: Books Happy

With gas prices soaring past the $3.50 mark, it’s officially become “only use vehicle when absolutely necessary” time. Thanks to the generous loaning of a bicycle by a friend of mine, I’ve been enjoying a newfound enthusiasm for bicycling these past two weeks. Naturally, since I’m a bit of a geek, I had to “geek out” on the bike a little bit, and since I was going to be bicycling around at night on the trips home, a couple bits of safety equipment were needed. And nobody with a brain rides around without a bike lock these days either.

It’s actually transformed into a rather silly but remarkably effective means of transportation. The headlight (steady only) and taillight (steady or blinking in various patterns) both cost under $8 each and run on standard battery sizes (4 AA for the headlight and 2 AAA for the taillight), and both units cheerfully accept rechargeable batteries. They run seemingly forever on a charge, too, though I’ve played it safe and recharged them all at least once a week so far. The U-shaped bike lock was also pretty cheap, and so was the little computer I added to the handlebar — it shows stuff like current speed, average speed, elapsed time, distance, calories & fat burned, and so on.

Technorati Tags: Geeky Happy