A Random Pattern

This has been a train wreck in the making for awhile. There are a lot of people still using an Operating System on their computer that is no longer supported. And by “no longer supported”, I mean “about to become a spamming tool owned by hackers”. Put simply, if you are surfing the web, and your startup screen says “Windows 98″ on it (you probably see it often if that’s the case), get off the internet until you can get a more secure OS.My recommendation? Drop $500 on a Mac Mini, then you don’t have to worry about it. Or just install the FREE but just as effective (for web surfing, email, and similar activities) Ubuntu Linux. The easiest way to do it? Just contact your local geek. Trust me, they like doing this stuff. (Even if they’re muttering something about hunting me down under their breath. Really. )

Why do I care? Because all the people that ignore this advice are going to end up sending me (and everyone else, including themselves) spam without their knowledge, as well as contributing to the general “clogging of the tubes” on the internet.

Fellow (Firefox) geeks, I need your help. I’m in way over my head here.

Although I’ve been blogging about Ubuntu, and am quite happy learning and using it, we also recently got a Mac Mini. My wife would be fine using it, except for one critical thing: one website doesn’t display pictures on Firefox on the Mac.

Tonight, I got around to digging into it more, and also used some tools that I know very little about. The site (and an example page) is www.babycenter.com boards. First I ran the Javascript Console, and discovered the site throws a ton of errors. The errors seemed to be similar and similar in number on both the Mac and Windows. I didn’t look too much into these, as I wouldn’t know what to do next anyways.

So I opened the DOM Inspector and inspected a specific item I knew was failing on the Mac. I looked at the first picture of our kitchen that my wife had posted, and happened to discover that “Moz-binding” was “none” on the Mac Firefox, but had the proper image address on Windows. If anyone can tell me where to go from here, or what this means, I’d appreciate it as I would like this to work.

I did discover that the same page works ‘properly’ in Safari, as well as in Ubuntu Firefox. So who do I feed this back to? Is there a fix possible? And what, exactly, did I find out (or not find out)?

UPDATE:  My wife says that the page displays fine on my Mac login, just not on hers.  I first installed Firefox on my account, so maybe that has something to do with it?  I don’t really know too much about how the Mac user accounts work as far as sharing applications.  Can anyone shed any light on this?

After we let Tessa down from the dinner table, she went over next to the kitchen cabinets and knelt down.

“Don’t go in the kitchen.” she repeated over and over.

“Don’t go in the kitchen, spider” as she shook her index finger at the little black insect.  After a few more admonitions the spider gave in and turned around, heading back out to the living room….

This morning at church, my wife asked one of the little girls in our ‘Lil’K’ class “How do you talk to God?” The girl’s response:

“In Spanish.”

Not sure where that came from, but it’s always funny to get unfiltered answers from children. They have such a fresh outlook on life.

(note: I’ve got no idea whether the girl was bilingual, race, or anything like that. I don’t think it matters for the story, either. So don’t ask, please. )

I’m a little traumatized right now. Selah just fell down the stairs again (all the way from the top this time, head first!). This is the third time in probably as many weeks – the first time I actually fell down stairs while carrying her.

She seems to be fine, which is a relief. The last two times she had trouble walking for awhile after the fall, and the first time Sara actually took her to the ER. She’s probably fine, but it really scares me.

I guess this is one benefit of living in a split-level – the staircases have half the stairs. That, or you could say that there are twice as many staircases…

I haven’t posted much this week, but a lot’s happened in the background. Here’s a quick summary, and you can expect me to return to a more normal posting schedule.

The Ubuntu box is back up – I ran a memory test, then rebooted a few times and it started up fine. During the memory test I discovered my RAM is bad, so that’s probably the reason for all the startup issues with that computer.

I also had a little trouble getting Remote Desktop working again, until I remembered to check my configuration for Firestarter (the firewall). Sure enough, I had momentarily lost power, so my laptop had a new IP address. I learned how to allow access to a whole range of IP’s through firestarter’s help site (though it was a little hard to understand). Here’s the short version: IP address/netmask. So if you want everything on 192.168.0.x to have access, add 192.168.0.1/255.255.255.0 to Firestarter’s “allow” list.

The frequent (brief) losses of power here probably don’t help any of my computers, so time to look into a UPS. Any recommendations for home use?

Today I finally got my own domain: ransomedhome.com. It’s a little raw right now, but I’ll be cleaning it up over the next few weeks, and moving everything there. In fact, I’m already importing my posts from here, and this may be my last post here (so update your bookmarks / feeds!) I will post a few more times to remind everyone of the move…

If you’re curious about string theory, or what in the world 10 dimensions mean, here’s a really nice graphical demonstration to confuse you explain everything.

That’s it, folks. More to follow soon.

Here’s a short slideshow video of our kitchen remodel. It’s meant only to whet your appetite, and give a quick overview. A more extensive video is in the works. Oh, and if you don’t have much bandwidth (if you’re using dial-up), you may not want to follow the link. Wait until I get a smaller version or collection of pictures up.

Edit: 10/31/06 1444, fixed links.

Quick link to pictures:  Granite counter top web album

You can see I’m really excited. That’s because I finally got around to sticking my Ubuntu CD in and trying it out.

Awesome! These guys are really doing something cool for Linux. I’ve been following Linux news for at least a few years, lurking but never actually getting it on one of my computers. Today, I’ve finally broken through the wall thanks to a number of factors, and there are even more things that make it look like I’ll stay happy with Linux.

Contributing factors:

1. Ubuntu will send you a CD with the OS FOR FREE. Really, honest to goodness, FREE.

2. Something called “Live CD” – you don’t have to install it, uninstall Windows, or do anything (other than maybe get a friend to help you boot from CD). Just start your computer with the CD in the drive.

3. I have an old PC that I built (a monster), that hasn’t been run in a year or two. It’s got Win XP Pro, but won’t start up anymore. I don’t know why, it just hangs on the Win XP screen. So I figured, why not? Guess what…Unbuntu started right up!

4. Lots of hype, people, lots of hype. I already get frustrated by Windows daily. The Linux hype convinced me (with a little help from myself) that Linux could save me. It’s probably not completely true, but I’m willing to buy the story. Especially since…

It’s FREE! (Well, minus an hour or so, but then again I’m a geek so that’s how I like to spend my time).

End result – the computer I couldn’t boot up for the last month is now up and running, on the internet, and I’m really excited.

One other nice touch: the Ubuntu guys have taken some criticism here and there for the brown theme when everyone else is doing blue. After about 5 minutes, it suddenly dawned on me that I was so glad not to be staring at another blue screen (no pun intended). The brown is calm, if not peaceful then surely not turbulent. In fact, one might say it is background, where blue is more in your face. Not to mention it’s different. Brilliant move, guys. I didn’t fully appreciate the genius of that little touch until a few minutes ago.

There’s a lot of other cool things, and some weird things (my PC does still have some sort of hardware problem). I’ll get into those in another article, though. Ubuntu lovers, leave me some advice!

Peace.

Only been working with this for a few minutes, and all I can say is,

WOW!!!

This is WAY Better than Blogger!  There’s some parts a little slower or more complicated, so for the beginning blogger (especially if you’re non-technical) Blogger may be a better starting point.  But if you want to do much with your blog, you’re going to quickly find yourself too limited and frustrated to stay on Blogspot.  So if you’re serious, try out WordPress.

Oh, this is soooo much better!