Work Timer

I scratched an itch. Here's a simple task and time tracker written in Ruby.

Election Day Followup

It is great to be a cynic and have fears proven to be false.

Election Day

This is perhaps the most important day in recent memory. The results of today's election will affect the course of this nation and by proxy the world. Actually...one can only hope.

It is unfortunate that an opaque and untrustworthy voting system negates the democracy of the process. There are reports from Texas and Florida (go figure) about electronic voting systems switching Democratic votes to Republican. That's one hell of a bug, especially one-way. Not to mention that exit polling is not being done in many areas.

They say never to attribute malice to incompetence or stupidity...but yet again, cynicism colors my perception. I think it quite unlikely that the Democrats will win overall this election. Not that I particularly like the Democratic party, but the Republican party has done more to destroy the liberty of the American people than any of the enemies it has sworn to protect us from.

PHPMyAdmin Authentication Error

Error: PHPMyAdmin - Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client.
Explanation: The user's password is stored on the server in the new password format.
Solution: In the server MySQL console: set password for user@host = OLD_PASSWORD('the_password');

Fedora Core 6

I decided to give Fedora Core 6 a go since I had to reinstall Linux anyway.

My First Thoughts:

• Installation isn't too bad...much better than the slow Ubuntu LiveCD
• I've got a lot of tweaking to do.
• These icons are HORRID!
• Where are my Nautilus bookmarks??? Where is the side panel???

I went the whole way and installed my entire toolset, here's to trying this out for a bit. My install notes are here.

Hard Lessons Learned...again

So yeah...I was trying to set up a VMWare virtual machine, and no matter what OS I tried to install, I would get errors. I poked around and noticed that a file in my /tmp directory was eating up ALL my disk space. A file with no owner...

Well, I can't delete it, so I go to single user mode...and still can't delete it. Oh joy!

Time to bust out the trusty Knoppix boot DVD. I run reiserfsck and find errors. Big surprise there. I run it again to fix and proceed to corrupt the partition even more. (Oh, by the way, this is my / partition, which is separate from my /home partition, thank god!!!). Of course the on-screen instructions DONT TELL YOU to --scan-whole-partition when you run reiserfsck --rebuild-tree ( it should be reiserfsck --scan-whole-partition --rebuild-tree /dev/hda1). So I proceeded to fubar my root partition beyond all recognition. Guess who didn't make backups???

I managed to clear space off my trusty 40GB IBM SCSI HD, and try to install Ubuntu Edgy Eft. 6 attempts later...I give up (due to some horrific installer bugs) and try Dapper Drake. I don't know what the hell is wrong with my box...but only the Xubuntu 6.06 installer worked. All the other installers hung at some point. Hey, maybe my RAM is bad. I'll start Memcheck before going to bed.

But anyway...my rant is coming to a close. Lesson learned...BACK UP YOUR SHIT. I had tweaked this box for almost 2 years running (thank you Debian/Ubuntu for in-place distro updates!) and I lost a LOT of config files...not to mention weeks of work logs, journal entries, and wiki entries stored in my /var/www folder.

Today sucked.

UPDATE: It was bad RAM.