A trip to the library...

Amanda (The Queen) shared with me an interesting statistic she had read: that homeschoolers are responsible for approximately 40% of the books checked-out from libraries. HOLY CRAP! 40% I didn't believe her...until today, when we went to the library.

The boys are studying medieval times in school along with the military lessons I've been working with them on (to my shame, I've been doing a poor job of that!) SO, Amanda located the correct section at the library and, as near as I can tell, checked-out every book on the subject.

I kid you not, we must've checked out just shy of 50 books today. Its staggering. Those kids will know about the medieval times! If not through simple osmoses...

So long Vista, and thanks for all the...fish?

I installed Vista Enterprise about four months ago in an attempt to familiarize myself with it for work... though no one intentionally sends me out to do Windows support anymore, it does happen on occasion. As such, I felt I needed to be familiar enough with Vista to actually support it. That said, the last four months have been a living hell. Between the `explorer.exe` hangs, hideous performance, and learning-curve, I've come to loath Vista even more than most. SO, last night I installed Linux Mint 6. Oh the joy.

This install was on my HP Compaq nx9420, which I've had for a couple of years. Its a great box and has served me very well. Unfortunately, the nx9420 still isn't an install and go platform. There are issues you have to address that I've documented in the Ubuntu Wiki page for the nx9420. The most glaring issue is, of course, that suspend to ram doesn't work out of the box. From a support perspective, everything else seems to be dandy, you just can't suspend.

Unfortunately, Stephan Graber has changed his website and as a result there is a broken link in my wiki entry for his hp-s2ram.patch. SO, I had to do a fair bit of digging to find it. :-\ I have found it, and it can be downloaded here, as well as a mirror I've put up on my site, here.

Other than having to fix suspend, everything seems to work dandy. Any other nx9420 owners out there that would like to contribute their tips are free to contact me at coreyjsteele_a.t_gmail.com.

PG2 on Vista

I had a bugger of a time getting PeerGuardian2 to work under Vista. SO, I figured I'd document my solution for others so they don't have to experience what I experienced. The biggest problem is that there are like twenty-thousand people out there that THINK they can show you how to use PG2, but most of the time they're completely wrong. That said, here's how I did it:

1. Uninstall any instances of PG and/or PG2 that you presently have installed.
2. Make sure the "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2" directory is COMPLETELY empty.
3. Download and install PG2-RC1 from PhoenixLabs.
4. Go through the on-screen dialog
5. Create a batch-file that includes the following:

del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\cache.p2b"
del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\history.db"
del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\lists\*"
start "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\pg2.exe"

...the batch file is how you will launch PG2, not by any other means. That's it. It works like a champ.

Python in a hosted environment

I have a server that I can't exactly install whatever I want on. I need to be able to talk to a MySQL database from a Python script. I didn't have any of the database interfaces installed, and couldn't install them system-wide. What is a geek to do?

Fortunately, Python's package installer is pretty smart. SO, I created ~/python, and then used ` python setup.py install --root ~/python` to install each module I wanted to install. Next, in my actual code, I used the following to ensure python could find the modules...


import sys
sys.path.append( '/home/hostedby/python/usr/lib64/python2.3/site-packages/' )
sys.path.append( '/home/hostedby/python/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/' )


One note: ADOdb requires MySQLdb, but the errors you get from it are completely non-sensical and do not give you even the slightest indication about the inter-dependancy. You could have figured this out by reading the README ,but who does that?

My New Bumper Sticker

I found my new bumper sticker tonight... I'm bitter.

Mostly, I'm bitter that Initiated Measure 11 was defeated. I had really hoped that South Dakota would be the state to re-kindle the Supreme Court decision about abortion. I guess that plaque I have that says, "if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans," is as accurate now as ever.