Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

That's my Satellite 5105-S701, which has the host name 'sidrat'.

The machine is like 6 years old...there was a plan to upgrade in 3, and then 4...and then 5....and perhaps someday I will upgrade. Though what I've been thinking of getting...I'm not sure it would be called an upgrade. Been looking at Netbooks (don't know if I'll get one with XP or not, more interested in the idea of running Linux....but might get the XP so I can dual boot....or because the Windows version is the more powerful unit)

IE: HP MiniNote 2133 is either a 1.0 or 1.2GHz with Linux....but with Vista it comes as 1.2GHz or 1.6GHz. Guess they hate Linux users. Though I'll likely get something Atom based.

Anyways. The old laptop pretty much has been tethered to its powercord for some time. Not sure if I can get batteries for it. Though battery life was pretty poor new, now almost non-existent. But, a while back....while my brother, and his wife, were in Ghana....getting knocked down with Malaria. I had the laptop running 24x7 doing BOINC....malariacontrol.net

Over the last few days...I would come often find the laptop hung. I'd reboot it and forget about it.

Well, it was that way just a moment ago....I rebooted it, and almost immediately it hung again. It is summer now....and I can't remember when I started doing the full-time BOINC'ng...but it would've been late fall last year. So, I suppose it might not be happy about the warmer temps. Though I may have cooked it to death.

But, this wake time...and evening....so it is a cool time in my condo. And, if it is finding that too warm to stay up. There's probably something else wrong. Perhaps the CPU fan has stopped working. Since it was over $100 for a RFE fan for the desktop, I'm sure it would be pretty hefty to get parts for the laptop and probably not an easy self-repair project.

Guess its time to write off the old laptop.... Only problem is...I think its too late to buy a laptop with Windows XP now.

Hmmm...

There are certain sites that I use, where I use the dangerous feature of having Firefox remember my password....even though the site has disabled autocomplete as part of its security measures.

I did this by using a bookmarklet that hacked the currently loaded page, etc.

When I upgraded to Firefox 3, those sites stopped working. It would fill in the form when the remembered password, and using the bookmarklet broken the page (the login would fail).

While looking to see where I originally found the bookmarklet, and to see if it had been updated....I came across this:

Always remember password hack for Firefox 3

If you’re on Firefox 3 you can just edit your Firefox installation to get the “Always remember password feature” without having to run some JavaScript code on every page load:

• Shutdown Firefox
• Backup the file PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js.

• Edit PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js with your favorite text editor and find the following lines:

                if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
                    element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
                    return true;
  

  On the GNU/Linux version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code is inside the private method _isAutocompleteDisabled, on the Windows version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code can be found inside the local helper function autocompleteDisabled which is part of the private method _onFormSubmit.

  To let Firefox password manager always remember passwords those “autocompleteDisabled”-methods have to always return the value false.

  All you have to do to achieve this is remove the lines above or comment them out like this:

  //          if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
  //              element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
  //              return true;
  

• Save your changes and close the editor.
• Restart Firefox - Firefox password manager should now always remember passwords ignoring the autocomplete=”off” attribute.

Now the dangerous thing I've been doing is working again.....

userChrome.css

/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar */
#bookmarksBarContent {display:block !important;}
.places-toolbar-items {display:block !important; height: 48px !important; overflow-y:auto!important;}
#bookmarksBarContent toolbarseparator {display:inline !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent .bookmark-item {visibility: visible !important;}
.chevron {height: 0px !important;}

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Link: http://www.umpcportal.com/2008/06/dell-netbook-coming-in-august-sans-function-keys/

Dell is pushing too little and too late.

Since seeing the power of the ASUS Eee Pc, I've been thinking of getting such a device. Though I wasn't sure if I could handle the sacrifice of hardware to get small, light and low cost. Then others started coming into the scene....such as the HP Mini Note. And, things started looking up that something suitable would be offered.

I then heard rumors of Dell coming out with something in June. And, since there are Dell's that can be had with Ubuntu...this seemed like it might be a good thing to wait for.

But, now they are saying August....I don't think I can wait that long. (too late). And, its not going to have function keys. Well, that's a sacrifice in hardware that I don't see myself accepting. (too little).

Guess I'll take a look over what is available now and pick the one that I'll have live with for the next 5-6 years (that's how old my previous laptop is).

Link: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/TestTrack/2008/05/28/testing-60/

This is a test to see if I've fixed the PHP code to do trackbacks works.

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Link: http://tech.arantius.com/select-urls-in-putty

Now that I run irssi in screen and PuTTY (on my Windows machines)....it has been a wish of mine to be able to click links that appear. Alternatively, to have an easier way to select the whole link....

Double clicking on the URL leaves off the http: part, so that doesn't quiet work....its not enough, or too much. Depending on your perspective.

But, just now I typed some terms into Google and eventually came upon this posting.

Since its mainly for the saved session that launches/restores my irssi session that needs this, I tried the edit saved session method. It didn't work, because the line it gives to replace is actually the original line. The correct line to insert for Wordness32 is:

"0,1,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,1,1,1,1,1"

Also it was tricky finding the key Registry location, but it's:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions\....

Now to leave a note for myself to do this to my computer at work on Monday

Link: http://lawrencechen.net/index.php/2008/03/30/today_might_be_a_good_day_to_upgrade_to

Thought I should mention the latest in start times for MS Money.

Now that some time has past, and I have all my bills reentered again.... I've found that the slow start and it taking 100% of my CPU for a long time when starting problem has returned.

The normal repair of the file didn't yield any problems or do any help. And, I wasn't going to delete all my bills again.

So, figuring it was something related to my upcoming bills, I made a guess that it might be the bills that are estimates of previous bills. Like having it estimate my electric bill (or natural gas) based on the previous 12. Or other bills that vary. I tried reducing the windows on these to see if it would help.

Didn't notice any help.

Recalling that budget was attributed to a slow down...and that the old budget was pretty much meaningless, since it was largely based on a previous life where I had much more means than I do now. I decided to nuke the budget (and try the saving and spending budget)....

There's still a spike in CPU and some lag at start...but it doesn't drag on as long. But, it might be too early to tell if this is the 'fix'.

Now the problem is sticking to this budget.....

Link: http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?p=75053#75053

I discovered that I couldn't send trackbacks from my blog.

I had previously turned it off, because I was getting too much trackback spam...but the new version of b2evolution offers more control to reduce trackback spamming, so I thought I would give it a try.

So far since my site's upgrade, no trackback spam....actually no trackbacks at all.

It did make me wonder if there was a problem with my site accepting trackbacks, but that seemed to work. Eventually, I found that the trackback sending code using fopen(), which is disabled on Dreamhost. Then I had better keywords to search b2evolution forum...and found a post on the subject.

I found a simple class that encapsulated curl, and used that to fix the part of the sending of trackbacks that wasn't working for me.

See my reply to the forum post for details....

I didn't touch the other part (POST method), because I hadn't encountered it yet....so I didn't have a simple test case to play with.

Of course, I'm talking about my Ubuntu server (well, maybe not obvious....except that I'm not known for doing upgrades).

I had debated waiting for Hardy Heron's release before building this Linux server. Except that I had bought the box back in December, and delaying was preventing was delaying all that BOINC work that I've been doing.

There's other stuff I want to or have thought of doing with this server, but don't know where I actually stand on doing those sorts of things. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would've gotten this box (it was knee-jerk response to replacing a dead server, which I was later able to resurrect...negating the ordeal of recreating things). OTOH, I probably would've continued on with buying something else....and I'm not sure if I would've been that happy with that purchase. Of course, it has delayed that purchase....and it may become too late to get it. Though perhaps Windows XP will continue to still be available after June 30th, and I'll make that one last upgrade in that department.

Anyways...other than taking much longer than expected to upgrade....either the upgrade servers are still badly hammered, or Cox is throttling me. Cox seems to be sluggish in general today. The download speed was dismal. And, then hidden in the terminal you don't see my default, it was asking if I wanted to proceed with the upgrade after everything had been downloaded.

Annoying enough when doing 'sudo apt-get upgrade', even more so here....because I wasn't expecting that I had to wait and interact (with a hidden screen) in the upgrade. Later there were dialogs that popped up on stuff that wanted input, mainly to decide if stuff I had configured in Gutsy could be unconfigured in the resulting upgrade to Hardy. Umm, I configured those services so that I could use them....

Finally it was done....it took forever to boot while it did fs checks on /home and /MMCVideo, but then everything looked fine.

Well, not totally. lm-sensors was changed, so I had to reconfigure that, and I'm not sure but the core temperatures seem to be higher now. The default is FireFox 3.0 beta....and all my extensions and themes got disabled. I've been avoiding upgrading to FireFox 3.0 on my other machines for this reason. Though people say that the new version is faster, and the memory leak is fixed, and some of the hanging/crashing problems on Mac OS X seem to be gone. But, I want it to work the way I've customized it....

So, I changed my shortcut to launch firefox-2 instead and reverted things.

Now other than network lag, which I hope will clear up on its own....the only main thing that doesn't seem to work in the update is vmware. Which probably just means I need to rebuild the kernel stuff again (or see if there's some hardy specific details to making that work). Not really a big deal though, since I never got around to running anything in vmware. It was on my list of things to try, but now I need more disk on this box.

I heard 8.04 was going to have support for PM SATA, wonder if that's true and if the PCIe PM SATA card that is in the box will now work, etc.

The site seems to be getting slower and slower. Plus I think dreamhost is somewhat slower than my other shared hosts....though others have been slower. Not sure where the bottleneck is, and I don't have a feel of what kind of resources the site uses now...so don't know if moving to VPS would help or not. And, whether to move the site or the mysql, or both.

But, I did some reading of things to try.

I cut down the number of posts that are displayed on each page.....to 10, from 15. That seemed to help. I also used this as time to clean out my link roll....which also helped.

Then I turned on debug to see what was going on in the page render. Discovered the weather widget plugin consumed almost half a second. So, I axed that. Using the weatherpixie image is probably the faster way to provide that.

I suppose if I was really concerned, there'd be more stuff to hack out...but this seems to have made enough of a difference.

Later the problem where page seems to completely renders and is stuck spinning at the end, had reappeared....I concluded that its the code that I was using for the twitter feed, so I changed it out for the official code from twitter.com. And, so far that's working.

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