crazyskillsbloginitiative

Remember a few months back when major retailers begain to offer some generic perscriptions for $5 / month?  Well, Giant Food Stores now offers 36 different generic perscription antibiotics for free.

AP

Wow these little buggers are tricky!  I don’t know what all took so long, but it was really something to get them to run the way I want them to.  For the record, here’s what worked:

• Editing the running jobs using NANO, not gcrontab or kcron as they would inject foreign characters into the jobs and then they wouldn’t work!
• Using curl to run the php scripts, NOT exec, NOT php.
• Using full paths.  not /var/www but 127.0.0.1 .

Other than that.. let’s see..  it is NOT necessary to have a blank line before each line of the crontab as some have reported…   It was also not necessary to define a user to run the cron (i.e. curl USERNAME 127.0…)

For the record: Ubuntu Server. kernel 2.6.27-9_black_cat, apache 2.2.9, php 5.2.6-2.

Running 2.6.27-9 (Ubuntu 4.3.2-1ubuntu11 - Intrepid Ibex)  now and wow have they simplified things regarding the UI!  It is cake now to have compiz and emerald up and running, and it isn’t even using the antiquated xgl libraries.  Not to mention, the Creative Labs X-Fi 64-bit ALSA driver works with this version.  So things are good.

…

So here we are.  And I am glad that we are here.  But it was not an easy road!  Initially, I tried doing a dist-upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid and all sorts of things just didn’t work right - probably because of all of the tweaking I had to do to get compiz working.  Plus I installed a bunch of things not using apt, but from sources, as I tried out different apps before I found the ones I really like.  Anyway, here we are.  And life is good.

If you are considering making the jump, DO IT - but do a CLEAN INSTALL, not a dist-upgrade.  Just my 2c.

I was reading around a bit on the interwebs today and came across a really good article [nytimes.com] by Ben Stein about memoirs he found which his father was in the process of writing when he “entered immortality” in ‘99. It’s really a good read; he points out some real truths, such as how to him, his father had breakfast in the morning and then left to go spend some time at his office or sometimes went into New York for a couple days. When he came back home, he would talk about a great restaurant he got to enjoy. He never talked about money and never really talked about work either. Ben Stein just assumed that everything was “secure and happy” and that he was having a good time at his office.

I’m not going to go into all the details - that’s what the article is there for - but apparently (surprise!), his work was diffucult.  This next quote really got me to thinking:

“Get it in your heads that if you throw away your moral duties to your parents, you are thieves. You were born on third base and your parents put you there, and you think you hit a triple. It’s not true. It’s time to give back.”

So Mom, Dad, thanks.  For everything.

“Sundance is weird. The movies are weird. You actually have to think about them when you watch them.” - Britney Spears

“That’ll take some serious twistin’.  You’ll have to go sideways, not forward.  If I knew how, I’d go sideways myself.”

Been working on serendipity [crazyskills.internal] this evening.  It’s really challenging my knowledge of linux, file permissions, users and groups, MySQL and PHP.  It’s all working though just as it should.  It is really a fantastic cms imo.  A little tricky to fix when something goes wrong, but I am progressively getting to know it better and am reducing my moments of downtime considerably.  S.P.A.R.T.A.C.U.S. is a brilliant addition to the serendipity administration suite.  When your permissions are set right (!) it allows you to easily manage plugins.

Anyway, if you haven’t checked it out, do so and let me know what you think.  Get in there.  Post something.  It is there for you to use.  I think it will really be fun once more people are involved.

As usual, it is 100% ad-free.  It is also free free, both in terms of speech and beer.  So check it out [crazyskills.internal]!

-Orb

Had a meeting today with a national consulting group and it went exceptionally well.  I am excited to be a part of this team.  I believe that a business like this can remain strong even during difficult financial times - very likely grow stronger as even greater value is placed on making the right decisions as a bad one will cost you.  It is time to be smart.  We have to move forward with intent and deliberation on every step.  It is times like these when people like us need to come forward and see what we can offer to the world, the country, the family and the self.

Stay tuned.

Took 3 tests today:

• php
• mysql
• javascript

and have now been officially shown to be proficient in each.  I didn’t know how I was going to do (having worked with them for so long but not having any official grading in any of them until now) but the results were certainly favorable!

I don’t know why but i was really apprehensive about the tests.  I mean crazyskills is all about php mysql and javascript, but I wasn’t sure where my skills really were.

Here’s to it!

Use the following command to keep Firefox from asking you which session you want to use - to just open another window in the current session.  Tested under Linux kernel 2.6.24-22.

Command:  firefox %u

In the continual effort to provide the highest quality service, we, the crazyskills overlords, are proud to announce updates to the crazyskills.com collective! http://www.crazyskills.com has gotten an overhaul! Check it out!  Don’t worry, everyone’s favorite news page is still around, though it is now accessible through the new crazyskills portal or via http://www.crazyskills.com/news.php.

We are really excited to offer these new services to the crazyskills universe.

Crazyskills.com - one of about 108,810,358 unique internet sites.

Operating since February 10, 1999.

This will stand as a recommendation for you, the viewer, as well as a reminder to myself:

I am running GNOME, Ubuntu Hardy 64-bit, kernel 2.6.24-22. I am transferring 8294 files, making a backup of crazyskills.com to my local machine. (AMD Phenom x4 9950 Black Edition Quad-core 64-bit processor on the AMD 790FX chipset running on the Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5 with 8G Corsair DDR2 RAM and 2 WD VelociRaptor 10KRPM SATA2 HDDs) (more than enough machine)

Here are my results:

gFTP gives me a segmentation fault.

FileZilla transferred them without incident.

I installed them both through apt. Both are open-source software.

YMMV

We just can’t get enough of the power and performance of the Dell 2100 server running Black Cat (Ubuntu) GNU/Linux 2.6.27-9-server_optimized.

Last night (this morning) we installed a CMS called Serendipity [s9y.org] by the PHPBB Group [phpbb.com] and released under the GNU General Public License [gnu.org].

Wow.

This is such a powerful tool; we are so excited to bring it to the crazyskills CMS initiative.

Access crazyskills.serendipity here [crazyskills internal].

It was a little tricky to get installed.  Initially, I installed it through apt, but the apt version was entirely broken.  Then I removed the apt version and installed the source - ahh much better, though I still had to go into my database and make some major changes to get it to work on my server, including changing every top-level table name in the appropriate schema, restructuring my php5 install, and setting options within apache2.conf, httpd.conf and .htaccess — none of which was I able to find any documentation on exactly what needed to be done.  The install docs dealt with configuring the cms once it is installed and not the actual install.

Tips for those interested in trying out this amazing cms program:

• Install it from source.  Don’t mess with the apt version.
• Copy all the files into a subdirectory of your web host, leaving directory structure and file permissions intact.
• Be ready to copy php libraries to the location where the (broken) links are.
• Be sure to chown files to the authorized user of your apache2 daemon.

It was really tricky, but I wasn’t going to give up.  I knew it would run on my server and I was determined to get it going.

Overall though, this was a brilliant challenge for me and I am proud to say everything is now working as it should!  And I learned quite a bit more about my server and this amazing cms in the process!

Check it out here [crazyskills internal].

Cheers!