MindlessCode.net

I think it’s nice people put pictures in their blogs…sooo…you’ve got to tolerate some photos from me today. Sorry!

Click to enlarge:

(12:30AM) Jamming the last night at Mark O’Connor Camp. I look tired, huh?	(2:13AM) Kayla, Me, and Kit (R-L) at the last night of Mark O’Connor camp
Mary, Bowie, and I rest in the shade of the 40°C (105°F) day.	Mary, Kit, Frank, and I (L-R) harvesting lettuce
Threshing Mustard using our “seed cleaning machines” (Frank, Kit, Mary, Laurie, and Me)

I’ve moved the Wild Garden Seed and Gathering Together Farm website from D4Hosting back to our original home at SupremeServer. This means that I don’t have to worry about if the website is working or if the server is going to get broken into…and all the hassles that has to do with running your own server with lots of other people on it.

Sure, it’s not going to be the same–I don’t get all the bandwidth and HDD space I want, It costs more, I don’t have scp or sftp (how stupid!), public key authentication, or all that other stuff. On the plus side, I get someone to run the server for me, daily backups, SSL is all is taken care of, etc etc. I think I’ll be happy.

If you sign up, be warned that they claim to charge $360 a year for SSH! That’s more than a whole year of hosting on their largest plan! I didn’t see this price until I had signed up. When they called to confirm the order, I told them to cancel my account. They called back about 5 minutes later saying “Oops! It’s only $30/year”. $30 still is a lot to charge for SSH–but *shrug*.

I was able to set everything up and test without waiting for DNS to resolve by setting /etc/hosts to map the IP to hostname. I got everything working and then released it the website into the wild.

Everything should be working fine–if you see something wrong, let me know at tajmorton@gmail.com.

I’m writing this from Dropline Gnome 2.10.2. I thought I’d try Gnome one more time before I gave up on it completely. While I do have to say that the Dropline folks have done a great job of packaging software and making Gnome easy to install, Gnome just isn’t for me. I just can’t get it to act the way I want it.

For example, I regularly have at least 2 programs running the background (IM program and a music player). Under KDE I have these programs “iconized” to the system tray where they won’t take up valuable real estate on my 1024×768 screen. However, for some reason I can’t get Rhythmbox and GAIM to iconize–they just sit there using space on my task bar. Throw a Rhythmbox plugin for Audioscrabber in there, and you’ve got 3 items always on my task bar–what a mess.

A few other annoyances include the fact that Naultilus is pretty poorly configured. If click on an image and it opens in Firefox or The Gimp. If you click on KWord document you get a message saying “There is no application to open this file.” If you try to open a document across a SMB share or on a FTP server, you simply get an error message (even if you are using a “Gnome” application). Right clicking on an image and choosing “Open in Image Viewer” brings up a Gnome image viewer with a directory view instead of the image you right-clicked on. Typing “google <query>>” into the Firefox search bar does a “I’m feeling lucky” search instead of the standard search. Opening a HTML document gives me some error about Epiphany and Bonobo. Oh, and did I mention the file-chooser sucks?

I’ve been using GMail for the past week, and have to admit I like it a lot. I might even switch to it from Thunderbird… It’s pretty sick. If you want an invite (I’ve got 50), leave a comment, you’re email won’t be shown.

Here’s two pictures of Laurie and me on Tuesday (click to enlarge):

One minute	And the next (snore)

NOAA was prediciting that it would rain on Sunday night and Monday. We went out to the lettuce field on Sunday and picked up at much lettuce as we could. What we didn’t pick up we covered with tarps. Of course, it didn’t rain Sunday or Sunday night. It waited until we were having our coffee break to start “bucketing down”. We had these awful 10 minute rain showers where it would pour down on us…oh well. At least we were more prepared that last year (if I had pictures of last year around me right now, I would certainly upload them–they’re pretty sad :P).

Here’s two crew pictures from yesterday: http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/crew-pics/

The seed crops are here, and don’t show any sign of letting up anytime soon. We’ve been working at GTF 3 days a week 8-5. It’s kind of crazy, but we’ve got a nice big crew of 7 people which is really sweet! Rock on!

I’ve been finishing up mime-type support in Autopackage. We’re using a XSL template to transform from the FDO mime-type spec to the legacy KDE .desktop file format. It’s pretty cool, and I have to admit it’s working pretty well. We’re automatically doing the transform and then installing the KDE files transparently, too.

Also, for the EULA displayer, we’re looking for a good way to show HTML in a GTK+ 1/2 app. Documentation would be nice, too. Suggestions?

We had the first lettuce thwacking today…highs around 32C (or 90F, for all ye imperial folks ;)). That means that my summer fun is over (all those fiddle camps), and the work is starting NOW!. Therefore I probably won’t doing as much interesting stuff (like re-re-re-re-recompiling libtalkfilters for an Autopackage of tmsnc), and instead thwacking and winnowing dusty seed.

Some very interesting stuff has been going on with the Autopackage project, like all sorts of ugly hacks for dealing with the libstdc++ problems…a lot of fun… :S

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day!. Check out the pics, they’re pretty funny.

[This was susposed to be posted yesterday, but the server was busy being taken down by a runaway shell script!]

“The SDF” (Seed Drying Facility), our $40 almost greenhouse finally got an upgrade Sunday :). The old SDF was white PVC pipe and clear plastic. It lasted a while, but after a few snow stormes, it was starting to lean over.

We decided that sometime a “real” greenhouse would be nice. After sitting around for a year or two years, it was finally put together:

The Original SDF	Inside the SDF–Scary!	Carrying the supports
Inserting the supports into the pipes	After getting rid of the old SDF.	Yay Done!