avablog

The latest feature to hit my Gmail account is Web Clips. It’s an RSS feed aggregator that appears at the top of my inbox. I can enter in the addresses of whichever blogs or sites I want to track, and I’ll have access to those sites’ latest stories right from Gmail. Man, this is nice. […]

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You may have noticed the small block of ad links over there on the right side of the page. The idea is that the thousands of people who visit this blog will click on links to ads for potato casserole, and I’ll subsequently become rich beyond my wildest dreams. Here’s how it works. Every time […]

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I’ve always enjoyed Webcams. No, no, not THOSE Webcams. Just regular ol’ Webcams pointed at stuff like cubicles or busy intersections or someone’s Halloween decorations. They’re a great combination of technology and voyeurism. I bought an iSight camera not too long after they were introduced. At the time, I wasn’t sure of much more than […]

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I’ve been trying to figure out how to serve images to the blog now that I’m running Gallery2, which stores its sized images in .dat files rather than as scaled jpegs. I think I’ve figured out a method. So, here goes. The downside is that the images aren’t stored locally, although I do have copies […]

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I just sold my Cube last night on eBay. The auction price jumped $90 in the last 30 seconds, which is always a welcome turn of events when you’re a seller. As I was getting the Cube backed up and ready for sale, I was looking for information on how to give a buyer that […]

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I’ve decided to remove the login requirement for getting to the blog. What this means is that you’ll no longer have to log in just to get to some blog content. If you want to see the juicy posts about Ava, though, you will have to login. Here’s how that works: In the menu on […]

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Thanks to my good pal Kevin, I now have a pretty cool calendar app that you can see via the Web. Here’s how it works: Leah and/or I update our calendar here at home using Apple’s calendaring app, iCal. There are other applications you can use on other platforms, I just happen to use a […]

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I’ve been thinking about the purpose of blogs. Or at least this blog. And I’ve come to the conclusion that this particular blog is really meant mostly for the dissemination of information about our daughter, along with tidbits about our daily lives. Set the world on fire? Probably not. So, in the spirit of isolation […]

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Apparently some mail servers are grabbing the registration confirmation e-mails sent out by the blog and grinding them into dust. If you registered and did not get an e-mail containing your username and system-generated password, let me know. Your user has been created, you just didn’t get your confirmation e-mail. I’ll reset your password, send […]

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Surprise, surprise. I’ve upgraded the WordPress software to version 1.5 (from 1.2), and I need to do some work before I get it back to the way it was (now done, pretty much). Hope I can do it. In the meantime, get your e-mail addresses and passwords ready, because I’m going to be locking this […]

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A while back Kevin and Rachel were in town for a visit. While they were here, Kevin and I took a look at the PC he helped me build last year. In particular, we were looking at the copy of Half Life 2 I’m running, which Kevin and Rachel (I think?) got me for Christmas […]

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Thought I’d just make a quick entry about a project Kevin recently worked up for my mom. Her ISP’s spam filters were choking on some e-mails she was trying to send with very long recipient lists. Their suggestion was to break the lists up and send multiple messages. Probably not a terrible solution, but why […]

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Whew, this thing is a challenge. I’ve got PHP5 and MySQL 4.0 installed on the Cube. Due to the (apparently) bleeding-edge version of PHP I’m running, I have to install a number of changefiles for phpBB2.0. As if that weren’t enough, I’m having some issues figuring out how much I need to do to the […]

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I’ve been messing around with the CSS for WordPress and Gallery, and I’m getting closer to having a consistent look through the three major pieces of the nicheplayer.net Web site. I chose nicheplayer.net as a nod to Apple, the computer industry’s perennial whipping boy (SCO notwhistanding). Rather than have little “Made On A Mac” gifs […]

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It’s been a long day of messing with CSS for a Web site I offered to help with for the local free lunch program. I just copied most of the CSS from this site and stuck some text into it, and voila, a new site. It’s not much to look at, and there are sure […]

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I’m running between three different computers and two different platforms as I collect information on configuring WordPress, so I thought I’d just make a post here that collects some of the best notes I’ve found from various places. Mostly, these notes deal with plugins, hacks, and CSS code for including images in WordPress posts. The […]

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This is just a post to check and see if my changes to the wordpress database worked OK. Turns out the default install of WP 1.2.2 (Mingus) fails to create a needed row in the wp-options table that allows the user to save an entry for the offset of GMT, which in my case is […]

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Now that the site is up and running reasonably well (stupid, lingering MySQL host problem notwithstanding), I need to think about how to modify the look of this blog, which as of this post is pretty much at its default settings (I’ve modified the color of the header to match the background color in Gallery, […]

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I received my copy of “Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days” from Amazon today. It looks really interesting. What will I do with it? I dunno. But my understanding is that Perl is a pretty easy language to get the hang of, and taking 21 days out of one’s life to learn something new can’t […]

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One of the things that I find frustrating about working up Web stuff on my Cube is that I can usually get most things working to a usable degree, but there are often a couple niggling little issues that make my installs less than perfect. In this most recent case, WordPress and MySQL are conspiring […]

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