My sister and I have been engaged in a dialog about the merits of weblogs versus traditional Web sites and it’s evolved into a quite interesting discussion. She asks: “I still don’t see how a blog would be better for me
than a web site. I don’t see why a person would want to come to my site
often to see what I’m up to.”
A pal of mine who is a prolific writer but not so much of a techie asked me the following question: “I’ve just heard that feedster added a feature where I can automatically ping them when I have new entries for my Weblog. I use Movable Type daily, but I’m darned if I know how to add a new ping host to my blog configuration. Help!”
A technical wizard pal of mine asks: “I have all sorts of challenge/response barriers to comment spam on my Movable Type weblog, but occasionally someone goes through the work of identifying themselves and still leaves some silly spam comment. I want to delete it, but right now I get the email notification of the new comment, then have to log in to the administrative interface, find the comment, and delete it by hand. Quite a hassle. Isn’t there a better solution to this?”
If you’ve been reading my entries, you already know that I’ve been working on installing different Linuxes on my Mac OS X PowerBook system, with success. All works well until you actually have more than one Linux installed on the system, creating a tri-boot, rather than dual-boot Apple computer. The problem is that, by default, each Linux installs its own version of yaboot which only knows about Mac OS X or itself. So I needed to figure out how to significantly modify the yaboot configuration file to support both Ubuntu and Yellow Dog Linux simultaneously.
I’ve been working on installing some different Linux operating systems on my G4-based Apple PowerBook as alternative operating systems to the (elegant) Mac OS X. Why? Because they’re there. 🙂
Once installed, Ubuntu Linux and Yellow Dog Linux both add something called yaboot which then controls the boot-up sequence. This boot control application that lets you pick which operating system you want to have run gives you about 15 seconds to pick between Linux and Mac OS X then defaults to launching Ubuntu. Not what I wanted at all.
A pal of mine asks: “Ugh.. I’m facing server-move Hades.. am moving my site dadsrights.org to a hosted solution, and I have dozens and dozens of files with PHP require_once() includes like “/www/dadsrights/XX”. They all need to be changed to “/nfs/www/dadsrights.org/XX”. Help!!”
“How do I scan to see if there are bad spots on my hard drive? When I booted up this morning, my hard drive made a rather scary sound…like it was trying to catch but couldn’t. It stalled for a bit then finally loaded.
“I know this should be obvious, but I’ll be darned if I can find anything that allows me to do it. I’ve searched for an executable file that would let me but all I come up w/ is the Norton viral scan. I am running Microsoft Windows 2000.”
I’ve spent a lot of time poking around with my extensive iTunes database and had lots of fun figuring out different ways to address my needs with a fully digitized music collection. When a reader asked whether there was a way to just list those artists in her iTunes collection for whom she had more than one album, I thought “ah, this sounds up my alley”, and so it is.
