noel alanguilan

i have here with me a temperamental laptop. it has a new hard drive, you see. i have reinstalled windows xp and religiously downloaded and applied all the updates. lately, it seems that the laptop has the impression that something went wrong the last time it was used that it has been giving me the option to login in windows safe mode almost everytime i start it up.

i finally got fed up and decided to install linux on the thing just to spite it. i happily slathered interpid ibex (ubuntu version 8.10) on it. that took all of about 20 minutes. after thats done i immediately upgraded it–via the network–to the jaunty jakalope release candidate (ubuntu version 9.04). the upgrade took about four hours (slow internet connection, mate).

initial impressions. nice. very nice. it has that tiny bit more polish than the previous interface–showing signs of a “maturing” gnome. i good step, i think. and although i haven’t tested it yet, the kernel version that came with jaunty is suppose to support more usb wireless cards. i am also interested in trying out the new file sytem (ext4) but i’ll wait until they fix some issues with it.

before i forget, there’s this nice touch with the shutdown process in jaunty. before, when you click shutdown, the system immediately does shutdown. with jaunty, when you click on shutdown, there’s a dialog box that pops out with a 60-second countdown before actually shutting down and there’s a cancel and shutdown button. cancel, obviously, cancels the shutdown process and the shutdown button shuts down your computer immediately, ignoring the countdown. i think its a nice touch which eliminates that “dooh!” moment the old version that immediately arrives right after you click on shutdown option. but then that’s just me. some people would be irritated by the additional click or two just to power off the computer.

so now i sit here in front of my own workstation which is still sporting interpid ibex and i’m seriously thinking if i should upgrade to jaunty jakalope now even though its  still a release candidate. the other laptop is taunting and tempting me.

i’m going to sleep on it for now. and start backing up my data…

i’ve thought about a handful of ways for technology to maybe help businesses (and maybe homes) to save a little money.

• use what you have. do not upgrade your software to anything unless its free. if you’re using windows xp then stay with it. there’s no point in switching to linux when you already have the license for xp. same goes with whatever version of microsoft office you have installed — if you have it installed at all. there’s also no point in pirating ms office when there are a bunch free alternatives already just waiting to be downloaded.
• standardize on the  basic file formats to adopt within the workplace especially with documents and spreadsheets. choose the common “denominator” — the file format that all word processing or spreadsheet program can save as.  this way, you can use different versions of the word processing or spreadsheet programs and not have to worry about compatibility or forced to pay to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of that program.
• make use of old computers. if possible, max out the memory or plug in at least 1 gig then install linux. you probably should use at least a 1 ghz pentium 4 or equivalent for desktops. mind the type of memory modules needed by the computer. older computers need older memory modules.
• you can possibly use these old computers as print or file servers. just max the memory, put in a really large hard drive and you’re in business. install a server-specific linux distribution and you’ll save a lot from server licensing especially if you have a large population of users.
• if your company is buying new computers, try purchasing them with linux installed. it should come out a little cheaper compared to when windows xp or vista is installed. if it isn’t cheaper then tell the vendor that windows is not free and when you woke up that morning it still isn’t free and that you’re just buying the hardware and not the software. for office applications you can always download and use open office.
• not buying new hardware? give a little speed to your old computer by increasing its memory to 2 gig. 4 gig would be nice but 2 seems to be the sweet spot. this is certainly cheaper than buying a new computer.

i woke up with an update notice on the wordpress dashboard. i usually dread this event because it meant two days of updating nine wordpress installations that i keep. it takes two days because i have to backup my wordpress databases and files then manually delete almost all the wordpress files then upload the fresh. i have to do this nine times and my internet connection is relatively slow. tedious.

the good new is that with version 2.7 i can easily update my wordpress installations — they included a update script. heed the advice and backup your wordpress database and files before doing the upgrade.

once you got everything backed up and you’re sure that the backups are good take the jump and press that upgrade button. all of my upgrades were successful so far. there are two more upgrades i have to do.

i upgraded seven wordpress installations in less than an hour. that is a huge savings in time.

version 2.6.3 of wordpress came out of nowhere. it has a security update for snoopy which gets the feeds being shown in the dashbard. they say the vulnerability is low risk but its still a risk hence the sudden upgrade. the good thing is that you only need two files to make the upgrade:

1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
2. wp-includes/version.php

just download them (they’re from trac.wordpress.org) and upload to your blog’s wp-includes/ subdirectory overwriting the two files there and you’re set.

this is the easiest upgrade i’ve done so far.

this is my eight-year old desktop computer. overclocked, i used to use it a lot back when electricity was less expensive. the last time i turned it on was october/november 2007. a need for another computer came up and i decided to take it out of storage, disassemble and clean it up component by component and put it all neatly back together. that chore took about three days — well, it has plenty of components .

it refused to boot when i finally turned it on. grrr. the fans were running, the cdroms and hard drives were doing their thing but nothing’s coming out of the screen. there were no error beep(s). heck it didn’t beep at all. this is not good.

i think the motherboard has gone to heaven.

dang. i just can’t leave it at that and relegate the whole computer to being an oversized doorstop. i don’t want to throw it out and add more pollutants to the planet. i don’t believe that a computer, even one that’s two or three generations old, would be completely useless if just one of its components dies. the rest of the components are still in pretty good shape — only the mobo is kaput. the truth is, its really impractical to replace the motherboard with a completely new and up to date one simply because — aside from getting a new mobo — i’d have to get a new cpu and memory modules to match. ugh. my pockets are not exactly overflowing with money here. the practical (and cheaper) choice would be to get a motherboard that supports the current cpu and memory that i have. the only hurdle is where to get a brand new, old motherboard. worse case is i have scoure tipidpc for a second hand mobo.

i’ve always thought that old technology can still be useful. i have  a pentium 3 300mhz running a linux firewall and a pentium 4 1.6ghz running a linux file server. this one is no different, it can be my son’s desktop for his studies (and games of course) or another linux file server.

i have not encountered any major glitches in upgrading four blogs to wordpress 2.6 but there is this tiny thing that annoyed me a little. after upgrading wasn’t able to log in to the dashboard. it just keeps saying “please log in again.” even though i’ve tried logging in several times already.

the solution i found was that you have to log out of wordpress first. go to the home page and, if you still have your meta section in the sidebar, click on log out. and then log in again with your usual username/password combination.

i think this has something to do with wordpress 2.6 using three cookies instead of the usual one. doing the steps above sort of cleared the previous version’s cookie replacing it with a newer version. i think.

wordpress 2.6 has been released and its upgrade time again. this gets to be tedious if you have more two wordpress blogs to upgrade like me. still, judging from the list of improvements its a version i’ll eventually move to. i like the full support of ssl in the core and the ability to turn off xml-rpc without hacking into the code and affecting pingbacks. making tinymce faster is nice too. the paranoid in me just wants to wait and monitor the wordpress forums first and see what problems pop up and what the solutions are.

links:
wordpress extended upgrade instructions
secret key for wp-config
ssl and cookies in wordpress 2.6