Stupid midterms and professors wanting to see how many kids they can kill right before spring break. Assholes. I’m angry. If you couldn’t tell.

Tags: No Comments.

What’s the point of using a templating system? Gallery would be so easy to redesign if there you didn’t have to deal with all the “smarty” tags. Why not just pure PHP and HTML? Everyone who would think about going in and editting code more than likely already knows PHP and would be able to very easily make changes to layout, etc.

But no, I have to look up new syntax which, frankly, seems to make no sense at all and yields completely unexpected results. I’m on the verge of giving up completely because of this.

I actually thought about going into the Gallery source to see if there were a simple way to chop out the templating system. Turns out it’s a little more complicated than just “chopping it out” (shucks…) and would probably not be worth it in the end. Right now I’m frustrated and am really annoyed.

Tags: 1 Comment

After trying and trying to get it to play nice with Wordpress, I’ve given up on trying to get Gallery embedded into the site. Instead I’m simply going to provide a link here and at the far left. That should be easy enough for most people.

Also, don’t expect Gallery to stay that ugly, default theme. I fully intend to “extend” this theme to it so everything looks good. That’s it for now.

Tags: No Comments.

I pulled an all-nighter last night to get work done but as a result I’m exhausted and I have more work tonight. Yeah, long story short, I’m cranky and won’t be fixing Gallery tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Or this weekend. Whenever I’m not tired (maybe never?).

Tags: No Comments.

It seems there is a problem with the Gallery integration. Everytime I try to insert a picture into a post or view the “embedded main page” (link on far left) it just shows the alt tag and, occasionally, a border. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the style sheet that comes with this theme. Sometime tomorrow I’m going to go through the entire embedded page and rewrite it so the sidebar doesn’t collide with the main content like it does now. I’ll probably also end up using a separate style sheet, just to make it a little cleaner.

Until then, later.

Tags: No Comments.

…sort of. Gallery has been installed and integrated. But now comes the hard part: making it look good/correct. Because the theme that’s used on the blog isn’t technically made for the WPG2 (the plugin that embeds Gallery into Wordpress), I’m going to have to go in and customize the theme a little.

Cross your fingers.

Also, it turns out I was wrong about having to compile PHP5.  Right before I was about to start the install script (instructions here) I had a hunch and decided to put up a phpinfo() site, just to make absolutely sure that I needed to do this.  Well it’s a good thing I did.  Turns out Dreamhost already allocates 90MB, more than enough for my site.

Tags: No Comments.

I’m trying to get Gallery2 integrated but it seems I need to compile my own version of PHP5 so I can set the memory limit to 16MB. This might take a little while to figure out but hopefully I can get this all done by tomorrow afternoon.

Tags: No Comments.

This is a problem I had for a while but just recently found the solution. I have a set of Logitech Z680 5.1 speakers. They are connected to a Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum. Since I’ve been using Ubuntu, I haven’t been able to figure out how to get the card to output the encoded audio stream to the speakers’ decoder. Well, it turns out it’s not that hard…

First head up to the top right of your desktop and right-click the speaker icon and go to Open Volume Control in the drop-down menu. Then go to Edit > Preferences. Then scroll down the list of available devices until you see Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack and check that. Click close. Then go to the Switches tab and make sure Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack is checked there. Then in Movie Player (if you use it) go to Edit > Preferences. Go to the Audio tab and select AC3 Passthrough.

That’s it. I don’t guarantee this will work for you, but it’s the setup I used.

Tags: No Comments.

I want to start off this post by saying that I really like Parallels. I think it’s a huge leap forward in making switching to Apple even easier. And I think that such programs (BootCamp included) are the reason Apple has been gaining on Microsofts overwhelming market share of personal computers.

That said…I do have a gripe. Not with Parellels itself but with the people who use it. Let me tell you a story.

So I’m sitting in a chemistry lecture the other day. I’m taking notes, listening to the professor. A lot of people bring computers to take notes on (personally I can’t see how they can do all the super- and sub-scripts fast enough to keep up).

A guy in the row in front of me had his 15″ MacBook Pro out. It looked like he had Word open but he clearly wasn’t paying attention because he had Safari open on top. But I also noticed he had the Parallels icon in his Dock. I started to think “Hey, an informed Mac user. That’s always nice to see.” Oh man was I wrong.

It wasn’t 2 minutes later that he switched over to Windows. I was truly shocked at what he did next. Most people use Windows to run Windows-only programs that they rely on for work (or otherwise). Wanna know what this guy was running? INTERNET EXPLORER! I know, I was as shocked as you are.

No one in their right mind would even consider switching over to XP on Parallels, sucking up resources and wasting battery life, to use an inferior and insecure browser. I was truly amazed at his stupity. Then I thought, “Maybe he doesn’t know any better…”

That could very well be. There are still people out there who don’t know about Firefox and the insecurities of IE. I mean, this kid probably heard the hype (and a lot of it is just hype) surrounding the new Intel-based Macs and thought that was the way to go when getting his laptop for college. That and he’s heard all about how Macs don’t get viruses so why would he need to protect himself, even when he’s running Windows?

Even if these assumptions are all dead-on, the fact remains he’s using insecure computing practices and that needs to change. New Mac users have to be made aware of the security risks involved in running Windows on their computers. I think warnings on the Parallels website would be a great place to start. Even a tutorial while setting it up (I know this might annoy some of the advanced users who are aware of the security risks but it’d be worth it if people can protect themselves) would be better than nothing.

I’m sure there are better ways to go about educating people but anything is better than nothing.

Tags: No Comments.

Today I saw a nice post on Digg. Basically the site is trying to get an accurate count of the number of Linux users out there. To do this you have to register at this site. It’s simple and doesn’t require a lot of information (just an e-mail adress if you want).

Anyways, I’m registered as #428608.

Tags: No Comments.