I was wandering around the web (actually I was looking for a rdiff-backup info) and ran across someones webblog and ...

Updated. The word of the day is that the system has been updated. If everything works right there will be no problems. So far I think have everything. We'll see what happens over night as it starts emailing automatically. Hopefully I don't wake up to a 1000 messages...

This is all because I want my machines on the same (or at least) close versions of Debian. So I'll test here on my site, then once I find any catches I'll update another machine I run. I also may start using some newer tools, but need a newer Debian for that.

Till tomorrow (or some other day).

I'm changing my css again. I think have a navigation bar that I kind of like. I also think I'm going to add some pages, but we'll have to wait and see. index.txt (which used to generate this page) moved to home.txt because that is what I wanted for my navigation on the left. So I'll post an entry. See how I like it, and go from there. Maybe after all these months I'll actually update the pages again.

I figured I would take a look at my access stats for my webpage. I'm getting ready to take my friend and her husband to the Wild Animal Park, and figured I might as well take a look. Looks like a few people have been looking for rsync info. I think this means I should stick together a page with all that information collected. I'll try to get that done when I get back from my honeymoon. I also probably should get the archive up. Right now the archive is a page where I have manually put a few old posts. So I'll try to fix that. Again it will have to wait until after my honeymoon. I also should probably get a rss feed up for my posts. This all ties into my changing how my posts are handled. I think I'll write a plugin for webmake, maybe add a <blog> tag. This tag will take a directory for where the blogs are stored. Generate the archive pages. Define a variable with the last x number of posts formated in it. I'll have to see how far I can take it. Then at some point I think I would at least try having comments. Doubt anyone will leave any, but it might be fun to try it.

I'm married. This past weekend (Sunday Actually) I was married to a wonderful woman. We have now partially moved her in. She still has a lot of stuff at here parents house, but we'll get it here eventually. Soon we are off to our honeymoon.

The wedding went wonderfully. I might post pictures, but don't count on it. Other than a few minor things, nothing went wrong. Well I guess that bridesmaid dress that broke was pretty bad, but since I wasn't there I didn't even know about it until after wards. Some fish died before they got the center pieces. She put my ring on the wrong finger, and I got confused and let her. The runner got blown off the ground. The group picture didn't go as smoothly as I wanted, but it did get taken. I thought our plates were supposed to be white, but they were clear. The car wasn't moved up before we drove away to the hotel. All pretty darn minor. No one fell down. No one got hurt. There was enough food and cake. Some people took the center pieces as planned (and the live fish with them). It still was kind of a blur.

One thing I found surprising was how many people liked our breakfast for dinner reception. I got comments from several people, something I didn't expect. I have gotten a few more comments since the wedding as well. Cool. I liked it. My bride liked it. Now onto being a happily married couple!

I had forgotten how intense Chrysalis was. I have now re-watched everything from The Gathering from the Movie Collection, to Chrysalis the last episode of the first season of Babylon 5¹. I remember why I liked it so much. Though at first I only watched it for the cgi. I heard about it in a local magazine I believe was called "Foundation". They had an article about this new show, and how they were doing wild things with all effects done by cgi. At the time this was unheard of. The best video machine out was the Amiga with a video toaster board. So I started out wanting to see how the effects worked.

I made it through the first season. Not sure exactly when I got hooked. When I said to myself that I would watch the whole show. The more I watched the more I was convinced that I wanted to see how it ended. I knew it was a five year arch from nearly the beginning. In my first year of college I got a few others hooked on it. We would make sure someone was in the TV lounge so that we could watch it there. I don't think any of us had cable at the time yet. We did later, and my other two roommates were just as hooked on it as me. All during the fifth season we had someone sit in the TV lounge in the student union to hold the lounge. The rest of us would get there by the time the show aired. We'd watch and often discuss on the way back to our dorms. Watching Babylon 5¹ is one of my most cherished memories from College.

Admittedly there are parts where it is hard to watch, well, because it was that cheesy. Some of it was hard to watch because it was upsetting. Seeing characters die, or grievously injured and not being sure if they were going to die as well. Seeing the downward spiral like a slow motion train wreck as a certain character was destroyed. There were low points yes, but there were high points as well. Vir telling off Morden. I Spy scene on the transport going to Mars. The breakfast joke on Ivanova by Sinclair and Garibaldi. The something reaching across the table to steel cards, and the later vow of silence by Lennier. Or "these strange cramps". Seeing the gag reel at Comic Con. It was a good show.

Now I'll soon be married. We've watched a few episodes, and now she seems willing to watch it with me from beginning to end. Realistically this wont happen until we are married in a bit over 25 days. Not like we could watch something like a 110 some episodes plus several movies before then. I think she'll like the show. I'm really looking forward to sharing it with her. Partly because I love the show, but also because I love her. This is something I found much joy watching, and want to share it with my good friend who I love deeply.

I've been thinking of redoing the site again (surprise surprise). I looked at blosxom again. I even went as far as setting up templates and slowing worked up to get the whole site in blosxom. Didn't quite get there, but close. I wrote a plugin to correctly render the old EtText entries. Setup some templates to make the site look the same. Started to write another plugin to render the navigation bar statically. So I had to get the navigation bar done, and to figure out how to get the non-blog bits into blosxom as well. After reading the code, I have found that my code I put into webmake is way more complicated than it needs to be. That I can almost surly simplify it, though I might leave it for old blogs. I also should be able to figure out permanent links for stories without too much trouble.

So after all my work with blosxom I probably wont use it. Instead I'll use what I learned to tweak my blog setup. Re-write or add some code to my webmake file to get it to do blogs better. Take the time and figure out how to do rss feeds with it. (www.taint.org is done with webmake and provides an rss feed and the webmake file so it wont be that hard). It will just take some time until I get too it.

The wedding planning is progressing. We have contracts for the caterer, florist, DJ, Photographer, location, plane ticket for pastor, taking dance lessons, have tuxes setup (need to check to make sure everyone has been measured), reservations for honeymoon all taken care of. So lots is done. Still much to do, but at least it seems like it will all be done soon.

I also guess pigs can now fly. Apple is going to ship intel based Macintosh computer (will they have intel inside logos?), and they now sell a multi-button mouse. Seems a little weird to me. It must make sense to Steve, but I'll wait and see.

Enough, it is time for bed. Lots to do. A Wedding to attend, a concert to attend, and stuff for our wedding to decide on (or at least look at). Good night.

For the most part this website is a bit lame. Most of it is random, and not very well written. So why bother? It is a good question.

There are a couple reasons that I write here. This will not be a complete lest, but will at least cover a few of the more important ones.

One is that I would like to write better. So I try here for practice. Any writer I have heard talk about getting to be a better writer always amounted to "write". I think it is because your writing is only as good as what you last wrote. So you sucked, try again. So you didn't suck, try again. So you sucked more than last time, try again. As with anything, unless you keep trying you cannot get better at. This doesn't guarantee success, but it at least success and betterment become possible. So I try to write here. Is it good? Probably not. Without trying it can never get better.

Another reason can be summed up in this one word, fun. I'm having fun putting up these pages. If you don't like them, or think they suck, don't read them. I may not write well, and most of these pages may suck. Thats is perfectly okay, cause I'm having fun. Go jump in the mud if you don't like it.

The final reason I'll mention is that I want more experience build webpages. Unless that content changes and the site evolves, there is only the initial setup. Not much to be learned then. So I blog so that my pages change, and I can learn by doing. Sometime I want to be able to help my sister with her site, with my experience working here I can be more of a help.

This is not a exhaustive list of why I have decided to put this blog up, or even this website. It is a quick list of the three biggest reasons I am doing so. You might not like those reason, but you know what? If you don't like it, don't read it.

Okay so my laptop finally got a hardware error. I had been having ATAControler blocking device errors, and even I/O errors. This caused random pauses, and complete lockups. So I got the hardware error, and took it back to the local Apple Store (I had taken it in a few weeks earlier, but their hardware test didn't show any problems). This time (since I had the error tracked down) they sent it into repair. After what seemed liked a month (actually only 6 days total when it was quoted to be 7-14 business days). I got it back. Of course the harddrive had been replaced, and had exactly what it came with installed. So since I got it back on the May 25th I have been slowly getting it going.

Interesting bit is that before I sent it in I was having file vanished errors when I was running my rsync backups. Now that I have it back, and a clean install of Tiger, the errors are gone. It maybe the new harddrive, or it maybe the clean install of the OS. I'll never know for sure. Not only that but I think I got a new battery. This one doesn't quite fit perfectly, but I now get nearly 5 hours on battery which is longer than I ever saw. Very happy with the service Apple provided

Now I don't suggest this, but one way to make sure your backup procedure works is to replace your harddrive. I had done a partial restore a few times (like one folder full of aliases and nothing else...). Since I had partially restored I was too worried that I would have problems. Turns out that I have. Seems that somehow I have lost creation dates on some files. Most files seem to have the right creation dates, but some don't. I noticed this when I was trying to figure out which resume was most recent. The dates are still on one of my incremental backups, but not on my laptop. So I can fix it. Also even though the rsync hfs mode patch works well, I'm not sure all the new spotlight (or acl) data is backed up correctly. Actually to be honest I'm pretty sure not all of that is backed up. I could use -E flag on Apple's rsync, but then the other end needs the same rsync which pretty much means another Mac OS X box. There is always rdiff-backup. Unfortunately I don't know that much about it. I don't think it can restore with just rsync (I could be wrong) or that I can browse through the incremental backups as I do now (I could be wrong here too). I need to look into it, as it does support resource forks which took the special hfs mode patch for rync (but only to backup restore can use plain rsync and FixupResourceForks). Still my backups work, but they could be better.

Also the world might be ending. Apple is going with Intel, Dvorak is therefore correct, and Debian release Sarge. Next thing you know Duke Nukem Forever will be released... Weird.

I think Apple has a lot of risks with the transition to Intel. Most notably lost sales as people put off buying machines. Also it will be Fatbinaries all over again, now called Universal Binaries. I went through the change from 68k to PowerPC, and it worked but was tough. After about a year more and more applications stopped or didn't bother to provide 68k versions. Which sucked for 68k users. Overall that transition went well, even for all the rough spots. The other problem I see is that if it gets too easy to run windows programs it go the same way it did for OS/2. We will have to wait and see what real release machines work (not the $100 rental kits available shortly). I give them a 40% change a failure over the next two years, and a 20% chance of failure over the next 5 years or so. Which means they will mostly likely succeed with problems.

So finally I'm still looking at options for these pages. I see http://taint.org runs on webmake (he wrote it so I would expect as much), so I should be able to get it to do what I want. Regardless I want to add an rss feed, maybe make the archives accessible, if I put up archives add a permanent link for each entry, move to a more markdown type text format, try comments, and improve the maintainability of the site. Of course this is in my free time, so it will probably be awhile before I get to it.

This is turning into a habit. Seems that I always wonder around the web and find something interesting, and than blog about something late at night.

The interesting things that I found, but probably wont mention again:

DrunkenBlog

Markdown and Daring Fireball (which are obviously related)

Guess interesting thing would be to explain how I wondered across the above.

It all started awhile ago I guess, when I looked to upgrade to Tiger. Which seemed like a good time to upgrade my knowledge management tools (read Sticky Brain). First I looked around at application such as DevonTHINK. Then I thought some more and figured that having a web accessible tool would be cool, especially if I could get at it without my own computer. So I started looking at Wikis. This lead to lots of hand wringing and trying to decide which is the absolute best. So far I have only run Instiki, though MoinMoin looks really good. So I have started adding things into my Instiki figuring if/when I find something better I'll just move whatever I have. If I have to I can always program something to move it across. This lead quickly (part way through the second page) to Markdown. I had looked at it before but I actually read most of the page linked to from Instiki. Which lead to reading Daring Fireball, which lead to DrunkenBlog (which I have admittedly seen linked to elsewhere)

This is all further made me realize that my webpage maintenance sucks. That Markdown matches how I think for text editing better that EtText. That for blogging I can probably find something that works better for me than Webmake (though I _really_ like it). I also would like to try comments and see if I get any. I also wish I wrote better.

At some point maybe I'll put up what I have found out about various wiki engines, or at least what I find out about the one I choose (which I really want to be a ruby based one). Or if I end up going with something like DevonTHINK, why.