Crazy Weinstein

I've been trying to remember the name of this skit for years. It was one of those Saturday Night Live fake commercials. Jim Belushi played a character who was talking about how crazy his prices were, then said he didn't even have any prices, he was just crazy! Haven't found the actual script yet, or a transcript, but I'm closing in! It aired December 10, 1983. Flip Wilson was the host. [Link]

So that's what love is supposed to be

Love is supposed to show affection to others even when they are hostile or unpleasant. I overlook that person's unloveliness and focus on my love for that person and their best good, and act accordingly. Apparently I'm not much of a lover. Hopefully I can change that.

Progress

I've had a project in mind for probably more than a year now. It involves programmatically scraping web pages for information and then saving that information to a database. I decided to use Python as the programming language, and MySQL as the database. Somewhere along the line I also decided to create a web front end, so Apache is also involved. I'd written some Python code a couple of months ago, then downloaded MySQL a month ago. Today I spent some time trying to get the pieces to work together and I had some modest success. I'm happy with that.

Cakewalk

I installed Cakewalk on my Vista partition last week. This evening I spent some time trying to make some music. Things went well after I found the manual that came with the software. Good thing I didn't throw that away! I wouldn't have been able to do anything without it. Searching for answers online can be helpful, but a well-crafted paper reference will trump it every time. I did go searching for one thing online though--how to play MIDI audio through regular computer output rather than through MIDI. I found that answer here at the techguy forums.

Plugging a computer in to a keyboard is something I always dreamed about as a kid, but actually making something that passes as music still takes some considerable time, and a composer I am not. Unfortunately, it seems that trying to do this stuff in Linux is a bridge too far. There are very few MIDI programs, and even fewer MIDI interfaces for Linux. That's another thing that I have to keep Windows around for. I'm not really much of a gamer, but I still like to play pinball from time to time.

Path to python in Apache

One of my side projects has been developing a MySQL database that gets fed data from the web using Python, with a web front end. Since Python is feeding MySQL, I figured I'd use it as the server-side scripting language too, but from the beginning I've had problems. I kept coming up with the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error. After I'd restarted Apache all was well. I'd seen that in the httpd-error.log the error was 'Premature end of script headers', but for some reason today I noticed that wasn't the only error. The previous error always comes with "env: python: No such file or directory". That gives me something to go on. So it seems that Apache doesn't know the path to python. I saw something somewhere on the web about the path not being complete when apache was started, but I didn't see a fix--maybe just complete the path before starting Apache, eh? Anyway, I don't feel like running this to ground tonight--I'm bushed.

CUPS progress

An event worth blogging about. I scored another victory in my struggle against my FreeBSD machine. I'd gotten CUPS working, but I still had two major problems. On the web interface, all the buttons that control my printer were broken, because the links had started http://::1 instead of http://localhost. After a significant amount of time, I learned that this is ipv6 notation, and if I understand correctly, incorrect ipv6 notation. It should be [::1]. I found a fix/workaround on the CUPS website, which said to add 'HostNameLookups On' to cupsd.conf.

There's still another problem--the HP backend keeps failing. Usually when I get ready to print it doesn't work and when I log in to cups, that's the error that greets me. When I tried to restart the printer, I'd have to wrestle with problem #1, so that makes things easier. I'll try to work on the backend problem later, especially since it seems to be worst with my daughter's computer, and she's the one who prints the most.

Contemplating

I'm thinking of making changes to this website. Whether I'll actually do that remains to be seen however.

Good gobbledy smack!

I never thought I'd see the day, but I *finally* got my FreeBSD machine working with my HP printer. I've dealt with this problem on and off for so long I don't remember when I started. I've been down lots of rabbit trails too. In the end, the thing that got it to work was gunzipping the ppd file and using it instead of whatever default drivers cups came up with, despite the fact that they matched my printer series. But before I got to that point, I went through lots of other things, correcting errors. I even made my own patch--though now I think it was unneccessary. The one good thing in this I suppose is it finally got me out of the package system and into ports. There are still some packages that I need to get rid of though. Now i understand what nod meant about 'living in ports.'

And even though I'm excited about my progress, I'm not done yet. I can print from the FreeBSD machine, but the goal is to be able to print from anywhere in the house. And then I need to make sure that scanning works too. Maybe I need to buy that VGA card after all. Remote scanning sounds cool, but its probably more practical to scan from the computer that's connected to the scanner.

Back

Okay. Its been awhile, but I'm finally back on the web. I hadn't done any kind of updates an what, a year? But my need to vent motivated me to contact Time Warner and get the web space issues worked out. Roadrunner now offers a user-friendly webspace that doesn't allow FTP--not for people like me. They didn't give me hassle about switching to this space though.

FreeBSD on the other hand, has been a big hassle. I've been wrestling with it for the entire year. Being the lazy person that I am, I made the mistake of not using ports, and downloading packages for all the programs I wanted to run. Now I'm paying for that. My biggest obstacle to date is getting my HP Printer to work. Turns out there was a problem with HPLIP and the specific subset of HP printers that my printer happens to fall into. There's a patch, but in order to patch, I need to compile, which means...ports. I'm still not printing--I'm getting an error that says CUPSEXT could not be loaded. I'm guessing the next step will be to delete the cups package and install the port. I'm also fairly confident that in the not-too-distant future I'll have to remove ALL the packages and replace them with ports. Not looking forward to that.

Latest Kubuntu update

I held off updating Kubuntu for the past couple of weeks. I was debating about moving to Jaunty Jackalope, but I decided to put that off too, but today I figured there was no point in not doing the regular update. I did notice that it included a new kernel, which always caused me problems in Fedora, but so far hasn't affected me in Kubuntu.

Well, I did have a problem. I don't think it was kernel related though.
This may have been my first update problem with Kubuntu. Firefox wouldn't start. When I tried to run it from the command line, I got the message Could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9.0.1 and 1.9.0.*. I was able to Google the answer using Konqueror--http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3097864. Heh, up until now I didn't know there was a separate forum for Kubuntu. The solution was at the bottom: sudo xulrunner-1.9 --register-global

First post

Hello.

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