Blog of a bald geek.

Some of you might know that I was not a fan of facebook.
I never said too much here because all my experience was by looking over the shoulder of Freddy and watching her struggle with it.
Yesterday at 7:06am, after a very interesting week,  I made my account and messed around a little.
Ended up talking with my buddy Doug over in Lancing MI to try and get me going. In the end we both gave up.
At 5:43pm yesterday, I deleted my account.

So. I was right. It is junk. One of the worst web sites I have ever tried to do battle with. Only Godaddy.com and the software of Weather-display is worse.
It really does have the feel that it was written by a few computer geeks that were half tanked late in the night.
There are menus all over the place, the feel of the navigation really is such that you can believe that the core code has never been touched and its just been built on, hack on gak.
The security settings are very confusing and having it wide open by default is just wrong (and very sad).
The basic lay out is just not logical or intuitive at all. Its like they are still stuck in the 90′s.

How did it become so popular? No idea. Clearly a lot people have more time and patience than I do. I suspect that they have the 80/20 rule in force. Of their 500 million users, only 20% of them are regulars.

Anyway, it matters not what I think, they are going just fine.
I am personally disappointed that some friends and family have stopped communicating along the usual channels since getting their facebook accounts. The pressure for me to ‘just sign up’ to be in the loop is not going to let up anytime soon I suspect.

So, the Ben Orchard that is on facebook? Its not me…. and its not going to be me anytime soon.

Had a moment of clarity on Friday afternoon…….. (Warning, geek content to follow).
It occurred to me while I was mumbling under my breath about my flakey web site that quite often the browser was throwing up the “cant find beno.id.au” thing way too fast……. It was like it could not even find me……

Ahhhh, perhaps its not. So, I hit up my DNS server host……… Afraid.
This guy has been great. I have been using him for about 6-8 years now.
Its been free for me all this time, and I honestly never really think about it all that much. My Linksys router has had its OS replaced with a Linux version (Tomato), and it supports Afraid for dynamid DHCP, which Time Warner use.
So I never have to worry about my IP address changing and I never have to worry about my domain name resolving to said IP address.

That is, until the last week and a bit.
When I went to the news section of Afraid, I found what I was looking for.
In case you are reading this long after the event, here is a cut and past of the news from Friday;

So, we found the mystery to my woes. I really am annoyed with myself, I really should have figured this, or at least included it in my tests a lot quicker than I did. I really am getting rusty over here (thats more than enough out of you Gary, I hope you split your drink from laughing!)

So, the bottom line it, I cant complain as I am getting it for free. The obvious thing is to see if paying for it would protect me from this sort of thing in the future or not. A few days of hit and miss every 6 years, is it really worth it? Is this sort of attack on his servers going to be come more common? Some of these questions I am not sure I am ever going to get answers to.
Bottom line. Least it was not something at my end. I have to be honest, I really was getting tempted to point the finger at Windows 7. It was the one thing I changed, and I am having hit and miss issues with my photo album, one moment it will change a photo, next it wont. I really cant get to the bottom of THAT one so I thought it might be a small indicator of bigger things.

Anyway, bottom bottom line, I am still going to take the site down for about 1/2 hour tonight to remove a hard drive from the current server PC.
That drive will then go into Terrys computer and will be formatted and have Linux installed. I will move the web site over to that PC (ie, my original one). Once the site is up and running I will swap the IP addresses and we will be back running on Linux. That will only take about 1 minute for that one.
I am hopeful that this will be it for another 6-8 years. Both Freddy and I are getting sick of all this shuffling and not having things working. Once this (last) shuffle is done, we are hopeful that 98% of things will be back up and running and the last 2% (I suspect that it will be the sharing of drives and data between windows and linux again) that is left hanging, I will just battle through it.

If you have been trying to hit my site of late (whadayamean you havent?!), you probably have noticed that it has been a bit hit and miss.
I am really not sure why. I have tested pretty much everything and just can not find anything wrong…… Not helpful or fun.
It seems to have been doing it for at least a week now.

This flakyness along with my continued frustration of getting more than 60% of anything working has lead me to consider yet another computer move…. Well, not so much computer as change the core OS.
I really did try and get along with Windows 7. I really wanted it to work. Really I did.
In a moment of clarity however, it came to me that all the Windows/Linux hassles came from me wanting to use ONE program. Lightroom.
When I was not doing any post processing of my photos and thus was running everything in Linux, all was good.
Then, I got into Lightroom and was running it in a virtual computer on my Linux computer. Because I could only use half of one of my eight CPU cores, it ran like a dog. That’s when I first changed to Windows. Sure, Lightroom ran well, real well, but the rest of my sanity went out the window.
So, as you may recall, I then switched to two computers. Linux for my web server/blog/photo gallery and Windows for Lightroom.
That’s when I had a lot of hassles sharing data between the two systems.
On top of that, I found that Windows does not do something’s very elegantly, like capture remote URLS, batch jobs or use component video capture cards.
Robert spent some time helping me try and get things going, but in the end, I came to see that I just was not using the right tool for the core job.

So, since you all decided for me that giving up was not an option, I have decided to go back to using Linux as my main operating system running the web site etc and do one of two things for Lightroom;
1. Try a new Virtual PC software that will use more cores of my CPU so the performance is better.
2. Give up on Lightroom and use GIMP for my post processing. (Last option, and not thrilled with the thought of this one).
3. Get and use a second computer for Windows and Lightroom, just turning it on when I need it. (And using Gary’s help to get the sharing between the two systems so I don’t have to use a USB stick to transfer the photo files as I was for a while).

So, at some stage soon, my web site will go down for an hour or so while I reformat the hard drive and load Linux and copy the web site etc over….. Oh, wait, given that its currently up and down like a hospital elevator, you probably wont notice any difference at all…. mmm, never mind.

P.S. Since I never did any post processing before I met Zim, I am blaming him for all my computer woes. You should blame him too. :-)

If you have been reading my micro blog on the right (I am really not sure why I bother on that one… I don’t think any one reads it…..) you would know that yesterday we had the biggest shake here in Temecula for some time.
Yesterday it was reported as a 5.9, then about 1/2 an hour latter 5.6 and then this morning I see that is has been officially rated at 5.4.

Even the locals are talking about it.
I was working back (as usual) when it hit. At first a gentle roll. A few of us felt it and said the usual ‘here we go’, and I sat back to enjoy it, but then it got a stronger roll to it and we all raised our voices, then all of a sudden it got real jerky and really started to actually shake.
It was the first time I have ever really felt it shake. Its hard to describe, if you have been on a boat, you know the feel of a rolling quake, but when it really shakes its a whole different thing.
The building started to bang and make some real noise. By this time all the office workers are on their feet and looking around and generally getting pretty excited.
Nothing fell off my desk or anything, and I have heard no reports of damage anywhere. Its pretty sparsely populated out there.
Thankfully it all settled down pretty quick, I would say the whole event lasted about 30 seconds.
I whipped out the cell phone to get some video right at the end and got nothing other than a bunch of us being all excited, I will spare you from that video…… So here is the shake map from the USGS web site;

Earthquake shake map

You can see that it was both very close to Temecula and also how good at dirt is from filtering us from all the action. By the time it got to us it really had lost a lot of its sting.

I’m losing track how many now I have felt, I know I was here for a long time and wanting to feel one and now I have had my fill and could be happy not going through another….. Thing is, I dont think that is much of a plan. The interesting thing about yesterday was that it was a really minor fault line and has not been active for years and years. No one was watching it or expecting any from it. The question is did the Easter Sunday one down the way set this one up or not?

Anyway, it seems to be a way of life here and makes me think about stock piling food and water for what it would be worth……

Since I moved the web server on the weekend, I can now get access to the data files…… This means that I can get my weather station back up and running.
Yea.
I have really missed it, I think I have lost the history (again), but oddly enough, after everything else, I really dont care, I just am happy that its back up and running.

Yes, I know there are some pretty major spikes in the data. I am not going to look at them until after we move. I suspect its got something to do with how the sensor cables are coiled up in the roof, so all that will change at the next house…. If I still have the problem there, I will look at it then.

In the mean time, enjoy the data.

Seems I have an apology to make……. I honestly had no idea that the few readers I have were so passionate about this blog / web site.

I’m sorry for under estimating you all.

Thanks for taking the time to express your support. I really appreciate it.

As such, we dug deep and have hashed about the computers and have things running a little smoother.
I can now update my web site from my windows computer, and still edit my photos on a windows computer.
And I guess most importantly, as a result of your support, I have decided to keep things running. One way or another.

There are still a few little bugs to sort out still, but on the whole, most people are not going to notice those little things (like the Uranquinty weather cam, humming bird camera, some of the weather data pages, Temecula earthquake page etc).
I will tackle those with a different approach. There is always more than one way to get things done in the computer world.

In other news, Zim has started his 365 Project again. He is starting a new phase of his life so it fits to start it up again. We all wish him the best and look forward to seeing where 365 photos take him.

We also got a chance to look at the house again, and will blog about it once we have a little more information (the Realtor feels we should hear something this week…. we aint holding our breaths).

I think I am about done.
Windows 7 has finally beat me down.
I am very seriously thinking of closing down my web site.
If I shut down this site, then I don’t have to deal with different systems not getting along. A bunch of problems go away.
I just cant get Linux and Windows to get along. I am tired of feeling stressed and I am tired of spending time on this. I would much rather be out taking photos or watching a movie or something.
Whats the down side?
I would lose a few people that currently look at my site for different things, but in the end, is that a big deal? The internet is a big place, they will find what they come to my site for somewhere else.
I would lose my photos on my site. I would have to find somewhere else to put them. I really dont like Flickr, but thats the logical choice.
I would lose the ability for people to comment on my photos. That would be pretty sad. (You have to have a flickr account to comment, I hate yahoo almost as much as facebook so I cant ask anyone to sign up just for me).
I would lose this blog.
I would lose the weather.
They are the main ones. There is one other thing, I would lose the humming bird and all sky cam. Its down at the moment, but I got a real kick out of having a camera like that. Again, is it worth it?  Duno.

One thing I do know, it should not be this hard… Its like I am being forced to make a choice. Give up photography and tinker with the computers, or give up the web stuff. I cant do both.