Josh-Kerr.com

A friend of mine recently found this nice little tool called FGallery so I decided to give it a try. So far, I like it. I’ve been using FAlbum and Flickr for a while now and it’s been nice. I did have a few issues with FAlbum initially but I worked most of them out. For now, I’ll give FGallery a try to see if I want to keep it or not. After all, not paying for Flickr service is a good thing.

• Give Stephanie flowers just because I love her
• Upgrade to the latest version
• New theme
• Move the URL from /blog to the root
• Blog more
• Redo the photo gallery

It’s a start.

To my reader out there :)  I’ll be making changes to the site soon so don’t freak out if things don’t work.

Sorry for the long delay, I’ve been rather busy as of late. In my last post I mentioned that the site, or parts of it, would be down due to a large spam attack. After changing all my passwords, taking down the wiki, forum, calendar, and removing all cron jobs the spam seems to have subsided. Along the same lines I took down the contact me page just in case. To this point I don’t know where the spam was coming from. Most likely I was victim to email spoofing, at least that’s what my hosting company told me. I was skeptical because some of the spam that I received came from their server. Dreamhost, provides users with shell access if they want it which is uncommon for shared hosting. When you are granted shell access there are a couple of servers that you log on to. About half of the spam came from one of their servers. This is not a slap in Dreamhost’s face, it could very well have been a script that was exploited and the attackers gained access from it. The long and the short of it is I’m not 100% sure what happened but I’ll definitely be a little more precautious with the packages that I install.

In other news I have my Gentoo boxes up and running. Gentoo is a great Linux distro if you’re interested. It does have some draw backs, and pros, though when you compare it to other distros. First off you compile everything in Gentoo from source! There are ways to use some pre-built packages but for the most part you’re going to be doing a lot of compiling. When you compare this to Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, etc this doesn’t sound too hot. Don’t let if fool you! The packaging system in Gentoo is top notch. Portage, their packaging system, provides the most customization I’ve ever seen. I can install package A without installing package B and installing package C less than version x.x.x.x. It’s great! If you haven’t given it a try, check it out.

I have mixed feelings about this next topic. Recently I purchased another 20.1″ UltraSharp Flat Panel monitor from Dell. To quote a friend, “it rockers my boxers!” My original plan was to dual screen my main box. I have a Nvidia 6600GT with dual DVI and an S-Video port. I plug-in the new monitor and where did my multi display settings go? I checked my display settings, checked the NView software, updated the drivers and got nada. I played around with this for about an hour, checking out forums, checking driver settings, anything I could think of and for the life of me could not get it to recognize my second monitor. The more forums I checked out the more I realized that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing though. Eventually I replaced my old bulb monitor that my Gentoo box is using with the new 20.1″ and it works great. For some reason the DVI didn’t work but VGA works great. I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t have dual 20.1″ monitors on my gaming box. That would suck to have a nice border right smack down in the middle of the game….

Last but not least, I’m working on a new theme for the site but progress has been slow.  I’ve been really busy at work so I haven’t had too much time to work on it.  I’ll get it done.  Might take longer than I want ,but it will get done.

Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of spam.  Most of the time this is not a problem however the spam that I’ve been receiving appears to be from an internal source.  In an attempt to find where this is coming from I’ve taken the forum, wiki, and contact page down.  If the problem continues in my attempt to find what’s going on I might take the blog down for a little while.  More to follow.

It’s my fault realy.  I didn’t make ample backups and I lost everything.  DreamHost has this “one click install” thing that is nothing more than a little script that goes and installs different apps for you; WordPress, PHPBB, MediaWiki, etc.  I originaly used the one click install to set up the blog on my root directory.  Later I decided to more the blog to /blog.  No big deal.  It was painless and seemless to everyone.  Recently DreamHosts’s one click install mentioned that it had updates for the blog.  I told it to update and it put brand new files in my root directory where the blog was at first.  Then being the bone head that I am I decided to delete the WordPress instance of one click install.  Coincidently that removed everything in and under the folder that it was installed to.  Thus everything in my web root folder was lost!  Thankfully my databases where left untouched so the blog is back up and running.  However I did loose my themes and stuff I’d been working on.  The moral of the story, BACKUP!!!!!

I’m currently in the process of overhauling my site. So far its going well. I have separated the blog, forum, personal calendar, etc into their own sections and managed to move the databases without too much complication. The icons that I’m using on the main page work great but unfortunately IE can’t handle transparent png files. Joy. So now I’m at a crossroad. Drop the icons or drop the transparency. My first choice is to harp on Microsoft to fix this bug. It’s been around for a LONG TIME but I think they’re just going to make most people wait until IE7 gets released or force them to use a fix. (Don’t “upgrade” to IE7. Lots of bugs!!!)  This is why if you’re viewing this page in IE you need to upgrade to Fire Fox.  Click on the link or on the little add on the bottom left of the screen.

Aside from the look of the website I’m planning on posting up a lot of the code that I’ve written.  Being a programmer you write a bunch of code that can be useful many places and situations so why not share it?  Also, I’m planning on moving the photo album out of the blog and have a custom script pull everything from Flickr.  Problem is time.  I really don’t have any time to do all this but I’ll get it done somehow.

A couple weeks ago I got myself a Flickr account and have been posting all my photos up there. I then added the FAlbum plugin to my blog so that the photos would be viewable while keeping the same theme. There was of course some CSS issue with the layout of FAlbum and my theme. Obviously I’m using a “Left Colum” design where all navigation/links/polls/etc are on the left and all the content is on the right. This type of design is widely used, as is the “Right Column” but FAlbum didn’t integrate too well with it. FAlbum uses Float: left; on all the thumbnails to place as many thumbnails on one “row” as possible. This poses a big problem since I too am using Float: left; for the navigation column. The long and short of it is when you do a clear: left; or clear: both; it clears the left column too. My photo album is up and running however it doesn’t look at good as I’d like. I’ll be working on a “Right-Colum” design to see if that helps.

I moved almost all of my posts from Jokerr.com over to this site today. I say almost because I moved them manually and decided to skip a few entries that were not relevant to this site. Also, a few comments were not moved over.  If you notice that your comment is missing and would like it put back, let me know and I’ll move it over.

WordPress 2.0 came out not too long ago and it’s worth a look. The admin panel has been given a facelift and makes it easier to manage posts and pages. A variety of tools have been added so you can import your existing blog from other sites too. 2.0 is still only a release candidate but no problems here just yet. I’m interested to see what else it can do.