Month: April 2003

So much for my plans of hacking; I’ve spent all day so far working on my in-law’s computer. Not only did they have the usual Gator, Comet Cursor, and other spyware/adware programs installed, they also were infected by three different virusses. I F-PROT’d their computer, but I still suspect there’s something amiss there. Eh, well, I didn’t bring any of my software to be able to reinstall.

This seems to be a growing trend; I recently used the Windows XP laptop of a computer-literate (heck, awesome programmer!) friend of mine. I was appalled to find multiple “toolbar” programs installed (spyware deals that change your IE toolbars to gather marketing data), Gator (ugh, I hate that program, the programs that use it should be given the death penalty), and other assorted annoyances. And he thought it was a good, productive PC! This alarming trend towards laziness in personal PC administration appals me as a sysadmin, yet it seems to be the norm. Far more the norm, in fact, than systems that have good pop-up blocking in place, a decent firewall, virus protection, and lack of spyware/adware/malware.

Well, I did my small part. I installed Promoxitron, F-Prot eval version (with a suggestion to buy the full version), and cleaned up a bunch of nastiness on their PC, including manually uninstalling the uninstallable Gator program. They come up with more aliases for that little thing! And then they stick it in your startup folder, registry run keys, and (I’ve heard) win.ini, though I didn’t find it there. Here’s hoping their little Win ME install holds together until they can buy a new PC. I keep trying to convince them to go with GNU/Linux, but I haven’t verified that Personal Ancestral File runs under Wine yet, and there don’t seem to be any free software competitors to PAF3.

This means, though, that I’ve gotten in no Docbook hacking. Dangit.

Next weblog, I hope to try more “linky” posting…

So I’m heading to Idaho to hang out with my in-laws in a few hours. The usual weekend routine is that we pull in some time around 11 PM (it’s 5 hours from home to there), unpack, sit around and talk until 2 AM, and then go to sleep. Well, usually, it’s my wife Christy that stays up and talks till 2 AM; I’m usually sacked out in a sleeping back upstairs in the over-garage family room by 17 minutes after we walk in.

Anyway, that may change a little bit this time. Christy’s planning on driving there, and I plan on hacking Drupal and my Docbook stuff on the trip up if we can. Before we left on our Spring Break vacation last week, we purchased a 75-watt power inverter for our car lighter so that we can use the laptop as long as we like. It was a life-saver on the trip up to Klamath Falls, Oregon, which is a 13-hour drive from our home in Tooele, Utah.

If I can manage to make dialup work while I’m up there (Sisna is a nationwide provider, thank goodness!), I’ll update the site with code and Guide-Goodness. If not, well, I’ll be back Sunday anyway. In case any of you ever need to access a local SISNA phone number while you’re near Idaho Falls or Rexburg, Idaho, here’s the info:

1.208.552-1843

Points to ponder while I’m gone:

• Do I really need a new computer for home-studio recording? My 933MHz does OK, but I can’t enable as many real-time effects as I’d like, and playback skips once I’m running about 12-13 stereo 16-bit, 44.1KHz tracks. A dual-processor rig with a ton of RAM would be nice, but pricey. And am I going to spend time recording or playing games? Or even hacking PHP, which I can do on my ancient Vaio 300MHz laptop?
• I’m spread a bit thin with family duties, job (that it’s tough to get motivated for, knowing they are just planning on closing the place down anyway), and my hobbies (mostly hacking together web stuff and recording music). If I spend my evenings recording music, then dishes & laundry don’t get done and I go arond smelling funny with a sink full of dishes and a not-entirely-happy spouse. If I don’t record or hack, I feel as if I’ve lost a hand and am not using my natural talents to their utmost ability. Maybe I can cut down on recording to twice a week, or otherwise just do two or three chores when I get home, stay up for only an hour to record or hack, then exercise and go to bed.
• Though there’s not enough time in the day, I really need to allocate one hour for exercise every day. I’d planned on finding that time first thing in the morning, but recording, programming, or hacking keeps me up until late in the night. And seeing that it takes me 45 minutes or so to get into the “groove” with a project, only spending an hour a night seems a waste of time as well.

Maybe I’ll just go back to the way I did it when I was growing up: head out to the studio in some out-of-the-way place three times a year for a 3-day weekend of 24-hour recording. You can produce an album in a year that way. Admittedly, the quality will suck because you can’t spend enough time on each track, but at least you’ll get it done.

Here’s hoping.

I realize nobody’s reading this again yet, except for a few lonely search engines casting about for interesting stuff late at night. I’ve spent the last several hours working on my Bugzilla documentation conversion. It’s not as easy as it looks! I’m trying to model it after the way php.net does their annotated docs, but Drupal uses a totally different type of organization than I’m used to dealing with. Drupal assigns each node an “id”, which is really just a number. It makes it so that a particular node never changes its reference (which is really convenient for links sticking around forever-ish), but Bugzilla and other documentation is orgnanized around a heirarchy of pages.

It’s a real bear to figure out, I assure you. It’s looking more and more like I should go ahead and do the reorganization work on the docs first and then put them up as editable nodes. Or else, actually put up the docs in their original, Docbook XML format, and run them through a custom converter which I’d end up writing so that they would format correctly in the Bugzilla tarball as well as on this site.

What fun! I’ll be chewing on this problem much of tomorrow while I drive up to Idaho with my family. I’ll try to enter a blog or two while I’m there.

I’ve just added the Annotations, Title, Trackback, and htmltidy modules. Here’s what they do and why I’m using them:

• Annotations: This module enables pop-up descriptions of text items to be added by users. This is compelling for my vision of the Annotated Bugzilla Guide. In-Place annotations, instead of after-the-article comments, can be a very powerful tool. Comments by themselves are great, too!
• Title: This module allows one to link to other nodes by the title of the node, rather than node number. This can be very useful in migrating the Guide over, because as we go through subsequent revisions, node numbers are guaranteed to change, and it’s proving very painful to convert all the links within the document to this alternative presentation method.
• Trackback: OK, this is purely for the geek factor. It allows me to send Trackback notifications to other blogs, and receive them as well. I just dig the functionality, and initially fell in love with it using Movable Type a few months ago. Now that the HD crashed that held my old Movable Type install, and I’m on Drupal, I missed it.
• htmltidy: Another "geek factor" toy. This one cleans up the HTML and gives warnings to the reader if the HTML is broken. I just like keeping things W3C-compliant wherever possible to keep the display clean. If you’re using IE, you’ve probably already noticed that BARNSON.org in the title bar has a black background due to being a transparent PNG; I’d like to avoid as many cross-browser issues as possible.

Dang, I write a lot of nothing.

After about two months of no updates due to flaky hardware, BARNSON.org is back in action. My first goal is to create an interactive version of The Bugzilla Guide and related documentation so that we can create the new and improved version of the Guide. The changes to the Guide from this forum will be incorporated in the next release of the Guide.

Unfortunately, the online edition is HTML, while the print edition is maintained in DocBook XML. I think it won’t be too big a deal to incorporate comments and annotations into the XML version from the HTML, but we’ll see after this initial trial. What this means for you is that you are welcome to make changes, comments, and annotations to the Guide, but the eventual commital of those changes to the actual Guide will have to wait until we have time to integrate it. Time will tell, I suppose.

Traffic to this site is VERY light at the moment, and I expect it to remain so with the other niche documentation that I maintain.