"Murphy was an optimist!"
Vibraplex moving to Knoxville December 11, 2009 6:32 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of InterestOn January 5th, 2010, Vibraplex will move from Alabama to Knoxville, TN. Very exciting!
add a commentFrom the mouths of babes December 11, 2009 11:24 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Evan, Family, From the mouths of babes, Of Being DadEvan, 4.5 years old seeing the food I just prepared: "Eggs!"
Me: "Do you want toast with your eggs?"
Evan: "Yeah!! What’s toast?"
How cold is it? December 11, 2009 8:20 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Amy, Daily Life, FamilyIt’s so cold that my lip froze to my coffee mug while waiting at the bus stop with Amy.
add a commentBrrrrrrr December 11, 2009 6:45 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, HouseIt’s 69°F (that’s 20.5°C to the rest of the whole) inside the house and probably 10 degrees colder in the basement. That’s with the emergency heat on and the thermostat set to 75"F (23.8°C). I can’t use the woodstove because 1) it needs to be cleaned, 2) Tommy now lives in that room and has piled stuff all over the stove, and 3) I haven’t put the fireboard up on a wall I built near it. That stove used to heat this house in the winter. I really need new windows and to re-insulate the walls and attic.
*temperature conversion by OnlineConversion.com.
2commentsThe Magento Headache December 10, 2009 11:37 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeI’ve had 3 people ask if I could support Magento, the open source e-commerce application that is the current rage. It is good for midsized businesses. According to today’s reading, small sized operations are better off with a different application as the complexity of customizations and updates on Magento are more costly than a small operation should consider. I can attest that Magento is a pain to configure. What seemed like should have been a quick infusion of data into a database and a simple installation process including a config file or two and this thing should be running. No, never that simple. I allotted two hours today to install and evaluate Magento. Instead, I reached the end of the day with my head throbbing; eyes tired, red and watery; and nerves on edge resulting in an undeserved burst of anger on Noah. I’ve read dozens of tech articles, forums, and blogs, and tried installing Magento on my dev server as well as my shared hosting server. Both simply return a "500 Internal Server Error." I have not exhausted my efforts and still feel I need to know Magento. I will get it installed!
Update: I ran the Magento server check script and found my hosted server at 1and1 meets the requirements for Magento and my development server is lacking one component. Coincidentally, the magento-check.php file produced a 500 Internal Server Error on both the dev server and the hosted server until I renamed the .htaccess to something else. It would appear there is a problem in the .htaccess. This should be easy to troubleshoot now.
Update 2: My error logs indicate "DirectoryIndex not allowed here" The Magento forums suggest altering httpd.conf to have "AllowOverride All"
Update 3: This barebones guide to installing Magento at 1and1 helped.
Update 4: Success! I now have a demo installation of Magento running. This will lead to many good things.
Today’s Social Media Revelation December 10, 2009 12:04 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Communications, Privacy, Technology, Touchy SubjectsLast night LinkedIn became Facebook and Facebook tried again to become Twitter: Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
add a commentQuote of the Day December 9, 2009 8:52 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Philosophy, QuoteI have an ever increasing respect for Matt Damon. To me, he seems less like an actor pretending to be a political activist and more like a political activist who happens to be an actor. He definitely has the mental capacities to back it up where other actors have just used their fame as a platform without the brains required to support their stance.
add a comment…change comes from the bottom up; always has, always will. “That goes for today, too. We can’t wait for Barack Obama to just fix things. We have to be in his ear. That’s our job as engaged citizens. –Matt Damon [Source, OpenNews.com]
And he vanished… December 9, 2009 12:01 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeI read something today which almost prompted me to try to delete my online identity. I guess one would call that virtual suicide.
3commentsState of Me December 7, 2009 5:22 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeWait a minute! What’s this under my feet? A sandbar! In the middle of the ocean! Okay, yes, the tide is rising. Quickly. But for the moment, however brief, my head is above the water without me having to kick my legs in a frantic panic.
add a commentDorm Room Flashback December 7, 2009 10:18 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Education, History, Of InterestThe in-laws must be cleaning out their garage. The children brought home a huge box of highlighters. So I started thinking, "What could one do with so many highlighters?" Then I remembered Clement Hall room 308 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. That was my room. The walls were the color of an 80s computer that had been used too long. Dingy. Gray. Like a light but wet modeling clay. And the walls were cinder block.
A fun trick for the frequent traveler who stays in hotels a lot is to leave a message on the bathroom mirror using a light application of chap stick or other oil. Done correctly, the message remains invisible until a hot shower steams the mirror.
Highlighters on cinder block painted in that gray color work the same. Draw the highlighter art by turning off the normal lights and turning on black lights. The art in room 308 was quite intricate when my friends and I were done. When the black lights are turned off and the normal lights turned on, the highlighter disappears. Turn the black lights on and feel like you stepped into a Jimmy Hendrix black light poster.
2commentsAnd the rugged got pulled out… December 6, 2009 10:09 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeHave you ever been building up to make that leap? You know, the leap of faith. The one where you commit your whole self even though you aren’t sure you should but you do anyway and you are ready to put your all into it. And all the while you are gearing up to make the jump, someone else runs past you and just does it. It’s kinda like that. But that’s okay.
add a commentThose dreaded in-laws! December 6, 2009 7:56 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, FamilyI’ve never understood the stereo type of the spouse having to despise the in-laws. My in-laws are awesome! How great are they? Well, thanks to the in-laws, tonight we dined upon a delicious, succulent London broil.
add a commentIt snowed in Knoxville today December 5, 2009 4:53 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of Interest
Cathy wants me on the icy roof December 5, 2009 11:59 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Cathy, Christmas, Daily Life, Family, Holiday, Of Being Dad, Publishing, VideoThere is a cure for Windows dependency December 4, 2009 7:24 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Software, TechnologyMy computer experience looks a little like this: Atari 2600 -> Atari 400 -> Timex Sinclair -> Commodore 64 -> DOS boxes -> Apple ][ -> Apple ][e -> Apple //c -> Macintosh Classic -> Solaris workstations, AS 400, Next Box, CM5, VAX, ramdom flavors of Unix machines -> Mac Performas (etc), PCs (Windows 3.1, 3.11, 97, 98, 98se, Windows 2000 server, XP, Vista, 2003 (blah blah name it) -> Linux (Ubuntu primarily). In the end I find myself surrounded with PCs with loads of Microsoft software. So everything I write is dependent upon the Microsoft Office suite, software I install requires Windows and so on. Granted, I have Linux development servers because much of my work is in a LAMP environment. That is until my primary machine died horribly and while I was recovering it, I was forced to spend most of my time on my Ubuntu workstation.
After working for a couple of weeks on Ubuntu and relying heavily upon Google Docs, I learned that I love cloud computing. Cloud computing is using applications that are primarily accessed over the Internet. Twenty years or more ago, Bill Gates said this is how all our computing would be and that PCs would revert to being dummy terminals. The nice thing about cloud computing is your data is accessible anytime, anywhere, from any machine, as long as you have an Internet connection; this is also the bad thing. Your data is exposed to 3rd party companies that may go out of business or change ownership or malicious people may find ways to expose your data to the world. You must weight the risk versus the benefits.
Another option is open source software. Many alternative software directories are ready to help you find a free alternative to the commercial software you love. My favorite is osalt.com. For example, search Photoshop, osalt points to GIMP. I’ve been using Quickbooks Pro since 1999 (actually earlier but 1999 was my most current version). So for 10 years, I have used financial software that was out of date. I cannot find the discs and desperately need a new solution. Many exist! including buying the current version of Quickbooks. A search of osalt found PostBooks which is free although some people are confused by their commercial offerings. Don’t be quick to discount open source software just because of the price. Free does not mean bad. For instance, I now favor GIMP over Photoshop in some instances. Soon I may wonder why I ever used Quickbooks.
Do you have any experience with Postbooks? Your thoughts?
See also GNU Cash h/t Jonathan Hickman of traveling at godspeed.
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