S1:E2 – The Naked Now

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“This one sorta creeped me out. It was really weird. Most of them got cuckoo, the Doctor fell in love with the Captain. They get drunk, and even Wes! He takes over the ship, and Riker doesn’t get drunk, he just keeps forgetting stuff. Weird episode, finally it has a good ending.”

TNG watches TNG – an ongoing series where my almost 11 year old daughter discovers Star Trek.

S1:E1 – Encounter at Farpoint

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“It has a nice ending. It sorta said SOME true stuff about people, but we’re a little more advanced than Q thinks we are. This show is weird – at the end, they figure out that the people in Farpoint station are hiding a giant jellyfish thing that can change shapes into anything. How big is the ship, and why are kids on it?”

TNG watches TNG – an ongoing series where my almost 11 year old daughter discovers Star Trek.

TNG watches TNG

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My daughter knows NOTHING about Star Trek – she’s never seen an episode, doesn’t know what a Klingon or a Vulcan is. She does have the ability to enjoy large, complicated storylines as evidenced by her love of LoTR, Harry Potter, and a whole bookshelf of young adult literature.

In this series of blog posts, I’m going to chronicle “Star Trek: The Next Generation” through her eyes.

Bye bye ubuntu: hello debian!

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So I have been increasingly annoyed with the direction ubuntu has been taking recently: a vitriolic take here.

In addition to some odd fiscal choices while trying to figure out how to pay their bills, they are going whole-hog into their own window manager that looks completely disinteresting to me: Unity. I mean, the idea of a fully accelerated desktop makes sense but I don’t trust ubuntu to build it. My experience under lucid and then maverick with Ubuntu One was less than stellar: it utterly failed. Their own software in their own environment. Busted. The window manager and ubuntu one issues are just one small part: generally, it seems like I derive very little from ubuntu but annoyance.

An example: I upgraded from lucid to maverick and flash performance (which was never stellar anyway) TANKED. A page with a flash embed would take 30 seconds at least to render, with or without a plugin crash. Unfortunately, as a web developer that works with video a lot, performant flash is pretty important. I have no idea why it broke during the lucid – > maverick upgrade: bad QA is the only reason I can come up with.

So I’m back on debian stable for my laptops and desktops and I couldn’t be happier. Everything feels much faster (it could be the switch from ecryptfs to dm-crypt but I expect there is more to it, I didn’t feel io bound), everything works and I have rock solid kde terminals. My ideals just jibe better with debian, it feels like I am home again.

Spam software gone awry

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I like it when a spammer’s engine of destruction malfunctions and their tricks are laid bare. A recent spam comment had this username:

The {sheer|utter|large} available {information|info|data|information and facts} online {makes|can make|tends to make|creates} {finding a|getting a|locating a|choosing a|selecting a} {good information|reliable information|straight answers} directory {reall

Deploying Debian Squeeze on slicehost by upgrading from lenny

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Don’t know why, but debian squeeze is not yet officially supported on my VPS vendor of choice – slicehost.com. This blog post got me started down a very easy path – upgrading a lenny slice to squeeze.

  1. Get a lenny slice. Log in.
  2. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to start clean.
  3. apt-get install locales followed by dpkg-reconfigure locales to fix that annoying perl locale warning (optional, but SRSLY – why not?)
  4. Make sure your slice is using the latest slicehost kernel in the control panel.
  5. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list, replacing “lenny” with “squeeze”. The debian-volatile repo has been deprecated, so replace all references to it with “deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian squeeze-updates main contrib non-free“
  6. apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
  7. Watch lines scroll by, answer whatever questions you get asked.
  8. Reboot.
  9. ???
  10. Profit.

I think it took me longer to type those instructions than it did to complete the entire process.

On a side note – I’m done with ubuntu LTS on my servers. The crap they did meddling with sysvinit and a bunch of other minor annoyances have convinced me I should get back on debian stable. I’ll probably still use kubuntu for my desktops / laptops (and we’ll probably still stick with ubuntu at Berkman), but it’s debian stable where it’s my choice from now on.

Diff’ing wordpress releases

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A new wordpress release is out and you’d like to know what’s changed? Sure, you can read the changelog, but is that REALLY enough?

Point your interweb box to: http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/ and then use svn to show you exactly what’s changed. Pick the URLs to the tags that represent the two releases you’d like to compare, and then:

svn diff http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0.4/ \
http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0.5/  > ~/tmp/wp-3.0.4_to_3.0.5.txt

Then inspect “~/tmp/wp-3.0.4_to_3.0.5.txt” to see what’s changed.

Pre-loaded Image Rollovers with jQuery

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I despise implementing image rollovers, but this makes it almost tolerable. Any <img> tag with a “hover” attribute referring to an image URL will have a rollover behavior attached to it. For bonus points, the rollover image will be pre-loaded, so there’s no momentary delay the first time an on-state image is loaded.

In your HTML source:

<img src="/images/button.gif" hover="/images/button_on.gif" />
<img src="/images/another_button.gif" hover="/images/another_button_on.gif" />

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
  jQuery('img[hover]').each(function(){
    // Preload rollover
    var imageEl = jQuery("<img alt="" />");
    imageEl.attr('src',jQuery(this).attr('hover'));

    jQuery(this).hover(
      function(){
        // swap the image.
        var hoverSrc = jQuery(this).attr('hover');
        var regSrc = jQuery(this).attr('src');
        jQuery(this).attr('src',hoverSrc);
        jQuery(this).attr('hover',regSrc);
      }
    );
  });
});

Thanks jQuery for being so awesome.