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Random Musings

Category: Frustration

  • In Praise of SIDUX

    I said I wouldn’t write about the old Dell Latitude L400 again, unless there was a “breakthrough”. Well, there hasn’t been one, so I’m not really writing about that machine (but of course, I really am) 😉 Really, this is more of a Linux posting than a specific laptop one… So, unless you’re […]

  • SPAM Problem Solved!

    OK, not really. That was only a slight exaggeration 😉 Seriously, the specific spam problem that I complained about in my “technology is random” posting is what I’ve now solved. As I mentioned in that post, I had a combination of procmail rules and SpamBayes filtering, etc. I completely turned off the old […]

  • Debugging Firefox and WordPress 2.1 UI issues with Firebug – SUCCESS

    I’m typing this to provoke the following error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open So far, not provoked, which means that I think I figured out what was killing me ever since I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. Before I declare victory, let me try to insert a link, which is what […]

  • Why does most technology feel “random” so often?

    I’ve been involved professionally with technology since 1980. So, you’d think that I understand it (and how it works) reasonably well by now. On some levels, sure, but on others, I feel as helpless as the proverbial mother-in-law or grandparent in the “clueless users” examples people always give… Conceptually, I understand how “small […]

  • I’m truly a glutton for punishment…

    OK, so here I am again, updating my progress on the old Dell Latitude L400 saga… Before I begin, let me assure the millions of readers of this blog that I have no illusion that I will ever be able to use this laptop in anything other than as a “guest surfing” node […]

  • Fifth time’s the charm 🙂

    I googled to see whether other people were having trouble with the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Most were successful on their first try, but a few people had problems that were similar to me. I made two changes and tried again: I ensured that my user had full permissions on the DB I […]

  • I’m officially a fool…

    This (meaning, the title of this post) is not news to anyone who knows me 🙂 For the purposes of this post, I interpret being a fool to “continuing to waste time trying to get the Dell Latitude L400 to be a stable machine for my purposes”. It should have been obvious to […]

  • Testing 1-2-3

    I’m not a happy camper. I started out with WordPress 2.05. After the first post or two (or three), I upgraded to 2.07. That upgrade went flawlessly. This past weekend, I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. The upgrade “failed”. The previous blog posts showed up fine, but I saw a SQL error in the […]

  • Hopping Mad

    Now the bureaucrats in Washington have cost me $40, and I’m beside myself. If you follow any of the nonsense involved in the US trying to shut down online gambling, then you know that they are ratcheting up their efforts considerably. The most recent example is serving subpoenas on Investment Banks that were […]

  • Ancient Laptop Frustration

    OK, since I’ve decided to blog a little, I may as well start with something that is driving me nuts. After all, the point of this is to attain a little catharsis (at least, that’s my point). My current laptop (now 2 years old) is a Sager NP8890 Force (this model is no […]