Angelo Bertolli

I like WordPress–a lot. It’s been my saving grace for constructing websites without having to write the code from scratch. But it’s gotten very, very bloated. I took a look at version 3.0 and the upcoming changes. It looks ok, but it worries me for the future. Now users actually expect updates and new features on a regular and frequent basis.  Whatever happened to just wanting something that worked well, and was patched for bugs and security?  I’m also worried about backward compatibility of things like themes and plugins.

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First, let me give you the link to opt-out of unsolicited emails from Boxbe:
https://www.boxbe.com/unsubscribe

Please Note: even after several months from using the above link, I still receive messages from Boxbe to join.

I’ve been hit by Boxbe spam. This company promises to reduce the spam its users receive, and in return spam every one of their contacts on a regular basis.  The only problem is, they do not provide the above link (which I cannot yet confirm it actually works) within their email.  To the best of my current knowledge, it is still a requirement that they provide this link.

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Using computers is not intuitive.  We may feel it is intuitive because we have used computers for a long time, or have become familiar with them.  However, computers are not intuitive—especially their interfaces.  Someone who is used to Windows may find the MacOS GUI frustrating.

Most people are familiar with Windows.  The Windows GUI environment has become so familiar to us, that some of us may find it difficult to operate in another environment.  Even down to the direction mouse pointer (arrow) is pointing—seeing a right-pointing arrow may make one a little uneasy about having to adjust their “aim” for the pointer to the right side of the pointer instead of the left side.

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It seems that the world WordPress themes is chock full of questionable use of GPL code.  I really wonder if there is someone I can report this to.  Let me give an example.  There is a site that sells a “membership” to download their themes.  Great, always happy to see someone getting paid for their hard work.  But then I read about the license on this individual’s work.  So just like so many other WordPress themes, it is questionable whether or not you can create a theme at all that isn’t under a GPL compatible license.  What was even more shocking was this bad English: (more…)

I’m not a blogger really–if you didn’t already guess by my posting infrequency.  But I do own and use a lot of what people call blogs.  I just don’t like to see them that way.

You see, I’ve been making web pages since 1995, and had a personal home page (remember those?) since 1996.  My first page was rather minimalist, and in a sense, a rebellion against what I’m doing here–writing a dialog with you in typical “blog post” fashion.  Back then I felt that no one really went online to know more about a complete stranger.  I still think I was right about that at the time (although things have changed).  At least I sure never cared about what most people put on their home pages at that time.  My page was utilitarian:  find resources related to gaming, programming, music, or whatever else I happened to be interested in.  More accurately, it was useful to me, a place I could store and show off a few things, including a rather cool photo album for the times.

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This is an example of customizing Mandriva 2008.0

First copy the contents of the CD to a directory

auto-boot/
|-- VERSION
`-- isolinux
|-- alt0
|   |-- all.rdz
|   `-- vmlinuz
|-- boot.cat
|-- custom.msg
|-- isolinux.bin
|-- isolinux.cfg
|-- memtest
`-- target.msg

To change default auto configuration file, edit:
isolinux/isolinux.cfg

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Did you know that Windows also has equivalent to /etc/hosts where you can set IP addresses for domain names? It’s a plain text file in the same format, and it’s typically found in one of these two places:

• C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

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OpenOffice.org distributes their binaries as rpms. That’s great for a majority of the people who can install them, but in a couple of situations I’ve found myself wanting to use the most updated version but didn’t have root access to do the install of the package properly.

Here is how I installed it for my own user. You will need the cpio utilities installed including ‘cpio’ and ‘rpm2cpio’ which are installed on many rpm based systems. (more…)