The Next Window

My <a href="exit.php?url_id=72&amp;entry_id=13" title="http://www.terrystockdale.com" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.terrystockdale.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">terrystockdale.com</a> site has now been redesigned using Cascading Style Sheets. I've pretty much dropped "tables" from the site, except for some historical sites (PBS, Dragonlode and Mary Lou's). I like this site format a whole lot better. It should be a lot easier to maintain, as CSS enables the separation of the content from the formatting. I'm still reworking a few pages, but have the basic layout complete and almost all of the "FrontPage" formatting removed.<br /><br />Google approved my site for AdSense, which is their focussed advertising program. With it, and with the Google search bar added to the site, I get paid a few cents every time someone clicks on one of the ads.<br /><br />Terry

Today was really strange. I clicked on &quot;tas blog&quot; in my browser bar, and got a server error. I guess this had something to do with the changes I made last night to the Apache configuration files. I reverted to a backup copy of the files I had changed. This wasn't enough.<br /><br />I deleted Serendipity and reinstalled it a couple times. Finally it was going again, but every carriage return in an entry had turned into &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; — three linefeeds. Then, when editing the entries to straighten them out, they just showed up in edit mode as a space. <br /><br />Don't know what did it. Editing had gone ok for a couple days. This time it choked. All seems repaired now.<br /><br />Terry<br /><br />

I've been behind on doing my book review of Open Source Web Development with LAMP, by James Lee and Brent Ware. A couple copies of the book were provided to the Baton Rouge Linux Users Group. One copy is in the library.<br /><br />My review is posted at my website under <a href="http://www.thenextwindow.com/exit.php?url_id=19&amp;entry_id=3" title="http://terrystockdale.com/bookreviews" onmouseover="window.status='http://terrystockdale.com/bookreviews';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">Book Reviews</a> .<br /><br />Terry<br /><br />

Went to the Baton Rouge Balloon Festival yesterday evening. We got there about 5:50pm, with the mass assension to occur at 6pm. Beautiful weather, high 70's and about 60% humidity. This was a good thing.<br /><br />The balloons had trouble inflating in the wind. The first balloon took off at about 6:50 and the others followed (hare and hounds game, where they couldn't start inflating until the hare lifted off) until 7:30. There was plenty of good food at the festival.? We went home at about 7:30.<br /><br />Terry

More volunteering for my favorite computer user group, the <a href="exit.php?url_id=56&amp;entry_id=7" title="http://www.clickers.org" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.clickers.org';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">Cajun Clickers Computer Club</a> in Baton Rouge. Clickers has been granted 501c3 status by the IRS, so donations are tax deductible.<br /><br />Saturday, 8/7/04, 1pm:<br />I'm the co-leader of the Windows XP Special Interest Group (<a href="exit.php?url_id=57&amp;entry_id=7" title="http://www.clickers.org/sigs/winxp/index.htm" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.clickers.org/sigs/winxp/index.htm';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">WinXP SIG</a>). We meet each month from 1pm to 3pm on the first Saturday of the month. Typical content is 75 minutes presentation plus 45 minutes of question and answer.<br /><br />Sunday, 8/8/04, 1pm:<br />Build Your Own Computer session. There are eight or nine people for this hands-on experience. I will be one of the instructors as they build their computers. There are another 15-20 people for a September session.<br /><br />Saturday, 8/14/04, 9am:<br />With all the recent news about security issues with Internet Explorer, many people have switched to other browsers. Others are considering the change. I'm using Mozilla Firefox as my primary (default) browser and use Internet Explorer only to do &quot;Windows Updates.&quot; At 9am, I will do a workshop (see &quot;extended body&quot; for differences between class, workshop and SIG meeting) on Mozilla Firefox. This pre-release browser has gotten rave reviews in a number of magazines, e.g. the August issue of <a href="exit.php?url_id=58&amp;entry_id=7" title="http://www.cpumagazine.com" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.cpumagazine.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">Computer Power User</a>. The latest version is 0.9.3, which was released this week. Version 1.0 is slated for September.<br /><br />Saturday, 8/21/04, 9:30-3:30<br />Cajun Clickers will have an Open House. I'm not scheduled for this yet, but will probably be there. Mary Lou will be one of the tour guides.<br /><br />Terry<br /><br />

Home Linux box, Serendipity blog software: I got the category duplication issue resolved and deleted the initial "test" blog entry. Both were related to the MySQL privileges granted to the Serendipity user. I needed to enable it to "delete". Once I made that change nothing seemed any different. I stopped and restarted MySQL and all worked fine then. <br /><br />Terry

Issue on maintensnce of Categories. I've got several that doubled. The delete category function looks like it's working, but nothing changes. This is probably an issue with privileges in MySQL. Need to check on its delete_priv setting.<br /><br />Yep, that must be it — I can't delete the initial &quot;test&quot; entry either. Well, let's check on this tomorrow…<br /><br />Terry<br /><br />

It's been an interesting evening. I nuked the MySQL installation from SuSE 9.0 on my home Linux box and then installed MySQL, phpMyAdmin and Serendipity. The driving force was Serendipity, which is this blogging software.<br /><br />This is the second shot at this message. For some reason, the first one went into the bit-bucket. <br /><br />Terry<br />

The last few days I've been doing some volunteer website design for a Baton Rouge-based volunteer organization. This has been fun from two sides — first, because I enjoyed doing it. Second, it was for a worth-while cause and was for a third party — and I could see what someone else thought about my web design efforts.<br /><br />Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Information Center of Louisiana now has a website at <a href="exit.php?url_id=59&amp;entry_id=2" title="http://www.grgicl.org" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.grgicl.org';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">http://www.grgicl.org</a> . The driving force to get the website up is their September state conference in Baton Rouge.<br /><br />I hand-coded the HTML for efficiency, rather than using FrontPage or creating a really bloated page with MS Word. I converted their logo from a tif file to jpg file and applied compression. I also took their forms, which were in MS Word format, and converted them to Adobe Acrobat Reader (.pdf) format so that they would be readable my many more viewers. <br /><br />I really like <a href="exit.php?url_id=60&amp;entry_id=2" title="http://www.bluesquirrel.com" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.bluesquirrel.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">Click2PDF</a> for easy conversion of anything printable into Adobe Acrobat Reader format.<br /><br />Terry<br /><br />