I'm still using that old Panasonic Toughbook as the server. It's been a good Linux learning tool. I have been playing around with some of the Turnkey Linux appliances in VirtualBox and really enjoying the fact that they've gone through the trouble of installing all sorts of software on top of Ubuntu server 8.04. I have used the LAMP, Drupal, Joomla and a couple of others. I liked the LAMP one enough to download the iso and install it on the Toughbook.

Now, some may say "but you could just install Ubuntu server yourself and get all that running." While that is true the Turnkey was just so easy that it let me get in and focus on some other things I wanted to work on.

I think this will be as far as I go tonight... I am actually testing the WordPress app for Android. Hey, it gets a post up here and that's good in my book.

I started to follow along month to month as he showed how to interact with twitter via shell script culminating in a fully working twitter bot that can parse it's stream and send replies to queries that were sent to it. This really piqued my interest as I see potential in what a twitter bot can do in regard to my job. So I am setting out to adapt his shell script to fit my needs.

I have finally got the script running after a few edits to match my directory structure and also had to re-learn how to set up a cron job. Now begins the task of customizing the script to add the functionality that I need.

This has been a fun way to dive back into shell scripts after not really doing anything with the shell since that as I am trying to learn Linux to be able to be more than just a user.

Nervous Reflex, my other website, has become something of a project as of late and I find that I am finally getting it to be what I want it to be yet it remains a bit out of reach. I set up an installation of WordPress MU that will allow users to create their own blogs right inside the site. This keeps in line with the original premise of the site's mission, to seek out and exploit strange new bloggers. To be honest I envision Nervous Reflex being a community of gaming enthusiasts; developers and gamers alike. I need to get some spam issues taken care of prior to opening up the site, that and find some decent themes. Oh! And a way to get most recent blog posts to appear on the front page.

Okay, now on to my new toy... err... tool. I had bought an older Toshiba laptop which I thought would cure my ever growing need, not need really more of an insanely nagging want. I soon found out that lugging around a damn near eight pound computer was totally the opposite of what I really wanted in portability. I always had the pleasure to talk tech with a co-worker and one of the gadgets he discovered was the Nokia N800. Since then it's been at the top of my wish-list until the day I had enough of that weighty monstrosity I called a laptop. If you read the older posts about my eBay crap-fest you know the trouble I went through just to get the thing sold. Here's the deal with that, I had done some research and I discovered that I could get nearly $400 for the laptop, which I did. At the time the N800 was selling for just under that but within the time it took to sell the laptop the N800 went through it's price drop and I ended up paying $270 for it, shipped. I made a profit! That was the first sign that this was a terrific purchase.

Right now I am writing this post on the tablet and I am loving this device. I intend to do much more blogging now that I can always have great tool for it in my pocket. I really want to write more at length about my experiences with the N800 but that will be at a later date.

I do have to mention how well w,hdows mobile handles spelling erroos. of Course. as Iwrite that a hand. full desi -cide to show up. See ing all these mistakes makes use wonder just how usefull all this is. It is quite fun though... (onqi vs zz precursors poros slice) -> Random Squiggles

Apparently not, it seems that the hallowed halls of eBay have become a haven for scammers. I have put this laptop up for auction seven times now each time the winning bid has come in from a scammer and eBay has taken down the listing. These people put in last second bids making it damn near impossible to use the function eBay gives you to remove bidders. I grow weary of this re-occurring and am now looking to sell the thing through other means. Craigslist comes to mind as does the paper.

I wonder if all this activity has anything to do with the recent hack of eBay. I sold my X-Box smoothly and without issue a while back and was pleased with the whole operation. Now I have doubts as to whether I'll use eBay ever again. I don't like the idea of putting something up for sale so many times.

Obviously, since you're reading this, the initial setup went well. The program asked me what kind of blog that Live Writer will be used with, since I use WordPress,  I told it "other" or whatever option it was that let me choose another blog type than the ones listed.  The next screen asked me for the web address and my username and password. Live Writer connected right up. I even got to choose whether or not I wanted to import the styles being used on the site so that I would be able to see how the post will look prior to it being uploaded.

It has already proved that it was worth the download already. We'll see how it performs later on down the road.

If you ever need to reformat your drive to fix an issue and you need to recover the documents you had in My Documents in a password protected account. What you want to do if possible is get another hard drive, either one that you may have laying around or borrow one. Connect up the original HDD as a secondary or 'slave' drive. Install Windows on the new drive, so that you're not losing your data to the format that happens. You may also be able to create a new partition in the empty space.

Once you have the new install of Windows running, you want to hit the F8 key when Windows is loading... this will let you start the OS in safe mode. Once in safe mode you can log in as Administrator, do that. With admin privileges you can now go ahead and find the folder in question and right click it. In there you can get into the properties. There is are security settings in the properties and there you want to go ahead and take ownership of the directory and the files in there.

Microsoft actually explains it better and it's damn helpful. Wish I had found out about that earlier.

I had it all set up GRUB worked fine except for the fact that when I selected the Windows installation it tried to boot the wrong partition. Easily remedied by editing the commandin GRUB. The issue I was having was that when FC6 loads up I see a few lines of the startup and then the screen would go dead. No more signal. I decided that it might be the ATI graphics card that was the culprit so I removed it from the system and hooked up an old monitor to the VGA port. Same thing happened, so I decided to try reinstalling FC6... this is where things take a turn for the worse.

Upon reboot, the GRUB loader doesn't do its normal thing instead it just gives me a GRUB command line. Oh yeah, I am nowhere near a very competent Linux guy. So I try figuring out the GRUB loader... I get it to load Linux, same loss of video signal occurs. Reboot try to figure out how to load Windows from GRUB to no avail. Crap... I then proceed to boot from the recovery cd to get myself to a DOS prompt. From there I did fixmbr in hopes of at least getting Windows to load correctly. Reboot, swear a lot as the boot record I fixed is now booting from the recovery partition.

Oh yeah fun times ahead... running chkdsk now because there ws another issue I had pop up that suggested I do so. Not good... PC still not fixed and I have to go to work soon.