AlphaBlog

Some time since I set anything down in this blog! A tremendous amount of change has occurred and I have not made the time to sit down write on this again. This stems in part from the fact that my nb install on the other machine is broken and it keeps inserting double entries and erasing the last entry. I don't remember what happens here.

Either way, we have moved clear across the country. The old Alpha with OBSD on it survived the move. I managed to copy over the mail from the machine for backup, but didn't need it in the end. Got here and turned on the machine and, with a little encouragement, the machine booted in OBSD again like nothing had happened. I still have trouble getting it to boot into OBSD once in a while, like when I have to shut it down for the incompetent electricians. We now have the Alpha running in our back 'Library', so I don't hear it or get the heat from it. Sure would be nice to replace it with something more efficient to help reduce electrical usage and our bill!

I've moved away from OBSD and Mac, using Solaris 10 at work. This started because of the effective hype over Solaris and because I liked the idea of being able to use my computer from anywhere, the thin client idea . Of course I have yet to set that up, and in fact, I cannot connect via that mechanism from the Mac! Eventually I will get it working, probably first the Global Desktop solution from them. It has been a painful transition that I will get into later in more detail. Suffice to say that a lot of time was lost and Solaris is much more complicated than OBSD. More later.

I didn't realize that what I needed to be looking at was the host name, not the domain name to get the correct domain for the host. I suppose that it really is the host name not the domain name, though the domain name needs to be set correctly for the yp configuration, but I don't think I'm using that at the moment. So, after reading through several more man pages and using the apropos command to find related pages, I came across the hosts file. This still had the computer name, i.e. host name, as my.domain. This is the default when you install the system. I wasn't quick enough during installation to realize that I would need to change this to something more realistic. I hope, now that I have the host name set correctly sendmail will now have the correct host name. Just for good measure, I'll restart sendmail, but I don't think I need to do this, though not sure why. Maybe because my mail server asks who sent the mail, sendmail doesn't tell it that? Not sure. Not much time to work on this now.

Still not working. The I've set domainname to a correct and valid domain name. That name however, is being forwarded to one of the Mac domains at the moment. When I restarted Apache, it gave me a complaint about an invalid domain name. The domain name has stuck, as evidenced by running domainname. Maybe this will clear up when I use this as the main server for the web sites, not sure yet. Also, I have not been able to get Sendmail to believe it is from xochitlfilms.org. I still get the errors in my received mail that the sender has an invalid domain name. I finally figured out how to restart Sendmail (pathetic, yes I know). OpenBSD FAQ had kill -HUP 'head -1 /var/xx/sendmail.pid', which just didn't work. Running kill -HUP pid worked just fine. We'll see what is up with the domain name and sendmail later today.

The MoinMoin wiki has not made me very happy. It is not as straightforward as I thought it would be to set-up. For instance, I have not been able to change the theme and the editing box in web browsers is unacceptably small. I'll give twiki a try on this computer. The Vanderbilt site uses it and I like their site, plus it's in the ports. I don't have time to play with it now, since I'm being a good boy and working on my K grant rather than playing with the computer (much anyway).

Trying to get the K grant to look different (somewhat) and nice with Latex. I started with the template from this site, using the newer nih class file. Using ctable, paralist, hanging styles, I've got a nice looking Biosketch template, though I need to get paralist to bring in the wrapped lines further and haven't yet messed with that. I also need to get \autoref to capitalize the word 'section' and refer to sections in the appendix as 'Appendix A' instead of 'section A'. These things can wait, because more importantly I need to get something substantial written down by the end of this week. A great package called acronym, part of the default install on the Mac is invaluable when writing something containing so many acronyms. Much easier than trying to guess where the first occurrence of an acronym is located. The only problem I have found, is that when defining an acronym with a short name, \acro{DEPM}[Department of Epidemiology]{fullname}, I can only get the package to place the short name in text, not the acronym.

Anyway, lots of good dinners, relaxing over wine and movies and getting up late to write.

Silly stuff! The new NB template is nicer than the old. The inset paragraphs are highlighted now, I like the look.

Found typos in the main_index template, replaced $ with & resulting in no image! Fixed now. Happy.

This box continues to email me status updates. Seems odd to me, the unix on the macs never do that. Root hardly ever has mail on them. Anyway, aside from noticing that /var is getting more full, the emails have a return to sender, address not valid listing in my emailer (Mailsmith). I don't understand how the domain names work quite yet, I'd like to register other subnames to go along with the main name, but I'm not sure I can. When I originally installed OBSD I just left the domainname as my.domain. This is clearly not valid. So, in sendmail I changed it to lizzy.xochitlfilms.org, but this resolves to my.domain, which is not valid. I have now figured out how to change domainname and have done so. I'm awaiting the next email to see what happens. Hope all is well with the most recent change.

On a side note, found a great little program called gphoto to obtain images from digital cameras on unix systems. Very nice command-line interface and very easy to use. I'd love to try it out more on this system, but there is little need with the G4 and iPhoto just next door. Maybe later.

Wow! Sitecopy rocks! About a billion times faster than mounting the .Mac iDisk through the finder on the macs. Sitecopy does an absolutely wonderful job of uploading all the modified files very quickly. I will try to incoporate this into the PUBLISH command for nanoblogger, though I think that it is actually fewer keystrokes to tell sitecopy to run directly than it is to run the publish command in NB.

Setting up sitecopy with the .Mac iDisk was not as straightforward as I thought it should be. I'm certain that if I understood better what was happening on either end, I would have realized the mistake. Anyway, the only site on the WWW that I found helpful was in Japanese. I'll summarize the necessary settings below:

site alphablog
server idisk.mac.com
protocol webdav
username xochitl
password pass
local fullpath/local/dir/
remote /idiskusername/Sites/alphablog

That's it! Fantastic little program. Now to get it working on the mac!

Up and running? Not sure about that just yet. I have installed sitecopy to help maintain the remote AlphaBlog site. I was using cadaver to upload files, but it just took too long and it was too much work attempting to ensure that all updated files that needed to be, were uploaded to the remote server. Cadaver is a great program. Works much better than the mount_webdav command in Mac OS X. I went ahead and installed Cadaver on the Mac before I found sitecopy. I'm uncertain that it will work as I have it presently configured, but here we go!