WordPress

Now that I’m using my blog again, I decided to ditch b2evolution for WordPress. B2Evolution has served me well, but I’ve never been crazy about its look-and-feel or its selection of skins. And, most of my geeky-type friends who blog, use WordPress, so I figured I would give it a shot.

Importing was easy thanks to these instructions I found.  Ironically enough, it was the same procedure I used awhile back when I converted from Blosxom to b2evolution:  export the existing stuff into Movable Type format, then import.

I really like the clean look-and-feel of WordPress, and it’s certainly much spiffier than the version of b2evolution I was using, although that’s not really a fair comparison because I hadn’t upgraded b2evolution since I installed it in late 2005.

In other news, I just registered lpaulriddle.com, which I’ll eventually use to house this blog and some other stuff.

 

Michael’s room finished (except for carpet)

Finally put a wrap on painting Michael’s room last night. Based on prior blog entries, this project droned on for almost a year. Kind of par for the course for projects these days, it seems.

The room has actually been habitable for a month now (Michael slept there for the first time on 9/22… a month ago to the day), but the room has been waiting on one of us to touch up the paint in the corners and around the trim. I finally knocked that off last night. For as bad shape as the walls were in when we started this, I must say the finished product looks pretty nice. At times, I had my doubts about how it was going to turn out.

I learned one valuable lesson from this: when cutting in where two different surfaces meet (i.e. around trim and in corners), skip the blue painter’s tape, use a good quality sash type brush, and just do it freehand. I was amazed at how easy it was, and it didn’t take any longer than it would have with the tape, either. Apparently it’s possible to get better results with the tape than we did, but if it’s just as easy to do it freehand, why bother?

Nothing left to do with the room now except get it carpeted, which we’ll let the pros take care of after we finish painting the master bedroom.

Master bedroom wiring – know what I need

Replaced the outlet at the foot of Andrew’s bed this morning, and it confirms the wiring layout:

  1. Master bedroom ceiling fixture  
  2. Master bedroom switch box
  3. Andrew’s room, outlet at foot of bed
  4. Master bedroom, outlet behind bed
  5. Back basement, ceiling fixture

This is everything I need to know to come up with a plan to redo the wiring. It will be very similar to what I did in Michael’s room:

  1. Disconnect the old wiring between #1 and #2, and replace with a single run of 14/3 which will function as a switch loop.
  2. Disconnect the old wiring between #3 and #4.
  3. Run a new wire from the ceiling box (#1) to the basement.
  4. Mount a new junction box in the basement and splice the new wire into the existing wire between #4 and #5.

An alternative would be to run the new wire directly from #1 to #5, but #5 already has a lot of wires going into it, and I think mounting a new junction box would keep things neater.

The basic idea is to splice the ceiling fixture to the closest fixture downstream of the switch box with accessible wiring, then back-feed the two outlets immediately downstream of the switch.

Anyways, I now know enough about the circuit layout to put it in the wiki.

Incidentally, the old outlet in Andrew’s room was cracked almost in half.  Check it out:

Broken outlet from Andrew's room

The outlet was most likely original to the house, and it was plastic, not porcelain.  So apparently they were using plastic outlets back then, but not thermoplastic-coated wire.

Demystifying master bedroom fan wiring

This evening I did a little preliminary detective work to try to figure out the ceiling fan wiring in the master bedroom, in preparation for redoing it. The goal is to reroute the hot and neutral wiring around the switch box, leaving only a single 14/3 switch loop going to the box. That way the fan control will fit properly in the box. More background is here.

Today I just opened up the switch box, disconnected the spliced hot wire, and observed what went dead.

Dead:

Master bedroom – ceiling fixture / Switch
Master bedroom – outlet behind bed
Andrew’s bedroom – outlet at foot of bed
Andrew’s bedroom – outlet behind crib
Andrew’s bedroom – light in closet next to door
Back of basement – ceiling fixture
Basement bathroom – light and fan

Live:

Master bedroom – outlets on wall adjacent to bed (2)
Andrew’s bedroom – outlet behind dresser
Andrew’s bedroom – ceiling fixture
Andrew’s bedroom – light in closet at head of bed

Like everything else in this house, this raises as many questions as it answers. The next step is to inspect the wiring in the attic (there’s very little visible wiring for this circuit in the basement), and work on replacing some of the outlets. As each outlet is disconnected, I can repeat this evening’s exercise and get more info about how the circuit is laid out. Stay tuned..

Fun with ssh tunnels

A couple months back, UMBC decided to block off-campus access to most of its internal hosts. Included in this bunch was concerto, which houses this blog as well as my house wiki. Although I could probably apply for and get a hole punched in the firewall for http and ssh, I decided not to bother. I’m not the most proactive guy in the world when it comes to keeping up with security patches, so the firewall thing is probably for the best. Of course, the down side to this is that I can’t use concerto as a free web hosting environment any more, which again, is probably mostly a blessing in disguise. However, there was one big thing I didn’t want to give up: ssh and web access to concerto from our home LAN. After all, there’s not much point in having a house wiki if I can’t get to it from my house! So the challenge became, how do I get this back, and make it as seamless as possible?

Continue reading

Firefox new window links

I’ve always hated when links open in new windows (usually by adding a target="_blank" attribute). Except in a few very rare instances, there’s just no reason to do it. Firefox allows the user to disable this behavior, but the procedure is not very well documented, so it seems like every time I want to do it I need to spend 10 minutes searching the web. So, I’m documenting it here in my somewhat-neglected blog. This procedure is valid for Firefox 2.x:

  1. Point the browser to about:config
  2. Find the property browser.link.open_newwindow
  3. Right-click on it and select “modify”
  4. Change the value to “1”
  5. Restart the browser

And there we have it. Another victory in the battle to make the web less annoying.

Fixing openoffice.org fonts..

I use openoffice.org all the time on my Debian server box, most of the time through a VNC connection. Problem is, the fonts have always looked horrible. ISTR that they weren’t always bad, but they’ve certainly been bad for awhile. Well, today I finally sat down and fixed it.

It all started out when I upgraded the system (which I hadn’t done in forever) to get some updated packages. I was hoping that would fix my OO.o font problems, but it didn’t, so I dug a little deeper…

Basically, there are two issues I was seeing:

  1. The menu font was cartoonishly large in proportion to all of my other apps; and
  2. It appeared that anti-aliasing was not working or something, because all of the fonts had a very crude, blocky scaled look to them.

None of this prevented me from using the system, but it sure didn’t make it enjoyable. Anyhow, first I tackled the ugly-scaled-fonts problem. I noticed that I didn’t have the problem when I started OO.o directly on an X.org display. The problem was limited to the VNC server. The solution turned out to be starting Xvnc with a depth of 24 bits instead of 16. Don’t ask me why it works, but it does. It remains to be seen if the increased resolution will cause any performance degradation over my slow DSL uplink. I’ve not noticed any difference over our 100mbps LAN at home.

I solved the second issue by adding the following line to my $HOME/.Xresources file:

Xft.dpi: 85

So there you have it. As always, Google was extremely helpful in tracking down this info. References here and here.

Let’s go paperless

I’m on a paperless kick. I’ve decided that I have too much paperwork cluttering up my file cabinets, desk drawers, etc., so I’m getting rid of as much of it as I can. My goal is to shrink my paperwork collection down so that it only takes up one file cabinet (I currently have three). It’s one part of an overall downsizing theme that’s pervading our household lately, the idea being that if we get rid of as much stuff as possible now, it’ll be easier to move into a smaller, lower-maintenance house down the road.

It’s also getting easier to go paperless. More and more billers, financial institutions, etc. are offering electronic (usually PDF) statements with the option of turning off paper mailings. It took me a little while to warm up to this technology, but now I’ve accepted it wholeheartedly (the key was deciding that I trust the online delivery mechanism more than I trust our mailman).

The centerpiece of the paperless scheme is what I call a “virtual file cabinet”, which is just a fancy name for a directory hierarchy to hold PDF documents. I use ‘unison’ to keep an exact copy of the hierarchy on a different machine, which serves as an effective backup scheme.

I’ve centered on PDF as my document format of choice, because it works well and is used by the majority of the e-document providers I deal with. And that means that everything that is not PDF, has to be converted to PDF. The best way I’ve found to do this is to set up a virtual “PDF Printer”, which creates a PDF file in lieu of actually sending the document to the printer. Then, just send the document to the virtual queue to create a PDF. This saves a step over printing the document to a file (which creates a PostScript file which then must be converted with ps2pdf). And some apps, like H&R Block’s TaxCut, don’t allow printing to a file, but they’ll happily send stuff to the PDF queue.

Setting up the PDF printer on my Ubuntu machine was a piece of cake, following these instructions. Condensed version:

  1. sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
  2. sudo chmod 4755 /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf
  3. Go to System -> Administration -> Printing -> New Printer
  4. Select ‘PDF Printer’
  5. Select ‘Generic’, ‘postscript color printer’ driver

It was a little more difficult, but not overly so, to set this up on my home server box (and also configure our Windows box to print to it). See the Wiki for details.

XP and QEMU

Last week I decided to try building a virtual machine to run Windows XP. I figured I’d install XP, install all the recent patches, then make a snapshot of the virtual disk. Then I’d have a clean XP install that I could use to run various apps as needed. Several years back I purchased a copy of VMWare for this purpose, and it worked great. This time around I figured I’d try QEMU, an alternative emulator that’s free. Now, I’ll prefix this by saying that my host machine (a Debian Linux box) is somewhat underpowered to run an XP guest OS. It’s a 700mhz PIII with 512 megs of RAM. It works, and it’s usable, but it’s quite comically slow. In particular, I’d estimate that the installation process took about 12 hours (this was spread out over several days of occasional attention, so I don’t have an exact figure). The basic XP install goes something like:

  1. Install XP from CD.
  2. Install Service Pack 2.
  3. Download and install recent updates from Microsoft to bring the installation completely up to date.

And that’s essentially what I did. The process was marked by long periods of waiting and wondering if it was hung, followed by entering some info in a dialog box, follow by more long periods of waiting and wondering if it was hung, etc. etc. etc. I ran into a couple of known QEMU/XP issues:

  • After the initial install, the reboot hangs on the “Windows XP” splash screen with the message “Please Wait”. Resetting the machine at this point seems to get it moving along again.
  • After initially logging in as “Administrator”, I got a dialog box that said “A problem is preventing windows from accurately checking the license for this computer. Error Code: 0x800703e6.”. Following some advice on the qemu-devel mailing list, I booted into safe mode and installed Service Pack 2, and that fixed this problem.

After that, there was lots more waiting while it downloaded updates, installed IE7, etc. etc. etc., but it eventually finished and left me with a working system. How much use I get out of it remains to be seen, but at least all the effort wasn’t for naught. Recommendation: if you’re going to do this, use a beefier machine than I did 🙂 Also, I highly recommend building and using the kqemu kernel accelerator module. For me, this sped things up from “super mind-numbingly comically slow” to just “comically slow.” And the final tip: If you think it’s hung, go to the host OS and check for activity on the virtual disk image. I lived by this during the install.

And in other news… it’s tax time again! And, this year I’ve decided that I’m tired of getting refunds. Even a “nominal” refund (say $100-$200) is still an interest-free loan to Uncle Sam. So it occurred to me, why don’t I just estimate our 2007 taxes and adjust my withholding appropriately so that I end up owing a nominal amount, instead of getting a nominal refund. Then, with each paycheck, I’ll set the extra amount aside in an interest-bearing account. When next year’s tax season rolls around, I’ll pay the amount owed, and the remainder becomes my “refund”. Seems like a no-brainer, and I wonder why I didn’t come up with this sooner. The complicated part, of course, is estimating our 2007 taxes and avoiding the whole underpayment/penalty/interest thing. But I’m going to give it a go.

Bye-bye Taxcut, hello TaxACT

Don’t look now, but it’s Tax Season again. This is usually the time of year I start looking for the best deal on H&R Block’s TaxCut product, which I’ve been using for several years. Truth be told, I’ve always been pretty happy with TaxCut. I usually pay between $15 and $25 for the “Deluxe” product (or whatever they’re calling it in the given year) which in the past has included “free” federal e-file and one “free” State (after rebates of course). However, this year it appears that Block is no longer offering the free e-file, so that prompted me to look around for a better deal.

To me, there are three important things to consider when choosing a tax preparation product:

  • Convenience. I’m sure I could use the old paper-and-pencil method, maybe with the help of a spreadsheet or two. But truth be told, that’s not really an option for me at this point of my life. It’s just too tedious and time-consuming. Tax preparation software is well worth a (nominal) price in terms of time and headache saved.
  • Accuracy. Obviously, the software isn’t worth anything to me if it doesn’t accurately complete the return.
  • Cost. The cheaper, the better.

Anyhow, I think I’ve found what I’m looking for: TaxACT online for Federal, and Maryland’s free (and excellent) iFile system for State. TaxACT will supposedly complete and e-file my Federal return for free, so combined with iFile, my total outlay this year will be a grand total of…. $0! And no rebates to bother with, either. Time will tell how well this works, but it sure seems ideal, so I’m hoping it works out. Stay tuned.