Thoughts from Jared Daines

I am writing this from the ScribeFire extension for firefox. It seems pretty cool. Life has been pretty busy these last couple of weeks. Trying to get project widgetnest off the ground. Starting sumer semester and trying to get my senior project started/approved. Its a frustrating process that is all I will say.

Oh yes I am going to try out the GTD process of organization It looks pretty interesting and I hope it will work for me better than my current system of organization. It expresses alot of how I think things should be done and I couldn’t really find anything to say see this is why it won’t work for me. Like I have with other organizational processes.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Yesterday I set up an Edubuntu server for the Jefferson Montessori School. They have been running the straight Ubunutu for the past year. However, it hasn’t been an ideal situation. They have limited resources(money) and I have limited time. So the two seemed to conspire against us and cause all sorts of problems. I plan on changing that by installing Edubuntu server in each of the Class Rooms.

The following is just a list illustrating some of the problems I had with a straight Ubuntu solution for the school.

1. NIS its just a pain, and doesn’t play well with NFS on Ubuntu
2. We had a single server that was acting as everything. While it could handle everything when it went down everything went down since the home directories were located there.
3. Teachers couldn’t easily push software to their students computers. Edubuntu makes this easy.
4. Keeping all the computers up to date was hard with no central way to see what computers needed updating.

While these were my top complaints with a straight ubuntu school system we will be testing out this next week to see if it is a better option than the previous solution.

The problems I had with Edubuntu

1. DHCP-
   I would of thought that the DHCP would of configured itself properly or at least asked for some configuration during the install. But nope it didn’t work out of the box.  I had to do the following:
   1. configure my second ether network card to 192.168.0.1. it was configured to 192.168.0.254 yet the dhcp file in /etc/ltsp/dhcp.conf is set to use a 192.168.0.1 address.
   2. Had to set the interface to listen on in the /etc/default/dhcp3-server
   3. I then had to copy the /etc/ltsp/dhcp.conf to /etc/dhcp/
   4. started the dhcp server (my network card wasn’t up so it gave me some problems here. Make sure it is up. check by using the ifconfig command. the edubuntu network manager showed the system as up but it really wasn’t for some strange reason.)
2. The thin client manager shows that you can view the students deskto. But you have to install x11vnc to the chroo. I don’t know much about this and could find no good documentation on how to do it.

So far those are my biggest complaints with edubuntu. Both of these are easily solved by better documentation which will come with time as more people use the system. Some may ask why post this here then?  1- it is easier to post it here and  2- I don’t know if what I did is actually how it is supposed to go together.

Well that its for now. Let you know how this little expirement goes.

In working on the RSS engine for fatTrackr.com it has brought up some interesting dilemmas of the best way to parse data and actually figure out what that data means. It is mostly because numbers are very arbitrary things. Well I am going to spend some time to really figure out some regular expressions. Off to class.

Current weight and using to test fatTrackr.com.

Well my weight hasn’t changed. So as You can see I got the widget installed on my site. Those word press people have put together a nice system. Any way as Dave has introduced me to the Fat Blogging phenomenon I realized that Fat Blogging will probably be around for a while. Why? Well because people need something to write about. From personal experience weight is always something lots of people struggle with. Just look at the tabloids they are always talking about peoples weight.

I am not sure which path I am going to take to start losing weight… I hate the gym. I hate going there perhaps this is because in High School I was a nerd and the gym was just one place I only went when I absolutely had to(although I did surprise the jocks when we played dodge ball). I think though a lot of it comes down to the fact that I would rather be outside doing stuff than lifting a bunch of weights and running on a stationary tread mill. But since I am getting over a cold I didn’t think spending a lot of times outdoors right now would be a good idea.

This entry was just used to test our RSS parser that grabs the data from my blog and updates the widget.

People are fat blogging all over the web. Well Dave and I have been working on a widget for all of those fat bloggers out there. Check Out FatTrackr. Hope to post more here about FatTracker as things progress further.

Step7 Design is the new company that I am doing web design work for. So if you are looking at getting a website please head over to www.step7design.com

From the Word Press themes that I have seen out there I feel that something is lacking. I haven’t seen on yet that really says use me. I guess that may because I have a vision in my head of what I want and nobody has made it yet that I have found. Plus who has the time to sort through the thousuands of themes that are out there? Just browsing through them they all seemed to be the same. This may be a function of the wordpress engine itself… We shall find out here once I get the time to dig into this system a little more. I mean for the most part it seems like whenever you hit a site that is running wordpress you can tell right off the bat. I hope to be able to change that.

    What to write about? The first post is always the hardest. Well Currently as of the writing of this post I needed a distraction from my other activity of creating and starting Step7 Design.  It is fun and exciting and a little scary to go out on your own, but I have a great associate Dave who does some amazing stuff with flash and web sites.

There are many things out there for a couple of guys who live and breath web design to-do the hard part is narrowing down and focusing on the small things. The other hard part is trying to figure out how to get a business started without having to pay an over priced lawyer to tell you what you can do or can’t do. Sometimes it seems that it is too complicated. You talk with one person and they tell you that you need to do this this and this. Talk to somebody else and they say well you need to forget this this and this and do a,b, then c. Despite all of that I feel confidant that our design company will be a huge success(why else would i do it?).  Besides the fact that I really like it and I hate working as an employee.

Hmm what would it take to put adwords on this site?