24 Nov 2007
This year we went and got some family photos done by a photographer that we used last year. We were quite happy with last year’s photos so we thought we see if we could get some good family shots again this year. Have a look:
06 Nov 2007
Posted by Dave under Dave's Thoughts,Geekstuff
This is the webmin view of memory and disk allocation for my webserver:
Not too encouraging. Particularly since when I grabbed the image, there really wasn’t that much going on with the webserver. The machine is an old and tired (c. 2000 – who’d have thought that a computer from the dawn of the new millennium would be described this way?) PIII-550 with only 256 MB of memory and a 10 GB hard drive. It used to have an astonishing 384 MB of memory but one stick went bad and caused a host of wonky errors when I tried to rebuild the box with ubuntu. Things were OK (mostly) while the blog was mainly text based, but all of the messing about with extra plugins and the photo galleries is starting to put some strain on things. Most of the memory use is the mysql database, so things don’t get much better than what the image above shows, only worse. Last night I tried to upload and open a 4.3MB zip file and ran out of free memory. Not too good.
So now I need to think about how to retire this box and get something with a little more oomph. The first thing that comes to mind is to get a nice shiny new powerful box for Brenda and I; then I can shuffle all the old hardware in the fleet down one notch in the food chain. Sadly that means 4 rebuilds – I’m already tired out, just thinking about it. But wait, in the spirit of never raining without pouring, my Dad called earlier this evening and his computer is kind of dead … 5 rebuilds.
I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend…
ps. 27 December 2007 – On the weekend of 15/16 Dec, I upgraded to a AMD 1700 with 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB drive. This is the new webmin view of things:
05 Nov 2007
Posted by Dave under Geekstuff
Well here goes with a test of NextGen…
I’ve spent all evening thrashing about with trying to get a working photo gallery. Of course, I let this all slide for about 3 weeks while life happened, so I spent a lot of my time tonight relearning all the things that I’d done before. Eventually I stumbled across a reference to NextGen gallery and gave it a try – what a difference. This actually works, and works well with only a minor amount of setup. Have a look:
There is also a test page; see the “Newpaige China” link in the header at the top right.
I’ve got a few things to work out, like getting the thumbnail alignment sorted out in the fireworks gallery, but I’m pretty happy with this so far!
26 Oct 2007
Posted by Dave under Dave's Thoughts
Well, instead of working on figuring out the vexing problem of how to get a photo gallery attached to this blog, I’ve been fighting malware on my main computer. Brenda was doing research on how various schools approach the issue of background checks for volunteers and, while on the website of one of the two big school boards in Calgary, managed to get a virus. It was one of those unpleasant ransom-ware style “virus scanner” deals, the virus pops up a WinXP style system tray alert box that warns of nasty viruses detected on the computer. Well, Duh!
The hook is that the malware tries to get you to buy a “full featured” version of some product (in this case, something called AntiVirGear) to remove the infection. Of course, if you’re dull enough to fall for it, the likelihood of being rewarded with a clean machine is pretty low. Anyway, it was a bear to get rid of: Norton, Adaware, Spybot and TrendMicro Housecall all were unsuccessful – although each one did find and remove some parts of the infestation. The last remnants of the virus relied on a randomly named and timestamped dll file in the system32 directory which had to be discovered and deleted by hand. Eventually I did clean it all up, but it took about 8 hours of effort.
I still think that I may rebuild things from scratch, just to be sure.
