John's Blog and Stuff

In a previous post, I wrote about setting up a tethered dial-up connection using a Palm Treo 755p and an eeePC.

It seems that during the upgrade process from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) to 8.10 (Intrepid), something changed in the networking modules and broke this...a little bit.

I just had an opportunity to install a new APC (Model BN1250LCD) UPS to support an Ubuntu Linux server. Configuration was really easy thanks to this post on the Ubuntu forums and this post in Ubuntu's Community Help documentation.

The only oddity I noticed was that after starting apcupsd, there was no notice in the /var/log/apcupsd.events of the successful start. No big deal, I guess...it still responds to /etc/init.d/apcupsd status with all the happy details of the UPS' condition.

I already love OpenOffice for all the typical reasons (functionality, freedom, etc.), but it's always been a little slow to load. It might take 15 seconds or so to initially open writer or calc...once they're open, everything is fine...it's just that load time that's a little annoying.

My first, second and third tries at posting to this Drupal site from a cell phone have taught me a lot about the MailHandler module. They've also left me with a few questions.

Sometimes, a Windows printer will print multi-page documents in the 'wrong' order...so you end up with a stack of papers with the last page on top. One possible reason is a configuration problem in the Printer Settings:

1. Open the Printer Settings dialog for the printer:
   • Click Start>Printers and Faxes, or Start>Control Panel>Printers and Faxes
   • Right-click the printer's icon, then click 'Properties' from the bottom of the context menu
2. Open the Printing Preferences dialog window:

I recently set up a Linux (Ubuntu) based network to allow VPN connectivity, and to avoid headaches1 I wanted to modify the internal IP address scheme from the default (192.168.1.0) scheme.

1. 1. FWIW, the potential headache there is that if I'm on a friend's network, I've probably already been assigned an IP address from that segment (192.168.1.20, perhaps), so connecting to the VPN would cause problems with routing (because I'd have two IP addresses from the same segment, but from separate networks).

I wish I could remember which airport this was in...it just struck me as funny that EVERYONE has trouble with Windows and the 'help' it offers:

5 or so years ago, I had all my domain management and hosting done through Network Solutions. It turns out they were charging $35 per year for domain name renewal, when relative newcomers like GoDaddy were charge about $8. Switching away from Network Solutions was purely cost-savings for me then, and I haven't been disappointed with GoDaddy since switching.

I just got off the phone with Network Solutions, after about 2 weeks of mind-numbing attempts to wrestle another domain from their clutches. Here's the run-down:

On a decent sized (500+ users) Drupal 5 web site, I ran into the same problem documented here, wherein the extra fields defined for users (in the Profile module) caused each user to occupy several rows of the table in a table-mode View.

Mark Peal did a nice job describing the problem, so I'll just copy/paste it here for completeness:

In the directory table, each username appears eight times.

I followed the tutorial detailed here and am now able to use my Palm 755p as a tethered USB modem, connecting to the Internet with an eeePC. My service provider is Alltel, and I paid for the USB modem software (I tried it first - the demo version worked fine too).