Gnorb.NET

Alright, too much car talk, as was recently pointed out by a reader. Time for another edition of Le Linkage to move things in another direction! (Actually it was moving in another direction anyway, and there are another couple of car posts coming up. My sister’s car was just stolen, so I’m helping her find a car. Not that I’ll be discussing that, but I have a few more bits of info I think would be helpful for people looking to buy a used car. Now I’ll shut up and start this episode of Le Linkage.)

Searching for Free Music with Google: Using this page, look for any artist or any song and with the help of a special a Google search query, this site may well just find it for you. Heck, I even found stuff by Sun Yan Zi, which is almost impossible to come by in this side of the world.

Strangest grammatically correct English sentence: Really, if you’re into grammar and the weirdness of the English language then you’ll love this short article on the strangest grammatically correct sentence in English. After reading that, I thought of my own: “Dogs dogs dog dog dogs dogs dog,” which translates to “Dogs other dogs chase, chase dogs other dogs chase.” Can you come up with others?

Drivers! Glorious Windows Drivers!: There’s nothing I hate more about software than having to find drivers. The problem is especially bad if you’re using Windows, since the OS is pretty much useless unless you have the drivers needed for it to work properly with your computer. (In Linux this isn’t much of a problem.) Anyway, if you’re stuck for drivers, this site may just have what you need.

Hope, Despair and Memory: An essay by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel discusses why for him, hope without memory is like memory without hope. “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” This essay is especially powerful given recent world events.

Ubuntu System on a Memory Drive: The coolest thing about CD-based Linux distributions is the fact that you can have your Linux distro just about anywhere. The bad part is that with those distros, you really can’t save anything so you’re pretty much relegated to single session computing. Sure, you can set up printers, have programs load up at lightning speed, and even download stuff off the Web. But if you’re the type to tote your OS around on a CD for use in different places, you’re also probably the type that likes to customize his environment, and that’s where the problem is: one reboot and it’s all over. Well now, if you use Ubuntu, you can save your system settings (and other items) on a memory drive! Just plug this baby in and you have YOUR computer with YOUR stuff back, with just a CD and a memory card. How cool is that?!

Alan Watts MP3’s and Podcasts: If you enjoy eastern philosophy, but don’t have the time to read a bunch of texts, then the downloadable Alan Watts lessons are definitely for you. If you know who Watts is you’ll know the value of these recordings. If you’ve never heard of the guy, click on one of the links and find out a bit about him.

Online Game: Proximity: This game’s pretty simple: Place your pieces in such a way as to make most of the board yours. What gets complicated is the strategy involved in order to make it happen. Very addicting, fun game.

(I would have posted this only on my MySpace blog, but it seems MySpace doesn’t take kindly to Linux systems, even those running Firefox. If you’re here from there, my apologies for not making it easier on you. Trust me, I tried. I’ll be adding this to over there later.)

Don’t you just hate it when someone adds a pic or something on your coment’s section that makes your page so huge you have to scroll horizontally? I know I do. (Well, seeing it. I haven’t actually gotten images that big yet, but I see them all the time in people’s pages.)

To solve this, I deviced the following little bit of code. Just copy it (not including the demarcation lines) and paste it to the top or bottom of your “About Me” section. (Don’t worry, the code won’t be displayed on the page.)

——————————
<style type=”text/css”>
<!--code by Gnorb, www.gnorb.net-->
embed {max-width:250px; display:block; margin-left: auto; margin-right:auto;}
img {max-width:250px; display:block; margin-left: auto; margin-right:auto;}
</style>
——————————-

(You can go ahead and just do a copy/paste.) This resizes all images inserted using either the “embed” or “img” tags to 250 pixels in width. To make that larger or smaller, change the “250px” part of the code to whatever size you want (300px is pretty good). The images are also automatically centered. (I added that just because I think centered images look better.) If you don’t want your images centered, remove the following code from both: “display:block; margin-left: auto; margin-right:auto;”

I hope you find this useful. If you like it, drop me a line. If you don’t, feel free to ignore this message. Feel free to pass this info on to your firends, but if you could, tell ‘em where you got the code from.

Tell me this isn’t cool: having the ability to go to one site and from there view all the other websites you want to read. No, I’m not talking about an RSS reader, I’m talking about Bitty, the browser which allows you to browse the Internet from within a Web page. I know, it sounds like it came from the Department of Redundancy Department, but seriously, it’s pretty cool.

What you see in the browser is my Bloglines blogroll. Click around to see all the stories and read the feeds. If you want, type in a Web page address in the navigation bar to see that page via the tiny browser. It’s not as good as a full-blown browser, but it’s perfect for all those times you’re at a seriously great page you don’t ever want to leave (like now), but still want to browse the Web.

Think about it: now you can make Gnorb.NET your homepage and never have to leave it again! It’s like wearing Internet-handling gloves!

Now, where can I put this…? Any suggestions? By the way, feel free to Add the Gnorb.NET Bitty Browser to your site.

I’m currently in the process of installing bbPress into a test server (for possible later use on Gnorb.NET). How’s this for a “don’t say we didn’t tell you” warning message?

bbPress is alpha software. That means it will

1. eat all your data,
2. crush your dreams,
3. and stab you in the eye

all after

1. claiming ownership of your firstborn,
2. serving you your own computer… with a delicious sauce flambé,
3. and urinating on your car door handle (just ’cause it can).

You’ve been warned.

Yikes!

Edit: The question is, why do I need a forum? The short of it is that I’m planning on starting a second site, one which cates to a specific community. A blog really won’t do when it comes to that, though it is part of the equation. I’ll get more into it later. Maybe.

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When you own a site, one of the scariest sights in the world is a blank page where your page should actually be, when you try to pull up your site and realize that nothing works. Today I had that kind of an experience.

This morning started like most: I sat down at my computer, opened Flock (a Firefox-based Web browser), typed “www.gnorb.net” in the URL bar, hit Enter, then waited…

…and waited.

Crap. The site’s being slow again, I thought. “Sigh.”

I looked at the status bar at the bottom of the browser and saw “Waiting for ‘www.gnorb.net’…” That’s not good. Shouldn’t I at least see blue by now?

It doesn’t happen very often, but once in a while this site gets seriously, massively slow. The problem here is that there are two types of slow. The first is the type where the background loads, then on-page components like the header images and text take an eternity to load. The second is where the page doesn’t respond, so it looks like the site’s down.

This was the second type, and I, as usual, started freaking out.

Oh shyte, I thought. Is this “the big one?” I could feel my heart pumping faster. I kept clicking the Stop/Reload button on the browser, hoping that it was just a snag, that my site was just fine and that the problem was from my end.

I checked CNN, Fark, and Google. All were there, meaning it wasn’t a problem with me. Crap.

Seconds which seemed to last hours passed. The site still didn’t come up. Stop, reload, wait… stop, reload, wait… stop, reload, wait…

Stepping back for a second, here’s a little perspective to keep in mind: This site is (proudly) hosted by Nebekh Omnimedia, which is run by an old friend of mine (you could almost say “war buddy”), Nate. Nate, who currently works as the system administrator for a local software company and is back in school for yet another degree, has been Gnorb.NET’s host and chief system admin since its humble beginnings all the way back in late 2003/early 2004, I forget which. (Come to think of it, Gnorb.NET is still “humble.”)

To be honest, I’ve never had any reason to doubt Nate’s administrative abilities, ever. When it comes to system administration, he’s extremely good. Whenever there’s been a problem he’s never been more than an email away, and usually takes care of problems in minutes. In fact, while with Nate I’ve had a 99.9% (or better) uptime. Not bad for a service that has cost me a total of nothing over the past couple of years. Not bad at all. (Understatement? Yeah, I think so.)

Still, like every other time technology hick-ups, I freaked out. It’s like turbulence on an airplane: I know its coming, but when it does, end-of-the-world thoughts come to mind. Within a couple of minutes of stopping and reloading thoughts about my backups and how I could get back up again quickly began racing through my head. I wasn’t quite panicking (I hadn’t yet emailed Nate), but my secret little techno-hypochondriac, my own personal cyber-doom-seer started to come out.

Is the server down? Did it explode? Is the database ok? Was my site hacked?! Given all the evidence I figured the site wasn’t hacked. Still, this wasn’t good.

Instinctively I went over to my Wordpress.com experiment, GnorbX. It’s where I go to whenever something happens to this site and I feel like I need to write, or whenever I feel like I want to show someone online but don’t want to bring them (or put it up) here. Mostly, it’s there because I was really curious about Wordpress.com and what it had to offer. (A lot more than Google’s Blogger, that’s what it has to offer.)

Thoughts about the possibility of moving Gnorb.NET to Wordpress came to mind, as they usual do in times like this. As soon as I logged in, I started to remember why I haven’t done that. The reasons are too many to list right now, but center around the lack of an ability to insert AdSense code or to modify the templates to look a bit less generic. (Sure there are a lot of themes, but I want my look, not some stamped-out duplicate, even if that means taking one of those duplicates and tweaking it a bit, like I’ve done here.) Besides, the Gnorb.NET “brand” has really grown on me, you know? And somehow “gnorb.wordpress.com” doesn’t quite roll of the tongue as easily as “Gnorb.NET”.

(Admittedly, “Gnorb” doesn’t roll off the tongue so much as it is torpedoed from the back of your throat unto your teeth and lips, but that’s beside the point.)

After again deciding against going that route, my thoughts turned back to Gnorb.NET. Maybe this is just a temporary glitch, I reasoned. It’s probably that. I again typed “www.gnorb.net” in the URL bar, hit Enter, then waited…

…and then there was blue.

Then the header.

The site was back. A second later the rest of the site loaded in all its CSS and Kubrick glory. As I saw this my techno-hypochondriac started to fade away, quieted by the armies of rational thought who were just a few minutes before too quick to call it quits. Of course this was just a glitch, I thought. I knew that. Really. I didn’t overreact. I was being… prudent. Justification for your actions is almost always easy. It’s why we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.

Now that this was over — this three and a half minutes of shier, absolute horror — my day could finally start.