http://www.frenchmerchants.net News you never wanted to know. en-us Copyright (C) 2005-2010 Frenchmerchants.net http://www.frenchmerchants.net/favicon.ico http://www.frenchmerchants.net http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2011.html#A110104 Just a little heads up. I will moving over to the new blog software and flatpages during the course of this week. This may make for a bit of a bumpy ride and there may be occasions when the site might be down. Please bear with me as this is a bit of a learning experience for me. Once this is uploaded, you shouldn't notice much of a visual difference. Most of the changes I've made are on the back end at the moment. After these changes are in place, I will be making incremental changes over time. I do plan to do a complete redesign of the site's look and feel, but that is still in the planning stages at this time. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A101217 With everything going on the last four months, I've been so busy that I haven't even had the time to post anything on the site much less write even a single line of code. I'm still shooting for a January 1 rollout of the new stuff for the website, but I'm thinking it won't be at all polished. I'll just have to improve after I update it. Please bear with all the warts until I can get them smoothed out. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A101112 I took some time and got flatpages implemented on the development version of the site. I even managed to get the manual moved over to the flatpages app. Since it was built in I didn't even have to move anything from the app I had already developed. I simply had to update a configuration file and update the url.conf. I then logged into the admin interface and started moving the manual pages into it. Done. Now I'm going to go through the rest of the site and look for some more things to tidy up and and get ready for the update on January first. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A101107 This might seem a little ho-hum to those who use Django on a regular basis, but I'm pleased to say that I have flatpages working on my development site. I'm converting the static pages for the rbChron manual now. It's kind of redundant to do this because I'll just have to do it again when I upload everything, but it helps me to find things here and there that I haven't thought of that need to be fixed. For example, the page turning buttons on the manual will have to be updated somehow, but I'm too sleepy to think of how to do that at the moment. I'm still shooting for a January 1 rollout of the new stuff. Hopefully there won't be too much that gets in the way between now and then. I've decided not to go for any new feature stuff and polish what I have for now. Visually I"m trying to make it so that there will almost nothing different. Right now, about the only noticeable thing is that the columns aren't lined up like the live site currently is. I'm thinking about how to go about making this look a little better and hopefully I'll be able to fix it before I upload. If not, I'm going to put it up anyway and just keep working on it as I go. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A101025 I migrated to Kubuntu 10.10 and so far everything pretty much seems to be ok. There are about three issues I've run into that really don't impact my ability to get things done. First, when you log into the systems via ssh, the messages appear either twice or will say that there are some random number of software updates available. It seems that the program that updates the motd file may be broken. Again, no problem and only appears when I'm doing remote admin on my systems. The next is annoying, but still not a major issue. The login screen has huge fonts. I can't blame the upgrade, though. This problem appeared when I recently replaced my monitor. For some reason KDM seems confused by the monitor's default resolution. I was hoping the upgrade would fix it, but alas I'll just have to do some old fashioned troubleshooting. Third, and the most troublesome, is the fact that my sound has been changed up. It appears that KDE is changing their backend to pulseaudio. The change doesn't appear complete and has limited my ability to adjust the volume on my system. I've pretty much straightened most of the issues out, but it was a rather unpleasant surprise. Over all I'm very satisfied with this upgrade. It is one of the smoothest upgrades I've had. The upgrade to 10.04 LTS wasn't bad and this one has been at least as easy or easier. I'm hoping the KDE 4 series is now pretty much past its growing pains and will continue to improve the way it has been since the 4.5 series started. If it does, then I'm going to be one very happy user. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A101016 A while back, I mentioned that I was going to track only LTS releases from Ubuntu and Kubuntu on my home network. The thought was that I would keep the base OS stable and keep a fresh version of KDE on my workstations. This plan, however has been blown out of the water with one simple announcement from Kubuntu. Specifically, they will not be providing any further updated versions of KDE for Kubuntu 10.04. In my honest opinion, I think this is a little premature. In my mind, I think it would make more sense to support updating the DE along with the core distribution throughout its full lifecycle. There may be some things I'm not aware of that may not make this possible, but when an LTS release said to be supported for a certain amount of time, I'm of the opinion this would include, not only security updates, but software updates as well. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100930 Have you ever started a home improvement project and then have it end up in a complete overhaul? I'm just coming out of such a nightmare. Of course, the results are ablsolutely amazing and I have my parents especially to thank for it. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100901 I've been busier than ever on just about everything but development for the last couple of months. It seems like when summer kicks in so do the afterburners. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100511 I just got through upgrading my server's mainboard, processor, memory, and video card last night. It was a simple and straightforward task with no unusual events, and it's purring nicely and ready for me to get the PBX software reconfigured. I'm really impatient to get it going again and finally get that project finished. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100504 I'm getting the computers prepared for migration to (K)Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I'll finally be able to begin my experiment with tracking only LTS releases. Kubuntu skipped the last LTS release because it had just adopted KDE 4.0 and we all know just how unstable it was at the time. Anyway, I'm hoping I can start focusing on getting more coding done and maybe do a little less admin stuff. I'm not necessarily tired of tweaking my system, but I only have so much time and I'm really wanting to focus on software development for a while. I'm planning doing admin stuff on an as needed basis. Even so, there is still a fair bit of stuff that needs to be done in that department. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100414 I finally got the RSS feed working. I'm now getting the headlines to show up and I'm also able to click through to the actual site. I have stumbled on to another bug, though. When the RSS feed is generated, everything looks fine except that the description just has the title in it instead of the body text of the post. I've tracked this down to the fact that my Entry() class is returning the headline in its __unicode__() method. That's as it should be, but I still need to figure out how to get the body text to be returned properly as well. Looks like there will be a little more research to do in order to get this little problem straightened out. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100410 Ok, I have a basic blog in place. I can now simply enter my thoughts, click on a button, and I have a blog post. I'm currently tweaking the rss feed. There is one more minor issue to work out on it and it should be ready to go. I haven't taken the code live yet, so the new stuff is only working on my local computer. I'm hoping to have the new code online by the end of the month. I have only one major gripe at the moment and that is that the text entry field for the body of the post doesn't allow for any kind of text formatting including paragraphs and things like italics and bold face type. Of course, this field also ignores html code, so that won't even work. I'll have to look into this issue. I'm currently trying to decide if this is a major enough issue to fix before I take the code live or just put up with it until I roll out the next set of updates. Anyway, I'm pretty thrilled at what I've been able to accomplish to date. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100405 I finally got the database model to load into the admin interface. I now have a graphical interface to post blog entries. I still have to knock off some rough edges, but so far so good. Right now I have the capability to post blog entries into the database backend. I now have to write a template and view so that the entries can be viewed in a web browser. I'm pretty sure that these won't be very hard to do. I've just got to find a few more free minutes to whip them up. http://www.frenchmerchatns.net/archives/news2010.html#A100404 I've upgraded my main computer at long last. I'm finally in the 64 bit dual core world and so far so good. As with any major upgrade there are some little issues I"m still trying to iron out but on the whole I'm satisfied. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100214 I'm finally getting back to integrating Django further into this site. While I've gotten a few templates up and configured the URLs for the most part, the actual articles and rss feed are still manually updated. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100213 Just when you think you have things figured out, life throws you through another curve ball. I've been trying to track down a lockup problem that really gave me fits for the last month or so. I thought I finally tracked it down. Attach all peripherals. Lockups. Detach all peripherals. Lockups. Attach one peripheral at a time. No lockups? What gives? http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100205 I finally figured out what was causing my lockup problems. I was a peripheral. That's right. A peripheral. http://www.frenchmerchants.net/archives/news2010.html#A100123 Well, here I am a few weeks later and I am still fighting with hardware trouble. I've gotten the lockups on my main PC down from every couple of minutes to about two to three times a day, but I'm having a hard time tracking down the remaining issues.