I’ve had this handy countdown graphic on Click for the past couple of weeks. Not that Debian is in the habit of setting release dates, but this particular image came about after the project itself announced that Feb. 5 or 6, 2011 would be the target date(s).

As I’ve written dozens of times by now. Debian Squeeze, still the project’s Testing branch, has been very stable for a very long time. To be sure, there have been little tweaks here and there, mostly in the design department from what I’ve noticed.

A lot of Debian users prefer running Unstable/Sid or Testing on the desktop. I may very well take that route myself. There’s also talk of a Constantly Usable Testing branch of Debian.

The last time I ran Debian full-time as my main desktop was with Lenny from late Dec. 2009 through mid-March 2010. I had everything running perfectly. If I had only known to (and how to) install a newer kernel before upgrading, my dist-upgrade to Squeeze way back then wouldn’t have gone as badly as it did.

Read the rest of this post

I’ve made a few changes here and there, but thus far I haven’t started hacking into the CSS and the templates for this FlatPress blog.

But I will.

After writing my entry on CMS and blog software that doesn’t require a database, one of the commenters recommended FlatPress.

It’s not just the name (a play on WordPress, on the off-off-off chance that you missed that particular bit of wordplay). OK, a lot of it is the name. By way of explanation, it’s called FlatPress because it stores its data in “flat” files and not in a database, such as the MySQL that powers the back end of WordPress and innumerable other content-management platforms.

But it turns out that FlatPress is a very easy-to-install blogging platform that uses PHP, stores the entries in the aforementioned flat files, runs extremely fast, takes up very little disk space (1.9 MB after the files are uncompressed, 508 KB before you unpack it) and is refreshingly simple.

Part of that simplicity at the level this particular blog is at includes entering a lot of HTML (or BBCode) tags, and it’s not as easy to bring images into the system as it is with something like WordPress. But there is an uploader in the FlatPress software, and once you know where the files go, it’s easy enough to call them into the blog with the proper tags.

Read the rest of this post

I took the offset off of the UTC so this blog reflects when the entries were created in Universal Time.