Regular blog here, 'microblog' there
Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
I just read about the Whisker Menu for Xfce at OMG! Ubuntu and installed it on my system from the Fedora repositories.
While I'm happy with my panel on the left and the traditional Xfce Application Finder, I thought the Whisker Menu would be worth a try.
Once installed, the menu itself can be added as a panel item (that's a step that took me a second or two or 10 to figure out). After you do that, you're ready to go.
Not only does the Whisker Menu provide an alternative to the stock Xfce Applications Menu, you can access your 10 most-recently used applications, create favorites for their own portion of the menu, or easily plop an application launcher onto the desktop or into the panel.
It's a nice little application that Xfce users might very well want to check out.
Just to make sure that nothing suits my needs better than what I'm running right now (that being Fedora 19 with Xfce and GNOME), I did an Ubuntu 13.10 installation this week and have spent a bit of time putting the Unity-driven Linux distribution to the test.
The installation was easy. Ubuntu is very good about that. And from the standpoint of actually knowing what's going on during the install, Ubuntu beats Fedora handily.
While the installation process was easy and smooth, I was unable to boot the finished installation with UEFI Secure Boot on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop, which has admittedly "difficult" UEFI. I had to turn off Secure Boot to successfully boot Ubuntu 13.10 in EFI mode. Since I'm now having trouble with Fedora 19 and Secure Boot on this same hardware, I'll chalk that up to an overall Linux kernel problem with secure boot as it stands today. Luckily you can just about always turn off Secure Boot in the computer setup/BIOS, so this shouldn't be a problem.
Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment is snappier than billed. But for me it's just a little bit "broken" compared to and Xfce 4.10 and GNOME 3. For instance, as far as I can tell, in Unity you can't drag windows from one workspace to another. It's also hard to tell when you've minimized a window, though this is also the case in GNOME 3.
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There are 865 entries in this blog.
There are 294 images in the filesystem, 187 of which appear in actual posts.
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Social updates
As I say at the top of this site, my social-style entries are posted to a separate Ode blog instance at updates.passthejoe.net. The Ruby script I use to do this is pretty ugly, but I released it on Github anyway. I started working on a version that is much more class-based (as in object-oriented), but that project stalled out a bit. I'm considering bringing this concept to Android, or doing it in Java with a JavaFX GUI, or doing it in Node.js for JavaScript practice.
Archive
The archive is not up to date due to the 2020 hosting migration. I plan to work on it.
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No databases were harmed in the making of this blog
You're seeing this blog, powered by Ode, through the magic of the Perl programming language and the Common Gateway Interface. Also involved: the Apache web server and Linux operating system.
Ode does not use a database to store content. Instead, every entry exists on the web server as a "flat" text file.
Comments are managed via Disqus, integrated through the work of Ode project leader Rob Reed.
Counter and categories: Thanks to Rob Reed for his help on the Counter addin, which provides the post-count and category features seen above. The show/hide feature is coded with inline JavaScript.
E-mail: stevenhrosenberg@gmail.com.
Who am I
and why am I here?
My name is Steven Rosenberg. Journalist. Programmer. Husband. Father. Fixer of the broken.
License
CC BY-NC-SA
Frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair by Steven Rosenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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