neuronical.com

Doing this little post was actually quite freaking difficult. Had to enable a whole host of modules in Drupal. One would THINK they would include these modules in the default install. Oh well. Anyways now I also have a gallery. The better to post pictures of my cat in: My Gallery

I never really disliked advertisements on the web. This was mainly due to the fact that I normally use Firefox as a browser, with the Adblock+ plugin installed. If I were still doing that, then this post would never have been written. Advertisements, the way I saw it, was a necessary evil on the web. The logic went something like this:
We all like content to be free.
There is no such thing as a free lunch
Therefore .. someone .. has to pay for it.
That someone.. better not be me

As it turns out the 185.18.14 driver that you download from NVidia doesn't work with Ubuntu 9.10, or in fact, any system running a 2.3.1 kernel. Fortunately a patch is available. Basically once you have downloaded the driver at http://www.nvidia.com you ALSO need this patch: http://www.neuronical.com/sites/default/files/nvidia-185.18.14.patch

(No I didn't make that patch. Found it at http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2033988&postcount=3)

Place both the install file and the patch in the same directory. Then run the installer with the --apply-patch option like so:

So yesterday I decided to install another operating system. Since we use a couple of Sun X4500 Thumpers at work and I really like ZFS, I decided to ditch Ubuntu 9.04 and load up Opensolaris 2009-06 on my Dell M2400.

Now the install process went (almost) without a hitch. Initially the install broke because I had my hard drive set to IRRT in the BIOS. Changing that BIOS setting to AHCI allowed the setup to boot... well kind of (I had to select VESA mode). After all of this.. the setup worked.

So this site now supports OpenID logons. Personally I hardly see the point, but it works. So once you create an OpenID at any one of many free public providers, just use your OpenID URL as username and login.

(Although.. the question remains as to WHY you would want to log into this site...)

Anyways, the public provider I used is https://pip.verisignlabs.com/
It was fairly quick and easy to setup, and now I can use this id to sign onto any site that supports it. One username and password to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

Personally I like the Drupal themes a lot more. A the time of writing, I am running a theme called darkmatter, that fits into the genesis framework, which in turn makes use of Drupal.

Installing themes in Drupal is as easy as in Wordpress. Simply extract the .tar.gz into the sites/all/themes directory and you are set. This theme was SLIGHTLY more difficult to install, as I first had to install the genesis framework - which is actually just installing the genesis theme....

So I decided to install Drupal on my site. This was of course largely due to the fact that some or other ad plugin I had on Wordpress caused Google to flag my site as hosting Malware. I tried hunting down the offending scripts, to no avail.

So I wiped my site. I mean, let's be honest - there wasn't anything worthwhile on it - with the possible exception of my Python/ODBC howto. I know I referred to it on many occasions.