It's time. It's time to reformat the hard drive on my laptop. It took about 6 months to get 95% of my iBook working properly under Gentoo, and then about 2 years for that percentage to fall down to 75%. Things that have stopped working as a result of software/kernel upgrades: screen brightness control. Volume control/mute. Sound is disabled on bootup, and I have to chmod a+rx /dev/sound/dsp to make it work. Then it plays only at full volume, until I put the laptop to sleep. After I wake it up, it only plays at what seems like minimal volume, until the next reboot. When the laptop is unplugged, the screen will dim after a minute or so, then go into hibernation mode after about 10 minutes. These are good things for saving the battery when I'm not using it. They are bad things when I'm in the middle of typing something and my laptop goes to sleep. Takes about 10 seconds to come back to life. I never got the X-windows DRI working -- hell, I was lucky to get X working at all after some upgrades -- so I couldn't get the great, smooth graphics running under Linux the way they worked on the OSX side.
Now, finally, I need Tomcat on my laptop, and It Just Ain't Happening. Too many things blocking the install, most having to do with X, and I'd been wanting to do a fresh install for probably close to a year. (I remember carefullly avoiding any upgrades other than dire necessities once I found out I had two weeks to get to Europe, since I didn't want to risk breaking anything else, and I didn't want to spend my time in Europe d*cking with Gentoo).
And the big thing here is... the blog. One Idiot's Blog runs Movable Type 2.64, which I doubt is available anymore. And in my setup I had done all sorts of unspeakable things like put the data and the pages under my home directory, use BerkelyDB instead of MySQL, and use my IP address as the URL, with lots of sub-directories below it to get to my blog. I'm not sure what that all has to do with anything. Most of that is probably not that unsurmountable; I'm actually giving you kind of a mish-mash of Things That Could Break and Things I Would Dearly Love to Fix But Haven't Had Time To And Don't Know Whether I Can This Time But At Least I'm Getting Good At Writing Long Capitalized Noun Phrases.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't know if my blog will continue as is. One less-than-ideal possible outcome (I suspect "scenario" is really not proper here) is that I will not be able to migrate this blog, intact, to something I want, and that I will have to leave the backed up HTML pages of this blog in place, statically, with no engine behind them, while I continue my blogging activity elsewhere (which probably means in some more normal directory on my laptop, but could also mean on something like LiveJournal, Yahoo360, etc.) Better than that, unequivocally, would be if I could successfully migrate my posts to whatever I move to (WordPress, etc.). Internal linkage seems to be an inevitable problem, though.
So, this is sort of a sign-off here. For good? For brief? Don't know.
Posted by Bob at November 14, 2006 02:38 AM | Monthly Archive