Whatsthis?!

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Lasse Leegaard

It has been brought to my attention that most blogs start out with a post touching base on what the blog will be all about. So I should write a few words on what this blog will be about. Apparently it is “the thing to do” when you are a blogger.

But I don’t know what it will be about. True to my form I went head first into this without thinking much about it. I think it will be a little of everything. At least until I find the topics people will pay me millions to write about – or until someone just gives me millions for some other odd reason…

I could write about my job and career as a system engineer in AT&T but that will narrow the audience down a bit since it is a bit specialized and – well – quite geeky. There might be some funny stories though that could see the light of day.

There is also the topic of Stupid Stuff My Dog Does – except I do not have a dog. Or a cat and there is already a lolcats site better than any other. Boyfriend and family stuff could be included if it is odd, quirky or clever enough to be interesting – It will probably be a while before I feel comfortable sharing too much though.

Oh! and politics! I could comment on recent events in Copenhagen, Denmark or even world news or stuff I find important enough to bring up!

Right now, sitting here writing this, I want to document everything – absolutely everything. Right down to the last setting in my irssi configuration file. I also know that feeling will be gone once I realize how much work it will be.

Anyway – I promise I will do my best to write interesting posts. I have a Mensa membership so there is a reasonable chance I will succeed in that unless of course my procrastinating self takes over and puts it off for yet another day.

Whether or not it is interesting to the public is another concern. It will at least be interesting to me. I am pretty sure I will not be able to write interesting stuff about things that bore me.

I read somewhere that good blogs are focused and topically narrow and deep.It has something to do with going to the museum to look at art and the ice cream shop to eat ice cream (both of which I enjoy BTW).

So there – interesting stuff about my life. That is what this place will be…

Stubborn success

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Lasse Leegaard

I, the sometimes-defeater of difficult technology, have managed to beat ubuntu, apache and wordpress into submission.

When it comes to board games I have an eerie beginners luck. I always tend to be good and seemingly lucky with my dice rolls, card draws and such the first time I play a particular game – maybe it is just because I pay a decent amount of attention. On the second play this is gone and I tend to loose interest fast.

Not so with things in the domain of Witchcraft (also known as That Computer Stuff). With IT I tend to be good only by practicing, starting over and repeating a lot. I am really bad at following HOWTOs and other guides because I feel over confident really fast.

Like Giotto di Bondones perfect circle I can now handle most things IT but it is built on top of a lot of failed installations and long evenings ending with a re-install. I work in IT and am actually quite good at it – but that is besides the point…

This is actually the 5th installation of wordpress in my server. I started out on wordpress.com with changethislaterdotcom.wordpress.com. As it is evident from the first post I changed my mind and went for a wordpress.org installation on my own server instead.

Having run ubuntu LTS for quite a while on the server and since I use it for other geeky services I didn’t want to change that, so I asked aptitude to install wordpress for me. Much to my horror I found out that the ubuntu lucid version was quite a lot behind wordpress latest stable. (I think version 2.3 versus version 3.2). I poked around a bit in the ubuntu version and found it to be lacking in the features I had already come to like from my wordpress.com site. Much investigation followed and I ended up removing the ubuntu version, grabbing the latest stable from wordpress.org and rolled it on to the server – I figured I should be manageable as long as wordpress was the only manually updated software on the box.

The installation was really easy. Download, unpack, point browser to site and you are more or less done… Except – I am a bit picky with names, paths, directories and such being – well – neat and in order. The first few installations were ditched because the database was already created from the ubuntu version and it messed up the installation script somehow. the next few were re-done after I found out that I wanted the apache configuration files and site directories to move from the default one site installation that came with ubuntu to a setup that scales better in a nice way. I am not sure I will ever need this scalability but it is nice to know it is there – just in case.

After finally having aligned things the way I liked them (apache directories/configuration, DNS names, database names etc.) I wound up with what you see now. My very own domain with my very own blog.

Who would have guessed that hard work and perseverance pays off in the end…

The post that almost didn’t happen

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Lasse Leegaard

For a time now I have been following my friends blog. I have always wanted to blog myself and have had a few attempts a long long time ago – way before wordpress, blogger, joomla and friends…

As a boy I often wanted to keep a journal. The children in the books I read and movies I saw that kept journals seemed cool to me. And by cool I really mean geeks. I didn’t know why by I wanted to be like that. When I tried it out my writing skills they were never as good as the journals from the books and movies. Maybe because I was not a professional writer at age 10. My skill for critical reading also far surpassed my skill for writing – I could only write about trivial stuff in a childish(well duh!) manner. So my attempts at journaling always followed the same pattern; I would find a notebook, write two sentences and throw it away finding it too embarrassing or trivial to read.

Later – as a student – I would dabble with small pieces of text that I kept on my own server for my eyes only. Snippets of life – small pieces of text I had found and thought funny or interesting enough to keep. I even had an emo period where I would write dreadful – but surprisingly precise and almost mathematically correct – poetry. I would nurse and rewrite the small pieces of text until they were perfect and then lock them up. Finding them too embarrassing or trivial to read let alone show them to the internet.

The last few months I have had an urge to write something. Encouraged by my boyfriend and inspired by my friend and the people on his blogroll I decided to do something about it. So – tonight – armed with a steady beat from DI.fm and a boatload of workwork to postpone I took the first baby steps.

I like to think that I have a structured approach to new things. However I tend to rush into it head first without looking or thinking. This often leads to a lot of half-finished projects and non-working solutions – and why would this be any different? After creating a wordpress user and spending a lot of time pondering a name for this blog I was struck by a short second of panic – was blogspot better for my purpose?! Well – google to the rescue!!! 15 new tabs later I decided that wordpress was probably better – mostly because I could host it myself and get all the benefits (greedy as I am).

Luckily I already have a server that I use for my own kind of friday night fun (which is tinkering and breaking stuff in Linux and whatever I have piled on top of it). It should be nice and easy – the server runs Ubuntu and there is a wordpress package – just follow the howto and you are up and running in 5 minutes! Well – that’s what they all say…

True to my style I now have a server that is not able to load the apache configuration and a domain name that is not live yet. I obviously did something to upset the webserver. Fortunately I know how to get back to square one but that does not get my own blog on my own server up and running…

Since I have chosen to be stubborn in this matter I have decided that the free version of wordpress is sufficent until I get that resolved. I wonder if it would have been all along – and saved me 4 hours of messing around.

I think I will go tinker some more…