Category: Geekery

The Computer Doctor is IN

A few days ago, my step-daughter Stevie complained that her iBook wasn’t booting right. All the symptoms pointed to her having the logic board problems that her model of iBook is heir to, but the warranty on that design flaw was only three years and her computer is 3.5 years old. She took it to the local Apple store where they told her it would be over $700 to fix. I can’t see spending $700 to fix a 3.5 year old computer, considering that it only cost us $1400 new, and she graduates in 2 or 3 months any way. So I proposed a fix: She sends her computer to me, I swap the hard drive into Vicki’s computer, and she uses Vicki’s 3 year old iBook to get her through the season, and I see if I can eBay a logic board for her computer. And if not, Vicki wants a new MacBook, so no risk, eh? (Personally, I wouldn’t mind a MacBook either, but it looks like Adobe won’t be porting Photoshop any time soon, and I’ve heard it runs dog slow under emulation. Plus I love my 17″ screen.)

The laptop arrived today. Thanks to The ifixit FixIt Guide, I had step-by-step instructions on how to take the two laptops apart and put one back together. It was pretty daunting, especially the part where after half an hour of prying open cases, taking out screws and removing cables, I get to the point where it says “Remove the following 16 screws”. But I got the first one apart without breaking anything worse than it was before. And Vicki arrived home with a 15″ Powerbook Titanium DVI that she borrowed from work. So surgery got another step. So first I opened up Vicki’s laptop, and put in Stevie’s hard disk. It booted, and I made sure the trackpad worked (I was worried about the cable), the sound worked, and the keyboard worked, and the Airport card worked. So now it was time for surgery 2 – I took Vicki’s hard drive, and put it into the Powerbook. That was way easier – only 7 screws to open the case, and two to take out the hard drive. The only wrinkle was getting the hard drive cable back on this tiny little connector. But it booted, and I made sure the sound, trackpad, keyboard and Airport all worked on it too.

So I’m two for two, and now I’m off to find if I can get the logic board cheap on eBay.

Content Management Systems

My experiments with SQLite have been on hold for the last week or so because Vicki signed me up to be on the web committee for the Browncroft Neighborhood Association. The current page is functional but not pretty, plus it’s hosted on an AOL member’s account. If I were to host it myself, they’d have gigabytes of space instead of the 2 megabytes they have now.

We’ve got a committee together, so the first thing I did was set up a mailing list for the web committee. After a week, though, not one member of the list has sent any messages to it except for me.

The second thing I did was register the domain BrowncroftNA.org and set up virtual hosting on my home server.

The third thing I did was spend some time at OpenSourceCMS.com trying out different Content Management Systems (CMS). One that caught my eye was ModX, which has a really nice AJAX-y administration interface. So I set it up on my server to experiment with. Obviously, I’m going to have to wait for the committee to decide on what content they want and where they want it, and that sort of thing. But I think a CMS looks like the way to go for the basic framework.

One thing I haven’t figured out how to do with this CMS is how to create role accounts that can upload files and link them to one particular web site – so, for example, the news letter editor can upload PDFs of the newsletters and link them from a news letter page. Or the History Committee can upload pictures and articles about the history of the neighborhood. Maybe I can do it, or maybe I’ll have to switch to a different CMS.

One thing that some CMS have, but this one doesn’t, is a web forum. I don’t like web forums much myself – I much prefer email lists. Some people like them though, so perhaps what I should look for is a web forum that can also email out posts to a mailing list as well as through an RSS feed. That way everybody can be happy.

The search continues.

Look at that counter click up!

Since I switched from MovableType to WordPress, my blog has gotten almost no spam, and almost all of it was caught by SpamKarma. In the past, I’ve gone months without any WordPress spam, and then suddenly a bunch of it for a day or two, and then none again. Since I upgraded to SpamKarma 2, it’s put a nifty little count of how many spams it had caught down there on the bottom of the blog page. It was up to about 7 this morning. As of right now, it’s up to 43. I suspect it will be higher by the time you read this. I’m hoping this is just another day or two spurt.

If I ran Apple…

…I’d do two things to improve the iTunes/iPod/ITMS experience:

  1. I’d license Pandora’s algorithm for suggesting similar music, because the suggestions that they’ve recently started showing in iTunes are not anywhere near as good as Pandora’s and
  2. I’d make the liner notes available to scroll through the way that Podcasts have information you can scroll through on the iPod. I’d especially like to see the lyrics.