But now, I have it! I (heavily!) refactored some plugins created by other people: i.e. I cut out just what I needed, and simplified from the "everything and the kitchen sink" to as bare bones as I could get. And it all works now. Shiny!

I really do like Nucleus as a blog engine thing: I've yet to find anything I couldn't make it do using plugins-- with every other bit of blog software I've played with, I've had to hack the source, which made upgrading a royal pain. I still haven't brought in a markup language like textile or markdown-- when I migrated from textpattern (which was migrated from MT), I just pulled the HTML version of the posts into the table. From a migration point of view, this makes sense, as the full HTML is the only thing that doesn't change (it's a pain to go back and edit, but how often to you edit really old posts? like never!). I'm confident that a plugin can do what it has to (maintain the textile/markdown in a different table than the entry), it's just a matter of getting to it.. *sigh*

For those that want the code (and for the hell of it):

• NP_ELSShowBlogs.php: skin and template tags for rendering entries in archive/index views, prev/next links for the index view, fixes to prev/next links for archive views, and a grouped-by-year archive list display.
• NP_ELSSocialTags.php: links to share entries with delicious and digg (wishful thinking?)
• NP_ELSTagEX.php: Modification of the TagEX plugin-- better use of the klist table, isolated blogs (no cross-blog tag sharing or display), simplification of list/cloud views, and a simple 'tag' display that will render an appropriate title based on the archive type (dated or tag).

Thankfully, someone already took the time to list all of the interesting things you should try to get your CD back. Number 3 did the trick.

1. The iTunes eject button
2. Disk Utility ...
3. Hold down mouse button at startup
4. Hold down C key at startup
5. Start up into Open Firmware ...
6. Start up in Target FireWire mode ...
7. Start up from another machine
8. Take your machine to an Apple Store

So there was this box. It got shipped here a little while ago. It's large, squarish, and only about a foot and a half deep. It's been sitting in the dining room by the skimpily ornamented Norfolk pine and the tiny Meyer lemon tree (which is just beside itself with lemons on the make, but that's another story).

Chris was very careful that I not see anything about it (I also was honest and didn't go looking.. I mean, what's the fun of that?), but he has asked me to guess what it was.. "A spare tire", "A wall-hanging jewelry closet", "A mirror"... The closest I could come (and I didn't think I had a chance in hell of it being so) was a big beautiful LCD monitor to replace the monstrosity on my desk downstairs.

And Lo! it was a big beautiful LCD monitor.. complete with a bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse. My husband, that wonderful man, gifted me an iMac.

Yesss..

The scanning has only just begun, though, so be patient. Some of these images have spent too long in a sketchbook rubbing against other pages.. so it's hard to get the scan so it doesn't look so darn grainy. *sigh*

I've run into anew issue loading the dri drivers: AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so: undefined symbol: __glXFindDRIScreen). Moving to the latest ati driver seemed to fix that (8.37.6-r1).

• ATI Linux drivers for debian has great information around how to configure X11 to work with the proprietary ati drivers.
• Fglrx - ThinkWiki is a good source for how this stuff all works with thinkpads...

So. I started by *gasp* removing them all from my little sketch book. I happen (because I'm a dork) to be equipped with things to make a nice portfolio with these sketches in them because of other crafty things, so I know where they'll end up. BUT.. before they go there, I'd like to get some high-quality scans of them (I'd like to be able to make prints of at least one..).

Anyway, after wasting scads of time, I can agree that the following links have whatchya need:

• Scanning pencil drawings (question in forum thread)
• Extending dynamic range (resulting HOW-TO)

I've been going back and forth between the two plugins mentioned in the posts above, and I'm also hovering between the two methods (two gimp plugins: dynamic range extender (DRE) or HDR tone mapping). As I go, I have been slowly leaning towards the first (which is what the author used for the example in the HOW-TO), mostly because I can then scan and work with the image all in grayscale (the HDR plugin assumes RGB mode). Not sure which is better in the end, but I'm finding the output from the DRE plugin to be more direct.

Scan w/ XSane:

• Standard options window: Brightness (1, 0, -2 or -3), Sharpness 1
• Created a "pencil sketch" medium: Gray with 1.0 Gamma, and -100/100 brightness/contrast (basically telling the xsane post-scanning processor to leave it alone)

I always try (with mixed success, I admit - it depends on how much control I have) to load my pages in lynx or some other text based browser to make sure I can still get around. I increasingly find sites that are not navigable sans full-graphical-browser tricks.

The downside: CPanel, and DNS manipulation. I am used to having my hands right on the DNS records - with CPanel, not only can I not touch the records, but in certain cases, they have rules (either self imposed or imposed by CPanel's Web Host Manager thing) that just plain prevent me from doing what I want. I hate not being able to do what I want. (whine whine whine).

But look what I found: EditDNS.net - A DNS provider of free web hosting and a bunch of other goodies. They thrive on donations of course, but still... worth a try, I think.

Wired connection

I set the wired connection (using e1000 module) up with netplug so that it will figure out when the cable is and isn't there - it has the added bonus of scheduling net-dependent services at startup.

• sys-apps/netplug-1.2.9-r3

Wireless

For whatever reason, this laptop does not have an Intel wireless chipset. The Atheros AR5212¹ that it does have requires the madwifi driver.

I also need WEP and LEAP, so I use wpa_supplicant as well.

• net-wireless/wireless-tools-28
• net-wireless/ieee80211-1.1.13-r1
• net-wireless/madwifi-ng-0.9.2.1
• net-wireless/madwifi-ng-tools-0.9.2
• net-wireless/wpa_supplicant-0.5.4

At first, wpa_supplicant would drop the connection after a few minutes. I couldn't find anything conclusive about why this was happening, but the one thing I did find suggested using the generic interface (wext) with wpa_supplicant rather than madwifi². No change.

When at home using WPA, the connection cycled frequently (sometimes as frequently as once every 4 or 5 minutes). When at work trying to use LEAP, it wouldn't correctly establish a connection at all.

I think I was suffering from a known bug³, so I created some new ebuilds for the 1605 version of madwifi-ng. That seems to have improved the resilience of the connection considerably.

I still am having trouble with rotating through connections and associating via LEAP at work. I have been using ap_scan=2 because of hidden SSIDs in the office, the problem is that this forces profiles to be tried in order, and when wpa_cli fails on the first one, it seems not to automagically roll over to the next (which previous versions of wpa_supplicant did just fine.. )

I've found some evidence⁴ suggesting that ap_scan=2 won't work because madwifi-ng doesn't support it. Lovely. But! There is hope⁵ a patch was added to the madwifi driver at a later level than the one I had to revert to.

I haven't retried wireless at work recently. I'll post more when I do.

Footnotes / References :

¹ HARDWARE (Atheros) ar5212 [gentoo-wiki.com]

² wpa_supplicant + madwifi + hidden SSID

³ ThinkPad Z60t: moving from r1543 to r1757 madwifi stops working at all

⁴ ap_scan=2 problem?

⁵ Scan for non-ESSID-broadcasting access point always fails

Other References (of course):

• MadWifi User Docs [madwifi.org]
• Ubunto on X60s -- ndiswrapper for Atheros

Dual Boot

My new-fangled laptop comes with XP Pro, and I don't have disks for re-installing that OS from scratch (in VMWare, for example). So, as an experiment, I decided to resize the WinXP partition, and put gentoo on the lion's share of the drive. I want to see if I can get a dual-boot OR VMWare image running off of that same base - because I think that would be cool¹. File access would be interesting - but that's another story; I want to see if it will work, first. As part of that effort, I also added support for R/W NTFS².

• sys-fs/ntfsprogs-1.13.1

While poking around, I read up on NTFS³ - and I think, based on the interoperability section, that I'll also look into ntfs-3g. Note that this requires the freshest version of fuse, which means: don't compile CONFIG_FUSE_FS into your kernel. Either compile it as a module, or leave it out entirely.

• sys-fs/fuse-2.6.0
• sys-fs/ntfs3g-0.20061115-r1

Footnotes / References :

¹ Dual-boot with Grub [geocities.com/epark/linux/] , and Running VMWare on a Physical Partition

² HOWTO NTFS write with ntfsmount [gentoo-wiki.com]

³ NTFS [wikipedia.org]