No Open Blockers

Digg had a link to 40 Stylish, Minimal, and Clean Free Wordpress Themes. I started looking around and there were a few I liked. I tend to go in phases, and I’m currently in a bit of a “cram as much on the site as possible” phase, so I’m looking for something clean. I’m also in the mood for a dark background site, so I decided to give the Emire theme a shot.

One of the coolest parts about the themes (and the fact that I run the web server that hosts the site) is that I have access to the theme code to dork around with it. So immediately, I started hacking away at what I didn’t like. I gave myself a whopping 750px for the blog content, which is a very welcome change of real estate after a few iterations of claustrophobic themes.

The other big change was widget-izing the sidebar. I’m not sure why more themes don’t use Wordpress widgets. They’ve been around for a while, are very easy to use, and let me easily play around with the sidebar content from the Wordpress admin pages.

Add in some font changes and adopting the <pre> formatting from my old theme (which was originally stolen from zeusville in the first place… which I’m told came from Wordpress itself… and so on) and I’m at least happy enough to leave it like this for a bit. I’m not in love with having green again, so I might change around the secondary color, but I’ll let it sink in as it stands now before I go much further.

Let me know if there are any rendering issues, which would likely be due to me half-assedly flying around the theme code deleting stuff.

It’s hot as hell in my office. I’m on the third floor of a townhouse and have virtually no air circulation in here, so if I turn on anything more than a laptop it starts to generate a rainforest climate. Needless to say, my open computer isn’t helping things. So rather than take steps to properly alleviate the situation, I added another hack to the mix.

The worst part is that there is a showing for the house tomorrow, so at some point today I have to actually man up and make this place presentable.

And yes, I do see the irony in posting a picture of a giant box fan pointed at a half assembled computer under the category “technology”.

Remember being a kid on Christmas? Diving through an endless sea of presents as wrapping paper and cardboard packaging fluttered in the air like snow. And how once it all settled, your parents would not let you play with your shiny new toys until after you’ve cleaned up the disaster.

A few days ago I posted about my sweet desktop memory upgrade. Installing the new chips took maybe 10 minutes, and then another hour or so of debugging timings and what not (which at times required me to reset the BIOS using a jumper on the motherboard itself). Once I got that to a (reasonably) stable state, I’ve been cruising in full 8GB glory.

This was on Sunday.

Today is Friday.

This is what my office currently (read: still) looks like:

The moral of the story? If mom and dad hadn’t made me put down the shiny new toys and clean up, the wrapping paper would have become a permanent decoration in the house.

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-> cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:      8196508 kB
MemFree:       7473284 kB
...

The sweet, sweet smell of hardware upgrades. I bumped my home Fedora 10 x86_64 desktop to 8GB this weekend. That is, I did it after digging through a good 1/4 inch of dust to actually find my memory slots first. In my next home office, I’m not having carpet, this just bites. That, or a fanless machine, but I digress.

Why did I upgrade? The better question is why not. It’s still running DDR2 which these days they pretty much give away in happy meals and at the bottom on cereal boxes, so it’s not like cost was really a problem. More importantly, this will help feed my growing (arguably unhealthy) obsession with seeing how many virtualized guests I can have running on my network at the same time…

I’m not looking to get into a big discussion of what virtualization is, so I’ll steal a quick summary from wikipedia:

In case of server consolidation, many small physical servers are replaced by one larger physical server, to increase the utilization of costly hardware resources such as CPU. Although hardware is consolidated, typically OSes are not. Instead, each OS running on a physical server becomes converted to a distinct OS running inside a virtual machine. The large server can “host” many such “guest” virtual machines.

Ok, that reads a little bit complicated. I have complete Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) installations running from inside of my Fedora desktop as if they were all on their own machines by themselves. They connect to my internal network just like any other machine, getting their own IPs and being able to connect to my Spacewalk server running downstairs in my family room. From the network point of view, it can’t tell the difference and looks like I have a ton more computers in my house. That’s a good thing, since with the warm weather coming the single desktop I have in my office is enough to generate a small tropical climate as it is already.

Pictures don’t do justice to how cool looking this is. I use a dual monitor setup, so a fullsize screenshot would end up at 3360×1050, just a bit bigger than the annoyingly thin fixed width theme I have on this site (seriously, once this semester ends and I get back some free time, this shit has to change). However, I’ve done my best to capture the total awesomeness of my desktop right now. Click the image for a larger-but-not-fullsize version.

That’s two RHEL 5 installations running on top of Fedora. The terminal is SSHed into one of them, so I don’t actually have to use the GUIs.

The coolest part is that it was dead simple to set up. I used two links, the first for the majority of the installation and the second for the bridge configuration to the network:

• Techotopia Installing and Configuring Fedora KVM Virtualization
• Libvirt Wiki: Bridged Networking

Too. Freaking. Accurate.

This is why I can’t really stand twitter these days. I don’t care what you’re reading. I don’t care what you ate for dinner. Make your tweet funny or provide real information or please, stop talking.

Geek Rant

A discussion at work reminded me of this cartoon. I tried resizing it so I could include it here, but it looked like shit when I scaled it down (I really need to start working with layouts that are more than like 17 pixels wide). It’s from 2000 and still completely applies (well, save for the perl part).

Realize that is the original cartoon, it’s not doctored in any way to use the name Jason (to anyone here who doesn’t know me, the Jay in Professor Jay is short for Jason). That’s just what UserFriendly chose, which makes this particular cartoon completely full of win.