Yesterday was the exciting part - working on Midget. Today’s job? Unite all computers as if they were one, using Synergy. Unfortunately, Synergy seems to not like networks that are too cool for NetBIOS hostnames. It prevented me from using IP addresses instead of hostnames, so for a while I was stuck. Then I heard about the “hosts” file, which can be found on any Windows system in \system32\drivers\etc\hosts. I decided to give it a look, and before long I had mapped my entire network to use DNS-based “hostnames!”

A couple of days ago I downloaded and installed Synergy, but I didn’t do most of the work until today. I instralled Synergy on lapdawg and nighthawk on Wednesday and was unsuccessful in getting it to work because it failed to properly look up the NetBIOS hostname “nighthawk” (it didn’t exist, really) and it refused to let me use Nighthawk’s IP address. So I left it alone and ignored it for a couple of days, but I remembered the “hosts” file today and figured that if I put Nighthawk’s IP in there then maybe Synergy would work. So I tried it, and…TADA! it worked. Unfortunately, due to a (apparently one-time) firewall bug, Lapdawg bluescreened and I had to reboot. 0xD1 and fwdrv.sys - a.k.a. Kerio Firewall - for those who are interested (ahem, Microsoft?).

So I got the laptop to work with Synergy. But what about BigMomma? So I transferred the Synergy tarball over via FTP and *cough* compiled it myself *cough*.

Now, there is something that you all must understand about NetBIOS. It’s a Windows thing. Linux hosts do not normally have NetBIOS hostnames, and even if the Samba service is running, the firewall often blocks out the NetBIOS ports. So that’s why my network is too cool for NetBIOS. Actually, I prefer to call it “too secure” for NetBIOS. (hint hint, nudge nudge, Mr. Gate$.)

The problem with FC4 is, it has this thing with multiple hostnames (one for each network interface). So I can’t make BigMomma part of the “fuhrykitchentable” domain and have my loopback interface be localhost at the same time. And anyone who’s at all experienced with Apache web server knows that the hostname assigned to lo (that’s LO, the Unix way to refer to the loopback iface) must be “localhost.localdomain” in order to start. No different on the highly-superior-to-other-distros Fedora Core 4. So, after a little help from Neal, I taught BigMomma that 192.168.2.40 is more commonly known as “nighthawk” and that 192.168.2.39 prefers to be called “lapdawg.” Unfortunately, BigMomma still thought of herself as “localhost”, so when I tried to connect to Nighthawk using Synergy, it failed because BigMomma called herself “localhost” instead of “bigmomma.” Thank God for the guy who wrote Synergy’s documentation - I was able to use aliases to teach Synergy that “localhost” was really “bigmomma”. So finally I got Synergy to remote-control BigMomma.

And then I remembered one thing: BigMomma spends 95% of her time in text mode (to save RAM). Why in the world would I need to control her using a KM program?

Some of you may have heard about Midget, my CMS written in PHP. Few will realize it (unless they look at the directory structure), but Midget now uses a template system (like phpBB) so making new styles and themes is now possible without hacking the code. This is cool because Midget used to only have one style; now it can have unlimited styles. I still have yet to design and write the administration interface for styles, however, so for now you will have to edit the Midget source code in order to switch styles. Expect a style administration system in a week or less.

Today I rewrote the way Midget thinks “administration.” The new admin panel (demo not yet available) uses the new template system for drawing the admin panel. The panel is also more organized now, and hopefully this will pave the way to having a very robust and complete configuration system.

Edit: http://midget.no-ip.org/ — Update: link removed, the midget.no-ip.org hostname is dead, it’s moved here.
-dandaman32

Good news for all FKT fans: the Fuhry Kitchen Table is now up for good. The only thing that was preventing it from being persistently up before was the fact that the port forwarding application required a manual reset every time I connected to the Internet, and my ISP automatically disconnects me every five hours (not a Windows “feature”).

So now that it’s up, I guess there’s only one thing left to say: Welcome home, Fuhry family, welcome home.

So long,
Dan

I recently found out how to make GNOME look a lot like Mac OS X. As you all know by now I’m one of the lucky few that has a working installation of Xgl/Compiz on my computer (though it took me 2 months to get it working :() and ever since I got it working I’ve been crazy about customizing it even further.

So I was browsing the Compiz forums this morning and I stumbled across a thread where some guy had posted a screenie of his super Mac-ified GNOME/Xgl/Compiz desktop. You can guess what I spent the next 8 hours doing and now both BigMomma and Nighthawk have this strange Steve Jobs-ified look.

Well I’m finally back [online], people. I spent this past week taking a break from computing and instead I spent my time taking a basics in flight course. I guess I’ve always sort of enjoyed planes and I got a chance to actually fly a 1979 (I think) Cessna 172 this past week. Obviously FKT has been down, hopefully I can make it stay up for awhile. I’ll be gone for an hour or so this evening but I’m hoping to stay up and be on Gtalk.

I never really got a chance to post this earlier, but I recently overhauled my dad’s computer. He used to be a Windoze addict. Not anymore baby…I installed Fedora Core 5 and was successful in upgrading to kernel 2.6.16, installing the nVidia display driver, and enabling Xgl/Compiz. Unfortunately he’s having some problems with access - he can’t seem to write to some files in his home directory, and he can’t write to his 256MB JumpDrive Sport. But overall he seems to be having a good experience with FC5.

Cheers,
Dan

Surprise, people! Big Momma’s CPU arrived a week early. The PIII/Xeon chip arrived on Friday, June 16, and it’s been installed and Fedora Core 4 has been deployed. In other words, this page was served by BigMomma herself! She’s proven to be nice and fast at webserving, and the desktop isn’t too bad either. She may be used for a workstation occasionally but we’ll probably just let her do webserving for now.

Check out her info page, the main website, and the forum.

I’m currently trying to figure out how in the world you’re supposed to do this…I want to have blogs.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org be this blog site and www.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org be the main site…and I have no idea how to do it. I tried using mod_rewrite and a specialized PHP script to do it…it worked, but it was very slow and virtual directories (like in AdvancedArticles) didn’t work. I want to have a way to do this using pure .htaccess mod_rewrite rules (there is a way it can be done) but I have no idea how to do this. Once I’m done with it I’m sure it will be really great.

Update: I got it! Ironically, none of the methods on the web worked, but my own (very little) experience with regular expressions guided me towards creating a working sub-subdomain system. w00t!

Update 2: I just moved to the Linux box that’s hosting this blogsite so now I can post the contents of the .htaccess file that powers the site. Here it is:

php_flag register_globals off
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blogs.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !servlet/(.*)
RewriteRule (.*) servlet/blogs/$1

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !servlet/(.*)
RewriteRule (.*) servlet/www/$1 [L,QSA]

Well that wasn’t too hard we’ve finished setting up the blogsite and I’ve got a blog set up now. Eventually everything will be hosted at http://blogs.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org/ but for now it’s hosted on Nighthawk since BigMomma isn’t ready yet.