Gilfether.com

I’ve been neglecting gilfether.com for a while now. I’ve been focusing on my other website ventures and haven’t had time to do anything with my personal website. If any of my friends, or even strangers have any ideas on some kind of common theme I should use for this site, let me know. I’d like to actually get a few more readers than the 1 or 2 I have now

You may have noticed that the site has been down for a few days. Gilfether.com moved to a new server. In the past I had been hosting Gilfether.com on an old desktop out of the office of my daytime employer. However, as some of you may or may not know, I have resigned my position there, thus I needed to move the site onto another hosting provider. I’m using the same server as the one that hosts AskRyan.com. I’m sad to lose the ability and convience of managing and running my own server, as the one we are on now is just a shared hosting server, nothing special. This will also cause me to lose the ‘Deny Hosts’ hall of shame, since that application is no longer running on this shared server I am on.

On a positive note, the reason I left my daytime employer is that I have gone on to start my own company WebGen, Inc.. Me and my partner feel that now is the right time to make the big leap and work full time for ourselves. I’ve been keeping it hush-hush for months now, but now I can finally announce our two education portal sites, Education Incorporated and Education Quest.

Yes, thats right, officially Linux desktop users may only be in the hundred hundred thousands but the actual numbers may be more than most realize. You may or may not know what Linux is, but chances are you have been using it for years.

From the article:

“There may only be a few hundred thousand users running desktop Linux worldwide, compared with tens of millions of Mac users and hundreds of millions of Windows users, but almost all of us are using Linux on a daily basis.”

Read more about it about it here

With the efforts of comanies such as Google, Dell, TiVo, Motorola and many others, the number of Linux users is growing fast. Heck, Gilfether.com Runs on Linux, so if you were not a Linux user before, I just made you one! Just to keep this posting well rounded, I’m posting from my Linux Desktop as well.

I need to rant for a second, something is bothering me …

Interest rates have risen again! This is the highest they have been in well over a year. I’m going to auction in a week for another investment property, and now I’m forced into having to finance with a crappy interest rate, my only saving grace is that while the interest rates are high, you can sometimes win a property so incredibly cheap that they are still a worthwhile investment. Though, I still get sick when I think about how I have to pay over 7% interest to the bank, hopefully rates will drop in time and I can refinance, I’m sure they will.

Wish me luck at the auction, I’ll let you know if I come back a winner next time I post!

Happy Birthday Ryan!
I am writing this blog to wish myself Happy Birthday! From this day on I will be forever 28!

I would like to mention that I failed to make the 27 club, which is a good thing (though I’m not a musician so I guess it comes as no surprise). Here’s a quick rundown the elite 27 club:

1) Brian Jones (February 28, 1942 – July 3, 1969) (The Rolling Stones) — Drowned in his swimming pool.

2) Jimi Hendrix (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) (The Jimi Hendrix Experience) — Asphyxiated on vomit while sleeping after presumably unintentional overdose of sleeping pills

3) Janis Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) (Big Brother & The Holding Company, The Kozmic Blues Band, Full Tilt Boogie) — Heroin overdose

4) Jim Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) (The Doors) — heart failure

5) Kurt Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994) Lead singer and guitarist for Nirvana — Alleged Suicide

Changing the application that opens link in Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0, as I recently discovered, is not trivial (at least not in Linux). I’m doing this using Mandriva 2007.1 Free, so other distributions may handle this differently.

Here’s what I had to do to get Thunderbird to open URL’s in Firefox.

1) Open Thunderbird, then go to the menu option Edit->Preferences. A window will open, now select the ‘Advanced’ option at top, and then click the ‘Config Editor’ button near the bottom.
2) search for the Preference Name called network.protocol-handler.app.http. On Mandriva this points to /usr/lib/thunderbird-2.0b2/open-browser-sh
3) If you open the file /usr/lib/thunderbird-2.0b2/open-browser.sh you will see its a shell script that checks gconf to see what browser should be used (I don’t know why they make this so difficult). There was a comment in the script that said the default browser was stored in the gconf key ‘/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command’
4) To see what the current application being used is: gconftool -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
Now you are ready to set this key to use a new application, run the following command:
gconftool –type=string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command ‘/usr/bin/firefox “%s”‘

Thats all you should have to do, you don’t have to restart Thunderbird as the settings should take effect immediately. I hope that soon Thunderbird makes this much much easier.

*Note: One other option you might try doing is when you have opened up the Thunderbird Config window, you might be able to edit the value of network.protocol-handler.app.http and set it to the location of your preferred browser. I have not tried doing it this way so I can’t be sure if this would work, though I suspect it would.

The Thunderbird config window looks like this:

It’s been 1 week since my nose surgery. I went to the doctor today for the 1 week checkup, and get the packing out of my nose, and stitching cut. There is a big improvment, and I feel 95% better, though things are still a little sore. Anyway, it was totally worth the 1 week of pain.

Thats all for now.

When I was around 10 years old I used to play baseball. I manage to catch a ball to the face and proceeded to bust up my mouth, teeth and break my nose. 17 years later (today) I finally got my nose fixed. This morning I went into surgery to have some corrective surgery and staighten out my septum and open up my nasal passages which were constricted. I’m in pain, and I look like a freaking alien! My nose is all swollen and I got all these bandages and ice pack over my nose and face!

I’m hoping I’ll look normal again soon, in the mean time, wish me luck!

Yesterday I wake up, get dressed and head out to my car to drive to work. When I get to my car I realize the driver side door is cracked open and I start thinking what an idiot I am for not shutting the door the night before. I open the door and look inside and my car is a mess, contents of the glove box all over the place. At first I think to myself ‘damn I need to start cleaning this bad boy a little more often’, then it hits me. Some ***hole has broken into my car! At first I was scared that they stole my toolbox which was in the trunk from the last time I used it. There is hundereds of dollars worth of tools in it. Luckily they were either too weak to pick it up (its really heavy) or they are idiots and left it there not knowing the true value. It turns out the only things they stole was some crap stereo I bought 4 years ago and my XM satellite reciever, which was also worth $1short of nothing (they left the antenna and all the perifials though, which actually cost me more than the reciever, go figure). In the end, the guys took the time to break into my car and steal the least valuable items they possibly could have. Congratulations, you walked away with about $40 worth of crap, and the head unit may short out on you (it had been acting funny), I only hope that it catches your car on fire. Here’s a hint, if you wanted a really nice strereo system, you were less than 100 feet from one, of course there is no way you could have gotten to it.

The only thing that does annoy me is that they also took the control panel to the A/C and heater, which was attached to the install kit for the stereo. Of course that piece is also worth next to nothing, but good luck with it, the vents always closed when the air turned on, and the A/C button only worked some of the time. Enjoy the summer!

One good thing that came out of all this is that it reaffirmed my decision to only drive in-expensive cars as daily drivers and buy in-expensive crap for my daily driver. This way when people feel the urge to break in, they get nothing but crap. Of course I do have alot of nice stuff, but I don’t keep in places that make it easy to steal.

A few years ago, out of boredom I decided to see if I could implement a very simple and basic web server in C++. I was successfull and the resulting product is available in my Projects section. This past week I have, for what ever reason, been inspired to pick up the project and continue it. I’ll be releasing a new and improved version hopefull soon, version 0.5. More details to follow ….