Gilfether.com

I finally upgraded WordPress to the latest version, and unfortunately my old theme no longer worked with the new WordPress version. I had that theme since the WordPress 1.x days, so its been many years and probably time for an update. I’ll be experimenting with various themes. So if you are viewing my site and it looks mangled and funny, it could be me messing with things until I get them right.

For those that don’t know, Spot passed away this morning at 4am after having surgery the day before. She had liver disease.

RIP Spot. You were a great cat, and my best friend.

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

For a few months now I have been frustrated by Mandriva 2008 and getting ndiswrapper to start at boot up. For some reason Mandriva insisted on loading the BCM43xx module even though I explicity set up ndiswrapper as the driver for my broadcom wireless card. I had tried everything from modifying /etc/modprobe.conf to using the Mandriva drakconf interface to tell it to set up wireless with ndiswrapper. The drakconf interface would set up ndiswrapper and get things working, but once I rebooted it would want to go back to loading the bcm43xx driver.

After searching the internet intensely, I found out that the kernel will attempt to load the bcm43xx kernel module no matter what unless you explicitly blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-mdv

Put the following lines in blacklist-mdv:
blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist ssb

I’m not really sure what ssb is, but from what I gathered it was part of the Broadcom 43xx driver set.

You may also want to do:
modprobe -r bcm43xx
modprobe -r ssb

Now use drakconf interface to set up your wireless card again, make sure you select the ndiswrapper option.
Next time you reboot you should now boot using the ndiswrapper kernel module instead of that annoying bcm43xx driver!

While surfing the web tonight and because I am bored and have nothing better to do, I came across a list of famous people, both currently living and from history who share the same birthday as me. I was born May 24th 1979.

Here is the list of the most noteable, at least to me:
15 BC – Julius Caesar Germanicus, Roman commander
1941 – Bob Dylan, American singer and songwriter
1944 – Patti LaBelle, American singer
1945 – Priscilla Presley, American actress
1979 – Frank Mir, former UFC Heavyweight Champion

If you look up the date May 24 on Wikipedia you can see the rest.

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: