Ramblings of the week
Passports—First phase of passport-fiasco is over. Phew! That for visa is yet to begin. I hope to see it go smoother. Will be touching wood a lot during the course =)
This site—I couldn’t delete the cache clutter from Matt’s Staticize plugin. I wanted to do this since my feeds are not validating. Owner is ‘nobody’ and user ID is 99 (yes, I’m on a shared hosting–can’t afford a dedicated server =). So no “sudo chmod” stuff possible at the shell. I had to get my hosting company delete that folder for me. Too bad I didn’t read Matt’s post before. Still, I’m turning it off for a while.
Then, later in the day, I faced with “error 28 from table handler” and opened a ticket with my host, which again mysteriously dissappeared as it did before the support could do something about it. I’m thinking that temp caches were auto-flushed by some maintenance program.
I downloaded a copy of my database (.sql file) and tried to restore on a localhost. The entries came along nice. But the format didn’t. I tried this with Kubrick layout files. I then realized that the backup sql file does hard-code the path and therefore it wasn’t loading the Kubrick images or the stylesheet from the localhost (Kubrick, btw, is a wonderful hack and layout design for WordPress by Mike).
Browser goofyness personified—I found Adam Kalsey’s thoughts about not recommending Firefox very interesting. When I read it the first time, I couldn’t bring myself to agree with it. But after experiencing it first hand in my office last week, I had totally different thoughts altogether. Here’s a quote:
Most Web users don’t know what a browser is. That blue E they click on the desktop isn’t a browser, it’s “The Internet.” Or maybe it’s “Yahoo” if that’s what their home page is set to. Tell them to download a new browser and they don’t understand what you mean.
And another:
It’s not that these users are stupid. They just don’t realize that they have an alternative to Internet Explorer. Many don’t know that they have an alternative when it comes to connecting to the Internet. That blue E is the thing that they’ve always used. In order to switch they’re going to need to have a compelling reason. They’re going to need to be told not that they need a new browser or they should stop using IE, but that the way they currently use the internet is unsafe and that Firefox will solve that for them.
The festival—We went to Rajesh Kulkarni’s place yesterday for the aarti. He had brought home a Ganesh idol for worship. It was a good feeling (being away from home-country where this festival celebrated with great devotion and enthusiasm).
I also hope that the passports/visa all go well. Will keep my fingers crossed.
Too bad to hear about the feeds, are you going to go for a new look with the Kubrick design? Seems its getting quite popular. Even I had looked into it myself, not sure if I will do it quite yet.
Interesting thoughts by Kalsey.
Even I went to Ganeshji Puja/Cultural Programme at our temple on Saturday. You are defniitely so right that it is a good feeling to be able worship with friends and family even though being away from home. Neeraj was saying that the festivities in Mumbai are going on dhoom-dhaam se.
Sep 22, 04 at 22:16Poonam Thanks. No, I’m not going with Kubrick for this site. I may use it for the intranet setup and local-test of nightlies. My feeds are working in RSS reader, it’s just that some minor glitch in the way the headers are being sent (The only RSS reader not working is the Mozilla’s Live Bookmarks =)
Sep 23, 04 at 11:35