BrakeBlog

Local photography, National rants, Zero navel-gazing allowed… Blogging from Hopkinsville, KY

  • Free Godaddy hosting

    I’m building an experimental website for my church that might not live to see the light of day. So I thought it would be good to build it temporarily using a free account until I was ready to put it live on the internet. Little did I know the severe reaction that would happen between…

  • Maintenance: 5/23/2008

    Upgrades These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating world dependencies . … done! [ebuild U ] net-ftp/ftpbase-0.01-r1 [0.01] USE=”pam” 0 kB [ebuild N ] dev-libs/libgpg-error-1.6 USE=”nls” 0 kB [ebuild U ] app-arch/tar-1.20 [1.19-r1] USE=”nls -static” 1,868 kB [ebuild U ] app-admin/sudo-1.6.9_p13 [1.6.8_p12-r1] USE=”pam -ldap -offensive (-selinux) -skey” 0 kB [ebuild NS…

  • limiting breakage

    WordPress developers spend a great deal of time making their software standards-based. A vanilla install of WordPress will pass the W3C’s validator easily that is until you try to embed flash video. The classic flash embed code includes the non-standard <embed> tag unique to the netscape browsers. However, there are methods of embeding flash with…

  • Workaround for heavy CPU load in Firefox Beta5

    For the people using Firefox Beta 5 on Linux. You probably noticed a curious bug where Firefox freezes for a moment accompanied by extreme CPU load and disk usage. Well, the problem is that Firefox3’s support for anti-phishing is saved to a SQL-lite database that grows larger than its cache can handle. The fix is…

  • An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

    Solar power? pfft! Feline static electricity will save us!

  • Gimp Magic

    This is the original color image. The camera is a Canon Powershot A300. This variation shows what can be done with layer masks in the GIMP. To create this effect, I copied the original image into a separate layer and removed the red panic button using a layer mask. Then it was simple enough to…

  • Maintenance 5/6/2008

    Upgrades These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating world dependencies .. … done! [ebuild U ] sys-libs/com_err-1.40.8 [1.40.6] USE=”nls” 4,007 kB [ebuild U ] app-editors/nano-2.1.1 [2.0.7] USE=”ncurses nls unicode -debug -justify -minimal -slang -spell” 1,365 kB [ebuild U ] sys-libs/ss-1.40.8 [1.40.6] USE=”nls” 0 kB [ebuild U ] sys-fs/e2fsprogs-1.40.8 [1.40.6] USE=”nls -static”…

  • dot com

    Hosting for the BrakeBlog was coming up for renewal at the same time I bought ericbrake.com. I debated whether to buy the dot com TLD. To GoDaddy’s benefit, they want you to believe that you must buy every TLD variation of your website. However, I didn’t want to fall into that trap of impulse buying.…