Why I Don't Like Grub2
Every Ubuntu installation since Ubuntu 9.10 installs Grub2 by default. In many ways this is great - Grub2 has a number of new features, and has become more portable and modular than older versions of Grub. The catch is, if you don’t need the new features that it provides, it can make life much harder if you ever need to configure grub. My system has often been inconsistent in the way it refers to its hard drives, which means if my hardware configuration changes at all, I have to boot into a live CD/USB to fix the Grub configuration to...
NoScript Pings My Site Fix
After the 2.0 version of NoScript installed on my desktop, I began noticing a curious event repeatedly occurring in my Drupal access logs. Every few minutes I would get a hit on the main page of this site from my IP, despite the fact that I wasn’t visiting the site in my browser. Of course, my first concern was that some sort of malware had gotten onto one of our systems, but I discovered that when Firefox was shut off (I had happened to open up the logs in Epiphany because Firefox was slow) the hits stopped - only to...
In Search of Schrodinger's Cat
John Gribbin does a good job at relating the history of the discoveries in quantum physics, and manages to explain most of the actual physics that he touches on. Although In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat shows its more than 20 year old age in some respects (especially when referencing electronics) much of the information is still quite interesting and as near as up-to-date as I can tell (not that I’ve read as much about quantum physics as I should like to have, so I could be totally off with this estimate). Even if the explanations of the science behind quantum...
Introducing Two New Computers
Not long ago I acquired a couple of old computers that the orginial owners had decided no longer worked well enough - and to be sure these are rather old, single core, 32 bit machines (which could use a stick of RAM or two), but turned out to be perfectly capable for running Linux. Indeed, one of them is already in use as a backup and testing server and has already proved quite capable of running my website for at least a few hours. The other I have slated to use to try out some distributions to try out and...
Moving Drupal Between Two Servers
Although this guide is targeted towards being used with an Ubuntu server, it should be easy to adapt it to other distributions assuming the same basic components are in place (a server running Apache, Mysql and PHP), and if the reader understands any difference in file locations on their distribution from Ubuntu server. This guide assumes that the user already has a server prepared to run Drupal and that they are running a copy of Drupal downloaded and installed manually rather than installed from a package manager. This guide was informed by my recent experiences setting up a server as...