OKAY. . . MORE SERIOUSLY. . .

Now that the first of the month has passed, it’s time for some more serious news.

Mrs. Hurin and I are expecting a little girl in August!

We’re very excited. . . and terrified. So far Mrs. Hurin has suffered almost none of the ill-effects so common in pregnancy. And she’s doing great. We can’t wait to meet the little bundle of joy!

STILL BACK

Been a bit busy. But this is not another downward spiral into nothingness again. Well, actually, everything, when you think about it, is a downward spiral into nothingness. Except this.

Because I said so.

PERSPECTIVE

Many of my friends and family are tired of me going on my “Roman Emperors” rant. Essentially, I argue that “Every single one of us lives better than Roman Emperors and all we can do is whine about how the Emperor on the other side of town has a fancier purple toga.”

Seriously, every single person among the billions who have ever lived on this planet over the course of human history would look at the way even the poorest of us live today and consider us to be incredibly wealthy and. . . well. . . lucky. Yes even our “poor” are unimaginably wealthy by any reasonable, historical standard.

My guess is that anyone from these prior eras would probably also see the “inequality” among us (where even our folks “below the poverty line” have housing, food, cars, cell phones, and cable TV) as inconsequential considering the benefits of living during this era of prosperity. They’d probably be aghast that we seem ready to up-end this system and try something new because some folks have nicer indoor plumbing than others. If you came from an era where even the concept of refrigeration and readily available ice was an unimaginable luxury. . . the fact that we all live like Emperors but some Emperors live better than others probably wouldn’t bother you very much.

Anyways. . . I’ve ranted about that many times before. We’ve totally lost perspective. Especially this latest generation.

So, without any further ado, here’s Louis CK with the funniest bit I’ve seen in a long while. And one that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It starts a bit slow but just keeps getting better.

In case that link disappars, here it is (without the intro commercial) on Youtube. Though the quality isn’t as good.

I realize this is from October. So I’m a bit late to this party. But if you’ve already seen it, it’s still worth seeing again!

REAL GEEKS. . .

. . . vs those that are paid to pretend they are geeks.

I’m currently living this experience as well. A friend of mine is having me re-do much of her home theater system. Problems included:

  1. DVD Player connected to HD TV via in-wall composite video cable (think “yellow RCA connector”). Yuck! Related to this. . .
  2. There was no other high-quality cable run through the wall (no HDMI, no Component).
  3. Center Channel appears to be routed into the right speaker. And vice-versa.

She was going to be charged $300 by a local installer to run a component video cable run through her wall. Instead, I convinced her to spend that $300 on a blu-ray player (when in doubt, upgrade!), $40 on a monoprice HDMI switch, and then just use the HDMI run for her DirecTV box to watch both the DirecTV and Blu-Ray. We got the stuff installed and she’s thrilled with the picture quality (as you’d expect since her frame of reference was DVD over composite).

Still haven’t had a chance to swap the speaker wires in the back of her receiver though. Should be quick and easy. But I only noticed the problem on my way out the door and scheduling a follow-up visit has been an issue.

But where was I? Oh yeah, Best Buy’s Geek Squad will charge you $325 to just mangle things.

The ironic part is that she has thanked me for my help by generously giving me a Best Buy card!

OVER A YEAR!?!

Had it really been (well) over a year since I last posted here? I suppose everyone has moved on by now. But let’s see what happens if I start posting again.

I spent the day working on the back-end. Updating things, cleaning up, and getting things ready for super-duper-full-on-post-a-matic-ness. So. . . there’s that.

FEDORA 7 and TOMCAT

In the hopes that this might be picked up by Google and help someone else out there. . .

I run a Fedora Core 5 (FC5) server at work. I’m in the process of migrating things to a new server that will be Fedora 7 (no longer called “core”).

We make use of Tomcat for java applications. However, upon installing Tomcat in the exact same way for Fedora 7 as I did for FC5, all I would see when trying to view my Tomcat server’s web pages were (totally) blank pages.

To replicate the problem (then the solution). . .

Install Java according to these instructions (though use the JDK instead): Link.

Install Tomcat like so:

>yum install tomcat5 tomcat5-webapps tomcat5-admin-webapps

Start the tomcat service (it should be available under the services GUI now. . . if not, restart the server).

Now, you too should be getting blank pages when you try to view http://localhost:8080

I had seen several reports that the F7 and FC6 default installations of tomcat were “bad” or “non-functional.” At that point, everyone appears to just give up. No solutions seem available out there other than to download the application from Jakarta and install it manually.

Here’s an easier “fix.” Though, I don’t know if this might be a bad idea.

The problem appears to be that Tomcat no longer likes the default installation of Java on FC6 or F7. Further, it won’t listen to you if you try to change JAVA_HOME via the /etc/tomcat5/tomcat5.conf file.

This is (apparently) because the /etc/tomcat5/tomcat5.conf file (where you’d think you should go!) is overridden by the /etc/sysconfig/tomcat5.conf file. So, make the change there, and all should work again.

For example. . . in /etc/sysconfig/tomcat5.conf, I made it:

JAVA_HOME="/opt/jdk1.6.0_02"

All now works!