Something Swift this way comes…

So I’ve been working my tail off lately. The week starting after Thanksgiving (USA) began a time of hectic work for me. This is actually oddly unexpected because the Christmas holidays are supposed to be our slow season. I don’t think the folks around got the memo about the TPS reports. So I’ve been working on various projects, putting out multiple fires and getting everything into a stable state once more. Odd how two days off will apparently cause things to go straight down the tubes.

On a completely different track, I brought home an Eee pc last night to work on it – being a linux user in a tech company in south GA means I am the ‘Linux Guy’ company wide. Nothing like a little job security, eh? *laughs* So, anyways, I brought this tiny little thing home to work on it since I knew I wouldn’t get much of a chance to at work today, the wife absolutely fell in love with it. She loved the fact that it was so small that she could slip it into her purse and take it out when she needed it instead of having to carry around Yet Another Bag. She also really dug the interface to it. She noted when she faux-typed on the keyboard that she’d likely have to trim her fingernails to be able to use it because the keys have so little depth to them. But I showed her how it worked and how it runs (it uses the Ubuntu operating system and the Sugar user interface) and she was deeply in love with it after only about 5 minutes. I think I’ve made my wife fully and finally into a comfortable linux user. So that’s likely the next thing she’ll be asking for on her wish list of tech toys. Not that her list is all that long – she loves a geek and geeks out when she can, but she’s not full-blown hard-core geekgurlie. That’s okay though, one geek in the family is enough I think.

Other news, well, most of the regular readers of this little page on the web know what’s going on in my life right now that’s hugely momentous. I’m not going to talk about it here, but I do wish that those who pray please send up some words for us that everything goes smoothly and in our favour. Things are coming to a head and we’re working towards fruition of a three (going on four) year project that is likely the hardest thing I’ve ever done and is likely to be one of the hardest emotional things I’ve ever gone through. I thank you guys for the love and support that we’ve received so far on this and only ask that you continue to pray for us.

To everyone else who are now scratching their heads and going ‘WTF??’ I would like to wish everyone a happy holidays. But more than that, I want to tell you Merry Christmas. And yes, there is a difference .

God Bless, and to all a good night.

S

So, I upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.7 this morning. Most of you probably won’t notice any difference as most of the changes are on the back end, but that’s what I was doing at 7am this morning before going to work. I guess we find the time to squeeze in the things we like to do when we can.

Aside from that, I’ve had a hectic couple of weeks. Several major systems went down a week and a half ago and I’ve been putting out fires ever since. Just when you think you’re going to get caught up with work it seems like something else dumps on you. I hate the thought of being so tired that I miss something, that I mess something up, so I try to stay with it, stay honed and focussed. Fortunately that works for me .

As many of you know, the wife and I are trying to adopt four children…as we have lived together for the last year, they have come to be my kids in all but the letter of the law. I would jump in front of a bus to save them…I love each of them and their own special unique personality. I can’t quite explain how much, how feirce is my love for each of my kids, but I know those of you who are parents (and soon to be parents! Congrats J!!) probably understand all too well what I mean by that, how I feel. I had a thought today though. I was working on a customer’s systems and watched their youngest boy crawl around on the floor, babbling happily to himself. It was a sad thought and one that still cuts me in the middle a little.

You don’t know how lucky you are. You get to watch all of your children grow up, be there for their milestones, be there for the night terrors and the emergency visits to the doctor when they won’t stop coughing. That time that the took their first wobbling steps and sat down *OOF* on their tush. Whether you have pictures or videos or just memories, you have that. We were lucky to be able to get that with Buggles, but with the other three, we missed those first steps in their lives. We didn’t get to experience that with them. We didn’t get to comfort them through the still watches of the night as they sobbed out their infant fears. I am jealous of the people who parented my children before me – not enough to be vindictive – just enough that it saddens me that these kids, so perfectly made for us that it makes my heart ache with love when I hold them in my arms, it makes me deeply sad that I couldn’t be their father from the first. It breaks my heart, too, that they’ve had to experience some of the things that they have, being ‘in the system’ as they have been for years, and I can see its mark in each of their faces, of the way they carry themselves. They are brilliant lights, shining in black velvet, forlorn at times because they are beginning to let go of their fear and mistrust, beginning to rely on us and love us. It makes me want to weep that they have had to harbor that fear and mistrust at all, but it makes my heart sing with joy when they come to me and show their love, respect, and trust in the little ways that they do. Wordless, they’ll each one crawl up into my lap one by one and hug me as tight as their little arms can. Whispering I love you doesn’t encompass the depth and breadth of feeling that I have for each of them.

I pray daily that I am a good father to them, that I can raise them up in the way that they should go, that I can be a rock for them. That they can always trust me to do what is best for them and not with-hold my love and affection from them as so many do from their children. I pray that I can be the person that they will always be able to trust with their hearts – both when they’re soaring with joy and crushed with despair. I just want to love them forever, they’re as much my babies as if the wife and I had conceived each one of them, and I love them greatly. Sometimes the weight of my love for them is astounding, and I can only pray that the impending adoption proceedings go smoothly and well, that there is nothing to halt our final joining as a family in the eyes of the law. I pray that one day I will be able to hold their children and tell them how much I love them, and how much I love their parents.

The traffic lights…they turn blue tomorrow.

S

So anyways, life is going fairly well. I’ve finally found and joined a church where I feel at home. The folks there seem to accept me for who I am, and they don’t seem to judge me – that’s something that’s kept me from bein active in my faith for a long time…and I realized that I shouldn’t try to blame other people for my lack of effort.

On other fronts, I managed to do some really cool stuff with linux at work. I’ve set up a ubuntu server running a piece of software named Bacula and Partimage Is Not Ghost. Finally I also set up a service on there called PXE using tftp. This basically sets the machine up to be both a backup server (Bacula) which can back up any files from any machine running the Bacula client on a network, and a Image server. By ‘image’ server I simply mean that I can take a snapshot of any hard drive on a network (that’s where the PXE comes in) and save that image to disk, so that in the event of having to roll an installation of an OS and software back out to a given machine, it allows me to boot to the server across the network and pull the image directly to the hard drive. For anyone who has gone through the heartache of having to re-install an OS, then re-install all of their software and try to recover any and all data from a backup, this simplifies the matter greatly.

I know, geeking out right? I was so freaking excited when I finally got everything working together like I wanted it. The coolest thing about it is that all of that software is free and open source, so you can take an old box running next to noghthing in hardware and set it up as a backup machine. My next goal is to mount a shared drive across the network to the unit from a NAS (network attached storage) and have it save all the images and backups to that. That way the box is just a middle man server that does all the work. We’ve currently got it running on an (ancient) refurbished machine. The system specs are: p3 800 mhz proc, 128 mb ram, 20 GB hdd. The whole installation with all services and everything (including the Xubuntu desktop so other techs in the business can administer the box) averages out to about 3GB installation. You can’t even run windows in that small of a space.

I suppose that if I really put my mind up to it I could script the images and automate a process where every six months the machines re-image themselves back to state and pull the latest backup information, but if I did that there would be little maintenance work for us to do! *laughs*

So that’s some of what I’ve been working on lately, how about you? Drop me a line there in the comments and let me know how you’re doing.

S

So today was a rather slowish day at work. Okay, it was /really/ slow. I wandered around the office today looking for little projects to work on. Finally I started tinkering with an old refurb machine, adding a couple of hard drives in and dumping some memory into it. After fiddling about with the hardware for a bit, I called my manager into the tech room and sat her down in front of the computer. Now, she’s more ‘tech’ than most common users, but she’s by no means a technician so when I told her she was going to be installing linux on the system, she started squirming and coming up with excuses that sounded a lot like ‘gee no thanks, I already gave at the office’. I shook my head and told her that she’d be alright, I’d be there to help answer any questions or address any problems that cropped up. So she reluctantly gave in.

First step was to get the system to boot into the ‘Install Kubuntu Linux’ option. It took it a little while because, frankly, the machine is an old one and not very powerful. But after it came up and put up the little gui screen asking what language you want the installer to run in (and install the system in), she picked up on the instructions on-screen and started going through it, answering the few questions that it asked such as username, password, host name, etc. She stumbled a bit when it came time to partition the drive, but I pointed out to her that we were doing a clean install, that she could just use the ‘Guided – use entire disk’ option. She got through that and then continued on to the end of the round of questions, in all it took her about ten minutes to get through the questions and click ‘install’. When she did that I told her ‘That’s it, congratulations, you’re installing linux for the first time.’

When I said that, you could’ve literally pushed her over with a breath of air. Her jaw fell open and she exclaimed ‘No way! That was so easy…easier than installing Windows!’ I simply nodded and smiled. Once it got to the point where it finished installing everything and rebooted, we took the cd out of the drive and let the machine reboot to a fully installed and running system. She asked me about how to find drivers and I explained to her that there is generally no need to look for hardware drivers in linux – another thing she couldn’t believe. The capper though was when she opened the programs menu (Big Blue K) and realized that Open Office and other useful applications were already installed on the machine.

She looked around in the menu for a bit, and then asked ‘So how do I get on the internet?’. I explained that she could use Konqueror as it will browse the web, but I wanted to demo the package manager for her, so I got her to open up Adept from the system menu and then told her to type ‘firefox’ in the search bar. She did so, and easily requested an install of firefox3. After clicking ‘Apply’ I explained to her that linux (in this case Kubuntu 8.04.1) goes out and gets the software from the internet for the user automatically, that it downloads and installs it for them, and even goes so far as keeping the software up to date for the user. She absolutely couldn’t believe it.

About that time, the phone rang and she had to take it, but overall her reaction was really positive – I’ve been talking about linux around her for almost a year now, and this is the first time that she really sat down and looked at it, giving it an honest shot. That said, I didn’t harass her into it, though I did explain to her that I wanted her to try it out and give me her honest opinion of it – letting her come to the realizations that it was more ‘user friendly’ in functionality than windows is because of the capability to have a working system up and running in under an hour instead of spending hours working on installing OS, finding and installing drivers, running updates, restarting the machine time and time again to get the simplest of things to work – I let her see that the user can /use/ the machine after it’s installed instead of having to spend hours trying to get the machine to a safe place to work. All in all, I think she left the demo in a favourable mindset towards the scrappy little OS called linux, and I think she’ll be more receptive about it in the future when I mention it around her.

More later,
S

You’ll notice that the site maintenance warning is gone. That means that this site has officially been switched over to a larger hard-drive (120 GB instead of a 4GB) and should run for a while without space worries. The other hardware it’s running on currently blows, but hey, we do what we can when we can. So, the freeze on posts is officially over.

Sorry for the interruption, and thanks for your patience.

S

So it’s been a little bit and I’m still kind of at a loss as to what to post here regularly. Seeing as how my readers seem content just to read whatever I put up, then I guess I’ll just put up whatever! MUAHAHA Command decision. Since I love linux that’s kind of what you guys are probably going to hear about most. Ah well, I’ve almost converted one or two of ya, or at least gotten you past the idea of fearing change enough to give it a rational chance…Which is all I can really ask of anyone.

One cool thing that I did the other day was write a script – I know most of you are probably thinking ‘I didn’t know he wrote screenplays!’ no. Not that kind of script. Put down the air-freshener and seek help. The type of script I’m talking about is a shell script to do something that I find rather tedious, automatically. See, everyone who knows me knows that I play online text based games (called Mush/mux/moo/mu*). Well, I use a text based client to log in to my different worlds – fitting no? – and whenever I log in, it automatically logs everything that I see on my screen. I set this up a while back within the client to auto-log on connection (the client, by the way is TF5 – Tinyfugue 5) and when it logs, it goes to a directory (folder for you windows users) under my home directory named ’share’. So the path looks like /home/swift/share. Now, underneath share is a directory for each ‘world’ or ‘character’ I connect to. TF automatically seperates the logfiles out by the world, and names the file in a MM-DD-YY.log format, so that I can look back on a particular day and find something. Neat, but what happens after abou three or four months worth of logging? Yeah! You get spammed when you go in and list the directory contents by a bunch of files that look like 08-18-08.log. I mean a /bunch/. I connect a lot. So, usually once a month I go through near the beginning of the month, make a directory underneath each character/world directory named in a MM-YY format, so it’ll look something like this – /home/swift/share/Swift/07-08/’all of july’s files here’

Needless to say I can do it fairly quickly but when you consider that I’ve got eight or nine characters/worlds that I connect to regularly, this shit gets tedious after a while. That’s fifteen or twenty minutes I could spend doing something else…like playing on my game! So I decided after getting fed up with having to hand organize these files “You know what? This is the perfect thing to provide a bash script to”, so that’s what I did. After a bit of trial and error, I came up with a script I call tflogarc.sh that I can schedule to go through once a month and do the following things:

• Go into a game directory recursively
• Make a directory that is named for the last month’s numerical-current year’s numerical (07-08 ferex)
• Move all files that start with the numerical month matching last month’s numerical month into the correct directory.
• Go back up to /home/swift/share
• Rinse and repeat until all played worlds are organized.
• Leave me with free time each month to do something else!

Okay, that last one didn’t really occur to me until about halfway through the project. I just started out seeing if I could do it, and with a little help, I did. Thus is the power of linux! And looking at it now, weeding out all the comments (I tend to comment heavily so I’ll know wtf I was thinking six months from now when I go back to tinker with it) the script itself is only 37 lines long*. Not a huge program at all, and if I were more experienced at scripting it wouldn’t have taken me the couple of hours it did to get everything just right. Add in the fact that with a single line in my crontab (file that the linux/unix cron daemon uses to schedule commands to be run) that it runs every month at 1:05 am for the length of time it takes to do the work (about 3 seconds) and then goes back to sleep until the next month. With windows, I’d just be completely shit out of luck unless I wrote it in something like python or perl, or (God help us) Visual Basic. I suppose you could try and script a .bat (batch file) to do it, but then you have to wrestle with the windows taskmanager and all of that. With this, it’s a built in scripting language that lets you do as much or as little as you want, to your own level of ability, and there are plenty of folks out there online willing to help out when you have questions, which is a bonus. If you’d like to take a look at the script it’s at http://swift.homelinux.net/tflogarc.txt.

* – for the command pipe that gave me that answer it’s grep -v \# tflogarc.sh|wc -l
What this does is greps (searches) the file for everything except the # symbol in the file tflogarc.sh then pipes all of them out to the wc -l command which does a wordcount (in this case -l tells it to count lines only, not words.) Wha? You didn’t think I’d actually count the lines by hand did you?

So you see, sometimes I get on a little kick and make my life a little easier by using the tools that are around, laying there, free for use, all we have to do is pick them up, brush them off and put a little effort into learning to use them.

More later,

S

Well folks, it is now official. You the common man (or woman as the case may be) can no longer buy a retail copy of Windows XP for your own use. Technically you probably can still go into stores and find a copy that is lingering on the shelf, however these are only stock copies and they will no longer be making and selling retail copies of Windows XP. See the link here: Microsoft Ends retail sales of XP

So, now that it’s official and you the masses are being pushed to using Vista on the machines that you own (good luck with that unless you’re running a relatively beefy machine) and most machines that you’re going to be able to buy in the near future, you’re going to be seeing a great learning curve in how your computer works and interacts with you. Be prepared for things like annoying popups that constantly ask you if you’re really really sure you want to do what you just told your computer to do – trust me, I’ve dealt with this in Vista, and it pops up damn near every time you click on something and/or try to do something other than sit there and let the eye-candy rot your brain out from the frontal lobe back. So, let me be the first (or maybe second or later) to suggest to you that if you’re going to be forced into using a system you’re not familiar with and virtually re-learning how the inner workings of your operating system goes (don’t ask about printing in Vista…), if you dear reader are going to go through all of this, let me suggest to you that you take a look at some of the free operating systems out there of the linux/unix variety. I can hear the groans from the back of the court but hold on, stay with me for a minute. You the common user are going to have to relearn how to do the simplest of tasks, everything is going to look different, and you’re going to be unhappy with it until you relearn it. This is a /perfect/ opportunity for you to step outside your comfort zone and begin to try out a different operating system. I say step outside your comfort zone because it does take a bit of a leap of faith to download and burn that first ISO, to run it from livecd and figure out what all the new things are that you’re seeing means. That simple leap of faith though is well worth it.

Let me give you a perfect example, a test case as it were. I of course and an iron-clad graven in stone linux user, so I try to incorporate that as much as I can into my daily work (I’m a network technician and I repair computers/networks for a living). The gentleman who works with me as a bench technician is a good friend of mine, an older gentleman in his fifties and before he came to work with us, he was a standard user – never even cracked open a computer case and so much as looked inside one before. Over the last six months I’ve trained him up as a bench tech on computer hardware and the Microsoft operating system. Doing this hasn’t been hard, actually it’s been quite a pleasant process. However, he’s always (as a user) used Microsoft products, and he’s used to seeing Microsoft and dealing with troubleshooting the systems that we have come across our bench on a day-to-day basis. However he’s also been, little by little, exposed to some of the things that can be done when you use free and open source software – I can troubleshoot a Microsoft system further and better with linux based tools than I can with MS ones – and he’s begun over the past month or so to become more curious about it. I’ve finally set aside some time and set up a demo unit to display with linux on it. Seeing as how Microsoft is forcing the user’s hand on the issue, I figured what could it hurt? So yesterday I sat him down in front of the computer that has linux on it (Kubuntu Hardy KDE 4.0-remix) and told him to play with it, try and open a word processor and save a document and run a game, surf the web – you know the every day stuff that 90% of the population does with their spare time at a computer. He, after a little bit of friendly griping at me finally dug into it and after about ten minutes said, “You know what? On the surface there’s just not that much difference in how this works and how Windows (XP) works…it looks the same, hell the Open Office even looks more like the Microsoft Office used to before they changed to MS Office 2007.” I quietly nodded and continued working on another system while he continued to play with it. Finally he got my attention and said, “You know what, I think when I get to where I can build myself a system, I’m going to put linux on there. I just like it better than I like Vista.”

Now this is from a guy who is a /confirmed/ Windows user. Someone who makes his living by working on Windows machines! He’s seen in the tech room that the systems I put linux on run and run and run and run, that once they’re configured up that they take very little adminstration and maintenance – hell 90% of our server capacity for our tech room is old scrounged machines running linux doing what they’re supposed to do and doing it without complaint. He’s seen the stability of the system from an observer’s standpoint, and he’s seen the usability of it from a user’s standpoint – and while there are oddities in the system (there will always be oddities in a system you don’t write yourself for your own personal use) he recognized and responded to it as a viable product that is useable to the average user’s standards. AND he didn’t have to revert to using the command line to get the things he wanted done. Granted he could still use the command line (this is the part that scares most ‘users’) to do any and everything he wants to, but he doesn’t /have/ to. I’ve been teaching him a few basic ‘commandline survival skills’ in case he ever wants to use it, but that’s from a technician’s standpoint. For the most part, you don’t have to use the CL unless you just want to for the speed and precision that it offers. What a system!

So, now that you’ve waded through my test case and seen that without any pushing or urging from me other than to say ‘Here, try this out and tell me what you think’, someone who was a plain-jane ‘user’ up until 6 months ago decided that they liked it better than their current operating platform. What does this mean for you dear reader? This means that you will not be alone if you decide to download and try out the linux software (I prefer ubuntu and kubuntu, but there are many distributions out there – some that may better serve your needs), that it is okay to try something new, that it may be more familiar to you than you think. And here’s the kicker. Download the ISO, burn it to a disc, put the disc in the tray and reboot your machine – try it out without fear of destroying your windows machine and the data resident there. If you like it you can always back up your data and change over to linux. If you don’t like it you can just shut it down, take the disc out and go back to windows no harm no foul. The thing is, you have a /choice/. And choice is always a good thing.

For those of you out there who want to read more about the free software response to Vista, might I suggest starting at Badvista.org, you might find it interesting reading, and it might even change your mind about the next operating system you use on your computer.

If you have any questions for me about linux, microsoft, free software, or just want to natter a bit, leave a comment and I promise to reply next time I check in.

Thanks for sticking with me,

S

So, found an interesting article at Linux.com that caught my attention. Normally I just scan the articles seeing if I can find an interesting tidbit or three about software that I might want to try or to get better performance out of, but this article really kind of nailed me to the spot. The reason it caught my attention so heavily is the fact that I help manage a ’small’ network for the county I work in, and I can tell you that the problems that people face on a daily basis there are a multitude of issues. I can’t help but see an article like this and wish that I could implement something similar to this on the county network because I know it would do several things:

• Save the county money
• Save the taxpayers money
• Advance the use of open source
• Create jobs for users of Open Source software
• Ease administrative tasks
• Allow the users of the system to be more productive
• Allow the IT budget to be spent on much needed hardware upgrades

There are other points that something like this could help out on, but these are some of the biggest. The money saved would lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) and raise their return on investment (ROI). These are the two biggest concerns in any IT situation – they are the two things that always get the accountants attention because it means that the money spent on IT, which is always a blackhole of money anyways, is being better used. Advancing the use of open source software may not sound like a big issue until you realize that things like Microsoft’s plan to end retailing OEM copies of XP on June 30′th (Microsoft.com) means that businesses will be pushed into upgrading to Vista when they have to purchase new systems. Anyone who has used Vista knows that it is a beast – it has to have plenty of higher end hardware to run on to get any kind of performance out of. This means that when they purchase new systems, not only are they generally going to have to invest more in their licensing structure for their company, they’re also going to have to invest in higher end hardware that will end up only performing as well as their last-gen hardware they are replacing – this is NOT good business sense. And you consumers out there? You’re going to have to use Vista if you want to keep your Microsoft. This means you’re virtually going to have to relearn how to use your computer because all of the layouts in Vista are different than what they are in XP. This also means that you’re going to have to dump more money into the family computer to either upgrade to a system that can capably handle Vista or to purchase an entirely new system that can handle it. Monolithic indeed. The move to supporting Open Source software in a computing environment means that generally you can run it on lower end hardware without flinching – you can get as good or better performance out of it than you can on an identical machine running windows. Now, in all fairness, let me note that Microsoft is extending the life cycle of XP on ‘ultra-low cost machines’ but this still means that you either have to buy a crappy machine (not good for workstations in a working environment) and that you still can’t go into dealership and buy a nice system with XP – the system you know and are addicted to already – installed on it. At least until 2010, fully 4 years before the planned release of whatever OS Microsoft comes out with to replace the snafu that is Vista. And we all know how well they stick to a planned roll-out of an operating system.

The fourth point is obvious – a lot of IT people are Microsoft users. Those of us who are versed in Those Other OS’s ™ generally have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for jobs and still do MS administration mainly – at least in areas like south Georgia and other IT dead locations that are just now beginning to realize that the advantages to having a solid IT infrastructure can actually /help/ your business. Ease of administrative tasks is also somewhat of a hard argument to make – it takes a good bit to get everything set up just right in a linux environment – refer back to the article above about their troubles with printing, however once you get something set up and running, it generally doesn’t take major overhauls and fixes every six months to put out whatever fire has sprung up at that point ala Microsoft. Regarding point 6, when the users don’t have to focus on where the software is coming from, where their documents are going, or getting a specialized piece of software budgeted into their next round of buying, they can simply request software from the IT department and get it, no fuss no muss. This also leads into the final point about allowing the IT budget to be spent on upgrading hardware. This is a special hot-button issue with me. One of the agencies I help take care of has the worst hardware in an organization I’ve seen in a while. We’re not talking about just slow machines, we’re talking about machines that were installed in the location almost a decade ago and have been limped along up to this point. Just finding memory for these machines can be a chore at times, much less trying to add any type of new software to them or capabilities that the users would like to have. Let’s just say that if people realized what kind of machines this agency was working with, they would have serious doubts about the county’s efficacy to handle things on that end of business. Taxpayers should really look into things like that – find out what your county budget for hardware and software are, generally you’ll find one or two agencies within the county that end up scraping the dregs out of the barrel with regards to budgeting, and they usually have the most problems – ending up costing the county and taxpayers more in man-hours spent limping the machines along, lost productivity as systems crash or slow down to handle too great a load on their already overstrained equipment, and the cost of having to buy parts at retail prices to try and keep systems up and running for just six more months. It’s pathetic in all honesty and it’s a situation that could be entirely avoided with proper planning and education – no matter /what/ OS and software you’re running in the environment, but especially with the freedom that Opensource software allows the consumer, the sheer multitude of choices that people have is staggering and goes largely unknown by the end user.

This brings me to my final point – a lot of my friends pick on me about proseletyzing about Linux and Opensource software, but the truth is, if nobody brings it up then your average Joey Bag-a-doughnuts is just going to go on buying the Microsoft line simply because that’s why they’re trained to believe, and they’ll go on spending too much money on too many unstable/unsuitable products and wonder why they always have so many problems. It is up to us, the IT people to educate others about things that are good and healthy for their systems and networks, and if we do not take every opportunity to gently remind people that there is a freedom of choice out there, then shame on us. We have no right to bitch about the systems in use if we can’t take the effort to learn something new and share that with others.

S

Okay, so now you’ve downloaded Open Office and now you’ve created your first document in there after fumbling around in it for a few minutes, realizing that all of the tools you’re used to are there, and work pretty similarly. However when you sent it to your buddy Joe-bob he came back complaining that he couldn’t open this crazy document and don’t you use Microsoft Office?!?

What you have there is an instance of Microsoft not supporting the open document format (yet). Remember my post a few days ago? Well, I’m here with a quick pictoral tutorial on how you can set your Open Office to automatically default to Microsoft formats. Please note, for the sake of preserving my blog’s layout, I’ve linked the images in instead of inserting them inline so you can read the text on the images.

First open up Open Office (I started with the Writer portion, but you could do it from any part of open office). It will look like this:

Writer

Now that you have this window open, you want to click on the Tools menu and go to Options, thusly:

Tools/Options

After opening the Options menu, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Options Dialog

You want to go down to Load/Save, so that it looks like this (make sure you highlight the General selection on the left):

General Settings/Load-Save Options

Now, you’re going to change the following values to those shown in this setting area:

• Text Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentation/Powerpoint

And that my dear constant reader, is all it takes to set up Open Office so that the people who still stick to a non-standards compliant office suite can read your documents. Feel free to post any questions about this or anything else in the comments section and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

S

Most of you probably won’t realize this until after I’ve said something about it, but I spent a good portion of today going back through every post that has ever been made on this site and categorized them. I’ve also added a new category labeled ‘life’ because, well, to be honest, I post a lot about what’s going on in my life. Hope this helps anyone who’s trying to find certain posts.

In other news, I finally found my glasses this morning! Decided to look in the one place I hadn’t yet that made sense, so I cleared out a spot on the floor between my bed and the wall and laid down there and dug out things that randomly, mysteriously, migrate under the bed. There they were laying dusty and forgotten – yes even a little forlorn – by a plastic drinking tumbler that had made its way under there to keep them company….all the way under the middle of the bed. How they got there I have some strong suspicions. I probably knocked them off my side table one night fumbling around in my sleep, then they got pushed underneath by a random flick of a pants leg or something similar…then as time passed they likely were pushed back further and further by encroaching Items of the Forgotten Variety.

Whatever the case may be, I’ve found them again and they now perch upon my nose in their old familiar place, cleaned and providing me with clarified vision once more!

More Later,

S