Inanis.net

Sorry to everyone who emailed me or commented over the past week with issues/comments/praise/rants about Inanis Glass. Holidays and overtime at work have made getting back to you difficult. Everyone should be up to date at this point…

Here’s some hardware fun:

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Had some extra hardware come into my possession, so I upgraded the Inanis.net server today. Upgraded the Athlon XP 1700+ to a 2800+, bumped it up to 1GB RAM, doubled the Hard Drive to 80GB and replaced the motherboard (or mobo, to the geeks). I had planned on putting the new CPU and RAM in the original mobo, but I found out the old mobo had a couple of capacitors that were starting to puff up, so I went full tilt. This upgrade was much easier than the last one I did. I used CloneZilla to copy the Hard Drive, and brought the new machine up beside the old one, to reduce downtime. I got the X Server configured correctly and made sure the network card worked properly (which, this time, was not an issue, not like last time), then switched the box over. Total downtime: about 10 minutes.

Life goes on.

Happy Easter. Moving on.

Had a nice week at work. See, I am in the middle of trying to merge two companies together and on top of that, the local Fire Department and Police Department have emergency-level failures in their infrastructure, one of my best clients had a backup failure and a couple of others needed server quotes. Do you see what I’m dealing with? Is it worth it? Remains to be seen.

I have hacked even more the Inanis.net blog theme. I am getting ever so closer to perfection. I hack it up all pretty and wait a couple of weeks to see if I find anything else that needs to be prettied. Then I hack some more. It’s like chili: the more times you re-cook it, the better it gets.

The Beast is purring like a kitten. I have the overclock reset and it’s running very well. I had hoped I would be able to eek out a bit more speed, since Gigabyte sent me a revision 3.3 motherboard for replacement instead of a revision 2.0 like I had purchased, but it just won’t take. Any FSB setting above 300MHz and the system does the POST-Reset loop crap. I think either the video card or the RAM is the cause of my woe, as many people have cranked this motherboard well above a 300MHz FSB and this processor (Intel Core 2 Duo E4300) is supposed to clock well over 3.0GHz on stock cooling (and I have better than stock cooling). I just can’t get it there, no matter what timings or settings I set.

Good news everyones!

I have hacked the theme to the blog/site again. I am slowly making it very Vista Aero in appearance. There are several relatively minor changes, but it looks more Aero than before. Have I mentioned before that I like the Aero theme? Oh, I have. Sorry.

I eventually want to polish up my theme and then plop it over on the Wordpress Theme Viewer website. Step 3, profit.

The theme works perfectly in Gecko browsers, Opera and IE7. It has a minor issue with the rollover buttons in IE6. Eh, IE6 sucks. Who cares.

In other news, I became a Great Uncle today. not a great uncle, I already know I’m great *tounge in cheek* but the relation to my niece’s son, you know. a Great Uncle. Damn, I’m old. I’m now of the "Grandparents" generation. Ugh.

Inanis.net has finished it’s conversion from Windows jail to Linux freedom. Open Source: feel the breeze.

Enjoy the new layout. It was the toughest part, a labor of love. It took me a total of 24 hours of work to get the theme hacked just the way I want it. My favorite part is the mouseover buttons at the top. Sorry IE6 users, you don’t get to see those. Get Firefox. Or Opera. Or run your damned Windows Updates, for Pete’s sake!

The server setup and configuration was easy. I just grabbed my in-house wiki box I was using for my Computer Museum and SPID, thew in WordPress and some greeblies, and put it on a public IP address. Having the wiki box as my webserver is an added bonus: no more weird dyndns and port forwarding crap!

It’s on a nice fast 3 Megabit fiber connection pretty much by itself, so it serves pages pretty well.

All in all, it was a fun project. Let’s hope it doesn’t break!

I spent the last couple of days getting the WordPress blog running. That is to say, the blog was running in about 5 minutes. The time was really spent finding a suitable theme then hacking the hell out of it until it didn’t look lame.

I am planning on converting Inanis.net from a “static layout+blog” to a WordPress managed layout. This will allow me to focus on writing content, rather than writing HTML around my content.

Here’s a preview of the layout. Hopefully, you will be seeing it live very soon…

I am in the process of switching my webhosting over from a Windows based thing I get for free, but don’t have any control over to a linux based solution, that will be co-located for free, but I will own the physical server, software rights and upon which I will exert total control. Mwa ha ha ha!!

Anyways, I was playing around with using WordPress, and just like they say, it is really easy to install. If you follow the instructions they give you, it can take as little as 5 minutes. Here’s some linky goodness

Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress on Ubuntu

On another note, since I changed to the “Aero” skin I designed, it doesn’t display properly in IE6. I’ll fix it when I switch to the new blog software.