Archive for September, 2008
VirtueMart Print All Products
Sep 17th
My experiences with VirtueMart are good. I have never been able to get the PDF feature to work though. Some workarounds are therefore required. Turn your online store into catalog mode, and then hit the show all products link in the mod_virtuemart module. Set the list to display 50 products at a time. Literally highlight all products then copy paste them into a Microsoft Word document. Word will automatically download the images from the associated urls and slap them into the document. After adding all of your products to the Word document comes the fun part; cleanup and tailoring.
6:30 AM – The Start of Another Day
Sep 17th
Work, a necessity, but it is also a drain on a persons self esteem. Having to wake up, start another day, only for it to end having made barely enough money to to do it all over again tomorrow. To get ahead in these troubled economic times an employee needs to make well over $25,000 per year. Minimum wage, hahaha, with a salary like this two jobs are necessary to merely survive in America; especially NYC. With a minimum wage salary a person needs to work well over 14 hours per day to not even make good money. 14 hours per day means no time for yourself, no time for your family, and no time for a relationship. What can a person do; if they speak up to their boss they jeopardize the availability of their job, but if nothing is said then everything continues. Maybe the boss cannot pay more, but maybe the boss is a greedy son of a bitch that likes cheap labor to profit as much as possible. Anyone working for minimum wage with no health benifits (no nothing) has a boss that can’t give a shit less about you. This is a conundrum facing countless people in this country right now. What can be done, what has to be done, because 14 hour days filled with stress and depression will lead this country and its die hard employees over a cliff.
Windows Host – Linux Guest – Seamless Mode
Sep 15th
In pre 2.0 VirtualBox seamless mode was only for Windows guests on linux hosts. Now Linux guests on Windows hosts benifit from this invaluable feature. Albeit there are not many instances where a graphical linux program is require without a Windows alternative, but if need be the feature is available. Just boot up your guest, and hit your hotkey + l and viola, VirtualBox rips the gnome, or kde docks right off the desktop and slaps it into Windows. Frankly it can’t get much better than this, and my main hopes for the future is better linux kernel support further reducing host CPU load when the guests are idle. This will further realize the dream of virtualization, which is the deployment of multiple virtual machines on a single host system. The less host CPU load experienced results in more guest OSs being deployable.
When Will Change Come – Bank After Bank Fail
Sep 15th
When and how will change come? Change of society in particular typically comes after a dramatic event. I believe a dramatic event is occuring with the collapse of over 9 banks this year alone, in addition to the recent collapse of Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Leyhman Brothers, and AIG. Bank of America is also contemplating purchasing Meryl Lynch. This is simply a tremendous occurence and has never occured in the history of our country. The amount of money lost as a result of mortgage borrorers not being able pay has simply destroyed the economy of the US. All blame cannot be placed on the borrowers, and much blame should be placed on de-regulation policies that gave lenders free reign to do literally what every they want. Republicans want free reign, with corporations having control over their policies. Democracts want slightly more government regulation of the corporate decision making process. Frankly extremes never work, and a balance is needed. Currently there has been almost complete de-regulation, which is obviously the cause of this disasterous economic situation. Democrats need to step in a impose a moderate degree of regulation in order to stablize a devastated American economy; and to control the agressively malicious lending policies of powerful monetary institutions.
Debian Etch Compiz – Beryl
Sep 14th
Although the Debian repos have Compiz available, I have had bad experiences with what should be a routine installation. Although I have had good experiences utilizing the now outdated Beryl repos and software. To install Beryl for Debian Etch AMD64 add the following repos to your apt sources file: deb http://debian.beryl-project.org/ etch main deb-src http://debian.beryl-project.org/ etch main Add the gpg key: wget -O - http://debian.beryl-project.org/root@lupine.me.uk.gpg | sudo apt-key add - Install Beryl: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install beryl-manager emerald-themes Update xorg.conf (sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf): then added these two lines under the “Screen†section Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps†Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals†“true†then added these lines under “Device†Option “AllowGLXWithComposite†“true†Option “RenderAccel†“true†added one line under “Server Layout†Option “AIGLX†“on†Finally at the end of the file add these lines Section “Extensions†Option “Composite†“Enable†EndSection
Open Solaris in VirtualBox – Comparision and Usefulness
Sep 14th
Open Solaris is only available in a 32bit flavor, and is well supported by Sun’s VirtualBox. When your host OS is 64bit you cannot use flash in your web browser without using nspluginwrapper, or installing a 32bit compatibility layer. Rather than having a tremendous amount of unnecessary code on your system, simply to run flash in a web browser, I prefer using a 32bit OS in a VirtualBox guest environment. Open Solaris supports seamless mode and from a graphical perspective is indistinguishable from a standard Debian based Gnome desktop. On the backend Open Solaris is very different. Utilizing a UNIX kernel, and a custom Sun package management system there are a variety of nuances that make Open Solaris different. Aptitude, and the shorthand apt-get command is only available in Debian land, and yum is only available in Red Hat land. Open Solaris utilizes pkgadd. The following is a tabled list comparing the two package management systems: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/apt_ips/ After getting the hang of Open Solaris a bit, it becomes functional just like Linux. Its stable like Linux, with the main advantage that it is supported by Sun Corporation. It is probably extremely debatable whether to use a UNIX based OS or Linux. From a LAMP server environment I see little difference in functionality.
