Grace Elizabeth Campbell – Too cool for the womb

personal No Responses »
May 282008

My wife and I went to the OB today for a scheluded appointment. My wife is 36 weeks pregnant and getting ever closer to popping like a thing of Jiffy Pop on the stove. While we were there we had it confirmed that she is measuring about 2 weeks ahead of schedule, ie she is measuring like she’s 38 weeks.

This is a good thing becuase it means we don’t have to wait as long to meet my daughter. From what I understand anything over 37 weeks is pretty much as good as full term. That being the case there really is no down side to her coming early.

This has reminded me that I need to hurry up and decide what I’m going to do on a site I bought for her when we actually decided on a name, http://www.GraceElizabethCampbell.com. Right now it has drupal 6 up and running and I think it does a fine job for displaying the few posts I have up on it.

I’ve recently been coding a plugin for WordPress to integrate the ebay EPN network so you can manage auction items in your posts. I’m leaning towards making it something like BANS but its still really early in development.

That being said, I’m really starting to like WordPress more and more. It is very good at what it does, giving you a way to post stories and posts. The admin interface, especially in 2.5 is such a pleasure to work with. Everything feels right about it. Being that it is WordPress you also get all of the other nifty plugins that other people have created, like the All in one SEO plugin and the WPG2 plugin to integrate Gallery2 into WordPress.

I suspect I’ll be making a final decision in the next week or so. I’m mostly looking for something that I can build up with her pictures and little things she does over the years.

Posted by Theodore at 12:34 am Tagged with: ,

Shards of Dalaya – EverQuest 1 only Free?

personal 3 Responses »
May 252008

A few weeks ago my brother sent me a link to Shards of Dalaya. I didn’t have much time to look at it when he originally sent it because I was busy with work stuff. Just yesterday I was at his place and happend to see what I thought was EverQuest 1 up on his computer. He was out in the other room and I decided to sit down and look around to see what it really was. After a few minutes he came in and confirmed that it was in fact EverQuest 1 but not really. It seems that Shards of Dalaya is EverQuest 1 but on emulated or reverse engineered servers.

Years ago when EverQuest 1 was the MMORPG big kid on the block my wife, then girlfriend, were huge into it. When We both finally sat down and talked to him and learned more about it we were both dieing to try it out.

Within an hour of being back at our house she had EverQuest 1 setup and patched and was logging into Shards of Dalaya. As of the time I’m writing this I still am futzing with it to get it to work. Shes running it on her older Alienware desktop, a 2.4GHz P4 with 1GB of memory. It runs just as good as It did back in the day if not better because she’s using a better video card now that she was before.

I’m spending time poking it trying to get it to work because I don’t have a Windows desktop or gaming box handy at the moment. I’m going to give it a shot in VMware Fusion on my Macbook and on my old HP Presario R3250. I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll get it working but worst case is I’ll wait till next week once I can get one of my computers home from work.

Posted by Theodore at 11:37 pm Tagged with: ,

HP Compaq Thin Client T5500 – More useful and simple to setup

personal, work 2 Responses »
Apr 132008

The 5500 I ordered of ebay came in the mail the other day. I was having a very busy week and didn’t really have time to play with it until Thursday night.

When I first turned it on it loaded windows ce then auto logged in and tried to connect to an Citrix ICA server. After some quick googleing I found out that by holding F9 while booting the T5500 will reset to its default windows cd settings. Once that was done I was greeted with a pretty simple windows interface with Internet Explorer and could browse the Internet and everything.

At this point I figured I had at least a neat toy if nothing else. I was really hoping I could somehow run linux on it which would make it much more useful for me. I went back to google and found that Puppy Linux has a very small installer that could be made to boot from a USB drive pretty easley, so that’s what I did.

Puppy Linux is actually more useful than I thought it as going to be. It ran well enough on the 733mhz with 128mb of memory that it would be more than usable for a simple email / web / writing terminal.

I wanted to try Knoppix and see how that would run but it was 2am at that point so I decided to leave it where it was and play more once I had time.

I’ve sense played with Knoppix on it and must say that it seem a little sluggish. I think the main limit is the 128mb of memory.

I’ll be posting more updates as I move along with this project. What I’m really looking for is something very similar to the Knoppix Kiosk feature. I’m even considering taking the latest Knoppix and stripping it very much down to get a simple X session with Firefox or Konquerer in a full screen window.

Posted by Theodore at 1:22 am Tagged with:

HP Compaq Thin Client T5500 – New Point Of Sale Kiosk?

personal, work No Responses »
Apr 022008

At the office today the idea was tossed around to replace our Point Of Sale terminals which currently are PCs that have a CPU, motherboard, memory and a cdrom drive. They boot a customised Knoppix CD that loads into a full screen Kiosk mode Konqueror. The start page is pos.store.domain.tld which is unique to each store with their local server.

One of the main reasons we are looking for something better is we seem to be going through cdroms about one every 5 months. That in itself isn’t a huge problem the larger problem is that we’re looking for something that doesn’t cost $300.00 for a new terminal. We actually talked about using the Linux Terminal Server Project but the Point Of Sale server is a 500mhz soekris net5501 and we didn’t think it would handle running its normal server duties along with X and KDE for 5 clients at a time.

I’m kind of hoping that I can get the thin client into some sort of kiosk mode then have use Internet explorer to load the same pos.store.domain.tld un full screen window. One thing that I’m a little concerned about after doing some research, which I should have really done before I ordered anything, but its too late for that, is that the one I ordered runs Windows CE 4.20 which seems to have a ghetto version of Internet explorer. From what I’ve read I think I would be better off with a thin client that runs Windows XP embedded.

I’ll actually be posting more as I work through this in hopes that someone elise could use this information too.

Posted by Theodore at 11:41 pm Tagged with: ,

April Fools Comes Early in 2008

holiday, personal No Responses »
Apr 012008

I was just catching up on my RSS feeds and came across a post on thenichestorebuilder.com linking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) where Jeremy shows you how to make $1,000 an hour. About half way into it it gets to be full of static and hissy. I immediately knew where this was going and by the comments on his forum it seems like he did a good job of pulling the wool over some peoples eyes.

In true April Fools fashion thinkgeek.com is up to their usual post some fake products shtick. I actually want to buy two of them though, the first is Spazztroids – Caffeinated Breakfast Cereal. How could this not be good? Caffeine… Check, Crazy Cartoon Icon… Check, Cereal… Check. The second thing I want is the Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock. I’m aware that it wouldn’t be practical but it sure would be a neat thing to show off.

April Fools also seems to hit slashdot and digg hard. On digg tons of stuff gets pushed up to the front page and it all seems interesting but it is a pain to sort out real news from the april fools stories. At least this only happens once a year, where the internet turns to crap…. oh wait…

Posted by Theodore at 1:43 pm Tagged with: ,
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