Over This

Persistance paying off?

Now, I’ve moved on to being persistent. I’ve also decided that “obsessed” probably wasn’t the best word for me earlier. I think I like “consumed” better. I’m not letting myself get consumed by things anymore. I am ok with being persistent as long as I keep boundaries to how much time I spend on things.

So, my various approaches to installing OS X on the Aspire One have failed so far. The recent hope these past few days has been the Boot 132 method, but I’ve given that up. After making progress, the process dies when my system says “Errors encountered while starting up the computer” and then freezes. All my searches for answers say that my DVD is corrupted. I’m using a retail DVD that has worked before, and it looks almost perfect. Rather than chasing down a better answer, I’ve moved on to my last hope.

At this time, I’m trying the iATKOS method. So far, it’s gotten farther than all my other attempts and actually gets to a version of the familiar looking OS X installer. The first attept I chose to skip the Disk Utility step that I read about since I already partitioned the CF card with a GUID partitition table earlier today. Sadly, the install process ended with an error. I guess it’s time to chase down this error …

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Obsessed with installing os x

So, I’m not just stubborn, now I’m also obsessed!

After learning that the Acer Aspire One is just as fast as the Apple Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz that I own, there seems like much less of a reason to keep the Powerbook. That is, of course, assuming that I can get OS X installed properly on the AAO.

My first attempt tonight was through the Kalyway method. The DVD I burned is now a coaster, so for now that method is a bust. Noticing that there were some pretty nice guides for the iATKOS method, I am waiting for my download to complete. While that downloads, I’m attempting the “boot 132″ method which uses the original Leopard DVD. This route is also on hold right now because all the guides I’ve read talk about installing to HD1 and HD2, but none mention a USB card reader with a CompactFlash card. Yeah, it’s a bizarro method, but hopefully someone will fill me in on the hexadecimal number that will work.

I contacted someone with a spare ZIF cable, so hopefully he’ll send it to me shortly. If I can get that cable to work with the ZIF adapter, then I won’t have to go this crazy external card reader route.

I think I need to work on this obsessive nature and learn to redirect to something more productive. Lately, I’ve had stretches of obsession with electric bikes, e-commerce packages, upgrading the AAO. I could definitely be doing other things or at least reduce my time allotment for these “hobbies”.

It’s a good thing my iATKOS download won’t be ready for a while. At least this forces me to put it to rest for tonight.

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Stubborn Aspire One hacking

After accumulating several upgrade components, I decided that I’d try to hack my Acer Aspire One tonight. As much as I like the laptop, it is definitely not user friendly for any upgrade. The ease of adding memory to the Dell mini 9 is amazing. The freakishly long process to upgrade the memory of the AAO is amazingly ridiculous.

Removing the screws on the bottom was easy, and I thought I was off to a good start. The keyboard came out pretty easily too. I opted for a screwdriver rather than a credit card as a video guide suggested, and I think I did OK not to scratch much. My warranty is way gone now, so scratches would merely be an aesthetic thing. The easiest thing to upgrade tonight was the wifi card. I bought a Dell 1390 card to replace the original card be/c I want to try to use OS X on the laptop, and there aren’t any drivers for the original card. The Dell card was not very expensive and extremely easy to remove, so I was pleased with that upgrade. I was able to remove everything necessary for the RAM upgrade without any problems either, and the laptop is showing 1536M, so the extra 1G of RAM is working too.

Thinking that I was making good progress, I decided that I would move on to the third upgrade, which was replacing the original 8G SSD with a 16G SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card by way of a CF adapter. I knew I’d probably have to do some surgery on the inside casing to make it fit, and depending on how much cutting I do will also determine if I need to trim the CF adapter. Little did I know that I would have to begin the surgery early!

To gain access to the screw holding the original SSD card in place, you have to remove the board on the right side. Every single screw tonight came out easily except for this last stinking screw! Neither of my two phillips screwdrivers was able to turn that darn screw. Eventually, I pretty much ruined the head of the screw. So, I resorted to getting the dremel out to see if I could cut a notch in the top so that I could try a flathead screwdriver. Well, that didn’t go so well either since my cutting disk was too thick and the head of the screw was thin. I gave up on thinking that I could actually remove the screw, so I grinded down the head of the screw.

Let’s just say that my dremel skills aren’t the best … I ended up cutting part of the board around the screw. Rather than finishing off the screw with the dremel, I figured that what was left was thin enough to be removed with a knife. So, I pried the super thin remains of the screw head off. Even with the screw head completely off, the board didn’t want to come out. So, I put a conical grinding head on the dremel and slowly grinded the stub of the screw. Finally, I was able to lift out the board.

This is where I was thinking that my being stubborn and refusing to quit was probably not the smartest thing. After all, I was potentially killing my laptop just to gain an extra 8G of faster storage. Oh well, there as no sense in stopping at this point.

After connecting the adpater with the original ZIF cable, I reconnected enough of the laptop to let me turn it on again. Not being sure if I installed the ZIF cable properly, I thought I’d let the computer tell me if I was right or wrong. A red LED light on the adapter was on, so I figured that was a good sign that it was getting power properly. However, when I turned on the laptop and hit F2, it didn’t recognize the card. I flipped the ZIF cable over, and I tried it again, and that didn’t work either.

Just to make sure the laptop wasn’t dead, I tried the original SSD card, and it booted just fine into the normal deskotp. That was a relief!

Finding the ZIF cable that came with the adapter would definitely help. The cable wasn’t in the same basket where I kept the CF adapter, so I have no clue if I still have it =( If it doesn’t turn up, I will have to make another 20 mile trek to Fry’s or pay $8 to buy 10 cables on eBay. 40 miles round trip is almost 2 gallons of gas, but with the sub $2/gallon price of gas, I guess driving is still cheaper. Or perhaps I should buy the cables on eBay and sell the 7 I don’t need …

Oh well, at least this delay gives me time to backup the contents of the original SSD. I was just going to skip that process since I have very little on the drive. I suppose that’s the silver lining to this whole ordeal.

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Magento is not too intuitive

I don’t consider myself a novice when it comes to e-commerce systems, but Magento sure has given me some headaches. I will admit that I started off without reading a user guide, and that was probably not the smartest thing. I’ve read a few knowledgebase articles and a few forum posts, and now I’m finally making some progress.

I would definitely say the not too intuitive process of doing things has contributed to my slow progress. I was able to add a category and product without much trouble, but I had no clue why they weren’t showing up on the site. It turns out that you have to add new categories under the default category. I started out not even using the default category and created my own. That was a headache solved by reading a forum post. So, now I have categories that are “anchored”, which is how they phrase adding the category to the nav bar. I can only imagine what fun I’ll be having with theming …

Something else that didn’t make sense right away was the difference between a “simple product” and a “configurable product”. It turns out that they are related rather than just plain different. As far as I can tell, you have to set up all the variations of a product first as simple products, and then you do some work with the configurable product settings. Since I built the now dead Bridesave.com site, I suppose I can use it as an example … If a wedding dress came in 12 shades of white, would I have to create 12 separate simple products? That doesn’t seem right since all the products are the same except for the color. And if each dress also came in 8 sizes, would I have to have each one of those in each of the 12 colors? That seems crazy, but actually now that I think about it, it is not uncommon to run out of a popular color in a popular size, and that would be the only way to make a variant unavailable.

Hmm, now that I am reflecting back on the Bridesave.com site, I think I built a pretty usable product. Someone took over the coding after me, but I think the major guts of the site were still mine. It definitely didn’t have the flexibility that Magento seems to have, but it was a custom job, and I only added what was requested.

One thing that I’m curious about with Magento is the API. I wonder what all it can do … On the other hand, just like Drupal, I think I’ll spend some time looking at what the community has already written before diving into the API.

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Leopard PHP with magento woes

Yeah, another woe post. haha.

I tried to install Magento Commerce onto my Leopard system (Apple OS 10.5.x) just now, and it complained about not having “pdo_mysql”, “gd”, and “mcrypt”. Oh, how I hate having to deal with compiling extensions and plugins! Now, I know why I don’t use a VPS for hosting. I hate having to mess with things like this.

As this is a system that I don’t want to play around with, I will leave it alone. It does what it needs to do, so I’ll leave it alone. I do seem to have a surplus of other computers that I can use for development. Perhaps I’ll upgrade one of them to Leopard and figure out how to get all the extensions to work properly. I’m sure there’s got to be a walk through out there somewhere!

For now, I guess I’ll play with Drupal + ubercart. I don’t think that requires anything special.

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TangoCMS / PHP-XML installation woes

I thought I’d give TangoCMS a try this weekend. I have used CodeIgniter and Kohana, and so I figured the TangoCMS which is built on a MVC framework was worth trying. I don’t know if there will ever be as many Zula developers as there are Kohana developers, so that could be an issue. Well, my needs for some projects are minimal, and this might fit the bill regardless.

During some freetime at BarCamp San Diego, I thought I’d try to install TangoCMS 2.1.2 onto my Acer Aspire One. I bought the Linpus version of the Aspire One since I wanted to do some occasional web development on it, I thought it’d be more appropriate than the XP version. As logical as that decision may have been, I ran into some snags getting the CMS up and running.

Apparently the PHP I installed a few months ago with “yum” was missing some XML components. It took a while to figure that out be/c my php_info() showed that I had “–with-xml”, which I assumed was what I needed. That might been true, but something else was awry, or perhaps I made things go awry …

I tried some different yum commands, and then finally thought I’d just remove the PHP instance. I was able to do that just fine, but when I tried to install PHP again, it installed version 5.2.4, which made no sense to me. It installed just fine, but when I checked the php info again, it was still showing 5.2.6, which meant that my apache2 config wasn’t noticing the new install. Grrr …

I didn’t want to muck around with the apache2 config, especially be/c I didn’t want to figure out where the various php installations were hiding. So, I just removed apache2 and reinstalled everything again with the “php-xml” flag. Lo and behold, that did work out, but of course I’m running v5.2.4 instead of the latest v5.2.6. Oh well, at least I can try things out now.

Thankfully, everything works well on my 12″ Powerbook, and I don’t have to mess around with much to do development work. Heh, I can’t say the same for my MacBook Pro after intalling Leopard. I think I have different MySQL instances floating around now.

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Barcamp San Diego - learning about improving memory

breath deeply - hand on chest and stomach, only the stomach should rise
eating - avoid snacks
sleeping - if you can’t get regular nights sleep, try power napping
before sleeping, review information during the day before going to sleep - done by Da Vinci … sounds like what I learned in psychology class; also try relaxing methods

colors are useful for giving fast clarity … like show all female words in red and all male words in blue
in verb conjugation, you can color code just parts of the word or the change to the base

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Barcamp San Diego - Trying Amazon EC2 now

I’m trying to start up a Amazon EC2 account right now.

ec2firefox.notlong.com - download elasticfox mozilla plugin.

ec2keys.notlong.com - need to give JS account some keys …

alestic.com - Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2

Keypairs tab

0.0.0.0/0 Network - Security Groups tab

provide a EC2 user id - eh?

Yah, a bit too complicated and costly for me. $72/month is unnecessary for my meager needs.

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Drupal acquia-marina theme woes

I’m sure a lot of people have been testing the new Drupal acquia marina theme. I just tried to install it on a 6.4 site, and it’s not working out so well. On a fresh install, it works just fine, but for my existing site, it’s coughing with “Fatal error: Call to undefined function taxonomy_get_vocabularies() /Users/overthis/Sites/icf/sites/all/themes/acquia_marina/template.php on line 339. So, I can only get to the admin section of the site now. All other areas give that error.

By commenting out the whole Taxonomy section of the template.php file, I can navigate to the rest of the site. It’s a quick fix, but it’s definitely not a long term one.

Hmm, turning on the taxonomy module has made the error go away, so I guess it’s a requirement.

The result … http://www.intervarsityicf.org

Although I’m a Mac user, I don’t actively check Safari all the time, but I did notice that my table elements were showing up as rather bold. They look fine in Firefox, and inspecting the css with Firebug didn’t show anything odd. I made the boldness go away by adding a “font-weight: normal” to the td at line 1448 of the style.css file. I guess somewhere it must have picked up a heavier font weight.

Addendum - 11/29/08: It’s been almost two months since installing Acquia, and everything has worked out fine.

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My First Drupal 6 Upgrade - Part 1

I’m using D6 on a couple sites already, but all of them were created from scratch. Starting from scratch doesn’t require any old content, modules and themes, so it’s a piece of cake.

Converting my work site, which is Drupal 5.9, hasn’t been such a cakewalk. I’m not tearing my hair out in frustration, but it’s definitely a process that requires going slowly. This partial write up will hopefully remind me of what needs to be done when I convert other sites over. The whole notion of skipping D6 is out there, but I think this will be a good exercise.

The first thing I did was tar and gzip the existing site and do a mysqldump on the database. Then I created a new entry in my “/etc/hosts” file, which I named “drupal63″. I also added the usual virtual host stuff to the “/etc/httpd/httpd.conf” file for “drupal63.” I create these new entries for all my development sites, so this was pretty routine. Next, I uncompressed the existing site into the “drupal63″ directory and imported the mysqldump into a new “drupal63″ database. At this point, I had a working backup of the existing Drupal 5 site.

With the “restoration” complete, I proceeded with the “upgrade”. I first renamed the “sites” directory to “sites5″ and “misc” directory to “misc5″ to preserve the directories. Then, I just copied over all the directories from an uncompressed version D6.3. I said OK to the overwriting of all duplicate files/folders, and then moved on. I kept an old version of the “misc” directory be/c there were a few special jquery files there. After I copied them to the new “misc” directory, I deleted the “misc5″ directory.

Next, I moved on to the “sites” directory. I copied the “sites/default/default.settings.php” to a new “sites/default/settings.php” file and edited the “db_url” and “base_url” lines to match my new virtual host and new mysql database. I also had to edit the “$update_free_access” variable to be TRUE since I was going to do the upgrade w/o being logged in first.

Then, I ran the “update.php” script and let it do it’s database updates. With all the updates, there was only one error, but since I don’t know much about why there’s a duplicate key, I’m not going to worry about it now …

Duplicate entry ‘2-0′ for key 1 query: ALTER TABLE term_node ADD PRIMARY KEY (tid, vid) in /Users/me/Sites/drupal63/includes/database.mysql-common.inc on line 374.”

Now, I had a pseudo working Drupal 6 version of the existing site. I had to make the “files” directory writeable at some point to make Drupal happy. The next task was to get my theme to work again. I’ll add that info in Part II. Part III will be about getting my modules to work.

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