So I finally took the plunge this weekend and converted my home FreeBSD workstation/server to have a single root ZFS partition.  Setting it up was something of a challenge, but in hindsight the steps were pretty easy.

When I was a kid, we had a 55-gallon fish tank in our living room.  Since then, I've almost always had a fish tank everywhere I've lived.  Up until now, I've lived in apartments or rentals that had something like a 10-gallon limit, so my tanks have been pretty small.

I was just flipping through some old XKCD comics and I found this one:

I decided to switch my site away from WordPress. I'm going to start using Drupal's built-in blog software in the interest if reducing the number of software packages that I have to keep up-to-date. I'm going to try to do the same with my Photo Gallery and I'd like to do the same with my YouTube videos too. We'll see how that goes.

Just as a heads-up for anyone trying to use OpenOffice to read and write documents over NFS on FreeBSD, you should make sure that you have the following in your /etc/rc.conf file:

nfs_client_enable=”yes”
rpc_lockd_enable=”yes”
rpc_statd_enable=”yes”
rpcbind_enable=”yes”

I was getting an error that said “General input/output error while accessing /foo/bar/whatever.odt” before I turned those options on.

Recently I was reminded of something that I find interesting: the conviction with which people can be convinced that a web site design is bad and the inability for them to put forth any concrete reasons as to why.

Just to be clear: when I say design, I mean graphical design, not information architecture.

I'm completely astounded that after all these years, there still isn't a good library for creating semi-complex PDF files from PHP.  We've been using DomPDF for a while, which more or less works but is incredibly slow and breaks frequently especially when tables are involved.  I've also tried the HTML2PS / PS2PDF route which is a little more robust but equally slow and produces inferior quality output (and requires system() or exec() calls, which aren't allowed on our servers).  I'm evaluating TCPDF right now, which also seems like a bust.

I have one of those small goose-neck halogen lamps on my desk.  It's been here since we moved the office into the spare room a few months ago, and the lamp is actually quite older than that.  I was sitting at my desk just now (2:15am) working away when I noticed the light starting to flicker.  I wasn't really surprised as the power grid in Santa Cruz sucks, so I just figured we were having some sort of power fluctuation.  My first instinct was to look closer at the lamp, but now I'm glad I did not: a few seconds after is started flickering, it exploded violently, sending

So I spent some time upgrading my home server/workstation over the holiday break, and I'm proud to say that I've now got a terabyte workstation, and shortly it will be a mirrored terabyte!  So now my home computer is also a FreeBSD workstation, just like my workstation at work.  Woot!  I feel so...open source!

I found the following web page that details how to install Flash in FreeBSD without using the Linux compatability layer:

http://www.riondabsd.net/2007/05/23/flash-on-freebsd-using-gnash/

That page is slightly out of date; there is a new version of Firefox, for one thing.  Basically, the procedure is to install the following ports:

www/firefox35
graphics/gnash
multimedia/mplayer
www/mplayer-plugin