I frequently defend the quality of services that you provide. You have a lot of enemies out there, but my experience has been positive. Your management tools are very simple and intuitive, especially when compared to GoDaddy (I don’t know WHAT is going on with their admin tools, but they’re getting better.).

Even your mail service is top notch. When using email clients, I rarely have problems receiving or sending emails. Good stuff.

However, I have recently been forced to use your Webmail service when away from home and it is a horrible experience. Why?

1. Webmail login page does not have a simple URL that is easy to remember
2. Interface is sluggish
3. The plain text writing tool: cursor falls behind/gets out of sync with typing
4. Webmail service is frequently unavailable

Otherwise, with the address book, other features and the overall design, your webmail could be a great product. These four issues (and I’m sure there could be more) diminish any other positives. If you could address the service availability at the very least it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Jason Simanek

The brake pedal is connected to at least one button for turning the brake lights on and off. As the pedal is released, the button is depressed. As the pedal is pressed, the button is released. When the button is depressed, the lights go off. When the button is released, the lights go on.

In the case of my wife’s 1996 Ford Escort, there is a small, blue rubber pad on the ‘contact plate’ that the brake light button presses against. The reason I was looking under the dashboard in the first place is because my wife asked if maybe the blue rubber filings and rubber pad that she recently found on the driver-side floorboard might have something to do with her brake light problem. She was right after all.

Since the pad had fallen off of the contact plate the button was not getting depressed far enough to turn off the lights when the brake pedal was released. The solution is to replace the little blue pad. I was not able to find out what this thing was called or even if you could buy one without replacing the entire brake light switch.

The rubber pad worked like a ladies ear ring. It had a little nub on the back that fit into a hole in the contact plate. Probably due to age, this nub broke off and created a big headache for me. In order to avoid visiting the Ford dealer I simply reconnected the nub with some super glue and, after a lot of sweating upside down under the steering wheel, snapped the blue pad back in place. It’s been a few days. So far the super glue is still holding the rubber pad together. My wife’s brake lights are back in action.

UPDATE

Well, the repaired rubber pad didn’t last long: 2 days. Now it’s broken into several pieces.

But I came up with a better solution. This time I rebuilt the pad using a foam-based wine bottle cork, a circle cut-out in heavy coated paper (a better surface for the button to press against) and the original pad’s little stem. All assembled with super glue. Let’s see how long this one lasts.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Reading Design

and at the bottom of that article his short bio states that he is the creator of Textpattern, a website CMS that I’ve been learning to develop with recently.

I love discovering that two people I find interesting are actually one person.

Once we get to that point I ask a them a few questions about how they use their personal computer. This recent situation called for compact disc booklet templates and a greeting card making application. In order to avoid complexity I rarely tell non-designers/tech geeks to give Inkscape, Scribus or the GIMP a try. What this means is finding some specialized application that makes the desired task super simple. If that isn’t available I turn to OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is surprisingly versatile and effective at the same time. There are also hidden benefits to using it, like dynamically generating letters for a small company with the power of OO’s mail merge tools or using embedded spreadsheets to create tables of data within a layout. Cool stuff that the professional-focused graphics tools leave to more specialized programs.

The end result, anyway, is that I decided to create some templates for OpenOffice. The related templates that the usual search engines pointed me to were not very good, so I thought providing these as free downloads might be helpful to some folks out there. What I have is a CD Booklet and Tray template and a Greeting Card template for OpenOffice Draw. Enjoy.

1. Compact Disc Booklet + Tray template
2. Greeting Card template

www.purevoice.com

If you don’t know how bittorrent works, basically the more people joining in to download the better. So as my contribution I am offering the torrent files for download as well since even the torrent file page on Ubuntu’s site isn’t coming up. Things are moving quickly too. I just downloaded the Desktop version for i386 in twenty minutes!

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron torrent files

• 8.04 Desktop (i386)
• 8.04 Desktop (AMD64)
• 8.04 Alternate (i386)
• 8.04 Alternate (AMD64)

(right-click and Save As to your desktop, then open file with bittorrent client of your choice.)

So far, I feel like this isn’t a bad night’s work in adapting an existing style from a ground-up site to a WordPress template. I hope the site remains to be usable during this transition period.

My primary interest in creating this is to help people like me, that are not formally educated in programming. The abstract concept of version control is not difficult to understand or appreciate, but I have found that learning to use version control applications like Subversion or GIT without guidance is difficult.

You DO have to be familiar with command line basics. Remind me to write a glossary for the command line similar to this one.

Don’t forget the excellent Subversion book that is FREE: Version Control with Subversion. There is also the very useful act of typing svn help into the terminal.

Create a Repository

svnadmin create /home/jason/mySVNrepo

Create an SVN repository named “mySVNrepo” in my user directory.

Adding a New Project (Set of Files) to Your Repository

svn import /home/jason/genweb [one space] file:///home/jason/mySVNrepo -m "initial import"

Add/Import the directory “genweb” to the “mySVNrepo” repository with the log message (-m) of “initial import”

Log Message

A Log Message is a description of the changes associated with a particular action. A log message can be

A brief statement: -m "initial import"

An entire text file: -F MyLogMessage.txt

Check Out a Copy from the Repository

svn checkout file:///home/jason/mySVNrepo [one space] /home/jason/MyWorkingCopy

You cannot work directly on the files saved in the repository. To make changes you must first Check Out a copy (like a Public Library) of the files in the repository. The checked out copy will be saved in the directory “MyWorkingCopy”

Command Line Basics

Before you go any further it is important that you understand how to use the command line.

• The Command Line Interface (C.L.I.) is a way of interfacing with a computer operating system by way of commands that are expressed with lines of text. This is in contrast with the much more common Graphical User Interface (G.U.I.), a way of interfacing with a computer operating system by way of commands that are expressed with graphical menu selections or the movement of the mouse.
• The CLI generally operates in a certain context: a file directory (or “folder” for those of you coming in from a GUI ). In the world of *NIX the most common CLI is called the “Bash Terminal”. In this terminal the context is stated before the flashing cursor: jason@NEWHOTNESS:∼$ This means that the user is jason, the machine is NEWHOTNESS and the ∼ is shorthand for the active user’s home directory.
• You can change the directory in which you are working with the change directory command. For example:
  cd ∼/Desktop will move the CLI context to my desktop directory and indicate that it has done so like this: jason@NEWHOTNESS:∼/Desktop$
• Similar to HTML, the CLI can refer to files in two ways: absolute locations and relative locations. The change directory command allows you to move to the directory where the files you wish to act on are located. This saves you the trouble of typing out the entire absolute file path every time you execute a command.
• To accomplish the following, it is necessary to change to the directory of your working copy. Some of these Subversion commands need context.

Check Status

svn status

Will retreive feedback on the status of your working copy files in relationship to those in the repository.

Status/Attribute Shorthand

• A = Added
• C = Conflicted
• D = Deleted
• I = Ignored
• M = Modified
• U = Update
• R = Replaced
• X = item is unversioned
• ? = item is not under version control
• ! = item is missing
• ∼ = versioned item obstructed

Subversion uses letters to represent the relationship of your files to those in the repository. The ones that say a file is “unversioned” or not under version control illustrate that the actions of adding, moving or deleting files in the repository must be accomplished with the SVN application rather than your operating system’s file browser.

Update to Match Repository

svn update

Update your source to match the latest version in the repository, notifying you of every updated/added/deleted file as well as updates that may conflict with your own changes to the source.

Resolve Resulting Conflicts from Update

svn resolved '~/DevFolder/sourceFile.py'

After you have resolved the conflicts identified by Subversion, you have to tell it that you have done so.

Create Patch File

svn diff >> PatchName.patch

If you are not on the developer list for a project, you will most likely not be able to commit your changes directly to the repository. In this situation you can email or post a ‘patch’ file. The patch file is a very concise text file containing a description of the changes you have made, what file they are in and where in that file they can be found.

http://ghosts.nin.com

I gladly downloaded the free sample tracks to check it out. I’m not quite sure if I’ll purchase more or not. The true test is how entertaining the songs are while I’m sitting still on the interstate trying to get home from work in downtown Nashville.

It’s no secret that Mr. Reznor works on a Mac. I think in one of the boxed sets he’s even distributing the album songs in the GarageBand.app format to make it easy to create remixes. No offense, but I’d be more impressed if he offered them in Audacity format. Him distributing gBand files like that… well he might as well be on Apple’s payroll.

But let’s not be ungrateful bastards. He’s certainly one of the few popular artists today that understands how giving some of his source files away under a Creative Commons License is an excellent way to promote his cult of personality. Hats off.

With that said, finding a folder named ‘_MACOSX’ in the free download ZIP archive is still amusing. I wonder, does the Finder window look really cool when you open this free MP3 folder? Or is this just the side effect of how carefully they prep a ZIP archive for mass distribution? “Oh hey, let’s get that on the site tonight”.

[ right-click/Create Archive]