Month: May 2004

PBS messing with my head

One of my daughter’s favorite television programs these days is called Dragon Tales. Among the animated cast is an adult dragon with a gravelly voice. His name is Queztal, which sounds exactly like ketzel, a word from my childhood that is about as far from gravelly-voiced adult dragons as you can get. Literally ketzel (or ketzele) means “kitten” but my mother often used it as a term of endearment for me and my brothers, something akin to “little one”. The juxtaposition throws me into minor confusion every time.

Dave points to news that WordPress 1.2 is released. I happen to have “famp” installed on a garage server and decided to give it a try. WordPress has a simple web-based installer that initially failed because I hadn’t granted the database user permission to create tables. To grant permission you have to log as someone who has permission to grant permission (root). My poor mysql instance was so little used that I actually forgot the root password. Here’s how you reset a forgotten mysql root password. Thanks to Scott for helping me figure out the correct granting syntax (“grant privilege on database.* to user@host;”) and for the various mysql pointers. After that it was pretty smooth sailing. Maybe 45 minutes start to finish for a vanilla installation, including finding and reading the installation docs. I haven’t had chance to do much of a test drive. I’ll write more when I do.

Getting ready for Iceland

Midweek I’m leaving for Iceland. The purpose is tourism and I won’t be bringing a laptop, so it’s going to get quiet here for a little while. Hey, look at this, a class on weblogs at the University of Iceland! Are they still in session?
Lara tells me that the Landmark guide is the pick of our coffeetable. I’ve started thumbing through it and learned a bit about the local alphabet, diet and electrical connectors.
Let’s see how my weblog authoring software handles the Icelandic alphabet. ð sounds like “th” as in “father”. þ sounds like “th” as in “think”. Easy, ay?

It was a small but lively Thursday meeting at Berkman tonight. In attendance were Shimon, Bob, Lisa, Bill, Jill and yours truly. The beginning was kind of a comedy of errors because nobody from Harvard was there so we couldn’t log in to the PC. Jill had a laptop but couldn’t get on line at first, and then we couldn’t plug her macintosh into the video system because its video connector was different from the projector’s. Shimon found an open wireless gateway and then Lisa came to the rescue with a Thinkpad. Hooray! Bob has promised to post his notes.