Year end clearance

Happy New Year to all!

The last few weeks have been hectic! I seem to have been inundated with SPAM but Thunderbird is doing a good job of pitching it into the Junk folder (hmm, seems to attacking my Sourceforge email, time to obfuscate the email address). I've been having troubles with updating my web site. First my web host put in ssh session limits to deal with SSH attacks (that's understandable) but that messed up sitecopy when using rsh (via ssh), so I switched to sftp. Then Sitecopy's sftp broke, but only under Fedora 4 systems. It works on my Gentoo system (my web pages are stored under the Fedora system). My laptop's wireless network stopped working under Fedora. That one's easier to fix as I just noticed that I receive a kernel update (recompile, rebuild kernel, reinstall, argh!). Up2date broke (I fixed it).Some how I manage to get my Insteon PLC hosed (been playing too much with my driver code) and now I need to reload the core app. I also have 2 updated (V2.12) PLC's ordered and I hope they arrive soon. But in the mean time I haven't written the download code needed for Linux (I sort of has this book to write ...). I was hoping to get to that later. Now I can't load it from Windows because Windows doesn't recognize the USB serial port (but Linux does, hey ain't that backward?!? ;-)). I've ordered another serial port, hopefully Windows will recognize it! At least it can still send out X10 codes (that part has been working well). I think I've finally attacked the last of my X10 gremlins. Last but not least I've spent a lot of time working with PHP to make my web sites easier to update. I had been using make, Perl and shell scripts to update my previous pages. Kind of my own CMS. I've now switched to PHP and I've been making pretty good head way on it. To those that my be wondering, I use make to build the web pages when I've updated a small section. They're mostly static pages, maybe daily updates. Make updates only the pages that are affected by the changes. Then sitecopy pushes the pages out to my websites and I have a local copy that I work with. I need to do a little more work with CCS and convert everything to XHMTL 1.0 or 1.1 but so far the redesign has been going pretty well. I have a few ideas for making the pages look a little nicer and I'm trying to par down the immense.size of the all-in-one page (~110K) to make it easier to look at and find information. I still keep the all-in-one page as others may want to look at that instead. Besides with my scripts it east to build the pages.

Well that's it for now, I'm currently working on the wireless network chapter (the kernel change made a mess of that!). My mind aches and I've got lots of work ahead. My brain aches!