In my last post, I whinged about things not making sense with getting the data off my glucose meter. Well tonight I realised what was wrong. Somehow my monitor's date got set for a day ahead of the current date. The PC software that came with it is stupid and only wants to know about dates that are current and not in the future. OK, so I suppose that's the way it's programmed, but a good program should have told me my meter had dates in the future that it wasn't going to import. At least then I would have had a clue. I only discovered this when I wrote down all 25 readings on the meter tonight before importing the data and then marking the dates on each. So I tricked the software by changing the date on my laptop to tomorrow's date so everything would get imported from this batch of readings. Then before importing to the database that shows everything on the web page, I manually adjusted the date. Pity I didn't notice about the times until later... at some point I changed the setting on the meter to use 12hr time. Big mistake. It got it's AM and PM confused and so I had a bunch of 6am readings I marked as 'fasting'. Turns out those were probably my pre-tea readings. So have put the monitor back to 24hr time, and after uploading the data and making sure I hadn't lost anything, I deleted the data on the meter so my next readings should have the right date and time. I'll have to keep an eye on it though - the date & time could be getting changed inside my case when I've got it in my purse.
The reason why I had 25 readings on the meter is because 1) I was afraid to try downloading the data after last weeks fiasco, and since last Friday, I've been otherwise occupied with installing Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn on my computer. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution, and I've heard and read lots of good things about it, and I was a bit annoyed with my previous distribution - Debian - since it hadn't been updated for so long. I had quite a few issues I hoped that Feisty would resolve for me. For example, I have a 4 port USB port, but none of the ports have worked with Debian for months now despite my attempts to resolve the problem. I knew it was a software thing because I could use a 'live' Ubuntu CD and have access to the USB ports without a problem. So it wasn't the hardware. I also had problems with my Email software, Evolution. I couldn't upgrade it on Debian due to library issues and it had bugs that were fixed in newer versions but not being able to upgrade meant I just had to deal with the bugs as best I could. Most of the time it just meant closing and reloading the program, but you shouldn't have to do that several times a day.
So Friday, I stayed home to be a geek. My first order of business was to make backups of my essential files. Unfortunately this took most of the day but those backups have been a good investment as they've saved me heaps of time in getting things back to how I like to have my computer set up. I didn't finish backing up to DVD/CD until about 10pm Friday night and then started an install on a USB Hard Drive. It took ages and then it turned out as I finally sorted out on Saturday morning that my computer BIOS says I can boot from the USB HD, but reality says 'No'. So I installed on my computer, and actually made it so the drives I didn't want formatted weren't visible or 'installed' so that I didn't have to worry about losing Gigs of music and downloads. That went much smoother and faster.
My next order of business was to get mail set up. I'm not a typical user. I don't just have my mail program do a POP3 poll for mail on the server. Oh no, I had to install Exim4 (a Mail Transport Agent), procmail and fetchmail so that I could have the same arrangement as I've been using. Fetchmail uses Pop to go out and get mail for me from my main server at VCSWEB and also my Yahoo account, and then passes the mail onto Exim4 which is a mail server, and that in turn looks to procmail and my procmail filter file to sort my mail into various folders (and I have a LOT - all neatly organised). This actually went quite well as I had my previous mail spool and all my folders copied over. The nice thing is once everything is set up (in the right order) and running, it's all done behind the scenes. Fetchmail runs as a daemon and every 5-10 minutes goes out and collects the mail and the other programs just deal with it for me.
Where I ran into problems was in copying over my older config files for Evolution (my mail program). Some how the file permissions were wacked and I actually CRASHED the computer (something that only happens very rarely with Linux) when I tried to convert an Email to a task (what a cool thing to have as an option!) and the task directory wasn't writeable. Everything has worked fine once I fixed the file permissions on like every file in my home directory (so it seemed).
I was able to easily work out what I needed to do to get my webcams working on the new system. It only required one line in the /etc/modprobe.d options file. I had jotted down the two key pieces of information (card number and tuner type) from my old system which saved me hours of trying to figure it out again as we've been through this exercise a few times in the past.
The only snag was that when I rebooted after making the change, somehow the system lost my 'window manager' (metacity) and that made it so I only had one window to work in, and there were no tops on program windows so I could resize or move them and things like alt-tab didn't work to switch between windows/running programs. I found the answer to the problem using Google and fixed it. I had to add metacity to the list of files that get run when I log in and then re-log in. Worked a charm. I'm sure a newbie wouldn't have been able to work that one out though.
The very first bit of software I installed was mc (midnight commander) as I'd be lost without it. Basically it's a file browser that runs in text mode, and shows two directories at once so you can copy from one to the other etc.. It has a lot of built in things though like a text editor and you can look into archived files with it, copy files from archives to where ever and run all kinds of commands on files. The only thing is that I use it both as root and as 'me' but Ubuntu doesn't have a root login, so there's no home directory for root. This means that the configuration settings for mc (like being able to store frequently used directories to get to them quickly) keeps disappearing for either user (me or root). I have to admit the graphic file browser that comes with Ubuntu is quite nice, but having screwed stuff up in the past with graphic file browsers, I tend to use mc instead as it's safer -- for me.
I'd wondered if my little script that I found online to make the backgrounds change every few minutes would work with Ubuntu but no worries. So I have all my nice family photos and other neat pics as my background and it changes every 5 minutes or so.
I'm also a bit weird. I don't mind using Gnome, but there are certain KDE programs that I must have available. KDE and Gnome are desktop managers - each are different and come with their own base programs. For web design work, I prefer to use Quanta which is part of KDE, and I also prefer to use Konsole for my term (this lets me type commands and use MC and such). Gnome's term uses different key strokes for certain things and it messes up my ability to use mc which uses the F-keys and Esc key for many of it's functions. I didn't have any problems installing either Quanta or Konsole, and was pleased that it didn't like it had to do a complete install of all of KDE just so I could use these two programs. It only installed what was actually required.
And Quanta is MUCH more responsive. I've no idea what version I had and what one I've upgraded to, but what a huge difference.
I spent last night trying to get Samba going the way we want it to work here. Samba is a server that lets other computers connect to my machine to share folders. I need it to require a user name and password for our personal directories and so far I haven't succeeded in getting this going, and that's despite having our previous config files. I'll keep at it though.
So what with the bug fixes in Evolution and a faster Quanta program plus other nice touches, today I finally feel like I've accomplished more than a few things that have needed doing. Having the ability to save a list of tasks is essential for me - my short term memory is horrible these days. Being able to organise tasks and just the nice feeling of crossing them off the list is a great feeling. I still have lots to do and catch up on. I haven't read the mail from the various mailing lists I'm on since Friday, and because I reorganised where I store the web sites I work on, I need to do a lot of work in setting up the 'projects' in Quanta for the sites I'm responsible for (it's only about 20 different sites!). Meanwhile though, I'm just tackling things as they come.
Tonight I compiled the two little programs that I use, and finally got my glucose readings online since I hadn't done this since last Thursday. I also added more postcards to the Flickr site. I had 4 come in today. One was from a lovely teenager in Germany. All of them had neat stickers on the back too. I've put a link on the sidebar for the blog here to the Postcards on Flickr, and also earlier today added this link to the sidebar of my website.
Basically, I've just plain been getting things DONE, and that's a nice feeling!!
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