The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

Today was "update stuff that hasn't been updated for years" day. It started out well enough, I updated the installation of eFiction on Hafoc's website and things went swimmingly. There's a  major update on that forthcoming, slowly, and I'm sure all the problems I didn't have today will show up then.

Then I went to work on Omnifariously Knotty and pretty much crashed and burned.

My problem there is that I dearly love the layout theme, but it's not been updated in over two and a half years. I've used some tweaks that other people have created, or tried to. One works (the date tabs include year for posts over a year old), but the one I worked on again today worked only partially. It was supposed to wrap the main content under the second column to use some of the wasted space as you scroll down. Well it worked great on the "home" page but when I when I checked it on the Categories page and the About page... nope. The content ran under the second column. No matter how often I look at the assorted template files I can't see why it works on home.php and not on categories.php or any of the other files that I tweaked. It's one line added to them, not exactly a lot of room in that for errors.

There is also a much more annoying problem with that layout. I've installed the OpenID plugin on my instance of WordPress but the layout doesn't display the option to use it. I poked and fiddled with the comments.php file today to try to get that fixed. That also didn't go well. I need to learn how to use php with forms (or at all really) and figure out how to construct the if/else loop in there to drop through the options of having a login account (which no one has other than me), supplying an email address, or using OpenID. Sure, as the site stands now people can use a name and email to comment, but I'd really, really like to have OpenID as an option.

Maybe I should just go looking for a different layout theme. *sigh*

Well I've managed to tag all my posts in 2004, soon the whole of my journal will be tagged and easily searchable.

For those that noticed that my email and websites (and everything hosted on my website and linked here) are down, I know why now. It seems my admin moved and didn't bother to warn me of the expected server outage. I managed to find a mutual friend that knew of the move and according to him the server should be back up sometime tomorrow. I'm guessing the hold up is the DSL connection at the new location since my admin hosts the server in his home.

But we all know that. And really this has less to do with ME than with baby Gateway boxen. I believe I mentioned that I wiped out ME and put 2kPro on my brother's machine. And it was working pretty nice, right up until I managed to download AVG and install it. It found a virus immediately but that wasn't a surprise given how long the machine had been up and online trying to download AVG in the first place. The surprise, and problem, started when I walked away from the machine while it was scanning.

I came back to a black screen with a dump of memory displayed. Remembering that I had not disabled the screensaver before walking away I just rebooted, turned off the screensaver, and restarted the scan. It dumped memory again scanning some ntoskrl file. Great. Rebooted again and sat through some very unsettling noises from the hard drive. Boot failed with a memory dump. It was late, and hot, so I turned it off and went to bed.

Booted up fine today, so I saved the AVG install file to the thumbdrive so I wouldn't have to download it again, and started poking around. Found remnants of the WinME installation. Crud. Started a reinstall of 2k, this time I decided to reformat the partition rather than just opting for a "clean install". Drive failure halfway through the format. I've tried everything but the thing is just not recoverable.

Needless to say my brother is not happy. Note that if he had bothered to call me before taking it into his head to pay someone $300 to "fix" his computer he wouldn't be out that $300 plus the cost of a new PC, he's just be out the cost of a new PC. But he "knows" ME (as in it doesn't scare him silly any longer, just makes me swear at it more) so he was against the idea of a new PC running anything other than ME.

We have a cousin that is continually replacing her PCs, she's got a decent one she's willing to sell. Unfortunately I think $500 is a bit much for it since the one I got back in March was that much and was new, not a year or two old. I'll have to cram some comparison shopping into the next couple hours and a few hours tomorrow. Ideally I'd like to have his replacement here and set up by tomorrow late afternoon at the absolute latest. That way I can set up the dialup connection, email, and his printer and scanner. Gods know that no one else in the family is up to that, and I'd rather he didn't pay the rip-off artist to work on his new PC.

I need a KMFMS shirt or something.

My VLC problems? Microsoft's driver update of the nVidia audio codec interface. The first "audio problem" entry in the VLC forums was my exact problem. Considering that in most forums about video playback the "audio problem" is a lack of appropriate codec I really wasn't expecting my solution to be handed to me so easily.