Sometimes the reforming radicals are those
who also seek to conserve.

Having been used for little but mass storage and updating my Road Angel via VMWare, my Workstation was in need of TLC.

I consolidated my Windows programs onto Parallels on the Mac, disposing of VMWare and Beth’s old Celeron (!) sloth. Impressively, both the Road Angel and Garmin GPS just worked via USB to Parallels.

Replaced White Box Enterprise Linux with CentOS, another reroll of RHEL. Straightforward enough, if time consuming, downloading ISOs, burning, validating, backing up, blah, blah. Chose SE Linux, and now restoring my server processes.

A nice feature was the partitioning tool, which trivially allowed me to keep my old partitioning scheme, transferring my home and backup partitions unmolested. Always glad not to need the tapes.

I just discovered that the Mac comes with a program called Comic Life that makes it really easy to assemble photos into comics and publish them on your .Mac homepage:

http://homepage.mac.com/stevenjbaker/comiclife/

Why must people deviate from proper standards?

Installing WordPress on a Mac caused me some grief simply because telling PHP to connect to the database at localhost didn’t work. Who would have thought that localhost couldn’t be resolved? I was saved because Beth was ironing my “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″ T-shirt, prompting me to give it a go.

OS X also does something culpable with the “local” domain, using it for rendezvous or something (it’s been a while since it troubled me).

I’m pretty sure this nonsense has consumed and made worse quite a few hours of my life. I wonder what the cost is globally?

Anyway, bottom line, use 127.0.0.1 in Mac configurations if stuff doesn’t work, particularly if you are installing WordPress and by implication PHP or MySQL.

So, the hard drive on my server failed in February – of course I had a backup – and it’s taken me this long to restore my sites. The trouble with working is…

March was fairly adventure-free apart from, inevitably, motorcycling.

April saw me return to Spain to finish my initial freefall training. It was going so well, until they took the plane away. I actually completed with my tenth consolidation jump at Skydive London – http://www.skydivelondon.co.uk. I’m now sitting here as an “experienced” (ha ha) skydiver, waiting for my next load

Apart from that, there have been new tyres on the BMW, rides with friends, HPC coaching and of course, enjoying the KTM. It’s a hard life.

Apart from installation falling over on permissions (of course), using WordPress, is, in the words of my beloved mechanics teacher, a Mr Atkinson, “Too easy for words.”