Charlie Page.net

Charlie Page.net - Random: I'm on Linux

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:17:39 CDT

Okay so I got on my Laptop Sunday night and I turn on my PC to encounter a scary "Operating System Not Found" error with only a black background. Long story short I was doing a heck of a lot of googling and was finding from an error in windows to my hard drive being dead. (bad, very very bad) As I was searching I remembered my friend Zach was going to be setting up Linux on this server he was working on, in a random thought I figured downloading it.

I was actually moments away from removing the HD and checking it out when I flip up the laptop and see that the Hard Drive is sticking out, I push it back in and see that two screws are missing. I turned it on to see it working fine and I couldn't find the screws, I can't imagine them just coming out somehow and I had my Laptop turned sideways that day, so I realized why I didn't notice the missing screws until now.

Alright, so anyways, even with Windows running I figured I'd give Linux a shot. I've always said that I wanted to give it a shot sometime and I had downloaded it onto my Flash Drive, so I went ahead and burned it onto a CD and installed it on my Laptop. After getting it running, I'm impressed! I'm using a type of Linux called "Ubuntu".

It took a bit of work to get all my programs (that I need) up and running, but overall I have few complaints. I love the way it's structured, the speed and pre-loaded programs. Most of my gripes have been fixed with little searching and the fact that PHP, Apache, etc. is built-in is just awesome!

So I guess the question is if I'd reccommend it to others? I'd say yes for those that know there way around windows and such. As much as Linux has advanced to be user-friendly, some things require using the terminal (but not much) and if you're looking for an OS for low-medium computer users, windows is a no brainer. But for the tech savy, Linux is at least worth a try.

Now back to coding!

Charlie Page.net - Politics: Keep an eye on Pakistan

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:56:59 CDT

I'm a HUGE news guy, especially middle east news and I'm always watching out to see what's going to be big news or at least something that I have to keep an eye out for, news wise. Although the media coverage will probably be weak, the one area you have to keep an eye on is Pakistan.

I posted a little over a month ago questioning whether Pakistan could even be an ally - Pakistan is an ally?

At the time I thought it was a big deal, but it would cool down - wrong. Just two weeks after my blog I saw quite an interesting article on The Long War Journal:

Northwest Pakistan descends into chaos

In a nutshell, not only is Pakistan struggling to keep control of some areas of there own country, but in several areas they have no control and in others, are losing control. Ironically one story that was heavily reported was when 9 US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, one story that has not been heavily reported is that once again the US was fired upon from fighters inside Pakistan - US returns fire on Taliban inside Pakistan. So what's all this mean?

Although I think it's for political reasons, Obama is right to shift the focus to Afghanistan. We can send over 10,000 troops and that would help, but it's also a situation that requires a second aspect being fixed - Pakistan. How? That's the un-answered question.

The ISI (Pakistan Intelligence) is often said to have at least element cooperating with the Taliban, at minimum. Musharaf won't be in power for that much longer and he's not in a situation where he can do that much.

A prime example is the Indian Embassy bombing in Afghanistan, more than 60 killed. Shortly after there were articles questioning Pakistans involvement - Is ISI behind Kabul embassy blast?. However the tip of that iceberg was the Afghanistan President, Hamid Karzai, publicly accused Pakistani agents of involvement in the embassy bombing, specifically even the ISI of orchestrating attacks in Afghanistan - Link. I'll keep updated on this topic and I recommend all readers do the same.

Charlie Page.net - Entertainment: Television is good again

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:06:15 CDT

As I've previously said, I'm kind of, well I'm a TV nut. I'm somewhat picky, or maybe I'm right in thinking that a lot of crap is on TV. If your favorite shows getting cancelled isn't bad enough, once Summer hits it's the worst time for Television.

Luckily with Fall so far away, Television fans get a reprieve. Two shows are coming back, one about an hour form now and the other tomorrow (Friday) night at 10 PM EST. The first show was my 2nd favorite new show of 2007, "Burn Notice". Great show, great action, great acting and everything else - very much a high quality show with a mix of action (a lot of it), humour and very good story lines.

Show #2 is successor (well, kinda) to the longest-running Science Fiction show in the US, Stargate Atlantis. I admit it isn't as good as SG-1 Season 1-8, but it's still a very good show. I know this kind of sounds like an advertisement, but it isn't. The lack of good TV shows in the summer has always been disappointing, but it's good to see some good television!

Also a bit of a tidbit, I'll be doing kind of mini-movie reviews here. A little while ago I thought of doing an entertainment website, with movie reviews among other things. So nothing big, but sometimes I get to see a movie or two earlier so lookout. Will be doing Ark of Truth and Continuum shorty.

Charlie Page.net - Updates: Monthly Recap - June 08

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:56:22 CDT

The "Monthly Recap" is a monthly post that looks at my projects and websites to see how they are doing. Statistics is a major part, however other things such as new users, number of articles and other things are also factors. Here it is for June 2008:

Insane Visions

IV had a solid June. According to analytics and adaptcms, stats were down a pretty small margin, down quite a bit according to Awstats.

I'm happy that a total of 6 articles were posted (1 blog, 1 tutorial), but I'll try and have 2 tutorials in July. Up

AdaptCMS

Thank goodness for my 2nd favorite AdaptCMS 1.3 feature, stats archive! 3 stats programs to use.

According to both Awstats and Analytics, June was down from May, but better than April. AdaptCMS (the script :p) says that it was down a lot from April and a bit from May.

Stats should go up in July with the release of 1.3, hopefully also (finally) getting on opensourcecms. Mixed

Charlie Page.net - Politics: Hamas keeps truce for 5 days

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:11:32 CDT

I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I honestly thought that this newest truce between Hamas and Israel wouldn't last a day, heck I wouldn't of been surprised to hear that it was blown in an hour. (I think that's happened before...) But somehow it took 5 days for Hamas to violate the cease-fire agreement.

AP Story - Rockets fired at Israel from Gaza shake truce

Depite at times the media having trouble covering anything related to Isreal fairly, I was surprised to see the only one who had a little trouble was MSNBC - Link. It's kind of funny how they go from reporting the story fine and then take a deep dive. Let's take a look:

"Militants in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip fired at least two rockets into southern Israel on Tuesday, breaching a five-day-old cease-fire."

I still have no idea why groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are regarded only as "militants" and not "terrorists", but whatever. Anyway, starting out it looks good.

"The attack came hours after Israeli troops killed two Palestinians in a West Bank raid. The victims included an Islamic Jihad commander. The militant group later claimed responsibility for firing the rockets, saying the attack was intended to avenge the Israeli operation."

Okay, a prelude to the violation, that's good to note.

"The West Bank is not formally part of the Gaza truce. But the Israeli raid could be seen as violating the spirit of the cease-fire."

See, this is why I went through the first few paragraphs. We go from the general situation to a crafty two sentences where the writer actually says that the area Israel had the raid (West Bank) was "not formally part of the Gaza truce", then preceeded to say that it could be considered as a violation of the truce. (or the spirit of it, whatever that means)

It truly is crafty writing. "not formally" part of the truce in reality means the West Bank is NOT part of the truce, period. Then "violating the spirit of the cease-fire" means that actually they may have violated the cease-fire.

As part of the cease-fire, Hamas claimed responsibility to keep the other groups in check (they are in charge, after all). This means that they didn't and it violates the cease-fire, Hamas being the one that broke it. To end this post, I leave you with a pretty funny headline from "Ace of Spades HQ":

MSNBC: Israel Violates Hamas Ceasefire By Allowing Itself to Be Attacked By Rockets

Charlie Page.net - Updates: Working on AdaptCMS, AdaptBB

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:48:19 CDT

It seems like AdaptCMS is almost a constant thing to work on. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad thing, though I seem to have to take breaks more often, but that's also probably because I still have so many websites. AdaptCMS 1.3 is going to be an even bigger version than v1.2, with quite a few big new features.

Form Builder Plugin, Enhanced Stats, Read Me (a BIG one) and my favorite - the File Release System. You can see some of the juicy details here. I still have yet to do the Subscriptions, finish the Read Me and a few small things, but I'll have plenty of time with the Beta releasing this week.

If working on a big release of a CMS wasn't enough work, I've decided to start back work on AdaptBB. I had the dilemna of either letting adaptbb.com go (likely forever) or renew, at minimum I'd eventually do a forum script. I went ahead and renewed it.

With working on a 2nd script again, I'm looking very much forward to working on AdaptBB, I plan on using some extent of OOP. (would be the first time) At this point it's mostly planning, from features, DB structure, file setup, skins, etc. I'll be sure to keep updated here and at Insane Visions.

Charlie Page.net - Entertainment: Firefox 3

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:08:09 CDT

For anyone that knows me (or has read any blog of mine), they know I'm a big tech guy. I know computers very well (internally...not so much), I code in PHP and love programming and websites. I also just like technology in general, from AJAX on the web to the United States missile shield, technology fascinates me.

In a much smaller form, the web, I am a HUGE firefox fan. After the horrible experience of using IE for year, a friend told me about Firefox and I haven't turned back. When the Firefox 2.0 beta came out I tried it out and well...wasn't impressed. It was basically the same thing as before, except a few small changes. But Firefox v2 was recently giving me trouble, so I figured I would do a re-install. But then I thought, might as well give the Firefox 3 Beta try and I'm glad I did.

Whereas the jump from 1.5 or whatever to 2.0 seemed to not be substantial, 3.0 is. There are so many changes, from a very nice new skin to a new bookmark system. Being a beta, of course, some extensions are not compatible, but most of mine are.

There is also a sleuw of small changes, from an option to always have the tab bar on (no need for a bookmark "blank"), extension reccommendations based on what you have

Talking further about bookmarks, not only can you use tags, but to the right of the URL in the Navigation Bar there's a star. Click on the star and you added it to your bookmarks! Also, in Firefox 2.0 if you start to type an address and you've been to it, you saw it list the URL's? Now it shows 4 things in FF 3.0. Favicon to the left, top line the title of the page and beneath, the URL. (as you type, it dynamically bolds any matches for either) To the far right there is a star to bookmark if you wish.

There is just so much new in Firefox 3 that I haven't even mentioned. When logging in, rather than a prompt, it asks near the top of the page, I could go on and on. Just do yourself a favor and give it a try! Firefox 3.0 releases in just two days, June 17th, but if you want to wait until then to download that may be a good idea - you can help set a world record!

Charlie Page.net - Politics: Pakistan is an ally?

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:22:19 CDT

I know to say that Pakistan has been big friends with the US would be overstated, but we are "allies". Unfortunately our "ally" has been unable to even control a decent chunk of it's country (Waziristan), allowing Taliban to flow right into Afghanistan. On February 27, 2007 the top US intelligence official even said officially, that Bin Laden was in Pakistan.

If all that wasn't bad enough, not one but TWO stories have come out today that are quite startling. The first story is about an attack on US forces in Pakistan commited by the Taliban. When the story first came out, it was said 10-13 Pakistani soldiers were killed by US-Afghan forces, but in the recent several hours we found out a key piece of the puzzle missing. Here's a few quotes from a Washington Post article:

"Taliban militants apparently opened fire and were then joined by Pakistani military forces, setting off an hours-long battle. It is unclear what prompted the exchange of fire."

"We have inflicted heavy damages," Omar said. The Taliban spokesman said Islamist insurgents fought "side by side" with Pakistani soldiers against the Afghan forces during the operation."

The reason Pakistani soldiers and Taliban were killed in the border clash was because the Pakistani soldiers were fighting with the Taliban. Okay, so isolated incident, right? Wrong.

"Pakistani intelligence agents and paramilitary forces have helped train Taliban insurgents and have given them information about American troop movements in Afghanistan, said a report published Monday by a U.S. think tank."

It said NATO officials have uncovered several instances of Pakistani intelligence agents providing information to Taliban fighters, even "tipping off Taliban forces about the location and movement of Afghan and coalition forces, which undermined several U.S. and NATO anti-Taliban military operations."

Charlie Page.net - Updates: Monthly Recap - April/May 08

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:48:39 CDT

The "Monthly Recap" is a monthly post that looks at my projects and websites to see how they are doing. Statistics is a major part, however other things such as new users, # of articles and other things are also factors. Last month I didn't post a recap, so this one will be covering both April and May 2008, here it is:

Insane Visions

IV had a very good April, according to Awstats it was the best month of the year and possibly the best month ever (or at least for a long time). Analytics said it went down. Either way, despite the stats, just 3 articles were posted in April.

In May, stats were down (by a decent amount in awstats), but a total of 5 articles were posted including v1.2 of AdaptCMS released and in late-may, a new website part of the Insane Visions network was launched - PHP CMS Reviews. Mixed

GTA IV Universe

Just as I predicted, April was a huge month for GTA IV Universe, practically doubling March. Also as I figured, May dropped off by quite a bit from April, but still better than March.

June is expected to go down as well, but with continued updating, could be similar to March. Up

Charlie Page.net - Politics: And so it begins

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:34:29 CDT

It's been quite an exciting (at times) political season, we now know for certain it will be Obama vs. McCain - one will be the next president of the United States. Although it has been fun to follow, the craziness and the stakes of the 2008 election may dwarf what we've seen so far And so it begins.

As I posted previously, I am a McCain supporter, so I am obviously rooting for McCain, but I would be quickly vote for Obama than Clinton. I have nothing against Obama, the background and how they have gotten this far for both candidates, is quite amazing.

The main issue that has my vote for McCain over Obam is easily Iraq. I don't want 100,000+ troops there for the next 10 or so years, but I want my president to base his decision on what the people who matter say - military commanders. To me, Obama doesn't have this intention, although if he wins I know we will be there longer than what he says now.

Government solving our problems is also a set of ideals Obama and the Democratic party has, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want government to get involved in anything - but some things suggested, I'd be seriously worried, government screws us regulary.

Either way in all of this, this should be a great 2008 election and I look forward to it!