Riverside Cafe is Back Online

My linux server, an AMD Duron 1200 at the end of a consumer DSL line, hosting riverside-cafe.com, was off the air most of the weekend.

I had occasion to reboot and the system wouldn’t come up. Wouldn’t even POST; it just sat there. I quickly figured out that clearing the CMOS memory would allow the system to come up. It would reboot cleanly 2-3 times, then need the memory cleared.

Hmm, motherboard or case, I wondered? Figuring many problems are a result of power supply deficiencies, I decided the new Antec Sonata was a good choice.

Installed mobo and video card, but no lan and no disks. System rebooted with absolutely no problems. Added drives and lan and the problem came back. To make a long story short, it was a defective lan card!

Oh, and why did I have occasion to reboot a normally quite reliable linux box? Seems that I had some how corrupted my root reiserfs based system to such a degree that fsck couldn’t cope.

I got a new harddrive, and mirrored (cp -ax) the root drive to the new drive. Guess my lilo skills are rusty, as I had to boot from my emergency disk and twiddle with lilo for some time before the system booted.

But, all is better now, and as usual, I’ve learned a thing or two along the way.

Windows XP Southern edition may be recognized by the unique opening
screen. It reads: WINDERS XP, with a background picture of General Robert
E. Lee superimposed on a Confederate flag. It is shipped with a Dukes of
Hazard screen saver.

Please also note: the ‘Recycle Bin’ is labeled “Outhouse”, ‘My Computer’
is called “This Dern Contraption”, ‘Dial-up Networking’ is called “Good
Ol’ Boys”, ‘Control Panel’ is known as “The Dashboard”, ‘Hard Drive’ is
referred to as “4 Wheel Drive”, ‘Floppies’ are “them little ol plastic
disc thangs” Instead of pop-up windows labeled ‘Error Message’ they are
labeled “Roll of Duct Tape”

CHANGES IN TERMINOLOGY IN SOUTHERN EDITION:

OK . . . . . . .Ats aw-right
Cancel . . . . .Stopdat
Reset . . . . . Try’er-agin
Yes . . . . . . Yep
No . . . . . . .Noop
Find . . . . . .Hunt-fer-it
Go to. . . . . .Over YonderBack . . . . . .Back yonder
Help . . . . . .Hep me out here
Stop . . . . . .Kwitit
Start . . . . . Crank er up
Settings . . . Settins
Programs . . . .Stuff dat duz stuff
Documents . . . Stuff ah done did

Also note that SOUTHERN EDITION does not necessarily recognize capital
letters or punctuation marks.

Some programs that are exclusive to Winders 98:
Tiperiter . . . . .a word processing program
Colerin book . . . a graphics program
Cyferinmersheen .. calculator
Outhouse paper . . notepad
Iner-net . . . . ..Microsoft Explorer 4.0
Pichers . . . . . .a graphics viewer
Dern lil varmit . .a mouse

I hope this heps y’all!

Billy Bob Gates
Head Honcho

There are some flash applications that are truly cool, and the geoblog site hosts one such example.

Displaying a cool world map (it shows the current daylight area), the application monitors a list of recently updated blogs generated from weblogs.com. It checks for new blog entries every minute and then fetches and displays the first few words of each entry for which the site’s location is known. The text is displayed via a short-lived popup, but a “pushpin” icon remains on the map so one can goto any site that caught their interest.

It’s a neat way to see different blogs being updated, around the world, and almost in real time (w/in 3 minutes). Unfortunately, the traffic is fairly low, as most blogs give no indication of their geographical location, which is a key to making this work.

The geourl site offers advice on how to add appropriate META tags for representing a site’s latitude/longitude so geoblog can determine where to place the entry on the map. I’m going to do that, but for privacy reasons won’t be entirely accurate regarding my location.

Just the thing for Monday: an exploration of The Principles of Artistic Illusions.

This site, enriched with many illustrative examples, reviews a few classic Escher works as well as exploring the general topic by describing a wide variety of visual illusions.

The review is continued on a second page which focuses a bit more on drawing techniques related to these types of illusions.

From Gastronome, a cool foodies web site, (self described as the gossip of a gaggle of gourmands), comes an excellent recipe for chocolate cookies (the dough is chilling as I write):

Chocolate Crackle Cookies

8 oz bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup Dutch-process cocoa powder (regular cocoa works if that’s all you have)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/3 cups packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/3 cup milk
1 cup confectioners sugar

Melt chocolate on a heat-proof bowl, or the top of a double broiler, over a pan of simmering water, or in the microwave (3 bursts of 30 secs, w/stirring each time). Set aside to cool. Into a small bowl sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt.

In another bowl, using an electric mixer beat butter and light brown sugar until light and fluffy (3-4 minutes). Add eggs and vanilla. Beat until combined. Add melted chocolate. Add dry ingredients alternately with milk. Mix on low speed until combined. Divide dough into quarters (4 small bowls worked for me), wrap (cover the bowl) with plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator until firm (at least 2 hours).

On a surface dusted with confectioner’s sugar, use your hands to roll each portion of the dough into a log 16 inches in length and about an inch in diameter. Wrap logs in plastic wrap and return to the refridgerator to chill (at least 30 minutes).

Preheat the oven to 350. Line baking sheets w/parchment paper.

Cut each log into 1-inch pieces and toss in confectioner’s sugar a few at a time, rolling to completely cover each cookie, which has formed into a small ball as a result of the rolling. Place cookies on sheets 2 inches apart. bake until cookies have flattened and sugar splits (12-15 minutes).

Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely.

Makes about 5 dozen.