Seth Kinast’s Blog

I found a new Firefox theme, Azerty. It’s been climbing the ranks like mad at u.m.o and I decided to download it. I visited the author’s site and found that it was all in French, which was no problem for me, but the only translation available was via Google Translate.

A note near the bottom said

I thank all the encouraging remarks from Mozilla.org.
If a bilingual person could translate the nuances of the
French language of this site I will be grateful.

So I sat down, and about 30 minutes later, had a (fairly) decent transliteration of the web page

I had trouble when I came to “navigation par onglets”; it was the only word I hadn’t heard before. So I popped onto #ubuntu-fr IRC and asked, in French, if someone could explain to me what onglets were. In French, they replied “Onglets are why Firefox is great and Internet Explorer sucks… you don’t use windows to surf.” Ah ha, tabs!

I set up a PGP keyset tonight and it wasn’t as baffling as it seemed at first Seahorse (Linux) is just right for managing keys.

PGP allows me to digitally sign documents, e-mails, whatever, and then allows you to verify that it was really I who signed / sent / wrote the document.

Not that I’ll be using this much, but I’ll need it for the Ubuntu stuff later. Mez insists that I need my key signed by a current member, but I can’t find that requirement anywhere. So we’ll see.

My public key

Now that my monitor has come, it’s about time for me to back everything up onto my secondary hard drive and wipe and reinstall. I’m even wiping my SuSE install; I’m going to try Ubuntu on the desktop. However I’m downloading SuSE 9.3 right now, just in case I hear it’s quite stunning.

With reinstalling comes the opportunity to do things right, the first time:

• A separate partition for /home. Probably hdb will just be /home. That way I can have OSes on hda and just wipe that whenever needs be.
• Less redundancy. I can install what I need the first time around, now that I know what it is that I need This also means keeping my Windows install super-slim, with just some games, Macromedia stuff, and not much else. I’ll boot back into Linux as much as possible.
• Organization. I’ve kept the same methods of organizing /home since approximately 1998. I need to revamp my thinking to encompass the larger number of things I’m doing, their increased size, and my OS agnosticism.

My current thinking is that it will take about a full day and a half to get everything back and working properly again. I almost wish I’d've kept notes on some of the more arcane stuff I’ve had to do to make something-or-another work.

The other half of cleaning house is changing my old passwords. I think my password right now is very secure; my big problem is that I use it on too many sites. I need to come up with a logical system for generating venue-specific passwords that is not immediately obvious to any would-be h4×0rs. Maybe I’ll post my old password when I’m all done

I finally sat down and ripped my code apart to make it possible for me to manage my WordPress installations via SVN. Sure, it was a boon when I started diff’ing the files rather than trying to change by hand, but this time around it took me less than 5 seconds to update to WordPress 1.5.1.2. The power of SVN and version control.

You can do this too, and the good news is that it’s not hard. This tutorial will walk you through the basics of setting up your blog to pull from the SVN repositories. You can use this just to update, or you could start running bleeding-edge code and help develop WordPress!

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