Okay, well almost a week, and I am very happy. First up, the list of things I don’t like (in no particular order):

• Can’t remove built-in apps (Nascar, Amazon, YouTube). My old Palm launcher was fully customizable and these are taking up space I could have for apps that I actually use.
• Sounds – system sounds, text, IM, missed call, etc; there’s only one sound. I would like to be able to have different sounds for different events.
• Visible alert for missed calls. It’s got an LED on the front, why not use that to let me know I’ve missed a call? It does make it’s system sound once every 10 minutes, but I would still like to have the light flash or blink, too.
• Battery life is too short. I ended up turning off Location Services, GPS, bluetooth and wireless, and setting email retrieval to manual while I’m at my desk all day. Also make sure to log out of IM when you’re done.
• No video. It takes awesome pictures, but doesn’t do video? It’s got 8 gigs of storage, why no video?
• Can’t beam contacts from one Pre to another.

That’s pretty much it for stuff I don’t like. The graphics are amazing, the touch screen is wonderful, even for my sausage fingers. The keyboard is smaller than my Q9c, but the dot and @ are available without having to hit the function button first.

Setup was incredibly easy. I set up my Gmail, Yahoo, and personal email accounts in just a couple minutes. It pulls contacts and calendar from Gmail, and you can specify how frequently you want to check for mail. One thing I was confused about was my “Palm Profile.” Your Pre syncs everything to the Palm website, but there is no way to manage any of the info. It appears to be only a backup/restore service. There’s also the option to wipe your Pre, should you find it necessary. Gone are the days of having to force my Q9c to sync with third party apps and websites!

When I usb it to any of my computers, I get the options to Transfer, USB drive, or just charge. I like that a lot.

I’ll post some pics and update this as time goes on.

Here’s my collection of wallpapers, so far

Need a fantastic little text editor for your Windows Mobile Smartphone? I just found Vieka WordPad, and it rocks! You can dowload the cab file straight from the Vieka website to your phone. Installed easily on my Q9c and it’s only 77k!

I’m still not sure which one is responsible for the actual recreation of the log files, but they are still being recreated with adm and root. I’ll dig around for some more config files after I revert all the changes I’ve made so far. What a pain in the ass………….Guess I’ll have to put my script back in to auto chown the files.

Update: Simplicity is best. Rather than go through the hassle of having a lengthy script that has to check file ownership and permissions constantly, I just put the chown in the postrotate section of /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd. Note the backticks surrounding the chown:

/var/log/lighttpd/*.log {
weekly
missingok
copytruncate
rotate 4
compress
postrotate
`chown -R www-data:www-data /var/log/lighttpd/`
if [ -f /var/run/lighttpd.pid ]; then \
/bin/kill -HUP $(</var/run/lighttpd.pid); \
fi;
endscript
create 0644 www-data www-data
}

On a side note, testing this was slightly problematic until I realized that having the “notifempty” statement precludes the force logrotate from running. Once removed, testing was easy.

I started noticing that when the Lighttpd logs get rotated, the new group and owner becomes syslog and adm. This makes Lighttpd very unhappy and causes it to start using /var/log/messages to log activity. It wouldn’t be such a problem if /var/log/messages wasn’t a dumping ground for all system activity. Throwing in all of Lighttpd’s activity, it get’s really large and nearly impossible to track issues. So in an effort to have my new log files made with the proper group and owner, I checked the /etc/logrotate.conf, but it just holds the generic logrotate settings. Then I checked /etc/cron.daily/lighttpd and set it to make the new logfiles with www-data as group and owner. Next time the logs were rotated, no change. The new logs were still being made with syslog and adm as group and owner.

As a work-around, I just wrote a script to chown everything in the /var/log/lighttpd directory every couple of days. Kind of lame, but it worked. Then, while reading this article about troubleshooting Linux with syslog, I found a reference to /etc/logrotate.d directy that holds additional config files for applications. Sure enough, sitting in there was a lighttpd config file with a nocreate at the end. So I changed it to create 0640 www-data www-data and had syslog reload the config file with a sudo logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd. Now we’ll see what happens on the next log rotation.

I’ve gotten a few emails asking how I got the comments to display on the main page after each post. It was easy – I found someone who already did all the hard work and cut and pasted his code! I found the answer on flisterz:blog, you can read the whole post there with directions. If you don’t care and just want the code, here it is:

<!– recent comment of each post –>

<div class=”recent-comment”>
<?php
$comment_array = array_reverse(get_approved_comments($wp_query->post->ID));
$count = 1;
?>

<?php if ($comment_array) {  ?>
<span class=”comment”> <?php comments_number(’No comment’,'1 comment’,'% comments’); ?></span> – Latest by:
<ul class=”commentlist”>
<?php foreach($comment_array as $comment){ ?>
<?php if ($count++ <= 2) { ?>
<li><?php comment_author_link(); ?> <br /> <?php comment_excerpt(); ?> </li>
<?php } ?>
<?php } ?>
</ul>
<?php } else { ?> <!– if there was no comment in that post,yet –>
<span class=”comment”>No comment so far</span>
<?php } ?>
</div>

<!– end recent comment–>

Open your index.php file, and paste the following code inside the Loop, anywhere before the <?php endwhile; ?>. Preferably after <?php the_content(); ?>

If you want more than 2 comments to show up, change this line <?php if ($count++ <= 2) { ?> to match the number you would like to show.

————-<<<<<<<<<<<       All Credit goes to Flisterz      >>>>>>>>>>>———-

Pissed off about Income Tax? I’m not usually one for marches or protests, but this is called a party, and I think taxing our income is a stupid way of funding the already too large Federal Government. So come downtown and meet a bunch of other people who feel the same and want to express this to our political “leaders.” You can find the info here – Austin Tea Party

April 15th Tax Day Tea Party Rally/March
4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. @ South Steps of Capitol
Contact: Judy Holloway (512)585-7673
Email: having.anaustinteaparty@gmail.com

You can also read about a better alternative here – Americans for Fair Tax

Here’s a list of Texas politicians and how they stand on the Fair Tax:

(It’s interesting to note that not a single Democrat is for the Fair Tax)

I was recently sucked in to a “debate” about  sin, specifically that of homosexuality. This good Christian said that the destruction of Sodom was proof that God hates homosexuals (I didn’t know God could “hate” anything, since he made it all, didn’t he? And I thought that he “so loved the world” that he gave his son). Then he proceeded to quote Leviticus to me, but only the passage he liked – 18:22 “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.” The bible says it, so it’s the law. That’s why all homos are going to hell.

So I told him what a nice shirt he was wearing. Upon looking at the tag, I noticed it was a polyester cotton blend. So I told him he was going to Hell, too. He looked rather shocked, so I explained that Leviticus 19:19 states “…neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.”  Have you eaten bacon or shrimp? Yep, you’re going to Hell. Leviticus 11:7 and 11:12. Have you ever cursed while in an argument with someone? According the the law, you should be stoned to death 24:10-14.  The absurdity goes on and on, just have a read through Leviticus. It explains in detail how to make animal sacrifice to please God. Who to stone to death, when, and for what reasons. Whatever you do, don’t pick up sticks on the Sabbath, you’ll be stoned to death (but I think that law is from Numbers 15).

Fun reading:

The Brick Testament – with Lego People explaining biblical verse

Slacktivist – Why some Christians hate gays, but love bacon

Leviticus section of the Skeptics Annotated Bible

God Hates Shrimp – Bring all of God’s law unto the heathens and the sodomites

My Favorite: Landover Baptist Church

Running total of people God has killed – count is at 33 million and some change

One of the best books I have read in a long time, The God Virus, by Darrel W. Ray, Ed.D.. If you are a free thinking person who uses their brain, then I bet you’ll find this book as fascinating as I did. On the website you’ll be able to read the first two chapters of the book. Here’s a short article about it, too. Enjoy!

From the article:

Whether you are a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic, you will find The God Virus an exciting and challenging experience, especially if you are not frightened or timid about being a being a rational, thoughtful, and compassionate human being. One has nothing to lose but the mental chains of superstition and intolerance that can keep one in a perpetual state of fear.

Borders has it on a 4-8 week backorder, but you can get it straight from the website with free USPS priority shipping, and it’s only $25!

Amazon.com has some reviews and they’ve got it for $19.95. My favorite review is from user Frich -  who hasn’t even read the book! But he is sure he won’t like it. Seriously though, there are some good reviews and a few from some angry people. The usual stuff one would expect from religious people who feel they or their beliefs are being attacked. I’ll be sure to post my own review later….

There are also some videos on YouTube from the author, Darrel Ray.

You may also enjoy a 1991 paper by Richard Dawkins, Viruses of the Mind.

If you are religious though, you might consider converting to the  Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

While reading an excellent article about the current state of the economy and how it got this way, I came across a section explaining how the banks are afraid to lend money. Not only to other banks, but to companies that require short-term loans for day-to-day operations (the commercial paper market). This causes layoffs, which cause people to stop spending money, which causes more layoffs, and on and on. I remembered a story I heard a long time ago about warm fuzzies. In this story, people have bags and any time they reach into these bags, they pull out a warm fuzzy to give to someone else. These warm fuzzies make everyone feel good. There was also an evil witch who was selling lotions and salves, but no one was buying. So she started a rumour that you would eventually run out of warm fuzzies. So people stopped giving them out. Soon everyone was feeling bad, and some were even dying, but the witch was banking selling her salves (which didn’t work anyway). So life was generally terrible in this once happy town until a mysterious woman showed up. She handed out warm fuzzies to everyone and people soon realized that it was okay to give them out like they used to, and they got over their fear of running out. Pretty soon the witch was out of business and everything was right as rain again. While the correlation between the story and the current state of the economy are not exact, the general idea is – if the flow stops at any point in the cycle, it eventually stops everything.

If you’re running Ubuntu Server and lighttpd, you may have noticed that lighttpd stops running after logrotate. I tried editing my cronjob to no avail. Then I found this one and it seems to work just fine. Go ahead and sudo edit your /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd

/var/log/lighttpd/*.log {
daily
missingok
copytruncate
rotate 7
compress
notifempty
sharedscripts
postrotate
if [ -f /var/run/lighttpd.pid ]; then \
/bin/kill -HUP $(</var/run/lighttpd.pid); \
fi;
endscript
}

This is apparently a known bug – but it took me a couple weeks to find

Check out https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lighttpd/+bug/74458

and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380080 for details, if you like.

I also noticed that Lighttpd doesn’t always start on reboot. So here’s the Ubuntu script from Lighttpd. Just make sure you change the user and group from lighttpd to www-data – Ubuntu likes it that way.