4 separate terrorist bombings took place in London, England today just before 9 A.M. local time.
My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

More information (these links are current as of this writing) :
CNN’s Timeline (Outdated link – broken)
Wikipedia’s Timeline
Information via WikiNews
UPDATE from the future; Wikipedia article about the London Bombings

OK, I’m not going to go into much detail, but the Michael Jackson case’s outcome is truly unbelievable to me. For some reason I keep feeling that if you are a rich celebrity and commit a crime (or several crimes) in California that you can get away with murder (*cough* O.J. *cough*) or the unspeakable that Jackson got away with. So now I leave you with this:

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog* (link no longer available)

*Note: the above requires Quicktime 7, which you can get here: QuickTime 7 download (link outdated).

I lost the last few posts because my ‘posts’ MySQL table got corrupted, and was beyond repair. D’OH! Say it with me: “I must do backups every day.” “I must do backups every day.” “I must do backups every day.” “I must do backups every day.” “I must do backups every day.” “I must do backups every day.”…

P.S. Thanks to the Google Cache of my site, I was able to recover the past few posts that I thought were gone. I am now missing only one post, which I think is the post that corrupted the table to begin with, so I really don’t want it back; good riddance. Thanks Google!

First let me say that I hope everyone had a nice Memorial Day. Even if you ignored the true meaning of the day, and you relaxed like I did.
OK, secondly, you might have noticed my site has not been working for the past 14 hours or so. Or if it did, it was not this familiar blog but rather a static page that I whipped up in HTML that said I’d be back soon. I tried updated my uNSLUg installation, using their ipkg system. I simply ran:

ipkg update; ipkg upgrade

and the whole thing dies on me. Apache wouldn’t run. Once I compiled my own version of Apache, I was able to serve straight HTML, but not php pages, since I think my PHP install got hosed also. So I recompiled my own PHP to work with Apache. I forgot to mention that I did check out MySQL from the command line and all was well, I could run select statements and so forth.
So what you’re getting now is a fresh Apache and PHP install, with the previously installed MySQL, from an ipkg.
The procedure (hopefully not for future reference, but to help someone else out) :

1. Unpack all bzipped tarballs.
2. cd into the apache directory (httpd-2.0.54 in my case)
3. ./configure –prefix=/opt/httpd-2.0.54-homemade –enable-mods-shared=most; make; make install
4. Edit httpd.conf to Listen on 80, and set ServerName to my domain
5. cd into the php directory (php-5.0.4 in my case)
6. ./configure –prefix=/opt/php-5.0.4-homemade –with-apxs2=/opt/httpd-2.0.54-homemade/bin/apxs –with-mysql –disable-libxml –with-mysql=/opt –with-zlib-dir=/opt; make; make install
7. cp php.ini-dist /opt/php-5.0.4-homemade/lib/php.ini and add these two lines to httpd.conf:
   LoadModule php5_module /usr/local/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
   AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml
8. /opt/httpd-2.0.54-homemade/bin/apachectl restart

That’s “it??. Yeah, it took a while but was worth it. Enjoy…

Over the past few nights I have been working on getting my Linksys NSLU2 to become my primary web server. Out of the box, it is a small file serving device that uses a USB 2.0 hard drive to store the files, and it also uses very little power (under 15 Watts, which includes the external USB hard drive).
The folks over at http://nslu2-linux.org/ have turned the NSLU2 into a full-fledged Web/Mail/SSH etc server. The site you are currently viewing is being served directly from my NSLU2, still using Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP), and the content is still being managed by WordPress. (See the “Powered by” on the right for details on any of these topics).
I can now save electricity and money by not having to run a power consuming full PC for my website.
If you�d like to buy your own Linksys NSLU2, it is available on Amazon.com for $79.99, with free shipping.
Lastly, if you are interested, here’s a picture of mine in action:

My NSLU2, Linksys wireless router, and Maxtor USB 2.0 Hard Drive.
From top to bottom: My NSLU2, Linksys wireless router, and Maxtor USB 2.0 Hard Drive, all sitting on top of my old web server.

There is a skillful guy who created an amazing picture of Venice in Microsoft Paint. It does say that he added some blur in Photoshop, but still, it is quite amazing.
Hat tip to Garrett at Linuxart.com.

So I took both of my finals last night. I think they went well. Today is technically the last day of the semester, and the Professor for my online course is accepting assignments until midnight. I have a couple to hand in still, so today’s the day. I’ll have 105 credits as of tomorrow.
Remember a few posts back, when I said I was taking the summer off? Well things have changed. I decided to take a course titled “Cryptography and Computer Security” which is also an online course. It starts on May 31st and ends July 21st. A month and a half to earn 3 more credits sounds good to me.
I’m also registered for 2 Fall courses, at 3 credits each, so at the end of 2005 I will have accumulated 114 credits. I think I actually qualify as a senior!
So school is not out for the summer… I still will have the last part of July and all of August to recuperate. Until next post, enjoy.

This is ridiculous:

This just continues to reinforce the fact that the New York Post is a rag. This is sure to strengthen foreign relations. If Newsweek didn’t aggravate enough people, the Post is there to finish the job off. Nice. <WayneFromWayne’sWorld> NOT! </WayneFromWayne’sWorld>

P.S. That’s 2 posts in one day, for those keeping score.

OK, school’s not over yet, but it’s very close. I just have to finish finals this week and I’m done until September. I decided not to take summer classes. I really do need a break.
So now you know why I haven’t posted much; too busy! Between final projects, and studying for final exams, this blog has not been a top priority for me. I apologize to all (3) of my loyal readers, and I promise to try harder to post when school is over. In the meantime, enjoy this picture of a bunny with pancakes on his head:

or alternatively, the smaller, animated version: