Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

Do something!

Doing something is always better then doing nothing. (unless that something is robbing a bank)

The point is, forward momentum is created by you doing something. Whether or not your are wrong is irrelevant. But like all things, you get better with practice. So if you are constantly striving towards your next goals, you will get better at achieving your goals. Period.

Don’t believe that you have to follow the norm. Inventions are created out of necessity. If you think you have to follow in the pack, you are wrong. You need to find out what makes you happy and run with it. Some of the most creative and successful people in the world were told over and over that they were wrong, and they would not succeed. Those of us that can push beyond those words are leaders, the and if you push yourself to do something, to move forward, eventually, the pack will begin to follow you.

Knowledge and practice are your key to success. Look upon those who have been successful. Read about them, listen to them, learn from the mistakes of others and make mistakes. I learn more from my mistakes then I do my productivity, which, in turn, makes me more productive.

Are you efficient? Can you be more efficient? Look inside yourself and get ready for 2008. It may change your life.

A great post on how to create your own picture gallery program right in drupal

http://drupal.org/node/144725
I also added to it a bit. I went ahead and created another view, and made a block. In the header of the block I created a link to the “all pictures” section of the site, and then put, “or sort by category”

I used the taxonomy filter to filter by keyword. The nodes are set up to do tags on the fly. So now when a user tags a new photo gallery, it immediatly puts a link into the block for the galleries. See an example at www.mcelhaneycentral.com

This past week, I started my own podcast. It is called Linux Basment and can be found over at www.linuxbasement.com . Once again, the community around Linux has amazed me. I’ve never felt more well received. It is a strange paradox in my life, because I am reading about open source, and living the core values of it at the same time. I believe that there are human spirit values that rely on the “free and open” core that holds true in the open source community. The strength behind open source is that people do it because they want to, because they get self gratification, because they have fun doing it, and because there is some core need that they have either recognized in themselves, or within the community that they deal with. They funny part about open source software is, due to the internet,is that it is actually maturing faster then our real communities. The red tape is torn away, and people produce without restriction. While governments would like to say that they’ve been set up this way, and support open thinking and innovative enterprise, this is not the case. We have hit a point in our society, where the internet has advanced faster then the political ties of our society have, leaving us with bad laws, and worse law enforcers dictating the way people are supposed to think and behave, when they do not realize what actually is happening around them.

Open source software, and Linux in particular will win out in this war, because there is a communication barrier that has already been breached, and there is a very low wall of entry for every person in the world to enter into the arena. There is no political or economical barrier. If you have access to the internet, you can help in producing one of the best platforms in the world. That should be exciting to you. So much more exciting then 100 guys smoking and drinking caffeine trying to produce the next big thing because they are getting payed to do so.

Educate thy neighbor friends, because when they realize that true innovation lies at their fingertips, empowerment becomes all encompassing. Go download your favorite Linux iso and give it to a friend. Spread the word. Times are changing and you do not have to settle for mediocrity.

I always wondered why even when you set your php.ini file settings to upload_max_filesize = 100M (or whatever) and post_max_size = 100M (or whatever) in Drupal, your max upload size would show up as 50M. I ran by this post today

http://drupal.org/node/97193

If you look at the bottom, you find the answer. Check out your includes/file.inc file and search for

Change it to

You could experiment with taking the line out, but being that it is doing a simple / 2 , if you change it to dividing by one /1 it will do nothing, and you don’t have to worry about a missing function.

Yay.

My suspicions were correct. I’ve delved into the world of Macs, and so far, I find them clunky and dumbed down at best. While I do find it easy to adapt to, with a linux background, I can’t imagine the pain first time users that are moving from windows to through. My major gripes all focus around the menu bar at the top, which I know is something Mac users love, and the lack of an easy way to organize program execution. So essentially, both the bar at the top, and bottom, drive me crazy. Not to mention the fact that the apple button does all the controls the control button should. Bleh.

I’m still blind to the fact as to why so many people love them. I do like having access to command line, but I miss the finer points of linux. I miss so many of my linux apps, and I’m finding myself, after a week, spending about 10 minutes on the mac, and 8 hours back on my primary linux machine. Yes, I am a net admin and do spend that much time a day on the computer. I will continue to give Mac a chance and will be spending more time with it in the future because I’m going to be doing a lot of advanced video editing. So we will see what happens. Who knows, maybe a few months down the line I’ll be a fan boy too. I’m willing to keep an open mind.