I thought maybe the fixes I found were specific IIS server setups, but not necessarily mine. So, I looked at my sorry IIS server’s phpinfo() output, which revealed some obvious problems with my wp-settings.php. Apparently IIS/PHP doesn’t set some of the variables that WordPress wants, so WordPress attempts to create those variables, based on variables it supposes IIS/PHP ought to set. But my server’s variables weren’t named quite right for WordPress to suss out the variables it wanted. I changed the variable names in wp-settings.php to match my phpinfo() output and it worked.

I did end up having to delete the database tables for each install attempt. I don’t know how many people run into install issues, but if there are a lot maybe it’d make sense for WordPress to do some sort of post-install sanity check. Even better if that sanity check involved a form where one could hardcode in those problematic server variables.

Update: I should have seen this coming based on what I saw browsing the forums earlier, but the admin emails from WordPress wouldn’t work out of the box. I’d guess that the dear IIS host I’m working with has had issues with spam so they don’t allow PHP to send unauthorized mail. Fortunately, there’s a plugin that lets you manually set WordPress to use an arbitrary SMTP server. There are actually a couple, but WP Mail SMTP is working for me.

# ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9pre/plugins/libflashplayer.so

YMMV, depending on what version(s) you’ve got installed. I’d imagine it’ll be necessary to do this again if/when the xulrunner version changes.

Update: This works great for me in i386-land, but not in x86_64. I’m not sure, but it looks like x86_64 liferea isn’t using xulrunner, and I haven’t figured out if gtkhtml supports plugins at all.

I ate a bunch of these at Jazz Fest. I’m not a huge fan of the crowds and dirt at Jazz Fest, so the crawfish make the thing tolerable. We ate some awesome food outside of Jazz Fest too, including some crawfish at Restaurant August that were loaded with cream and cognac - even better than the usual Old Bay-ish stuff.

Back in DC, Acadiana’s news page says they do crawfish boils every Friday 3:30 to 6:30p on their patio “weather permitting.” So, I guess not today - maybe next week if the weather cooperates. On the phone they said they also do the boils Sundays 2-5p.

Update: Even though the weather looked bad to me they were still boiling crawfish outside and serving them in the bar. We’ve been a few times now - they’re pretty expensive but worth it if you’ve gotta have some crawfish.

I forget to stop down the lens a sometimes after using the open aperture for easier focusing. All the stray light, flare, internal reflections and whatnot conspire to make some subjects look pleasantly soft. Seems to be distant subjects, where you’d have the focus at infinity, that look best. So, I tried a few shots of the capitol with the aperture open to 1.4. Bumping up the contrast removes the haziness, and I prefer shots like this in black and white. In color they look like 70s snapshots, which can be nice too.

This has been a pretty nice cherry blossom season in DC - a little windy but warm enough that they haven’t fallen to the ground early like last year. These were down around the tidal basin, across from the Jefferson Memorial. There are some less crowded spots out around Hains Point, but there’s something about the trees around the tidal basin - the light off the water illuminates the blossoms from below I think. There’s a bus from the parking at Hains Point to the tidal basin this year, so it’s easy enough to see all the trees.

“It seems remarkable that some people are prepared to be infected with worms, but the fact that they are says a lot about how poor current treatments are.”

Link to the BBC News article

Where the 12-inch iBook had an adequate-sized 1024×768 screen, the Eee PC’s screen is 720×400, too narrow for a lot of web pages. Zooming out can help, but I find that just makes my eyes hurt after a while. I expect ASUS will add a version with a larger screen sometime this year.

The keyboard is probably my biggest gripe. The keys are all there, but they’re a little small. With my small hands and fingers it works okay, but the iBook certainly was more comfortable for extensive typing.

The installed OS is good and bad. Good because it’s a Linux distribution, so I didn’t pay for a Windows license that I wouldn’t be using anyway. Bad because it’s Xandros and defaults to a simplified user interface. I did live with the advanced desktop mode for a while. That does offer more flexibility, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep things properly updated - counting on ASUS to update Firefox seems foolish.

Luckily, I’m not the only one underwhelmed by Xandros on the Eee PC - the EeeUser Wiki has a long list of alternative operating systems people have installed on the Eee PC. Fedora usually works for me, so I decided to try Eeedora, a live cd version of Fedora with some customizations for the Eee PC. It seems to work well enough, but there are a few things I’ve done that I’ll post about later.

Fruitcake has a reputation as an undesirable, comical holiday gift, more suitable as ammunition for a trebuchet than something to eat. To me, this is the ideal food to cook at home - however it turns out, it’ll certainly turn out better than the commercial alternative.

My current favorite fruitcake recipe is based on the Good Eats fruitcake episode, substituting in edible ingredients for the things I can’t eat - honey for sugar and almond meal for flour. Note that while there are some shortcuts you can use, the best final product takes at least a day or so. I guess you could go buy one if that’s a problem. Along the same line of reasoning, I’d also suggest not bothering if you’re not willing to invest in good ingredients. I like all organic, but at least take a look at and taste your fruits and nuts - if they’re not good the cake won’t be any good either.

Ingredients

• 2 cups roughly diced dried fruit
• 1 cup dark rum
• zest of an orange
• 4 cloves
• 6 allspice berries
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• 1 cup apple juice
• 1 stick butter
• 1 cup honey
• 1/2 to 1 cup pecans (walnuts work well too)
• 1 3/4 cups almond meal
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 eggs
• more rum

24 hours before you intend to bake, combine the rum, fruit, and zest. Chop up the fruit roughly. I like apricots, figs, raisins, and cherries - pretty much any dried fruit will work. I especially like the figs because of the crunchy seeds, which remind me of tobiko on sushi. I like to peel the zest with a serrated veggie peeler so I can later remove it, but you could grate or chop it fine and leave it in - it’s a question of texture. I think rum is traditional, but you could use any liquor you like. Combine the booze, fruit, and zest in a sealable container and set on the counter. Shake it around now and then.

24 hours or so later, pour that mixture into a heavy-bottomed pot with a lid. Add the cup of juice, honey, and butter and turn the heat to medium. While it’s heating, smash or grind up the cloves and allspice and add them, the cinnamon, and ginger. Simmer that mixture a while with the lid on. It should get soupy looking and smell really good.

Meanwhile, toast your pecans. Use more or fewer pecans, depending on what you like. You could probably even use some other nut, such as walnuts or maybe slivered almonds. Toast your nuts for about 10 minutes at 300 degrees F. Watch them closely - undertoasted is okay but overtoasted goes in the compost. Set aside when they’re done.

Take the fruit off the heat when you’re confident the flavors have melded, at least 10 minutes of simmering. This is when I remove the zest peels, burning my fingers each and every time. Butter some nonstick pans. This makes about 3 small rounds, a couple of loaves, or a bunch of muffins. I make two rounds and some muffins. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees F, adding a pan of water to the lower rack - the steam will make your fruitcake happier but means you need to watch out when opening the oven door. Combine your dry ingredients - almond meal, salt, and baking soda. When your fruit mixture is cool, dump it into a bowl and stir in the dry stuff. Mix in the eggs one at a time, then fold in your nuts. Spoon into your pans and bake. Small round cakes take about an hour, muffins about 1/2 hour. Testing with a toothpick works. Be very careful opening the oven door due to the steam from the pan of water.

Let the fruitcakes cool fully on a rack before trying to get them out of their pans. Nonstick pans seem to release pretty reliably, and silicone muffin cups work perfectly. If you like the surface of the cake a bit drier you can bake them on the rack for a few minutes. This also makes the surface more absorbent if you’re planning to paint them with rum.

The fruitcakes can be served as they are, but if you want them to last longer and taste better, paint them with some rum a few times over the course of maybe a week.

A sliver of fruitcake is delicious plain, but combining that sliver with some sautéed bananas and whipped crème fraîche makes a perfect dessert.

Non-alcoholic version: If you’re avoiding alcohol for one reason or another, you might be wondering if it’s possible to do this recipe without the rum. Of course! Try soaking the dried fruit in apple juice instead of the rum. My cakes turned out darker - the juice probably made the mix sweeter, resulting in faster browning. I didn’t paint mine with anything later, but a mixture of warm honey and apple juice might be good. The rum probably has some preservative value, so you might want to eat your non-alcoholic cakes sooner.

I’ve got an old 12 inch dual-USB iBook that’s been running various flavors of Linux, most recently Fedora 7. That was working fine, but it seemed a little slow. Rather than upgrade to Fedora 8, I decided to try something allegedly better for older hardware. Xubuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu using the Xfce desktop environment, is supposed to be lighter-weight and faster. This is my little story about getting it running.

The first thing it to get an install image to burn to a CD or DVD. It turns out that PPC is no longer an officially-supported architecture at Ubuntu, and apparently at Xubuntu too. So, when you go go get Xubuntu, there are only i386 and amd64, no PPC. If you search for “ubuntu ppc,” you’ll eventually end up at this Ubuntu & Apple forum, where a lot of clicking may lead you to this Xubuntu 7.10 download page. If you’re reading this sometime in the future, maybe you’d want to click up the directory tree to get to a different release. So, install image in hand, I got started.

I already had Fedora on the iBook, so I didn’t need to do any of the initial prep stuff. I also removed OS X long ago, so didn’t need to worry about dual-booting. I had a separate /home partition, so could easily keep my data intact. So, I booted up the install CD and…nothing. Just a blank, black screen after some boot stuff. Back at the Ubuntu forum I found this list of PPC known issues. I guess that’s a drawback of using something that’s not officially supported - it might be broken. So, I followed the instructions at the known issues page. Reading it now, it seems clear, but it took me a few tries. Here are the steps:

1. Boot up the install disc, which should involve pressing c at a prompt if you have Yaboot installed.
2. At the second prompt, type in one of the kernel names (hit tab for a list), followed by break=top. The break=top should dump you to a command line thing - maybe try another kernel if not?
3. At the prompt, you need to load the ide modules so your drives will work. Type modprobe ide-core (or is it idecore, or ide-disk?), hit enter, then exit and enter again to resume booting.
4. The Live Installer should boot up. It’s possible to try out Xubuntu right from the CD - no need to install if you think it sucks, pretty neato. After the install, it won’t boot up though, for the same reason as earlier. So, do the same process again.
5. You could go through that every time, but there’s a better way. Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules using your favorite editor and sudo, adding ide-core on a line. To make that stick, you’ll need to run sudo update-initramfs -u.
6. Reboot to find out if it worked.

So, the downside has been that it wasn’t easy to install. On the plus side, all my hardware works, including the internal AirPort card. The trackpad was set to notap by default, and the eject/F12 button is set to right-click, which I prefer. It seems more responsive that my Fedora install was, but I probably could have managed that with some intelligent package selection.

The diminutive 35/3.5 Super Takumar is on the right. In addition to being smaller, it’s a bit lighter than the others - nice for walking around. On the Rebel XT 35mm feels like 35 x 1.6 = 56mm due to the camera’s small sensor, a little longer than a 50mm ‘normal’ lens. The front element is recessed a bit, possibly making it flare-resistant without a hood. Here’s a sample photo from Boston:

The photo could probably benefit from a levels adjust, but it appears pretty sharp and the colors look good.

In the middle is a 28/3.5 Super Takumar from eBay. It’s a little bigger and quite a bit heavier, but still smallish on the Rebel XT. It’s just as fast (or slow) as the 35/3.5. On the Rebel XT and other 1.6-crop sensor cameras, a 28mm lens feels like about 45mm, so it’s still not really a wide angle lens, more like a wider normal lens. The front element is not recessed so a hood is a good idea to avoid stray rays. I didn’t get the vintage hood via eBay, but the rubber one I got seems easier to live with than that giant, square monstrosity. Here’s a sample photo from San Francisco:

It seems saturated but neutral, and relatively sharp.

On the left is a mystery so far. It’s a 28/2.8 and the manufacturer is apparently “D.O.”, which I’ve never heard of. It looks a lot like the Sears or JC Penny lenses I’ve seen around (here’s an example, probably older than mine), so it was probably made by some Japanese manufacturer. It’s a lot heavier than the others and quite a bit bigger too. On the Rebel XT it feels heavy but in terms of size fits well - it’s about the same size as the Canon 50/1.8. It’s got a rubbery focus grip instead of the ridged metal of the Takumars. In terms of fit and finish it feels just as good as the Takumars. The aperture dial runs opposite to the Takumars, which I thought might be confusing for stop-down metering but isn’t really. The lens isn’t recessed, so it should have the same flare issues without a hood as the 28/3.5. It uses 58mm filters, which are costlier than the 49mm ones the Super Takumars use. Here’s an example photo from West Virginia:

There’s no real difference from the 28/3.5 Super Takumar as far as I can tell. The only reason I’d choose one over the other would be convenience. A lot of Super Takumars have the same 49mm filter ring as these, making it possible to share filters, hoods, and lens caps. It’s nice to be able to use the same set of filters on all the lenses in your bag.