soapbox

The blog is now running on WordPress version 2.5 so things will look a little bit different when you go to write new posts. For the moment, the external appearance of the blog shouldn’t change at all. However, I did recently buy “WordPress for Dummies” specifically so I could play around with the formatting and look of the blog. Those changes are going to be a couple of weeks away though.

Let me know if anything is broken, if there’s anything that you really like know, or if there’s anything that you really hate.

I know everyone desperately wants to be able to use in their blog posts, so hopefully this will work. (As opposed to all of the previous attempts.)

Here are the instructions:
$$\int e^{-x^2} dx$$
gives as an inline version

$$!\int e^{-x^2} dx$$
gives

$$\int e^{-x^2} dx!$$
gives $$\int e^{-x^2} dx$$ as source.

The difference in the three cases is just the existence and location of the exclamation point.

I just wanted to tell people about some heavy duty lifting that dactyl’s been doing lately.

1.  Wordpress, the blog software, has been updated since the old version had some security holes.  Let me know if you find anything that you particularly like or want changed. 

2.  The underlying linux distribution running on dactyl has been completely refreshed.  This actually took 5 solid days of compiling with dactyl running at 100% the entire time.  You might have noticed that the blog seemed a little slow.  Anyway, everything is now completely up to date and the compile itself had no problems.  That says very good things about dactyl’s stability.  Again, if there is any special software that you’d like to use on dactyl, just let me know. 

So, after a stint away where I forgot my login pwd, I’m back in blog land because I realized that my work PC remembers my login. So it is now something I remember, and I am now able to post again. Now to try to remember all those things I had hope to post …

While lots of people may think of dactyl as just being “the blog”, it actually does a wide range of things on the web.

Off the top of my head, it:
is a secure email gateway
serves individual people’s web pages
streams music to iTunes
works as a samba server to mount a network drive on your desktop for backup/etc.
works as an application server for some fancy scientific software
could serve as a true random number generator (with a little bit of work)

The issue that I’ve run into lately though is that I have my laptop that I haul back and forth to work as well as an iMac at home. Frankly, it’s kind of a pain to try to keep web browser bookmarks, iCal, and other things coordinated between the two machines. Luckily, there’s a solution! Dactyl is now a WebDAV server and can be used to synchronize all those various files.

The only issue is that configuration is a little bit tricky. I have to manually configure it for each person who wants access. As an added bonus, it also gives you a fast web-based disk that you can mount on your computer no matter where you are.

(Oh, and I just fixed some things with dactyl email if you use that.)
(Oh, and you should notice the blog running quite a bit faster because I just added some advanced caching.)

This post is just a placeholder, but today was a very interesting day and you’re going to want to hear the stories.

Unfortunately, you’re going to need a password to read the full story. That password is going to be my stage name, first and last.

If you don’t know it, you can ask me know in anticipation.

Julie!

The first of hopefully many first-years posting on the blog.

Now, if she can do her first post at 4 in the morning after a hard night of partying with drunk astronomers, we should be able to get some posts done too.