Now here is somebody who is truly dedicated to a particular piece of software. I’m a fan, but not that much of one. I do find it very pretty, though. And yes, it is real and permanent.

Well, another one bites the dust. One more venerable magazine that started back when you needed to actually know something to build and use a computer has ceased its print operation and gone to a scaled-back digital version. It started with an e-mail a few months ago:

As a valued reader, we regret to inform you that Dr. Dobb’s Journal ceased its standalone monthly magazine with the February 2009 issue. The quality editorial coverage you have come to expect from Dr. Dobb’s Journal continues in its sister publication. InformationWeek will now include Dr. Dobb’s Report once a month.

Today, I received another e-mail that reads:

You may have noticed that you stopped receiving your print issues of Dr. Dobb’s Journal as of February this year. Well we are proud to announce that Dr. Dobb’s has gone Green! Going forward, Dr. Dobb’s will be available exclusively in digital format as Dr. Dobb’s Digest! Subscribe Now for your FREE digital subscription!

I still fondly recall the days of BYTE, Creative Computing, and Kilobaud. The personal computer grew up at the same time that I did, and I was happy to be a part of it. I was entering programs into a simple computer one byte at a time in binary using nothing but switches and lights when I was in middle school. My next computer ran BASIC, but the interface was an noisy, mechanical teletype machine with paper tape storage. FORTRAN on punch cards, batch processed on the downtown mainframe was the norm in high school. I was always the most popular guy in my college dorm on snowy, windy nights when people could access the school’s mainframe using my Apple ][ and 300-baud modem from my room instead of trudging down to the computing center to hunt out a terminal.

I know everything, including magazines and newspapers, is going digital these days. I’m the first to sign up for on-line bill delivery and payment so I can stop all that paper from invading our mailbox. But there will always be a place in my heart for page after page of program listings that you had to hand type into your PC, and those back-of-the-book ads showing all the newest gadgets and toys and endless lists of prices.

About 15 years ago, a colleague asked me, “Have you ever had the dream?” When he explained what “the dream” was, my jaw dropped because I had indeed had it many times. Now, “the dream” has been put to paper, and it’s even more widespread than I’d imagined. Normally, I find xkcd to be stupid or annoying, but this time they hit it spot on.

Celebrity must really suck sometimes. Even before taking office, Barack Obama has said he regrets the loss of being able to just take a walk. The paparazzi essentially killed Princess Diana with their incessant hounding of her, right to the point of her driver making a fatal mistake while trying to avoid them.

Steve Jobs has been living with rumors for close to a year now that he is dying. It’s undeniable that he’s been losing weight. Some people have tried to say that his health is a private matter, while others argue if his health is deteriorating, he owes it to Apple stock holder to come clean. Well, he finally caved to pressure ahead of MacWorld and released a statement disclosing exactly what’s going on. Now perhaps those people will go out and get a life.

Damn, these computers can be finicky. Over the weekend, on a whim I decided to tell my server to update to the latest version of Apache in the Etch Debian distribution (which is what I’m running here). When it completed, I went on to other things. Round about Tuesday, I discover that the web server isn’t serving up my WordPress pages properly. It doesn’t seem to know what to do with PHP files.

At first I figured the Apache update modified a configuration file somewhere, but a quick check of all the relevant directories showed nothing had been modified since August. Hmm. Next, I tried polling the server using Steve Gibson’s wonderful ID Serve utility to see what it thought it was running. It turns out that Apache was fine, but it didn’t have any PHP extensions turned on. A quick check showed that everything was in place for PHP, but it just wasn’t loading.

OK. Drastic measures. I ended up uninstalling everything related to PHP5, then reinstalling it to reestablish all the proper connections. I have no idea what could have hosed my installation, since this Debian machine has been very reliable, but all is well again. Now, off to install WordPress 2.7 and see what else I can break.

Why is it that every time I get this server humming, I muck around with it until it breaks? I’ve been running an old Debian Etch installation for years now, and I haven’t wanted to do a release upgrade for fear of completely breaking the whole system. However, yesterday I decided I wanted to at least upgrade all the packages to the latest in the Etch archives. So, I issued an "apt-get upgrade" and approved upgrading several hundred packages. All went well and it finished without any errors (which itself was a miracle). Then I discovered that my Squid proxy server wouldn’t start.

Fortunately, I had also recently cleaned up my system logging, and there were some helpful messages in the log. I did a quick Google search on the error, and in short order came up with this page. Someone else had this same problem over a year ago and was kind enough to write up a complete wiki page with step-by-step instructions for how he fixed it. Within minutes, Squid was back up and running. This Internet thingy is pretty cool!

Here’s a little Thunderbird tip. With the release of version 2, Mozilla turned off automatic image loading when displaying e-mails that contain HTML. When there are images blocked, there is a button you can click to load the images. There is also a link you can click that will tell Thunderbird to always load images for any message from that sender.

The way that latter option works is it checks your address book for the message sender, and if an option is selected in that address book entry, it will load images automatically. When you click the link to tell Thunderbird to always load images, it creates a new address book entry (if there isn’t already one) and checks the option to load images.

I started getting irritated, though, that my address book was getting cluttered with e-mail addresses of list servers and vendors, most of whom I’ll never send e-mail to, but do want to receive complete HTML messages from. Then I found a little trick in the Thunderbird documentation.

When Thunderbird checks to see if you have a sender in an address book, it checks all the address books. What that means is you can create a separate address book just for e-mails that may come in with HTML. As a result, you can have images automatically loaded on approved incoming e-mails without cluttering your primary address book.

One of my new favorite blogs is Photoshop Disasters. They specialize in drawing attention to botched Photoshop jobs, similar to the one where the Iranians tried to pull the wool over our eyes by transforming three missile launches into four. The picture here appeared on the TV Guide web site in a special section about Olympians to watch. You’ve got to wonder how, in the fraction of a second that swimmers pop their head out of the water for a gulp of air, Michael Phelps was able to move his goggles up off his eyes, open his eyes wide, get his chin in front of the water, and manage a smile, all for the camera. )

I wasn’t particularly saddened to see the closing of all CompUSA stores. I did enjoy walking around in them, checking out the latest technology. However, I never bought anything there. Everything was just too expensive. Even their fire-sale prices in the last days before closing their doors were higher than many sale prices at other stores.

I’d been on their e-mail  list and received regular e-mails about the current week’s sales flyer, and when they closed, I figured the e-mails would simply stop. I was pleasantly surprised when they didn’t, though. Pleasantly surprised because suddenly, without the overhead of brick-and-mortar stores, the all-new CompUSA has some killer prices. For example, the Jawbone wireless Bluetooth headset retails for around $130. You sometimes see it go on sale at brick-and-mortar stores for around $100. The cheapest I’ve been able to find on-line at any mainstream, non-auction site is $65. CompUSA’s latest sales e-mail lists it for $59.99. This clearly isn’t the old store.

Check out their site and subscribe. I received at most two e-mails a week, and they are never spammy.

With the death of Google Browser Sync upon the release of Firefox 3, I went on a quest to find a replacement. I’d tried Foxmarks, but all it does is bookmarks, and I really didn’t like it. Browser Sync had let me coordinate not only bookmarks between multiple machines, but also cookies, saved passwords, and even open tabs. Enter Mozilla Weave.

Weave is a product of Mozilla Labs and is strictly experimental stuff. Even so, it’s exactly what I was looking for, and is in active development. Each release brings with it exciting new features.

However, since it, by default, relies on Mozilla servers to save browser information, the load on those servers determines how well it works, or if it even works at all. The program uses basic DAV to access the servers, and there is a configuration setting where the server address can be changed, so you can actually use any server that supports DAV access. There is a nice post in the Mozilla support forums that describes how to set up your own server, and there is more information in the Weave FAQ. I already had DAV working on my own server, so switching Weave to use it instead was a piece of cake. Now, syncs work every single time and are lightning fast, plus I don’t have to worry about the security of my information.

Since Mozilla is worried about stressing their servers too much, they’ve closed registration to new Weave users. However, if you use a different server, you can still get in on the fun. Set up your own server, or check out the forums for some free alternatives. Download the extension directly from here.