I need to study more. Today we had an oral exam in French, while we had a regular exam last week. While we were on break in class this week the teacher handed out our graded exams from last week, and I am a bit disappointed in myself. I got a 79. Since I missed a week where we started a new chapter, I missed some information, but I thought I had it covered by reading the pages that were covered. To my thinking the grade is a high C or a low B, but it reminds me that I should have spent more time studying.

This week was probably slightly better. For one part we just had to read/record a short poem in French and we were given the text we had to read. For the next section, we had were paired up with another student and we had to have a short conversation in French. We were given English instructions for what the conversation was supposed to cover, e.g. “Find out the last time he/she went out.” One student asked questions while the other student answered. We can write out our questions and answers ahead of time, but we cannot have them in front of us when we are doing the recording (it’s a computerized language lab). Though it’s not too surprising, I had a hard time remembering what I came up with, and I also suck at spontaneous conversation in French. I do okay writing it out, as long as I have a book in front of me so I can check my work, but speaking French spontaneously is something I have to work on.

In Second Language Acquisition last semester, there was a lengthy discussion (that kept popping up throughout) about using the L1 in the L2 classroom. At early levels it is needed, but at some point it becomes a crutch for the student. In the second semester of Beginning French we are to the point where we should be able to have some simple conversations, but have problems expressing ourselves because we still don’t have a large vocabulary and don’t know all of the rules of grammar. I need to hit the books a bit harder.

Also, since I got Poser last week, it has proven to be big time waster. I was never very interested in gaming, but I think this is a similar situation. To create props, clothes, morphs, etc for Poser, you have to export the model from Poser as a generic file (I used .obj) and import it in a different 3D editing program. I used Blender in this case. Surprisingly, even for a speedy computer like my Mac, Blender takes a long time to import .obj files – like 1/2 hour or more. Once it is imported, I save the file as a .blend file so it will load quicker next time.

After the post about battery life, I found myself making sticky notes with the time I unplugged the laptops to see how long it takes for the error messages to pop up. I also started doing that with Blender importing .obj files. I thought it was strange that I did that, because it seems a bit anal in retrospect. Although if I actually compiled the data in a spreadsheet and graphed the data, that would be a bit too much, so I guess I’m okay for now.

I’ve had the MacBook Pro for over a month now and since I have more experience with it, it’s probably ime for a progress report or something. As an aside, I keep wanting to call it a Powerbook because it reminds me of the Apple G4-era Powerbooks from a few years ago.

Typing still sucks. I’m not sure why, but I must hit some keys lighter then others when typing and the letters don’t show up. On other computers I get a lot of typos from pressing the adjacent keys, but with the MacBook the problem is random letters are missing because I didn’t press a given key hard enough. Also, Apple advertised it as having a full-sized keyboard, but they probably meant a full-sized laptop keyboard. I’ll talk about that more in a bit.

Horsepower. For most of the past month I’ve used the computer mainly for listening to music and watching DVDs. Hardly taxing for a capable machine, so I decided to put the CPU to use and installed the BOINC client for SETI. A few years ago SETI had the SETI@home project which harnessed the collective CPU power of the machines with clients installed. It was a well-known example of distributed computing. However, some people felt the idea of looking for aliens was idiotic and came up with their own distributed computing clients that worked at protein folding or gene mapping, with the hope of finding a cure for some disease. Eventually BOINC came about as a standardized client for these projects, so a person only needs to install the BOINC client, then they can choose between dozens of different projects for their computers to work on. Since I work with a lot of computers that often it idle, I installed clients on them too, but the MacBook is second fastest of them, following a quad-core Xeon server.

Sound and video are great. For a laptop, the speakers are surprisingly good, while the screen has higher resolution than my Linux PC at home. The screens at work aren’t worth mentioning. The screen is capable of HD, but the DVD will only play regular DVDs, not HD-DVD or Blu-ray. I don’t know if they can be bought as external peripherals.

The battery life doesn’t seem that good. I have Dell D630 laptop at work that was bought in September. The Dell has a smaller screen, but it also has a Centrino Duo CPU as opposed to the Core2 Duo in the Apple. Overall, they are about the same though, with only minor differences, IMHO. With both of the fully charged, I unplugged both at the same time. The Dell lasted 56 minutes before the warning LED came on and an error message popped up. The MacBook lasted 71 minutes before an error message popped up. To be fair though, I should have waited until each shut off from lack of power. I had a previous laptop that would keep goin 30 minutes after it showed a similar error message.

I said in a previous post that the Mac seems pretty worthless for web development and I stand by that for now. For the way I do web development work (i.e. with a text editor) Linux is far better. Plus, the tools in Linux are free.

I recently bought Poser after not using it for years – they don’t make a Linux version. I’m trying to rebuild a rusty skill set there. I used Poser 3 or 4 years ago and now they are on Poser 7, which came out last year. It also seems like it’s changed hands a lot over the past several years. It almost seems as if every time they come out with a new version, the company gets sold. Some company called e-frontier developed Poser 7, then the company got bought by Smith Micro for something like 6 million dollars last autumn. Sounds like a drop in the bucket for Silicon Valley prices. Poser and the Mac seem to go well together, though it helps to have a two-button mouse attached rather than using the trackpad with one button. Also, I’ve only had Poser for a few days, so the impression may change later.

It’s so-so for Blender. Using Blender it best to use one hand for the mouse and one hand for the keyboard, because Blender has a lot of hot keys or key sequences that control actions. One of the biggest reasons for using the keyboard is to use the number pad to go between alternate views, but the MacBook, with it’s full-sized laptop keyboard, the number pad is an alternate function of the main keypad. This is common with laptops, but it makes using Blender very difficult. I’ll probably try plugging in a full-sized USB keyboard and see how that works.

So far so good, but after a month I’m only giving it 3.5 of 5 stars (I’m a tough grader), because it seems mostly average.

I came across this article via Tech Dispenser and it got me briefly wondering about Slashdot’s moderation system. The author there apparently hasn’t been around Slashdot that long, otherwise she would know a bit more about how it’s evolved over the years.

Mainly, she writes about Firehose, which is a new feature for /. that shows the submission queue to logged in members and allows them to vote articles up or down (sort of like Digg, now that I think about it). Articles that are rated high enough get sent to the main page where everybody can see them.

The author, who is a PR person, insinuates that it is inevitable that Slashdot’s queue will be taken over by PR people. She writes,

“Slashdot is a valuable public square, and it is inevitable to flacks will be attracted ot it. Somehow Slashdot’s proprietors will have to find ways to prevent us from taking over.”

[typos included- MPH.]

While I’ve seen a lot of press releases and all-out ads in Slashdot’s Firehose, none of those end up on the main page. I think the Firehose is just the queue and the users have their say, but in the end it is up to the site moderators to send stories to the main page. The mods presumably know their audience and know what will interest them. Regardless of how a story is rated in Firehose, it is up to a mod to send it to the main page.

As usual, when I upgrade, something breaks. In this case, the blogroll at the bottom isn’t working. WP changed the template tags a bit so now wp_get_links doesn’t work and they suggest people use wp_list_bookmarks instead. It’s not just a name change, but apparently has some different functionality. Anyway, I can’t get it working at the moment.

I’ve been thinking about coming up with a new theme, but haven’t figured out which way I want to go with it. Brown is kind of good for a coffee/mocha motif, and there are even some themes out there that already have coffee motifs. However, it would be nice to have tome other colors too, so I have to ponder a bit.

BTW, I’ve come to the conclusion Macs are horrible development platforms, for the web at least. They don’t even come with a decent GUI text editor. It’s a sad state of affairs when Microsoft’s Notepad outshines anything Apple has to offer on their systems. There are text editors available for download or purchase, but an OS should come with a decent GUI text editor as part of the basic suite of programs. Mac OS X doesn’t even allow people to upload to FTP servers. I’m aware of the security issues of FTP, but if it allows me to download via FTP, why shouldn’t I be able to upload. At the moment, my MacBook is relegated to being a jukebox and DVD player. It’s very good at those things.

A week ago I did an upgrade of the site to the latest version of WordPress, but I kept getting an error Fatal Error: PHP Allowed Memory Size Exhausted then it would give the name of a script and a line number. Browsing around the net, I was able to figure out the problem and find some solutions.

The problem is an issue with the default setup of PHP, where is has a memory limit of 8 MB. This isn’t necessarily a big issue, but some more sophisticated scripts require more memory of the server, and since PHP is limiting how much memory is allocated, it returns a fatal error if a script wants too much.

The first solution is to change the memory_limit section of the php.ini file on the server. However, since this site is hosted, I don’t have access to that for security reasons. Also, most hosts are not inclined to change those setting for fear they will break other sites they host. Makes sense.

The second solution is to add the line php_value memory_limit 32M to the .htaccess file in the root directory of my site. I did this and it didn’t work. I tried it with different memory values with no success. I tried using M, MB, and Mb, also with no success. This was really frustrating because the FAQ for my hosting service said to change values in the .htaccess file as an alternative to making changes to the php.ini file.

The third solution is to add ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’32M’); to the top of each script that might require extra memory. Depending on how your scripts are setup, you might be able to get away with adding this to a header file or template file. It didn’t seem to work for me, until I added it to the upgrade.php file for WordPress. It’s not a very elegant solution, but it works. I actually added 64MB because I was frustrated.

I still don’t know why the second solution didn’t work, unless the server is ignoring that portion of the .htaccess file. I can’t say I’m 100% pleased about it, but if it happens in the future I will know what to do.

I’ve been sick most of this week. La grippe is French for “the flu,” which is most likely what I had. The coughing is still going on, but the muscle pain is mostly gone. I went into work each day, but only stayed an hour on Wednesday and until about 3:00 on Thursday. I skipped both classes this week because I didn’t feel up to going.

Wednesday was bad. I had a slight fever when I went into work and I didn’t sleep well the night before. I only had a few things to do, so I only stayed an hour. I went home and took a couple of generic Nyquil “Liquicaps” and hit the sack. I was only able to sleep in one or two hour spurts because I would wake up with coughing fits. I would get up, get a drink of water, keep coughing, and not be able to get back to sleep for awhile. I was too tired to want to read or watch a movie, but too alert to fall asleep. Every so often I would check my temperature with a thermometer (old school mercury and glass style). When I got home from work it was about 102, but through the night it progressed to 104. I debated on going to the hospital, but decided to do what I could to bring the fever down. I had been using a thick comforter. I tossed that aside and grabbed a lightweight fleece blanket. I also dropped the thermostat in my apartment down a few degrees. A damp rag over my forehead and closed eyelids seemed to help, but the fever always warmed it up after a few minutes. I also took 500mg acetaminophen an hour after taking the Nyquil, because I think it is supposed to be anti-inflammatory. By the morning the fever was around 100. I went into work feeling better but not great.

After work Thursday, I stayed up a little bit but tried to get some sleep to make up for the lack of quality sleep the night before. It didn’t work. Again, despite the Nyquil and some acetaminophen, I still kept waking up with coughing fits. I went into work on Friday at my normal time, but my body was beat. I didn’t feel sick, but exhausted. However, I think this was mainly a residual effect of the Nyquil, because I felt better in the afternoon. At home after work, I wasn’t tired so I surfed the net for a bit and took a hot bath for the muscle aches. When I went to sleep it was the same thing as the previous two nights, though the spurts seemed to go a little longer. I woke up at 5:30 on Saturday because of the alarm on my watch and didn’t bother to go back to bed. Surfed some more, took another bath, and around 8:30am I laid down for a nap. This time I was able to sleep for four hours and woke up very refreshed. It was the best sleep I had had in days. The downside is I wasn’t tired enough to go to bed early, which is why I am writing this in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday. I hope next week is a better one, but I’ve got a ton of homework to do.

I am fatigued, though a better translation of the title might be “I am tired.” For me though, I mainly feel fatigued. Last night I went to bed around 6:30 or 7:00 with a little sinus pressure. It’s been rainy here, so that might have something to do with it. I woke up at around 1:30 am to some lady in the alley shouting at somebody. I didn’t hear them, but she was going on for awhile. I couldn’t get back to sleep after that, but I slept well and felt mostly refreshed so I didn’t care too much. I got up, turned on the computer and started surfing.

Since I’ve been awake, I’ve been coughing a fair amount. It’s not a sore throat, but it feels like a little tickle at the back of the throat and drinking coffee and water hasn’t made it go away. Around 6:00 this morning, I headed to work early. Shortly after I got into the office I noticed my whole body felt fatigued and my head felt a little congested. While I’ve felt much more congested, my body felt as if it had been beaten up or as if I’d been working out for a few hours. Still coughing too. I took some extra-strength Tylenol hoping the muscle pain would go away, but it didn’t. I stuck it out until a little after lunch then headed home, where I am now.

My body is tired but my mind is not. And after drinking copious amounts of coffee and water to try to fix the cough, neither is my bladder :-/ I may take a hot bath to see if that helps with the muscle pain. After that, I don’t know.