"Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone."
[Via Quotes of the Day]
Author: bill
RE: Salami slicing Fallujah
In the mere nine days since I posted a piece on the negative trends of battle attrition in Iraq, things have changed. I said that the then-present tactics being used against insurgents in the city could not be sustained because the odds were not in our favor…
[Via One Hand Clapping]
I guess I noticed the same thing. Things were looking bad but I was surprised the foks in Fallujah tried to take on the marines directly. A man must know his limits. Taking the battle beyond guerilla warfare is probably suicidal considering the American firepower. It appears that the best strategy for the folks in Fallujah was to accept the ceasefire and organize themselves for the future power struggle. Now they can do neither! If this is the endgame for the Fallujah uprising, this gives the future Iraqi provisional government a little more time to get a working ruling consensus.
RE: Claudia Rosett's Summary
The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know, and When Did He Know It? This lengthy article is the best overview of the whole rotten, complicated mess that was the OFP that I have found. If you only read one…
[Via Friends of Saddam]
Since I finally realized that only $800 million was spent on bribes, I have become very curious where the other $9 billion went. This summary does a great job explaining how the money disappeared and who got it.
Hernia operation
My wife got some bad news at the doctor's office. He says she has a hernia and they need to operate. He went on to say that after the surgery she will need to stop riding horses for two months and to expect recover about 80% of her original abdominal strength. My wife's world just crashed down on her. She rides about six horses a day for much of the week. Many of her clients rely on her ability to get up on their horses if necessary to fix problems. All of that has changed! My wife is one unhappy camper and there is nothing I can do but listen and sooth. I doubt that will be enough.
Habitat for Humanity Church Relations Newsletter
I am not sure how I found this page but the first quarter Church Relations Newsletter for Habitat for Humanity is online and can be found at 1st Quarter Church Relations News for Affiliates.
RE: Mark Twain
"We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess."
[Via Quotes of the Day]
Bloggar Test
I finally got Bloggar to work with Radio. The hard part was figuring out the page to use since all my searches came up empty. So here is what I configured to make it work:
- Host: 127.0.0.1
- Page: /RPC2
- Port: 5335
- Posts: metaWeblog API
- Categories: metaWeblog API – Multi
Earlier I had set up phpAdmin and WordPress on my local Fedora box and bloggar on my XP box. I then configured Bloggar to post to WordPress. Bloggar is now configured to post to two different weblogs. As you can probably surmise I plan on migrating away from Radio Userland to probably WordPress. I am now going to look into updating phpwebsite using bloggar.
WordPress
During a long lunch break from repairing the driveway I did a little catching up with my Rss reader and found a reference to another sourceforge project, WordPress. It looks real interesting so I downloaded a copy. I have looked at Movable Type several times but have backed off for minor reasons. Radio works for me most of the time and is cost effective. However, customizing the css or pages is a pain and there are some MT features I would like to see.
Awstats and changing web host providers
I installed awstats on the fedora box to test it out. I am planning to move a couple websites over to godaddy.com and I have been trying to figure out web site statistics. I have a love-hate relationship with webtrends. Its fine when it works. Last year I am missing about a months worth of data on one of my websites. I asked the web host provider to generate the month again but I still got nothing. After a couple more tries a gave up. I am not sure whether the data is missing but I would like better control.
My plan on changing my web host provider is to add features and lower cost. I think I can get away with $3.95 a month for a low volume LAMP site. At the worst I may need to spend $7.95. My present provider, Interland, provides me LA service for $19.95. Time to move on!
The good news is I got it to work. The bad news is the statistics for phpwebsite does not tell me much about which pages people are visiting. I guess I need to read the FAQ and manual.
Gftp is fixed!
I forgot another tibbit I fixed yesterday and the day before. I have been using ssh to communicate with my W2K3 server and the fedora box while I am still working out my problems with Samba. The command line utilities, scp and sftp, worked fine but the gui ftp program, gftp, did not. A couple of days ago I figured out that I needed to check the sftp subsystem box in the gftp's SSH configuration to get it to work. Then I saw that a few directories were displayed incorrectly and inaccessible. The screwed up directory just happened to be the one I wanted to transfer. Now that is a real bummer. Then yesterday I noticed that Fedora had a new updated version of gftp available. I checked the release notes and noticed they had changed the default setting to on for the sftp subsystem. Better yet the new version fixed the directory problem.