Some readers know that I like to play with technology a bit.

Today, I finally successfully made hard disk encryption work on my linux laptop. This makes me pretty happy. I've been playing with various incarnations of this technology for a while--it is nice to have one that actually works the way it is supposed to work.

If you are also geeky and interested, here's a good how-to for the current wave of "new technology" that integrates block-device encryption with the kernel:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedFilesystemHowto3

jonathan

Well, Vancouver has been a blast so far.  I've been meeting a lot of people in my industry, which is a good thing.  I've also been able to facilitate three discussions that look to be pretty fruitful, and have had the chance to network with some folks I've met in the past but haven't really talked with to any extent. 

I've also had a chance to explore some of Vancouver, which is always a bonus.  On Monday, I rented walked the sea wall walk from the street that my hotel is on through the marina and over to Stanley Park.  Near there, I rented a bike and rode around the park a couple of times.  It's a little over five miles around the park once.  I stopped a lot on the first loop to look at things and take some pictures.  The second loop was pretty much just for the fun of it.  I also took an alternate path at the end to explore some more of the park.  It is a pretty extensive park, and I only had a chance to view some of it.  It was good fun, though.  On my way back up to the hotel, I found a small market and picked up some fruit.  I also found an awesome Korean place, so I had a great lunch. 

I explored some of the other areas of the city with others from our group on Monday evening, checking out an area called Gastown.  This area was named after a guy whose nickname was "gassy".  Yeah, that's probably not a nickname one wants to actually have.  Anyway, most all of the shops in the area were closed by the time we were finished with dinner.  We stopped first at the "Vancouver View" tower, which is a short version of the CN Tower.  When I say a short version, I mean that there are now taller buildings in the city than the tower.  Actually, most of the new buildings in the city are as tall or taller than the tower.  :)  It was pretty funny.  On our way through the neighborhood after dinner, we heard a clock playing the Westminster melody on something that sounded vaguely like a caliope.  As we walked down the street, we encountered what is called "the steam clock".  This is a clock powered partially by steam, and it also uses the steam to play a set of pipes at the top of its case.  Highly awesome is all I have to say about that. 

Tuesday was a busy day.  I unfortunately missed a trip to English Bay to watch the sunset with some of our group, as I was busy with a required meeting at the end of the day, and everyone had already departed by the time I got in touch with them.  I ended up finding this Thai place that was highly recommended in a number of different books.  More awesome food.  Yum. 

Wednesday was a few more events to attend, including the evening social banquet.  This was good fun.  It was a wine tasting dinner, with a local Canadian wine celebrity talking us through the meal.  I don't often have duck, and even when I do, it is only rarely something about which I'd write anything good.  This duck was absolutely perfect.  This was another good evening, and was occasion to facilitate a few good conversations between folks who had never met but who work through us. 

Today was the big voting meeting that I had to be here to attend.  After that was a special dinner for some of the sponsors.  It was held at a great place in Stanley Park.  I understand that people wait four months for reservations at this place.  The wine flowed quite freely, and hte food was great.  The wait staff was really eager to make sure that our wine glasses never fell below a certain level.  I don't know how many bottles we finally polished-off, but there was a good pile of them that I saw towards the end.  We were all ferried to and from the place in stretch limos.  It was a great time. 

Now I'm tired.  I have a presentation that I need to spend some time finishing tomorrow for Sunday.  There are a few conference events tomorrow, but I likely won't make it to any of them--we'll have to see.  I absolutely need to bust-out the rest of that presentation.  I also have to finish processing the pictures from earlier this week.  Now I probably need to get some sleep.  :) 

jonathan

So, I finally did it.  Here it is--Blog V3.  Let me know if you have any problems.  I'll be adding some stuff in the near future, too.  There are a few missing things right now (links, a few old pages didn't migrate correctly, and the twitter status block is not there yet).  Also, if you had an account on the old blog, you'll probably need to create another one here.  Sorry about that.  I promise that I'll try to stop jumping among software packages. 

jonathan

Well, Blog V3 is almost ready.  I will probably make the switch soon.  I've been using Movable Type on here for a number of months, and it has worked well. It hasn't been as easy for me to extend as I thought it would be, though.  It also hasn't proven able to handle other websites as easily as it handles this blog.  I don't like having to maintain multiple packages all aimed at doing essentially the same thing (content management), so I think I'm going to bid adieu to Movable Type.  I've already moved one other site that I maintain over to the new software (Drupal), and it has been running well.  Drupal is well-suited for that particular site, and it looks like it will also handle a general blog/informational site well, too.  I've been having some fun learning more about CSS as I work on the theme for the new site.  Check it out at the link above, or just wait until it gets posted here.  It should be fun, in any case. 

jonathan

For the techie types out there, I've been working on Blog Version 3.  I'm playing with a software package called Drupal to host it.  If you're interested in clicking-around on it and taking a look at how it works, here's the URL to the test site:  Blog Sandbox.

I'm liking this software a lot.  I'm having far too much fun playing with it and adding features.

I fixed some of the image placement issues that were bugging me in the "Cool!" post.  Now I'm working on seeing if I can add the formatting fix as a plugin, which would make it a lot easier to add images from our gallery with formatting that I like.  :) 

jonathan

Made the site navigation bar work.  Woo hoo!  I'll probably tweak it some more, but it looks pretty good, I think.  I now also need to go and re-enable the content for it so that there's more than the old "our old house" page.  :) 

jonathan

I'm liking this system.  I worked some template goodness to add a "Links" section, and worked some additional template goodness to re-enable the Google ads (sorry, but it helps to pay for costs associated with this site).  W00t, as they say.  This is fun. 

Still to-do:

• Header image goodness.
• Static pages for restoration work, about us, etc.
• World domination through historic restoration.

Er, yeah.  About that last bullet....

jonathan

I've gone ahead and switched our blogging software.  I was starting to have too many problems with the old system, and have been reading lots of good things about this system.  In addition, some people I really trust to make good decisions about software to use for mission-critical applications recently chose this same platform for another project.  If it is good enough for them, maybe it'll be good enough for our extremely-low-volume-and-not-very-complex blog!  :)

One of the things that I like about this system is that the back-end is written mostly in perl.  I use perl just about every day for all kinds of things, so this is quite convenient.  Some readers may not know this, but I like playing with code.  Here, I can actually do it.  Not that PHP (which is what the old system used) is terrible or anything, but every time I tried to do something new, I ran into a roadblock with something.  Either the complexity went through the roof, or I thought it might be a security risk, or actually doing what I wanted to do required a few more plugins.  Blah blah blah.  So far, I'm pretty happy with the back-end architecture of this system.  As an example, I spent yesterday evening installing this new system, loading in some test entries, and just playing around with it a little bit.  Tonight, I spent about fifteen minutes with some of the documentation to get myself familiar with some of the internal workings, then spent about an hour importing all of the old entries, re-working the templates to build the pages, getting the neat little random photo thing to work in this environment, and getting the site ready for a refresh.  I also spent about an hour and a half re-structuring the filesystem layout for all of this domain, which I had been wanting to do for some time. 

The end result is a blog that loads much faster, is easier to maintain from the administrative end, and has some nice additional features.  Additionally, the filesystem layout and rewrite rules make a lot more sense now, and should allow me to do some additional neat things with the site in the future.

Why bother with all of this?  Well, I'm a techie.  I can't help it.

Note:  This is my first time playing with tags on this blog.  We'll have to see how that works-out. 

jonathan