The Mystic Bird

Just when I thought everything was going along just dandy, along comes a spider that sat down beside ‘er and just blew things away. That spider was my goofball idea to move this blog over to another account of mine which also happens to be on a different server. The DNS happened to be the same but the IP address was different. Thus the spider reference. They’re usually harmless but can do some crazy things.

Well, most of the propagation has completed now and I’m left with a little light housekeeping to clean up some images that have mysteriously disappeared from some posts and some other small issues. It’ll keep my tail busy for a little while and remind me that sometimes…just sometimes, it’s best to just let some things be!

Google finally confirmed their interest in the mobile phone market a few days ago with the admission of work being done on free software to power them. Google has brought together around 34 companies under the Open Handset Alliance to provide service for Google’s Android mobile phone software.

Confirming it’s long rumored foray into the mobile market, Google said it was developing the free cell phone software package so that it could more easily peddle ads and services to those of us not in front of a computer.

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Go figure. I’m baffled on this one as I really don’t have a clue at this point just what happened. Pidgin was running along just fine on my Gutsy Gibbon desktop (Ubuntu 7.10)…no problems. I exited from the app because I had to reboot the machine for a download I’d made.

This is where things get fuzzy. After the machine re-booted, I checked for the program I’d downloaded and made sure it was operational. That part went as expected. Next, after clicking on Pidgin on the Taskbar where I had parked the icon earlier…nothing happens. Pidgin never loaded. I tried it several more times…each time giving the app plenty of time to load up. Still nada.

Time to backup and punt here. I uninstalled the entire app via synaptic, rebooted (yeah, I know I didn’t have to) the machine and reinstalled it. Still nothing.

While I’m researching the cause of this problem, I installed Kopete and have it running to keep up with friends and conspirators alike.

Anyone have something similar happen with Pidgin? This is a puzzler.

Update:

Got Pidgin working again and the solution was as nutty as the problem. Seems that the app was running on my desktop but it was hidden for some unknown reason. I found this out by accident when searching for a system process that I was trying to locate.

It was here that I stumbled across the running process for Pidgen. I thought I had lost my mind because the app was removed from usability in the Edit Menus section while I was using Kopete. The darn thing must have been running all along and I just didn’t realize it. That’s what I get for using a Windows mentality approach.

This is why: In Windows one can load up several instances of a program or application. Apparently in Ubuntu, this is not necessarily true. Where I had attempted to load up Pidgin it was already running and therefore didn’t load up twice.

Yeah, I know this doesn’t make any sense really but it’s running again and the next time I run into a similar scenario I’m gonna check the System Processes first before anything else.

What the heck is a favicon? It’s that little emblem or icon if you will, that sits up there in your browser’s address bar right in front of the website address. Some sites have one, some don’t. How would you like to have one of your very own? Cool, huh? OK, well follow along while I set mine up at FavIcon From Pics.

Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size/resolution) for the “Source Image” from your computer using the handy “Browse” button and then click “Generate FavIcon.ico” .

The next screen will show you a preview of your new favicon.ico with 2 options. 1. You can then download it to your computer or 2. You can test it in your browser to make sure this is what you want.

Now, assuming you’re satisfied with your creation what you want to do next is to upload it to your website. Here’s what to do:

To add this favicon to your web page:

• Click “Download FavIcon” and open the package. favicon.ico is included in it.
• Upload the favicon.ico file to the folder on your web site where you have the web page.
• Add the following HTML tag to your web page after the <head> tag, before the </head> tag: <link rel=“shortcut icon” href=“favicon.ico” >

That’s it! To test your new favicon in Internet Explorer, add your site to Favorites and reopen the page. To test it in Firefox or other Mozilla-based browser, simply open your web page and watch the address bar or the page tab.

I made mine, uploaded it and saw it in less than 5 minutes. See what you can create for your web page!