WillChatham.com   I am a geek.

You may have read here before about my ventures with Linux on the home pc, where things must work for the whole family, not just me the Linux Geek.

Back in March or so, I grew tired of Windows XP on my home desktop. I was sick of having to keep up with WGA cracks (ahem), sick of bloated crapware, and not interested whatsoever in Vista.

So, I installed RedHat Linux (Fedora Core 6 to be exact). This was highly tolerable for a couple of months since I was used to using it at work all the time, and I am well versed in RedHat operating systems. However, it caused issues for Alicia because it just wasn’t intuitive enough, and it didn’t just work. There was always some fingling needed to be done in a terminal window.

I decided a few weeks ago that I would install Ubuntu 7.4 Fiesty Fawn, and I haven’t looked back since. When I learned that Dell was shipping PC’s with Ubuntu instead of Linux, I knew it must be time. The installation was fast, and it was insanely simple to do. The Ubuntu developers have thought of everything, and it seems like they are driven to make something with mass appeal that is better than Windows. In my opinion, they have.

It just works. Plugged in my iPod, it worked. Plugged in my old NTFS data drive, it worked. Plugged in my USB card reader, it worked. All of it works. Needed a codec to watch some video clip, and Ubuntu went and found it easily, letting me start watching within seconds.

The final test of Ubuntu’s readiness for the masses was how well my wife handled it. So far, the only complaint is that she cannot listen to music she bought from iTunes (until I work around that). So all in all, Ubuntu passes with flying colors.

On the Dell website, they detail all the cool stuff Michael Dell has in his personal tech arsenal. I was suprised to see his primary laptop runs Ubuntu Linux, Open Office, and Firefox. Guess he’s as fed up with Window as the rest of us!

Speaking of (free) alternatives to (upgrades from) Microsoft products, Thunderbird 2 is out! I have been eagerly waiting for this, as it will introduce some cool new features, such as the ability to tag your messages with keywords. Ooh! I gotta go upgrade now…I’ll let you know how it goes!

For the last few weeks, the techie blogs have been circulating stories about how Microsoft Windows Vista can be installed and used for free for 120 days. You see, Microsoft gives you 30 days to try it out for nothing, but then they will disarm it and require you to purchase a license to continue using it.

Someone found out that Microsoft had built in a way to extend that 30 trial to 120 days through a little registry tweak.

Well, now someone has figured out how to extend it indefinitely, not by hacking or cracking the operating system, but by using the built-in tools that Microsoft included in the operating system.

From DailyCupOfTech.com:

“It appears that crackers need not break Windows Vista activation because Microsoft has done it for them! Brian Livingston of Window Secrets writes in Microsoft allows bypass of Vista activation about how to allow you to keep your Vista box running indefinitely without activating it.”

It is likely that MS will try and fix this through some future patch, but what will they break in doing so? They obviously had a need to provide this functionality for some reason.

Now that I’ve abandoned Winders on the home desktop completely for RedHat Fedora linux, this makes me chuckle. However, maybe I’ll give it a shot and see what happens!

I just got through setting up Tomcat5.5, Apache2, and mod_jk on a RedHat Enterprise AS4.4 machine at work. In the past, I have done this by compiling each component separately and fingling with config files until it all worked. But I wanted to stick with RedHat-approved RPM’s from the RedHat network to ease updates and patch management, and to allow the organization to have support options.

I had a lot of trouble finding any documentation on how to do this anywhere, so I thought I’d throw it out here for anyone in a similar situation in search of help.

The following are my notes, sprinkled with a little help I got from a RedHat support tech.

First, I had to enable the following channel within the RedHat Network for this system:

–Red Hat Application Server v. 2 (AS v. 4 for i386)

If you don’t have a RHEL license for updating your system, you will need one.

Once those channels were enabled, I installed the following packages using up2date at the command line:


# up2date tomcat5
# up2date tomcat5-webapps
# up2date tomcat5-admin-webapps
# up2date mod_jk-ap20


With the packages installed, I set out to configure a virtual host to pass requests to Tomcat as needed by using the mod_jk connector. The following steps explain how to do this for a web site called example.com using IP address 123.123.123.123. Substitute your domain and IP accordingly.

Step 1. - Add mod_jk to Apache

In /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf add this:


LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so
<ifmodule mod_jk.c>
JkWorkersFile "/etc/httpd/conf/workers.properties"
JkLogFile "/etc/httpd/logs/mod_jk.log"
JkLogLevel info
JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y]”
</ifmodule>


That loads the module into Apache, tells apache where the worker is that will handle jsp/servlets, and tells Apache where to record log entries for mod_jk.

Step 2. - create a new file called /etc/httpd/conf/workers.properties and add this to it:


[channel.socket:example.com:8009]
port=8009
host=example.com
[uri:example.com/*.jsp]
worker=ajp13:example.com:8009


Step 3. Create a virtual host in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf like so:


<virtualhost 123.123.123.123:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
ServerName www.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
JkMount /*.jsp ajp13
JkMount /servlet/* ajp13
# Deny direct access to WEB-INF
</virtualhost>


Step 4. Set up Tomcat5 by adding this to /etc/tomcat5/server.xml just before the very last </Engine> tag at the bottom of the document:


<host name="example" appBase="/var/www/html" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
<context path="" docBase="" debug="0" reloadable="true"/>
<alias>www.example.com</alias>
<valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs" prefix="web1_access_log." suffix=".txt" pattern="common" resolveHosts="false"/>
</host>


Still with me? We are almost done.

Step 6. Create a sample jsp file called /var/www/html/test.jsp and add this to it:


Time: < %= new java.util.Date() %>


Step 7. Start up the services

# apachectl start
# service tomcat5 start


Step 8. Try it!

Browse to http://www.example.com/test.jsp

If all went well, you should see the system’s current date and time when you load the web page. Congrats. Hope it works for you!

From The “That’s So Disgusting” Department
Found a rather hilarious writeup about my Fingernail and Toenail Collection today over at I Am Such a Child. The pics aren’t working on that page, but you should be able to follow along.

I was contacted by MyHeavy.com about doing a video of myself performing my toenail licking ritual and submitting it to their site. June had originally mentioned that idea a couple of months ago, and I’ve just been waiting until the moment feels right. Stay tuned.

From The Online Web Tools Department
Check out this huge list of online generators for generating things such as 3-column CSS layout and accessible forms.

From The Tooting My Own Horn Department
Someone has erected a Myspace page for Crain. Nice job of collecting stuff.

From The Crucial Apps Department
If you use multiple monitors on your PC, then you must get Multi Monitor Taskbar, a freebie tool that puts a taskbar at the bottom of your second monitor, saving you mouse mileage and window confusion. It also has a nifty clipboard memory tool built in.

A common task I always find myself doing in Firefox is searching through my boatloads of bookmarks (1100+) for something I remember the look of, but not the name or URL of. I tend to remember things visually, so this is a common problem I run into.

I’ve looked around for a Firefox extension that would do the following, but haven’t found anything. Does anyone know of a bookmark extension that would provide the following functionality?

• Take a screenshot of a web page when it is bookmarked. (This could be optional somehow).
• Show the screenshot when hovering over bookmarks in the Bookmarks menu.
• Retroactively take screenshots of web sites already in your Bookmarks.
• Be compatible with Foxmarks.

Yeah, so that’s probably asking quite a lot…but hey! This would be a killer extension if it did half of what I listed.

Any takers?