Geek on Two Wheels

I think I’ll call it PlainText. I’m sure the reason is obvious.

Computing, thy name is frustration.

After some forgetfulness and procrasination on the part of the old webmaster, the contact person, and, of course, myself, I was finally given the proper information necessary to access administrator functions for http://www.bmba.ca. Much to my dismay, despite being hosted on a linux machine, there is no ssh access to the server, and I am forced to do everything through cPanel and various other web-based administration applications. Having to access the backend through an unsecured webportal was uncomfortable, to say the least, and the inability to download and install package updates on the server was just annoying. To add insult to injury, the database server suddently came under load while I was attempting to rid the forum of spam bots, making even simple SELECTs take more than 15 seconds to complete. To make it worse, in order to delete an user, I had to bring up the user profile, mark it for deletion, confirm the deletion, then follow one more link to return to where I started, for every individual account I wanted to purge. A happy administrator, this did not make.

Eventually, the server returned to normal, and the task was completed successfully. Content with the results so far, I moved on customizing LyX in order to be ready for the papers I’m required to write.

Long story short, I am failing utterly at it.

LyX does not seem to be recognizing that apa.cls is indeed installed, and will not let me use the APA layout. Oddly enough, the former is not included in the teTeX package, while the latter is included in LyX. I will have to try using apa.cls again with LaTeX to see if it will at least work there.

Although I’ve finally learned the awesomeness that is BibTeX, pybliographer decided that it would only run once, then fail to even load on subsequent launches despite the fact that I’ve just created, added an entry to, and used a BibTeX database successfully using it.

Ugh!

As it turns out, I’ve somehow managed to break the config file while browsing through the settings tabs, and removing .pybrc.conf was sufficient in solving my problem. (Infact, I just figured this out a minute ago, right after completing the previous two paragraphs)

So, to summarize, I need to look for a new webhost for BMBA, LyX still pwns me, and BibTeX is awesome. Stay tuned for more on my perpetual and losing struggle against technology.

Ooops…

I apparently forgot the fact that all comments made to this here blog must be approved by a moderator, or be posted by a user with previously approved comments to show up on the site. Silly me.

You may now enjoy all the random comments the people in my monkey-sphere have made as well as my own.