Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system… for a few years… then we hurried back. The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

via XKCD

On Chrome OS netbooks the caps lock key has been replaced by a search button that opens a new tab. After bashing on the search button a bunch of times I used one of the new tabs to search for information about my problem. The solution is simple. Press both shift keys at the same time to activate and deactivate caps lock.

TemplateSyntaxError at /form/
Caught AttributeError while rendering: ‘FormWizard’ object has no attribute ‘__name__’

This is not just a problem with Django Debug Toolbar. There are also a number of Django decorators that raise an AttributeError when you use them to decorate a form wizard instance. To make everyone happy, it’s easiest to just declare the __name__ property in your form wizard classes.

Things to note: shell commands can be aliased by adding ! before them. Piping the output of git diff into `mate` opens the diff in my favorite text editor, Textmate. Also you can chain together multiple commands using a semi-colon.

I’m really looking forward to this movie. I haven’t read the novel yet, but I have heard some really good things. I’ve also been told it has a similar premise as “Journeyman”, which was a TV show I loved (but was cancelled).

I also figure this will count as a “chick-flick” and I can take my fiance with me to see it.

My lease was up in June so we started looking for places to live. The places we looked at renting were too expensive, so we started looking at buying a home. After lots of searching and open-houses, we put an offer on this one and it was accepted.

It is a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom home built in the 1930′s. There is a porch on the front and a deck/patio on the back. We’re currently doing some renovations that I’ll post some pictures of later.

I have redesigned JeffBaier.com to help me be more productive. The long posts I write are now located under “Articles.” These are mostly Howto’s, tutorials or long recaps of events or trips. I am reserving my front page for my 3 latest tweets and recent blog posts. My goal is to keep the ‘blog’ posts shorter and more interesting. They will most likely include pictures and may end up being more personal in nature. Becka and I just bought a house and we are remodeling. Expect lots of pictures of that.

I was also tired of my old design. Hope you enjoy the new look and content of JeffBaier.com!

Friday, November 9th, I woke up around 4am shivering uncontrollably. I got up and got more blankets and went back to sleep. I woke up later in the morning to go to class. My right leg was hurting badly. It felt like I had pulled a muscle. I also felt nauseas, had a high fever, and also still had chills and shivering. I decided to skip classes, and just sleep all day.

The next morning I woke up and my leg still hurt. I had trouble walking and noticed that my leg was developing what looked like a rash. I eventually went to the Emergency Room, and this picture was taken shortly after I got done.

They diagnosed me with cellulitis, prescribed me some pain medication and Bactrim antibiotics, drew a blue line on my leg, and sent me home.

This photo album is of my leg slowly healing.

“We are very pleased with VMware’s demonstrated ability to work with the open source community. Open Virtual Machine Tools streamlines the process of providing ISVs with an edition of Ubuntu optimized for virtual appliances that follows the JeOS concept of ‘Just Enough Operating System’ and allows us to provide end users of the Ubuntu operating system with a compelling out-of-the-box experience. We look forward to the debut of Open Virtual Machine Tools within a future release of Ubuntu.”

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project

VMware’s move to open source will prove to be important in making more efficient virtual machines and getting more people to use virtualization products.

via VMworld 2007 Press Release

Today I realized I had done something incredibly stupid. About 9 months ago Apple initiated a worldwide battery recall. I bought one of the 15″ Macbook Pro’s when they first became available in February of 2006. My original battery had just begun to have problems. It would only hold a charge to about 40%. So the timing of this recall was just about perfect.

I filled out the form, and within a few days I had my brand new battery. You were supposed to send back your old battery, but I didn’t. I was curious to see what would happen. I never got charged for it, so I went ahead and kept my original battery. I figured having an extra would come in handy, even if it would only hold half a charge.

Flash forward 9 months later, and it wasn’t that handy to have an extra semi-functional battery. The battery had been stashed away in my old school backpack for the better part of 8 months. Today I found it while cleaning out my room. This is what it looks like now.

The moral of the story is that if Apple is recalling these batteries, it’s probably for a good reason.