With Linux we can easily clone an installation, or move hard drive between different systems. The hardware changes normally don't make much of a difference. BUT, with modern Ubuntu systems - and other distro's I'm sure - the network card can cause a problem. This comes up with virtual machines (with VMWare, Xen, KVM, etc.) when a copy of an existing guest install is used to create a new virtual machine.

The results of these changes normally show up as an error something like this:

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device eth0

Like the new coat of paint? Yep, the new server is up and running and I thought I would commemorate with a new theme for the site. As a matter of fact, the site received a fair bit of long needed attention.

First was a manual migration of EVERY blog posting I've made since the start of Grover Ponders. I could have saved a lot of time and effort if I just copied the site over as is, but this was a perfect opportunity to take care of a few things that have been nagging at me.

I have just received a kind email from the UK expressing thanks for a few of my articles. But this particular visitor went the extra mile and let me know that when registering an account for this site, the details are not getting mailed out properly. This was news to me, though in retrospect I think the problem would have started when I moved my mail server to a new host. Thanks and props to this visitor for taking the time to a) identify the problem, and b) take the time to track me down regardless, with both their thanks and the trouble notice!

I prefer to use KDE for my desktop environment. One of the nice tools included with KDE was Amarok. Version 1.4.x of Amarok was great - it did most of what I wanted. Then when KDE switched to it's 4.x versions and began taking advantage of the QT version 4 capabilities, Amarok was a little slow to keep up. A short while later the Amarok team introduced version 2.x of the player. And promptly irritated a large number of the users.

We've all seen the usual HTML select lists. Something that looks like this:

This is ok, but looks clunky and gets to be annoying if you do not know about holding down the CTRL key to do multiple selections. More importantly, you can never list anything other than text - you can't add helpful icons or more elaborate HTML elements if needed. Instead you're left rolling your own solution.