I have a cold. It’s all my friend Carl’s fault. He was blowing his snotty nose all weekend. Admittedly I’m not exactly dying, it’s what people might call ‘Man Flu’, but I feel pretty rough.
It’s all Carl’s fault.
Monthly Archives: April 2005
LUG Radio Live Blog
Jono from LUG Radio has kindly allowed me to post on the LUG Radio Live Blog.
It looks like I might be helping out with a few things, particularly the Clan Gaming section, so please go and have a look to see if you can help out. A few links:
Also, consider putting a LUG Radio banner on your website.
If you are coming, how about shooting you fellow man in the back with large balls of paint at LUG Radio Paintball which will take place the day after LUG Radio Live?
Finally, another mention for clan.lugradio.org, if you can’t shoot at your fellow man in person, consider doing it over the net.
New Hardware
Always a good thing 😀
I treated myself. I’ve been after a TFT monitor for ages as I have to keep my curtains closed due to the sun hitting my monitor and it’s quite large and so has to sit in the corner of the desk causing me to crane my neck at a slightly uncomfortable angle. I remember a friend telling me that the prices were due to fall in early 2005, so I checked and checked and saw no sign of this until Monday night, when I saw a 17″ LG L1715S on www.ebuyer.com for £150.01 inc VAT so I pounced on a whim. It’s a little extravagant for someone with no money and a credit card but I spend about 10 hours a day staring at my monitor so it’s worth the difference it will make.
I also treated myself to a 24 port US Robotics 10/100 ethernet switch as my old 8 port switch is pretty much full and I anticipate needing something with more ports for taking to events like What the Hack and LUG Radio Live 2005.
Both of these arrived today and I dropped the switch in for the old 8 port switch within about 15 seconds. The VGA cable for the TFT monitor wasn’t long enough to stretch around my desk, luckily it’s detatchable and I have a longer one spare. So far the monitor seems great, I have set it up with the proper horizontal and vertical refresh rates in xorg.conf and added 2 extra resolutions of 1280×1024 and 1152×864 alongside the usual 1024×768 et al. 1024 made my GUI seem too large and 1280 makes the web look too small, I haven’t tried 1152 yet, maybe that will be more comfortable.
The only real criticism I have of this monitor so far if that there is a small amount of faint left to right ghosting, about 1cm wide. It’s predominantly along the left-hand screen edge, apparently to do with the backlighting, but other than that it’s great. Played Wolf ET with no problems at all.
The other day, after being refused the free mobile phone upgrade in the O2 store that I was entitled to as part of my contract, I received a letter from them offering me a free upgrade. Pricks. So I took it and I now have a nice shiny Sony Ericsson K700i as recommended by Aq.
As my old phone was a Nokia 8310, I had to work out how to transfer my contacts from it to the K700i. The K700i imported all of my contacts from the SIM card but a while back my Nokia went weird and started saving everything to the phone memory rather than the SIM. I don’t have any bluetooth devices, a cable, or mobile internet connectivity in my contract and the only IrDA devices are my laptop (Ubuntu), my sisters old WinME PC and the two phones themselves. I couldn’t work out how to do it by direct phone to phone IrDA though I didn’t try very hard. I looked at MultiSync but it doesn’t seem to do Nokia, I tried to find Gnokii in my Ubuntu repositories but I must have spelt it wrongly because I couldn’t find it last night, though I could today when it was too late.
So anyway, I had to use my sister’s Windows box and the Nokia Phone Suite (I used an old version apparently) to get my contacts etc off the phone and onto a PC, then to my Ubuntu laptop. I couldn’t get MultiSync to talk to my K700i via IrDA so I ended up typing the missing numbers in by hand. Meh. I should have used the Windows only CD that came with the K700i but I couldn’t be arsed. I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly.
Recommendations for a Linux compatible bluetooth dongle are welcome. It’s not something I know about.
While we’re on the subject, I also found this link for all things Nokia under Linux. And this one for using the K700i with Linux.
Also the weird hangs and power-offs haven’t occured since I took the side panel off my PC so it looks like it was a cooling issue, I’ll have to get some more fans.
Well anyway, I have a new phone, a new 17″ TFT monitor and a new 24 port network switch so I’m quite happy. Just don’t tell my credit card company 😀
Oh and volunteers to do my uni assignments, a free holiday in Barbados, a guaranteed £50k a year job messing with Linux and being sexually abused by Michelle Trachtenberg (aka Buffy’s sister, Celeste from 6 Feet Under and the chick from Euro Trip, who I happen to think looks like my girlfriend at times ;)) are the only things that could make me happier at the moment.
Hardware Problems
I think I’m starting to have hardware problems. A few times recently, my PC has just turned off without warning. I put it down to the long hours it spends on every day as it goes on when I get up and doesn’t turn off until I go to sleep. I bought the best parts I could afford at the time and put them in the largest, cheapest case I could find so it might be to do with cooling, my room heats up quite a lot when it’s on all day. I lost a newish drive not long back and I’d noticed a few weeks before that the drives were almost too hot to touch, theres very little space between them, so maybe it’s too hot in there. I ought to investigate a better case or some extra fans.
Recently another problem has started appearing. In Windows, though I haven’t used it in ages, the PC used to freeze hard whenever I played a game. Championship Manager, Wolf ET or whatever. Couldn’t even ping it. Well I don’t use Windows any more anyway so I just thought it might be a driver bug and forgot about it, but recently it’s started happening in Linux too when I play Wolf ET and the other day when I played Tux Kart with my 6 year old neice. It locks up hard, can’t ping or ssh into it or anything. I have to reach for the power button.
I hate hardware problems like this. I’m pretty good at identifying hardware problems but these kind do my head in. Theres nothing in the logs to help identify the problem. Maybe my graphics card is dying, maybe I have a dead spot in my memory that the increased usage of the game hits. Sadly for me, I normally check things like this out using spare parts but my desktop machine is the one machine I don’t have suitable spares for. I have a spare graphics card, but if thats the problem the nVidia GTS 2 is no replacement for my ATI Radeon 9500 Pro, a rough £100 price difference.
I’ll try the other card and run a memtest I think.
On a software note, I’ve managed to solve the annoying problem that meant my WolfET menus were in French. I moved the WolfET_Fr_Alpha2.pk3 from out of my ~/.etwolf/etmain directory and I’m back to English.
I’ve also noticed that Kaffeine doesn’t exit when I close it (even using the residual system tray menu, which I believe should be final). Instead it lurks without trace, using up ~95% processor time and memory until I run top and then kill the process. My 2GHz, 1GB RAM system starts to crawl if I watch a few video files one after another. It sounds like this has been fixed in the next Ubuntu Kaffeine package. I’ll just have to wait.
I prefer Kaffeine as it has playlists and works with a lot of codecs thanks to the Xine backend, unlike Totem.
Waiting for power
Are we so far gone down the electronic entertainment rabbit hole that people have forgotten what else to do?
A few times recently we’ve had power cuts and I’ve observed a number of people sitting there in front of the hi-fi/TV/PC/games console/whatever waiting for it to come back on. Just sitting there. Waiting. Waiting for the electronic entertainment to start again. Sometimes for an hour or 2.
My god. Am I the only person that knows about things called books and other non-power dependent activities?
Windows is Shit
Shocker 😉
Really, it is. I haven’t used Windows properly in a few months now, I’ve been using Ubuntu. But today I had to. I have to set up an Apache server on a Solaris machine at uni, via ssh. Compile it yourself etc and run it on a weird port that has been assigned to me. Cool. Done. Except it doesn’t look like they’ve allowed access to the port from outside of the uni network so I can’t see my server working unless I’m there. I can do all the set up from home, I just can’t see the results. Nice one.
So I was in uni today and I decided to check it out. Yep, it’s running. There were problems with the permissions so I set about fixing them. I could ssh in to the server and change this but I decided to look at a few other things too. Changing some of the config requires a text editor. This is a university Windows network, I can’t install stuff so I had to use notepad which can’t understand Unix file endings and it turns all Unix files to unreadable mush. Is it that hard to make a text editor that can detect the kind of line ending? Or are Microsoft just being awkward?
Also on these machines, the default browser is unsurprisingly Internet Explorer. Ick. What do you mean, “popup blocker”, “block images from…”? No such luck. Ugly ugly ugly. The Mozilla suite is there, but it’s the whole suite: click… wait… wait… splash screen… wait… wait… get bored… wait… Ping there it is. No Firefox here. In fairness, Firefox probably wasn’t really ready when these machines were installed. The presence of Mozilla is a reasonable improvement over recent years but this isn’t my biggest gripe, it’s the fact that the preferences and bookmarks aren’t persistent. Everytime I log out they disappear. Annoyed.
So anyway, I’m using IE and it sucks ass big time. It takes me ages to do anything because it feels slow, awkward and swamped in adverts. God, how I love Firefox by comparison. Also as I don’t have my own set of bookmarks, I can’t find anything and half of the module links on the uni website point at the wrong place.
Also context sensitive menus have been disabled on my open windows on the taskbar. Can a Windows system be so easily hamstrung by right-clicking open windows in the taskbar? Is there such a disaster waiting to befall Windows 2000 that I’m not allowed to right-click and close my browser windows using their taskbar entries?
I know most of this stuff is just to do with the fact that the uni button monkeys have disabled certain functionality to harden the system and it’s reasonable to expect IE as a default browser and to be unable to install stuff on a organisation’s machine, but damn. I so hated using Windows with it’s uncomfortable feel and crap software choices that I gave up and went home after an hour.
It seems the only thing I could do using the uni Windows machines that I couldn’t do better under Ubuntu at home was use the uni Outlook Exchange webmail faciility. Using Firefox on Windows or Linux means that I have to supply my username and password everytime I want to read an email, open a folder or indeed do anything at all. Even though I save the u/n and pass, it still asks me every time I do anything. Firefox 0.92 and 0.93 were ok if I recall correctly but since v1.0 I’ve had this problem, though I’m told this is to do with the Outlook Exhange server configuration at the uni.
This is as much a rant about the uni configuration as it is about Windows, but I’ll be avoiding the uni computers in future, or at least taking my Ubuntu laptop.
Webcams and PHP assignments
Hmm I seem to have gone from 3-a-day topic based posts to once every few days, all-in-one posts. Maybe I’m getting lazy, or maybe it’s 3:30am again and I realise that I have something to blog about when really I should go to sleep and wait until the morning.
Well my PHP assignment is going a bit wrong and I have to submit it by 7pm today (today in the after ‘it’s after 00:00am’ sense, not the ‘new day when you wake up’ sense…)
I have to create an Apache Log Viewer thingy which takes user input via an html form for start and end days and times and then produces wonderfully detailed reports on various things from the logs. Which is fine except I don’t really know PHP and I’m a weak programmer. Plus we haven’t been taught more than basic syntax, commenting and variable manipulation in this module.
So, my thing is going ok, we were given an extension because several facilities weren’t working that we were supposed to use and I have all of my form and log file reading working ok except for one thing.
My form values are being POSTed fine across to the results page which does all of the validation before doing any calculations and whatever on them. I can echo them out no problem, except that as soon as I try to assign $_post[“whatever”] to any kind of variable or manipulate it with any kind of function, all I get is the same values every time, no matter what I enter into the form:
01
01
00
01
01
00
00
This is just the output of me echoing the variables’ content after trying to do anything with them. Same every time regardless of what I enter. The first 3 are the start values for day of current month, hour and minutes, the second 3 are the same for end times and the final one is a report interval in minutes. I have to produce separate reports for each interval of the specified size for the time between the start and end times. Apart from all being wrong, the minute based ones are 00 while the rest are 01.
I don’t know what the hell is wrong. All I have done with them before this is check that they are in the right range (day is not less than 1 or more than number of days in the month, minutes between 0 and 59 etc), I can still echo the posted variables correctly after this, as soon I try to do anything else they go weird and I get the same values as above each time.
I need to put them into 2 digit day or time format, eg 00-09 and then 10+ and so on but I can’t touch them because I get the above output, I can’t think why this could be, unless it’s because they’re strings and I have to cast them to ints, longs or some kind of date/time type, but I thought PHP did this for you. It would also be nice to find a checktime function, like checkdate that just checks that your values are valid times and formats them according to your whims. I’ll have to play with strftime more. Until I can solve my weird variable problem and format my days and times to be 2 digit I can’t do any date/time analysis or create separate time based reports, which means I’ll struggle for a D. Shit. Maybe I have this all wrong.
On another note, I’ve been playing with my webcam today. I’ve never really bothered with it much before because I hadn’t had much luck with it under Linux until I started using Ubuntu, even though it is supported. It’s a Philips webcam so how much longer it remains that way I don’t know.
Well anyway, I wanted to record a video clip. Couldn’t. XawTV will display the stream but won’t save it to disk. Back to Windows to give the old driver CD a whirl. Installed the utils that came with the camera way back when and recorded an extremely long clip without a problem, no dropped frames or anything, apart from that I had let it run too long and the software stopped recording at 4GB. It occured to me that this was a home-user product from the Win98 era, quick check on FAT32 file sizes and yep I was right. Max file size is 4GB. Obviously to prevent the software hanging and the OS having to intervene to stop itself going down too, the video capture app cuts the file off at 4GB. Shame, what I wanted to record would have been about 45GB. Don’t know why it didn’t get the max file size from the OS or the filesystem type. Win2k had just come out at the time (ie NTFS – 16 terrabyte max file size). There are no newer versions of this software available either unless I’m paying I guess and it’s an OEM product, probably tied to the camera model like some optical drive manufacturers do with copies of Nero.
So I’ll have to put more work in on XawTV, I’d much prefer to use Linux anyway, Windows was just a case of having to make it work quickly. I just want to be able to use it as a cheap and nasty ‘capture a moment’ type device that is easily portable with no file size problems.
After this I decided to play with setting up a webcam page on my desktop’s Apache server. I’ve been interested by this idea for a long time. I came across some useful links by chance today. I used the webcam utility (can’t find a link, you try searching google for linux webcam utility) and this tutorial and I was up in minutes. Delighted.
Whether the drinkycam ever goes live to the world is another question. I don’t really fancy having my every move publicly available (unless there was money or sex involved…) and I don’t want to have to remember to turn it around everytime I get dressed/undressed, go to sleep, pick my nose, scratch my arse or whatever people do without thinking about it when nobody is around.
In the mean time, I have to go to sleep, have a look at the Video 4 Linux resources and the Webcam Howto.
Night.
The Slow Dawning
This made me laugh so much at the way the world can conspire against you and his subsequent respose that I left him a comment.
Guilt…
I just discovered that What The Hack, for which I have a ticket, coincides with my girlfriend’s birthday, the first one for either of us since we got together. We’ve not been together that long so I’ve not really known her birthday until recently. Thankfully she’s not laying the law down to me and at least I can try to work out what to do. I’m not sure whether the ticket is refundable or transferrable to someone else but I would feel terrible if I missed her birthday. I think she’s willing to forgive my discovery if I buy her a car 😉
This reminds me a lot of the scene from Trainspotting in the nightclub where Tommy is telling Spud about his girlfriend Lizzy going nuts at him for forgetting her birthday and buying a ticket for an Iggy Pop gig which is on the same night. The scene is intercut with shots of Lizzy in the nightclub toilets talking to Spud’s girlfriend Gail explaining the same situation. The scene closes with Lizzy and Gail returning from the toilet and interrupting Tommy and Spud’s conversation by saying, “What yoo talkin’ aboot?”, they look nervously at each other and reply, “Football. What yoo talkin’ aboot?” to which they smugly respond with, “Shopping.” Sadly this is the penultimate milestone on the road to the end of Tommy’s relationship with Lizzy, the beginning of a downward spiral that results in Tommy becoming a heroin addict like his friends and ultimately his death.
Hopefully the same will not come of me.
Other people’s blogs and my own sanity
It seems other people are saying more interesting things than me at the moment.
Firstly, Ade went on a course at Microsoft’s UK HQ in Reading on single sign on and *nix to Active Directory authentication etc. Which is something I would like to be able to deploy using free/open tools.
Also Aq reminded me that hotkeys provides similar functionality to lineak. Which is that it makes those extra Internet or multimedia keys on your keyboard do something useful. I’ve used lineak for this before with decent results, but lineak’s gui config frontends are not in Ubuntu at the moment and the lineak team has stopped supporting the Gnome frontend, leaving only the KDE one (or text editor).
He also has an excellent post about the poster campaign by the Conservative Party (aka the Tories, or Tory (singular)) for the forthcoming UK political elections. The Conservative Party are focusing on several contentious issues for their election campaign, one of which is that of immigration. These posters have caused enough outrage that they are being vandalised to great comic effect. Aq has produced a little web app to enable you to create your own Tory poster. Here is mine:
Disclaimer: No Tories were hurt in the making of this poster and no offence is intended to genuine victims. Humour style a la Doug Stanhope, not to be taken literally and I don’t care about your political opinions, I will not approve any screaming insults in my comments.
This brings up an issue that worries me a lot. With the flames of racial tension being fanned by several highly read, sensationalist tabloid newspapers screaming about the issue of immigration, the Conservative Party, as the mainstream right-wing political party and nearest rival to the governing Labour Party, are attempting to draw in some of the extreme right-wing voters to boost their chances of election by campaigning hard on the immigration issue.
After seeing a fantastic documentary about violent racial tensions between 2nd and 3rd generation British blacks and Asians and also between existing UK residents (black, white or Asian) and new, commonly South Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern or Eurasian immigrants, such progressively violent racial attitudes trouble me deeply.
As for me, I feel pretty good today, which is surprising given recent events. I’ve been living under a dark cloud for some time, mostly to do with the increasingly insurmountable university workload. I reached critical mass with my project report (aka dissertation) and got to the point where I thought I was on the brink of genuinely cracking up. I’ve decided that if it makes me that unhappy, it’s not worth the pain and have resolved to go and see my personal tutor to see where I stand. This has lifted an enormous weight from me and I feel a lot better. I have yet to see what state this leaves my degree in. Bad probably.
Just as this occurred and I began to feel well again, my girlfriend’s sister moved from Wolverhampton to Huddersfield and I was the transport. After a heavy farewell celebration on Thursday night, four of us went up there on Friday night, went to a club, slept over and the girlf and I travelled back yesterday evening, before showering, eating and watching the Shawshank Redemption which is an incredible film. It was a pretty hectic few days and I didn’t get to just sit and contemplate my future which I really need to do, but I feel better for the break. I just need to figure out where my future lies now.
I’ve always been a pretty steady, level-headed person and this has really shaken me. The value of your own sanity is not to be underestimated.
Your Votes Required
Please vote for Jono Bacon‘s band Seraphidian to play at this years Download Festival before Monday 11th April. They have been selected as one of the 10 top unsigned Metal Bands by Kerrang Magazine and if they win, will play at the festival, record a single, make a video and be a prime position to get signed.
You can vote here.
What The Hack
I bought a ticket for What The Hack. I had a brief chat with Jono this afternoon and he, Aq and Matt Revell are all going. Hopefully Ade will be going too.
So I have an event filled summer ahead:
- LUG Radio Live: 25th June
- What The Hack: 28th-31st July 2005
- V Festival: 20th and 21st August
Cool 😀
Hideously disconnected 4am thoughts
This is going to be random…
First of all I’m in a whirlwind. I have so much uni work to do I don’t know what I’m going to do. After a serious period of inactivity I’ve actually started and made some progress with my uni assignments. The major ones at the moment are my Web Based Information Systems PHP assignment and my dissertation draft report, both conveniently due on 8th April. Shit.
WBIS has been slow since I am pretty much learning PHP from scratch. Thankfully Jono from Open Advantage, Wolves LUG and LUG Radio gave me a 2 days beginners course in using LAMP in January (people looking for a pre-configured version of Apache, MySQL and PHP, Perl and a host of other stuff with a nice installer for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris should check out XAMPP). The bad thing about this is that I haven’t been able to make the most of what I learned until this assignment and I’ve pretty much had to start from scratch. Fortunately the one thing that has stuck in my head is the syntax. My knowledge of available functions is pathetic however. I discovered late last night as my girlfriend slept beside me that I have spent about a week trying to use drop down boxes to limit user input so that I didn’t have to faff with various date formatting and then validation, when there is a function that checks if a date is valid called checkdate() which will pretty much (I assume, haven’t had chance to try it yet) take any input and give you a yes or no on whether the input is a date and whether it is a valid date (ie it picks up Feb 29th on a non-leap year). I also spent a day trying to work out how to get PHP to give me the first and last line of a ~500MB log file so I could explode them and work out the first and last date/time entries. In dispair I posted to the Wolves LUG mailing list asking if there were PHP functions similar to the Unix head and tail commands and was informed that I should use head and tail from within PHP. A quick google and there I was with shell_exec(). I’ve been going for a week and I have a week to go, I still haven’t got a D grade :-/ I’ve still got to do all the DNS lookups and chart drawing in PHP and if it it takes me a week to get a web form that doesn’t link to it’s results page yet… I just wish I had someone sitting on my shoulder to assist when I get stuck. It would speed me up by 100% easily. My girlfriend (not computer literate at all) has had to endure hours of relentless ranting about things she doesn’t understand, which usually culminates in me explaining the intricate details of things she will never understand, or need to. I know quite a lot about programming theory for an almost non-programmer and she just looks at me like a light that went out. Poor girl.
Oh, btw the way when I say I have been working on something for x units of time, you should take for granted that this time is liberally sprinkled with cigarette smoking, head scratching and frustrated swearing…
I’m really enjoying this assignment though, I haven’t written any code in maybe 2 years, I’m a terrible programmer, mainly because I’ve never taken the time to sit and learn any language properly, just enough to hack an assignment pass together and forget about. As a consequence I’ve started tentatively rewriting my site in php, I’ll do the lot before it goes live, it’s too big a job to do in public. Just working with the raw code lays bare how bad all of these WYSIWIG web editors are at writing html. I’m a real beginner at this but I can see how bad it is. Bascially Frontpage and Dreamweaver have made paragraph, font, bold and whatever else tags with alignment added for good measure to pretty much every individual item of text on every page. I’ve cut the page sizes (in KB) by around a third while keeping the same layout. Appalling.
The assignment I’m doing means I have to learn to use a language that fits in with my idea of the kind of things I need to know, which is that to be a good Linux sysadmin, I need a scripting language and some decent web coding to start the money rolling in when I finish uni. I think I’m going to have to fix Windows machines for ~£20 a throw when I leave uni so I have some money while I wait for my first proper job. I’m very good at hardware and software issue resolving to be honest. It’s a valuable skill to have.
I have been surprised to see that my html is pretty good, if basic. I’ve never sat and learned html, it’s amazing how much you pick up without noticing. Not that it’s hard of course. I’m certainly no web guy like Jono or Aq though. The good thing about this assignment though is that it will be easily portable to my project as an end-user style log reporting web interface for a black box internet firewall appliance. It will also be very easy to move to different log files so I will be able to display simplified log information for a range of network services to the kind of person that just wants to see if it works and if anyone has done anything nasty to their machine.
My draft dissertation is in a worse state. Because I’ve spent all my time on the PHP assignment, I’ve hardly touched my report and I now need around 8,000 fully researched words in a week. Fuck.
In other news… I bought a V Festival ticket. I went last year, it should be great. I just missed the selling out of the tickets though, we had a power cut and my alarm reset so I didn’t get to the box office, I tried to get one online but they were all sold out so like last year, I had to pay probably a third on top of the retail price to get one from ebay.
I’ve been scan reading some blogs tonight, trying to get my unread count down below 2,000 (I’m subscribed to a lot of Planets). I’ve decided that I should get up to date with some cool Mozilla Firefox extensions, like Google and ebay search extensions. I read some stuff the other day but I lost the link, so I can’t say what. It was a list of cool Firefox search extensions with feature comparisons. If anyone knows what this blog link is please let me know. It mentioned an academic one for searching ACM etc.
I finally wiped the evil that was my OEM Windows XP Home installation from my laptop and installed a preview of Ubuntu Hoary, prompted by the need for mobile tools to do my PHP assignment like Bluefish, gFTP, Apache and PHP to test it in a disconnected environment (ie my girlfriends house). It’s great apart from the installer barfed on my 2GB /var partition while downloading updated packages, so I reorganised the partitions and redid the remaining steps only to see it refuse to install GRUB. I lost about 3 hours to that and had to leave it overnight and finish up in the morning. It’s been great ever since though, I’m using it now. It sometimes feel a little sluggish but it’s a 1GHz Celeron with 256MB SDRAM, so it’s going to feel that way whether I run Windows or Linux.
I have to say, I really like Bluefish and I think gFTP is the best FTP client I’ve used on any platform.
As it went so well and it’s so close to official release time, I upgraded my main workstation from Warty to Hoary, I wanted the newer Bluefish, Gnome and Firefox and also an end to the boot slowing PCI hotplug errors that seem to be common to Warty, along with the ACPI_Power_Off called message that signifies that my machine isn’t going to power itself off. It went ok, there are a few cosmetic issues like a missing Home icon in Nautilus (fixed by a dist-upgrade about 8 hours after this post), a new Debian submenu that I don’t want and a load of KDE packages I didn’t ask for (now removed). The major bitch is that I seem to have done it at a time when various PHP packages including the apache module have been held back and can’t be installed due to dependency issues, so now I’ll have to do my assignment on my laptop until it’s fixed (fixed by a dist-upgrade as above). Xorg, which was my big fear works fine with my ATI card. I can now play Tuxracer and Tuxkart without extraneous polygons making it unplayable 🙂 I also seem to have been infected by Gnometris at a time when I could do with it the least. I had to uninstall Wolf ET and Bygfoot for this very reason. Hopefully the PHP stuff will be ok in a day or 2.
Incidentally someone has taken the last free release of Tuxracer and built on it to make Planet Penguin Racer. Sure to be worth a few wasted hours. As should Thunder and Lightning, a flight sim similar to FlightGear, with added aerial combat.
I still have to decide if I’m more productive in Linux or Windows. I think the main issue is my motivation to do the work, but after moving to Ubuntu as my main OS, I set off at a trail-blazing pace for a few days, citing the joys of Open Office.org‘s turned-on-by-default word auto-completion as a major factor, but I’ve really done little written work since, I’m not sure of this is environmental or just whether I don’t really want to do the work. On this note I have to say I am really looking forward to seeing Open Office.org 2.0 hitting my desktop and hopefully, that of many other people besides.
On the topic of work again, I’m really stuck with the practical side of my project a (Linux) black box Internet firewall appliance, with local network serving (web, mail, Samba, DNS, DHCP etc) capability and web admin interface (yes I am aware of the risks of having a firewall do this kind of thing). All that remains is spam/virus mail filtering (ClamAV and Spamasassin), firewall/NAT, web interface and a specialised kernel. Oh and probably tying fetchmail into the mail system.
The firewall I will probably do in Guarddog, not a problem, I just need to finish the rest first. A kernel and fetchmail I will do at the end if I have time. The web interface is in progress, thanks to my other assignment. The problem I have is that probably since Christmas time I’ve been trying to find a simple to read guide on tying ClamAV and Spamassassin into a Postfix mail system on Debian. There doesn’t seem to be such a document. I’ve read quite a lot (not enough as it seems to be written in Hebrew to my eyes) on the subject and still don’t have a a good understanding of what I have to do. A lot of the things I’ve read seem to be for Red Hat 8.0. And Debian do things differently. I had to abandon Cyrus-IMAP for this reason. Mail filtering is pretty core to my project, I wish someone would just fall from the sky and show me how to make it work, but I guess I’m just going to have to sit and read all of the ClamAV, Spamassassin and Postfix docs and work out what applies and what doesn’t. As if I wasn’t short of time already.
I think all this uni stuff adds up to the fact that I’m in deep shit and if I don’t fail, I’ll be lucky to get a reasonable degree at all. 6 years and �25,000 of graduate debt doesn’t seem worth it for a 3rd class degree and a crap job.
I think I’m near the end now. Aside from uni work, I have no money. Which is bad, I’m having to live off my Barclaycard at a highest-in-the-country ~19% APR. And it’s my best friend’s girlfriend’s birthday this weekend. My friend Lindsay is coming from London for the weekend, Chris wants me to accompany him on a night out, all on the same night and another friend, Rebecca who I used to work with is having a birthday drink on Sunday. Sadly I don’t have enough money for my friend’s girlfriend’s birthday as they’re taking a train to Birmingham (£30 return taxi fair), going for a meal and a night out. I feel bad but I just can’t make my empty pockets stretch to that. My friend from London is visiting her mum for her birthday which I can afford (ie no cost ;)), but I’m not sure if I can stretch to a night out afterwards with Chris or Rebecca. I’m back at uni after Easter on Monday so Sunday night will be panic night. Sorry to everyone who loses out (ie is pissed off at me for not going to their thing), but I just don’t have any money for these things, nor do I have the time to take out to do them. Saturday night is the one night I do take out for chilling (aka partying), but I’ve hardly been out in weeks with the cash shortage, so much so that when I bumped into Chris and Holdsworth almost by chance the other day, they hugged me like a long lost friend and looked at me with amazement that I was in front of them.
On one or 2 final notes. I attended the Wolves LUG meeting on Wednesday briefly, which was cool because I haven’t been able to go for some time. And also, I ought to trumpet LUG Radio Live once again. Linux stuff, Linux people, Linux jokes, getting drunk with Linux people and playing LAN games like Wolf ET are all up for the taking on June 25th 2005 at the Molineux Stadium, Wolverhampton, UK. Tickets are £5, people are coming from as far as France, Canada, Sweden and erm… Wolverhampton to be there. I am, are you? Read the Lug Radio Live forum, people are even trying to help you find a hotel in the area.
Speaking of events, Aq asked me at the LUG meeting if I was planning to go to What The Hack. I certainly am, it will be my first proper computer festival, in the music festival kind of way (ie sitting in a field with a laptop and a load of stoned geeks). I just have to raise some cash.
I think thats it. It’s 5:45am. If you read this before 3pm Friday 1st April 2005, I’ll add all of the links in later… I’ll also probably fix the typos and add all of the other things that my Swiss-cheesed brain had forgotten. I still have about 6 unwritten/unfinished articles waiting to be posted on here, some of which as are actually quite intelligent, unlike this one. This is just a bulk update.
It’s been a while since I last said anything useful on here so, this accounts for the last 2 weeks of blog inactivity, sorry to give it all to you at once, in no particular order and without suitable headings. God help Google when it tries to pull anything useful out of this lot for search results.
Oh, ok, that reminded me, one last thing. The search terms people use that have caused people to read my site and my blog are hilarious and quite impressive all at the same time. The impressive ones are the stuff about Linux, networks and computers in general, I never thought people would actually use them as any kind of authoritive resource (thats not say that they did). The funny ones include ‘Does Posh Spice take it up the arse?‘, ‘Prague Street Prostitutes‘, ‘ ‘most scorpios are murdered‘, ‘hopeless bastard‘, ‘world record ejaculation’, ‘world record for semen swallowed‘ and a worrying amount of hits for ‘ladyboy‘. I might link to the relevent pages when I get up so you can all read it again and see what pages people actually got.
Shit, I just did a word count on this post, about 2,600. That would do for one of my assignments.
I’m going to bed, goodnight 😀