Whats Going On?

Well let me tell you.

Well it’s my 29th birthday in 28 minutes, if only I’d written that a minute ago eh? I’m moving house this weekend and will be having a house warming party the weekend after. I’m getting shit loads of 419 emails and I mean loads. Sparkes gave me his Digital Alpha Server 800 today and I gave him 2 486SX laptops for him to play with Minix 3 on. I might have a look myself to be honest. I still have to work out how to get the Alpha to boot from the Debian CD, it’s not apparently straight forward.

I’m still busy at work, ploughing along with the daily admin tasks while trying to catch half an hour or so to play with Xen, Python, tape backups (!= fun), moving people over to my new mail server and so on and so on. I downloaded the Dive Into Python book and printed it at work as it had work related benefits. I don’t like reading from a PC screen too much, but I now I have a 5 or 6cm thick pile of treeware. Now I know why PDFs are called the portable dekstop format. I haven’t had much of a chance to read to yet though.

As for the house move, I have single handedly moved most of my stuff to the new house. The only things left in my current house are my PC equipment, my desk, bookcase, bedside table, clothes, TV, toiletries and crap likes alarm clocks and bedside lamp etc. I’ve filled almost the entire floorspace in what will be my home office with my unsorted crap. I overheard my housemate say down the phone that, “Adam’s got so much crap its unbelievable.” And to be honest, I have. I’ve got loads of books, boxes and computer paraphernalia. I don’t know where it all came from.

I think I’m going to have to move my blog hosting. Sparkes was kind enough to provide this hosting for me, but I think I’m outgrowing it, either that or I’m getting spammed out of existence.

I moved to using Spam Karma 2 as recommended by The Mysterious Cities of Bald to deflect the evils of blog and comment spam since Spaminator stopped getting developed and wasn’t much more than 50% effective. Well since then the amount of comment spam that I have to moderate has dropped to 0, seriously. It’s all still sitting there in the background, but Spam Karma 2 is filtering the lot out so I don’t know it’s there. I’ve been checking it quite frequently and there are no false positives, its great.

The problem comes from the fact that my data transfer has increased 10-fold in the last month, I’m hitting my bandwidth limit and I’ve only got about 8 MB disk space left since I uploaded my LUG Radio Live photos to my gallery. Now I think that’s mainly to do with referral spammers. For the non-techies it’s a long story, but for the techies, all of my top 20 referrers with the exception of maybe 1 or 2 are referral spammers. With no technical understanding of either approach, I’m guessing that Spaminator just stopped the communication process when it decided the comment/trackback/referral was spam and Spam Karma allows the process to complete and just drops it in the spam hole before deleting after the specified amount of time. I might be completely wrong here, as I said I have no technical reasoning behind my theory, I’m just scratching around for an answer to how my bandwidth usage has increased by 1000% in a month. I can’t suddenly be that popular, I haven’t written anything that interesting recently and I know I’m not getting linked from elsewhere that much. I can’t think of another reason. So, I’m thinking of moving my website, blog and gallery to new hosting. I work for an ISP so it shouldn’t be a big deal, it’s just that I’d prefer a dedicated machine rather than shared hosting, that way I can afford to play a bit more with stuff without putting any of our other customers at risk. We’ll see on that one.

Oh erm, I gotta go, it’s late and I’m up early in the morning 🙁

Nerd T-Shirts

I’ve always been a fan of geeky T-shirts since I bought a fsck T-shirt from rootshop, I now have a couple and it’s always fun to wear them around non-geeks.

Now there is nerd.ws. If anyone is buying I can give you a list of what I would like for you to choose from. Geek Inside, BSOD, and Fix Your Own Computer. My preferred colours are blue and either yellow or white

This might look like an ad or a beg but it really isn’t, just spreading the good word. I like geek clothes. Ok so maybe it’s a bit of a beg but I know nobody is going to buy me anything and I wouldn’t expect them to either 🙂

Usability Testing

Woo, I just came across the Novell Linux Desktop Usability Study results. These are video clips of normal people peforming simple tasks under Linux.

What interests me here is not so much the usability issues that regular people have with a Linux desktop, but the way that people try to figure things out with a computer. I guess that they’re pretty much the same thing, but I like watching how people assume something should work and how they go about finding out how to do something. It’s more interesting watching someone get it wrong than it is thinking about how something should be fixed to make it more obvious.

For example I know I’m on the net if I can see my little network monitor applet in the notification area (I nearly said ‘system tray’…) and it doesn’t have a yellow sign over it. I might also check my IP address using the network monitor applet. The lady in the clip I watched just opened the browser (she didn’t know what it was, she just knew it was the thing she used to browse the Internet) and typed in an address to see if the page loaded. It struck me how that might not be the first thing I would do, but it is the easiest. I know how I do things but I find it interesting how non-technical people do them. Forgive me if this interest suddenly wanes when I observe the same things in a tech support capacity…

It is interesting seeing how regular people deal with everyday tasks under Linux though. Just to see where the breakages of concept, of real world modelling and of common sense show up.

Go get some of them from here.

Moving House

OK it is about as official as it is going to get. I’m moving into my own place. For me it’s the third time I’ve moved into my own place, hopefully this time I won’t have to move back in with my parents again – it’s so expensive to live on your own these days.

All this means I’m shit outta time and money. I’ve been paying the obligatory IKEA tax, went twice in 2 days (they closed before we could get everything we went for…) Also blew a fortune in ASDA and still have to get a TV, some glasses, a bin, bath towels and a cheesegrater. Also on the desire list are somewhere to hang coats, somewhere to put shoes, a garlic press, a kitchen table and chairs and a variety of other non essentials but these can wait. What we want most of all is a shower but this presents a problem. The house is old, the walls aren’t straight and aren’t tiled, the bath isn’t fixed to the wall and so on. Looks like baths for a while then.

What this also means is that we will be having a house warming party. I move in on the 28th assuming there are no hitches which is a Saturday night, 2 days after my 29th birthday and 3 days before Hallowe’en. It makes sense to have the party then. Being house proud as I am, it also makes sense to do the untidy bit while the house is untidy.

As for being poor and out of time this means that if you want me to go out for a few beers it’s unlikely to happen in the next month and in fact if you knew how much my rent was going to be it may probably not happen for a good few months. Also if you want me to do anything that isn’t already on my agenda then you’re probably going to have to sit at the back of the queue. You could of course bring the mountain to Mohammed and pay me for looking at it 🙂 (That one goes to the ever growing list of people who have covered their Windows boxes in spyware and adware and want me to reinstall them for you).

While we’re talking about time, where does it all go? I get up at 7, I do not pass Go and I do not collect £200, I get to work for 9, I get home at 6, I’ve eaten by 7 or half past, even when I’m not out doing something (4 out of 5 weekdays) I do life organising stuff for about 2 or 3 hours and that’s it. Time to get my stuff ready for work and go to bed. Now remember, I’ve been a musician and a student for the last 11 years or so, I’ve never done the 9 to 5 thing regularly before. Frequently I make it to bed an hour later than I should have done and end up wiped out in the morning. How do you people do it?

On Saturday Jeff Waugh of Ubuntu Linux is coming to visit Wolverhampton Linux User Group, of which I am a participant, on his world tour. That should be great fun.

Out.