Monthly Archives: December 2005

It’s a Hat-Trick

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Yes, I think this is the last of tonight’s 3 updates of the sad and lonely. Well, bugger it’s Christmas in about 22 hours. I hate Christmas. I hate all of the commercialism and the whiny carols shitting out of tinny car park speakers from the middle of October. I hate the way theres a Christmas related stall on every spare patch of city centre land, their attendants try to stop you in the streets, won’t take no for an answer and look genuinely offended when you tell them you’re not intersted and brush past. Everybody seems to want to sell you a bit of Christmas and I fucking hate them all. Fuck. Off.

All that said, I do like Christmas really. I like the time off work. The sitting around in the uneasy peace of your family Christmas dinner, where the year-round niggles of day to day existence together are put aside and you can actually talk to one another for a change. Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a rant about Christmas or anything, just an update about life in general. One has been overdue for some time, I know because people start to complain when I don’t update my blog. It’s strange, but they become compulsive reading, even when they’re just another load of drivel, which I have been known to produce from time to time and this one is no exception. So, on with the show…

Well yeah, I’ve not been up to too much recently, apart from working, eating and sleeping. I have my plan to take over the world, but I’ve already written about that. I’m really looking forward to that. I bought The C Programming Language, though I’m not sure how much I’m going to do. It’s strange, I did an entire degree and never learned to program properly in anything, but of all languages I’ve dipped my toe in, C++ made the most sense. Although I understood the principles of object orientation, I never learned how to apply them programmatically and so C, along with being the Unix language of choice aside from Python for GUI apps, made sense. I’d like to learn to program in C properly. It is highly likely however that the book will just sit on my bookshelf or next to my desk along with the other 20 or so books I never get to read apart from in an emergency.

I also bought The Boo Radleys Anthology on a whim. I’m not sure what led me to that, but I used to love some of the Boo Radleys EPs when I was at school and for the most part, the early ones aren’t available any longer and I don’t have a vinyl deck any more. Sadly, the Boo Radleys were best known in the mainstream for the absurdly chirpy summer hit Wake Up Boo! from around 95 or 96, but that wasn’t their musical bag especially, more a proof of concept that they could write great pop songs if thet wanted to – and they didn’t want to. Better tracks to listen to if you can are the blistering 12″ version of Lazarus, Does This Hurt? from the Boo! Forever EP and The Finest Kiss from the now unavailable Every Heaven EP, released on the ill-fated Rough Trade label. The band originated within the psychedelic trance pop genre known as shoegazer but developed beyond it. Fucking great band.

Other than all that, things are going ok. Work has settled down and I’m now feeling reasonably confident with my role, it’s been a heavily pressured few months up until this point though. I’m enjoying playing with Vexim, a virtual mail hosting layer for Exim, with a web interface, virus scanning and spam filtering. Great news. I still hope to get a working Xen system going, but thats been on the back burner for the last few months while I do real day to day work.

If I don’t post again before, I wish you all a fantastic Christmas and a prosperous New Year. I’m off for another JD and coke.

Belkin Are Shit

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Flush from the success of Windows is shit and O2 are shit, I thought I should tell you Belkin are shit.

My dad bought a Linksys WAG54g wireless ADSL modem and router like mine, so my mother can use the Internet downstairs again now that I’ve left with all my network equipment. I set it all up, secured it and wrote out detailed instructions on how it works, what the terminology means, what the settings do etc and went home only to get a call later that evening saying she couldn’t get on the net. So I half mumbled some stuff down the phone and left them to get on with it, only to find out a few days later that they hadn’t got it to work, so the next weekend I went down to set it up again. It had occured to me that maybe it was configured per user on the Windows machine so I set about setting it up for each user. Strangely however, it seemed that the settings were correct, but just not enabled or something, so I did various checks and applies and reboots etc, only for the thing to continue to work as my user and not for anyone else. The ‘Enable radio’ button wouldn’t enable radio.

Then after getting pissed off I realised that I was an admin and everybody else was a normal user, so I bumped my mother’s user up to admin and tried again – it worked. Cool. Only I’d set everyone up as a normal user for a reason to stop them changing anything they don’t understand, my niece particularly, being 6, likes to whizz the mouse around while clicking the mouse furiously, which often leads to scrambled icons, opened programs and destroyed settings. So I decided to get the latest drivers for the wireless card, obviously you shouldn’t need to be an administrator to use a network card. Oh fucking yes you do. If you use Belkin cards you do. To be honest, I’ve always been the admin of every machine I’ve used, so maybe that’s common to many cards and drivers and I’ve never noticed, but what a fucking stupid idea. The whole point of levels of user authority is to prevent people who don’t know what they’re doing from things they shouldn’t be doing. There were no driver updates, so I had to set every user to be an administrator to get on the net. That’s shit. Sure I could have faffed around in the registry or something looking for the magic key to let normal users use the device, but I’m not going to spend an hour on Google looking for shit about Windows.

Man alive, Belkin are shit. Allegedly.

(As a side note for the lawyers out there, I’m happy to tell the world that Belkin are great and listen to their customers if you get your programmers to fix this ridiculous situation).

Ahh you made it

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Welcome to my new home. I dunno, I think it seems to happen about once a year, I get restless and start doing things. Last year it was setting up a blog and moving to Ubuntu, this year it’s buying some sensible domains names and moving everything around in a bid to take over the world with my Grand Master Plan.

So anyway, I bought adamsweet.org, adamsweet.net and adamsweet.co.uk. adamsweet.com is already taken and I emailed the guy about 2 months ago to say hi as we share the same name and he didn’t reply. My old website still exists and so does everything at that domain, like my blog, just that it’s all Apache virtual hosts now on my own server. Yeah, I got my own server at work, it’s not a powerhouse or anything, just an old server that was lying around in need of some parts replacing.

I decided some time back to buy the above domains and consolidating them all onto one server under my own control, I’m a sysadmin for chrissakes. Theres only so much you can do when you have 3 meg of disk space left and you run out of bandwidth 6 days before the end of every month. It’s like a statement of where I am in terms of my skills. As I said, last year it was setting up a blog and moving my desktop to Ubuntu. This year I have a clear plan of everything, I want my blog, a new website and my own mail set up, along with a stats viewer and a few other bits and pieces. Hopefully I will look back in about a years time and think how primitive it all is.

I’m about halfway there so far. My old website was a simple upload and Apache virtual host. My blog was the same, along with setting up the database and it’s prerequisites. I’ve still got to sort out the gallery as I didn’t bring the old one over as I wanted to get away from Coppermine and move over to Gallery. I originally chose Coppermine because it looked nicer and more featureful than Gallery, but now Gallery is looking good and Coppermine was just too awkward and I didn’t want to invest the time to learn to use it properly as it should be obvious how to use it in the first place. I want to do the mail system before I set up my new website. To be honest, I have no idea what I’m going to put there either. My blog says who I am and what I do and thats most of what I want to say. My old website is much of the stupid stuff I wanted to do when I was younger and it’s largely unmaintainable now. I think I’ll have to do all of the tutorials and stuff I’ve been threatening to do for years, even though I don’t have that much time these days.

Anyway, welcome to the other side.