Well, I’m not feeling well today, but thats a side issue. I have made some moves in various directions that are quite interesting (to me at least, nobody else will gve a crap probably). I can’t imagine why my good friend Holdsworth described my blog as self-obsessed and boring techno-bollocks 😉

I spent most of the weekend celebrating my new job or recovering from celebrating, so last night and today have been groggy affairs. I did manage to install Coppermine and have a look. At first glance it seems pretty cool and I may well end up using it. I should probably install Gallery for a comparison though.

I also have concluded that I need to learn the Red Hat Way of doing things as I’m going to be using it at work. I know the Debian Way reasonably well, but I’m going to be administering Red Hat boxes. This means I need to hurry up and finish the crap old P200 machine so I can take the disk out and swap the box in for my current Smoothwall, thereby releasing my Celeron machine back into interactive service. I will either be using that or my Dell P3 machine to play with Fedora Core on, unless I doing even more machine juggling and move my uni project over to the Dell box and put Fedora onto the Athlon 1200 box. But thats dangerous, I might lose my project if I fuck it up. I’ll have to think about how I’d do this. I guess I could just image the drive. I also need to decide whether I should start with FC3, which is out now, or wait until FC4 comes out on the day I start work, I would have preferred to look at FC before I start, but is there any point when the new release is a week away. Ooh, also Debian Sarge should be out tomorrow which means I can install my Sparc machine with something useful.

Oh, a random conversation also reminded me to try to install Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Linux. Following these instructions it was a breeze, I’m really pleased. I finished the first 2 levels in just under 2 hours. Thats one of the few games I really like.

Among the other minor triumphs was having a look at Eclipse. I’m going to need a good IDE for work. Jono was demoing it at the Wolves LUG meeting the other day. I also noticed on his desktop a load of Bluetooth icons, so having tried and failed to send files to my phone via bluetooth, I phoned him up and he suggested gnome-obex-send which worked a treat. Little did I realise at the time was that he was in Stuttgart attending GUADEC. The conversation ended pretty sharply when I discovered that, but I still think an international mobile to mobile call is going kill my phone bill.

The Hackers FAQ for Managers made me laugh. It’s a guide for managers who are trying to manage a hacker. Hackers just don’t seem to make sense to the business oriented mind of a conventional manager. It made me laugh because I recognised some of my own traits in there, like ‘percolating’ which is where you sit there playing games or other non-productive things while you leave your subconscious to mull over the technical aspects of a complex problem. I do that all the time, do something unrelated and let my subconscious take care of things for me. You can’t force ideas out if you’re not in the mood, they come to you when you’re not thinking about them.

In other news, I got an Ubuntu t-shirt. Wow. Thats soooooo cool. Also Liverpool won the European Champions League. Big congratulations there. Aq’s book, DHTML Utopia is out, but his cat died. Congratulations and commiserations.

The final thing I wanted to say was that Jono I have started trying to think of something really cool to do for something for What the Hack, assuming that it goes ahead. I was thinking of maybe an open Gallery or Coppermine server that people can put their weird photos on, Jono thought of an SMS thingy hooked up to a speech synthesis thing so we can all just sit there and crack up at other peoples photos of weird stuff, or this croaky Hawking-esque voice saying freaky stuff. Whatever we do we will broadcast the hell out of it at WTH so other people will join in. We really hope to make our tent a bit of a cool party focal point for people to come and hang around and do interesting stuff. If you have any suggestions, put it in the comments or mail me direct.

A few other things have happened too but I have real world things to do, I can’t sit here all day. I’ll let you know as things happen.