Hello all.

First of all, I’m not feeling well and for that you all must suffer. I’ve been coming down with what feels like the beginning of food poisoning for 2 days, though it’s probably not.

Progress with Asterisk at work. For weeks the phones have been playing up. Can call from one to the other but not vice versa. Adding a third phone means that phone #2 now works, but phone #3 can’t call etc. Weird stuff. Today I looked into the config and found a section for the extension configured at phone #3 which says exactly the error I was getting, so I commented it out and hey presto – 3 working phone extentions. I really like playing with Asterisk, I’m using Asterisk@Home as I’m an Asterisk virgin and I don’t have time to read the whole book to be able to compile and configure it by hand, but it does have a lot of weird issues.

There is also more progress at home. I have pretty much finished my mail system. As I’ve been mentioning for some time, I’m using Vexim as the base and putting a few extra things in, like webmail, whitelisting, blacklisting and so on, nothing outrageous, just a featureful system. This project has been dragging on since January or thereabouts, but I haven’t had much time to work on it and it’s had some false starts. I frigged with Fedora for a few weeks before going back to Debian, then frigged with Courier for 2 or 3 weeks, trying to get it to authenticate against MySQL, but with full debugging on, the log files said the right thing but it wouldn’t let me in, even with the config copied from a working setup. In the end, I swapped it for Dovecot and I had it up about an hour without any experience of configuring it. I will have to decide soon whether I will stay with Yahoo, move to Gmail or use my own server. It was really just a ‘doing it for the sake of it’ exercise, but the moment of truth will soon be upon me. I have to admit, I like the idea of myname@adamsweet.org.

Next bit of movement is in the Alpha stakes. Sparkes gave me a Digital Alpha Server 800 5/400 back in October and I had a go at trying to install Debian on it but didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t get it to boot from the CD. A bit of idle browsing today told me what I needed to know and I have managed to install Debian successfully, it’s apt-get updating as we speak. Nice one 🙂

For any googlers out there, I used this thread. I had to use the SRM console to boot from a Sarge CD, not the Alpha BIOS though that is possible I believe from a Woody disk. I also installed Woody (using the SRM console) and did a dist-upgrade to Sarge. If you get the Alpha BIOS, there is a setting in there to use the SRM console, which is a blue screen, rather than Alpha BIOS’s white one. I used show dev to show the devices and then picked at the ‘dka’ ones until it booted, using the boot devicename where devicename was the name of the device listed by show map. My cdrom was something like dka400.4.0.5.0 and the hard disk was dka200.2.0.5.0, so the command was

boot dka400.4.0.5.0

When the minimal system is installed and the installer reboots, you have to interrupt the boot process at the SRM console again and change the boot device to dka200.2.0.5.0 to boot from the hard disk as the SRM console remembers your boot device. Subsequent reboots will therefore obviously not require you to change the boot device unless you want to boot from the CDROM again.

Other points to note include that you have to make BSD disk labels rather than DOS partitions for an SRM console boot and your first BSD label should start on the 2nd disk cylinder not the first as per the default, to leave room for the bootloader. Installing straight from a Sarge CD will bypass all this disk label and cylinder nonsense as the partitioner will do it all for you, but if you only have an Alpha BIOS, then you will have to install Woody and then upgrade to Sarge as the Alpha BIOS booting routine isn’t supported by the Sarge installer.

Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, again, it was more an experiment than any purposeful exercise, but I like the idea of installing Linux on pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I have x86s, PPCs, a Sun Sparc Ultra 10 and now a Digital Alpha. I am also silently hoping to lay my hands on an SGI Mips machine, but we’ll have to be patient there. If you have any redundant hardware that Debian has been ported to then I’m your man, I don’t believe I have PA-RISC, m86k or arm machines, I don’t have a mips yet and well, I doubt anyone is going to give away an Itanuim box or an IBM S/390, but if you need to you only have to call…

So thats that for now. New car is due in the next week or two. Over and out.

One thing that has been annoying me for a while is that I can’t find an car stereo that plays oggs. Most of the things that I want to listen to in the car are in ogg format. Thats LUG Radio, primarily, but also pretty much every Linux CD ripper rips to oggs. They rip to MP3 too if you have the plugin and I do, but I would prefer to use the non-patent encumbered ogg format. Ogg is quite popular in the hobbyist media area as far as I can tell. I have a friend that uses oggs for his work and he’s not a Linux user at all.

Why does nobody make a car stereo that plays oggs? OK first up, the market demand probably isn’t that high, but the ogg codec is free and unencumbered by patents, which means they can put it in without any legal restictions.Ogg also offers the best audio quality for file size ratio. Why the fuck don’t they? If you’re developing a device that uses MP3, WAV and WMA then it’s pretty trivial to include ogg. I want it and I’m sure many other people do.

Apple don’t support ogg because they say they don’t see any demand from their users, well I have an iBook and I want ogg support. I also want a car audio player that does.

The reasons I have come across are these:

• Most people don’t use oggs so it’s not important

It’s completely free to use and gives users another option. More to the point it creates more market for the manufacturers. Certainly for smaller manufacturers it would boost sales.

• Because hardware vendors fear that the only people who use oggs are freeloading music and video pirates.

This isnt the case in my experience at all, I’ve never encountered pirated material in ogg format. So far as I am aware pirated material is normally in MP3, MPEG, WAV and AVI format.

• Probably nearer the truth is the possibility that most manufacturers are put off as content can’t be protected by DRM when using the ogg format, which means Apple won’t go near it and sooner or later, neither will Microsoft or any other fee paying download service.

Let’s think of this one another way. MP3 has the market for portable media players and In Car Entertainment. There are ‘MP3 players’ which play oggs. Not iPods or Creative or anybody else like that, but there are a number which do including devices from Teac, Iomega, Saumsung, LG and Freecom. The illegality of doing tape to tape copying didn’t stop many manufacturers from selling double tape decks, nor did software developers stop making CD burning software that could copy audio CDs. Nor did the MP3 player market develop in the era of iTunes or a legitimate Napster.

If anyone knows of one, please leave me a comment.

Manufacturers: Please make a ogg car stereo system. Oh and make it affordable 🙂

Ok, ok, ok. Yes it’s been ages again, 3 weeks to be exact, but I’m pretty pushed for time these days.

So, whats new? Well Shortly after I posted last, I went snowboarding for half a day which was great. Bumps and bruises all round once again.

I have a new phone, which seems to be a redesign of my old one with crapper games, so nothing interesting to say there. The thing I didn’t want to announce last time was that I’m getting a new car. A brand new Mini no less. Well, it’s a company car, but still, it’s explicitly for my use. Gonna push the pennies to limit though I think, a point at which they are already at, but it’s something I would have to do in the next few months anyway, so there wasn’t too much choice in the matter.

By Monday you will realise that I am once again guest presenter on LUG Radio, Season 3 Episode 13. Jono sent me over a pre-release copy and it sounds pretty good. It’s weird being on LUG Radio. The first time I was on, I struggled to listen as I thought I sounded weird and I also noticed how I tend to overpronounce my words, a fact which was confirmed by a giggling friend. It doesn’t bother me, but it’s just weird hearing yourself recorded and knowing that maybe 10 or 20,000 people are going to be listening to you.

The second time I was on, I was barely awake and on listening back, realised that I tend not to say anything of any real value. I’m great at chipping in with the scrotal humour, but not so great at saying anything useful. The third and possibly this most recent time have borne this theory out in my mind. On the other hand, I have to remember that I normally get less than 24 hours notice, 8 of which I am asleep, 8 of which I am at work and perhaps 3 or 4 hours are spent getting ready and travelling to work and back; being pedal to the metal all day leaves me around 15 to 20 minutes emergency research time, so in reality I am doing OK. I just feel that the intellectual content of the show suffers a little when I guest.

So what else is new? At work I am hectic as usual and struggling to get on with Asterisk. I have 2 SIP phones and don’t think one of them is working properly, which is making life really awkward. I had to flash them to make them work in the first place. In my spare time I have set up a new Vexim machine on Debian to try as best as possible to stay within the bounds of a packaging system, which makes a machine handling 150 people’s mail a lot easier to support with patches etc. It’s pretty much working except Courier-POP3 just will not authenticate against the MySQL database, even though it and the various authlib and authmysql parts have the same config as a Fedora machine which does work. Go figure.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hope you’re all well.

Well, first of all I’m, back at work. Thats more or less a good thing I think. You can’t sit on your arse all your life 😉

Secondly, I lost all of my phone numbers from my phone by using fucking Apple iSync to sync my phone and work laptop. Well, I couldn’t find the “Sync phone to computer” button, so instead it just deleted all of the contacts from my phone and replaced them with the contacts from my iBook. Fucking bastards. Anyone who mentions backups can go and die. That was supposed to be the backup. So anyway, if I have your number, well, I don’t have it any more, so email or text it to me.

Leading on from point #2 is the fact that I am due a new mobile phone. I have a choice of the following and I am willing to take your recommendations:

• Samsung s400i – small, camera, good screen, free bluetooth headset
• Motorola L7 – thin, bluetooth
• Motorola V3 – flip
• Sony Ericsson z520i – flip, white

The included details are pretty much all I could scramble down whilst on the phone to the monkey on the other end.

So, wotcha think? All I need are bluetooth, voice activated dialling, a camera and MP3 playback would be nice but not necessary. Most other functions I don’t really use. Some degree of compatibility with open source sychronisation software like Multisync would be nice, or Mac at a push. Also an advantage would be modem scripts for OS X Tiger. I have to use this in the event of an emergency, I haven’t had to yet and in fact I have a work mobile for this very purpose, but, you know…

If anyone wants to explain to me how to do this in Linux, or explain to me why I should be using GSM/GPRS to do this, rather than a hideously slow mobile phone modem over bluetooth connection then I’m all ears, especially if you can tell me

a) How it works

b) and how I will be able to get it through a firewall (static IP would be nice ;))

At the moment, I’m leaning towards the Sony Ericsson. I have a k700i at the mo and I’m very happy with it, but it’s just starting to fall to bits. The Motorola L7 looks great but I’m not sure if they’re as good.

Thats all for now, I may have some great news (for me) to report soon, but I’d better not let the cat out of the bag right now.

Ohh and I guest-present the episode 46 of LUG Radio once again, so you should listen to it to hear my sexy deep voice 😉 Which reminds me, you should start booking your tickets for LUG Radio Live 2006.
Over and out.

Had a mixed day. I’m not at work for the week so I’ve been slowly slipping into bad habits of going to bed late and getting up late. Today I didn’t get up until 12 and felt fuzzy all day as a result. I meant to do some work and some reading but spent the day staring at a meaningless screen, not feeling like doing anything.

This evening I went somewhere which brightened up my day. I won’t say where as it might let a slight surprise out of the bag for the geek community (it’s not that exciting…), but it was a good evening and I really enjoyed kicking back afterwards and discussing a lot of stuff with people who understand both the content of what I’m saying and the angle I’m coming from (ie a sysadmin). It was really good to chew over some technical issues with people who understand. At work I’m the only sysadmin and so I don’t really have anyone else to chew these kind of things over with from the same perspective and at home nobody understands a word about what I do, so thanks guys, you know who you are 🙂

On a different note, I went snowboarding yesterday. Today I am full of aches and pains 🙂 It was great fun, I picked it up again pretty quickly after going on a snowboading holiday a few years back. They made the booking for the wrong day and in the rush to get there I forgot the paperwork, so it looked like we might be heading home without boarding at first, but they had another lesson which they could put us on, which lasted an hour longer than we had paid for at no extra charge so it worked out pretty well. I have a half day booked for another place at the end of the month so I should be up to Olympic standard in no time at all.

Going snowbarding has for some reason stopped my back aching, just that now my neck is aching from bouncing my creaking carcass around on the snow 😉 I feel like a small flower that has had the stem broken just below the flower head 🙂

Over and out. No doubt I will be up late again tomorrow…

For all of my ‘fans’ out there, here’s the update you’ve been bemoaning the absence of.

Firstly, I have the week off, so a week of sleeping, getting bored and putting up all of the things that have been lying around since I moved in is afoot. I’m also booked in for some snowboarding this week and again at the end of the month, which is the cause of this month’s poverty.

I’m also saving for a big holiday sometime between summer and autumn, somewhere as close to paradise as possible. I think I’m going to need a new car this year too. I’m passed the stage where I’m learning to drive for real and the risk of an accident has passed and also because I travel 50 miles per day at ~70mph, I’m going to need something which is going to continue to be reliable. My car is just starting to get cranky now and it’s pretty old. After clearing the credit cards and a holiday, a car is the next important thing. I’d really like a BMW Mini Cooper, but they appear to start at £8,000 second hand so that’s unlikely 🙁

On a geeky note, I have been setting up the mail for my domains which is proving to be a slow process, even though I know what I’m doing. I’m having trouble finding suitable Courier-IMAP, Courier-POP3, Courier-Authlib and Exim-MySQL RPMs for FC4. I have built them from source before, but the idea with this attempt is to try to stay within the package management system. Looks like I might be back on Debian and have to host my mail at home.

This week I plan to play with Xen at last. It looks like good fun (to a geek) and could maybe make my life easier on a number of counts at work. I may also try to work out whether Linux software RAID is actually any good and whether there are any hardware ATA RAID controllers supported by Linux.

OK, I think it’s time for sleep, it’s nearly 5am.

I know this because I went out on Saturday and I felt like I was. OK, so everyone I was out with was 8 or 9 years younger than me, but thats not the reason. The reason I felt old was because my back hurt, I felt tired and I didn’t enjoy myself that much, I kept thinking I’d rather be at home.

I injured my back a few years ago playing in goal for my university football team and it’s since been prone to bouts of stiffness, normally due to lifting something very heavy, but there has been a growing stiffness for a few weeks, most probably due to being constantly seated for 8 hours of the day (which is also the probable reason why I have increased in width to the tune of about a stone and a half in 9 months). So anyway, my back hurt and I felt tired.

I also would have preferred to be at home. As strange as it might sound to my friends, I haven’t been out drinking since New Year’s Eve and it’s March. 2 months. Until last year, I was out once every weekend without fail. Before that, it was both weekend nights and when I was a musician, it was 5 or 6 nights per week. Man, how I’m still alive… But Saturday night I kept thinking I could be at home watching a film, or in bed or otherwise relaxing, instead of spending money on mindless consumables and paying £12 to get home, which I can barely afford. I’ve never earnt more or been so continually broke, I pay bills and thats it, I don’t buy anything (heh, realisation of what adult existence is like). Going out to clubs used to be my relaxation, I could just let loose, but these days I just prefer to catch up on my sleep. I need to have my head on the pillow with my eyes closed by 11pm or I’m too tired to speak to anyone for 3 days.

Man, I’m old and I’m not even 30 yet. I suck.

Above heading found here while researching this post… (For non-techies, a shell script is a small, simple program written to automate repetitive tasks, or replace minimum wage employees ;))

Yes, it’s been a while since I posted. Man, do people get grumpy when I don’t post for a while. (CARL!) I’ve been, well, dunno. I could list any one of busy, broke, tired, sleeping, but honestly I dunno, just getting on with my life. Getting up, going to work, coming home, having dinner, going to bed, sleeping double at the weekends and so on. Sounds kinda dull but I’m largely happy. I’m not the youngster I once was. I’m still cutting my groove, but my priorities have changed.

Anyway I think I’m going to get one of these. I’ve had enough of fixing other people’s PCs. You know, if you’re going to run Windows and use Internet Explorer without ever doing anything to learn about how to look after it properly, then you’re asking for trouble. I get quite a few calls a week from some of maybe the 10 or 15 people who consider me their free of charge computer repair man. Stop asking me, I have my own life to live and you’re eating all of my time and largely, you always have the same problem.

Your computer running slow? Get lots of pop-up ads you didn’t ask for? You’re infected with something. Most probably with something that is making your computer do things you don’t want, like use your internet connection to distribute itself and thats the least scary bit. Use your PC for banking? Your details aren’t safe. Have a webcam? Neither is your personal privacy.

The fact is that compromised PCs are big business and the problem isn’t going to go away any time soon while systems are insecure and their owners are lazy.

Look after your PC because I’m not going to keep bailing you out.

I can’t have been the only geek in the UK eagerly awaiting the first episodes of Channel 4‘s new IT comedy, The IT Crowd, about a pair of awkward, ill-fitting, female starved IT support geeks, lost in the basement of a corporate building, managed by an attractive, computer illiterate young woman.

Maybe I’m too much of a geek, but the premise is ripe for comedy and witty one-liners. Geeks share so much in-joking and clever word play that I was expecting some compulsive viewing. Something seminal that geeks would remember, like say War Games, but in an office or The Office about computer nerds or something. Something that would appeal to people who have to deal with geeks as much as it would to the IT support, geek and hacker fraternity.

Sadly, I was very disappointed. The show opts for cheap parodies, exaggerated characters and farcical comedy, almost in the same kind of way that The Producers annoyed me so much. It was such a disappointment. I really thought that it could have been a great show if it had been written with clever, witty jokes rather than cheap, lowest common denominator puns.

It could have been so much better. Maybe somebody will do it better next time.

My work machine is an Apple iBook. I didn’t choose it, so, Ade, I’ll have less of your “It’s a proprietary operating system on proprietary hardware.” I have to set up PGP or GPG for domain registrations and what not. I figured it would be easier to do using Thunderbird and Enigmail than trying to do it with Mac Mail, it would also give me the opprtunity to move to Thunderbird, which I had always planned to do anyway.

My problem was that I had 6 months of business emails tied up in the Mac Mail format. I noticed that Thunderbird could import from Eudora and Eudora could import from Mac Mail, so I tried this, but not only was Eudora horrible to use, but also it didn’t import my mail. Fortunately I found a little tool that would allow me to copy all of my mail from Mac Mail into an mbox file, which I figured I could then import into Thunderbird, or at least convince Thunderbird that it was my mail spool for an account. This didn’t work either, but I did find a way of tricking Thunderbird into thining my mbox was one of it’s own mailboxes, by renaming the mbox to the name of one of the Thunderbird mailboxes and copying it over the top.

So I got my mail into Thunderbird eventually, but it was a hassle. And I found Thunderbird on my smallish iBook screen to be not much fun to use and theres is only an old version of Enigmail for OS X so I went back to Mac Mail. I have since found some instructions on a better way to use GPG with Mac Mail so I will try again. Shame though, it would have been OK on a larger screen.

The point of this though, is why can Thunderbird only import from Netscape 4.x and Eudora? Surely mbox and maildir would be easy to implement and although harder, wouldn’t Mac Mail and Outlook/Outlook Express/Entourage import wizards make it easier, for those entrenched in the main competing email programs due to the need to keep existing important emails without needing to fire up another app, to move their mail over to Thunderbird? Surely this wouldn’t be a big engineering task. If I was a good enough programmer I’d do it myself. If I was rich enough, I would pay someone who was good enough to do it. Will you do it for me? Please?

While looking up links for another post, I came across this site about Linux Software RAID. The guy has a banner ad at the top of his page for GnuCash and as much as I dislike advertising, maybe it’s a really good idea for breaking into the brand-aware consciousness of non-Open Source and Free Software people. I think if people saw what they were missing, they might do something about getting it.

Most passive software users are aware of the big names and the latests versions (the amount of times I hear the phrase “Microsoft XP”, without the person knowing whether they are talking about Windows or Office, or indeed understanding the difference), maybe if we started adding a banner or other ad to our blogs and home pages, our own products might start to invade the minds of these people. Perhaps I should contact some projects that I’m find of and ask them for some banners and set up some kind of not-for-profit ad scheme.

Admittedly, most people have developed the ability to phase adverts out of their web browsing experience, we just subconsciously acknowledge an advert as an advert and ignore it’s content, we may not even notice what it advertises, so maybe this would be entirely futile, but the passive computer user might abosrb this kind of brand recognition, erm… passively.

Of course principles are bullshit without actions.

Oh. My. Good. God. Today is a strange day.

As people might know, I like looking at my web server stats. I was just having a quick check this morning, I always like to check the referrers, the most common search terms and the most popular files.

Today I proudly announce that I am top on Google for Poo Pictures. What the hell is going on? Here is the evidence:

While I was busy laughing at my questionable status amongst poo lovers in the world, I happened to notice the Ebay sponsored ad in the right hand column.

I thank you and goodnight 🙂

OK so I upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Cool. I also included the new Spam Karma 2.1 and Referrer Karma 2.2. I still have some wrinkles to iron out, but it should be good. The point of me telling you this is to let you know that if you get any weird messages about being a referrer spammer then you should let me know and I’ll whitelist your domain or the domain you came from.

Well the upgrade process wasn’t quite smooth. I did a fresh install last night on my own machine to see if it all hung together correctly, including whether the Rubric theme for WordPress 1.5.x worked on 2.0 and it all went great. So today I set about upgrading. I backed up my files, backed up my database and then went ahead with the upgrade. What did I get? A blank page. Ulp. Deleted the live system, deleted the db and then reinstalled my old db and my old files. Checked everything, all cool. Back as we were. So I double-checked the upgrade instructions and upgraded again, same result – blank front page.

I was just about to curse something and start again with just a plain WP2.0 and then add in Spam Karma, Referrer Karma and Rubric to see what was cauing the problem, but then I got bored and went off for a few hours.

When I came back, I decided to see if I could view the admin pages and low and behold, by blindly typing in the admin page address I could see the admin pages. That meant it wasn’t all bad. I decided to check whether the theme was installed properly and it seemed to be but I selected it as the theme again to make sure. Checked the front page. Bingo. Upgrade done. I guess my db was incorrectly referencing the theme or something.

I just had a few other bits and pieces left to sort out with Spam Karma and Referrer Karma and then it was done. I still have to get Referrer Karma to use the Spam Karma blacklist and sort out a few other things and then I’m done altogether.

I’ve watched a few films recently and so I thought I would share them with you, you lucky, lucky people.

The Producers

When I first saw this on the TV adverts, I thought it would be shit and then the idea started to grow on me so I went to see it. In a word – don’t. It irritated me so much that I walked out before the end of the second scene – the first scene after the intro and according to Radio 1 the day after, it seems I’m not the only one. It’s horrible, screechy and hideously over-acted to the point where it’s just too much and it’s worse than bad theatre. I just hated it. It’s true however that I don’t like musicals anyway and it never occurred to me that this was one, but it was just irritating.

Just Friends

I sneaked into this after walking out of the The Producers, as it was the only film still playing at that time, in fact it still hadn’t started so we saw the whole thing. If you like that American Pie, Road Trip and Without a Paddle kind of American high-school comedy then you’ll like this, it made me laugh hysterically in places. It also features the fabulous Amy Smart. If you don’t like those then you won’t like this. I have to say though, that in this case the lead male role was probably less of a likeable character than most of these kind of films, he wasn’t the kind of lovable dumbass, more a complete arsehole at times, but meh, these kind of films weren’t written with moral recompense in mind. Good mindless fun if you like that kind of thing.

March of the Penguins

I wanted to see this since mid-December when it first started attracting media attention after sending America into raptures, but it seems that it’s not on widescale release in the UK, even after the adverts claiming it was on show nationwide after an initial limited release at the end of last year. In fact it took a great deal of effort to see this.

Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it covers a year or so in the life of the Emperor penguins of the Antarctica, from leaving the sea and their 70 mile walk to their breeding ground, to finding a mate, breeding, nurturing the egg and the fight for survival of both the parents and their newly laid egg in the Antarctic winter. This a cute, lovable and informative film. If you like nature documentaries or have a heart at all, then you’ll love it. It wasn’t quite as heart rending as I was expecting, just a lot of giggles at the awkward, clumsy, fish-eating buffoons and lots of ahhs at the babies. Watch it if you can.

OK. I guess that’s it. Over and out.

Well WordPress 2.0 just got released and I’m waiting for my blog spam filter – Spam Karma 2 – to get a final update release to support WP2 and then I’ll be in feet first. It would be nice if the Rubric theme that I use were to get updated for WP2 also, but maybe it just works out of the box, I’ll have to test.

So I was looking into versions and stuff for my blog upgrade and the guy who remade the rubric theme to work with WP1.5 has a little thingy at the bottom of his page that says how many referrer spams have been blocked by Referrer Karma. It turns out that it’s by the same guy as Spam Karma and integrates with it. Thats great. Spam Karma solved my spam problem, but I still get thousands of porn web sites claiming to link to me, when they actually don’t, they’re just referrer spamming, which ruins my stats because I like looking at who links to me and where most of my traffic comes from. I think maybe 2 or 3 of my top 20 referrers are legitimate, the rest seem to be Italian hosted porn sites and drug sites. So anyway, I’ll be adding this in too as soon as I get WP2, Spam Karma 2 and rubric installed.

Anyway, while I was looking around I came across this article about the state of blog spamming, which is kinda worrying and it’s over 2 years old. I guess this is way old news to those of you who have been paying attention to this kind of thing for years and well, I kind of knew most of this anyway, but this article makes for pretty stark reading.

Sleep well 🙂

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.