Thats right, from the heart of Wolverhampton, LUG Radio Live 2006 is this weekend, 22nd and 23rd July 2006 at the University of Wolverhampton’s Student Union bar and it’s only 5 of your GB pounds to get in, so you have no excuses for not being there. Tickets here.

If you’re not sure whether to come or not, you really should come. Last year was an absolute scream and made me feel very proud to be part of such a fun and welcoming community. There are some great speakers, including Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu head honcho and space travelling millionaire, Simon Phipps of Sun, Stephen Lamb of ahem… Microsoft, Michael Meeks of OpenOffice.org and many other things, ‘The Reverend’ Ted Haeger of Novell, Gerv Markham of Mozilla – one of last years highlights for me, Bastien Nocera of Gnome and Red Hat and Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu.

Of personal interest to me are Jonathan Haslam on DTrace, John Leach on Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, Matthew Bloch on Virtualisation and Mirco Müller talking about Lowfat, amongst many, many more.

And of course who could forget LUG Radio community heroes Ben ‘mrBen’ Thorpe and Bruno ‘he’s basically French’ Bord, aka kNo`. Aside from being community heroes, they really are great guys.

On top of all this, there is also LAN gaming, BOF (birds of a feather) sessions, where you sit and discuss with like-minded people about your chosen BOF topic, then theres the exhibition area with the likes of Gnome, Ubuntu, Debian, O’Reilly, Fedora, Novell, Linspire, Bytemark, OpenSolaris and heaps of other people.

Also in line are are a LUG Radio Live recording and the shaving of Jono’s beard in aid of Amnesty International (donate here), the biggest donor will get to do the shaving.

Rumour has it, there are even going to be some girls there. Real ones. But you shouldn’t stare as Kat Goodwin, Jen Phillips and Phated will be talking about women in open source and probably about the attitude of all us slack-jawed male gawpers.

The schedule is here. Got nowhere to stay? The accomodation section is here.

Please come, it’s a truly great, heart-warming time. You may even get to see me so drunk I can only open one eye (again, though I’ll try not to bother Jonathan Riddell all night this time) and possibly see me in the most disgusting suit in the world (again, again).

Be there or be != geek.

Yeah, I’ve been quiet recently, a lot of personal stuff going on and I didn’t feel inclined to go over it here, nor did I have the time, but my future is looking rather different now, not necessarily better or worse, just different. More details as they become apparent.

On the tech side, I have moved my domains to a new server. The old one kept dying in the heat, whether the PSU was faulty as has happened with many of the same servers, or the memory was bad or just the heat itself, the thing kept turning off so I moved it to my mail server which has been reliable despite being on the same kind of hardware. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest versions of WordPress and all of my plugins.

The fate of the old server was sealed the other day when I spent 20 mins writing a post to tell you all to come to LUG Radio Live 2006 and the server went down just before I hit submit and of course the browser back button couldn’t save me. So let this serve as warning that you should go to LRL2006. I will post a proper notice soon 😉

Anyway, hope you’re all well.

Are you?

I upgraded to Dapper on Sunday as if it weren’t obvious by the XGL post. It really was easy. If you’re already running Breezy, just issue:

gksudo update-manager

from a command prompt and click the Upgrade button. Thats it. Of course Ubuntu Dapper was released properly today.

If you’ve never used Linux before, or tried it long ago and found that either it was shit, you didn’t like it or your hardware didn’t work, then you should try the Ubuntu Linux Desktop CD which will run when your PC boots and it won’t affect your existing Windows installation. It’s a great way to try Linux to see if you like it and to see whether it works on your PC. Please go and try it. if you like it, the CD allows you to install it, but you don’t have to, you can just reboot, take the CD out and go back to Windows.

Go on, you’re bored of not knowing what I’m on about all the time, give it a try, just don’t run the permanent hard disk installer once you’ve booted from the CD-ROM if you don’t want it on your PC.

UPDATE: I removed the ‘-d’ from the update command given above as it instructs the update manager to upgrade to the development version, which, once Dapper was released means you would be updating to a hideously unstable early development version. Apologies.

I’m loathed to put this as Part 1 or anything because then I’ll be obliged to make Parts 2, 3 and n.

Well I’ve been faffing with Asterisk for months now, slowly going nowhere, mainly due to having little or no time to put into it at work when ‘real work’ needs to be done, not having the time or the environment to concentrate on research properly or absorbing the docs, then having phones that don’t work, then having phones that work some of the time and well blah, blah.

About a month or so ago I had a breakthrough when phones actually started calling each other, which, stupid as it sounds took me ages to get right, what with never having used Asterisk before meaning I didn’t know when something looked wrong. Re-flashing the phones meant they picked up the server and then finding a commented out extension in a config file, even though I had added it using the web interface (everytime I added a new extension it would uncomment the previous extension and comment out the new one…).

Well yesteday, having been playing with incoming and outgoing calls via the PSTN using a Digium TDM-400 card, something didn’t seem right and, again, never having seen a working Asterisk box, I didn’t know whether some of the errors I was seeing were normal or not. It was only when I started playing with using the zaptel configuration tools that I realised that the error I was getting didn’t mean what I thought and why the thing wouldn’t dial out was due to the fact that the machine I was using wasn’t recognising the Digium card properly. A quick lspci revealed this to be true, I have no idea why, but possibly because I was using a cheap test machine with an SiS chipset as the Digium card wouldn’t fit in the case properly of the server I was going to use originally.

Well anyway, I wasn’t going to use this machine as a production server anyway, it was a proof of concept machine to see if Asterisk could do what we wanted (nothing that complicated to be honest). So, already sold on the idea, I made a fresh install of the latest Asterisk@Home (yeah I’m a wuss) on some proper server hardware and heh, I had it up in an hour or so, secured it and played with the PSTN again today. A bit of playing with the trunks and incoming and outgoing routes and I made my first calls in and out. I was really pleased to have it working, I left myself stupid smug answerphone messages.

The configuration is primitive at the moment, all calls out go over the PSTN and all incoming calls ring all extensions, but I guess thats to be expected. What I need to do now is assess call charges from BT and various SIP providers, analyse our call patterns and costs (mobile/international/regional) and then design a proper call plan. I also need to design a proper menu system and Digitial Receptionist so that people can get put through to the right person first time, sort out a default office voicemail, remote extensions over VPNs and arrange various out of hours and out of office forwarding to real home or mobile phones. This will be more evolutionary according to need, rather than revolutionary by designing everything from the beginning I suspect, but some planning won’t hurt at all, grumble…

I think thats about it on this subject, speak soon.

Woo, it’s fucking weird in here… Kinda like being a goldfish living in a bowl, with the whole wobbly windows thing.

Yeah, I know I’m late to the party, almost last I think, but yeah it’s cool. The spinny cube thing with the desktop changer is cool as hell and so is the OS X Expose thing with the F12 button. I will play with some more of the effects another time and maybe I will make it go to some extremes for extra trippy moments. Performance is ok on my 128MB ATI 9500 Pro, though admittedly I havent done much yet. Just a shame I need to run a proprietary driver…

All in all, cool as fuck and it will moisten the underwear of the hardest Windows monkey. OS X can take a spoon and eat my ass.

Yeah, fuck, it’s been nearly a month again. I’m sorry, don’t know what I’m doing these days, I just don’t seem to have 5 minutes to spare.

So first news is that I have a new car, a brand new BMW Mini:

So, woo for me! I gotta be honest, I’m not much into cars and I’m not into speed or high performance, so, Carl, stop telling me I could have had X, Y or Z, but I love it. I just want to get from A to B and in comfort and that I can now do. (Note, the front garden is a work in progress, hence dead weeds and various bits of scrap lying around waiting to be disposed of…)

Last weekend I went up to Manchester for my friend Celine’s birthday. We had a great time, it was good to catch up with Celine, Carl and Vaj again as I don’t think I’ve seen any of them since my house warming-cum-birthday party at the beginning of November (my birthday is at the end of October for eagle-eyed gift shoppers ;)). We went to club called 5th Avenue, which, while not being a cultural mecca or The Ritz, was my kinda club and I loved it, it reminded me of Friday nights in Wolverhampton’s Dorchester, a club so cool we are still having reunions nearly 10 years after it closed down.

On to this weeks film recommendations. I watch a lot of films, in the months since the last time I made some recommendations, I watched Jarhead which was excellent, probably the first in the next generation of war epics about Iraq. It reminded me quite a bit of Full Metal Jacket, my only criticism was that it didn’t seem to conclude anything. Syriana promised a lot but was something of a let down. It was a huge, sprawling, multi-threaded picture which was difficult to follow and didn’t seem to tie up at the end, leaving me to wonder what the point of some of the different threads was. The only conclusion was to display how sordid the power-hungry dual interests of oil and politics are when they combine.

More recently, Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic was unmissable, a great portrayal of a tortured, intoxicated, stumbling soul. Tristan and Isolde was excellent, reminiscent of a cross between Braveheart and Romeo and Juliet – take your partner to see this one. Slither was a fun, entertaining film to watch with friends, though not likely to change your life. It’s a witty, if not classic, light horror. I watched V for Vendetta the other day which I thought was great. I saw a number of parallels with 1984 and I really enjoyed it, never having read the original story. At times, it seemed a bit uncool, rather like those black and white 50s sci-fi series I saw as a kid, especially when V was talking in the Fawkesian mask and bobbed hair, but it was a really good film. And Natalie Portman, as always was blissful.

One other film I saw recently was Hostel, the Tarantino/Eli Roth horror. I saw it at the cinema and having missed maybe the first 10 minutes were only 15 or so minutes away from some real gut-wrenchingly brutal scenes. I’ve always been kinda proud of being able to stomach some really challenging films and I like watching stuff that will cause a strong reaction but this was too much for me. Being late and only really knowing it was a strong horror, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw and in the middle of some really strong scenes I decided that if the film continued like this then we couldn’t watch it so we left. I have since found out that most of the really strong gore was over after that part and I regret leaving now, but man it was rough. Now I know the film doesn’t carry on like that throughout I will have to watch the rest.

On to more technical things, I spent the other weekend researching some spam filtering techniques and applied them. In principle, some were a little over the top and some were perfectly reasonable. The over strong ones were pulled out immediately when I realised they were blocking things that my users were perfectly entitled to receive. However, I noted a while back that all UK universities and AOL now block mail from systems where the forward and reverse DNS lookups don’t match, since most spam is now generated by virus infected PCs around the world, not legitimate mail servers that simply send out spam. So, I implemented this, I also blocked mail from domains which didn’t have DNS MX records, machines which didn’t have fully qualified domain names and any bounce messages that don’t contain my domain in the original message-ID.

To me, these all seem perfectly reasonable, I already drop mail from anyone who claims to be my mail server, who opens with an IP only HELO statement, servers in a few reliable spam blacklists and anyone mailing viruses or banned file extensions. Unfortunately, my new policies seemed to break the whole world. Or more specifically, the whole world seems to be broken and playing by the rules means you don’t get to receive any mail. Genuine, legitimate mail from properly configured servers got through but it seems that loads and loads and loads of servers are badly configured. The spam rate dropped to almost zero, a few still got through, but the amount of genuine mail that failed was astonishing. I mailed a few sysadmins on postmaster and hostmaster addresses (an RFC requirement for mail and DNS servers!) to find that those addresses didn’t exist, in one case I trawled around and found and address for one admin and mailed him, he still hasn’t replied.

In the end some of my users were losing important mail from so many places it was impossible to whitelist every sender or coax every (well, any) mail admin to do anything about this stuff that I had to pull the rules and let the spam rain down. It appears that about 2 or 3 years ago, AT&T did the same thing and had to make the same climbdown. I was really fucked off.

People: if you are going to run a mail server make sure you have forward and reverse DNS lookups that match. Make sure you have webmaster, hostmaster, postmaster and abuse email addresses that actually point to a real person. Implement an SPF record in your DNS to say which hosts can send mail for your domain. Make sure your mail bounce messages contain the domain name of the sender or sending mail server.

In more geek news, I have to decide whether to go back to uni and finish my degree or not. To be honest I don’t think I can work and finish my degree at the same time and I can’t afford to not work, so I think that partly answers the problem, but also I don’t think a degree is particularly useful in career terms for what I want to do. I’m far more interested in doing a CCNA which I think will be inifinitely more useful. The only downside of not going back to finish my degree is that having a Diploma in Higher Education will be bad for my CV as it will look like I can’t finish what I start, which is not the case at all, it’s just that the whole thing made me so miserable I thought I was going to crack up and I chose my well-being above all else. It also looks like the Student Loans Company might be shafting me on the interest as my repayments don’t cover what I’m being charged in interest every month by about a third. Have to sort that out. And that…

The Blender project, an Open-Source 3D animation modelling and rendering software project has finally announced the release of their Orange project, Elephants Dream, an animated movie available for download free of charge. At this stage I have no idea what it’s about or whether it’s any good, but if it is it will surely raise the focus on Blender which has been plugging away for a few years doing great stuff without any real recognition from the major studios. Hopefully people will now begin to see that Blender is capable of results similar to it’s proprietary competitors. For non-geeks, did you know that most of the animated movies in the cinemas are rendered on Linux? No you probably didn’t, but off the top of my head, Toy Story and the sinking scenes from the Titanic certainly were, amongst many other household names you would recognise.

Non-geeks may now re-enter the room. Looks like I will be going on holiday for the last 2 weeks in June if I can get the right deal and time off work. I’ve been saving since Christmas for a nice holiday and can just about afford what we want. Originally we wanted to go the Caribbean (particularly the Dominican Republic) or Mexico, but we are on the brink of being ready to go and well, it’s winter/rainy season over there, which means it’s cheap, still warm compared to here, but also liable to have hurricanes, which is not my idea of a holiday. Besides I’d rather go when it was hotter there but I’m not prepared to keep waiting until November. So, it looks like it might be Egypt instead with lots of water sports etc. The only other issue to be cleared up here is to try not to miss the World Cup…

I’ve been green fingered recently. I’ve planted and grown pumpkins, carrots, peppers, leeks, brocolli, brussel sprouts, sunflowers, onions, spring onions and now I have strawberry plants. I also have a compost heap. Sad I know, but it’s fun watching stuff grow and know that you did it yourself. It’s also great for teaching kids where food comes from and weaning them off all of that horrible, processed meat shit they get served in burgers, sausages and chicken dippers. With help from my parents I’ve really started to get our enormously overgrown garden under control. It’s only halfway there of course but if we stay here for another year or two it should be in good shape.

Alongside recycling waste paper, glass and plastic, using energy efficient lightbulbs and driving as little as possible, composting is one the best things you can do for your environment. All vegetable kitchen and garden waste can go on the pile (never any animal waste or animal products!) and you can use it to plant stuff in. My friend Dan visited a community where they were completely self-sufficient, grew all of their own food in their own compost. Wouldn’t that be cool? People in the UK can get a cut-price composting bin from here.

I think that’s it for now, I’d better go and do something productive with my day. See y’all 🙂

This is a polite reminder that the URL for my blog is now http://blog.adamsweet.org/, not http://blog.drinky.org.uk. I have left blog.drinky.org.uk as a pointer for now but you should update your links to point the correct URL if you are still using the old one.

That concludes this public service announcement. Meh.

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.