My Next PC and my First Server

So I have my plans set out. Sometime in the next 12 months our old PC will be retired, and a new home theatre PC will be built by me.

The old PC will be then converted into a server for me to play with and learn from. I’m not sure how it will work. I guess I have to find out first if my ISP supports static IPs. I hope they do — I’m tied in for 18 months with them.

I’ve been reading and most people seem to advocate going GUI-less for server. That kind of scares me… as good as I’m getting at command line, I still think a GUI could come in handy.

BUT I want to have a project. No point having a server without users. I’ll never learn what I need to if I’m the only person using my server. Any ideas?

I was thinking of buying a neat-o domain and offering email addresses. I’m wondering if I could put together an email package that would be well tailored to mobile email, since phones are my are of expertise.

If I was going to offer email, I would have to satisfy myself that it would satisfy my standards

— there would have to be good junk/spam/virus control at the server end.
— I would have to be able offer text only/html/attachment stripping and attachment download options.
– i would have to be able to guarantee people that the email domain would always be maintained.

Ah it’s just a brain storm at the moment, you never know!

Backing Up to prevent reinstall hell

Well, yesterday I reinstalled windows Vista and Ubuntu for the 3rd time. I don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure it was a cross between my fluffing the install of Ubuntu last time, so that it ended up on a weirdly high numbered partition (oops) and the Vista updates that had installed the last time I turned my laptop off.

Anyway, partitions suddenly had disappeared, and even the Super Grub Disk couldn’t help me… I couldn’t even find my Ubuntu files to back them up, so I lost everything from the past month.

On the upside, the install went quicker than before and my blog post about my issues from the 2nd time came in very handy.

Oh and the pink shadows issue is gone with this new install, i didn’t have to put the fix in at all. There must be new nVidia drivers.

Actually it was a weird install; I used a disc that came with a Linux Format magazine and it had all sorts of KDE apps on it and tonnes of stuff in the menus that didn’t belong there at all. Still, it had loads of stuff preinstalled that I would have spent the evening installing so that was pleasant.

So I spent the evening sussing out backup options to prevent this from being an issue again! I have been backing up evolution (it has a built in backup facility) to a folder on my desktop which I hope will cause me to remember to copy it to my external HD from time to time. The email really was the heartbreaker in all of this, setting up the folders and filters took ages.

The other heartbreaker was firefox… my add-ons and especially my bookmarks. I have LOADS of bookmarks and I love them. So I searched and discovered Foxmarks which saves my bookmarks on a server and allows me to have the same bookmarks on both computers, but most importantly, allows me to restore my bookmarks if I have to reinstall again. Brilliant. Firefox should make this a permanent part of the package. I know Opera have a similar feature (I use Opera mini on my mobile phones).

And for the rest of the stuff, I have downloaded Simple Backup Solution and configured it to back up to a samba share. Fingers crossed!

I rarely use my Windows install but there are some times it’s handy, like when IT want to check my computer at work or if I’m on a dodgey wifi connection, Windows reconnects better than Ubuntu. Also the Nokia SDKs only seem to work on Windows so I have to use them sometimes too! But, there’s nothing there I really care about if I lose. Anything I do on Windows I move to the external drive immediately anyway because I’ll likely be needing it later when I’m in Ubuntu. So not worried about a backup solution for that.

I’ll be happy if I never have to go through this again!

Driving is not a womens’ issue

Analysis, Opinion – Independent.ie

That’s right Carol, I don’t care how you phrase it. The new laws are not a womens’ issue and have nothing to do with gender. Women are equally as capable as men of driving safely and passing their test, and I’m sorry if I sound “vociferous” but I actually bothered my ass passing a test (twice in fact, at home and in Ireland) and would prefer not to share the road with the lazy asses who think they’re qualified to assess their own driving skill.

And no, there should be no amnesty for older drivers with clean driving records. Some of the worst drivers I know have “clean driving records” mostly because of the disgraceful lack of law enforcement on the roads of Ireland. I know a woman who has driven with no licence whatsoever (provisional expired) for over a year, every day, to and from work, picking up her kids (because having children is a licence to do what you want, with smugness). No garda has ever asked for her licence in that time. And she had a bloody breakdown when she realised, a week ago, that they might be checking licences in July… and she didn’t even have a provisional, let alone a full licence.

Until the country starts enforcing laws, people won’t bother obeying them… it’s just that simple.

Ooooh Mariska!

Damn.

Dorothy Surrenders: Straight Gals Acting Like Gay Gals: Fight Club

Special Hotties Unit. Sorry, that was bad. But what’s not bad is the love that dare speak its name between Mariska Hargitay and Maria Bello. Look at those two lovebirds.

Best Blog post I’ve seen in forever. And yummy. Scrumdiddlyumpcious.

Go forth, and drool.

New ADA for SVU

“Law & Order: SVU” has a new assistant district attorney: Young thesp Michaela McManus.

Interesting choice. I’ve never watched One Tree Hill, so I have no idea what she’s like as an actress but she does seem very young for the part. Whatever happens I really hope she has some charisma. The show could really use some now that Munch rarely gets to speak, Benson is spending her days longing for a baby and Stabler is gradually self destructing under his massive ego.

I do hope we’ll see Stephanie March reprise her Alex Cabot character, even if she won’t be SVU’s ADA.

Beanz meanz bigotz — too right.

Ben Summerskill: Heinz has insulted gay consumers | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

And while Heinz’s decision to withdraw the ad might be seen by them as an easy way to palm off 200 fundamentalist Christian complainants, it seems to have been made under the quaint impression that it will cause no offence to Britain’s 3.6 million lesbian and gay consumers. Or any of their friends. Or families. Or colleagues.

I thought I might be over this today, but I’m not. So much so that I’ve been searching the internet looking for some clue that Heinz might have figured out the huge mistake they made.

While searching, I cam across this article in the UK newspaper, The Guardian.

He says it better than I could or than anyone else has. Heinz made a knee-jerk decision based on a handful of complaints (200 complaints, while meaningful, was probably 1 church group in motion) and that decision has alienated millions.

They’ve also managed to draw attention to the high fat content of the advertised products as people have been pointing out that the complaints were groundless as the ads are not allowed to be aired during childrens’ programming anyway.

I don’t think I’ll be happy anymore with the ad being reinstated. I expect a full on apology from Heinz. I’ve left a comment on their website, I hope you all will too.

Here’s the link to tell them how you feel.

Queers United: Heinz Pulls Ad With Two Men Kissing

Queers United: Heinz Pulls Ad With Two Men Kissing

This also comes under the “OH SERIOUSLY” category of stupid. I’ve seen this ad several times, and had a great chuckle. In fact, I hadn’t thought of it as a “gay kiss” but that the idea was these sauces would make it just like having a New York Deli in your kitchen, sandwich guy and all.

I think it’s disgusting of Heinz to bow to these weirdos. Newsflash: Gay is no longer a bad word. Get over it, or move to Iran.

(evil video in question)

(note the explicit gay sex)

(you don’t see it?)

(look closer)

(watch it again)

(it must be there)

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Nokia: Open source developers should play by our rules

Fatal Exception | Neil McAllister
Nokia could be following Google’s example. Instead, it has allowed itself to be bogged down by notions inherited from a computing model that’s rapidly becoming outdated. As Jaaski himself admitted, “As an industry, we plan to use open source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules.”

Tsk tsk Nokia.

I’ve worked in mobile phone stuff in the past and it still fascinates me. But Nokia’s attitude is less fascinating and more cringeworthy. While the overall quality and competitiveness of Nokia’s handsets has plumetted over the past 18 months, other manufacturers are becoming better and more savvy. Nokia need a lead-in. They need something that will make their handsets must-have devices.

To do that, they need to open them up. They need to allow us to write apps that will work on their phones. They need to make them the most customizable (Nokia 5110 anyone?) phones available. They need to allow their phones to be the device that changes the way people interact with each other and the world. Phones are capable of this — they’ve already done it — and they are capable of bringing it along much, much further.

The open-source community are innovative, keen and clever. They are the end-users so they know what they want. Why the suits at Nokia feel they need to be telling the community how to operate is a question, but for those of us familiar with the feebleminded execs who head up most of these companies, it’s not a tough one to answer.

Stephanie March Sex Change

Seriously? I mean, the rest of the search terms all seem reasonable but… check out my list of search engine keywords that have lead people to my humble blog.

Open Source (aka there’s more to the internet than p0rn)

O’Brien: Mozilla’s open-source model represents valley at its best – San Jose Mercury News: “For now, let’s just be grateful to have Firefox 3.0 and the community that built it.”

As I write, downloads of Firefox 3.0 have reached 6,124,310 since 18:16 UTC yesterday. It makes me happy and I’ll tell you why.

Now, I’ve loved the internet since I first encountered it in 1994. I spent my first year in university connected to a high-speed campus network, spending nights in chatrooms and meeting people around the world. I even operated a “pen pal” service in my dorm, matching 18 year old Canadian university students with Scottish grad students at the University of Edinburgh. I found a bulletin board for their university using Gopher.

I eventually met one of the Scottish students when I lived in England. Although we’d both changed and were no longer able to be friends, it felt incredible to know that we’d been such a presence in each others lives, having never met in person (although we did talk on the phone when my budget allowed). We’d even post each other books. That experience taught me early on that the internet was at its most powerful when connecting people.

I’m getting a bit weepy now. It’s ok, I’ll get over it.

What does this have to do with Firefox? Granted, it sounds like I’m going to rhapsodise about Facebook.

I’m not.

While my earliest experiences taught me that the internet could connect people, what I have only just learned is that the internet can connect people and they can use those connections to make things happen.

WOW.

Think about it. On my laptop, I run Ubuntu as an operating system. It does everything my computer with Windows does. Only, people built Ubuntu because they wanted to. And they distribute it for free. And not free like some free software that only gives a company the ability to plant spyware and adware into your computer, but FREE. It’s not costing you anything and they’re not looking for anything in return (unless you want to help out!). It’s also FREE as in “free speech”. The source code is available. Anybody can look at it. Anybody can modify and make it suit their needs. Hardware companies can see the source code for themselves and provide drivers that work properly, instead of the guesswork involved with the OS source code is not available for viewing.

You’ve heard of Linux, right?

Basically, in 1991, this guy posted on newsgroup that he was setting up his own operating system, as a hobby. He was looking for feedback and suggestions. He never made it proprietary. He never claimed any kind of monetary rights to his OS. He never sought to sell it off to a company, he just allowed it to be used by the community and it became the root of the operating systems we call “Linux” (Distrowatch list 349). People just kept building stuff the way they wanted to use it. And they still do.

Wikipedia is an example of the same phenomenon in action. They claim 75,000 active contributors. While there are always warnings about the potentially unreliable information to be found on pages that can be freely edited, Wikipedia has proven to be one of the most reliable and current sources of information for those doing research, especially in the preliminary stages. I’d be hard pressed to find a reason to own a set of encyclopedias today.

Firefox, is of course, part of the same community developed phenomenon. The Mozilla Developer Center informs potential developers how to obtain the source code, write patches, and submit them for review and inclusion.

When you look at these (and so many other projects) it seems completely insane to continue supporting the proprietary software that keeps us bound to brands and restricted in our productivity(and charge us for it!). Recently the company I work for have started using Open Source projects, like Open Office. I also noticed our LCD display runs on a linux box when I unplugged it by mistake the other day and saw the startup script.

Perhaps there is hope for the old internet yet, beyond Bebo and porn.