29 December, 2005

Is this a gumboot I see before me?

I finally got the Gumboots (a set of five documentation CDs) installed on their own vhosts in apache - now it's all visible from the Internet at large, when I open the correct port in the firewall. Thanks to wishes and others for pointing me to the correct way to get it all working, though I don't know why it wasn't working properly the first time I tried it all their way. Still, great that it works now.

I still haven't got this blogger working quite properly - the applet doesn't get the Title in the correct place, and there's no way of selecting the correct format for text in a paragraph without going onto the website and modifying it for myself. Still, as I said earlier, it's a good quick program.

I had a good Christmas over all, though I'm still awaiting a secondhand DVD writer.

27 December, 2005

I do not LIKE green eggs and ham

Well, actually I don't mind either eggs or ham. Not that I got either for Christmas, though I got some other items of use. The one item I got that disappointed me, even though I thought it would improve things, was a 80-wire IDE cable. Now Windows won't boot (no loss, some would say) and I still haven't got any other speed increase in my hard drives. Surely I ought to get 40-something MB in drive transfers on udma4? But no, it's a slow old 12MB/sec. Never mind.

I'm still working my way through "Crime and punishment", a good old classic story from the Russian author Dostoevsky. It's getting rather intriguing, with the prime character still not having been caught for his crime of murdering two people, but constantly fluctuating between "Do I confess all? This is killing me!" and "I don't really GIVE a shit about the world". Being given lots of money and a new set of clothes only serves to have confused him somewhat so far. I'll let you know once I've read more.

Ever had the post-Christmas blahs? That time directly after Christmas day when nobody's open (in Wellington, anyway) or you don't have any money to spend and you've run out of things to do? Yeah, that's struck here too. Pity, really. I wanted to go see "The fastest Indian".

17 December, 2005

Enlightenment strikes with Gnome

I've FINALLY managed to get Gnome 2.12 to work, and enlightenment to fire up under it. Because of this, I was able to get TWIN windows to take up the full screen, even overlapping the panels. I understand that I've got to address this, but I'm not too worried by it. Frankly, I've got bigger fish to fry. I'm interested to see what extra niceties Enlightenment-DR17 will bring. And now that Gnome is playing nice (I was having trouble with an old menu that wasn't formatted properly, and UTF-8 encoding was screwed) I can see how it all works.

14 December, 2005

From the desktop of The Viking

Yeah, this time I'm posting from my own desktop. Like, how cool is THAT? The only thing I'm missing seems to be formatting, but I'm not too worried about that as this application I'm trying out is for quick-throw notes up onto the blogger (or whatever) site, and not for particularly worrying about whether the words are all formatted in Verdana (my preferred blogging font). The other option would have been to create a post and email it, which blogger.com supports happily. The only problem with that being that I have to go back in and edit the post to change the formatting from mobile post to normal post, then actually POST the darn thing. The second is easily handled by a setting to post straight away, the first - well, I don't yet know. Anyway, this method lets me post to the blog straight away, and worry about the formatting later.

Anyhow, I'm still waiting for my LG GWA-4020 to arrive from Canada. The anticipation is just killing me. I even went out and badgered zoombuggy into letting me buy DVD media in preparation - thankfully I saw some for NZ$9.98 for ten DVD+R and the same cost for ten DVD-RW, which is STILL a ripoff as far as most other countries are concerned, but well, that's New Zealand for ya. They even charge the earth for cellphone calls too! Just in case you want to know (like you're in New Zealand) I got the media at Dick Smith, and they're basically DSE-labelled.

I had a wee bit of an accident with my Apache. I downloaded the Apache packages from Cooker to upgrade my system as I'd decided to upgrade to php-5.1.1. Well, was MY system ever in knots! Couldn't find this file, that symbol was missing from the module file, and as a result, apache wasn't going to start without a bit of a repair job. Made me feel like chucking the whole thing in. Thankfully, I'd decided to grab slightly earlier Apache packages from the updates tree for Mandriva LE2005. I stuck those back in, then had some help fixing the config files so that all my existing vhosts could be seen.I'm still not sure how on earth to make those vhosts visible from outside my network without starting them all on differing ports. At the moment, I have them differentiated by name (gum1, gum2, cisco, etc) but that won't work from outside as my DNS is private to my network, and isn't seen from the Internet. So, noxo (from undernet#linux), thank you.

Right - time for me to go, again.

06 December, 2005

Baen Books and David Weber

I got pointed to a pretty good set of books the other day - if you're into books about Science Fiction, then go see the Baen website , especially books by David Weber who writes the "Honor Harrington" series about a woman commander of space craft. I've only read the first book so far (On Basilisk Station) but already I can see I'm going to really like this author, just as I enjoy Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov, and Tad Williams. Other authors (from different categories) include James Clavell, Stephen Donaldson, and Bryce Courtenay. So yes, perhaps I am a bibliophile.