07.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 18:05 by nlawren
Well supposedly anyway 
Back to work this week and life has been busy. The normal combination of politics and stupidity making for an interesting life. One of the good things about what I do is that the technical aspects of it (currently at least) outweigh that sort of crap. Although I must admit some days I do have to remind myself of that fact.
Did some lovely perl scripting yesterday - very simple stuff, just reading in a list of files in a directory and scanning for some keywords. That is the sort of thing that perl excels at (after all “practical extraction and reporting language” does tend to imply that) and it was wonderful to actually sit down and do some scripting again.
I see Apple have released the mini-Ipod even though the price was not quite what was being predicted. Apparently it is as small as a business card but has a nice 4gig hard drive. The specs look very interesting and I must admit it is tempting to look at for car use rather than fitting an in-car mp3/cd player. I’ll have to wait to see what the reviews have to say (and for it to actually get to this country) before thinking about that. For the moment the Zaurus does a wonderful job (with a 512meg CF card).
TIme to start thinking about some computer changes around my place - there is a possibility that I may be able to move into a Linux job where I work and, of course, Redhat Enterprise Linux and Suse are the distributions of choice. I haven’t used Redhat seriously since I did my RHCE at the beginning of last year so I am out of practice a little. I do have a little personal Redhat9 box at work that is a web/mrtg/stats server but I haven’t really done any major sysadmin style work on that machine.
So one of my machines will be converted to a Fedora Core1 box for a month or so (the Fedora Core2 when that comes out) to get back into the hang of dealing with redhat style sysconfig and rpm fun again. That is the problem with debian (even running unstable), it spoils you for most things (ie upgrades etc). I’m just about to do a large apt-get upgrade on my laptop (tracking unstable) which is over 550meg :). Now that is what I call some major changes.
A useful site I found from arstechnica - fedoranews.org. Has some nice tutorials and other interesting articles which should be a nice introduction back into that world.
Now time to go and attend to some backups and file copying.
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03.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 14:06 by nlawren
Been having a great deal of fun playing with web statistics analysis programs - trying three at the moment - analog, webalizer, and a new one awstats. This last one produces some really nice stats and a different viewpoint on some of the data that gets produced on a daily basis.
So I now produce 4 sets: analog, webalizer, webalizer run over /journal and awstats (which only goes back to August 2003 while I work out exactly how to get it to play ball). It isn’t that tricky but I am running it statically rather than as a cgi.
For the terminally bored, you can find some examples here. No fancy index page yet, just boring directory listings.
The weather remains great down here, perfect for lazing around the beach and swimming in the surf. Reading a techno-thriller (for want of a better description) called “Crush Depth”). Interesting idea of very small tactical nukes being used a lot in the near future in a very changed world (try around 2020). Made me shudder from an ecological viewpoint but it moves along at a great rate.
Nothing much else happening - starting to look at doing a LPIC level 1 certification (to add to my RHCE) after I complete my MCSE. You can never have too many certifications these days
Now to read planetgnome and see what is new in the gnome world today.
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01.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:29 by nlawren
Midnight on 31/12 down the south coast is normally very noisy - people partying, running around until the wee small hours etc etc - except for this year. Very quiet indeed. Had some friends over and had excellent food, wine and company until we saw the new year in (so to speak).
A very nice looking day down here - the beach is already starting to call me The water temperature has been perfect down here and I’m looking forward to spending a fair amount of time in the surf again.
Had to go to work on Monday and Tuesday - but was able to see Return of the King late Monday afternoon - it was truly truly stunning. An amazing achievement, perfectly executed and brought to life. I sat spellbound for the whole time - if anything, it almost seemed a little short, rather than the length that some people have commented on. I need to see it again….
Did the 218 exam on Tuesday and passed Somehow got a score of 1025 which I don’t understand - I thought the maximum was 1000 but anyway, it really doesn’t matter. That gets me MCSA, only 1 more exam to MCSE.
Now its time to catch up on the world and see whats happening.
Some links of interest:
- Snort have a new version out - 2.1 which I have downloaded and intend installing in a bit.
- Snortalong is also up to a new version - very nice perl script that one and extremely useful for looking at snort logs.
- Version 1.8 of rawdog has been released - this is a rss aggregator that produces a html page and can be run from cron. I use it instead of the normal aggregators as I can access the data from anywhere (which suits my circumstances very well).
And now it is time to head down the beach.
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27.12.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:23 by nlawren
Well, Christmas is over for another year and I hope everyone got exactly what they wanted. Did the Family christmas day for the first time in a number of years and it was great. Ate too much, drank too much and suffered rather badly in the heat (Sydney roasted on the 25th, it wasn’t just the turkeys).
However, down the south coast, it is a completely different story. Drove down early yesterday and the weather was a welcome change - warm without being silly. And today looks more of the same - although there is some cloud overhead which according to forecast should clear.
Have to go back to work next Monday - although at least I will be working from home on the 31st. Not fun, but someone has to do those things I guess.
Now to read up again on how to configure kernel 2.6 and give it a try (Linus’ christmas present to the world along with the thousands of other developers who SCO is trying to do out of their rightful work).
Oh yes, and both of my sisters now have personal websites as well. Just need to get them into using Movabletype
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23.12.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 16:44 by nlawren
And more to the point, another day closer to 4 days break from work
Unfortunately NSW State Rail decided to call a meeting today for all the train drivers (no problem with that) which was scheduled from 10:00 to 14:00. That was fine but when I actually got to work (easy at my time of the morning) I found out that they only intended to restore services at around 15:30 
And then claimed that only 50% would be back at around peak time - not a very nice thing to do.
So I ended up getting a cab home - I could not be bothered waiting around for them to get their act together (disadvantage of leaving work at around 15:00).
The whole SCO thing is turning into a farce with this new 65 files they claim copyright on. There is a fascinating post from Linus himself to lkml (linux kernel mailing list) going into the exact history of ones of those files from when he first wrote it back in 1991. From scratch. Without copying it from anywhere. Groklaw have reproduced the commentary with permission from Linus.
Oh, and a new update on groklaw - McBride now says he will have a “Linux expert” who will testify that Linus was wrong - as they note, someone will try and convince a jury that Linus can’t keep track of his own work? Linus Torvalds??? For crying out loud….
Upgraded my Movable Type installation (painless as ever) and added the new Atom 0.3 feed for anything that reads it - I’ll have to investigate it in my copious spare time 
The xml file it produces is very nice from just reading through it (ie it actually makes sense - although that may be because I read a lot of raw xml these days - the GPMC is a nice tool for that). Mind you (re GPMC), I have to look into the perl xml modules to start trying to get some nice output from that.
Now to play with subversion some more - I’m really liking this particular source control software for some reason (I don’t really know why but it seems more logical to me than cvs and the directory handling is wonderful).
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22.12.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 18:26 by nlawren
Just reading the new post at groklaw - good grief, when will SCO ever get a clue?
As PJ says “65? I thought it was millions?” They are truly truly amazing - the judge denies them and allows IBM’s discovery and this is what they come up with to discourage the extremely shonky deal they have with the star lawyer (who has a few problems with his own ethics - if you read groklaw as often as I do).
Didn’t do the 218 exam today Turned out the testing centre was closed for the break but only alerted Prometric late as to this fact. So doing it next Tuesday.
The good news is I will be going to see the final Lord of the Rings - Return of the King next Monday - should be very very very very good As you might gather, I’m looking forward to it. Just finished re-watching both extended editions again so I’m up to speed (and re-read the whole trilogy twice along with the Silmarilion).
Oh well, busy day at work tomorrow (new Business to add to our domains and a new DC to promo).
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Posted in Uncategorized at 8:02 by nlawren
Hmmm, Monday mornings and work - not a great combination. Well, not when you are feeling tired and really didn’t want to get out of bed. Been in at work for 2 hours now, done the early morning changes to Group Policy (yet another XP hotfix) so now is time to keep cramming for the 218 exam at 13:00 today.
Spent some time yesterday looking at the whole trackback/ping setup in MovableType and am impressed with the idea behind it. Having read the “Introduction to Beginners” from the mt website, it started to gel so I’ve decided to enable trackback for interest. Probably pointless since no-one actually reads this thing but good for amusement.
Gnome 2.4 in Debian unstable is once again my desktop of choice. Having briefly gone to KDE (I really didn’t like gnome 2.0 or 2.2 and the breakage that happened for a while in Debian unstable didn’t help), 2.4 is very very nice. It reminds me of my old desktop of Gnome 1.4 and is similiarly configurable which is what I like.
My standard application load also behaves very nicely with this desktop:
- Mozilla
- Pan
- emacs
- mutt
- Evolution
- gkrellm
- gqview
- gimp
- gaim
- rhythmbox
As you can see, almost all gnome/gtk applications which is why running KDE didn’t really make much sense. I know KDE has its own equivalents of all of those apps but these are the ones I’m most familiar with (aside from Rhythmbox which I’m just started playing with and am very impressed with).
Now to sit down and do some more review questions.
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20.12.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:54 by nlawren
This is very very strange - the temperature at my little place down the South Coast of NSW is cool and cloudly - not quite what the weather forecast said it was going to be. Althought driving down from Sydney last night, you could feel the temperature drop the further south you came. Myrddin and Caspa were both saying how hot is still was in Sydney when the temperature here was very pleasant indeed.
So, nothing much to do today aside from study various bits for the Microsoft 218 exam on Monday Fun, fun, fun.
Other interesting things found recently: distcc - a way of compiling across multiple machines. Should be very useful on the laptop (which is one of the example they cite) and epiphany - the browser of choice for gnome2.4 (based on mozilla which is what I use anyway).
Oh well, time to finish this rather nice espresso and head out to pick up the Christmas turkey…
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18.12.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:33 by nlawren
Well, after about 3 years, one of my machines (the main server for the household) has hung twice in the last couple of days. Nothing on the screen, nothing at all, no response from the keyboard etc etc. The PSU was still working, the fans powered from the psu still turning but no response from the board at all - including the power switch. Restarted it by pulling the power cable but then it did the same thing 90 minutes later (although I was at work by then).
So it could be either the HSF or the board (hoping the HSF) so time to look at something new. The always funny and very informative Dan has reviewed some new heatsinks so the question is do I use the nice Spire Whisper Rock IV (this is only a Duron900 after all) or go the nice NPH2 heat pipe thing. Although I’m tempted to put the Whisper Rock IV on the Duron and use the NPH2 on my main gateway XP2000.
The machine is behaving at the moment (touch wood) so I will continue to watch it and work out what to do next. Never a nice feeling though.
Dans review can be found here.
Having played a little with cvs and getting my head around it, I’ve noticed that it is getting some bad press at the moment (mainly about security which is understandable) and various other SCMs are trying to vie for popularity. One the nice ones that I’ve just started to look at is subversion which looks excellent. I was debating about using it before I noticed that Debian is using it widely (eg Branden Robinson providing Public X Strike Force Repositories using svn). He has a nice document here which describes more.
Ah well, time to return to fighting with Adm templates to create registry keys and preparing for a couple of group policy changes at 21:00 tonight
Joy…
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16.12.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:19 by nlawren
How can Movable Type get any easier? When you use a little gnome panel applet to post data
Found this little one from Planet Gnome - a nice little simple applet which can be found here.
And, of course, for those of us running Debian unstable, it is just a simple apt-get away (Debian is just such a lovely distribution for that sort of thing).
Aside from that, not much going on. Group Policy is being its normal annoying self - trying to work how to add a allowed cookie site into policy. Problem is, it appears as though you can only import “Security and Privacy” settings in Which is no help at all, I only want a site to be allowed to place cookies, NOT all of the other stuff - my workstation is quite different to the average users.
Oh well, time to do some more googling on this - it has to be possible somehow you would think.
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