Vegan Fayre / Temperature 2

Dragged myself out of bed to the Vegan Fayre in Bristol today. It was a lot bigger and busier than I ever could have imagined. Very good. Bumped into Stephen Pope (and part-family) which was nice.

Shame my stomach wasn't up to gorging on all the gorgeous free treats. :-(

My temperature still keeps going up to the mid-38s. I'm knackered. Work on Monday - I wonder if I'll make it.

Blame it on the Cancer

It's no secret that I had cancer between 1978 and 1980. I probably mention it too much in fact. I was one of the lucky ones - most of the children I was in hospital with died. I shouldn't be churlish and complain but here's a list of minor annoyances it has left me with (note: to those who know me, I've left a couple out deliberately).

1. Immune system: mine is shot to pieces. I catch a lot of germs doing the rounds and often go down hard. (Like this week - same virus as rest of family - lasts twice as long - higher temperature - blah blah, moan moan).
2. Neural damage: chemotherapy affects the way your nerves develop. This isn't much of a bummer - it can have some mildly ammusing/annoying consequences but it can cause problems when combined with other illnesses.
3. Stomach etc.: Yep - this whole area is shot. I forgot to reorder my prescription that keeps everything ticking over and today (one week later) I couldn't even breathe. Painful.
   
4. Height: debatably, chemotherapy made me shorter than I otherwise would have been (although there is a strong genetic case for my height too). I'm convinced it cost me a couple of inches at least.
   
5. Back pain: if someone cuts your stomach open several times, your stomach muscles never quite learn how to support your back.
6. Back pain 2: radiotherapy left me with one leg 3% shorter than the other. Hence more back pain!
7. General fitness: I am not generally fit.
8. Heart: "Old slugger" as I call it, is borderline LVD.

All in all, nothing too serious, but when added all together, they (guess what?): piss me right off.

Yours, moaning as per usual, nic.

Temperature

My temperature is back down to about 38 which is a bit more bearable and gives me a better grip on reality. (No comments please).

Virus, CUPS (etc.), Radco, Evil Ray.

Yet another holiday and yet another (human) virus. This is starting to piss me off.

I haven't had printing working on tom (my main machine - runs FC2) for months. I fucked it all up by using the CUPS web interface which totally confused the Red Hat "system-config-printer" gui tool. I'm downloading a newer CUPS (I'd already done this to try and get USB printing working) and a newer HPIJS to see if it'll fix things.

The new Radco superstore is very nice - a huge improvement. Shame the ceiling fell in there yesterday. (The Co-op without a web site in Radstock, for the curious).

I was attacked (OK - it missed) by a feisty ray on Friday at the Seaquarium in Weston-Super-Mare. Odd. Very interesting creatures though. I could have watched them for hours.

monoforge

I've set up a monoforge account. Wonder what I'll do with it.

Gaim, BLAM!, notification panel, xscreensaver, bus, Liverpool, workrave, Lq

Various things:

1. Gaim - I wish gaim would show me as "away" automagically. Lq started typing at me the morning (from Oz) but guess what? I was still at home in bed. (Aside to Lq: hope you and A are having lekker time - thanks for message!)
2. BLAM! - Read this with excitement. Finally worked out that it only disappears from the GNOME notification panel area when I've read/ma
   
3. GNOME notification panel area: a bone of contention with some people. When I close gaim, it keeps running in the notification panel (the behaviour I want). When I close BLAM! the application quits completely.
4. Why xscreensaver still looks like it did when I first started using it, by JWZ.
   
5. The bus hit a car on the way in this morning gouging a hole in the car's front tyre.
6. Liverpool is the most modern and forward-looking city in Britain - they're banning smoking.

Back to work - and workrave is telling me to have a break (again).

Ubuntu Warty released

Ubuntu Linux Warty has been released. I'm running the release version now (and appear to have been for most of the day). Very nice. All the contentious graphics have been replaced with more usinversally acceptable ones (which is a mixed blessing, I suppose). Everything is stable and rock solid.

All I need to learn now is how to build .debs and I'll be as happy as Larry. (Who he?)

PostgreSQL weekly news

I can't believe that my humble (but glowing) blog entry on PostgreSQL training was linked to from PostgreSQL weekly news.

I meant every word I typed though. I am now a PostgreSQL convert!

Ubuntu Theme furore

The fine folks at Ubuntu Linux are getting ready for their first release (Warty Warthog a.k.a. 4.10) and have just started making the final changes for the first "Release Candidate". Way to go - a lot of hard work from some very clever people.

So what's up? Well, they've changed the default GDM theme, gnomesplash theme (that splash image you get as GNOME starts up) and the desktop background.

The old defaults featured the beautiful, stylish and simple ubuntu logo (three stylised people of different races in a ring) and text. Very nice, conservative, modern and professional - with a subliminal, powerful political message.

The new themes (and bear in mind ubuntu is all about humanity, and their themes are called "human") feature - shock, horror: humans!!! OMG! The humans in question are young and happy Africans of different racial groups: one bloke and two women.

• In the GDM background they're all happy and smiling and in a ring like the logo, on a white background. Very nice. Modern, different and human.
  
• In GNOME, your background should default to a nice brown background with the ubuntu logo showing through. Due to a previous bug (hey, it's beta software), some people got the monthly "Ubuntu calendar" background. Same shade of brown as the default background, but with our three African chums all shown naked from the top up (the ladies retain their modesty by positioning their arms well).
• gnomesplash isn't there long and is somewhere between the two.
  

The new themes/images are different, if a bit cheesy in some peoples' eyes. I'm almost won over though. I think it's a brave, radical change. Humans! On computers! Whatever next.

But I'm going to go on record and say I think the 3 people should keep their clothes on. It doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother Debbie either. It'd just be a bit more tasteful/less embarrassing in the workplace.

Here's Mark Shuttleworth's take on the whole thing: Mark's e-mail (can't argue with a man who has been in space).

PostgreSQL training 2

Had the second day of PostgreSQL training today. At last I understand how it works (to administer it). MySQL is a lot simpler to understand but is nowhere near as powerful/clever/well-suited to the enterprise/whatever.

Simon Riggs rocked as a trainer because he deserved ultimate respect. All that knowledge - wow. (I'm sorry; that wasn't a sentence).

Impressive stuff, especially version 8 (currently in beta).

PostgreSQL training

We're having on-site PostgreSQL training from Simon Riggs of 2nd Quadrant.

It's a bit different having training from someone who really knows what they're talking about. Other trainers may "know" their product well enough to train, install and troubleshoot it, but this guy knows the guts of the system being one of the contributors to it. (Not that he's full of himself nor is he mentioning it all the time or anything like that - he's humble and a likeable guy).

It's a damn fine course, and I'd recommend getting PostgreSQL training from these people any day. Props to them.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

I'm currently reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - a book I knew nothing about until I picked it up a few weeks ago in Ottakar's in Wells. (Apparently it had just come out that week). I bought a black copy.

I'm only about 1/5th of the way through, so this isn't a review. It's just odd that I should

1. purchase a book which I'd never heard of before
2. purchase a book by an author I'd never heard of before
3. purchase a book by a female author (I'm no sexist, it's just the way things go - although I do have all five Harry Potter books ready to read at home)
   
4. purchase a new, hardback book
   
5. purchase a book mainly because the cover(s) looked good

Strange that it was that almost instantly reviewed on /. and then I saw loads of adverts on the tube in London. Do geeks have an in-built sense of "we must read this"? Are we attracted to the same thing? Or is the book more mainstream than I think it is? (I never really have understood why certain things I like are mainstream and some aren't).

The book so far is very good - I keep trying to cram in moments when I can read it between work, parenting, food, talking to Debbie and sleeping.

The associated web site www.jonathanstrange.com is an intriguing idea - good looking, extra content, associated stories and more. If only all web sites were like this (reminds me of the original Blair Witch one).

worldofnic.org is live

I've moved from www.nic.uklinux.net to worldofnic.org (hosted by ukfsn.org). At last.

The CSS (nicked from here) is still slightly wrong and I'm thinking about a 3 column layout, but apart from that it's all systems go.

Next will be smarty and then mysql back-end.

nic's web-history:

1. www.bath.ac.uk/~mapnjd (c. Feb. 1994-2000)
2. www.maths.bath.ac.uk/~njd1 (c. 1995-1998)
3. www.nic.uklinux.net (c. 1999-2004)
4. worldofnic.org (Oct. 2004-...)

Of course, no-one ever reads it, but that's another story!

Still here in London

So I'm still here in London.

/dev/random turns out to be in a patch (112438-03) for Solaris 8 which I've now installed. Now I'm just waiting for the first two disks to sync... and someone's just come in and told me that the machine room shuts at 7pm. Not tonight it won't. I at least want / and /usr mirrored before I reboot (to get the kernel module loaded so OpenSSH can start).

More importantly, my car is going to be stuck at the Park and Ride all night. (I'm not going to get home until about 10pm or later at this rate). I hope to fuck no pillock breaks into it.

Stuck in London

So I'm stuck in London at ULCC doing a Solaris 8 re-install (don't ask why) on a SunFire V880.

The joys.

First, a cut down (ie. faster) install failed because it hadn't installed awt, needed for the installer to continue and install the second CD.

Next: why do Solaris Patch Sets take so fucking long to install?

Why isn't DiskSuite installed by default?

Why is so much other shit started by default?

Where the fuck is /dev/(u)random? My OpenSSH build needs this and it's fucked off on holiday somewhere...

I know Solaris 8 is old now... Let's hope 10 is saner. (Bet it won't be).

Elinks

Kudos to blogger: you can post using elinks (which I'm using now). You don't have to use a GUI browser. My main problem is I don't know the navigation keys off by heart and keep losing what I've typed by going backwards, or navigating away from the compose box and not being able to get back again. It's also a lot faster to render in elinks than in Gecko, etc. as the graphics for the WYSIWYG editor can take a long time to download.

Nice one blogger - if only all sites were this good.

Tory Tax

So yet again the Tories want to cut tax (although this time, Letwin hasn't been stupid enough to name an amount). Where the fuck from?

Under Tory misrule with endless tax cuts, the state was run into the ground, and even beyond. We ended up with failing schools, failing hospitals; you name it - it was cut.

Since 1997, things have got a lot better. This has involved a lot of investment - to make things better it costs more than it costs just to maintain a decent running system. We're not even at that stage yet - more improvements still need to be made.

But the Tories don't care: let Labour build it up to an "acceptable" (by the man in the street) level, and then cut it all back - let it all go to pot just like before. All for the sake of people thinking they've got more money in their pockets.

The future will follow one of these scenarios:

1. Labour and the Tories will take it in turn to run the country - Labour will keep trying to rebuild the state and the Tories will continue to destroy it.
2. (Worst case): The Tories will succeed in destroying the state. Education and Health Care will be effectively privatised. Taxes will remain low, but private education and health insurance costs will more than compensate for this "saving"
3. Labour will succeed in building up the country and people will learn that good things cost money. Eventually they will learn to understand and appreciate taxation. Well I can always dream.

Parish Council Elections

Why do local elections matter? Why are they party political? Twofold answer:

1. non-party-political councillors are usually Tories in disguise or renegade ex-party members (and hence just as political);
   
2. getting a local councillor elected in a new area is like getting pre-cancerous cells - they don't really seem that dangerous but if left unchecked can take over the council, spread into the Unitary Authority, and ultimately topple the MP.

Firefox and the common man

I wore my Firefox T-shirt to a family party last weekend, and was shocked when my Dad asked, "What's Firefox?"

It shows that sometimes we geeks can fool ourselves into thinking that the rest of the world will soon be marching in time with us. I'll burn him a CD when 1.0 final is released. And perhaps Thunderbird, too.

P.S. Debbie just read this and said "that's really interesting - not". More proof, if any were needed. :-(

Ubuntu 3

More comments about the fab Ubuntu Linux.

I installed it on sylvester (my venerable Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop) using "Sounder 9" (the Sounder pre-releases are known to install properly). First the problems:

• The supplied version of grub is bollocks :-) It's obsessed with ext[23] as opposed to any real filesystems (XFS, JFS).
• Not an ubuntu problem, but I got my keyboard wet, which screwed things up wonderfully!
• The installer is dog-ugly - I'm used to anaconda.

But that's it! My other install went horribly, so I didn't know what really went on. (The other install wasn't from a Sounder disk and didn't even install the kernel, grub, modutils, ... let alone a desktop)!

What you get with this install is a fully-featured, working GNOME 2.8 desktop installed with everything you could actually want. Unbelievable.

This is only a preview release of the first version of Ubuntu and it's nearly as good as Fedora Core already.

It was also a piece of piss to get my prism54 card working properly - a quick look at the wiki and that was it. Fantastic. (The firmware was already in the right place). I'm loving laptop-mode, too. Clever.

I'm becoming a convert, and I've used Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core since RHL 4.1. Weird...