Monthly Archives: February 2004

Agnostic

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Not entirely a techy entry… and not a metablog either.

Got into a discussion about beliefs tonight. It’s not something I stop to think about very often, but it’s strange how you kind of know what you believe whether you’ve consciously thought about it or not. You know where your prejudices are too, I think. I don’t like churches – organised religion – but is that just a product of the times I was brought up in, or a result of the one bad experience… or maybe a bit of both. I think I know the real answer to that…

We decided I’m agnostic, by the way… Dictionary.com says that means I am “skeptical about the existence of God but do not profess true atheism“. Sounds about right to me…

Techy bit – posted from Linux, so it’s still cool. WinXP boots without further intervention as I’ve properly edited boot.ini to remove the old duff entry. Erm. Oh and I installed RedHat’s Fedora at work today – it looks very nice. Now to get Apache, MySQL and Bugzilla working on it… :-)

Uptime

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Well done Greebo, 101 days and going strong… although I fear a semi-planned outage today, so here comes the obligatory uptime stats :-)


greebo:~ # w
14:13:23 up 101 days, 3:37, 2 users, load average: 1.70, 1.32, 0.65

Watch out penguins, here I come!

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Yep, hold on to your hats everyone, it is time once again for me to try out Linux on the desktop. And here I am posting to my blog from Konqueror, within KDE 3.2, on SuSE Linux 9.0. And apart from a little problem with Windows’ boot.ini, everything seems to be just fine. I have MP3s playing via an smbmount, IM going on via Kopete and am browsing via Konqueror and Mozilla (Konqueror looks better for now…) About the only thing I can’t do is sync my iPod, but then that’s what the dual boot’s for, innit? ;-)

(And I have just noticed another cool feature in Konqueror – spellchecking in website forms – nice)

As for that pesky boot.ini problem (“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \system32\hal.dll. Please re-install a copy of the above file”), well I tried lots of GRUB stuff to no avail, hiding things, trying to boot from different partiions and so on. Then it struck me that if it was Windows moaning, then the problem probably lay with Windows itself, rather than GRUB. So a quick bit of random playing from the XP Recovery Console lead me to ‘bootcfg /rebuild’, which seemed to work wonders :-)

Technical note – I added partitions when I installed Linux, and as I have a weird Windows install with the system drive being D:, it’s partition moved and boot.ini was pointing it at the wrong partition. bootcfg /rebuild searches your drives for Windows installations and rewrites boot.ini accordingly.

Quick note to anyone reading this, I do not condone ‘random playing’ with the XP Recovery Console… your luck (or karma, or grasp of the force, or whatever) may not be as good as mine.

Anyhoo, it’s Sunday night, and I suppose I should be thinking about getting my head down before work tomorrow…

Meta-blogging…

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Blogging about blogging; seems to be a habit around here…

Anyway, the other pages have been suitably styled now (except the comment bits… but hey, no-one comments on my stuff anyway, do they Ian?) so feel free to go and click stuff and tell me what’s broken – I know you people enjoy that bit.

I have tested this layout in various browsers in XP, Linux and OSX, and it seems to be readable in all, which is a bonus. I am aware of a ‘font-phenomena’ in Firebird on Linux – I might look into it soon…

Also, the blogs (i.e. this one and Ian’s) are now stored in a database for better performance (maybe) and easier backups (definitely – mysqldump’s a wonderful thing).

My brother got me a couple of books for my birthday. It is reassuring to know that other people have the same software-engineering issues that we do, and they’ve been having them for 30 years or more. It seems the problems don’t go away, they just get written about…

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm” — Winston Churchill

Don’t touch that!

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I spent most of this morning wrestling with CSS to come up with the new layout for this blog. You’ll note that everything lines up now, and for the moment the calendar widget has been lost – I thought it was a bit clumsy and you don’t seem to be able to scroll through the months anyway…

Anyway, as you can probably guess by title of this entry, I haven’t got round to changing any of the templates apart from the main index page, so everything else is ugly – Don’t Click That Link! :-)

And in a vague attempt to keep the blog barely up to date, and actually include content about something other than the blog itself, here’s a link to the Java 1.5 Beta JDK. It includes a number of new features (generics, typed collections, autoboxing…) which are all good things. I kinda wish they’d found a way of doing those things without changing the syntax of the language though. Java has always been devoid of the kind of syntactic soup that scares beginners away from C++, now it has <angle brackets> and everything… Oh well, it’ll be a couple of years before we get to use it in anger, anyway…

Ahh, that’s better

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Yep, it seems the evil-ness that was that piece of fish has left the building – good riddance. And so back to work tomorrow, headlong into a project that I’ve been itching to do for a while – should be good.

In other news… Ouch, that’s gonna hurt. Lindows.com™ has lost one of the rounds of one of the trademark cases it’s in against Microsoft™. A dutch judge has “issued a preliminary injunction barring the company from selling or advertising any products under the Lindows name in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg”.

Now – hindsight is great, but this does seem like one of those things that was always going to happen. “Windows” is not a generic term – “windowing system” may well be, but “Windows” is not – it is the name of a product offered by Microsoft. It just seems like a generic term because every bugger uses it…

This ruling may only be preliminary, and it may only apply to a couple of relatively small european countries (relative to the US), but it’s really gonna hurt even if Lindows do win the US court case – who wants a name that you can use in some parts of the world?

Best think of a new name, Mr Robertson… YetAnotherDesktopLinux.com is available ;-)

Edit: Slashdot thread – it seems I am late with the news again… :-)

And in other other news… the world has gone mad.

Hello again, world!

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Yep, I’m back… and somewhat cursing that piece of fish I ate in Bergerac yesterday – ow ow ow…

Stay tuned for those blog entries, and pictures – I’ll post when I’ve had chance to settle back into life with a central heating thermostat ;-)