Rationale This is the first in a series of documents about the experiences of installing a new Debian workstation system. As a result of confusing my old installation by selecting a strange mixture of Debian/Testing and Debian/Unstable sources, I decided to re-install. And this time, I intend to Do It Right and also to Do… (read more)
We’ve got speed bumps in our road now. The builders packed up their kit and left yesterday. Today, the Line Painters arrived. There isn’t a speed bump outside our house, yet they felt the need to do this: Yes, that’s right, they’ve marked out the non-existent bumps. The interesting thing is that traffic is slowing… (read more)
I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to upgrade the weblog software which this site runs from b2 to WordPress, ‘cos WordPress looks nice, is derived from b2, has database import scripts for b2 and has fuller features than b2. Unfortunately, lots of things just didn’t quite work well enough. Database import needed a… (read more)
Yesterday I went to LinuxWorld Expo 2004 at Olympia in London. The following ‘report’ is partly for my own benefit, in order to clarify what was said and done, but hopefully it will be of more general interest. The day started by me running for the bus, which is never a good idea. I’m glad… (read more)
Had a reply from the current webmaster at the site discussed in the previous post. Basically said “Yes, I know, it’s really awful, isn’t it? I inherited it from $PREDECESSOR and am half way through re-coding it. Revised site will be online soon.” Still makes a good example of How Not To Do It, though…. (read more)
I have recently sent the following email to the webmaster of the Association of University Administrators web site. The web site is truly awful for various reasons. My email reads: Dear http://www.aua.ac.uk/ webmaster, A colleague pointed me at your web site – she was trying to access information about one of the workshops. She had… (read more)
Persuaded a helpful person in the IT Department at head office to block port 135 on the router at their end of our slow, kilostream connection. Magically, our connectivity is working fine again. They still have to track down all their infected machines though, but at least that’s not causing us a problem any more…. (read more)
So, external network connectivity is slow today. Again. But it seems more than just congested. I suspect rogue network traffic. Right, on with my investigative hats (tcpdump, nmap etc.). I try to figure out what’s going on. I see ARP requests for all IPs on our subnet, lots of them. Not just the active machines,… (read more)
So, in the last few days there have been new releases of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Firefox is now at version 1.0PR (PR == Preview Release), so this is very close to being version 1.0, meaning that it is considered good and stable. There are a couple of nice additions since the version 0.9.x… (read more)
Have been feeling rather under the weather for a couple of days, but switching the TV on and seeing the image below certainly made me feel better: A protestor dressed as Batman managed to evade security at Buckingham Palace and staged a five hour protest on a narrow ledge at the front of the building…. (read more)
