Been investigating various different encryption plugins for email clients and seeing how they interoperate. Yes, I know, some people do gardening or go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, but … Under investigation: Mutt, using GnuPG, under Linux (this is my ‘standard’ setup that I use all the time) – rock solid, stable, configurable;… (read more)

I’m not making this up, honestly. This morning I got an email from a colleague, saying “Dave, I can’t send email.” … erm, yeah, OK. My reply was simply “Yes, you can.” and I heard nothing more. Suppose I shouldn’t be surprised really, as this sort of thing is inevitable in my line of work… (read more)

It arrived yesterday. The Database Server. Shiny black case containing the nicest bit of hardware it has ever been my opportunity to get my hands on. For the record: dual 2.4GHz Pentium-IV Xeon processors, 2GB RAM, a 36GB system disk and a RAID-1 mirrored-pair of 72GB ‘data’ disks for our databases. The standard Debian installation… (read more)

I’ve been messing around with the stylesheet for this site for ages, but finally decided to make some more drastic changes. Previously, I think I had rather too many different shades of blue – now I’ve reduced it to only two, darker shades, contrasting with two shades of yellow/orange. I think it’s an improvement.

Sent an email to an online electronic scientific journal with a query about our subscription. Got an automated response which said: “Your question has been received. Due to an unusually high volume, combined with the recent inclement weather, you may experience a delayed response to your inquiry.” Well, if they have an “unusually high volume”,… (read more)

Seems to have been a long week. Geeky point of note was the supposed leak of some of the Windows 2000 source code. Quite a coherent discussion of this is at NewsForge. We all said Windows should go open-source … Also found myself playing with the 2.6-series Linux kernel after messing up my installed copy… (read more)

Everyone’s been waiting for the new release of Mozilla Firebird, version 0.8. But, when it finally arrives, it turns out that it has been renamed Mozilla Firefox. Eh? Wazzatallaboutthen? There’s clearly enough confusion to warrant a Renaming FAQ. Seems like the short version of the story is that there were complaints from the Firebird relational… (read more)

Like the old “Points Of View” shows, the “modern equivalent” is complaining to the BBC about stuff on their web site. Like this article on BBC News. Entitled “Linux cyber-battle turns nasty”, it is actually the first article that has made me send them feedback. This is what I sent: The article entitled ‘Linux cyber-battle… (read more)

Today, I converted ten users from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firebird basing the setup on my Mozilla Firebird Corporate Rollout HOWTO. In the process, I am refining some batch scripts to make the process of upgrading to new versions more straightforward. This means that about 70 per cent of staff are now running Firebird, which… (read more)

This is a rant. The recent MyDoom viruses have been causing me annoyance. Not because my system can be infected by them, because it can’t – it’s not Windows. Not even because I have received a large number of emails containing these viruses from infected individuals – I haven’t; as far as I can tell,… (read more)