Going back to Linux

When I first started this blog at wordpress.com it was called “Learning Linux And Loving It”. At the time I had an old Intel based PC that I had been given. Not wanting spend any money on an operating system, I installed a version of Linux called Ubuntu. The version was Warty Warthog. It was horrible. I had awful problems trying to get the machine to run in widescreen, get a soundcard working, and most important of all get a wireless network connection running.

Needless to say, I gave up. This blog has, since then gone through a couple of re-designs, becoming my personal blog when my main hosting was down, and latterly my geek rants blog.

It would seem that things have come full circle. Yesterday I grabbed a machine that was left in my garage, brought it indoors, dusted it off and installed the latest version of Ubuntu - version 8.04 LTS (long term support) Hardy Heron Edition.

So? Initial thoughts? What a bloody revelation. It was a positive experience without the trauma scarring my memory from my earlier experiences. The “new” machine is an AMD Athlon XP2800 running with 512mb RAM and onboard sound and video. A generic wireless card and hardwired ethernet too.

The installation itself was a few guided questions with simple options for the novice (or windows convert) to understand. All the hardware was detected and installed, both network cards, video and sound. The system even detected the most suitable screen resolution as 1280×1024.

Using the OS is a breeze too. OK, there’s a bit of searching on the net for me to figure out what I want to do, remembering that I have to use “sudo apt get” in a terminal for example, but it’s still fun and the knowledge on the ‘net is awesome.

I am going to live with it for a few weeks on my second machine and see how it goes. I can’t permanently convert from Windows because of iTunes for my wife’s iPod, but I might end up using this one as my main machine and just leave Windows on the old machine for the boss to use.

I have found a couple of problems though. I don’t know whether it was just a glitch, WP staff mucking about or if it is FUBAR, but the screenshot below is what greeted my when I visited the wordpress.com support forums a few minutes ago:

Once I have settled in to using it a little more and found resources that I believe are really useful (Donncha already provided a couple, thanks Donncha!) I will put up a new post with those links for others to share. In the meantime if you have any tips or tricks to share I would be most pleased to hear them!

What The FUCK is this?

4 attempts to get this damned image to post.  And then I forgot to put a ring round it.  Guys - It’s not a TIP.  It’s ADVERTISING.

A tip: Use the “B” button in the write window to make something bold.

An Advert: Be the master of your own domain.

See the difference?  Nice forum thread too.

While I am whining, for gods’ sake PLEASE give us back the ability to edit our posts on the forum.  Even a five minute window would be nice.

I am liking wordpress.com less and less every time I “visit”.  I might just have to stop “visiting”.  I think the only thing that brings me back right now is the morbid curiosity of what people are going to be moaning about in the forum.

And don’t even get me started on the Possibly Related Posts thing.  I think between TGA and the forum threads, the whole subject has been pretty much covered.  As if it needed explained, I have already opted out by ticking the box.

New Apple Product Free??

Everyone - and I mean everyone - has access to this product.  You don’t even need a computer (PC or Mac)!

It’s entirely free and usually made up of entirely natural products.

The only catch is that you have to assemble it yourself.  It’s really easy and every version is entirely unique.

Follow these simple steps:

1. Announce to everyone nearby that you need to use the bathroom.

2. Sit on the toilet.

3. Go for a crap.

Voila!  You just created your own iPoo…

Sorry.

XP Remote Shutdown

I picked up a nice little tip the other day (via, I think, Life Hacker). It’s an easy way to shut down an XP machine remotely. I know, it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing it via the command line for years. But, can you remember the command line syntax? Nor me. I have to refer to the help every single bloody time. Well, fret no more. Shutdown.exe has a GUI!

Go to the run command and type

shutdown.exe -i

You get a nice little interface to play with. I used this successfully on Wednesday to reboot a non-responsive machine in the yard that was far too far away to walk to in the rain. Worked a treat I tell ya. It recognised the Active Directory machine reference and away it went. Sweeet!

M$ Q1 Profits

The Register reports today that Microsoft’s quarter 1 profits were down by 10.9% to just $4.3bn.

So, M$ is still feeling the after effects of yet another crappy OS in Vista and the only thing that’s really saving it is sales of the Xbox.

M$ has claimed that it has sold 140 million licences for Vista. Even taking into account world-wide sales, that sounds like a hell of a high number to me. If I had been asked I would have said it was closer to 10 million, taking into consideration all the other operating systems available, and that no corporate customer I know of has upgraded to Vista yet. Certainly my lot have stayed with XP and that’s no bad thing. Hell, much of the MoD is still running NT!

So, what’s next for M$? I know that Server 2008 is on its way, and there was a rumour floating round the ‘nets that M$ might break its desktop delivery schedule and replace Vista in 2009, a year early.

In the meantime I also heard that SP3 for XP will be available Monday. Wonder what’s going t break this time when we install it…

Make Your First Dance Memorable

So, you’re at the wedding of friends of friends you barely even know. They want to be remembered for a great wedding. What do they do?

This:

Betcha won’t forget that wedding in a hurry!

Electro Ffffffunk Daddy Superstar Break - Beat Boxing

This is just awesome. By now everybody knows what beatboxing is. If you don’t you are square. Yes, an 80s reference for something that first appeared in the 80s.

Anyhoo, this is the perfect recipe for the “Electro Ffffffunk Daddy Superstar Break”:

This is one of those skills I will never have. Not enough teeth in my mouth…

Hat tip to the awesome Jon Dyers for the vid.

Analysing Web Traffic

Something I can’t do right now.

Unfortunately, last night my hosting hit the bandwidth limit for the month. I wondered if my site was getting really popular, some hope!

There’s not much I can do about it right now as I have no money to upgrade the hosting. I was looking at the logs last night and they showed that something hit my server for 1.2 gb of http data at the same time two nights running on April 2 and April 3. Other days are averaging 55mb

I was going to go back and have another look this morning, unfortunately it’s dead and I can’t even get into the cPanel to do more analysis and see where the requests came from or what they were hammering me for. Not that I know how to read the bloody logs properly when I can get in there!

So, 10 days to go and I am stuck without any hosting. I’m not worried about my personal blog but I am trying to organise an event called Minis In The Trenches and that website has died too. :(

I have done so much in the last few days that I was desperate to blog something. It’s like chocolate. When you know it’s there and you can have it, no problem. When it’s not there and you can’t get any you get even more desperate to eat it. Or blog it.

Aaargh! How am I gonna cope???

Like Kubrick? Hate The BBH?

Try this:

Big Huge Labs header generator for Kubrick.

I played. Came up with this:

I won’t be using it as I really don’t like Kubrick, but it’s nice to know that these options are out there…

Via WLTC.

blah blah blah…

Image via Wikipedia

Just a post to test previewing options within the WordPress editing suite and to see if Zemanta is gonna play nice today…

Update: Well, zemanta played nice (ish) but it would be nice to see an option screen to choose the alignment of the image. It threw it on the right automatically with no easy options to re-set it if you’re using the rich text editor.

The Preview button doesn’t auto-save before producing the preview, but it is opening it in a new tab in Firefox 3, beta 5. A problem for Mike in this forum thread.