Brain reviews

I've got two reviews published in this week's brain. I'm especially happy with the review of Made in Sheffield (DVD).

Fedora Core 2

Fedora Core 2 is out. Downloaded via bit torrent (as usual).

Pretty good so far apart from a few niggles:

1) X configuration is bollocksed.
2) gdm uses a HUGE font !
3) anaconda failed to install grub

Good things.

1) GNOME 2.6 looks nice
2) Everything still works
3) XFS filesystem support (yay!)

Solaris 10 zones

My god. It's ages since I got excited about anything in the OS (or OE) world. It's got to have been a long time since I had anything nice to say about Sun but here I am excited about Solaris 10.

Here's why: Zones. (For Sun's official site, read this link).

Complete virtual computers (including root access) that run inside the global (real) computer. Whoa! Read that sentence again!

Of course, we never may get to use this feature but it seems like a pretty cool idea. Run lots of separate customers on one big box. (Although, running one big box can cause it's own problems: big Sun machines can take an age to reboot; can't share apache processes across the zones (without running it in the global zone and thus breaking the security/separation provided by zoning) so memory use is up and the machine is less efficient).

It sounds a good idea to me.

Cycling (again)

Cycled to work again today. Avoided the so-called recommended cycle routes and just bombed down the main road. This was far faster.

On Tuesday it took me an ermbarassing 45 minutes in and 55 minutes home. Today it took just 35 minutes in (respectable) and 50 minutes home (not particularly fast).

In fact, at 35 minutes, cycling is the fastest method for me to get to work (vs. Car, Bus and Park+Ride).

I am famous (OK not really)

I went to build the latest version of exim from Nigel Metheringham's SPRMS today and did a quick check on the differences between his .spec file and my own customised one.

I was happily surprised to see that he'd folded in my changes into his! So there you have it. I am famous. ;-)

(Though I've found another necessary change to get it to build, but that's another matter).

This is why free software is good. We all get to share our knowledge around (like academics) and thus make the world a better place for everyone.

gnome-blogger

Got gnome-blogger working. It looks at plant.blogger.com by default which is now not correct. Telneting to it on port 80 shows that you need to substitute www for plant.

NB: Note that it doesn't get the title right - I've had to edit this back through the web interface. Arse.

So I haven't really got it working 100% after all.

Cycling

I cycled in to work for the first time since last August (I think). Certainly the first time in ages.

The smell of wild garlic, the permanent hubub of birds flying around both made me forget that I was actually cycling fairly slowly. ;-)

Last year I put a road-triple on my hack/communting bike so that I now have 30/21 gear (about 38.6 inches) which makes it a lot easier than struggling up the big hills around Bath in a 39/21 (about 50.1 inches) which is impossible when you're not fit or haven't cycled for a while.

(OK, so it's not impossible, but you're at Level 4 all the way and at a low cadence).

Hopefully, I'll start cycling in and keep cycling in a few times a week.

Blog moved

So I moved my blog here from a Slashdot Journal. Why? I don't know really.

What I wanted to do was install a PHP-based blogging package at www.nic.uklinux.net but time, PHP-version clashes and the huge size of some packages (they do multiple blogs) meant that I couldn't.

So I investigated this, which is free, themable and more.

Expect more dross, lies, stupidty and most importantly ranting than ever before. ;-)