l33t 5h1rt

Got my free OpenSolaris T-shirt through the post this morning.

This in itself makes me officially more l33t than you, regardless of any computing ability. :-)

Perhaps "T-shirt kiddie" should be a new phrase akin to "Script kiddie".

Tim Eden

Congratulations to Tim Eden for being appointed Professor of Teenage Oncology.

Just one of the cast of hundreds to whom I owe my life.

Strutting your stuff

So you think your clever? You've been around the web development block a few times. You know that MVC/Model2 is the future, and you can program in Java. So you decide to write a web app using Jakarta Struts.

What a fucking stupid idea.

Man, I suck!

My main problem is that when I decide to do something, I want to do it "as perfectly as possible". This of course means that I never get anything done, because I'm up against some infinite learning curve, which with Struts is infintely steep.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Should have written it in shit PHP, instead.

MyEclipse

I've been using MyEclipse - a cheap wrapper around Eclipse that does one hell of a lot.

It can start and stop Tomcat and deploy to it (along with many other app servers).

One quibble, why does it include JSTL 1.0 versions in new web-app projects? (This took me for ever to hunt down...) Freaking stupid errors about not being able to understand the URI...

God damn! Anyway, back on with the show. Eclipse rocks, and my experience with it wasn't too great before paying 20 quid for MyEclipse, but in general, I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to start out with Eclipse with web apps.

RHEL licence is wrong

Seriously, what is the point of the RHEL licence?

There are so many "respins" (effectively identical versions) of RHEL (CentOS, Tao, WBEL) then why don't Red Hat bite the bullet, gain more market share (even with the same revenue base) and allow people to download and install RHEL itself.

What Red Hat are charging $349/£200/€279 per Basic ES server per annum for is access to RHN (without grouping a.k.a management) and updates. I am perfectly capable of fiddling the updates so that all servers can gain access them (I don´t - we have over 50 Basic ES licences and use CentOS for less critical machines) so why don´t Red Hat allow other sites to mirror them, and then non-licenced hosts to use yum/apt to get hold of them that way.

You can see bugzilla reports from the CentOS folk in Red Hat´s Bugzilla, so come on. Stop fannying about and bring Red Hat back to the masses.

Ubuntu all the way.

Well, all three of my machines now run Ubuntu Breezy (5.10). I gave up on Mandriva. Yes I still love Red Hat and Fedora, but Ubuntu is just that little bit more polished than FC4 which is a shame.

question.next() - will we support Ubuntu on the server when 6.04 comes out?

Français, s'il vous plait

Yay, I've registered with Alliance Française to study French.

Distro Tart 2000

Mandriva 2006.0 RC1 is a let down. The installer is very pretty, they've remembered to include gdm, but now it fails to notice my Intel eepro100 network card. (Obviously, I can fix this, but Mandriva is supposed to be easy). And epiphany crashes on exit every time.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10 preview release) is damned good. I can't praise it enough. How come the Ubuntu people keep delivering, when Fedora is too slow (honest) and Mandriva looks like it just doesn't have enough developers really. Perhaps they

Perhaps 2006.0 will be better when it's released. Perhaps I'll be running Ubuntu on that machine soon too.

Distro tart

Recently, I changed tom (my XP2100 box) to run Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3. Now, RC1 is out but there's no official torrent. No real worry I suppose, but if you want people to use torrents please put them up at the same time as the ISOs...

Today, I upgraded my desktop at work from Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10 preview release with brand new GNOME 2.12 goodness. Yummy (or "apty" :-). Note: Synaptic may bomb out during an upgrade, forcing an apt-get -f dist-upgrade to be necessary, but other than that, schweet. No latest x.org with Ubuntu, but hey.

Sylvester (the aging laptop) still runs Ubuntu 5.04.

So I don't have any Fedora Core boxes at the mo'. This is weird as I'm such a huge Red Hat apologist/fan-boy. I also recommended to a friend to use Ubuntu for a desktop for his church as it "just works". I mean - it is dead, dead easy.

Can Fedora ever get equal with Ubuntu? Can Mandriva ever catch up? Who knows.

The Governor

Apparently, I am now a governor of my local school. Go me! Time to go in and tell them to install Linux everywhere :-)

Bloglines

If you're interested: here's the list of RSS feeds that I read,

Computer Books

Why are computer books so heavy? For example, the Microsoft 70-291 book (which I'm meant to be studying) weighs in at 3lb 9oz (1.614kg) which I am not going to lump around, just for 20 minutes of travel-sick inducing studying on the park and ride.

I really like O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series though - they're neat and to the point.

Linus on slashdot:

"I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."

opensolaris

Built opensolaris on Solaris Express Community Relase Build 20 (uname: SunOS edu-any-any-d07 5.11 snv_20 i86pc i386 i86pc) under VMware GSX Server on a dual 3GHz HP Proliant DL380 G4. It took 6 hours and 24 minutes. Speedy!

Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3 - update.

My X problem was cured by downloading the latest versions of xorg from cooker (6.9.0 cvs 20050825 - 15 days newer than the beta).

There are some other buglets for the GNOME user, but appart from that it's pretty good. I did try KDE, but it makes me ill. :-) Seriously, I can see why people like it, but it just doesn't do it for me. If I had to use it for a job, I wouldn't complain, and maybe I'd learn to like it.

ScheduleWorld.

ScheduleWorld seems like a brilliant idea. I should be able to get all my Evolutions, work-based Outlook, Symbian S60 phone (and via Evolution) my Palm all synced together.

Bollocks will they.'

Evolution happily talks to the LDAP part perfectly. But the calendar? How?

Outlook 2003 won't give me the option of talking to the calendar - it's greyed out. It fails to log into the LDAP server too.

The J2ME app on my phone does nothing. It completely fails to start.

Obviously the J2SE 5 WebStart app runs perfectly, but that's no flaming good.

Now can I run SyncML / whatever between Evolution and my Nokia S60 phone. That would rock.

Anyone any ideas?

Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3.

Attempted to install this last night. All went well except X, which failed to put /etc/X11/X symlink in and also only draws black on a black screen (and locks the keyboard). Nice.

I don't think my Radeon 9200/Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 410 (702) is such a wild combination. I'll have to do some digging tonight/over the weekend.

Suicidal Squirrel.

Last night, a squirrel jumped from the verge into the side of my car, hitting the wing mirror I think. I stopped and went back, but it was dead. Perhaps it had been asked to document the entire searching for and burying nuts process.

Plus retro-actively fill in forms asking for permission to get nuts and log the location of each in the Squirrel Helpdesk, a spreadsheet and a word document on a weekly basis.

RHN hacking via XML-RPC

On systemo.org

Mycroft for JISC Mirror

On systemo.org.