Sunny Breaks

I noticed two of the compter mags here have stuck different versions of Linux that can run from a CD on thier covers currently. Aust. Personal Comp. has LindowsCD 4 and aust. PC World has Knoppix 3.2. The idea is that the whole thing runs from the CD. You just whack it in the drive, boot up and the operating system runs the same way it would if it was on the hard disk, but it’s not — so once the CD is taken out again, it’s back to Windows (or whatever is normal) liike nothing ever happened.
A good thing if you’re left slightly dizzy by the thought of accidentally obliterating everything you’ve ever created or collected onto you computer.

Files created while running either of the CD OSes can be saved onto the hard disk in a small folder in Windows. Supposedly Lindows should have more drivers for bits of hardware in your machine, but in almost all versions of Linux this is much, much less of a problem these days. Any machine bought or put together with bits made in the last 4-5 years should be fine with either of the two CD OSes.

Knoppix is a dedicated ‘system on a CD’ project, while the Lindows CD is kind of like a promo-tool with the intention of impressing you enough to buy the full system. A promo-tool, but very much a value-added one — like the chemist show-bag.
There’s something like 800 programs in Knoppix, LindowCD has a smattering of the essentials with the idea being that you cough up some cash to join the ‘click n’ run’ warehouse.

If I was going to get one of these I’d go for Knoppix.

comments:
Quanta
url: please don’t eat me!
date: 2003-09-21-19-25
APC has a free complete version of Linux a few months ago, I forget what type it was, but it was interesting to toy with the idea of actually using a non-ms OS. Luckily I stopped myself before actually going through with the install.

;)

(p.s I think it might have been Debian-something.)

Hehe – I couldn’t resist that – it was the title of a spam. The spam situation here has improved markedly lately. The TPG isp put some filters on and now I just get one update link email from them each 3 days. I click through to their postmaster setup and take a quick look to see if there’s any real ones.

I’ve been watching how blogrolling works on please don’t eat me! and myrr purrs and am giving it a go. I think it could save me some time by me not clicking through to weblogs that haven’t been updated.

At last! Those three.com.au people have made a mobile phone that can be held at arm’s length and yelled at, instead of wedged against the ear. The fact that it has a small tv screen is an unasked for bonus. They let a good opportunity go begging by not tying in Original series style communicators in the ad. Some pointy ears at least!

comments:
Myrr
url: myrr purrs
date: 2003-09-20-10-40
about the blogrolling thing – it’s ok up to a point, but sometimes people update but the roll doesn’t tell you, so in the end you have to click through everyone anyway … I have thought about going back to doing it the old way but I’m too lazy.

yak sox
date: 2003-09-20-17-28
Yeah I was wondering about that – i thought maybe I hadn’t configured it right.
Ah well, worth giving a try for a little while.

sometimes you can meet nice people at them while waiting for your thiing to be churned out.
Other times deadheads can piss off with your stuff, needlessly diminishing your printer credits. Unlike Fonzy, I lost my cool today. I nearly yelled at some people. I should have.

This is interesting – Mandrake, with it’s 9.2 release on the horizon has decided to put ads into it. They say it’s because of the financial trouble they been having, and that they’ll only be in a few places — and what it sounds like at the moment is that they’re easily removed.
It seems like a fair enough thing to try. I’m sure they’ve got the intelligence to stay way over on the mild side of pushy. When you look at the major distroes Mandrake is really the only one that can still be got for free, that’s also in the ‘easy-to-set-up’ category. Slack isn’t, and Debian certainly isn’t. SuSE is charging a sizable chunk of dough and RedHat ain’t even interested in YOU anymore.

A while back i said I wanted to have a go of LiveJournal to see what it’s like. I did, but not much. So this isn’t very comprehensive: I did it here.

The interface that i type into, called Drivel, is pretty simple. Compared to things like Pivot here and MT – it feels like it’d be a lot less self-conscious way to go about recording thought into an online depository. One could use the drivel everyday and not ever actually look at their site. Of course that could be done with other mechanisms too, but it seems much more of an obvious possibility with LJ.
I can take or leave the little ‘iMood’ things, but I do like the ‘what song i am listening to right now’ bit. Because the Linux version of Drivel is Gnome-grouped, it picked up what XMMS (X MultiMedia System) was playing no probs.
It’d be neat if that could be added to Pivot.

I did have a look at how to go about modifying the look of the page, but I kept getting error pages when attempting to load that page, which isn’t very good.

Song I’m listening to right now: The Breeders – Iris [live]

A couple of tribesmen from my old northcote tribal days came to visit today. It was good. I was kind of thinking I’d have little in common with them now, but not so. Went trawling some of the 2nd hand bookshops geelong has to offer. There’s one that I just wouldn’t normally go into (nad hadn’t in ages) because it’s almost impossible to come out not holding a book. Uni has taken much of the joy out of reading. I don’t think I’ve read anything longer than a medium sized magazine article in one go, off my own bat, since January. But maybe I’m not trying hard enough. But then, I do a lot of reading online – that I don’t give myself credit for. Whatever.
I bought a collection of 3 Woody Allen books rolled into one, one of which I’ve read – Without feathers – which was a lotta fun eg. “Should I marry W.? Not if she won’t tell me the other letters in her name. And what about her career? How can I ask a woman of her beauty to give up the Roller Derby? Decisions…”.

I had a thought while walking around this funny little backwater called Colac today – ‘they’ should make a digital camera that has all its drivers built into a small portion of its storage capacity. Most of the storage is in the flash cards these days, but I don’t see why there couldn’t be a little of the internal memory housing drivers for the major releases of windows like 98, 2000 whatever. You slot your trusty usb cable into whatever machine you come accross when you’re on the road, the camera swings into action by setting up a way for it to talk to the computer, so that you could d/load the images to the machine which could be then sent to wherever — storage space, emails.

This’d help a lot with windows machine that currently need a cd rom to get the two things co-operating, while OS X and Linux are more conveniant in that they have the drivers built in, OS X moreso because they employ people to write the drivers that hardware companies should but aren’t.

I think that in hell, the devil tortures some of the people by giving them computers with dodgey mice that work some of the time – just enough to not throw them through the window.

I’m down here hangin’ out with my mum for a day or two. My brother’s computer is disgustingly grubby, and I’m getting some kind of karma payback — he’s a closet ciggarette smoker and now that I’m not smoking I can tell that everything reeks… there’s probably a lot of people out there in the past that I put this on too. The bugger’s on gurnsey island and he’s still getting me riled.

There’s an article at the o’reilly weblogs about trackback here. Pivot don’t have trackback, but just in case the o’reillys accept non-ping-pings here’s the t/b address too. The article is ‘a non-movable-type’ explanation of trackback.

The other day i was thinking about adding the stand-alone implementation of t/b to here, and so had a closer look at it – and it’s licensing. My memory was playing tricks on me because I thought the MT kids had released it as a fully open-source tool, but in fact I was just getting it mixed up with the fact that it was stand-alone (still a tool) and so could be used without using MT.
It uses the Artistic License, same as MT itself.
I don’t understand the “Artistic License” and am feeling most definitely humble enough to have anyone clarify it for me. Does this mean trackback’s creators could start charging for its future use in any other scripting set-up that it’s included in (same as MT could be charged money for in the future) ??
Is Perl also under this license?? Surely not.

Anyway, I don’t mind trackback not being built into Pivot. Like the author of the O’reilly article, i don’t see t/b rendering regular comments obsolete anytime in this millenium. It dictates too much. Say someone’s written something interesting that I want to t/b (because they don’t have regular comments available) — this means that i have to put that specific passage of response at the very start of my weblog entry – if I want to make any sense when it shows up on that other persons t/b listing. Either that or I have to write a specific little entry solely dealing with that one issue — another form of dictation, because that not the way I normally operate. Also it’d help if my heading had something to do with the relevant topic, and that can be boring sometimes.

As an alternative I actually like a thing that Waxy.org has got going where each weblog entry will count referers — if a certain number arrive from the same link (on somebody else’s weblog) it shows up on waxy’s entry page (eg. down the bottom -here). Such a thing could be set by the site’s owner to a chosen threshold, like 25 click-throughs — which has the benefit of maybe not quite stopping spammers and juicers dead in their tracks, but it might slow them down.

Hey is that Dr. J. Wright guy (the one who’s been doing the healthcare commercials) a muppet or what?

This layout is pretty much how the default Pivot set up goes. I was getting sick of jumping on an XP internet explorer machine at uni and seeing things messed up when I thought it was looking okay. I think I’ll install apache and PHP on the win98 partitiion and give every adjustment the full (x86 at least) check over before moving it to here.
The main background tile is a slightly jigged version of one of the squidfingers .gifs.
I’ve never gone the tile before, or the boxy look.

Literally and otherwise.

I’ve been putting off mentioning drivel until I actually got a chance to try it out, but it hasn’t happened and it’s taking very little to get me spinning out about what kind of pace I’m going to have to sustain with studying this semester. A no-breaks 4 month dash for the finish.

Anyway — it’d be fun to be the dian fossey of webloggen by working my way into the strange and mysterious realm of livejournal — getting them to accept me, acting like them until they started to forget I was there et cetra. For those not in the know, it’s a free, hosted service similar to Blogger’s blogspot setup, except (and I didn’t know this bit) that to join up to LJ, you have to have an existing member ‘recommend’ you. (There’s also an option to pay to join.) I haven’t had the time to gain the trust of one of these inhabitants. Just wanted to see what the interface was like.
And that’s where Drivel comes in – it would be like the ‘word-processing’ window bit (or front-end) to the livejournal account. There’s versions for windows and Linux on the souceforge page pointed to above. The first time I saw it was as part of Dropline Gnome and I was wondering how many Slackware + Gnome nerdy hacking types would be into using LiveJournal since most users seem to be on about breakfast and boyfriends (like so) — but the Livejournal software is open source, so there ya go.

Comments:

pixelkitty
url: http://pixelkitty.net
date: 2003-08-01-07-27
I have an LJ account, so I guess I could recommend you to get you in, if you like? havent used it in a long long time though.

yak sox
url: www.spouting.net
date: 2003-08-01-07-42
Why that’d be neat, thanks.

I realise it’s disturbing to show up here and see things shifting around so much but I promise this is the end of it.
This is the first beta of the the 1.0 Pivot release. It werks very nice.
It all looks a bit stubby so far because it hasn’t filled itself out on the index page here. It has all the neat-oh trendy webloggen features like \’recent comments’ and a sublog — that’s right — say hello to Fabulog! which will say other stuff, but whether or not it differs much from the usual remains to be seen. I haven’t located a thingo to do trackbacks from specific entries, but I guess that if MT users are really interested in getting trackbacks then they\’ll have that bit turned on to automatically receive them.

I think it’s easier to start (or restart) with a system like this, and rip the bits out that aren’t needed rather than start with someting like Blosxom and attempt to add stuff in.
I know I raved on about blosxom for ages. It was just one of those things that no amount of mucking around really gave a proper indication of what it was like to use for real. I still like it but think it’d be better suited to a situation where you were serving up your website right from your local machine, so that posting entries was as simple as writing it and sticking it in a folder. Or, a situation where the writer intended to maintain a ‘distance’ from potential readers (ie. no interest in comments or trackback or any of that jazz = no bells n’ whistles) ... perhaps like a poetry-log or something.

Also, I get the feeling that the RSS.XML feed might be a bit better formed in Pivot which is is good for the CORE feed and the long-suffering SirFlakey. :^)

Pivot caters for the chumpster-blogger too. It has a decent assortment of emoticons, an image upload thing like MT, and a pull-down box in the entry-writing bit that lets you write in colour. There other pull-downs for other formatting things also.

hmm, that’s mind-bogglingly odd. How is that I can delete a file and yet it still would seem to be here, doing its redirect thing.
Maybe it’ll all be better in the morning.
Anyway, thanks Bob (Bahb) – I’ll take it from here.

Finally got around to snipping up some red tape that’d been dangling around for the last six months. I never officially got me a diploma for the writing course because of doing it across two institutions. Since the time I finished it at the place in geelong they moved the department to another campus, so I went voyaging out there.
I’d forgotten how much of a suburban wasteland the east side of town is. I’m glad i don’t live out there. Not that the west here is hoity-toity, but at least it’s got character. We have our own town hall with clock. [note to self: take foto of clock] I can hear it dong from outside, or late at night in bed.

I got writebacks workiing on Blosxom – hooray! I have to make this change over of systems. I go on about open source stuff too much to be not using it in a practical sense on the site.
Actually, i don’t go on about it much — but I’m thinking about it.
I had a subscription to the australian PC World magazine this last year and its just run out, which is fine by me because it was becoming less and less relevant. There’s only so many articles a fella about how to cut the amount of spam your windows machine is getting, particularly when he’s not using windows. And hardware reviews don’t interest me much either now. As a magazine it’s aimed at a certain level of computer proficiency and for sales reasons it makes sense for them to stay static at that level.
On the other hand, I’ve had a couple of looks at Linux Format magazine – about 90% of it is relevant (PC world was down to about 10%). It’s a bit more expensive, but the stuff that’s on the CDs (or DVD) makes it worth it.
Things such as the little gem of an application, Junkie – a graphical FTP client – with a difference. Along with the normal functionality of moving your files to and from places, it comes with a whole bunch of “yo momma”

jokes such as ‘yo momma so ugly that BigFoot takes pictures of her!’, and if that’s not your cuppa tea, there’s pictures of kittens too. Classy.

This is something i don’t know much about – and there doesn’t look like there’s much info on the web either. I was mostly interested in who is making them – there must be a lot of money in it. I found this one note on google groups about how they were introduced to cars to make them more fuel efficient, but all up haven’t really done this. My anecdotal evidence goes along with that.
[Incidentally, it’s funny how I’m more likely to be skeptical of something originating from an alt. group than if it had its own web page.]
Froggy was telling me how his car’s – a mitsubishi magna – computer chip is going kaput. It was happening over summer – I don’t remember exactly but the power used by the air con. would cut in or out at various points—while driving, the upshot being situations like being on a highway and the whole thing locking up (because of power steering) and him ending up halfway up an embankment after much swearing. It’d be pretty funny if it wasn’t for real. The mechanics said the chip had to be replaced (this car’s is probably no more than 5 years old) and the cost was something crazy… $2000 or something. Froggy said bugger that – he was only planning to drive it into the ground anyway – so he got the mechanic to set the revs twice as high as normal so it wouldn’t cut out. The mechanic grumbled that it’d be using heaps of juice doing that, but did it anyway.
Also, a year and a half ago he bought a new BMW for hiis wife. The last time they took it in for a service they were getting offers to sell it because that particular model has a ‘superchip’ in it which allows more power through to the engine (or something like that). So there ya go.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-05-04-13-31
Perhaps I am a cynic, but I am suprised that the BMW service people didn’t just steal the “super chip”.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.10
date: 2003-05-04-18-58
Wow, you’re more cynical than me because I never even thought of that !
I bet froggy would’ve noticed though ‘cause he’s always thrashing that thing – if it wasn’t hammering up to 60kmh as per normal then there’d be trouble — ACA trouble, Today Tonight trouble. I’m sure the dealership wwouldn’t want that kind of publicity.

Just a quick-un to say the site was down for the last 5 hours or so – I don’t know that anyone else noticed, but I did. Yet, amazingly – it wasn’t my fault. It was the people who I paid to host this site, but I’ll leave the dishing out on them to another day.
I’d already done some preliminary scouting for a new web host and right now I’m craning around to ask the spouting chief financial officer (he’s the one in the tin foil headgear) how soon we can make the move. By May 11 he says. Excellent I say.
After a brief discussion with signor newbie I decided that digitalbiz is the go. For the same price as what I got this 12 months with incompetents inc. – digitalbiz give twice the amount of space, a mysql database, and from what I’ve seen of jeremy’s site (his is with them) they seem to be able to accomplish the miraculous feat of keeping web servers running.

Anyway, slacking off time is over. It’s another week of hammer n’ anvil before uni goes back next Monday. More later.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-21-22-42
Hey yes! I noticed it was down.. but assumed that it was the crap proxy server that I have to use at work. It’s like I keep trying to tell so many of my clients, “internet is not an exact science”. It inherently has random (or hard to control) factors built in.. like the path that a piece of data travels from one side of the world to another
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-21-23-48
Heh, yeah. Funnily enough I was much more aware of things like Kraken biting through under-sea cables when I was on Bigpond. That was always happening to them – kraken, loch ness monster, mynoks.

Y’know I’m not crazy about the idea of cybernetic implants, but if I had to get one I’d have an electric eye which could take photos. I’m always seeing people or things or whatever out on the street where unholstering a camera would be way too conspicuous or clumsy or slow—like this old guy near the supermarket in a ridgey-didge sea captain’s hat and skivy – absolute classic. I’m not making fun of them – I applaude their oddness and out-of-placeness. I’m always seeing bumper stickers too – bumper stickers are a great form of cultural communication. Like “I wish I had an Oakley sticker like all the other wankers”, and another that was easily the biggest sticker I’ve ever seen (it took took up half of the back windscreen), “I’d like to see how well you drive after i stick that mobile phone up your ass”.

Damn! How expensive are easter eggs these days?! I saw a rather smallish average-lookin’ bilby for $4.49 today. Even the politically incorrect bunnies were dear. I think I’m going to have to try making them myself next year.

Speaking of sweet stuff (and supermarkets) – out at NQR yesterday — I mentioned a while back all the whacky marketing ideas that gather on the shelves there – and these apple pies shaped like Tasmania. Yesterday I was thinking ‘ah c’mon I’ll give ‘em a go’, and went in for a closer look … to find that it’s a salmon pie – yeech! No wonder they’re not selling… fish pie … ug.
There was an article in Nexus mag a couple of months ago about this product called Xylitol – it’s a sweetener. It’s not new; it was invented by Finns during WW2 because they were having sugar shortages. It’s extracted from birch bark – so not artificial. And it leaves refined sugar and artificial sweeteners for dead. Let’s face it, refined sugar technically is a toxin – it takes more energy/nutrients to process it than it gives—it gives nothing really, just a nasty little high that’s followed by a twice-as-long low.
Xlyitol is almost the complete opposite, it’s more like the natural sugars found in fruit – and it’s even good for your teeth!
In the article they were saying something like ‘it’s good to have something with a little bit of it in it just before bed’ which spun me out, because in the last couple of years I’ve kind of self-conditioned me to be wary of anything that was obviously sugared up, knowing that it’s no good for me. My gums are succeptible to the stuff.
Xylitol is now being sold in australia by these people. Unfortunately it’s expensive, compared to normal sugar. I’d still like to give it a go sometime to see what the difference physically feels like.

Telstra is a vampire and I am Romanian village peasants. The charge for a normal line connection is going up again next month and they’re ditching the ‘neighbourhood’ call charge, which was advantageous to me because my local TPG POP connection was close enough to fit into that category. Every price-hike means more GST too. It sucks. Me dry. I want to look into if Optus are any better.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-17-22-54
Telstra pisses me off too!

Phone line rental is like $25 a month.. I thought about not having a land line and using that $25 to go towards a broad band connection.. but of course, there is no cable in my area, so I would need to pay for a phone so that I could get ADSL!
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: Quanta
email: quanta@dodo.com.au
url: quanta.aspyre.net
ip: 203.220.144.149
date: 2003-04-18-22-24
We all know how evil telsta is – that what they told is a Optus camp.

Optus – Join us!
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.220.144.149 / Block IP range 203.220.144.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-19-09-04
Unfortunately I don’t think Optus can offer much more when all I’m wanting from them is the home phone.