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Month: January 2005

Meme: How open source are you?

January 9, 2005
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Here’s a little geeky meme from Neil:

“Below are a series of headers for different programs you use on your computer. For each one, say what program it is, whether it’s open source or not, and what you like about it.”

Score of: 3.5 open source programs out of 12.5 (“Compression” category counts as 2x 0.5 as I tend to use two programs)
Score of: 5.5 free programs out of 12.5 (“Compression” category counts as 2x 0.5 as I tend to use two programs)

Operating System: Windows: Not Open Source
I use Windows XP (with the “Classic 2000” style) as it’s what I’m used to “on the desktop” and for compatibility purposes (as the majority of the customers I support in a tech support capacity and my Dad tend to run Windows XP). I do have RedHat Enterprise Linux installed on the server which hosts my blog and a few other sites (that’s only accessible via the command line/SSH though) and running RedHat Fedora Linux on my home server (mainly operating through the command line, but it does have the Gnome desktop installed which can is very very similar to Windows).

Continue ReadingMeme: How open source are you?

Personal: MT Macro’s now working, but /dev/hda isn’t…

January 5, 2005
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Well, that’s good. Thanks to Neil’s suggestion about setting my templates to Static to make MTMacro work, I’ve now got my cute little smilies back 🙂 Yeah! The bad news is, I think I’ve got a hard drive failure on my home server. Last night I heard it making very strange chugging noises, SSH’d in and /var/log/messages was getting a lot of messages about potential failures of /dev/hda (the main HD). I shut it down and asked it to perform a FSCK (file system check) upon reboot, but as yet it hasn’t reappeared on my LAN. Looks like I’ll have to hook a monitor to the box and see what’s going on.

I just hope it hasn’t caused any damage to the software RAID0 system I’ve got configured: If so, I’ve lost nearly 400Gb of data (and if it’s taken the 4th HD with it – that’ll be 630Gb in total!). Next month I’m planning on buying a machine with 2Tb of storage in a RAID5 config so I’ll be really really annoyed if all that data’s gone [to give you an idea of the current storage requirements: That machine had around 600Gb of data on it, my “main” desktop machine has 270Gb of data on it, my laptop another 10Gb and then 150 CDs (practically 95Gb) that all needs transferring to a single server machine…

Yep, I’m a “data collector” 😉

Apart from that, I haven’t done much since yesterday. Went bed early yesterday (8.30pm), woke up by the Work servers at 2am, went back to sleep by around 5am then woke up again at 9.08am (without my alarm clock going off and 8minutes after I was meant to be at work!). I’m actually putting together a little submission to Behind The Front Line which I’m hosting for a mate, and believe me, the sort of strange and annoying queries I’ve dealt with today at work could probably double their current contributions!

Still to do:
* Finish the redesign of this blog: What do you think of it so far? Too bluish?
* Start the design of my own personal site (and upload holiday photos)
* Start the basic design of my father’s site and install a good CMS system for him
* Redesign my “old main money spinner” site
* Redesign/overhaul Beebware.com
* Launch at least 3 more sites
I’m planning on having most of them done by the end of this month. You can start laughing now 😉

Blogging: Blog So Far

January 4, 2005
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blogsofar.jpgRight, I’ve done a bit of redesign work (as you may have noticed) with a nice little picture of yours truly and a blueish fixed header, “fluid” three column layout and without using pixel-specific font size (so it should resize simply in any web browser). Still a bit of work to do on the columns though, but it’s coming along nicely – however, I’m back at work in the next 8 hours, so I just hope I can find some time to finish this off (then I’ve got another couple of sites to build after that).

Anyway – I’m having trouble getting Brad Choate’s “MTMacro” plugin working with Movable Type 3.14 – with Smarty template errors when ever I use <MTMacroDefine> or <MTMacroApply> : is there a “secret” setting I’m missing?

Blogging: New URL

January 3, 2005
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Well, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of MovableType (3.14), installed MT-Blacklist, moved all the content to a NEW URL of https://blog.rac.me.uk and setup redirects from the old URL to this new one.

Now I’ve just got to do a redesign, get a few things working again (such as MT-RefSearch, RemoteCache and Amazon linkage) and then I’ll start blogging again.

Yeah me!