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Author: Richy B.

Follow me on Mastodon at @rbairwell@mastodon.org.uk or just the posts on this blog by following @richyb@blog.rac.me.uk .

Personal: Cat Must Love Me

July 24, 2003
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Cat PresentAhhh, my puss cat must love me. Why else would she bring me a little present when I was relaxing and watching Big Brother last night. What a shame it was a LIVE mouse: but t’was a nice thought.

Actually, she walked in the back door – through the kitchen – with the mouse in her mouth. She then tried to go upstairs (but the door was shut) and then released the mouse and started “play chasing” with it: let it run a bit, catch it, swat it, wait for it to run and repeat. As soon as I realised what she was doing, I had to distract her whilst I got the mouse trapped in a container – then call Smokey for her dinner whilst I carefully slid some cardboard under the container so I could release the tiny brown mouse. It didn’t look hurt, but when Smokey was chasing it it would try and jump up around 6inches! However, it didn’t seem to look or act scared – it seemed resigned to just being a cat plaything.

Now if only Smokey just wouldn’t ignore all the proper toys I’ve got her…. Darn cats!

Guess That Movie: Scores So Far VI

July 24, 2003
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Well, another round of images has graced us by, and things have begun to heat a little bit up on the Guess That Movie high score table. Kymberlie is still in the lead (and I now owe her £8.30 worth of Amazon gift vouchers: she’s gained an extra 830 points on top of the 1610 she’s already won!) – however, Angrad is getting quite close to being able to claim a prize as well. He’s got 395 points (two hundred for correctly recognising Murder By Death and Village Of the Damned and another 95 points for being the second person to guess at Aliens).

I was surprised at one point though – nobody managed to recognise SouthPark: Bigger Longer and Uncut within the time limit (i.e. all the points ran out due to time, even after I added a 48 hour extension worth 200 points!).

Anyway – I’ll drop Kymberlie an email tomorrow to let her know she’s won a prize (even though she’ll already know if she’s reading this) – and at the same time get the next image uploaded. I’m currently out of captured movie images so I’m going to have to get those screen shots grabbed again!

Congratulations all!

Techy: New Cpanel Server

July 24, 2003
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Cpanel ScreenshotAt work, we’ve got a combination of Cpanel and Ensim Pro control panel based webservers (plus a proprietary system on our very old datacentre). My “personal” dedicated server just has plain Linux (Debian) on it and hosts around a dozen sites – but I’ve decided to go for a more easy to manage solution and I’ve chosen to purchase a brand new Red Hat Linux (I actually would have preferred Debian) server – complete with a whopping 700Gb bandwidth per month (I’m currently on just 40Gb) with Cpanel.

Why Cpanel? Well, Ensim tries to “control” your server a bit too much for my liking: you’ve got to be especially careful what you upgrade/install and if you make any changes to the Apache configuration by hand – then it can really screw things up (and the next restart of Ensim will mean it’ll try and “correct” your amendments). Cpanel, on the other hand, seems to act as a control panel should – it’ll allow me to go right in and forcible change settings without having to worry too much about it overriding my settings.

Plus, the whole system seems lot more “open” then Ensim’s compiled Python mess: which means if I feel like writing an extension to Cpanel, then I’m free to do so. And, it comes with some nifty “one click install” style items – I’ve disabled most of them, but at least if I ever want to have a quick play with – say OsCommerce – I won’t even have to bother loading an FTP client to upload the files! Oh – and it’s support of anti-spam systems looks perfect (my current real email/spam ratio is around 1:500 – yes, I get around 500 spams for every proper email! I deleted 3,500 of them so far today)

On the slightly negative side: I’m having real difficulties disabling FrontPage on the server. I absolutely detest that b–ardised system: it’s a little bit of a web design package, a little bit of “PHP/Perl scripting” and a strange FTP client all muddled together and pulled out incorrectly. FrontPage would have been so much better if it used standard FTP uploads and server admins didn’t have to worry about getting the darn FrontPage extensions to work correctly. 75%+ of our technical support calls are about FrontPage (but, to be fair, some of our customers are such numbskulls that I have to talk them through how to start FrontPage’s inbuilt help system: I wish I was joking 🙁 ).

Anyway, once I’ve got the new server stabilised and ready, I’m going to be moving everything to it – it’ll take me a while though as my current server has a few “exotic” settings made to it which I’ll need to take into account.

Blogging: Free MovableType Templates

July 23, 2003
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Neils WorldCool, it appears the a certain ODP editor has decided to release the Movable Type designed template he uses on his blog as open source to download and use on your own site.

I must admit, for the last few days I’ve been tempted to “borrow” his site design (as it’s quite nice looking) but at least I can do it legally now 😉 I have already purchase some other web site templates to use on various websites, but unlike Mr.T, I’m not a designer. I can manipulate the design, but I just can’t get it to “feel right” to me – it doesn’t really help with Photoshop making “fixed layout” HTML instead of the dynamic flexible type. There’s still a chance they you may find that my blog could start looking like Neil’s 😀

Movies: Charlies Machines

July 23, 2003
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The TerminatrixLast night I watched the new “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” movie (not yet on general release here in the UK, but it premiered on Monday) and the night before I watched “Charlies Angels II: Full Throttle“. So, which did I prefer and why?

Well, I’ve watched the original Charlies Angels movie and Bill Murray – a 53year old white guy – played John Bosley (usually just referred to as “Bosley” in the opposite way it’s always “Charlie” and never Mr.Townsend): however Bill Murray didn’t want to work with Lucy Liu (playing Alex Munday) again so he was replaced by Bernie Mac, a 45 year old black guy playing “Jimmy Bosley”. Close enough in the names for you to think they were family members, but… erm.. Secondly, apart from the “Can’t touch this” dance sequence around 15minutes in there was nothing memorable about the whole movie (well, the singer “Pink” was in the biking scene – but if you’ve seen her music video you’d have expected that: oh, and the fact that in the credits I discovered that “The Thin Man” was played by Crispin Glover – aka “George McFly” from the original Back To The Future). Oh, I also recognised Luke Wilson from “Blue Streak”).

A few other things kinda niggled me about the movie: sometimes it was the small things – like Alex carrying a 36-42″ TV (and holding it for some time) but with the screen away from her (have you tried carrying a large TV like that?), the plot being a bit silly (rescuing two rings that containing all the details of every person in the “witness protection programme”: erm, what happens where a new witness needs protecting?), and the fact that John Cleese was in it (playing Lucy Liu’s father) as more of a “long running throwaway joke” where he’s made to think the Alex is some sort of call girl/working girl. Oh – and those extremely good binoculars on the beach scene where they can see a scar on a surfers knee over 60ft away…

So after I’ve decimated Charlies Angles II, what about Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines?

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