No gods, no kings, no billionaires
I do enjoy a good spy thriller. I went out to see The Bourne Identity yesterday evening after Abi had taken Alex upstairs for his bath & bed. I’d wanted to go and see this a couple of weeks ago, but I got to the cinema too late and saw The Sum of All Fears instead.
Continue reading “The Bourne Identity (and a little bit of The Sum Of All Fears)”
Whatreallyhappened.com: “The history the government hopes you DON’T learn!”
Quite rabidly anti-government (US), but they do have a number of very interesting links and stories. Just bear in mind that one should be critical of one’s sources.
I’m currently downloading SuSE version 8.0. I haven’t got myself a new hard drive yet, so I’m going to spin this version up in a VPC virtual machine to get some practice installing it before 8.1 comes along. Who knows, if it get used to it, I might even just stick with 8.0 and manually upgrade to the packages I want from the 8.1 distro…
As a companion quote to Abi’s new posting in her “Serious Thoughts” series, here’s a little something from Rush’s song “Witch Hunt” (from the 1981 album Moving Pictures):
Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear
Walk hand in hand
If it weren’t for copyright, I’d quote the whole song. But you can pick it up through Google.
Okay, it’s time for Martin’s annual trip to Linuxland. Last year it was Mandrake 8.0, and the two times before that was SuSE 7.x. This time round it’s going to be SuSE 8.1, which is due to be released in early October.
Mandrake was okay, but it somehow felt a little bit like Linux Jr. SuSE was more difficult to set up (although this may have been because I was less experienced with Linux at the time), but it felt more solid somehow. It’s most recent version (also 8.0) has had some pretty glowing reviews that give me confidence it has only become more powerful and easier to use in the time since I last installed it.
The SuSE 8.1 press release touts cool stuff such as KDE3, OpenOffice, and even GPhoto 2.1, which means that it should be able to talk to our digital camera. (I tried GPhoto under Mandrake, but couldn’t get it to work). K3b for “simple, reliable and rapid CD burning”. KMail for mail. Mozilla is production code now, and Opera 6 is available for Linux, too. And apparently TrueType fonts are a lot easier to get up and running now with XFree86 up to version 4.x.
All round, it seems like something I can make work. I’ll need to get used to working with the Gimp instead of Photoshop and PSP, and I’ll have to figure out what to do with Ogg Vorbis
Stuff I won’t be able to use… Visual Studio, and VS.NET. Not necessarily a bad thing, though. It may give me an incentive to get better at perl, or to learn Java. If it turns out I need to use VS at home, I can always try to convince work to give me a laptop, or I can run them under VMWare.
Also, my minidisc player is not going to be happy being hooked up to Linux life support. Again, this may have to be a VMWare job. And games, of course. But now that I’ve got a PS2 (and an N64: it’s-a me, Mario!), I spend much less time on PC games anyway.
If it all goes well, and I don’t go running back to hide behind billg’s skirts, I’ll be running Linux and Windows side by side for the first few months at least. I’ll have them on different hard drives, because I don’t really trust either of them not to eat the other’s partitions on a dual-boot system. (Past experience speaking, there.) Chances are I’ll probably keep the Windows disk around even after that. VMWare only goes so far, and I don’t think I’ll be able to give up PC games entirely.
So: tasks for the next few weeks until SuSE 8.1 arrives:
Fingers crossed that by this time next year, you won’t be reading about another annual experiment with Linux. I’m tired of Microsoft, and I hope that this time “Bye-bye” is going to be for real. (At home at least. Work is still a Microsoft Gold E-Commerce Partner. Ka-ching!)
If you came by the sunpig web site in the last 24 hours or so, you may have noticed a things looking a little weird. The server we’re running on is in the process of being upgraded, and in the process it blew a gasket (or something like that). (There’s a longer explanation, but I can’t be bothered explaining it all right now, and frankly, you don’t care, do you? <sniff>) The nice tech folks at EZPublishing, responsive and friendly as always, are on the case, and the site should be back to normal now.
It’s possible that the site may move to a different physical machine to stop problems like this happening again. If that turns out to be the case, sunpig.com will probably end up with a different IP address. This new IP address will take some time to get propagated out through the DNS system, and so you may find you can’t get through to our web site at all for a day or two. If this happens, don’t worry. If you get really concerned, drop us an email or something. We’d like to hear from you.
No, really.
Last week this site got hits from over 300 distinct IP addresses. Some of those are search engines, and some can be put down to folks on dial-up connecting with a different IP address each time. But even if you discard 90% of that traffic, we still don’t have that many friends and relatives who know about this site. So who are you, and what are you doing here?
I meant that in a nice way, of course.