A taste of Linux.

It sounds weird but I think my errant power supply unit with its wobbly fan which makes a horrendous noise seems to be cured! Its been eleven hours now without any problems, noise or disrupted air flow, from it. Last nights three power cuts (!) all within the space of one and a half hours seems to have jolted some sense into it! I'm not complaining, maybe something useful came out of the power cuts, I'm just grateful that its working properly again.

Several years ago I used to joke that 'security' was my middle name, work colleagues tried to reassure me by saying that I was wrong, it actually was 'paranoia'! Whatever, I've always been very security conscious and it manifests itself in all sorts of ways.

Which is why I started freaking out when I saw there were TWO users on this machine on the gkrellm panel! I knew there was only one, and it was me! So I closed everything down that I could see in all of my desktops, and then had a look at KDE system guard ........ hum, a bash shell! Checks, and bash is not open, nor being used. So using Security Guard I closed it, and then watched it reopen!

Right, Plan B. Log off and close the session. Which I did, counted to ten, and then logged back on again. And theres still two users showing! Time for Plan C? Reboot? Maybe!

So I started closing everything down, all the things that were minimised in my system tray which included kdissert 0.3.4 my favourite mindmapping program (which I was able to store in the system tray using KDocker 1.0 CR) ...... and to my amazement my second user went off the gkrellm monitor! So, to check, I reopened kdissert again, and the second user reappeared! Turns out that kdisseert also opens a bash shell at the bottom of its display, why I don't know, but it does ...... and this is what gkrellm was picking up. Problem solved!

And I still don't believe that I'm paranoid!

Seen on Boing Boing just now. An advert for your own personal tank for only $19,999 and not forgetting the 95 cents! It looks very much like something from a 'Star Wars' film, but can carry five people ... either inside, or on its roof. Its top speed is 40 mph and has a 400 watt premium sound system! It sounds like the ideal vehicle for getting around London, or any place where you're going into crime-ridden areas. Totally amazing, and I think that I shal start my new list off for Father Christmas with this item.

Now this slipped through the net and under the radar! An article in the Guardian dated Thursday 13 January entitled UK firms warned over employees' blogs which discusses the sacking of Joe Gordon from Waterstones booksallers last week for allegedly "bringing the comapny into disrepute" and "gross misconduct" for commenting adversely about Waterstones in his blog. (More information about Joe Gordon's case is in these articles 'Bookshop worker first to be sacked over internet 'blog'', and also in Worker sacked over blog from the BBC.) The Guardian article starts out by saying;-

A leading internet lawyer has warned that UK companies could face legal chaos if they fail to set out clear guidelines for blogs written by their employees. Nick Lockett, a solicitor at the specialist commercial hi-tech law firm DLLegal, said there was a fine line between what was derogatory and what was fair comment.

As far as I know, although I can't recall where I've seen this posted, Joe Gordon's case has, or maybe is, going to an industrial tribunal. Thats what I think, but I've got no source that I can recall for it, so don't quote me on it.

The Guardian article then goes on to suggest that employers ought to have policies in place to ensure that they are not brought into disrepute in any employees blogs. Which also implies that if they are, then some form of discipline will ensure .... maybe even to the extreme extent of sacking you! Or in blogging terms, you would end up 'dooced'.

However, the last two sentences of the article say;-

"Companies have said that, properly handled, this could be very beneficial," he said. "This could be a low-cost form of marketing."

Which is encouraging anyway.

And why 'Under the radar!'? Well, becasue I haven't seen it commented on in any UK blogs that I've read, so it seems to have slipped 'under the radar' and not be in the public consciousness. Which is a pity really because it could have implications for ALL UK bloggers with regard to 'freedom of speech'.

For Christmas I was given a DVD of Robin Williams in 'Mrs Doubtfire' because it was known that I could watch videos on my computer. But when I loaded it into the DVD caddy neither kaffeine, xine, totem, kplayer, or mplayer could play it! Whatever I tried didn't work, it couldn't be read and played.

So, I asked the fedora newsgroup, using the gmane newserver and got lots of helpful replies, but none worked. I still couldn't play it in any program! So, I did my usual thing, I gave up, whilst my back-brain mulled it over until it came up with a solution.

Instead of just trying the DVD drive, why not also try the CD/DVD combo drive? So I loaded it in and mounted it, opened xine up and asked it to play the DVD. And it worked! So I've now seen 'Mrs Doubtfire'.

The moral being, try ALL options, however silly they sound, before giving up. And don't give up until you've asked other people more knowledgeable than you are in whatever the subject is. And then don't give up, just put it on the back-burner for the back-brain to work on in spare moments.

Futurismic has returned! This wonderful site of modern science-fiction writing has returned from a short break, when, every time I visited their site I got a '404' page. It turns out that they've changed their host, but now they're back.

I had a rather nice email from Tom Doyle two days ago saying that the site was back up, but I didn't see it as being back and working until today.

Welcome back Futurismic, I for one missed you and look forward to many more wonderful stories like Tom's Consensus Building.

I've found a new BitTorrent client. Well, new to me, and its called Azureus. Now, normally I don't like java programs, but I read its blurb;-

Azureus offers multiple torrent downloads, queuing/priority systems (on torrents and files), start/stop seeding options and instant access to numerous pieces of information about your torrents.

Azureus now features an embedded tracker easily set up and ready to use.

and as it was only 5.14MB I downloaded it, and to my surprise, it worked straight away. It was so easy to setup and use, that its now going to be my BitTorrent client of choice.

At 03.48AM Scribus 1.2.1 (stable) was posted on freshmeat as being released and by 10.00AM it was posted in my 'updates' file to tell me that it would be updated today by yum. A turnround of 6 hours to build, test and upload the new Scribus.rpm is excellent work, and I'm really impressed with it. :)

Elvis Presley would've been 70 today, if he hadn't died of a drugs overdose. But his image and magic lives on from beyond the grave, to the extent that he has sold over one billion records worldwide, more than anyone else, and attracts 600,000 tourists a year to Graceland, his home in Memphis, Tennessee, as well as pulling in an annual $45 million through sales of songs and a merchandising range that includes everything from T-shirts to train sets.

But he is set to accomplish one more feat from beyond the grave by reaching the number one spot in the British charts with 'Jailhouse Rock', 47 years after its original release and 28 years after his death from a drug overdose. And if it does reach 'Number One' then the special birthday re-release will give the King his 19th chart-topper, it will be the 999th number one single in UK pop history. Link

Also to commemorate his birthday a three-day Elvis convention will take place in Blackpool, over this weekend with the aim of finding the best European Elvis impersonator. Fans in France will celebrate with a tribute concert by Elvis cover bands and a special exhibition of memorabilia will be on display in Bonn, Germany. And his Graceland, home will be the focus for US celebrations with four days of events including a concert by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

Record company SonyBMG are releasing Elvis' 18 number one singles at the rate of one a week in Britain, complete with original artwork and a collector's box. Hit single 'One Night' will follow next week - with the chance of becoming the 1,000th number one as interest surrounding Elvis' birthday grows. Link

I've often wondered how Google determines its 'ranking' for the sites that it indexes. Now it appears that it should properly be called 'pecking order' as it uses pigeon technology in determining the page rank.

When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks, are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.

Seems like I spoke to soon about 'futurismic fiction' that I mentioned last night. Whenever I've visited during the day I've been met with 'Welcome Site/User Administrator' page, so, for the time being, I guess that the site is officially "down". Sorry folks, just have to wait and see if it reappears.


Gigabit Transfer Rates Over Power Lines?
Seen on Slashdot today;- "Penn State engineers, Pouyan Amirshahi and Mohsen Kavehrad, estimated in a research paper released Wednesday that their system could deliver data at close to one gigabit per second over medium-voltage electrical lines in ideal conditions, with speeds of hundreds of megabits per second available to home users. Their system would uses repeaters placed every one kilometer, (0.62 miles) and requires power lines to have been modified to reduce interference with the data signals. The engineers said their estimates were based on computer models, and that the data speeds available in a real-world version would depend on how many repeaters a power company used."


Now, if this really would work then it would expand the usage of broadband over vast swathes of the country that currently are unable to get it. Could be one of the improvements of the decade too.


Link

Free download of Linspire 4.5
Reading my rss feed tonight, I came across this 'Interview with Linspire CEO Michael Robertson' in which he offers a free download of Linspire 4.5 and 30 days of CNR service, available through this link. The offer expires on January 15, so act fast.


SciFi on the Web.
A rather interesting site is futurismic fiction where new science fiction stories are being published. I rather like the latest which is "Consensus Building" by Tom Doyle, and its well worth a read.

Back in the 1950's the newest science fiction was published in 'pulp mags', so-called due to the paper that they were printed on, and many famous authors cut their teeth and honed their writing skills on them. People like Robert Silverberg, Andre Norton, Fred Saberhagen, Clifford Simak, and Philip K. Dick to name just a few. Perhaps the equivalent 'publishing stage' in the 21st century is the web, but if so, will the writers stories be preserved for future enjoyment? Or will they just dissappear into the electronic ether in a flurry of dying pixels? Who knows?

Somehow I ended up at this site during an evenings browse around, and I was suprised at the number of differernt bittorent sources. Theres some there for MS Windows, Mac OS/X, various Linux distros and even one for BSD. As I'm primarily interested in Linux, the Linux distros are :- Fedora Core 2 and 3, Xandros Desktop OS Open Circulation Edition, Slackware 10, Knoppix v3.4, 3.6, 3.7, Kanoxtix, and Libranet. It looks interesting, have a look for yourselves.

Useful spam? Surely not!
I hate to say this ....... but, I've found some spam that is actually useful to me! Normally I hate spam and just browse through my spam folder just to check that theres nothing worthwhile there. Using kmail and spamassassin covers almost all of the bases, although I haven't managed to get spamassassin to autolearn yet. Anyway, I'm browsing through 49 spam mails that arrived today, and I'm checking who they're for, whether they're html coded [thats a big no-no for me. If you want me to actually read your email, don't send it as html!] and what the subject line is. Mostly its a very quick scan, occasionally checking to see what the spamassassin score is by 'view source', and then move on to the next. But suddenly two caught my attention, in plain text, having words that made sense in a sentence, not about sex enhancement or prescription drugs, but containing quotes from famous people, such as;-
Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.   Sir James Dewar, Scientist (1877-1925).
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.   Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910).

Now maybe this is a new spammers ploy to get us to actually read their mail and then possibly follow it up. I don't know, but as I'm a sucker for good quotes, I copy them out of it and save them in a document! And I read the whole of the email, word for word, and then just trash it! Why change the habits built up over so many years of so many million emails!

Update on my spam stats.
I've been keeping records of my daily spam received since 22nd October 2004, and it seems to average about 85% of spam per day last year, and with a slight increase of about 87% so far this year. Being so close to the start of the year its really meaningless to say that its increased as there isn't a big enough sample, however, it may be showing the beginnings of an increase or a trend, only time will tell.

If, like me, you're interested in Science Fiction writing, then you'll also be interested in a free 'Sf writers' birthday calendar'. Each month highlights a cover of a book's author who was born in that month, and each page has a list of famous science fiction authors' and artists' birthdays for that month. Its very colourful so if you intend to print it out then it might be useful to use a colour printer.

Link.

First of 52 weekly old kiddie records.
Here's the first of 52 records that will me made available this year by kiddierecords: "Walt Disney's Story of Robin Hood." It comes as a single zip file with 192kbps and the album cover art (17.2 MB). Although when you do get this one, you've got the equivalent of two 78rpm records and a colouring book. And its also available as an MP3 stream too.

Link.