Hi all...

Yesterday my primary HD crashed, but that's not the whole story. This was one of the strangest weekends I ever had. So many coincidences.

Let me start by saying that I live in Israel and am connected via ADSL to my university as an ISP (at home) and have a dorm room with my primary PC (running GNU/Linux) on campus.

Well, on Thursday I come home for the weekend, and lo and behold, the phone company has replaced our nice working ADSL modem with something that looks more like an iron, and it didn't work ofcourse. Well, on Friday morning (after a lot of angry calls and threats to switch to cable) the ADSL was almost online, with several more calls it actually worked (from linux!). I then reconfigured the ADSL script for PPPoE and was happy.

Friday evening the network connection falls. Reason: No connection outside the university (inside works perfect). Well, they fixed that on Sunday morning, but about an hour later the ADSL falls again. I call them and they fix ADSL and the dorms network is down. So, I come to campus only to find out that in addition to all the troubles my primary HD has crashed.
Luckily for me, my nightly backup was OK, so I bought a new 80Gb WD HD with 3yrs warranty and started to reinstall and restore the system.

Then I made a fatal mistake.

I reinstalled the backup script. Which runs rsync --delete. 6 AM comes along. Wham! No backup. Or technically, a perfect backup of a clean system. Luckily for me, I copied /home back, and I have /etc in CVS on the backup HD, so I could restore everything except /var, and I did remember to restore my email before 6 AM, so (almost?) all is restored.
I can't even start to think what would I have done without this backup.

My tip for you all: Backup! It's worth it.

Egged timetable access for unsupported browsers. Posted to increase Google rank for relevant searches.

You know I like this site, I really do but this is crap. For a site that preaches about standards compliance Slashdot HTML is horribly noncompliant, full of errors, and coded in ancient HTML 3.2. This is something that the editors don't want you to know. Check out the URL below, you get a 403 forbidden error.

Blah they wonder why nobody will buy subscriptions. Let's see, crap like this, no grammar/spellchecking, no fact-checking on submitted stories, dupe stories, Michael, and numerous other annoyances.

Validation Results

Rank | Real name | Occupation | /. nickname | # fans
1) Rob Malda - Slashdot founder - "CmdrTaco" - 975
2) Wil Wheaton - Actor/Activist - "CleverNickName" - 784
3) John Carmack - Programmer, id Software - "John Carmack" - 606
4) Eric Krout - Bucknell engineering major - "ekrout" - 538
5) Bruce Perens - Writer - "Bruce Perens" - 516
6) Josh Marotti - J2EE consultant - "FortKnox" - 381
7) Jeff Bates - Slashdot co-founder - "hemos" - 318

Please notify me of any corrections. Updates: Added Wil Wheaton per AC comment; Added Bruce Perens; Added John Carmack; Moved Eric Krout up one spot to #4 after overtaking Bruce Perens

As it stands, I'm more than halfway there toward gaining more fans than Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. That would be a neat accomplishment and one that I'd be very proud of.

If I can come through (I was on sabatical for a week), I think it would only be proper for Rob to give me some leadership position here at Slashdot. Perhaps I could serve as a liaison between the members and the editors/coders to ensure that Slashdot continues to develop and "scale" with its increasing membership and database size.

Thanks for reading. I truly love you all and enjoy the time I spend here at Slashdot. If I can help any of you with anything (even non-Slashdot related), please let me know. I'm always there for friends (and fans ;-D).

2002 Nov 12. First serious use of Slashdot. First meta-comments.

Well another slashdot submissions rejected, it sat in the thingy for about 3 days I assume for a slashback before being rejected. At any rate extremetech ran a nice series of reviews of 8 linux distros. Check it out Here.

Also, based on these nice reviews I decided to try out RH 8.0 'pysche' - bonus points to the geek who can tell me what it's named after. Now, a little background here. It has been years since I have tried out a desktop linux distro. I pretty much just use debian exclusively for my server and IpCop for my router/firewall/cache. But everyone has been saying how nice these new ones are so.. what the heck - I figured I would give it a shot.

I formatted it off my hard drive in about 3 days. The Good/Bad/Ugly are listed below.

• Good: Nice, Quick install. Automatically detected and configured my soundcard (audigy), usb devices (Scanner + zip drive), and video card (Geforce4). Very nice and a nice change of pace from the typical 4+ hours required for debian.
• Good: Wow does the desktop look nice. I mean real nice using KDE. The fonts are the best I've seen in linux in quite some time.
• Good: Nice set of config tools Red Hat provides for just about everything, including the common server stuff like apache. Would be quite useful for a newbie.
• Bad: My fscking usb Microsoft intellimouse wouldn't work with the 'wheel' enabled. I mean flat-out refused to work. No reason I could figure out, not even after checking the bug-reports so I had to make do without the wheel which is a major Pain in the Ass
• Bad:WTF? Why are there 14 submenu's? I mean do we NEED 4 different control menus? Argh. I have always despised this about linux desktops.
• Bad: I don't want ssh enabled on my machine by default. That is stupid. Repeat: No Good Very Bad Thing.
• The Ugly: RPM Hell. I have been spoiled with apt-get. I tried to get Opera, my browser of choice, installed. Nope, needed a package. Tried to get some other app's installed. It was about 50% success ratio. This was when I first shut down RH and booted back into Win2k.
• The Ugliest: NTFS. I still get mad just thinking about this. Red Hat doesn't enable NTFS support by default. Most ditros, like SuSe will auto-mount your NTFS partitions for you. Not RH. Nothing I did could get the NTFS module to load. Nothing. I tried loading into the kernel and everything else it just *refused*. My more geeky linux friends tried it and gave up. I gave up after an hour and formatted the fscking drive. I'm sorry RH but I am not going to spend an hour trying to read my NTFS partitions when SuSe and many others will automatically detect/mount these partitions on install

After a long struggle with TuxPuck, I finally beat Arcana, 15-11.

I'm afraid I still can't beat that nefarious Tux, though....

If you haven't seen TuxPuck, try it out....Its quite addictive.....

I want moderation powers. In order to get moderation powers, I will try to get 50 Karma as fast as possible.

I currently have 37 Karma.

I am leaving for vacation Thursday. I want to hit the cap before then.

This means I will be posting responses to everything. Everything I see that I think I can get modded up, I'll do it. And if I have something really insightful, Ill post w/o +1. Its already (at this point) gotten me 4 more Karma. So mod me up already!

For some god unknown reason I can Meta-Moderate but I have never been able to moderate. Go figure. Anyone have any clue why?

IE is technically not a browser at all. To call something a "web browser" it must at least adhere to RFC 2616. Well, MSIE does not. To quote the RFC:

7.2.1 Type
[snip]
    Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. [snipped]

Thus, a browser MUST adhere the Content-Type if it's given.
OK, now load IE and try to visit this site, or this site (warning: browser will crash). Note that the content type of these sites is text/plain and thus the text should simply be displayed on screen.

Therefore, IE is not a "web browser".

Can you believe it??? CmdrTaco lives in the same damn town that I do!!

I think I'll steal his mailbox and then sell it! C'mon...You'd put in a bid, right?

I just thought this should get out there...

If you are running Linux, add the line:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

to your /etc/hosts file.

In Windows, search for "hosts" and edit the file in notepad, adding the line above.

Your (inline) ads should now become DNS errors. Cannot get rid of top banners this way, because they are hosted by images.slashdot.org, and that way you'd lose all of the images on the site!