I wish Bill Hicks was still alive today

A few observations on Fedora Core Linux 2:

1) The spatial file manager in Gnone 2.6 is just lame. Its like i'm back in 1987 and I'm using the AmigaOS method of navigating my files. I've turned the behaviour back to the navigator mode - which required digging about in GConf.

All this is just not good enough. The option should have at least been in the GUI preferences.

2) The new file open dialog is kind of cool, except none of the apps i've tried actually use it. The only thing i've seen it in is when you browse to install a new gnome theme. At that point, the lack of having anywhere to type in the path became glaringly obvious. Ugh.

3) THE GODDAMN INSTALLER SCREWED UP MY PARTITION TABLE. I was just performing an upgrade from FC1 -> FC2, keeping the same partitions and everything, and goddamn anaconda overwrote the partition table with god knows what values. This is a KNOWN bug, which has been known for AGES. It has not been fixed. How FC2 even shipped with this still in there is just beyond belief. I am now in the firm belief that the QA process at Fedora is utterly sub-standard

I think for my next linux install, i will very seriously consider using an entirely different distribution.. maybe one of the more bleeding edge debians...

Whoo.. my slashdot karma hit Excellent yesterday... thanks to a little thing known as a +5 Informative comment

man... i'm sad

Finally managed to get signed on with TelstraClear, and will be getting some cable loving this week..

I've also got a new email address with paradise, but probably won't really use it in favour of my googlehax.com one.

I get a new phone number too.. that's a bit more of a pain.. but I can live with it..

Let the party begin

Looks like i'm finally changing ISPs.. coz I'm getting connected with cable....

This means changing over to a new email address - now I'm gonna use my googlehax address, which'll be good in a couple of ways, I shouldn't have to change it again as long as I keep the domain registered, and i'll be able to avoid most of the friggin spam i'm getting to my inet account.

It's a complete arse to update my mail address on all the things that need it, and to tell everyone of the new addr...

ah well

I got about halfway through writing Wellington Weekend Day 2, and I was resizing the mozilla window to test some CSS layout, and boom. Mozilla disappears completely.

Argh.

Heeh.. I should have written about this a week ago, but I got busy, or lazy, both - I can't remember.

Finished work early. Went home, got changed, packed and took Daisy to get some Chinese for dinner. Because of heavy traffic, this meant I was running behind schedule for picking up people to go to the airport. Pick up Robert. 15mins late. Pick up Chris. 10 mins late. Go the airport, finishing off the last of my take-away Chinese meal as I drive.

We check in our luggage, get tickets arranged, all sitting together. Cool. Turns out that Robert is somewhat uncomfortable with the concept of flying.
We wait for our boarding call. Then it's announced that the flight is delayed due to "engineering reasons". Great. Our plane is broken. Rob gets very nervous. We go to the "Time Out" arcade, and the best game there is this Aerosmith shooting game, where we have to shoot the "New Order" and free Aerosmith. It sucked. It sucked royally. Although, it *did* have Aerosmith in it.

Another announcement. Our flight is cancelled. We're all put on a later flight, one that leaves like 45 mins later.. thankfully it takes nearly that long to stand in line to get our new tickets issued, so there was to be no more Aerosmith action that night.

We get on the plane, and the flight is pretty smooth, even though it was snowing and the wind was blowing pretty stronly. Rob thought he'd just gone to hell and back. Chris and I, air-travel veterans, gave him a bit of shit for it. :)

Chris & I taxi to Prof's flat for Fran's 21st (the reason for this whole thing) and we arrive.. maybe an hour and a half later than expected. This means the bottle stores have closed. Its OK, Jogle makes me a dirty Martini. I like martini, but as it turns out, not dirty. I thought I was drinking seawater. Maybe I was. Seawater with an olive. I put that down and fixed myself a Kahlua + coke. Much better :)

The party was good.. caught up with a few old faces etc etc.. I gave Fran a Cure DVD, and Daisy gave her a bunny-ears hat, which went down pretty well. There was a lot of cameras about.. some photos are at http://www.ogle.co.nz/gallery/category/franParty
I had abisinthe. Its strong. Really strong. It kept me goin most of the night. Prof's flatmate, Matt was really friendly, but quite odd. It turned out later that he's actually a crazy person. I think Prof is going to move out.

After the party, we took taxi's to Jogle's place and tried to watch Jacob's Ladder. Except it was a dodgy SVCD or DVD rip or something, and it futzed out, so we went to sleep.. it was like 4am by that point anyway.

I'd just like to add the song title "Paytoilet of Dispair" is insanely brilliant. The band, Human, is, well.. not a brilliant, but the song title at least deserves mention.

Last night there was a power-cut.. it started around 1am, and lasted... mm maybe an hour.. as far as we could tell it affected our block, maybe more, but we could see the streetlights from Stammore Rd and Fitzgerald Ave, so I suppose it was localised. I still wonder about the cause.. surely if it was part of some rolling-blackout type arrangement because of power shortages, we would have been informed about it... that and the energy saving figures have been pretty good recently... Ah well.

The power outage affected two things. Firstly, it killed the jobs I had running on Daisy's computer.. it was downloading an Invader Zim Episode that I haven't seen before, and it was also encoding a Chobits episode to MPEG-2, ready for SVCD. These things had to be re-set up when the power finally came back on. It also killed the uptime on my linux firewall/router box :( It'd been up nearly a month.. which doesn't sound like much, but I only put it in a wee while ago, and I keep messing around with it :)

The other thing that got affected was how much sleep I got.... it was 2:30 by the time I went to sleep, and as both Daisy & I had work in the morning, we got maybe 5 hours each...?? I'm feeling that right now... heeh.

I think im also becoming addicted to playing Natural Selection, a mod for Halflife.. it uses *actual* teamplay if you want any chance of winning, and actually requires proper use of voice communication... and its great.

Oh, and here's a link to Southern Forestry Ltd which is a site I made, and by listing it here, hopefully google will actually list the damn thing :)

Yes it does. I tried using Exim4, with the exiscan patch compiled in... but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get the f**ken config to deliver mail. To top it off, there is no 'eximconfig' for Exim4. This was annoying, because when I used the debs for Exim4, it worked. Except that there is no exiscan. D'oh.

This wasted 3 days.

Fine. Uninstall Exim4. Install exim3 using apt-get.
Ok. Run eximconfig. ok. Now for the fun of getting SpamAssassin to filter the mail.
I got this going. Except that it won't directly bounce mails that are rejected for relaying reasons. D'oh. Ah well.. something I'll work on tomorrow.

For now, i'm gonna re-implement my PHP navigation system using Smarty. Unline XTemplate, which I've been using, Smarty is actually being actively maintained, and I hope that it'll actually work :)

Right... some success

I have my workstation back from the drones... its now got a 400Mhz Celeron processor in it.... but its also got 64MB more RAM in it too.. so thats some consolation ;)

In the meantime, i've been making good progress on this spamassassin box.. I've got exim forwarding mail to the exchange server properly.. yaay... but it looks like in order to use some of the really funky spam killing options, I'm gonna have to compile Exim plus some patches from source. On a 486. There might be a faster way of doing this.. but I'll worry about that on Monday.

Right. I'm going home.

Well... the Microsoft Certified Drones haven't finished with my workstation.. although they now know that the CPU is at fault.. dumb fucks.. i told them it was a hardware thing. Apparently they're looking for a CPU to put in it. I only hope its not any slower than the one that was in there.... A PIII 450Mhz.. argh.
Ok, well im sitting here waiting for this fricken spam assassin box to apt-get dist-upgrade itself.. its taking *forever* not surprising tho - it's a 486..
This means i read slashdot today using.. lynx. In fact, im writing this journal entry in.. lynx.
Yes, text-based web-browsing makes me leet. Just thought I should share that with the group.

Heeh.. i've spent today and yesterday afternoon off work. I'm still being paid tho.

The reason? My (2nd hand) workstation at work is stuffed again. So its in at the ComputerBroker (btw.. do NOT ever buy anything from these people) being looked at... which means I can't get any work done in the meantime. Not even at home, as the CPU is dead on my machine, and thus not useable.

I just hope that the morons at the aforementioned computer store don't fux up all the data on the harddisk on that PC. I totally don't trust them.. they reckoned that it might be a software related problem.. coz I was running linux on that machine.... I can say with 100% confidence that its a hardware thing... hooray for Microsoft Certified Drones.... *sigh*

I guess it shows that you get what you pay for.. its cost more in my wasted time than the money saved from cheaping out on the PC... f00ls