Stuff and things...
Things continue to be busy, managed to work all night Thursday, got in at quarter to six, five hours sleep then back in the car to finish job off on Friday. Far from requiring sympathy, I felt great, and strangely really enjoyed getting things done and beating the odds to finish on time.
Birthday weekend was good fun, in a low-key way. Highlight has to be sitting on the beach with a beer with Gary Numan playing Cars behind me :). But got to see a nice lot of people and chill out. Oh and ate a lot of sausages! :)
Recently I've had a couple of moments that have demonstrated the best and the worst of the Linux world to me: The good - I recently found my old favourite keyboard, a Microsoft "Wireless Natural Multimedia" one. After fitting some new batteries and plugging it into my KVM switch I was able to apt-get install keytouch keytouch-data, launch the utility to select my keyboard and straight away I was able to define the functions of the extra 17 buttons, setting them to use my favored applications, avoiding installing bloated "drivers" and having annoying things flashing in my taskbar. The bad - I recently tried to help my dad sort out a new setup for a fileserver which should have been relatively simple. We put the hardware together installed Debian, configured software RAID with little hastle and were quite happy apart from the surprisingly low resolution that the screen was running at. A little probing revealed that the scan rates of his monitor weren't being picked up. Not a huge problem, or so I thought. I quickly found out that the xorg.conf file is completely empty, by design, on modern systems and that the configuration options have changed radically. All the documentation I've found so far is to a lesser or greater degree obsolete, and despite looking I've been unable to find a straightforward page with "this is changed, if you used to do this thing, you should do this other thing instead now" only a fair amount of conflicting ways around associated problems, and a large quantity of arguments about the changes. *sigh* more Googling for me coming up...
Having had a chance to draw breath and catch up on things for the first time far too long, I've woken up this morning feeling spectacularly rough, and spent most of the day bimbling round the flat failing to be productive, which is rather frustrating to say the least. Still at least I have clean clothes now :).
Birthday weekend was good fun, in a low-key way. Highlight has to be sitting on the beach with a beer with Gary Numan playing Cars behind me :). But got to see a nice lot of people and chill out. Oh and ate a lot of sausages! :)
Recently I've had a couple of moments that have demonstrated the best and the worst of the Linux world to me: The good - I recently found my old favourite keyboard, a Microsoft "Wireless Natural Multimedia" one. After fitting some new batteries and plugging it into my KVM switch I was able to apt-get install keytouch keytouch-data, launch the utility to select my keyboard and straight away I was able to define the functions of the extra 17 buttons, setting them to use my favored applications, avoiding installing bloated "drivers" and having annoying things flashing in my taskbar. The bad - I recently tried to help my dad sort out a new setup for a fileserver which should have been relatively simple. We put the hardware together installed Debian, configured software RAID with little hastle and were quite happy apart from the surprisingly low resolution that the screen was running at. A little probing revealed that the scan rates of his monitor weren't being picked up. Not a huge problem, or so I thought. I quickly found out that the xorg.conf file is completely empty, by design, on modern systems and that the configuration options have changed radically. All the documentation I've found so far is to a lesser or greater degree obsolete, and despite looking I've been unable to find a straightforward page with "this is changed, if you used to do this thing, you should do this other thing instead now" only a fair amount of conflicting ways around associated problems, and a large quantity of arguments about the changes. *sigh* more Googling for me coming up...
Having had a chance to draw breath and catch up on things for the first time far too long, I've woken up this morning feeling spectacularly rough, and spent most of the day bimbling round the flat failing to be productive, which is rather frustrating to say the least. Still at least I have clean clothes now :).