Now that comments on this blog appear to be broken I going to give a CMS a try. First stop is Plone. Currently Plone is set up to activate if you go to http://www.electron.me.uk/cms (edit: no longer available) but at present it's an (almost) bare default Plone set-up. Still it'a start.
Now I need to get reading - my intention is to keep the static pages static and served by lighttpd and to proxy the blog and gallery to the Ploner server.
Time will tell!

After updating my server from Etch to Lenny I migrated from postgresql-8.1 to postgresql-8.3. It seemed to work but not all is well. This blog seems to be having some troubles. I'm thinking of going over to a CMS but it always seemed like a lot of work to get going - maybe this is just the spur I need to make the change.

Why is it that that manufacturers of food or related products think it necessary to hide the real contents from us?

As an example I noticed that the main ingredient in my toothpaste is "aqua" - what the hell is aqua? I expect they mean "water" and if so why not just say "water".

Branston pickle, popular in the UK has rutabaga which is I believe an American term for swede.

Come on food producers, we are not fooled nor do we think there is any reason to fool us.

Our back-boiler died a few weeks back, it was a Vulcan Verona and estimated to be at least thirty years old so its demise was arguably long overdue. It supplied hot water and central heating and as winter is rapidly approaching getting a new boiler into the house became a priority.

After getting three quotations we finally settled on installing a Worcester-Bosch boiler with a digital room thermostat which controls the boiler by radio. A major reason why we went for this boiler was the five year guarantee that came with it.

Having been installed for a week or two we found that the thermostat was loosing contact with the boiler at irregular intervals, when this happens the heating goes off, not particularly nice when temperatures are falling and you've got children in the house.

Never mind, the guarantee came to the rescue, I called W-B on a Thursday; they said they could send someone on Tuesday, five days with intermittent heating, well okay, that would have to do.

Sure enough the maintenance man came on Tuesday, his suggestion was to change the thermostat and the receiver which was fair enough, at least one of them was likely to be faulty.

However, that evening the same problem persisted so I called W-B again and they sent another maintenance man around the next day, so far so good.

When I got home from work I found out how this man had "fixed" the problem; he had simply removed the thermostat from the wall and placed it ON A SHELF and in an UNHEATED ROOM near to the boiler. Wow - breathtaking incompetence - I would have been dismayed simply at the haphazard way the thermostat was casually placed on a shelf but to put it in an unheated room just takes my breath away.

So then, a telephone call to W-B was in order and one was duly made, this time to complain about the "fix". The result? The call centre drones quickly put me onto "technical" who just weren't interested and would only refer me to the original installer who was, I may add, a Worcester-Bosch approved installer. So I've got a brand new Worcester-Bosch boiler and the heating works only when it feels like it (which isn't often).

So much for the Worcester-Bosch guarantee!

In the end I moved the position of the thermostat so that it is now attached to another wall in the original room and it seems to work. The job took me 15 minutes, is there any reason why the second W-B man couldn't do this?

I've been a Gentoo user for sometime now; I think I first tried Gentoo in 2003 so I've been a happy user for around five years. Like anything else though there comes a point when you've just got to say "enough is enough" and I reached that point recently when I tried to print out a document and the printer which was working a few days before refused to print anything. At the same time the sound stopped working which was particularly annoying as I've been getting back into some of the music I used to enjoy. Also, just to add to my woes the desktop notifications stopped.

We'll miss you.
Jess passed away on the afternoon of 14th September 2007, 18 years old.

Introduction

I've recently been considering setting up a server using a mini-ITX form factor motherboard, the attraction here is that the power cosumption will be around 15 Watts at idle which will help in "saving the planet". In order to keep power consumption as low as possible I intend not to install a CD/DVD drive so the OS will be installed via a USB pen drive. I'd really like to install Debian Stable but it seems that I can only get ISO images for burning CDs.

This howto will show you how to install a bootable Debian netinst image onto a USB pendrive.

For much of this howto you'll need to be root, when this is the case any instructions given here will be preceeded with "#", when root is not needed a "$" will be used.

Process Overview

We take a USB pendrive, format it, download the Debian netinst image, copy the files from the image to the pendrive then finally install a bootloader onto the pendrive. Yes folks it's that easy!

Requirements

1. A pendrive (obviously) capable of holding 180MB of data
2. The SYSLINUX package

Recommended

1. A kernel supporting the loop device
2. The following utilities: wget, pmount, mkfs and fdisk

This blog has been hit recently by a spate of comment spamming. This is an automated attack that adds comments to the blog entries the only purpose of which is to advertise what can only be decribed as "some unsalubrious" web-sites.

Because of this I've implemented some anti-spamming measures: remote blacklists which won't affect the person making the comment (unless (s)he is a spammer) and a "captcha" which will.

I really hate doing this but I feel I have to; I was getting twenty to thirty spam comments a day and I haven't got the time to delete them all at this rate.

In addition there's a maximum rate at which you can make comments from the same IP address so if you make a comment and then come back you won't be able to make another comment for at least five minutes.

Fired up spock, my desktop PC, this morning and it didn't boot or, to be more accurate, it hung half way through the boot process - very annoying.
Being a Gentoo box I have the boot scripts running in parallel so it was impossible to see which script was causing the problem. Knoppix to the rescue! I switched the boot scripts to start in series, rebooted and got a surprise - it was dbus causing the hang - huh! No problem I entered interactive mode and skipped the script, now I could investigate the problem ... except I couldn't; every time I tried to log on spock hung again - WTF!

Back to knoppix and I decided to make the logon as simple as possible so I removed the ldap references from nsswitch.conf and bingo, I could log in.

Now kirk is my server and that's running slapd, a quick check found that kirk wasn't playing anymore so he got a hard re-boot. kirk is a Debian box so doesn't often go wrong but today it did and I still don't know why.

After kirk got a re-boot I could log in on spock but dbus was still taking ages to start up. I did the usual gentoo-ey things like re-emerging various libraries but still the only thing that would get dbus starting quickly was removing the ldap references from nsswitch.conf, as soon as they went back in dbus took at least a minute to start, holding up the whole boot process.

The disappearance of Madeline McCann in Portugal strikes a note of fear into most parents' hearts, she's only three years old and, as I write this, her location is unknown. Quite naturally her parents are doing all that they can to ensure her safe release and they seem to be getting help from places you wouldn't normally expect. According to the The Telegraph "rewards totalling £2.5 million were offered for information leading to the child's safe return. J K Rowling, Sir Richard Branson and Wayne Rooney are among those to have contributed".

I find this a very worrying turn of events. I can't blame Madeline's parents for doing everything they can to get her back but have J K Rowling, Sir Richard Branson and Wayne Rooney thought about what they're doing?

When terrorists take prisoners we are always told that "we do not negotiate with terrorists", whether we actually do or don't is irrelevant, we are told this for a reason.

Now, in this situation the position is much worse than when terrorists are holding hostages; we know nothing of Madeline's abductor and yet we attempt to hold a one-way negotiation and hold up the money like it's going to help.

They're trying to buy Madeline's freedom but by doing so they're selling a little bit of ours.

A recent post I made to uk.comp.os.linux has reminded me of how far I've actually come in setting up my web server. Here are the top level steps that I've made:

1. Set up the firewall
2. Set up NFS
3. Set up a time server (NTP)
4. Set up an LDAP server and authenticate from my desktop
5. Set up an FTP server (anonymous and err .. non-anonymous)
6. Set up a web-server and re-written my static pages
7. Set up a PostgreSQL database to serve Gallery2 and Serendipity
8. Set up Gallery2 and uploaded some photographs
9. Set up a Serendipity blog
10. Added SSL to some pages
11. Nearly finished setting up a log analyser (analog)

All I've got left to do (for now) is set up lighttpd to require authorisation for some pages.

Of course before all this I had to reconfigure the hardware in the old PC and install Debian Stable (which changed from Sarge to Etch the day after I installed it!).

Not bad seeing as how when I started I knew very little about setting up servers, especially those on the web.

Hey! I've got a great business idea, listen to this! I'm going to buy on old derelict mill, refurbish it and rent out the space to local businesses selling such things as "collectables", crafts and furniture. Then, and here's the good part, I'll charge members of the public an entrance fee in order to come in and shop even though they can do it for free in the high street.
What, can't work you say? That's exactly my thinking but we're both wrong, this business model works and it works well. About 15 minutes drive from where I live there's one of these not only flourishing but doing so well that coachloads of visitors turn up nearly every day.
I've no idea how it works but it does and I paid my first visit this weekend (free entrance day). Five huge floors full of things like "power crystals", old books, monochrome photographs of your local town and many, many other things (I was slightly tempted by a Star Trek montage signed by William Shatner but at 180 quid the temptation quickly faded).
I've got to hand it to whoever thought of this business venture, they must be making a packet and I would never have seen it as an opportunity which is probably why I'm an engineer and not a multi-millionaire.