A simple matter of…

Decided to try the new Skype client for Linux. As usual I hit the hurdle of “no 64-bit binaries” I went to [http://packages.medibuntu.org/pool/non-free/s/skype/ medibuntu] to get the 64-bit variants they do and found that they’ve not done v2 ones yet. So I made my own: * install skype-common from medibuntu * download the skype-static v2 [...]

Another month, another LUG meet. This month it was another meeting with [http://www.surrey.lug.org.uk SurreyLUG] kindly arranged by Dominic. All three speakers were from HantsLUG though – including an Ubuntu Developers Conference talk by Alan Pope and one on bitlbee by Tony Whitmore. The first talk up one by yours truly about [http://puppet.reductivelabs.com/ puppet]. I was [...]

For a little while openoffice has been very unstable for me on my laptop which runs Ubuntu (my desktop is Debian). A bit of googling found the workaround – remove openoffice.org-gtk and openoffice.org-gnome. This blog entry is just to spread the word.

Another year has gone by so it’s the usual self-analysis phase with the usual outcome I’ve reduced the amount of home-time that work eats into – considering I often start at 07:30am that wasn’t too tricky. Now I just need something to do at home. For the last six months I’ve been considering taking a [...]

Well after what must be about 6 months of trying (of which about four were spent waiting for Neil to get some squash shoes), we’ve _finally_ managed to have a game We played about once a week when we both worked at Dyadic, but then we both left and so were no longer in the [...]

Fixing computers definitely has its upsides, as a reward for fixing a computer an ex-colleague invited me for dinner a while back with her family. It was a really nice lasagne and Karen was kind enough to send me the details. So it’s now become one of my regular dishes. Here’s this week’s sample – [...]

At least in my experience. In fact, I don’t like Cisco: * you can’t get new VPN clients without a license agreement (which then means you need a friendly network guy) * they just don’t seem to fix bugs * and then they [http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11260 threaten people when they point out unpatched security holes] I suppose [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using [http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/ puppet] to manage my machines at home – deploying config files, packages etc. Just search for “puppet” and you’ll find my earlier posts. This was in preparation for rolling it out at a customer which we’ve now done. The timescale is now: # add machine to puppet [...]

I’ve been running my xen server at home for some time now and it’s time to RAID the disks. Fortunately I planned to do this from the outset so I had installed it as a degraded array. It’s now all synced up and since the format of /proc/mdstat doesn’t seem fabulously well explained anywhere, I’ve [...]

Went to see Rush in concert last night. Fabulous – not least because we were middle of the stadium in the second row When you are that close, the big screens really are a very poor substitute. You could see every detail when they played, their expressions etc. Also the pretty intense heat from the [...]