MT4.01

So, I install Moveable Type 4.01, it takes an hour to rebuild the site, and within a few hours I have moronically obvious spam comments?!

MT4, go Cheney yourself.

Posted by dave on 06 October 2007 at 20:47 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Believe your eyes

No, your eyes didn't deceive you - this blog was briefly updated to MT4.0 and back to MT3.x a few hours later. I'm trying to set it up so that I can gradually add the various customizations I use here, without having to update the whole thing in one go.

I'm not a fan of the management console with the new version, however. I prefer the more traditional (web_1.0?) style of the previous version.

Posted by dave on 08 September 2007 at 23:02 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Upgrading from FC6 to Fedora 7

#!/bin/bash

# a script to illustrate the steps required to upgrade using yum.

# Note that this is FC6 to F7.

# this should require a locally mounted repository for extra speed.

yum clean all

yum update

/usr/bin/pg_dumpall -U postgres >/storage/postgresql/all_data.backup

rm -rf /var/lib/pgsql/*

chown -R postgres.postres /var/lib/pgsql

#(/storage/linux... is my local repository)

rpm -Uvh /storage/linux/fedora/core/7/i386/mount/Fedora/fedora-release-*

#

# There's a missing dependency: libgcj.so.8rh

#

yum remove libglade-java libvte-java libgnome-java glib-java kdemultimedia

yum upgrade

#yum install libglade-java libvte-java libgnome-java glib-java kdemultimedia

service postgresql initdb

/etc/init.d/postgresql start

su - postgres

psql -f /storage/postgresql/all_data.backup

# you may need to check the ident config in pg_hba.conf, and that it's

# set to trust, not ident. Also there may be more than one file!

Posted by dave on 05 August 2007 at 14:01 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Some misc stuff

I notice that Hemlock appears to have updated his index of Hong Kong blogs recently and I've been removed after being on the occasionals list for a while. He wouldn't be the first who got the impression that I was more of an Australian blog...

If you're reading this site by an RSS feed, there was an older RDF feed which remained stuck in 2005. The real feed is http://www.diaspoir.net/index.xml, although the rdf feed is now a clone of that. There's also a feed of all the comments, if you're really bored.

The new version of Movable Type is looking good - I'll probably upgrade to that as soon as it's out of Beta and an Upgrade to Fedora 7 is on the cards.

Back to your scheduled ranting...

Posted by dave on 02 August 2007 at 13:30 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

It's Alive!

Well, that was a pain and a half, but this machine is now back up and running on a new motherboard. ASRock sucks!

More details later.

Posted by dave on 24 June 2007 at 13:13 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Robots in Disguise

Those entries below look awfully similar, yesno? As I'm likely to be very busy for the next few months (even busier than normal), I've set up my del.icio.us account to post new items. This will most likely provide a weird and eclectic set of postings and links.

So say hello to 'robot dave'

Unfortunately, this is not very well implemented at the moment, and can only post on a daily basis. I'd prefer something once every week, or so, but I'll have to wait until I can program it myself later.

Posted by dave on 05 May 2007 at 09:23 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Movable Type 3.34

I've upgraded to MT3.34 which has FastCGI compliance built in. To get this working with Fedora Core 6 I had to do the following:

As a normal user, go to your installation directory and unpack the MT archive, then

[odaiwai@gizmo ]$ cp mt-comments.cgi mt-comments.fcgi

[odaiwai@gizmo ]$ cp mt.cgi mt.fcgi

[odaiwai@gizmo ]$ cp mt-search.cgi mt-search.fcgi

[odaiwai@gizmo ]$ cp mt-tb.cgi mt-tb.fcgi

[odaiwai@gizmo ]$ cp mt-view.cgi mt-view.fcgi

As root, you'll need to install the following files:

[root@gizmo ]# yum install mod_fgcid perl-FCGI*

If you don't have the dries repository, you can always install the perl with:

[root@gizmo ]# perl -MCPAN -e shell

CPAN: File::HomeDir loaded ok

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.8802)

ReadLine support enabled

cpan[1]> install FCGI

I haven't noticed any great increase in speed so far.

Posted by dave on 20 January 2007 at 13:50 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Quaked II

(This one's in OpenGL)

It seems that access is back to normal, or thereabouts. I'me still experiencing some slowdowns on some sites, but I can access most things from home.

I suspect that the techie boys at netfront.net (my ISP) have re-routed everything though Singapore, but they're turned off ICMP packets on pings, so I can't tell from the traceroute.

Posted by dave on 29 December 2006 at 01:34 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Dealing with Corrupt databases

Hmm, the PostgreSQL database was corrupt and I had to manually delete a few records to get everything to the stage where it would recover it's onw integrity. So I lost a few comments. I manually retrieved some of the later ones, from google caches, and the various backups here.

So, what happened? As far as I can tell, the regularly scheduled backups at 0400 on Thursday morning caused the primary drive (old 40Gb) to fail and also completely bricked the primary backup drive (250GB). My Tertiary backup (300Gb) picked up some corruption as well, probably by copying stuff from a failing drive.

Three live copies of my data in on three physical drives and it nearly wasn't enough. However, to be fair, the stuff that was corrupted was in memory or non-comitted stuff in a database. All my client work, designs and reports are safe as far as I know.

I've whacked a new SATA drive in as primary with a fresh install of FC6, and moved services and data over as necessary. A better solution is obviously required: not just copying files, but a proper dump and restore backup, so a failed drives just means swapping connectors around, not two days of trying to remember everything I ever knew about Linux System Administration.

Posted by dave on 15 December 2006 at 18:47 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Site Outage

There's been a major failure on my Linux server: Primary and backups are both bricked, currently working on new installation of OS with shards of previous disks being milked for content. Normal service will be resumed later.

I've recovered my databases, although they were slightly older versions, and seem to have got most things working again.

Posted by dave on 15 December 2006 at 13:58 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

RSS fixed

Oops!, my RSS feed was broken. The link was pointing to an old feed. The new one should be correct in the side bar ad here: RSS Feed.

Thanks to Spike for the heads-up.

Posted by dave on 23 November 2006 at 19:05 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)

Updates

Updates have been pretty slow around here for a while. Part of it is due to work, but a large part is that my outrage meter appears to have burned out.

Normally, the news that the Republican party appears to be self destructing in an orgy of sex scandals (Mark Foley), security revelations (Iraq) and corruption allegations (all of the above) would incline me to post on it, but it's happened before (Gannon/Plame/Katrina) and the American public just seem to blindly accept whatever Fox tells them and continue to vote for the Fascist Party.

Recently, the US Congress voted to approve a law which gives the President power to declare anyone and unlawful combatant and hold them without trial, without habeas corpus and without the oversight of the Geneva Conventions. Surely that would make the US People rise up and throw these guys out of office? If Abu Ghraib didn't, will anything?

It looks like a propaganda campaign is underway to justify a pre-emptive war with Iran. The American public swallowed lies hook, line and sinker for the Iraq debacle, why shouldn't they accept this next one?

Plus, it's no fun making fun of the letter writers to the SCMP, if they don't turn up and try and defend themselves in fractured English.

And speaking of Hong Kong, our Chief executive recently announced some ludicruous non-binding happy thoughts about a minimum wage. "It would be nice to have one", he said, "but we won't make it law, because then the Heritage Foundation (and associated local loonies like the Lion Rock Foundation and Simon Patkin) might not award us a meaningless 'freeest economy in the world' award every year."

(It's not like there's a proposal to give toilet cleaners HK$50,000 per month. They're currently paid about HK$13 per hour.)

Posted by dave on 15 October 2006 at 22:30 (GMT +08:00)

Categories: ,

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

HOWTO: dualhead with xorg 6.8.2 on intel i810

As I said here, I've upgraded the webserver. Along the way, there's lots of things which need fixing.

Today's project as go get the onboard graphics on the new motherboard (a ConRoe945G-DVI) working in dualhead mode with one desktop spanning two 17" monitors.

The onboard graphics is an Intel GMA950 chipset, capable of powering two outputs (one DVI, one VGA) and should, in theory, be easily capable of dualhead.

Without too much ado, here's the xorg.conf file for i810 powering two Eizo L685 LCDs. It's pretty straightforward, the only critical part is the "Device" section:

Section "Device"

Identifier "Device0"

Driver "i810"

BusID "PCI:0:2:0"

Screen 0

Option "MonitorLayout" "DFP,CRT"

Option "DisplayInfo" "False"

Option "VideoRAM" "32768"

Option "DRI" "True"

Option "XvMCSurfaces" "6"

EndSection

Section "Device"

Identifier "Device1"

Driver "i810"

BusID "PCI:0:2:0"

Screen 1

Option "MonitorLayout" "DFP,CRT"

Option "DisplayInfo" "False"

Option "VideoRAM" "32768"

Option "DRI" "True"

Option "XvMCSurfaces" "6"

EndSection

That MonitorLayout option is the critical element. Don't put "CRT,LFP" as most of the advice says, because LFP is only for directly attached flat panels (i.e., laptop displays). Also, one of the options is CRT because of the output from the graphics card, not the input to the monitor.

UPDATE: And you know something? the 2D quality on the CRT head is *far* superior to the image quality on the CRT output from any nvidia card. It's basically indistinguishable from the DVI head, and both are right up there with the old Matrox card for quality. If you want a decent dual-head motherboard, this one really does have it right out of the box.

Posted by dave on 16 August 2006 at 22:37 (GMT +08:00)

Categories: , ,

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Upgrade

Well, that was easy - I upgraded the blogging system to MT3.31, with no apparent issues whatsoever. Looks like they've got the whole upgrading-without-hosing-your-system issue under control at last.

Posted by dave on 22 July 2006 at 13:36 (GMT +08:00)

Categories: , ,

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Akismet now available for MT

The Wordpress anti-spam took Akismet is now available for Movable Type: http://akismet.com/development/

Via Paul Frankenstein.

Posted by dave on 31 May 2006 at 16:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories: , , ,

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Some minor updates

*tap*, *tap*, is this thing still on?

I'm back from the depths of Queensland for a flying visit home, so the updates have been even sparser than normal.

I've noticed that some of my links on the left are out of date or I don't bother visiting them anymore, so I've tidied up that a little bit. Please note that, for all those who throw hissy-fits at being removed from someone's blog, I've only done it because you smell bad and your mother dresses you funny.

Notice that I've also left the South China Morning Post in the 'telling it like it is' section out of a sense of deep sarcasm.

Posted by dave on 19 October 2005 at 20:53 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Upgrade to MT 3.2

I've upgraded the site to Movable Type 3.2 and it was a complete pain in the neck to do so.

I've basically had to rebuild the entire site from scratch (and my daily backups). I had problems with importing templates or creating new templates and thus rebuilding any part of the site. This made doing an uprade impossible. I suspect that this is because I've had this blog in MT for a few versions and it's been upgraded quite a few times already.

I installed the MT-3.2 files in a new cgi-bin directory and did a completely fresh install. I then imported the entries I'd exported before I started this whole sorry mess. Now I just have to rebuild every single template I made. While I'm doing that, commenting probably won't work.

Lucky for me that I linked them all to files and edited them outside of MT anyway.

Moveable Type 3.2 is not ready for primetime. Or, at least the upgrade process needs a lot of work. Do not upgrade your blog to it. It's better to do a clean install and then export your blog from the old system and import it into the new system.

UPDATE: The old templates have now been restored and some small changes made to the stylesheets.

Posted by dave on 31 August 2005 at 20:57 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (1)

Site Redesign

As you can no doubt see, I've redesigned the site. This is more or less the same style which was visible on the non-blog elements of the site, but I've made quite a few changes and simplifications to the underlying XHTML and CSS. It even validates!

So far, I've tested it on:

  • linux:
    • Firefox - Looks OK
    • Konqueror - Looks OK
  • Mac OS X
    • Firefox - looks OK
    • Safari - looks OK
    • IE for Mac 5.2 - Looks OK
  • Windows XP
    • Firefox - looks OK
    • IE 6.0 - looks OK

It doesn't look exactly the same across all the platforms I tested, but it looks basically the same. Firefox users get nice rounded corners, while Safari users get text-shadowing effects. IE users get whatever benefits you get from using IE.

Let me know if it works for you. If there are any rendering quirks, or oddness on a platform I haven't tested, or especially if one I've already tested goes nuts on a slightly different platform.

I've also fixed the comment previewing mess and some of the lesser used templates. Please leave a comment (or send an email) if something looks broken.

Posted by dave on 15 June 2005 at 21:32 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (2)

Screen Resolution Poll

I'm pondering a redesign of the site, and I'm curious as to how people have their displays set up. Do you normally run at a high resolution (1280x1024+) or do you have old/crap/cheap monitors which can only manage 800x600? Do you prefer lower resolutions because they're easier to read and Windows makes it hard to have big fonts at a higher resolution? Leave a comment, please, if you have a resolution different from 1024x768 which you think I should support.

Note: I typically run at 2560x1024 on twin LCD monitors, but I don't span applications across monitors unless I really have to, so 1280x1024 could be considered my standard resolution. That's the resolution I generally use to test things, although I do resize the browser window and the text size to see how things change.

Posted by dave on 02 June 2005 at 01:05 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (4)

DSL Outage

Apologies if you were looking for this site for the last few days - my ADSL modem expired and PCCW were a bit slow to come out and look at it.

Anyway, it's all fixed now, and email is again rolling in.

Posted by dave on 10 April 2005 at 14:42 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Upgrading

As you may or may not have noticed, I upgraded the blogging backend from MT 2.661 to Mt 3.121. It's a pretty straightforward upgrade, but there were some issues with the MT-Blacklist upgrade.

To make MT-B and Postgres play well together, it is necessary to implement this little hack.

Posted by dave on 05 November 2004 at 10:59 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

More Site Changes

In the process of upgrading the back end software from Berkeley DB to PostGreSQL, I enountered a number of problems which required solving. Solutions were as follows. This describes some problems enountered when upgrading Movable Type with MT-Blacklist 1.6x which aren't covered in the upgrade document (link). I'm running redHat Linux Fedora Core 1 for x86 architecture and host the site myself on this box.

  • PostGreSQL required IDENT to match the user accounts.

  • This required modifying the pg_hba.cfg to not require IDENT, as I am sure as heck not going to expose my system passwords on a website.

  • MT complained about files not being linkable -this was a user permissions issue. The files needed to be made part of the httpd user.

  • chown username.webusers /path/to/files/files

    where 'webusers' is a user group which has write access to the websites hosted on the machine.

  • A database needed to be created by a new user

  • su - postgres

    createuser [username]

    su - [username]

    createdb [dbname]

  • YAML also needs to be installed (link to directions on jayallen.org)

Posted by dave on 20 September 2004 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

FUBAR

From what I can see, my Individual Archive entries are FUBAR, a technical term for 'not working'. It looks like MovableType is getting confused with which template is which and building the wrong files and not building the right ones.

Whatever is wrong, I can't fix it through the web interface, and I don't have access to my webserver from work down here in Melbourne, thanks to a proxy which won't allow SSH through it, even if I use other ports. I'll have a look at it when I get home, whenever that is.

UPDATE: Now it appears that Movable Type has overwritten my templates with one of its own and the front page is looking odd. I've patched in one of the standard MovableType Stylesheets for the moment. This is really annoying.

Posted by dave on 07 August 2004 at 10:54 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Site Changes

Is there a way of having certain posts not show up on the Living In China Aggregator? I'm sure an announcement that I've faffed about with my stylesheets isn't particularly riveting to the blogging population of China.

I've also ditched Textads. I was, quite frankly, majorly annoyed with the advertising material I was asked to approve, most of which I would consider immoral. Spam related advertising is definitely not okay, and neither is libellous/slanderous stuff.

I've set up Google ads on this site, so you get ads which are actually relevant to the page you're looking at! i.e. the SARS graphs have SARS related advertising on them. Even individual entry pages on the blog will have relevant advertising! (Check out this entry, for an example.)

Posted by dave on 11 July 2004 at 23:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (3)

Connectivity

There's been a few incidents of the site being off-line over the last few days. There's a few causes of this. One is that there's been renovating happening in the flat upstairs and they managed to cut one of our power lines. This took out the power for most of the flat. The other thing is that the router isn't keeping the connection up like it should.

The power has been temporarily fixed, and the builders will come down and do a proper repair job sometime next week.

The router problem is a bit harder to solve: it has an option to keep the connection alive by 're-dialing' if the connection is down for longer than 60 seconds. This isn't working. I'm going to try and write some simple perl (or bash) script to monitor the connection and hopefully push the 'connect' button on the router's control page when necessary.

A side effect of the router being out of action is that mail doesn't work. This isn't really a problem if the outage is a few hours. A longer outage does start to pose a risk of email bouncing due to there being no server to receive it on this end. Generally speaking, a proper Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) like Sendmail or PostFix will retry every hour or so until five days have passed. Some poorly written MTAs will give up after only a few hours.

Posted by dave on 08 May 2004 at 13:21 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

System upgrade

If you were wondering why you couldn't see anything here, it's becuse I've been upgrading the webserver. It's now running Fedora Core 1. with a 2.6.5 kernel.

The current system configuration is always visible at this page.

Posted by dave on 26 April 2004 at 00:44 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Weather

I've been waiting all week to catch a glimpse of where I'm going to be for the next six weeks or so on the TV, and tonight they showed it. Chucking down with rain. Lovely.

(TVB Pearl have taken to showing a few minutes of EarthTV after the news each day. It's sort of interesting, although they do tend to focus on Germany and other cold places for some odd reason. You'd think that a few cameras in Fiji or Hawaii would be more pleasing than watching frozen Germans walking around.)

Posted by dave on 30 January 2004 at 02:25 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Changes to the blogroll

Astute viewers may have noticed that the contents of the navbar (the one on the right) changes a lot. This is mainly due to the fact that I'm trying to trim both navbars down to one. I think, that having two makes the screen very crowded, especially on a small screen, and can make the central column very thin so that it loses any sense of balance. There are supposed to be two narrow columns and one wide one, not three narrow columns!

What I found recently, when forced to work somewhere where the equipment was primitive, was that on an 800x600 screen, my site is very hard to read. Even on a 1024x768 screen, it's a little compressed if you have the bookmarks down the side as I normally do.

I normally use a resolution of 1280x1024 on my Eizo L685's (I have two), with a web browser open on the right hand monitor, and the editor open on the left hand monitor. This gives me a full screen display, but only occupying half of the viewport, which is 2560x1024. This is done with a relatively cheap Matrox G400 card with dual-head outs. I've got a dual-head Nvidia card for the Windows box, which can let me play games on two screens as well.

My site should look like this picture here, which shows my web-browser rendering my site (and a few others, thanks to tabbed-browsing). I normally use Mozilla for browsing. I download the updated source on a weekly basis, compile and install it The source all comes out of CVS, so it's the latest development version of Mozilla. My primary workstation is running RedHat 9.0, although it's customised with stock kernel and various other utilities compiled from source rather than via packages.

Posted by dave on 19 January 2004 at 23:47 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Strangeness

Well, that was a bit strange. The whole front page went back to January 1 for a few hours there. I think what happened was that some search robot started hitting the karma links on the old blog (the Grey Matter blog) and forced a rebuild of the main index. Problem has been solved.

Posted by dave on 10 January 2004 at 12:17 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Moved to MovableType

I've moved the blog to MovableType, with the aid of a nifty bit of Perl and a lot of faffing about with regard to stylesheets.

You shouldn't notice much different in the overall appearance - the stylesheet is the same as before - but things like comments may act a little differently.

I plan on revising the stylesheets soon, and I may do something about having two navigation bars. On smaller screens, these compress the central column a little too much.

and just as I type this entry, I can see the first viewer of the new blog: 24.58.89.186, running MacOS and using MSIE 5.23. How does it look for you?

Posted by dave on 02 January 2004 at 00:48 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

San Ding Fai Lo!

A slightly late Happy New Year to all! "San Ding Fai Lo!", as they say in Cantonese.

I'm busily migrating the whole blog over to MovableType, which may result in odd things appearing every now and then.

Posted by dave on 01 January 2004 at 20:39 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Closing Entries

I closed off the last entry — it was just ranting on my part about something that almost no-one who reads this would ever find interesting.

Currently trying out Movable Type. Seems a lot slicker than Greymatter.

Posted by dave on 28 December 2003 at 23:12 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Site Down

I've been trying to upgrade this webserver to Linux 2.6.0 over the last few days, but I've had very little success. I've had to spend a few hours tonight recovering from a corrupt root partition, and trying to get the server to actually boot again, despite having a good spread of RedHat kernels, home compiled kernels and the new kernel. If you've been trying to access the site tonight (28 December 2003), it's largely been powered down and disassembled

Strangely enough, I had 2.6.0 booting or a bit, and my ancient laptop will boot it with no problems, but I had persistent creeping failures when trying to get Gizmo (the webserver) to boot it.

I guess the lesson is that production machines shouldn't run the bleeding edge stuff. I'm sticking to the stock redhat kernels until Fedora 2.0 comes out, with the 2.6 kernels as stock.

Speaking of the ancient laptop - it has some weird problems with the PCMCIA cards - I have a wireless card for it which is a genuine PCMCIA card, but I keep getting "Bad Vcc" errors due to the weirdness of the PCMCIA interface. Toshiba Tecras are not a good choice for a Linux Laptop - they're just chock full of proprietary hardware which doesn't work with anything except Windows. Not to mentions that the processor is welded to the chassis, and has a heatsink welded on top of it. It's is not possible to upgrade the damn thing! I fondly remember my old Olivetti, with a Socket 7, so that I could keep uprading the processor.

Posted by dave on 28 December 2003 at 02:20 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Site Down

Hmmph. My DSL line went down last night just after one, and needed a good kick to get back running, which is why the site was unavailable.

I must really get around to writing that Perl::HTML module to keep an eye on the router...

Posted by dave on 15 December 2003 at 20:03 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (2)

A few changes

You may notice a few changes...

Update 10/12/2003: right now, the styles are a bit of a mess and the layout is a bit busy. I'll try and sort it out soon as I can. I can't get at the guts of the site when I'm not at home.

Continue reading "A few changes"...

Posted by dave on 03 December 2003 at 23:20 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (3)

More of the same

Just some fiddling with the styles - the font I was using looked awful on my screen and was a bit large. Also, there were some of the usual nonsense with IE refusing to obey right: 0em;. I'm now using Verdana at 85% of your default size.

One of my 'design goals' with the CSS on this site is to make it as independent as possible of your screen resolution, fonts, window size, etc. The layout should work on any resolution or orientation of a screen and it shouldn't matter whether you browse full screen, or in a little window. I've just tested it on 640x480 and it's readable, although a little squashed in both Mozilla and IE. From 800x600 up, it's fine. Still looks nicer in Mozilla though.

Posted by dave on 15 November 2003 at 13:18 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Minor Style Changes

Reverted to a three column layout - four was a little too cluttered on a smaller screen.

Posted by dave on 14 November 2003 at 01:10 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Permalinks

I've sorted out permalinks, just in case anyone actually wants to link to a particular article. Just use the Heading as the link. Example : Off Kilter.

Posted by dave on 13 November 2003 at 22:16 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Oops

Things were unavailable for a few hours - I goofed in making changed to the webserver configuration. Should be OK now. Thanks for the heads-up, Ron.

Posted by dave on 04 November 2003 at 23:29 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Keyword Mapping

Check out KWMap.com a keyword map. Looks a little strange, but somewhat interesting.

Posted by dave on 26 October 2003 at 00:02 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

After the brain surgery

processor : 0

vendor_id : GenuineIntel

cpu family : 6

model : 8

model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)

stepping : 10

cpu MHz : 1003.675

cache size : 256 KB

physical id : 0

siblings : 1

fdiv_bug : no

hlt_bug : no

f00f_bug : no

coma_bug : no

fpu : yes

fpu_exception: yes

cpuid level : 2

wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse

bogomips : 1998.84

processor : 1

vendor_id : GenuineIntel

cpu family : 6

model : 8

model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)

stepping : 10

cpu MHz : 1003.675

cache size : 256 KB

physical id : 0

siblings : 1

fdiv_bug : no

hlt_bug : no

f00f_bug : no

coma_bug : no

fpu : yes

fpu_exception: yes

cpuid level : 2

wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse

bogomips : 2005.40

Fixed a clock silliness. I wonder why the Bogomips are different for the cpus?

Posted by dave on 18 October 2003 at 22:25 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Leet Mad SkillZ!!11!!

Right now I feel good. I've fixed a blown motherboard with a soldering iron!

My ECS D6VAA dual PIII motherboard was languishing in the box with no power to CPU#1, and some blown capacitors. I chanced across http://www.vp6-board.com/caps1.htm a while back, and today changed the blown capacitors. The board came straight back to life! HKD 29 on some capacitors and I've resurrected about $3k worth of computer!

Later on tonight, I'm going to put the dual mobo in to Gizmo, my linux box and web/mail/everything server.

Posted by dave on 18 October 2003 at 19:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Without a safety net

Having perused many websites about the topic of motherboard repair, I am going to attempt replacing the capacitors on my ECS D6VAA. I have two reasons for doing this. The first is that it may well resurrect the board at quite a small cost to me. The second reason is that dual processor boards are now stupidly expensive, and even if I have to pay a few hundred bucks for capacitors, it's still much less than $3k for a dual Xeon board and $4k for the processors.

Intel are screwing us really - I was able to put a dual PIII machine together for about $3k a few years ago, but there seems to be no budget SMP option available now at all. This is a crying shame - Intel are making a big long term mistake by making SMP so expensive. The end result will be that no one has any experience with multiple processor machines and the usual run of MCSE idiots (with apologies to anyone who has one of these useless qualifications and who isn't an idiot) will have no experience with anything other than single processor machines. All company networks will have very fast processors and slow down or stop on the first high priority task they come across.

One of my favourite SMP machines was a Compaq DL580. Four PIII Xeons at 700 MHz. Not the fastest machine ever, but it never stopped responding. You could load that thing out the Wazoo and it would still be there for another bit of work.

Posted by dave on 17 October 2003 at 01:55 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

More Apache 2 Nonsense

OK, well, the site was down for about a day or so thanks to some lingering incompatibilities between the configuration files for Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0. (That's the software which powers the webserver.) I guess that's what I guess for converting the config files in a hurry.

Update: looks like I spoke too soon - more problems - Here goes for a full blown reconfig of the entire site to 2.0 guidelines.

Posted by dave on 13 October 2003 at 22:42 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Ooops!

Oops! The webserver was misbehaving for a bit while I was trying to sort out SSL under apache 2.0.40. Apparently you can't have two virtual hosts with the same name but different ports. I had this working on older versions of apache, but the new directory based configuration system seems to confuse things.

Posted by dave on 11 October 2003 at 11:42 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Oops!

Apparently, my site's been down (or effectively so) since Sunday night (log rollover time). The reasons it was down was that I upgrade the webserver software (apache), and the RedHat upgrade put pack a file I had removed which tried to force the server to host an SSL page with the same name as the main page. This caused it to think that it wasn't working.

Posted by dave on 23 September 2003 at 15:16 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

New Style

I've revised the stylesheets slightly to get a three column layout, with the local index on the left and the main navigation on the right. All layout is completely in CSS now, and the site should be skinnable (ie, there should be a few different styles which can be applied to it).

Posted by dave on 22 August 2003 at 13:14 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Why is Internet Explorer such crap?

Just why is Internet Explorer such a pile of crap? I design a layout which is perfectly standards compliant and valid CSS and it looks great in Mozilla (or at least, it looks like what I expected). In IE, however, elements are in the wrong place. We're not talking a few pixels out, which can be explained by the wrong box-model it uses. I'm talking major elements which were positioned absolutely are off the page or on top of another element.

For an example, look at Vicky's Sample Page in any browser.

Posted by dave on 15 August 2003 at 17:41 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Connection Down

Hmmm, it looks like my connection to the internet is down and has been for a while. Not sure what's wrong - can't connect to the PPPoE server, says my little Linksys BEFSR41. This is a pretty unusual occurrence, as Netfront are normally a very reliable provider.

Astute watchers of the webcam will have noticed a vast increase in screen acreage here at diaspoir.net. Yesterday I bought two 17" Eizo L685 LCD Monitors in what you might call a closing down sale. With the trusty Matrox G400 which lurks in my Linux box, I can enjoy a 2560x1024 display. This is basically my work setup - makes it much easier to work on websites and similar. When you get used to lots of screen area, it's very difficult to go back to small ones.

Posted by dave on 01 August 2003 at 00:08 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Heading

Wibble

Posted by dave on 01 July 2003 at 15:14 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

The War of Attrition Continues

Nope, it's not one of my political rants. Gizmo's motherboard expired today. I was trying to install a Southbridge fan, and must have shorted out the power circuit - the board went dark. I was not able to get it working with any of the various Socket 370 processors I have lying around, so I transferred all the essential bits and pieces to the other case along with my trusty old Asus P2B motherboard. I have one of my 1Ghz PIIIs running in that at the moment (with a slocket). That's a little unstable at a 133Mhz FSB, so it's at 100Mhz. That gives me a 750Mhz PIII, which will have to do for a while. I really should upgrade further, but I don't want to spend too much money at the moment.

I recently built a PC for my brother-in-law for about HK$2600. It was a P4 Celeron 2Ghz with 80Gb disk and 17" monitor. I did donate a few spare parts I had lying around, but the Motherboard (PC Chips M935LU) has quite a lot on board (audio, video, USB 2.0, network) that I didn't need any cards at all. It's not bad, although I think the Celeron P4 is much slower than the Pentium P4. I think that the cache is a lot smaller. This Mobo also takes SDRam as well as DDR, so I was able to save a bit on that.

I might go a similar route when upgrading gizmo/mojo (I have no windows machine at the moment, which is a pain when it comes to scanning: XSane doesn't support my Slide Scanner.

Posted by dave on 15 June 2003 at 21:55 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Techie Stuff

If you've been trying to find the website and it hasn't been working tonight, it's because I've been trying to revive some old SCSI disks by freezing them, then hot-plugging them and trying to read the data. It mostly worked, apart from the one which sounded like a chainsaw starting up. It did entail a lot of reboots, however. Linux is ok with a SCSI device being plugged in, but not being plugged out.

In bread-related news, I've started using Allinson's yeast, and it's got a lot more oomph, and a very distinctive taste. I'm almost tempted to try and make beer with the stuff...

Posted by dave on 08 June 2003 at 02:11 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Small change

Just changed the index page so that it shows the last ten entries rather than the last five. This keeps things on the index pages a bit longer and probably helps my already good google.com rating.

Posted by dave on 03 June 2003 at 23:16 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Not so fast

I had to back off the overclocking a little: 120Mhz FSB was a little too fast for the Celeron to be stable. Now, it's running at 117Mhz FSB, with 1.6v Vcore. Seems to be solid enough.

  $ cat /proc/cpuinfo  processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 11 model name : Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU 1300MHz stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 1524.039 cache size : 256 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse bogomips : 3040.87

So, not quite so throbbingly macho, but still more than 50% faster than the PIII that was there before, and the temperatures are much more consistent: CPU temp doesn't go flailing towards the meltdown point whenever the CPU gets busy. I'm getting CPU temp around 45-50 C, and that's with the additional voltage on Vcore (1.6v vs a stock 1.5v). I could probably lower that, but tuning an overclocked machine basically consists of adjusting things until everything breaks and using the setting before that, and thats just far to much trouble.

The PIII would leap from 40-45 C at idle to 55+ under full load, and those thermal stresses did worry me: I don't want a kernel compile to start a fire in the same flat my wife and kids live in. Also, coming into the summer here, the ambient daytime temp is going to be 30+, which could conceivably push a hot processor over the 60C mark and into thermal shutdown. If I want to do some silly overclocking, I'll go back to my slockets and the P2B board. Rated Max is a PIII 550. I've got a 1Ghz running in it.

And, by the way, glxgears is giving me about 700fps through a G400, so that's ok — my screensavers are running full throttle.

Posted by dave on 16 May 2003 at 00:29 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Windows Suicide

My Windows box, the dual PIII 1Ghz machine with the ECS DV6AA motherboard blew up last Friday. It popped some capacitors. Don't know if it was due to heat, age or anything, but it wouldn't function. I stripped it down to bare metal today and found that there was no current getting to CPU1, although CPU2 was ok. Now, I clearly have two options here: 1. get a new socket 370 motherboard (at a cost of two to five hundred dollars) to use my existing RAM and processors, 2. get a P4 mobo plus new RAM (at a cost of a few thousand dollars).

Duh! I'll pick up a new S370 mobo at some point soon. There's actually no rush. I installed RedHat 9 on gizmo, my Linux box. I spent some time on Saturday getting full graphics acceleration to work. I can do almost everything on gizmo that I needed a windows box for before. The only thing I can't do is run Excel VBA macros. Otherwise, gizmo with RH9 is a superb desktop machine.

I am very impressed with RH9 - it's the best Linux for a desktop machine I've ever seen. It does require a little bit of work setting up, but then, I'm a professional Linux admin, so it's pretty damn easy for me. The fonts and the XFree86 4.3.0 work really well, although getting them to work with a Matrox G400 takes some time. (check out the forums at http://www.matrox.com/mga to find out some useful information.)

I absolutely need to be able to work from home at the moment. To do somethings, like log into my linux boxes from outside, I need Terminal Services. Happily, RH9 has rdesktop, and I can do everything from home that I can from work. Plus, the coffee's better! (And I have some of my own homemade bread too!)

Posted by dave on 28 April 2003 at 01:17 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (2)

RedHat 9

OK, bear with me a mo' - I'm just rebuilding gizmo to be a RedHat 9 Linux box, and the upgrade is *way* less smooth than a clean install. I would thoroughly recommend against doing an upgrade from the CD with RedHat I usually get better results by copying everything to a second disk on the same PC, then installing from scratch but leaving the backup alone. Then you can copy everything across (like /etc/X11, etc) as and when you need it.

Basically, if you have a system which has elements which aren't in the RPM db, you'll need to take a lot of control over the process.

I just downloaded RedHat 9 over the long Easter Weekend just passed and I've spent the week trying it out on my work workstation. I haven't used Windows very much in the last few days, and didn't use it at all today, except to copy some config files around. I use Evolution linking to our Exchange server and that's amazing. I remember seeing early versions of that which were scary, but right now it's what Outlook should be. It has all the basic functionality of Outlook (connection to and Exchange server and LDAP directory stuff) and the adds a ton of features (turning off image loading, threading of messages.) I really have trouble believing that the most common email client can't thread a message. Sure, you can group by conversation, but that's a useless feature in practice. Threading is what you need for mailing lists, any involved email exchange, or just keeping track of who said what to whom and in response to what.

There were three critical apps keeping me using windows at work. Outlook (replaced by Evolution as above), Agent (replaced by Pan, although I downloaded a more up to date rpm from the pan site), and Excel.

The most recent versions of Pan have most of the usability of Agent and they have score files. They still don't have the 'next message on middle mouse button' features, but, score files more than make up for that. I've been using Agent since 1996 or so, but the development of it is too slow, and the developers are catering for a binary-downloading user (i.e. porn hound) rather than someone who wants to participate in one of the few communities left on Usenet.

Excel. Nope, open office still doesn't touch it. Nothing touches it. Excel is Microsoft's killer app, and they probably don't even know it. It hasn't changed very much for about five years, 'cause there's not much to change. I've sent at least two large firms down the Microsoft Office route since I started using it in 1993 or so. Just today, being determined to have a Microsoft free day, I wanted to chuck some numbers I grabbed from the screen into a spreadsheet, parse them into individual entries and see how they related to each other. Now in Excel, alt-d, e brings up the 'parse selected cells' dialog. Open Office calc didn't seem to have that. I couldn't find anyway to split a cell by spaces (or whatever) without resorting to writing a BASIC program. And that's an enormous shot in the foot right there. Sure, you're copying Excel by having BASIC as the macro language, but, often, that's the only programming language available on a Windows box. And VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) in Excel is a great tool for reading in data, processing data, writing out results files - it's the reason why Lotus 1-2-3 no longer exists and why Quattro never took off - don't get me wrong. But this is a Linux box. It has Perl, Python, C, C++, Fortran, Bash, etc all available as scripting/programming languages. Let me use Perl on a spreadsheet and Microsoft will wobble. Let me use a combination of C, Fortran and Perl on a spreadsheet and I can eliminate proprietary transport planning software almost straight away. All it would need would be for the spreadsheet to recognise the #! declaration and insert a library of it's own to link in. e.g.

 #!/usr/bin/perl use OpenOffice;  ... my $row=10; my $col=100; foreach my $parameter (sort keys %value) {  print SHEET("1999 Results",$row,$col) "$parameter";  print SHEET("1999 Results",$row,$col+1) "$value{$parameter}";  $row++; }

If you know perl and associative arrays, you know just how powerful that would be. If you don't know perl, it's hard to describe, but there just isn't a better programming language for analysing things where the data structures have to be built on the fly.

Posted by dave on 25 April 2003 at 00:19 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Muhahahaha!

Woah!. Okay, I've added the time of day to the sorting algorithm, so all the news entries should appear in reverse order of when I put them in, which is The Right Thing. Before, it was reverse chron at a daily level, but each day was put in it's own file. Now, I have to post two entries in the same second to be in the same file. And it's all done with flat text files. No databases to get slashdotted here!

Posted by dave on 16 April 2003 at 23:59 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Site Changes

Clearly, it needs some work...

Posted by dave on 16 April 2003 at 23:54 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Makefiles

A quick test of the revised makefile system which makes sure that every entry should be in Chronological order.

Posted by dave on 16 April 2003 at 23:52 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Abuse

Someone from the IP address 62.217.91.39 has downloaded the entire contents of this site almost every day for the last week. That's an Iranian ISP, in Kermoon. Strange behaviour. I wonder if I can get apache to rate-limit connections?

Posted by dave on 06 April 2003 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

More new RRDTOOL graphs

I've finally gotten around to graphing the web-server load - it's over on the http-load page.

I keep seeing some American military person with "XO Shai Hulud" on his helmet being interviewed on the TV. I wonder if he knows that Shai Hulud was the secret weapon of the Desert Dwelling Fremen in Frank Herbert's Dune? And that these Arabic fighters successfully resisted an invasion of their world and went on to dominate civilisation?

Some silliness: Hu's the President?

Posted by dave on 26 March 2003 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Site Troubles

As you may have noticed, this website was out of action for about 18 hours. I upgraded Gizmo from RedHat 7.2 to RedHat 8.0, and the upgrade did not go well at all. Dear me, no. The CD ROM on Gizmo refused to read all of the install CDs, so I had to do a minimal install, copy the required files in from the other CD and install extra packages normally. On the plus side, I now have very little in the way of packages that I don't need. I started off with the 476Mb Minimal Install and added things like sendmail, vim, httpd, etc. Plus I had a backup of the original installation on the second disk, so I can restore things as needed.

On the minus side, RedHat 8.0 has a number of dramatic changes which you only really notice when manually upgrading. It now uses httpd-2.0, f'r instance, which requires substantial changes to the httpd.conf file, as well as sendmail-8.12.x, which use a pretty different config. Strangely enough, I was using 8.12.8 from source before upgrading, but it wouldn't compile afterwards. Odd, but the upgrade package was 8.12.8 anyway.

I've also added an option to spell check these webpages, so ewe should knot sea Moore spilling miss steaks. UPDATE: aspell is taking a really long time (like forever, dude) to check anything with this new install, so I've disabled it until I can sort out what the issue is. I'm guessing that there's some sort of file permissions problem as it's faster when the root user does a check.

Posted by dave on 24 March 2003 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to anyone reading this site!

Check out the alternate stylesheet. (View|Use style|winter> in Mozilla/Netscape. You can't have alternate stylesheets on IE.

Posted by dave on 01 January 2003 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Miscellaneous news

Not much going on at the moment really - I'm going to do some more fiddling with the style sheets and may try for a few different themes so that there are a few different looks to the site, even with the basic structure remaining constant. That's the nice thing about CSS, of course, style and content are separated.

I have some more pictures of Conor (and of Roxanne too, of course) which I'll scan soon and put in place. I also have a scheme for putting all the various images on their own little webpage without using a database or php or anything dynamic - probably generate pages for them through the Makefiles which build the site.

In other news, the RRDTOOL section will get more bits added to it - I'm really getting the hang of it now - I'll add more bits to each page showing the usage of each section (and maybe even each page!) over time.

Posted by dave on 30 December 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Christmas!

Another month without any news! There hasn't been a lot happening, however. I've got some time on my hands now, so I'll try and neaten up the site a little. I have done some work on the graphs in the rrdtool section and I've also upgraded gizmo. Gizmo, my web-server and mail server, is now a PIII Celeron 1300Mhz, with 768Mb RAM. The Celeron Chips are just so damn cheap over here, it's silly. I've finally retired the venerable Asus P2B motherboard and PII 350 chip which has been running more or less constantly since late 1998.

Posted by dave on 26 December 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Some News

There are some new pages here. These new pages monitor various aspects of the home network, including:

The Gizmo details are produced with RRDTOOL, which is better and more customizable than MRTG. Expect to see lots of those graphs turning up all over.

Posted by dave on 24 October 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Moving

We're doing the move tomorrow. Don't expect to see this site for a few days. Email shouldn't be affected unless I'm disconnected for more than a week or so.

Posted by dave on 09 October 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Mid Autumn

OK, I've been making lots of changes to the stylesheets today and there's more to come. I tend to assume that everyone reading this page uses a pretty recent browser like Mozilla or IE 6 (and some things don't even work with IE6), and design accordingly. Hence, if you want to see these pages the way I design them, you need a pretty recent browser.

Note that The site is readable in Netscape 4.7, but it doesn't look very nice. This is because that's an old and broken browser. Mozilla is a much nicer browser which works very well.

If you use a different browser and these pages look awful to you, please let me know.

Posted by dave on 22 September 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Stylesheets

Anyway, I've been doing a little fiddling with the stylesheets here. Like the new look? Comments to the webmaster. The backdrop is a little gecko lizard we found in our bathroom in the last flat. Geckos are harmless and eat cockroaches and other nasty bugs. I think they're cute, the wife disagrees. Roxanne is frightened of them, but a little fascinated as well. Conor just goes 'blup'

Posted by dave on 11 September 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Busy

The website is now generated from a series of data files. This won't have much effect on the overall appearance, but it does allow me to make sweeping changes with a few keystrokes and to automatically update a lot of the site.

Posted by dave on 05 August 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Semi Automated.

As you may have noticed from looking at the site, I've changed from the yearly index page format. This index page now has the last five entries on it, so it will download faster. There are other options as in the menu above, so you can see the last ten, twenty, all in reverse chronological order or read by year in order. This is down with some simple utilities. Note that the site is still not dynamic, i.e. database backed: the number of changes don't warrant the processor overhead that would take. The static pages are regenerated every now and then. I'm currently moving all the appropriate pages on this site to this generation method.

The gallery page has been updated with some new pictures.

As always, any comments on the site design, layout and content to webmaster@diaspoir.net.

The power will be off in the entire building tomorrow (Wednesday 24/07/02) from 10:00 to 13:00, so obviously this website won't be here. (Or wasn't here, if you're reading after Wednesday.) (This website is hosted on one of my Linux servers at home on the end of my DSL line, in case you're wondering.)

If you're family, we've been assured that this week is *the* week.

Posted by dave on 23 July 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Some new pages

Yikes! It's been nearly a month since the last update!

I've added two new pages showing the constant pounding my server here gets from codered/nimda viruses and people who try to crack into it. The codered/nimda page and the ssh-logon page are both updated hourly, thanks to the wonders of cron jobs.

Posted by dave on 19 July 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Later that same day

Dig the groovy fabness which is the pictorial backdrop. If you're looking at this with Mozilla, it looks nice. If you're using IE, it looks like a mess. Specifically, the image under the text scrolls with the text when it shouldn't. Again, this is down to IE not working to the CSS specification. If you haven't already done so, give mozilla a try. It's at v1.0 now, after years of solid development. It's completely compliant with the specifications and pretty fast too.

The way the backdrop works is explained by Eric Meyer in his CSS pages. Go look at this page and be prepared to drool. (Probably won't work with IE, but then, IE is not standards compliant.

Posted by dave on 05 June 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

New Style!

OK, I've made quite a lot of changes behind the scenes and some changes to the style sheets. I'm going to try and work on more new content over the next few weeks. As always, if you have comments on the look or find broken links, send email. (Even if you just want to comment on some of the content.)

Posted by dave on 24 May 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

*ahem* some changes

OK, well, one month ago, I said I'd start making changes and I've made a few, but mainly I've been setting up a behind the scenes infrastructure to make site wide changes easier. I've also started dabbling with virtual hosts, http://www.diaspoir.net and http://diaspoir.net are now two different sites.

Posted by dave on 25 April 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Linux Slut

OK, I've started making it easier for myself to update this site - I've put the website files where I can get at them more easily, and also where I can upload pictures with less hassle. You can expect to see more updates more frequently than before.

I've been pretty busy for the last few months being a Linux consultant, not much time to faff around with the website. It looks like I'll be busy for the foreseeable future too.

Posted by dave on 25 March 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Friday!

In the month since we came back from Ireland, my linksys has kept the line up without a problem, so whatever the issue over Christmas was, it's not happened again. Maybe it was an ISP problem.

There's a new section on the website: the usage page. It's automagically generated by webalizer, a program by Bradford L. Barrett. (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/). the statistics get updated once a day.

One of the hassles of running a website these days is the constant load on the server caused by people infected with the CodeRed and Nimda viruses. There are just so many idiots with insecure IIS configurations who will not upgrade their systems. I have a little script which blocks these hosts after the first time they strike, currently I have 232 hosts in there, and remember these hosts are only able to hit me once, and this list only covers the last month or so!

Fortunately for me, these virus attacks only affect Windows systems. They bounce harmlessly off my Linux based web-server. My email is also based on Linux, so I laugh at all these Windows email viruses.

I'm spending all of my working days in Linux now, being a Linux consultant and all. about the only thing I use Windows for is playing games and scanning images at home.

Now I need to find some time to update the look and content on this website...

Posted by dave on 01 February 2002 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Christmas!

OK, sorted out - I upgraded from RH7.1 to RH7.2 and a lot of stuff broke when it shouldn't have.

As most people now know, I no longer work for ____, I'm a Linux Consultant now.

Quite frankly, I'm glad I'm free of that cesspit. It was really a very unpleasant place to work and this way I get some time to build up my own business. Which is going well, by the way, I've been working full-time since I left ____.

OK, more technical problems. just wait a while and I'll sort stuff out.

Posted by dave on 23 December 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Important Announcement!

It is becoming extremely likely that this website will relocate before the end of November. The new site will probably be http://www.diaspoir.net. The reason for the change is that I'm setting up DSL at home and will running my own email and web servers from there. There will be no need to keep the Demon account going when that happens and it will go down very quickly, probably within a week.

Posted by dave on 15 November 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

More style changes

I've been fiddling with the style sheets and they look pretty good now. I've you've got a compliant browser (like ie6 or mozilla), the pages will like ok. If you've got an older one, like netscape 4.76, they may look like anything at all. NS4.76 isn't very compliant and may well do strange things. K-meleon is a nice, small browser which uses the Mozilla rendering engine. It will read your IE Favourites and Netscape bookmarks too.

I've added a little page about my home computer systems, saying what everything is and how it's all linked together.

Posted by dave on 30 October 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Oops

Well that was fun, wasn't it boys and girls? I upload a bunch of files but not the revised stylesheets and everything looked like complete cack. Right now, I'm trying to make it not look awful under IE5, despite IE5 being somewhat broken. Mozilla is a good browser, or Opera. IE6 looks good as well. If you're running Linux, Konqueror is good. I'll try it with Lynx too.

Posted by dave on 16 October 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Style Changes

I've been doing some changes to the style sheets. This probably looks better in Mozilla/Konqueror/IE6 but utter cack in IE5.

Posted by dave on 12 October 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of Changes.

Too many changes to list individually, just look at the What's New page and note all the files changed today.

Posted by dave on 07 September 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Links

I've put up a page of links which features thousands of links (about 2300 to be exact).

Posted by dave on 24 August 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Filelist

For geeky people, I've updated my filelist to have dates and times. (See File list page.)

Posted by dave on 22 August 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

tweak, tweak

Just some technical changes to the site and to the stylesheets. I've also added some new sections. The new Linux section is about the various free Unices I use. It's not exclusively Linux, there's some stuff about FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris as well, but I mainly use Linux, so I'll concentrate on that.

Posted by dave on 13 August 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

minor updates

I've noticed that I seem to be getting quite a lot of traffic recently, so I've rearranged my site so that I can see which sections are more popular. Everything should work the same as before - if it doesn't email me and let me know.

Posted by dave on 15 June 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

tweak, tweak

Following a heads-up from a reader last night, some changes to style sheets and html/css validation required.

Posted by dave on 25 February 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

tweak, tweak

Changes to the style sheet, the addition of Javascript and positions with CSS. If it looks bad, it's yer browser!

Posted by dave on 18 January 2001 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Stylesheet changes

Some big changes to the site and the style sheets. Do you like this layout? Email me with comments. Thanks

Posted by dave on 16 November 2000 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

tweak, tweak

I've been fiddling with the stylesheets today, as well as updating some of the content. There is now a page explaining the name of the site, and some incoherent wibble.

I've also updated my photography page a little. One day I may even sort out a gallery, but I've got too many photos to scan first.

Posted by dave on 01 September 2000 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Wotsit.

I've done some work on my Photography Page, and Ranted a little.

Posted by dave on 21 December 1999 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)

More News

Just some small changes in stylesheets.

Posted by dave on 18 November 1999 at 00:00 (GMT +08:00)

Categories:

Permalink | Comments (0)