Somewhere out there!

Like many people these days, the internet is now an extension of my brain. I find new knowledge and skills simplely by googling it. In the complicated world we live in, there is only so much you can hold in your awareness at one moment. The internet provides the opportunity for near-line memory. A hook into billions of other brains. The question is how to control it, search it and like any good memory system cross-referrence current knowledge with past expereince. So many times I’ve remebered something I’d see on a webpage that would help me now, but I for the life of me could could not find the bookmark or the right google expression.

Every so often you randomly run across something truely useful.

Had some trouble getting Dark Horse CRM to work with Tomcat on Debian, I suspect it is because Tomcat is only at version 4 in sid. So I decided to try running it on Gentoo.

I’ve never run Gentoo before, and in fact since 1996 when it comes to Linux pretty much only run Debian. Like most people I started with Slackware, tried Red Hat, fiddled with Stampede and finally found Debian to the be all and end all.

Anyway it wasn’t to hard to get a Gentoo image running on my UML colo server. Simply matter of creating a loop-back filesystem, untaring a stage3 complete copy of gentoo (stage3-i686-2004.1.tar.bz2) then firing it up.

I mostly followed this reference when I was doing the inital upgrade.

At this point in time, debian is still my favourite distribution. I can’t see it changing. Source compiles my be good for desktops, but I think for servers it leaves the possible issue of a easy access compiler. Better not to make things easy for a hacker. Plus the /usr/portage files take up a lot of room. At the moment the smallest I can get gentoo is 1.1G. With debian its down at 150Mb.

Regards its doing the job for me now, Dark Horse CRM deployed without a hitch onto Tomcat5 running on Gentoo. I’ll probably keep it running on this, even if I find a way to get it running on Debian. Its always good to learn new environments.

Its possible I might look at a desktop based on gentoo. I certainly see the benefits of its cut-edge package management for getting the most of your system. I’m not talking about better performance, but an easy way to have the latest packages compiled with the options you want.

I usually forget this exact recipe.


openssl rsa -in privkey.pem -out server.key


Wouldn’t it be nice to have this view outside your window:
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See more here.

Is nice when one of your friends throw something from up the past.

I enjoyed a night or two in this House No. 611 in Babine Kuće, on Mjlet, five years ago less a few weeks.

See this galley for some pictures.

I’ve had a copy of Crossover Plugin and then Office floating around since the Codeweavers first started selling their product. When it first came out it did some pretty cool things, and I got it so I could run Excel and Word Viewer on my machine for the times when (sometimes) Gnumeric or (mostly) Abiword couldn’t read a file I need. Unfortunately it couldn’t handle Lotus Smartsuite, the office application we used internally so it didn’t see much use.

Openbsd just gets better day-by-day.

Now it has a builtin pf rulset optimiser.

Hardy character entity chart.

Saw this movie yesterday as part of the New Zealand 2004 Film Festival.

Its a French comedy directed by Francis Veber, with Gérard Depardieu as Quentin, a good-natured idiot embarking on a life of crime, and Jean Reno as hard-boiled Ruby, a vengeful crook with enemies everywhere.