Somewhere out there!

For your friends and family who don’t understand the web design process, show them this site. Should help explain things you you point out that, being a developer you talk in 1 and 0s.

I’ve just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.0. The new version seems quite nice, I actually like the WYSIWYG editor, plus the new ajax features are good. When I get some future time I want to upgrade my theme to something new. First I’ll probably have to do some work on the top10 plugin which I use as a view counter on my posts.

Also, I setup a Feedburner account and created two feed trackers for my posts and comments. However, I had some issues with the redirection magic in htaccess. So getting that fully functional is something else for a future todo list action. Feedburner saves me the bother of parsing my apache log file, although there are some Wordpess stats plugins I could consider as well.

Run across a pile of interesting tools and cool gadgets of the last couple days:

URLy Warning is a Windows version of curl, cron and diff. Undoubtablely useful for you stock trader friends.

LibraryThing is like flickr/de.licio.us, but for your books. I wish I’d discovered this before I’d purchase Delicious Library. Definitely more useful when travelling. Although the video barcode scanning is damn useful.

The Noguchi Filing System, a useful management hack for organising paperwork. Particularily useful as it provides an inbuilt method for dealing with when to archive.

I’ve been thinking about trying out a PSP for quite a well. Now I’ve got a Treo 650 (which is a very good phone and reasonable good PDA, review to come sometime in the future), my iPAQ hx4700 is now really finding time only for reading dot-lit ebooks. If I could find some way to read dot-lit and ereader ebooks on the PSP. Then ombined with the Neo 4-in-1 Pad the PSP would quite useful. AA battery option, CF or SD slot. Combined with the large clean screen it would become the better travel companion, with a much improved form factor over the hx4700.

Some what odd but cool, a gamer pillow raises heads, lowers posture expectations. Not that I game much these days, but the several other places this might be useful, like as one commenter states on a plane.

Finally from: TED Blog: Inspired Holiday Gifts, Part 2:

For someone who loves entertainment … and being first on the block: Sony LocationFree TV. Watch your Tivo’d programs, local TV, or your DVD collection from anywhere in the world. The base station in your home streams the video over a broadband connection; the LocationFree TV screen — or your PlayStation Portable handheld! — receives it at the other end. All we can say is: Wow. TEDster Dan Dubno’s review (in his holiday gift guide), will get them started. $1099 w/7-inch TV at SonyStyle

CORE FORCE provides pf for Windows. Damn that’s cool. There are a few reports that it works well.

At the moment I’m using a licensed version of Kerio. WhenI stop traveling I’ll do an install and run a test.

I’ve just installed this comment-spam plugin Akismet from the WordPress.com crowd.

At the moment I still get the odd storm of spam. Mostly though it ends up in my moderation queue. Sometimes this obscures the odd real comment, hopefully this will improve things. We’ll see how well it goes over the next month.

Performancing is a Firefox extension that provides a full featured blog editor.

Some useful hints for running Debian/domU from the Xen Wiki:

I encountered the following problems when setting up Debian 3.1 as a DomU on Xen3.0 Unstable for the XenDemoLaptop:

1. When booting, I get “Couldnt get a file decriptor referring to the console” about 100 times.

• Fix: Remove /etc/rcS.d/S05initrd-tools.sh

When booting, I get lots of “FATAL: Module blah not found”

• Fix: Remove offending modules from file /etc/modules

When booting, after it says “Starting hotplug subsystem:” some of the say “[failed]”

• Fix: Move offending modules out of /etc/hotplug/

Sun’s released ZFS for OpenSolarias and it looks very cool. Couple of flash demos show how easy it is to manage and its selfhealing abilities.

It would be very interesting to see the possibilities of this combined with OpenSolarias acting as a dom0.

My new v20z was taking an annoying amount of time to boot. Checking the console and a quick google I discover this hint.

The following works well:

title Xen 3.0 / XenLinux 2.6.12.5 / Unstable
kernel /xen-3.0-devel.gz dom0_mem=262144
module /vmlinuz-2.6.12-xen0 root=/dev/sda3 ro console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0 hda=none hdb=none

The same thread had a link to this interesting site that produces boot charts.

Point and Print in Samba is a nice short article about how to install print driver into samba, Windows clients pick this driver up correctly. I had to do some additional fiddling with force user and changing the readonly setting, so I could actually get the drivers installed, but it worked eventually.

Something I should have figured out many years ago.