Somewhere out there!

Planning to move to a centralised logging system using a database. Mainly so I can keep log entries around for at least 6 months, plus to make it easier to find and sort entries with one of the php based log-display systems.

Couple of methods avaliable that look interesting: Syslog Logging with PostgreSQL HOWTO and Centralized syslog-ng to Mysql.

Will have to investigate further.

Following up from the Earth at Night post a few days back, here is a slashdot post with a link to a site with a population density map.

Using kprinter directly would often bring on a whole pile of warning messages like “kdecore (KIconLoader): WARNING: Icon directory /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ group 48×48/stock/media not valid” for empty directories. Annoying to say the least.

Final forced myself google for a solution. I must say the KDE has some real nice flexibilities in configuration.

Astronomy Picture of the Day is a constant source of interesting view-points on our universe.

I think it would be revealing if we overlayed a population density with todays picture. You would probably see which parts of the world have a high level of living compared to those that don’t.

I’m not sure I trust Sony, but the Sony U-70 sure looks sexy. Small nootbooks and PDAs are rapidly converging on each other. Another interesting unit is the Pocket Loox 720 by Fujitsu. Particular since it can “operate as a USB 1.1 host”.

Last year I almost bought a Fujitsu P-1120. In the end I decided both that it didn’t have USB2 and that I could wait. Although it could fit in a pocket, it just didn’t quite seem to have enough modern features.

Now that I’m off the beast-master system upgrade horse, having replaced my gaming platform with the XBox, and in the process saving myself a lot of cash. My remaining goal is too thin-client myself. With a combination of Win4Lin, Crossover, KDE and NX running on top of UML, I can set myself up almost anywhere running almost anything.

These pocket based systems combined with WiFi and GPRS certainly seem like a good step along that way. Your front end becomes nearly throw-away.

Remebering passwords is a chore, its becoming more important with the ready increase in cracking power. I can just see some windows worm being designed right now to provide more distributed horse-power to crack passwords and distributed disk space to create massive password dictionaries. Combined with a little more cunning, these beasts are going to start automatically cracking passwords on systems they compromise.

There was a recent discussion on debian-user with some clever ideas for generating passwords.

Personally I agree with Karsten M. Self. Eventually the best way to secure our systems is going to be with tokens.

Quick receipe for building sparse filesytems for use with User-Mode Linux.


dd if=/dev/zero of=filesystem.ext2 seek=1024 count=1 bs=4M
/sbin/mkfs -t ext2 filesystem.ext2


This produces for me an empty loopback filesystem which is only 70M in size.

I find Daily Python-URL one of my best sources for new and interesting software. It had a link to an article today with mention of three “interesting enterprise-ready open source applications”, particularly SugarCRM. Following up on this application with freshmeat I found a reference to another CRM, XRMS.

Both these applications look good, not quite as functional as Dark Horse CRM but because they are LAMP applications easier to modify and upgrade. Neither currently has a calender modules, though there is some talk of adding Wed Calender to XRMS.

SugarCRM seems to have a nice interface and more features for building relations between contacts but no file attachment ability. XRMS has a cleaner interface with the ability to add plugins.

I’ll have to look closer at the code for both applications before I decided which is the better to use.

Went to see this movie on the 23rd.

Was a some what weird exploration of Korean life. Very a raw movie, with the story not holding together very well at the end. Unless maybe if you where Korean. Unfortunately I think might have enjoyed Before Sunset instead. It happened to be on at the same time. In fact a friend told me a couple days later that she really enjoyed it.

This site has a huge list of different CRM software. Its doesn’t mention DarkHorseCRM which is the best I’ve found so far.

Still looking for the prefect one though.