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Wed, 23 Jun 2010

I'm definitely still alive

Allie Brosh's take on not being dead

Yes, folks. If you haven't been stalkfollowing me on various other online channels (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.), it might have appeared to you as if I was no longer alive.

A blog with no updates in over 6 months! Heavens.

However, the truth is that I've had a number of pressing matters to attend to.

Mostly they relate to my personal finances and to my Fathers' health.

Fortunately both of them are slightly better now.

I shall endeavour to post once a week, or more frequently, when I've got interesting news / reviews / rants I'd like to share with all three of you (Hi Mum! Hi Dad! Hello you other weirdo!)

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Wed, 16 Jan 2008

We're back. And, we won.

Actually I never went away, yes 22 months is a long time between blog entries, I just got distracted by travelling and working at AwayPhone. I'm still there and we are looking for one or two developers, principally in the US (Washington state) — but as a global company, not necessarily — so let us know (ASCII only, spell-checked, coherent English, etc.) if you are interested.

I've been on (technically) holidays for the past few weeks, but I find myself awake, reviewing code at 02:45 (now 03:30) and trying to catch up on emails. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who always used to shout “RELAX!” whenever we went bar-hopping. I've been trying to apply that to a broader area of life than just bars but it appears that it just isn't how I'm wired to operate; for better or worse.

That means, that whilst in Australia, I'm also rebuilding my mothers' IT infrastructure at her publishing company. I want it all to survive without any intervention for at least 2 years. So, I've been evaluating various pieces of kit. My conclusions:

NetGear
Switches, Modems (ADSL) and Wireless access points
Western Digital
Linux NAS boxes (they have Samba, rsync and SSH on pre-installed. I'd expect a firmware update from the makers to incorporate iSCSI and allow you to join a domain shortly).
HP
Desktops and Servers. Although I wish Bdale has some influence within HP and I did not have to taint the kernel of my servers. Seriously, it is because of that I re-do a price/functionality check everything time I go to purchase a machine. HP only just get it right.
Linksys / Cisco - snom
VoIP handsets. To be honest, this category is still being evaluated; but I'm leaning towards snom.

I realise everyone has probably been burnt but some of the vendors mentioned above but this is my experience of them. You'll notice nothing about laptops. I'm looking around for a decent vendor, I'll let you know if I find one.

If you have been following along, you will notice that the Netgear ADSL modems (DM111P) runs Linux. The WD MyBook World Editions II's, run Linux (and I'd expect that they could be coaxed very easily into running generic Debian). The HP stuff (mostly) runs Linux. As does the Linksys and snom handsets.

We won.

Now, I've got to figure out how to setup Clonezilla so that the desktop Windows machines can be replaced when they fail. And I have less than 144 hours to do so. There is nothing like a deadline to concentrate your mind.

P.S. I do have some half-finished entries for the intervening 22 months, I will clean them up and post them under their original dates in the next few weeks

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Thu, 10 Nov 2005

Plugins I have installed

Michael Still writes about Trackback pings.

I'm still not used to blosxom and how everything fits together but I thought I'd enumerate the plugins I've installed.

categorytree
I've actually got this named as 01categorytree, so it runs first, but it gives me the listing of topics I've posted too
extrensionless
I'm a big fan of Cool URIs, this helps me almost get there. Bonus points to those who can work out where I don't quite make the magic happen seemlessly. Oh, named 02extensionless.
atomfeed
As every good blogger knows, syndication is the name of the game. While you got use the deprecated RSS, Atom is where is it at. I've actually disabled RSS feeds in preference to atom
breadcrumbs
On permalink posts, you'll see a click-trail. All professional websites have them, so I figured I should too.
calendar
Presents a calendar with all the posts you've done on various days highlighted, so you can quickly determine when someone has been sleeping or has been an insomniac
config
Comes with the Debian blosxom package, and originates with the author. Allows you to customise configuration dependant on where the post is in your heirarchy and other magic.
directorybrowse
If you have deep category hierarchies this makes all the elements of the paths clickable. It's cool, you want it.
feedback
Part of the blogging scene is to allow other people to comment upon what you've written. This gives them comments and trackbacks. I've modified this somewhat and still need to fixup how comments are previewed but otherwise this plugin is gold
flavourdir
Also part of the blosxom package, this means you do not have to have your blog entries intermingled with the page templates (known as flavours) used to display them
interpolate_fancy
For large plugins, like feedback, you might end with some text on your template that you only want displayed some of the time. This enhances blosxom so your template (flavour) can have conditionals, comparisons and whatnot.
multcat
Not everything can be easily catagorised into one thing. This lets you put a post into multiple places. It'd be nice if all the categories a post was under was displayed as part of the category path
rendertime
Calculates the amount of time the page took to render

On my todo list is to convert from a table based layout to a fluid CSS one. It'll probably be a 3-columned look with fixed-width sidebars since negative margins looks are harder to get right.

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Wed, 02 Nov 2005

Yay!

First post. I too have decided to get into the whole blogging scene.

I looked around at various pieces of software and only blosxom and pyblosxom fitted my criteria.

My criteria was pretty simple:

Both blosxom and pyblosxom have those but I found it easier to get blosxom setup and running. Eventually I'll write up a colophon about what I have and how it is configured. However, please excuse the very rudimentary setup I have — it'll get better in time.

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ॐ (aum) - what was, what is and what will be, wildfire's musings

Anand Kumria
wildfire@progsoc.org

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