by Mary
Very busy at the moment trying to get my team elected to the uni newspaper editorship next year. Apparently we shouldn’t attend classes all week to facilitate our chances – I’ve missed too much maths as it is.
This is all requiring about 10% more energy than I possess. Hack-mode would cost me my health if indulged in in the next week 🙂
Life
Sick… head cold and tired. Concentration seriously shot.
Geeking
Time to become a hardware geek and do hardware magic… or at least ethernet cable magic so my computer doesn’t fall off the house network.
Linux
Very seriously considering nuking SuSE in favour of Debian. Perhaps will get a potato CD burnt soon (update: well 2.2 now I guess. I don’t know. Potato is a cooler name).
Games
Playing Baldur’s Gate and Quake 3 on and off – this is the very first time I’ve had a computer capable of playing games from the last three years. Consequently, this is the first time I’ve played games in 4 or 5 years.
Site
Added some links and information provided by Laurel and Telsa. Maybe other people will discover it exists. Perhaps not until it is actually useful though.
Stuff
Became insane recently, so I went and bought tickets to the Olympics, which I thought I would never do. At least it’s not at Sterile Park (Homebush Bay).
As long as karma doesn’t require us to be evicted with no cause (requiring 60 days notice in NSW) in retaliation.
Computer
Beginning to regret having done the default SuSE install, instead of taking time to handpick packages (no ssh was installed for instance). Also discovered the Mutt it was running was 1.0.1 and I couldn’t find a more recent RPM – am I navigating mirror.aarnet.edu.au wrong? So I compiled 1.2.5 but haven’t managed to get it to use colour.
Apparently 7.0 is out, I wonder how much has changed?
Code
C++-ed for uni for the first time. I haven’t C-ed since last year and I’d forgotten the niceness of pointers. Nice.
Certifications
Re the article: I notice a lot of diary entires in the ‘most recent’ list are by Journeyers. A few weeks ago the entries were weighted towards Apprentices and Observers much more. Is this:
Hopefully it’s the second alternative.
New computer hassles – my life as a newbie sysadmin
Had a bad time trying to get Windows to ignore my extended parition (instead of mounting the first 2GB as E: since it couldn’t see any logical drives). Eventually changed the partition type to 85 (Linux extend) and it was happy.
Now trying to uninstall sendmail in favour of exim (oh the dependancy horror…). At the moment, I think the permissions and ownerships are buggered. I think the exim page is down, so I can’t RTFM right at the moment.
Update: That’s OK. It was bad permissions. But now I have to rewrite its init script for SuSE since I installed the Red Hat RPM.
… is my new computer. Named for Titus Groan, Earl of Gormenghast in the chronicles by Mervyn Peake.
Default SuSE install was fine. Not too concerned abiout open ports today due to machine being completely isolated 🙂 Will eventually close off almost everything and especially the telnet port to annoy my ssh-wastes-bandwidth- won’t-install-it flatmate.
OK, so it’s a 566 Celeron, which isn’t top of the line these days, but KDE shouldn’t take that long to load. Will have to take that off. Yay for fvwm2!
Windows yet to go on, left a partition for it, plenty large enough for Baldurs Gate and BGII (and Quake and …)
If kannel looks any good when I get round to compling it, I’ll probably get the relevant bits and build a better testing environment around it. One where the gateway gives helpful error messages.
Andrew will probably burn a Linux distro for me tomorrow. Maybe SuSE. Hopefully he won’t sneakily install it, either because he’d be really interested (and he would be), and because I will stress if anything goes wrong (which I will). Neither is a valid reason to do an install without me present. And in control.
XHTML1.0
Got my personal homepage to validate, which is… concerning. Now trying to sell stylesheets (as opposed to formatting with FONT tags and such like) to everyone.
Certifications
Have discovered I seem to have the power to pass along ‘Apprentice’ certs single-handedly. I discovered this by certifying Judith, due to her being a being documenter. I like documenters :). About to certify farrellj , because he certified me. And claiming to have coined the term ‘Slashdot effect’ deserves credit.
Salon
Wow… I just beat the rush to join.
Diaries, certificates and certification
I notice an unusual number of diary entries today by Observers 🙂 For a few days, I was one of maybe two Observer diary entires there – I guess they tend to get ‘trying hard’ Apprentice certs and blend in more nicely with the other colours.
But most of the diary entires seem to be by Journeyers. I wonder if:
It does seem that Journeyer or Master is the level you’d settle at. Hacking doesn’t appear to me to be the sort of thing you just ‘dabble’ in every so often – it’s too much work – you either love it or go away and install it.
It would be interesting to know the number of all certificates on the site, and the levels of participation (measured by certification, certifying others, replying to articles, or diary entries) over various time frames by various groups, and the certification of the participants. This site is very much skewed, it appears to me, to the Journeyer level of participation. Is there flexibility to skew it towards the Apprentice level, or Master level? Are the certs pyramidrical, should they be, will they be?
It will be interesting to see what happens. I hope the diary entries don’t scroll too fast – it would stem the trickle of people saying ‘you want a project – here’s a project!’ to me – thanks guys!
Site
Now has a few projects, adding a couple a day.
Life
New computer being paid for today! I’m nearly convinced to use Debian.