Incredible! That’s all I can say! I acquired a Sharp Zaurus C760 PDA this week. It’s a Japanese-only PDA that runs Linux. I am very impressed with it. It’s hands-down the most powerful and versatile PDA that I’ve ever seen. Being tge Linux hacker that I am, I’m having imense fun playing around. Drop in a wireless card, and now I can do just about any system maintenance remotely. Thats enough from me – back to playing!
I finally did it. I’ve been threatening to do it for a few years, but I think that Open Source software has matured to a point where I can actually run Linux on my work laptop for most of the time. I’m taking baby steps, though. I took the 20Gb partition and partitioned off 3Gb for Linux. As I slowly get rid of the junk over on the Windows partition, I’ll change the sizes of the partitions.
The installation was relatively painless, but it did give me one heart stopper. I used Partition Magic to shrink the existing XP partition and create a Linux partition. During the shrinking, Parition Magic aborted with an error. Upon rebooting, my machine wouldn’t boot up, but presented me with a blue-screen error. I had to boot in to recovery mode from the XP CD and run chkdsk /f to bring the machine back to life. After reading some comments on the Internet, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should run chkdsk /f every time just before running Partition Magic.
I installed Red Hat on the Linux partition. This is the first dual-boot install I’ve done, and it went very smoothly. It auto detected the XP partition, and configured Grub to dual boot. Again, my readings suggest that once I’ve done this, it’s best not to delete the Linux partition, or I might lose access to XP (the Grub configuration files are actually on the Linux partition, so deleting them makes Grub unable to read it’s configuration).
I haven’t had any problems with drivers for my Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop. Redhat sees all of my hardware, even my Orinoco wireless card.
The next job is to play around with some wireless sniffing software. There’s someone in my neighborhood that my wireless card tries to associate with once in a while. I’ll have to see if I can find out more…
My wife and I were reminiscing recently about the wonderful fish and chips with curry sauce that we had on our trip to the UK. I did a bit of research to see if there was anything that we could get that was close here in Canada. I found a product that I thought we might be able to order and get shipped here.
Well, Cheryl was more resourceful than I, and found a local supplier of British imports, and picked up a package! What a wonderful surprise when I came home! A quick trip to the local ‘British’ fish & chip shop and we were set.
Now, if only I could find a local supplier for Pot Noodle…
I’m sure just about everyone has heard about the little worm that’s spreading around the Internet. Heck, even my mother asked me about it when I last talked to her. Microsoft’s solution to saving their precious WindowsUpdate service was to take down the URL completely.
Actually, the news stories are a little misleading. They’ve taked down the windowsupdate.com URL, but the windowsupdate.microsoft.com URL is still up and running. I giess Microsoft’s just fortunate that the worm author just happened to point to the alternate (shorter) URL and Microsoft’s WindowsUpdate feature built in to their operating system uses the longer URL. They’d be in big trouble if the worm was going to hit the same URL as the WindowsUpdate feature requires. Maybe next time they won’t be quite so lucky.
As an aside, here’s an interesting link to a tool put out by Microsoft that will allow the user to scan an entire subnet for machines that are still vulnerable. I found this a few days ago, and used it on our corporate network. Even though we regularly patch our machines, it still found a couple of machines that got overlooked.
This is hands-down the all-time funniest thing I have read on the Internet in as long as I can remember. I sent it out to my co-workers, and I had my entire department in tears. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Now this is cool! A two-dimensional image projected seemingly in mid-air on a curtain of mist. Not very portable, but it’s a start. Now, if only they can get a 3-D version working…
Slashdot had an interesting article that likens developing for a closed source platform to sharecropping. The article rang true with several things about Microsoft that I have come across recently. One of these is Microsoft’s recent purchase of GeCad Software. Microsoft specifically mentions that it’s a purchase of intellectual property, and that they have no plans to continue to develop GeCad’s products. This is rather unfortunate, because GeCad’s RAV antivirus software is a wonderful Linux-based antivirus mail scanner product. I wonder if the prospect of destroying a Linux product had anything to do with Microsoft’s decision. If I was Symantec right now, I’d be very worried about Microsoft muscling in on territory that’s been fair game for years.
In case anyone is interested, tomorrow is Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven. I’m starting to notice a trend at my local 7-Eleven. The slurpees are getting runnier. As I was approaching the machine, I though I spied the Coke slurpee was perfect. From a distance, you can tell by the colour of the mix in the machine exactly what the consistency is. The Pepsi one was very dark, and obviously very runny. Well, as I approached the machine, I realized that someone was playing a cruel trick on me – it wasn’t Coke – it was Vanilla Coke! What an awful slurpee flavour (it’s terrible as a beverage – freezing it does nothing to enhance the experience). What was I left with? Grape, or some mexican thing. Ewww.
Talking of slurpees, I ran across this online diary the other day. It’s obsessive-compulsives like this that help me feel normal.
The strangest conversation happened at work today. It was concerning an ingredient in HP Sauce. The ingredients include tamarind. Well, one staff member insisted that a tamarind was a kind of fruit. I, on the other hand, was convinced that a tamarind was a kind of bearded monkey.
A quick google, and I was happy to see that in fact I was right.
What a busy couple of days. Last Saturday/Sunday was amater radio’s annual Field Day event. This is a 24 hour event that involves lugging thousands of dollars worth of radio equipment out into the middle of nowhere, and proceed to chant the same incantation (“CQ Field Day, CQ Field Day”) into the microphone for 24 hours, only to gather up all of the equipment and take it home again. The weekend consists of junk food and mosquitoes.
Actually, it’s lots of fun. It’s basically an emergency preparedness exercise, with a big social element thrown in. This year, we were located in Mission Creek Park in Kelowna, BC. This gave us great public exposure, with lots of people asking us questions.
This year was a double-whammy, because right after Field Day was the annual Canada Day contest. This time, we were holed up in our club shack, but the incantation was similar (“CQ Canada Day, CQ Canada Day”). I must admit that this year I sneaked away from the Canada Day contest to grab some decent shut-eye in my own bed.
Now it’s time for me to get back to work…