Author: Paul Tansom

Linux & retro computer geek who likes to sail boats when he can. Keen on wildlife, particularly cetaceans & caught on stage on occasion.

Point and Click ‘experts’

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November 8, 2005

2:52 pm

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Computers

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I’ve been resisting blogging this piece for about two months, but it bugs me so I’ve given in.

I’ve been working with somebody who hasn’t upgraded their mail server for a while now and they have been using a well known local company (which I will not be naming or identifying in any way). Sadly I am only involved on the domain side of things and not the implementation. Thankfully for the end users I know enough about their setup to save them from the ‘experts’ doing the work.

The first thing to do was install a new ADSL line ready for the shiny new Exchange server. The first I was aware of this was a request to point the MX record at the IP of the new ADSL connection. I almost did this on the assumption of some degree of technical competence, and more significantly the assumption that they had installed the new server they were talking about. I wasn’t completely convinced though, so double checked. The new server was not installed, and they knew little if anything about the existing setup. They were unaware of the following information:

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Whoops we’re aground!

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November 6, 2005

11:51 pm

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Sailing

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Well yesterday was intended to be a trip to the boat for a check of the engine and a quick run down harbour and back to check everything was ready fot coming ashore next weekend. Things didn’t go according to plan though!

The club has just purchased its own lifting gear and tractor to manage launch and lift out each year, and this year is going to be the first time it has been used. When we got down to the club we found that the tractor drivers were having a bit of practice with the new equipment and bringing a couple of boats ashore early (since the weather was reasonably good). On the way down the slip we were asked whether we would like to come ashore too. Well why not be a guinea pig?!

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Which dot dot dot… again!

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November 6, 2005

11:12 pm

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General

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Well I haven’t really given much thought to updating by blog for a while now (nearly a month in fact), which starts me wondering whether my initial thoughts that, at least for me, blogging wasn’t really worthwhile may have been accurate. Still, I checked through the Hantslug Planet today (again for the first time in about a month) and spotted another one of these questionnaires. I’m still not entirely sure why I did another one, but anyway, I came out as:

Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are you?

Well that didn’t come out too bad did it? It could certainly have been a lot worse, after all some people come out as Wesley! Since the text appears to be missing from the link and image (unlike the others) I’ll add it – it could be critically important after all 😉

Jean-Luc Picard An accomplished diplomat who can virtually do no wrong, you sometimes know it is best to rely on the council of others while holding the reins. There are some words which I have known since I was a schoolboy. “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” These words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie — as a wisdom, and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.

Dual screen configuration – first pass

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October 11, 2005

1:20 am

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Linux

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OK, as a first pass at getting my two graphics cards working in a dual head mode I’ve made the following key changes to my XF86Config-4 file. This is by no means exhaustive, but should give a few reference notes to refer to. A HantsLUG wiki entry is planned 🙂

First off the Device sections. I had an original one for my NVidia card along these lines:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "NVidia GeForce MX 440"
        Driver          "vesa"
#       Driver          "nv"
#       Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "UseFBDev"              "true"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Note that the two commented out lines are due to switches back and forth with the NVidia drivers. So far the vesa one is the only on that has consistently worked and for my usage is doing me fine for now!

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Old Monitors

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October 10, 2005

10:04 am

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Computers

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I finally hooked up a pair of old monitors onto my computer system last night which resulted in a small ‘yay’. It may seem a bit odd putting old monitors on, but the ones they replaced (an old Dell 17″ Trinitron and an ADI Microscan GT56 – again 17″ Trinitron) weren’t really that much newer, if at all. Sadly these two screens don’t appear to have built in anti-glare, but they are still nice Trinitron tubes. The screens are a matching pair of Iiyama Vision Master Pro 400 17″ monitors that I picked up from Jamies, so that must beg the question, “what was the point of switching?”.

Well these screens have dual inputs instead of the usual captive lead or single D-Sub. They still have the D-Sub, but in addition they have a set of 5 BNC connectors. This allows me to use a different lead that I’ve had kicking around for some time unused to connect to the computer, but more importantly it allows me to connect two computers at the same time and switch between them and therefore saves me a £200 outlay on a KVM (the cost of a Belkin twin screen USB keyboard and mouse unit with necessary cables). Although it doesn’t give me keyboard and mouse switching it does have one advantage over the KVM – it allows me to switch the screens individually.

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System building

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October 2, 2005

12:07 am

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Windows

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I was planning to head to the LUG meeting today, but a combination of over tiredness, things that needed doing and apathy set in and it didn’t happen. What did happen was supposed to be reasonably productive – once I’d got myself going that is!

The first achievement was a good positive one. I tried the scanner I picked up from Jamies a while ago for the second time and found it actually worked. My first test was simply a power on test and when the scanning light didn’t come on and it made no noise or other indication of life I feared the worst. Well it seems that the modern USB scanners do the sensible thing and stay dormant until required – and this includes keeping the light off. My ancient SCSI one has the bulb lit permanently and makes a solid clunking sound as the mechanism checks that it is settled in the parked position as soon as power is applied.

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Planet bug

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September 30, 2005

11:57 pm

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Web

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By the looks of things there is a bug in the Planet software that HantsLUG is using. I’ve just been tidying up my posts to ensure that my HTML is correct. The fact that each individual entry is then stitched together left me with a few teething problems unfortunately.

Anyway, all is now working fine, but in the process I had to escape some sections of quoted HTML. This left me with a whole load of < and > characters converted to &#60; and &#62; entries in there. This is fine except when it occurs in the title line of the RSS feed that Planet works with. In this case the first & of the escape secuence is escaped itself, so you end up with &#60; and &#62; actually showing up in the text because the first & has been replaced by &amp; (and you should see how this entry looks in raw HTML!).

Me vs Windows: a printer installation

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September 30, 2005

12:02 am

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Windows

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Daft subject? Maybe, but one more reason why Windows is clearly not ready for the desktop yet! I’ve spent good chunk of today trying to install 3 Hewlett Packard network printers onto a Windows XP Professional installation. This is a clean install of the OS, so shouldn’t be far away from pristine condition.

It should be easy, especially with the Install Network Printer Wizard that HP provide. This scans the network to identify any printers available and will then configure and install all the necessary settings. Well it will if it doesn’t get to the last stage and then decide that it has an unknown error and back out the whole operation. This happens every single time it is used on all three network printers.

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Incompetent Revenue

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September 29, 2005

11:12 pm

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General

Yesterday I got a lovely letter through from the Inland Revenue regarding my PAYE and NIC contributions and talking about ways and means to avoid ‘recovery proceedings’. This worried me a little to say the least so I phoned them up to find out what was going on. The person at the other end of the phone started asking about how I filed my P35 and when, so it was on to the accountants next. This resulted in a bit of slightly frustrated explanation from the accountants.

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Firefox configuration URL

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September 28, 2005

11:35 am

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Computers

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I’ve just had a bit of fun hunting around to remind my self of this very handy URL for working with the Firefox configuration, so thought I’d post it here so I can access it easily. – about:config – just type that into the location and off you go. I’d post it as a link, but it doesn’t work when I do that 🙁

Actually this gives me a good idea. I have a whole raft of text documents sitting around waiting for me to experiment with a Wiki for long enough to define a structure and migrate them into it for reference. Blosxom could actually act as either a very quick and handy stop-gap or possibly a excellent alternative to this! Since it basically works by turning a directory structure of .txt documents into a Blog all I need to do is categorise the .txt files into directories and add a first line matching a subject and Blosxom will handle the rest.

OK, just need about and hour spare an I can do that 🙂