A New Chance

Category Ebooks
Im sorry that there is so little on this blog recently that is either Lotus or fencing orientated, but there are so many other interesting things going on, the one that caught my attention today was a book called "The Pictures and Diary of a Wartime Artist", its a fabulous book, giving a never seen before view of WW1,
but the bit that makes is pertinent to this blog is the fact that not only is it available in ebook only (at http://www.greatwarartist.com/ ), but that this is not made obvious in the reviews in the newspapers or on the radio, a first i think for the UK, i certainly cant recall a ebook being reviewed on the quality of its content rather than the fact its E-book format only.
On a tech side note, the ebook format they use, works fine in all browsers (its flash based) but the off-line version only works on windows (not even on my vmware machine), and the printing is limited to 15 pages at a given time, but after 10mins savaging, i have a full size standard pdf that work everywhere (even on the Sony Ebook and kindle), again DRM proves pointless and just irritates. (shrug)

Posted by Mark At 23:47:52 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category None
Is it me, or has anyone else noticed, this trend of putting multiple page articles on the web when they could quite happily live on a single page? i can understand the logic to it, ie that more page views mean more add space, and it is a good idea (we all have to make a living), but they are taking it to far i reckon, if i can see the "Next" or "page 1 of 5" buttons without any scrolling at all, then i just close the article as they are taking the Mickey, in the end is self destructive, just like people not watching movies that have too many add breaks. (waves walking stick and mutters)

Posted by Mark At 09:04:42 Location | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category Join the Trend


1) Pile of linux boxes, with over the top speakers

2) The Fabled Lost Tribes Of Hard drives

3) Graveyard of cables

4) Understanding Girlfriend



5) This is not a random trailing network cable that trips people up, its not, its not, its not!!.

6) Proven Technology

7) My Babies (i love my drobos)

This is the same as Matt White and co. are doing, come on Ben join in!!

The reason that my shots are so close and narrow focus (unlike the other bloggers), is although the majority of the flat is vastly interesting (in a though the key hole kind of way), explaining and coping with the embarrassment would take me more time than i have left to live.

Posted by Mark At 20:17:22 Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category Fun
I see nothing wrong with this, it is proof there are still sane people in the world Play Wii with a Japanese Maid

Posted by Mark At 14:52:22 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Rant Rant Hate Hate
As a half admin/half dev i always like to take the other persons point of view (which is even a good view for life), but this bloke takes the biscuit and in fact has made my and a number of other peoples life hell, this gentle man is the head of the http://www.five-ten-sg.com, and his view of spam is draconian by even the most deranged point of view, if he catches a spammer on a ISP network, he blacklists all IP address on that network, ALL IP'S!!!, WTF!!,
It turns out that someone who is hosted by fasthosts.com, has performed a "misc" offence against his spamming rules, and now all my domains have been black listed because i have the affrontory to share the same hosting provider as them, to add to this you cant request your ip address to be removed like other blacklists (there is rumours that you can with cash but i don't have anything other than forum notes to substantiate this), and there are no contact details on the site (have to get them from whois), thankfully not many Spam agencies use his company, but enough for me to get complaints,

I thought i must be going daft but a quick goggling shows that i am by no means alone, so if you are an admin, please stop using this loonies black list (quite a lot of the black list monitors don't even list his sites as they are classed and "unreliable and unreasonable", but as a crowning example i give this in which he has used his position as a black list controller to black list the whole ip range of a magazine company (all associated and innocent companies included {some 127 publications}) who have phoned him up twice in 6 months to sell him their magazine.

There are levels in the fight against Spam, people, you don't nuke a town to get one killer, you don't ban an ISP to get one spammer.

Posted by Mark At 17:01:24 Location 2 circle of hell | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category None
Being the dirty traitor i am, i have spent the day coding ASP web sites (Microsoft Visual Developer 2008 free version), i know, i know, but yah got to earn a living, i have to say that Microsoft basic methodology and layout style have not changed (its been 3 years since i last did .Net stuff), and quite frankly that's a good thing, im reskinning someone else's site, so i don't get to take advantage of the famous Microsoft wizards, but one thing i have noticed, Microsoft development environment still throws the same hissy fit when you step out the box and start fiddling, it is however very very polished and give you a good reminder of why it so popular.

Nearer home, the Domino Beta 2 client on Linux has improved in both speed and functions (we now have spell checker back, along with some strange graphical glitches), Soooo want the Dev client.

Posted by Mark At 19:07:11 Location Home | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category None
Well UKlug has finished and i really enjoyed it, learnt a lot and took home some great things, but to put it all in bullet points

Good:
1) Some real big guns there and some fantastic speakers
2) Very well organised and venue was perfect.
3) Very good vendor turn out and we went away with a couple of them we will use.
4) Cutting edge (well as far as notes can be).

Bad:
1) I completely screwed up my session (very poor proof reading, under ran, projector was max 640x480, which was to low for my content but i had not thought to check before, overly nervy), though got more people coming up to me afterwards for thanks, questions and requests than the last one (perhaps it was out of pity)
2) I think that keeping a big gun talk for last session, would stop people like me slopping of to the pub and staying there on a warm Friday afternoon.

Neutral:
1) Faced the double edge sword of London being the venue, on the plus side its very easy for a lot of people to get too and so the official attendance is high, but on the down side, people don't commit to it and so drop out as work finds it easy to cancel/call back people, but what can you do about that

Posted by Mark At 15:44:14 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category request
Ive got my new redhat box working with domino 8.5 (using only ftp and ssh), and it all looks sweet, there were however a bunch of gotcha's (took me 5 hours {including 2.5 hour files upload}) so I'm currently writing a dummies guide, that takes nothing for granted, and includes all the little offshoots you need to install (change firewalls, create users etc), are there any requests?

Posted by Mark At 11:34:11 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Windows to Linux
Another 2 Windows apps bite the dust and i shuffle over to linux, this time its windows remote control, down to rdesktop,
It has lots of nice and expected options, i use the following in a taskbar icon

"rdesktop -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD -0 SERVERNAME:3389"

the "-0" is the same as "/console"

And also "super cat" down to "Removable media catalog management", does what it says on the tin, no further details needed (i use if for keeping a list of the files i have on my NAS)

Posted by Mark At 11:36:21 Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category 2 penny worth
Scenting the air for the movement of the market, in the sand or up your a**e,
I'm with Ben on this one (though i think his choice of laptop stinks), i read his article on exchange with interest, and was glad of the info.



P.S. if IBM stopped trying to flog websfear as a replacement to notes (YES THEY DO!!!!), we might feel more like they are our benefactors, rather than as at the moment "Oh chr**t it's IBM consulting!!, get your cheque books and WebSphere manuals out"

Posted by Mark At 11:10:51 Location | Permalink | Comments (2)