Peter Murdoch

So I’ve just migrated from my Shared hosting account of about two years to a VPS with my existing host of almost three years, A Small Orange

It’s good, albeit somewhat frustrating at first, to have complete control over my all-in-one mail/web/DNS/whatever server. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to play with things like BIND in a production environment, and combined with yum (CentOS’ package manager, for the uninitiated) being somewhat of a headache, I’d probably have a face-shaped pool of blood on my desk and/or keyboard letter imprints on my forehead if it wasn’t for the help of a certain IRC-goer, so cheers to mgdm, to whom I now owe three pints (one for each daemon he fixed)

Anyway, still a few kinks to work out because I basically just Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V’d over the old file hierarchy to the new machine out of sheer laziness, so things like mod_rewrite are playing up just now and I can’t be bothered to configure them (which is why I’ve disabled it temporarily and you might end up with a few 404s every now and then, but I’ll fix them in the next few days… not that anyone cares), but thankfully mod_userdir is working fine save a few permission mask issues, making handing out tidbits of webspace to friends in need less of a headache.

Oh, and has anyone else experienced annoyances with recursive file transfers over FTP? I tried things like lftp and yafc amongst others, but ended up just using fish (yay for Konqueror integration) for the sake of saving what little sanity I have left.

In other news, I fail at blogging regularly. With a total viewerbase of about three, I don’t see the need to update, though it’s been a long-standing wish of mine to make this blog a lot more technical and a lot less about me. However, in the meantime it’s about me, so I should probably mention that I recently started work at o2, who severely overpay me, give me far more benefits than what I deserve, and pool tables. I love pool.

It’s still January. It is still January. It feels like January’s lasted forever.

Well, happy new year. And with a happy new year comes a happy new desktop: you’re probably aware by now that KDE 4.0.0 has been officially released and, as Jeremy Whiting (and apparently myself) would say, it rocks like a fish Praise and criticism is all over the Intarweb for the 4.0.0 release, and I’d give nothing but praise for it. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s the first release, which is what the critics don’t seem to understand. It’s the foundations of what’s to come: you can’t criticise a building when only a few bricks have been laid. Wait until the building is complete, and it’ll turn out to be a mansion. Metaphorically.

If you want to see how a hundred thousand people celebrated the release of kde4, have a look at Riddell’s video footage of the pre-release event here. This release event had over a million quid worth of fireworks and an army of security on the night of the 31st December 2007, 11pm-1am in Edinburgh’s city centre. No other events were on that night. Honestly.

Whilst on the subject of KDE, I’ve now started (unofficially) working on the merge of KBruch and KPercentage. It was agreed during the E-Team’s Paris meeting in December that they should be merged, and I remember saying “meh, I might do that” afterwards. Well, it’s begun, and it’ll take a while, but once I have something that works — time permitting due to work and college — it should be in playground within a week or so under the development name of KMath. We’ll see how things turn out, I suppose

On top of that, I’ve recently invested in a new monitor, the Samsung SM226BW. For not much over £200 + delivery, you get a hell of a lot mroe than what you pay for. After a few days of fiddling around with multiple graphics cards and xorg.conf I managed to set it up as the left monitor on a dual-head display (Click. I realise the whiteboard says “get something to eat”. It should be noted that was added several days ago and I have eaten many times since then). Hopefully this should increase my productivity as I plan to have apidox/references/tutorials/etc. on my right monitor whilst I do all my coding on my left. It also means that instead of only spreading my work across eight virtual desktops, I now have my work spread across twelve virtual desktops across two displays. It’s like overkill, only it’s much, much more pretentious! Oh, and thanks to Kenny who helped me set up the dual display/donated one of the cards

As far as gaming goes, I sent my broken copy of Halo 3 back to Microsoft to receive a replacement copy amazingly quickly: three days after posting. By my logic that’s one day to get it to them, one day to chuck the old disc and send the new disc, and one day to send it back to me. One thing is that despite the disc being a PAL disc with a PEGI rating, the box clearly states “Not for supply in the UK”… And yes, they sent a replacement box along with the disc; presumably due to the fact that the case is what causes the disc issues in the first place.

Talking of gaming, I’ve been on XBox Live for a while now, but not many folks know my gamertag. It’s lostrootpass if you ever feel like a game of anything. Currently working my way through Burnout Paradise. Oh, and no bonus points for guessing what the gamertag means