Merry Crimbo and all that shenannigans……
It’s been a quiet year for blogging here. It’s been a busy year for many reasons and any blogging time has been spent on the house renovation blog and on the work blog.
On a brief tech related note, I got my entire new-old house wired with cat6, including buried wires, I used OS X far more than Linux for the first time, I switched to a Android phone (HTC Hero), which I am very pleased with.
Anyway here’s a apt picture of my new workplace for 2010. Which incidentally is heated mainly by my dual old school Xeon Linux box. I’ll try blogging more next year!
Spider haunt at the Chesterton cycle bridge
The new(ish) cycle bridge at Chesterton is well lit at night with many spotlights along its breadth. After a relatively pleasant evening spent at the Fort St George (all too rare since Greene King took over the place last year and converted it into a cheap rate All Bar One) I was cycling back and had a little trip across the bridge.
Looking at one of the beams in the middle of the bridge, there must have been close to a thousand spiders hanging there. The spotlights illuminate the webs in a very pleasant way.
(Unfortunately my new HTC Hero does not have a flash).
Although I’m sure that the main function of these lights is to make the bridge safe they have a side affect in that they have created an ideal site for webs. These lights draw in flies, moths and other flying insects, and many, many spiders have set up their fly catching homes here.
If you are ever passing after dark then go have a look. Perhaps not alone if it’s too late
Radio controlled hellicopters
Here’s A hapless fool’s foray into the world of radio controlled helicopters. Obviously far too much money than sense!
Jesus Green lock in high water
The melting snow put a lot of water into the Cam today. I’ve never seen Jesus Lock so full. There was only a 0.5 metre difference between above and below the lock gates.
As a kayakist in my past, I used to pray (figuratively speaking) for days like this. Seeing a river in spate used to get me excited, and watching the normally placid Cam, look ever so slightly turbulent was very reminiscent of that.
Here’s looking downstream. Note the boats alongside the flooded banks.
old-fashioned kernel upgrading
I keep the kernel on my Linux box fairly up to date. With more or less every point release, after my distro, Gentoo, has released a fairly ‘mature’ patched version, I upgrade. However, I’m thinking that I’m using some pretty old fashioned technqiues in doing so. For example I manually configure the kernel, my boot loader is LILO, and I do not use any of the distro’s helpers.
My usual procedure is:
copy the old config direct from /PROC and using the ‘oldconfig’ option update the config with all new options for the new kernel. Since I rarely leave this more than 1 version difference there’s generally only 20 or so differences:
cp /proc/config.gz gunzip config.gz cp config /usr/src/NEWKERNEL/.config cd /usr/src/NEWKERNEL make oldconfig
Once that’s done I compile the kernel using the bzImage image, and compile the modules and install them at the same time.
make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install
Incidentally that double ampersand is a cool shortcut. If the previous command ends with an error it does not run.
Once compiled, I change the /usr/src/linux link to the new kernel, copy it to the boot folder, add the new kernel to the lilo.conf file, run lilo, n reboot with prayer to whatever humanist non-deity you don’t believe in!
rm /usr/src/linux ln -s /usr/src/NEWKERNEL linux vi /etc/lilo.conf lilo reboot
Incidentally if you use a distro that stores the Linux headers, or rather iuses the kernel ones, in /usr/src/linux, then be careful changing this link. Luckily the distro I use stores these in another place, so you can upgrade kernels willy nilly, without affecting what glibc is compiled with.
New House New blog? How 2008 is that?
So the new house is ours (well 4 weeks now, but what with Crimbo etc….). Since this is going to be a fairly long renovation/rebuild there’s a blog to show it all! If you’re at all interested please visit, although you might want to wait until there’s some content!
In the meantime here’s a picture of my office to be! 
Nokia Email service graduates as part of Nokia Messaging
Nokia Mail graduates from the beta labs finally. I’ve been using this for a while now and it’s pretty good. I do not have the experience of a Blackberry to compare, but it surpasses all other mobile email I’ve ever used.
Nokia Email service graduates as part of Nokia Messaging: ”
Written by Davis Fields, Nokia Messaging team
Hello,
It’s Davis Fields and I’m happy to announce the official release of Nokia Messaging. Please go to http://email.nokia.com to download the latest version. I’m also proud to say that we are graduating the program from Beta Labs. The Nokia Messaging team has gained so much from you, our users, during our time here. We started our beta in August 2008 with the first release of Nokia Email service. We will be rolling out the service on a country by country basis starting with Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and Venezuela. You are free to continue using the service until it’s commercially available in your location.
Here are the highlights of this release:
- Support for Yahoo! Mail
- Support for more Nokia S60 phones
- Support for up to ten email addresses
- Support for subfolders for IMAP email accounts
- Support for Google Apps hosted email and other vanity domain email addresses
- Flagged messages will automatically become starred messages in Gmail
- More intuitive inbox navigation via a discoverable control bar
- Faster opening of inbox
- Sent email will be synced to your webmail’s sent folder for all email addresses
I can say that most of these features came from your requests, and I hope you enjoy this new release. I can also say that we are by no means done with our work – this is the first official release but we will continue to regularly offer large updates to Nokia Messaging. I want to acknowledge specifically the omission of HTML in this release – we have spent plenty of time figuring out the best way to implement HTML and we are close to delivering it, but not in this release. It’s an important feature to us.
Finally, though we’re graduating from Beta Labs today, I will continue to be listening to your feedback and keeping up the dialogue. You will be able to find future postings from me regarding Nokia Messaging at the S60 Living blog. I will continue to read and reply to emails sent to nokiaemail [at] nokia [dot] com. As always, thanks for your feedback. Enjoy the holidays and the new release of Nokia Messaging!
- Davis Fields
Nokia Messaging
“
(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)
Hackers ‘aid’ Amazon logging scam
Hackers ‘aid’ Amazon logging scam: “Hi-tech criminals have helped Brazilian logging firms evade official limits on how much timber they can harvest, says a report.”
Quite amusingly when I first read this I thought that some crackers had hacked into the logs of some Amazon transactions, and grabbed credit card details….. Of course Amazon is not the only Amazon, and neither is it the largest or most important! 
(Via BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition.)
Will future generations regard the Plane Stupids as heroes?
I’m sure that the Daily Mail etc… of the Suffragette (city?) era swore and cursed them. I’m also sure that Rachel Silent Spring was cursed (..and still is by pesticide companies) by the tabloid press. So will history regard the Plane Stupid people in the same way that we rightly regard these people as heroes?
Although I do not agree with illegal protests, I’m off the mind that our children (or theirs) will regard the Plane Stupids as people who took a stand. They took a fairly lonely position as obstacles in the unrelenting carbon burning nature of our apathy. I may even pop in Lush next week (even though it does stink) and buy something!
Making Time machine backups easier with a ReadyNAS
The latest beta firmware for the ReadyNas contains support for easy addition of the unit for Time Machine. I’ve been using it for two Macs for a while and it does work nicely. Although I’ve not had to use a backup in anger yet!
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