Computers
I return once more, with a startling proposal. In the scientific spirit that governs this here blog, I am about to shake the mathematical world to its very foundations.
The basis of what I am about to lies shortly after prehistoric times, when the ancient Greeks started drawing stick figures on the ground, and thus realised that the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter is a constant number, and is approximately 3.14, as we all know.
This last month I have grown very fond of Ubuntu. I have installed it on some 4 PCs around the house and at work, and it works very well (also, I love Beryl). While I haven’t completely switched from Windows, Linux beats Windows on a server by far.
One of the things I could never get to work is local hostname resolution under Ubuntu. None of the PCs I installed it on could resolve hostnames in the local network (LAN, for those of you who didn’t understand that other term). I searched for days and days, and finally I found how to do it somewhere, but now I don’t remember where.
It is time for me to create something magnificent, but I am all out of ideas. Ideally, I'd like to write a tutorial or something to that effect, but I don't know what on. So, what would you like to learn? I guess if you knew what you wanted to know you'd already know it, but I'm open to ideas. Post comments here (you don't have to register) and I'll get right on it.
Today was a very important day for me. I logged on to my site to reconfigure something, and I saw some new comments posted. When I read them, I couldn’t believe my eyes! I had my first flamer! I am posting the first comment below, for posterity:
abou u malaka e; ti vlakas
Submitted by Anonymous (147.27.15.101) on Thu, 20/10/2005 – 05:42.
abou u malaka e; ti vlakas anthrwpos thee mou…pata sth gh paliolinatsa poutanoksekoliara poutsomounoxeilou kariolomouna paparologe malakokefale poutsogleiftra kolovlaxe
This roughly translates to… Err.. Well, it’s a string of obscenities. The English language is really not as good at curseword variety as Greek, so I cannot directly translate words such as “dickpussylipper” (yes, the words are top-notch, such that only the mind of an eight-year-old could concoct), which together with the other comments loosely translates to “U r dumb, u suk, omg get of ur hi horse”. I never thought a day would come that I would be graced with this honour. Indeed, a flamer is the highest of all fans, and shows that you don’t go unnoticed.
OK, it’s like this: Originally I had one 80 GB disk, one 120 GB disk and a 160 GB one that stopped working three months after I bought it (damn Maxtor). Last week I got a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda so I’d finally have some space (all the other disks were full).
The new disk arrived, I ghosted the 80 one on the 250 (after quite a few crashes and hangs, which after a while stopped), and I installed the 80 on my fileserver, while still keeping the files as a backup. Three days ago I decided the new disk was working well enough, so I formatted the old one and went on my way, when suddenly yesterday the 120 spun down and hung the entire system. I removed and replugged the cable and it worked, but as a precaution I copied everything on it to the 250 (which still had 30 GB left). I decided that I’d delete it when I needed the space if the other disk was working fine.
Here you can find some scripts I made. The python ones require Python (obviously), which you can get from ActiveState.
