It’s time for the world to know…
Bernie & I are expecting our first child, due end Jan / start Feb 2003.
Does this mean I have an excuse to sit up all night and write stuff, or that all this mindless drivel gets replaced with baby photos and stories? We will see.
Today I found the html tag <::abbr title=Full Name”>::Abbreviation<::/abbr>:: which is used to expand on abbreviations. For example, I live in the state of VIC, which displays VIC, but when you hold the cursor over it in a html 4.01 compliant browser, it displays Victoria. In order to write this page, I also had to relearn howto display html using & lt:: and & gt:: to display < and >. All rather neat.
I spent some time to get things upgraded and life has improved.
I upgraded to RedHat 7.2, which gave me improved versions of Mozilla, Koffice and Kde, which have fixed most of my problems. I’ve also moved over to Mozilla for both Mail and Web, which is tighter. I can now open Excel docs in kspread, and copy and paste between all apps.
The LDAP problem is better, in that it is now looking for names, but lastname first, which is not my preferred method. I still havent looked into mounting netware volumes. Other problems include not being able to print.
I’m barely using the VMWare app at all.
Now that I have a copy of VMWare, I’ve taken the liberty of moving myself off into the Linux world and trying to wean myself of Windows. The transition has not been painless, but growing never is.
I’m using Mozilla 0.7 for Web, Netscape 4.77 for mail (with Groupwise available in the VMWare window). All of this is sitting on top of a RedHat 7.1 system.
There are several things I’m concerned about:
It has been a long a frustrating couple of days.
On Monday afternoon a bit after 2pm, three emails turned up in my mail box with the ip address of this server as the subject. This made me instantly suspicious, so I ssh’d into the server and found it had been hacked. I downed it straight away to avoid further problems, but I already had problems enough. Someone using ManiaC r00tkit had got in and defaced the main web page among other things.
We ended up rebuilding the server Monday night, and got all the we pages back up, but there was a problem with email until Wednesday lunchtime. Much more work needs to be done on hardeneing the system. The new server is already more secure, and it will get better.
I had a great chat with my boss Steve today. We talked long and hard about the plans for the lab and what that would mean for us and the fact that if we grew much we would need more staff. I also expressed an opinion (that I really didn’t even know I had) that I was not enjoying some of the work we did for the Magazine any longer and I preferred doing the government and corporate contract work. This is mainly due to the less geek/more business focus of the new magazine, which I’m struggling to get used to.
He took this all pretty well, and I was glad to get it off my chest. We were then able to get down to the nitty gritty of what needed to be done for this month, and I felt much better from just having talked about it and started.
I feel that as time moves on my role will change to be more of a project manager (which is what the bigger boss, Lee wants anyway) and i’ll be overseeing projects in a way that means I can still get my hands dirty and use my talents in the field, but also use my organizational and lateral thinking talents to develop the business even further.
Well, we started doing a bit around the pond area at the front over the couple of weekends. Bern weeded the whole area and started the process of getting it to look good. Then Jase and I managed to manhandle a bunch of Huge (some 100Kg+) rocks into place for the waterfall. After a quick test we found the waterfall was fairly good, but not perfect, but by that time Connor was getting grumpy so Jase went home.
I decided to go out last night after work and see if I could improve things but one of the rock was faw too heavy and in the process of trying to move it, one of the other rocks fell off and rolled into the pond, smashing the pump in the process. Hopefully I can fix it with some super glue, or I might need to go and buy myself one of those hot glue guns.
In the meantime I’ll need to organise some help again I think to switch two of the rocks around.
I got sick of having to explain where the toilets are at work, so I decided I’d write a Toilet HOWTO to put up on the door at work. I thought I’d GPL it in case someone else wants to use it…
Toilet HOWTO
1. Grab the wooden wedge from the lunchroom window ledge beside you
2. Wedge open this door so you can get back in
3. Go up 2 flights of stairs and through the door and to the right
4. Now you have to make a decision
5F. Ladies, follow the right wall past the notice boards and you are there
5M. Men, the toilets are almost immediately on your left
This HOWTO is free software:: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation:: either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This HOWTO is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY:: without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this HOWTO, but it would not fit on the door. If you really want one, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Last night we went to see what could best be described as an interactive musical called The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The original story was written by Charles Dickens, who had the ill manners to die before completeing the story and telling us whodunnit”, which is where the interactive part comes in. Towards the end the audience are asked to vote on who the murderer is and which two characters should fall in love (and do the penultimate duet). It was quite an enjoyable evening. I love live theatre.