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Ubuntu 8.04 upgrade woes

Ubuntu’s generally splendid Linux distribution came up to version 8.04 a few days ago.

The three Ubuntu systems in my life were headed for an upgrade! First off a Kubuntu laptop I use for work. Fairly vanilla configuration. Upgrade took a while due to a *lot* of downloads, but it went well and the upgraded system worked fine. [EDIT: See below - Later saw this upgrade was bad too...]

Unfortunately this encouraged me to try two others, which both went very badly…
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Support Dan and his Data!

It’s an honour and a privilege to elevate two-fingers at the people trying to censor Dan - he of Dan’s Data, one of the better (and more idiosyncratic) technology sites on the Internet. Go to his site and see the story posted today, 19th February 2008, about how Firepower are being a pain and coming on all heavy. Go here for a fuller discussion.

And the item they wish to censor? GET IT HERE!!!!!!

EDIT: And here is Dan’s analysis of the document.

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KDE 4. Short but not sweet.

This is going to be just about the briefest review of KDE 4 you’ll read anywhere.

First things first: I LIKE KDE. I like it a lot, and have done for years. I use it every day (literally) and always look forward to new versions. They just get better and better.

KDE 4 was finally released a few days ago, and I installed the Kubuntu version of it to take it for a spin.

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Building a home server

Here we look at building a cheap, quiet and compact home media server.So what is a “home-media server”? Different things to different folks, but the box I’m going to build is actually to replace an existing unit which works fine but is too large and much too noisy.

What is a home server?

Like many homes these days we have various PCs and client devices scattered around the house, all networked back to a central point and, if required, via that central point to each other. What sits at the centre? Internet access, a fat hard disk for backup of workstations’ data and a couple of server-related functions. The server-side of things has several requirements: Read the rest of this entry »

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Poor and uneducated - Call that lucky?

A story tucked away on the BBC new website a couple of days ago is entitled “Medway luckiest for lotto wins.”The story is about the “luckiest” place to buy a lotto ticket in the UK.

And how do they measure the value of “luck”?

Apparently the technique is, for a given town:

“based on the number of top prize-winning entries as a proportion of its adult population.”
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HotRecorder are crooks

HotRecorder is a neat product. Unfortunately the people who run it are a bunch of crooks.I bought HotRecorder in April 2006, being a soul who purchased music (legally!) off the iTunes store but who wished to play it on MP3 devices.

One day I was stupid enough to want to move HotRecorder from one old, unused PC to a new one. HotRecorder’s online activation said “No!”. OK, so I email the support people FOUR TIMES asking them to permit the activation of the software I had paid them for. Four times they do not even reply.

HotRecorder do not deserve your money. They are dishonest and fraudulent.

Avoid.

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Pinnacle Showcenter 1000

Media servers for Pinnacle Showcenter 1000

I’ve had a Pinnacle Showcenter 1000 for a while now. It was one of the first “simple client - smart server” devices around, and is still a great device for getting music, photos and video from a PC to a hi-fi stack and TV.

The Showcenter itself is physically located with the TV / HiFi, with a network connection back to the media server. The Showcenter has various video and audio outputs and, for the network connection back to the server, supports wired or wireless Ethernet.

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Bioshock

Bioshock is one of the most talked about games (PC and console) to be released in recent times.

Almost all the major gaming sites, or major sites who also carry some games reviews, are lost for superlatives. Check out just a handful of reviews here, here and here. These are most representative of almost every other review I have read.

And I’m confused. I bought Bioshock on release day. And these guys are just plain wrong. Bioshock’s not bad. But in many respects it’s hugely average.

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MD5 Hashes - Part 2

MD5 Encryption?

It’s been a while since I wrote the first part of this MD5 article . Here in Part 2 I’m not (yet) going to cover the subject of hash collisions… That will follow in another future part.
Just now I want to deal with the pervasive, but wrong, belief that MD5 (or any of the other hashes commonly used, e.g. SHA1) are, of themselves, a means of encrypting data. They are not. However they often, at first glance, look like they are being used as such under some circumstances. This is a widely held misunderstanding and needs to be corrected.
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Ruby on Rails. On Ubuntu.

Here’s how to do it.

I had a Ubuntu box running 6.06 (Dapper) and a vanilla install of Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL5. I wanted to dabble in Ruby on Rails using the same box, but not affect the “production” side of it.

Despite the normally trivially easy install of software on Ubuntu I banged my head against a wall for hours trying to get it working… I just could not find a simple and complete example. I know I’ll probably find that some clever clogs can reduce all of this to 5 keystrokes, but I couldn’t. So this is a complete and detailed walk-through of how to get Ruby on Rails running on an existing Ubuntu server.

My definition of success was to have a noddy “Hello World” running on a URL such as http://192.168.0.4:3000 while http://192.168.0.4/ continued to run my normal media server (i.e. via port 80) I want complete independence between then. Here goes…

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