New Car

oh, I also bought a new car on Saturday.

I pick it up on Thursday, and spent Monday morning and about an hour today doing the insurance dance of poverty (mention you’re under 25 and they pull out the remove-left-arm-and-leg device).

Change of Jobs – now MySQL AB

As of the 1st of December (my start date), I’ll be a Software Engineer at MySQL AB.

Exciting stuff.

last day at SGI today

Today is my last day working at SGI, and I’m home sick. have been all week. urgh.

So i’ll end up popping in next week to say goodbye to workmates that i’ve had this year.

Soon, I’ll be starting at my next job – so all excited for that!

gnumeric or OpenOffice

for spreadsheet (tax time again)

i like gnumeric – but it doesn’t have that split screen view thing that i find really useful.

oh well… i only use a spreadsheet a handful of times in a year

GnuCash

Have just spent a whole lot of time importing my financial data into GnuCash with the hope of actually trying to manage my finances.

With luck, this will make the next tax return easier – plus let me have some idea of where my money actually goes.

I now know that my CD and DVD habit costs me more than my petrol habit.

Remote Serial Console HOWTO

Remote Serial Console HOWTO

You can have a serial console to GRUB – something i didn’t know. Which is cool – and sometimes needed.

The last thing you need is to drag your (soon to be) sweaty ass into a hot sauna server room to select a working kernel.

Integrating MemberDB with LA’s look-and-feel

Well… since LA actually has a look and feel now (thanks to the new website), I have to make good on the “site look is independent of the actual memberdb code” statement.

It’s proving to be sorta-true. A couple more patches into memberdb and it should all be right.

Oh, not to mention patches to the LA website :)

We’re going to have to undo some of those silly styling things (such as styling all h1 tags to be in the same position on the screen).

Screenshot of an Early effort at integrating LA's website with MemberDB

ACA Consumer Information: SPAM

ACA Consumer Information: SPAM

I’m very tempted to add a procmail rule that forwards all spam to the reporting address… Although i pity the poor people on the other end of that.

Although.. getting rid of spam and prosecuting (executing even – i really don’t mind) spammers is a REALLY GOOD use of my tax dollars!

blog spam hitting wordpress

*sigh*… now blog spam is hitting wordpress blogs. At least there’s a “Moderate all posts” option – unlike the crud that is MovableType. Well… MovableType before it went *really* non-free.

parallelised init

well… i don’t know if i’ve blogged this – but the other day i decided to see what would happen if all my startup items were done in parallel. Being the lazy guy that I am, i decided to just edit the rc script and add a & to the startup function.

Believe it or not, this actually worked!

Yes… things started up in parallel. Granted, because of the way debian prints things out it looked ugly… but everything worked. Now, to find some time to play with it some more and get GDM up first so we can log in while everything else loads.

It’s part of my “i really don’t need postgresql, squid, rsync, smartmontools, ssh, apache and cups loaded before i start the login process.”

Things should be dynamic and cope with services, networks etc starting/stopping/restarting.

Besides… you can always have a “login requirements” list or something if you really do think that mysqld should be running before you log in.

Augie March Gig

last night – Augie March. They sooooo rock. Of course, since it’s an augie march gig – everything broke. Took about 10 mins for them to get glenn’s guitar plugged in properly – and naturally somebody with the knobs couldn’t get anything done without a lot of nasty feedback. But it all worked out in the end.

Brundism is awesome live.

Lots of new stuff last night – quite like it. esp a few of the songs.

they played “moth ball” and altough glenn made no promises he’d actually remember it – did really well and it sounded devine. with the soft sweetness at the start coming into a wonderful loud and rocky bit at the end.

good night it was.

Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu Linux – Welcome to Ubuntu Linux

Yes… the super secret debian project is out of the bag!

Installing on my crash-n-burn machine now…

so far:
– text install will be replaced with GUI in next release (good thing)
– ext3 is default filesystem (eww).
– install taking an okay amount of time
– nice splash screen.