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Old, old personal web site

by | Jun 30, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I was talking to a friend about posting to the web – and I mentioned that I’d had a personal website since about 1993. The challenge was to see if it was still hosted.

Google is my friend. I found one of my old websites – and it’s not been touched in over nine years. I’m wgetting it now to host at home. (Unlikely it’s going to go away soon – it’s been static for nine years!)

Way back in the distant past (1990) I had access to the ‘internet’ from a VMS host at university; telnet, VMSmail, lynx – all good stuff.

Just after – around 1991 – I also got a CompuServe account – mainly for access to the Novell technical forums and patches.

When I could afford a ‘better’ workstation (386dx33, 32MB RAM, 40MB HDD, Windows 3.11!) in around 1993 I finally moved to a ‘real’ dialup PPP account using Almac in Scotland. That’s when I first had personal webspace. A whole couple of meg online.

Finally I moved to UUNet/Pipex and used that service for around five years.

Now I host at home with a dedicated line and fixed IP.

It’s incredible how times have changed.

ZLM 7 mirror – zlmmirror – how to

by | Jun 28, 2005 | Linux, Uncategorized, ZENworks

Here are some examples of ZLM 7 ZLMmirror configurations – fresh from cvs.

There are several key changes to mirroring from ZENworks 6.x Linux Management or Red Carpet Enterprise:

– a single configuration file for all mirror services
– configuration file is now an XML document rather than a conf file

Examples will be given for mirroring from RCE/ZLM 6.x (such as update.novell.com), YaST Online Update, Red Hat Network and finally ZLM 7 upstream services.

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Bleak portrait photos

by | Jun 22, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I did an interview for a trade magazine a week or so ago – not an uncommon occurance; this week they are going to press and they called Rod, our PR guy, and asked for a photo to run with the article.

Hmm.

I was at Alan’s place tonight – and he’s a dab hand with the camera – so we did a couple of serious looking photos. Then really made them bleak with PhotoShop.

ezs

New Hampshire

by | Jun 21, 2005 | travel, Uncategorized

I am back in Lebanon, NH for a day or so – and what a difference from the previous visits.

The first few visits here were during the depths of winter – very cold and with a higher humidity than Utah it was bone chilling.

Today it is sunny, warm and about 30’C/90’F. This part of NH is also very green and lush; even with the prolonged rain back home it is nothing like this. It’s a real reminder of England.

Drivel

by | Jun 20, 2005 | Linux, Uncategorized

I found another nice new tool for blogging – especially when I am off-line.

Drivel is a really cool client for working with your blog – it supports the online hosted stuff like blogger as well as self-hosted sites like MovableType or WordPress.

I installed Drivel from the Fedora Core 3 RPM (runs just perfectly on NLD) – just make sure you have an updated libcurl on your system. You may need to do some jigging around with symlinks in /usr/lib if you find badly behaved/packaged applications.

Why WordPress

by | Jun 16, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I posted a few months ago on why I used Blogger. The main reason for not self-hosting was:

Without starting the whole religious war – yes there are very very strong open source blog frameworks out there; put it simply I’m just too lazy (or too busy) to get the thing deployed, tweaked, secured and customised for my world.. that’s why I’m posting here.

I wanted more control of the content; as well as the ability to control posting, comments, spam etc. I also wanted to investigate using one of the tools in production. What better way than to host.

As for my choice of WordPress – I like the plugin architecture; the post-editor; the licensing works for me. I also looked at several blog comparisions – and it really came down to personal choice.