Planetary Ponderings

openlp.org is nearing it's final release, and we're putting together a distribution pack to market openlp.org to churches. See the openlp.org website and my blog entry on there for more details.

Well, it was time for my contract upgrade, and so I decided to go for it and get the phone I've been eyeing for a while, the Sony Ericsson M600i. So I bit the bullet and paid in the extra and got the phone I wanted. Yay! Of course the cool thing about it is that it supports 3G.But in Muizenberg, 3G is another story.

Apparently I should just give in and get an mp3 player. As per our friendly IRC bot, Spinach: [11:48] <superfly> iSpinach: choose 256meg Ogg player for R378 or 1G mp3 player for R365 [11:48] <Spinach> I choose 1G mp3 player for R365, superfly So I guess it's back to oggdec track.ogg | lame -h - track.mp3. Ah well, write a bash script, that should be useful.

So this past week I re-installed my server, and I decided to write a howto for others who would like to have their own web/files/etc server at home. I decided to use Dapper, since it is the stable and well tested release. It contains recent enough software to be patched, and since it's the Long Term Support release, it'll still have security updates coming out for the next 5 years.

My setup at home is something like this:

Well, last night was successful, and I got my server up and running, dialed up to the internet, et al. Network shares are working swimmingly and LAMP with virtual hosts is fine, thanks to bind9. I'll post a HowTo early in the next year (perhaps even on New Year's day if I have the time), which will detail exactly what I did. I'll probably also then add it to the CLUG wiki so that others can benefit from it. That's all for now. Its bedtime!

I have decided to move to Ubuntu. Reason(s)?

• Ubuntu Just Works (tm).
• I use Ubuntu at work.
• I recently set up a new Ubuntu server at GnuWorld
• My server at home used to run SuSE 10.1 with ISPConfig. ISPConfig is terrible, you don't have control of your server anymore.
• SuSE's virtual hosts is messed up.
• I've been wanting to move away from YaST and to get to know the config files.
• Oh, and I'm not sure of this whole M$-Novell thing.

Well, this is to say that my blog is back in action! My previous blog was being overrun by spam, and so I *had* to get rid of it. I've also moved to WordPress, and installed the Askimet plugin to reduce comment spam. Also, people have to register/log in to be able to comment. This theme was HACKED together by me. WordPress' theme system is atrocious! You can't do ANYTHING. So I've had to revert to some hard links and things. Perhaps with a bit more fighting, I can get around the hard links.