Category Archives: Reviews

The ubiquitous reviews category – food, books, music, whatever.

Coming back online, one step at a time

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I’m recovering my server functionality at a fairly steady rate – the web stuff was back by yesterday evening, and I’ve spent this morning putting the mail back together (with a brief detour to walk in to work to look for my Postfix book and take photos of the snow-covered landscape). With mail being handled by my laptop for the moment, I decided to look at other options available to me for mail storage, including Hula and Cyrus.

Cyrus didn’t want to play nicely at all, so it got chucked out as fast as I had installed it. Hula, however, was another matter. A quick load of some development packages onto the Kubuntu server, and it compiled like a dream. Installation is fairly painless, and the integrated web admin module is very reminiscent of ConsoleOne – which is to be expected, as Hula is founded on Novell’s NetMail. I’ve worked with NetMail and Groupwise before, so the interface wasn’t too confusing. The online documentation is fairly solid too. The only issue I had was that it didn’t play nice with Konqueror, requiring Firefox to display everything properly.

The integrated calendaring is nice, and the fact they brought over the user proxy (give another login read-only or read-write access to your mail and calendar) is nifty goodness. It also seems to implement the Single Copy Mail Store that both Groupwise and NetMail utilise, which would make it very useful for a large-scale deployment where you want to conserve disk space. The web mail interface is no Squirrelmail, but it’s certainly useable – my only beef with it was that the template file that controls the appearance is binary. This is the *nix world guys, please give me text files (or text files and a compiler!). Can’t complain much though, it’s not even a stable project.

In the end, however, I’ve gone back to Courier IMAP, Cyrus SASL and Postfix as my mail solution. It’s the one I’m familiar with, and my existing mail spool is a Courier-generated Maildir. I’ve managed to to the install with pure packages this time though (at least so far, maildrop might not have SQL support which will be a blow) – previous installs have always been ‘from scratch’. The only thing that did bite me hard was that I previously had smtpd.conf (the file with the auxprop configuration for SASL) in /etc/postfix. The Debian/Ubuntu package wants it in /etc/postfix/sasl – or at least a symlink to the installation elsewhere. *twitch*

An adventure in Snowdonia

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The forecast for this weekend was for where I live to be cloudy, but nice and sunny in the west. A consultation with my parents gave me some place names to visit, and I was off to Cymru (Wales) this morning, bright and early (well, sort of early – 8 A.M.). Out of Newcastle via the A34 and the A500, across the A534 and A41, in search of a magic road called the A55 that runs just south of Chester out towards Llandudno (and if you’re not Welsh, you probably can’t pronounce that name [properly that is]). If the forecast was accurate, it’d be a good day for taking photos with the 5D.

The weather forecast was indeed accurate, and the grey skies of Staffordshire and Cheshire gave way to brilliant sunshine and blue skies as I motored along through Wales. It really is a nice easy run, once you ignore the hops you have to take to actually reach the A55. While heading to Llandudno, one has to pass Bodelwyddan (where I saw a wonderful airy looking church, I’ll have to go back there) and then go through Colwyn Bay, and early on a winter’s morning, it’s quite a beautiful sight. The morning sun was just lighting up the headlands, while the rest of the bay was in a bit of shadow.

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Quieting the beast

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The computer that serves up this site, handles my mail and acts as my workstation at home is a fairly decent box – Athlon 64, 1 GB RAM and something approximating 300 GB of disk. Not too shabby as a personal server really.

Recently, the sound level from it has been irritating me, as it’s been loud enough to penetrate into my bedroom. I grew up with a computer in the room, and all of my college days I had at least 1 computer (often more) in the room when I was sleeping. This was a different kind of sound though, the sound of a fan that’s had too much dust to eat and is out to make my life painful. It was succeeding.

So, how to solve this problem? A Scythe Ninja of course! Oh, and some rubber mounts for the fans. I sourced all of the parts from Quiet PC (UK) – decent prices and very fast shipping.
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KDE 3.5 is out!

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Apparently KDE 3.5 is out, and the Kubuntu hackers have released the packages for Breezy within a few days. So what’s a KDE fan(atic?) to do when faced with the knowledge? Add the repository to my list of places to get software from and apt-get dist-upgrade of course! Standard upgrade doesn’t work due to some libraries being obsoleted and thus held back, and thus holding back some applications.

First impressions? Nicer eye candy, a wee bit faster (subjective) than 3.4.3, some nifty features in the CD handling code and Kopete has picked up the webcamera support (which I was fiddling with ages ago when it was very unstable). ArtsD is still as annoying as ever, but that’s a legacy issue with Arts. Hopefully it’ll be gone by 4.0. In the mean time, I’m probably going to look on eBay for an old SB Live PCI so that I can get a hardware mixer and use Alsa instead.

My boss asked me about a decent linux distro he could run in VMWare 5.5 – so I’ve pointed him at Breezy, and so far he’s happy. wonder how long that’ll last? His last impression of KDE was on a RH 7.3 install, so it wasn’t very impressive, and had an annoying tendency to go splat.

Mice. The electronic type.

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My faithful(ish) Wireless Intellimouse Explorer has been giving me some grief recently. Even with new or fully charged batteries as the power supply, it randomly decides that the LED is going to flash like mad, not read the surface, and stop my cursor dead in its tracks. Very very annoying when trying to use Kmail to read an e-mail – I can navigate with a keyboard quite well, but it’s still bloody annoying. As a contrast, my corded Intellimouse Explorer (generation 1 or 2) has never, ever given me grief. It’s over 5 years old, a fair chunk of the paint has been worn off, and it works absolutely brilliantly. I may not like Microsoft’s operating systems much, but they do make (or used to make) some very decent hardware.

So I wandered over to PCWorld today, and browsed their mouse selection. It’s a bit stunning to see how many are wireless. You can get your basic mouse – two buttons and maybe a wheel in corded. You can get your superfast Logitech MX 518 gaming grade mouse corded (at the low low price of 50 quid). Everything else on display (well, box display) is wireless. Or cordless to use Logitech’s term. What on earth happened to the wired Intellimouse Explorer, currently in generation 4 if Microsoft is to be believed? Do they not sell?

I figured I’d give Microsoft another chance, and acquired a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 5000 (high definition technology, magnifier and tilt wheel – yeah baby!). Oh yes, PCWorld used to let you play with mice in the store, see which ones fit you hand and so on. Not any more. That sucks. Paid with the debit card and went back to work. Got home this evening and carefully unpacked the mouse in case I’d have to return it.

Problem 1: It jitters worse than my older WIE. Much worse. Unuseably worse.

Problem 2: The mouse wheel feels like goo. There is no other term I can think of that adequately describes the absolute lack of tactile feedback from the mouse wheel. I’m a Model M keyboard type of person – I like solid feedback that tells me the mechanical unit has performed an action. Goo that leaves me wondering if I actually just scrolled the wheel or not is not a good thing.

Problem 3: Tilt wheels are useless for me. I use my index finger to scroll the wheel. I’m used to being able to apply a bit of pressure because the wheel only goes forwards, backwards and down. Simple. With the tilt wheel, when I wasn’t trying to work out if I was actually scrolling forwards, I was trying to work out if I just went sideways. That goo feedback in the wheel is just horrible.

So it’s going back tomorrow. I’m getting my money back, and I’m going to find a nice generation 2 Intellimouse Explorer on eBay. I don’t care if it’s used, and has no paint. So long as it tracks and clicks accurately, I’m not complaining.

MMORPGing

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A few months back, a friend of mine (Hi Andy!) introduced me to City of Heroes. It’s a fairly interesting game, though I find the concept of shards of the world being wholly independent a bit restricting. If there are people all around the world playing, I’d like to be able to interact with them – much like how MUDs are.

Browsing around the other day on Ars Technica, I hopped into the Gaming forum and browsed a few of the threads. One of them was about a game called EVE Online, and the concept seemed quite cool. It’s essentially Elite on 3D steroids and a much, much bigger universe. Even better, everyone is in the same universe at the same time – there’s ‘one’ server (in reality, a cluster of blades), and everyone is visible. Well, sort of visible. If you’re not in the same region, or even solar system, you won’t see the person (other than perhaps the Corp channel etc).
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Now powered by a /29

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With the move to a 2 Mbit ADSL line, I decided to upgrade a few other components in my network. I’m now using a ZyXEL 660HW ADSL modem/router combination to provide my LAN with Internet access. Previously, I was using a SAR 110 router – it did a decent job, but was unable to handle multiple IP addresses. With the ZyXEL in place, I duly filled in a RIPE form and sent it to Force9‘s support team. Less than 24 hours later, I had a shiny new /29 allocated to my network.
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