July 2004 Archives

A couple of months ago I was experimenting with Mandrake on my ancient Dell laptop. Well time goes on and so does my choice of distro for my laptop. Although Mandrake was working fine I decided to experiment a little, so I replaced Mandrake 9.* with Mandrake 10 via a net install. Once that was running "happily" it was time to change again, so the next distro I tried was Suse 9. We'd got all the disks from the nice people in Novell who we met at the ICT Expo, so the install was easy enough. To make things a little more interesting I decided to replace the default desktop with Ximian. Ximian is designed very much with the corporate environment in mind. It's very nice to look at and easy to use, but it wasn't really for me. I also encountered a couple of odd issues with my wireless connection. Although it worked fine when it was "up" the boot sequence was a bit demented and loaded modules in a rather strange order. End result being that I had to manually enable the wireless connection after boot. It may not take long to drop into a shell as root and type: ifup eth0 But I really don't see why I should have to go to that trouble every single time I boot the system. So what could I try? I didn't particularly want Redhat, Tao or Whitebox, so I decided I'd give Debian a go. Debian stable (woody) has been out for over 2 years at this stage, so, although there are "back ports" of recent applications, it isn't really at the "cutting edge". There were two other options: - Unstable - Testing

Sony has won a landmark case in the UK against a British citizen accused of illegally supplying mod chips for Sony playstations. The ruling follows on the implementation of stringent EU copyright laws late last year. Yet another blow against consumers has been struck.

Google seems to have changed its listing criteria yet again. One possible theory being posited for this latest sea change is the growth of sales in text links. Whether this is true or not is really a matter of making an educated guess, rather than anything based on concrete facts. Why so? Well Google don't make a habit of releasing their secrets Some search phrases that I normally track are returning a very mixed bag of results, while others are returning a lot of "spam" URLs and little or no real content. The first set of results is bearable, however the second set is quite disturbing, especially as the engine seems to have completly dropped most of the genuine listings for the keywords. In the light of the constant changes to the Googlebot and its listing criteria this kind of change is having a highly detrimental effect on some commercial sites.

This site is now running on Apache 2 on Debian. The last time I used apache 2 it was an early release and the configuration structure and methods was almost identical to the 1.* series. The current version uses similar directives, so implementing vhosts (virtual hosts) has not changed that dramatically, however the actual method for configuring them has. Under the Apache 1.3.29, for example, all directives were contained in httpd.conf, whereas with apache 2 that file is completely blank. I found that a little bit confusing at first :) So how do you actually do it?

In order to prevent spammers from posting hundreds of comments to this blog I have added an anti-spam check. It's not configured correctly yet, but at least it stops all the spam stonedead! (It also stops valid comments, but there weren't that many of them anyway :) )

Adsense, Google's adpublishing system for website owners, is constantly being updated. Over the last couple of months they have added support for graphical adverts and even more formats and styles. I've been using it to publish adverts on a number of sites, including this one. It may not bring in "piles" of money, but it is better than a kick in the teeth. What really impressed me was the speed of their support department to answer my queries. I submitted a request the other day and they responded within a couple of hours. Considering the size of the company and the number of publishers that they have this is truly impressive

Lots of controversy.... It seems that the US won't be allowing cinemas to show the film directly prior to the US presedentials as it may influence voters.