Speed

As a gamer and a computer orientated person, I find input and output issues to be interesting. One of the things that I find very interesting is input, by input I mean any way of putting data into a system. I just found a little game that measures your speed for mouse interactions. My best was 0.106 seconds. Have a go yourself and see how you go.

Linux and PDAs / Phones

Well my pain about what to buy in regards to pdas or phones has just got worse with the introduction of these!

New machine

Well it took a lot more effort then I thought but I finally have everything up and running on the new machine. I have even changed the architecture of my home network as well. The problem for the delay was in how I was connecting to the net. In the past I was using a usb modem which, while not a quality modem, did the job. After mirroring the old terra, I thought it should be as simple as bringing up the new box and away we go, ofcourse nothing ever is that simple :) The key problem was simply regardless of what I did I couldn't get the new machine to talk to the usb modem. At first I assumed it was just my kernel config so I spent some time rebuilding kernel after kernel, changing configs and then kernel versions around. Further research showed that the problem was the driver that powered the usb modem under linux, eciadsl, did not support non uhci usb interfaces and my new machine ofcourse didn't have any of those. After trying more kernels (I was told this problem "possibly" went away under the latest 2.6.10pre kernels, it didn't) I got fed up with the whole setup and decided that I would get some kind of dedicated device to do the internet connection. Now normally I shy away from this because I want to terminate my net connection ON a linux machine, as I have more confidence in a linux machines security and stability then I do some black box, additionally terminating it on something else means that I lose an IP, something that is problematic for me as I am short of real IPs in the first place. After some more research I realised that I could setup a bridging mode, where basically I have a adsl to ethernet converter (pure bridge) that connects to my linux box that acts as a gateway. The win with this type of setup is that I maintain my single access point (and consequently a single point of security enforcement and monitoring) but don't lose any IPs. It sounded great so after borrowing a cisco router from work I asked one of the hardcore network guys to help me out with a configuration..... 6 hours later I got a "its theorectically possible but I don't think I can get it working" reply. Hmmm. In the end it is up and running without the bridging mode so I have lost one IP, and that will do until I move to my new place and get a chance to set it all up correctly. Ofcourse what it did mean was that I had to change the IP of my main server (due to conflicts with my router) and so everyone was unable to reach the network for a longer period of time then I would have liked. Still its all up and happy now ... at least until I move house sometime in the next month.

Uptime

It seems appropriate after my recent blog about downtime to have one about uptime, especially as the lack of it recently has seen my frustration levels rise. While there are an ever increasing amount of "admins" in IT, it seems that there are an ever decreasing amount of enterprise admins. By enterprise I mean admins that know how to look after large sites and ensure uptime. That doesn't mean just making sure that the boxes are patched and functioning, but also that the design of the network and services can scale, respond to short, sharp spikes in load and generally be reliable at all times. I mean admins that know what it's like to lose thousands of pounds per second when your service is down and know how to avoid it. I say this because of two experiences in the last two days.

The first experience there was with world of warcraft. This is a new game that is set to be the next BIG thing in MMORPGs. Now for some time, Blizzard, the company that makes WoW, have been saying that they will have an "open" beta, meaning that the general public will get a chance to test the game before Blizzard marks it as ready for general consumption and final release. This is a great opportunity for people who might be interested in the game and try it out, people like me :) Now the problem with this is that the client to connect to WoW is 2.5gb, and when you have thousands of testers wanting to play that is a LOT of bandwidth needed to give each user a copy. Blizzard being scared of trying to host something like that themselves took a different route. What they did was told fileplanet that if they hosted the signup for the open beta, they would give fileplanet exclusive rights over the beta by giving them a whole heap of keys (that is the ability to actually get INTO the open beta, because while it is "open" in reality there were limited amount of positions to be filled). Fileplanet accepted and promptly started offering deals to "subscribe to fileplanet" and at the same time get "free entrance into the WoW beta". A wonderful marketing opportunity for them and Blizzard doesn't have to host it. A win all round yes? well actually NO. The problem was quite simple, despite the fact that fileplanet had obviously sold Blizzard on the idea based on their ability to host something like this, they quite clearly didn't have the skills to do it. Let me explain.

Now to jump forward a bit it turns out that the idea of anyone trying to serve out 2.5gb of data to a huge amount of yearning gamers frightened everyone involved so they came up with an interesting way around the problem by making the client you used to download the game client a custom built bit torrent client. For those of you that don't know what bit torrent is I encourage you to go its site and check it out, but for the purposes of this rant its enough to say how it works is that instead of having to download the 2.5gb from one server run by a company, instead you end up grabbing the file from other people who are downloading it as well thus allieviating the load on the companies servers. Now bearing this in mind we see fileplanet only had to do a few things:
1. provide an interface to sign up to the open beta. This was in the form on ONE webpage form which took some details you put in and dumped them into a database.
2. send the new signee a client with which to download the game (the aforementioned bittorrent client).
Now I happened to be up when the open beta finally went live and so I immediately headed over to get my key and sign up. Imagine my surprise when the company that had sold this entire idea to blizzard because of the power and size of their site, had fallen into a complete heap. For a start the web page just stopped, I mean completely halted. Then the errors started. It turned out the entire fileplanet site is run on some stupid conglomeration of MS .NET technology that quite clearly was simply not up to the task of servicing that many requests. Over the new 30 minutes I saw errors from the .NET technology, errors from the webservers, errors from the database, errors from protocols (ie timeouts) and just about everything else that could break did. Whats more you could almost SEE their technicians running around randomly restarting things and by the time they had moved on to the next broken component the first one had died under the load because it wasn't able to talk to anything else ( any decent admin would take the entire site offline, do what is needed then bring it all back at once). It would have been comical if it wasn't for the fact that I was trying to get some information out of this mess. The site was still useless a solid 8 hours later when I got up (on a different note I was able to get my key but that was because I sat there spamming a query into their DB when I knew it finally came up for a few seconds :). The whole incident really killed any faith I had in even large sites doing things "right".

The next incident that fired me up was the release of Firefox version 1 yesterday. Now this is the long awaited release of what I personally think is the best browser around right now and so I was keen to get my hands on the new version. Much to my chargrin when I went to www.mozilla.org it had slowed to a crawl, it took over 3 minutes to render one page. I was quite shocked because I always tend to think better of my free software friends then those that run MS apps but it seemed that the problem was not specific to an architecture but rather, simply a lack of good admins (I group architects in the group as admins as a good admin will do both). Now to be fair to mozilla.org it is possible that the load they experienced was simply NOT feasible to plan for, and at least their site was still working, albeit incredibly slowly. It is also possible that they knew their site would not deal with the load and that their design was near perfect BUT that they didn't have the money to setup the right infrastructure to deal with it, but I don't think so. Fileplanet certainly doesn't have that excuse as they are a commercial organisation dedicated to doing events like the WoW openbeta.

Where are all the admins?

New box

Well after looking at some more kernel panics with a friend we came to the conclusion the problem was not the usb kernel code as I had thought, but rather it looked like the hd. With that in mind I then disabled my software raid 1 setup, or at least I thought I did. It turned out that although I had disabled it at the software level when I rebooted it had "autodetected" the raid 1 configuration due to superblock modifications by raid and had booted up with raid anyway! I then rebooted passing the raid=noautodetect option to the kernel only to find that now lvm was seeing duplicate PVID's and was effectively using both HD's anyway! At least I know that I had a really resilliant setup :) Anyway after finally turning off all raid / balancing I was able to boot off one HD and see how that went under the impression that if it didn't fail it was the good HD. Ofcourse it promptly failed so I booted off the other HD now confident that it was the good HD. You can imagine my perplexion when it promptly failed even more spectacularly. Now I was left with the idea that the problem might have been one of the following:
* bad CPU
* bad motherboard (as mentioned previously there were some broken fans on the MB)
* bad ram - after all the problem was transient which is the best indication of ram, and often happened when compiling.
* bad hd - both were old scsi, in fact I have such an old scsi hd in it that its 4gb!
* bad compile options - I was using gentoo hardened which has some hardcore compile options, and then I had broken their guidelines and optimised that further. Finally I had reverted back off that and had cross compiled some binaries from my other amd box.

The more I thought about it the less sure I was that anything was fucking working as advertised, so I took the tried and tested option - I bought a new computer :) I briefly agonised about using this as an excuse to go the "full monty" and upgrade to 64 bit, but after thinking about it and talking to a friend I realised that it would be best to simply get an ultra cheap, but still very powerful "normal" upgrade. So as I write this the confirmation orders are coming in from komplett and ebuyers. The new terra will be a athlon xp 2800, 1 gig ram + other assorted goodies. I hope to have the parts and be building it by next weekend, now its over to the Brittish mail system. sigh

Downtime

Problems with my main server are persisting. It is now seemingly having a usb related kernel panic every other day. I am still trying to work out what I am going to do with my disciplina setup. I think for the interim I am going to move some services to a stable box based in Australia. I will keep you all informed.

Gaming

Being a hardcore gamer at times I found this article very interesting. It's interesting reading the old game designers opinions on things, there is such a different mindset from the old table top role players to the new, latest and greatest "hit" from a modern computer gaming studio.

Free Software

I read an article today. It was the usual war of words about free software and its sustainability. Groklaw has an editor that thinks this is the be all and end all of emphatic responses, in particular he is impressed by the clarity and style of writing that the refutation uses. I invite you to go and read both articles and form your own opinion, but I personally found the "attack" to be almost unreadble due to excessively vague and misplaced arguments and the "rebuttal" to be slightly more clear but to also be repudiating points that I didn't even consider as valid in the first place. An interesting read on this subject is the oreilly's book about Richard Stallman, it is completely free (ofcourse) and available online here.

Hardware woes

I have always thought that I have been relatively lucky when it comes to hardware. I have been using computers extensively for the last 20 years or so and I have never had a failure that has resulted in me losing all my data or having to completely replace a computer. Yet recently I am beginning to think that I am cursed and that while I have not had a failure that is decisive, that perhaps that is WORSE then what I am experiencing. Let me explain.

Currently I have 2 computers that I am using to host various things (I have others scattered around the world for redundancy but essentially the active services are run on these 2 boxen) and just when I get something setup and others start to use / rely on it something breaks. Now it is never anything major, an example might be my CPU. By "break" I mean that sometimes when doing some compiling I get an error from GCC indicating that the compilation failed due to a hardware error. At first I suspected my memory, but I have no reason to believe the RAM that has been fine for years should suddenly fail, whereas the cpu has been stressed quite severely over that period of time and some of the fans on the mainboard have failed (no not the cpu fans) and so I thought that it was simply an issue of overheating. After some cooling tests this doesn't seem to be the case as I can reproduce the gcc errors quite reliably after I have left the machine off for some time or have cooled it, whereas I can still compile other things equally CPU intensive with no problems. This doesn't sound like a major problem until you start to combine it with other things.
My main box connecting to the net is using a usb modem. I actually think that this is a good thing these days as using a seperate device, like say a adsl router, means that you are relying on a black box for you security at the net termination point which is a bad thing IMO. So while I am happy that I am connecting my net connection straight into my hardened server / router it causes a problem as the modem is usb. Currently the drivers for my modem require that usb be built as a module in the kernel which not only further increases security concerns but also means that there is a lot of loading and unloading the driver when it initially connects. Now it turns out that there are a few additional problems, firstly unix usb code is in general shit (not specifically linux) and that the code for my usb modem is not much better. So now we have a situation where we have an unreliable usb module with an unreliable driver being inserted into my kernel with some other unreliable issues like my cpu. The results are the usb section of my kernel often panics and the box locks ... this is the same box that is running all my active services. Now yes I _could_ run all my active services on my other box, my desktop we will call it. The issue with that ofcourse is that it is my desktop, which means that I use it as a testbed for all kinds of things (I am doing more and more gentoo development work and end up running such alpha quality stuff that I invariably kill it, additionally, while it is increasingly rare these days on the odd occassion I like to play some games so that means a reboot into windows and consequently downtime on all the services anyway. What this means is that I need to get a new box and migrate the important services off of the older one onto my current desktop and turn my current desktop into the new main server. Ofcourse this is complicated by the fact that I don't really NEED a new box and I particularly don't want to buy one right now when the computer industry is going through a hardware change the likes of which we have not seen since when the first pentiums were produced. I am referring to the change from 32 bit to 64 bit on the home computer, the change from atx to btx form factor and the change from pci to pci-x. I have said a lot of times that I will only buy once all of these things are readily available and hopefully the price premium has dropped a little :) So in the interim I just keep trying to keep my old server working and try to ignore the jibes from my friends about "reliability" and me being an enterprise admin ...

Heating

Europeans have a phobia about air conditioning. It was one of the more amusing things when I first discovered it, I was talking at the Goethe Institut in Berlin with a bunch of Spanish women at the time and the topic came up and I started to say how good air conditioning was (it was 30 degrees + in Berlin at the time) when they all started to say that it was bad and caused all kinds of health conditions. Now anyone that has been to Australia will attest that most Australians live in air conditioning, especially at the work place, so to have these Spaniards (and shortly thereafter almost every european within hearing joined in on the argument) say that it was very bad for you caused me to break out in laughter. Now the fact may be that air conditioning isn't GOOD for your health but to say that it is bad strikes me as being irrational, after all I have never heard of anyone getting sick from air conditioning, sure the very occasional case of legionaires disease, and the more common shock of entering a cool room after being outside in the blazing Australian sun, but never anyone having serious issues, and certainly I myself had never been sick from Air conditioning. Anyway that was my first discussion about heating in Europe.

Having just got back from Prague this all came back to my mind because I have spent the last few days in such excessively overheated environments that I am now wondering if Europeans don't have any ability to regulate their own body temperature at all or, that they are all living in the past when Europe was actually cold and they needed that level of heating, and now, although they quite clearly don't, no one has bothered to play with the automated heating in the last 20 years and they continue to just heat everything to baking temperature. For the entire time I was in Prague it didn't get below 13 or so degrees. This is not what I call a "cold" temperature, in fact during most days it sat at around 18 degrees, which is mild by anyones standards. Yet despite this fact every single place you walk into has the heating on full ball, at one shop where I could see the thermeter it was over 26 degrees! This problem is just compounded if it ever does actually get a little cold. At one point in my old workplace it was 8 degrees outside and 29 inside! Now try to tell me that such huge differences in temperature is good for you, or that you can even work in such hot tubs! This all ties into my theory that Europe just doesn't have the cold weather that it used to do (eg winters during WWII) but that the people still think its a transient thing.

Prague

Well I have just got back from Prague, it was an interesting trip. The city is very beautiful, with a mismatch of architectural styles that only continental Europe can offer. It's particularly amusing that the city center has amazing French villas, gothic churches and baroque decorations, and just over the hill outside of the old city proper you have the wonderful architecture of the communist government. At times it felt like I was back in East Berlin.
What struck me the most about my trip to Prague though, was the cost. I had always heard, as a child, about countries that were really cheap to go and visit, normally they were asian countries (a fact mainly due to growing up in Australia and also due to the economy prevalent throughout the region at that point in time) but, by the time I started travelling such tales were merely that, tales. Prague was the first time that I have visited a country where I was probably earning ten or more times the standard salary. Now admittedly we had booked by lastminute and due to my girlfriends concerns had chosen a relative cheap place, but I was in for a shock. We arrived about 9pm on Wednesday night and got the bus marked on my printout to get to the "hotel". Well we got off at the right stop and then the instructions stated "walk across the road and you will see a street called 'zikova' and we are number 13". Well, we followed the instructions and sure enough we couldn't see any street called "zikova" and after a walk around the area I was beginning to get a little concerned. Eventually I hailed down a taxi and asked him ( he had the reassuring look of someone who had been drinking all day and had passed the state of drunkeness and now was in his own little world of happiness, suffice it to say I wasn't getting in the cab) and he gave me some directions and off we went. We eventually found the "hotel" which turned out to be some gigantic, communist hostel conversion, and immediately I was starting to get angry feeling somewhat ripped off. We entered and the old lady manning the reception didn't speak a word of english, but after I said my name she perked up a little and handed me an envelope. Here's where it started to get strange :) Inside was a coupon and a hand written letter which read as follows:

Dear My Smee,
you have reservation for 1 twin room with private bathroom from 27/10/2004 for 3 nights. The room is at Hotel Masarykova. Tha'kurova 1, Prague 6. Please, give them the voucher and the will give you the key at reception. Please, could you stop here (Zikova 13) tomorrow from 10am to 1pm to pay for accommodation. Thank you.

Accompanying this was a little diagram with a big highlighted blob, presumably showing us where our new hotel was situated. My confidence at this point was reaching an all time high and thus we set out for our new place. In the end it all worked out ok, the new hotel was actually the Universities techical college and converted into quite an acceptable hotel. What truly started to amaze me though was the cost of things. One night, being very tired and out of other easy options, we decided to have dinner at the hotel restaurant. We each had a 3 course meal with multiple cocktails and coffees etc, when the bill came it was 400 kroner, which equates to about 8 pounds. All of a sudden I realised I was in the fabled country I had heard about as a kid!
I spent the majority of the next few days ducking into every store in between seeing all the tourist attractions. It was quite an experience to go out and fine dine, buy whatever you want at the shops and just not worry about money at all. Certainly it was the first experience of its kind for me.

Holiday

Well I am off in a few hours on a trip to Prague. Not sure what it will be like, but with luck given the time of year it should be quite cold and romantic (I am going with my girlfriend). My only concern at this point is whether or not I will get knocked back at the border! In the past all Australians and New Zealanders needed to have a visa to go into Czechoslovakia but apparently with its recent inclusion into the EU that has now been waived.... or at least that is what my online data mining revealed. I will find out soon enough.

The Apostrophe's Apostrophe

For some reason people have for quite some time enjoyed picking on my use of the Apostrophe. I have never quite understood why, out of all my writing shortcomings, this particular point seems to upset more people then any other, friends like Benjamin Waters, Adam Nealis and even my father. So I thought I would go and read up on precisely how you are meant to use an Apostrophe, and came up with this link. That read it has merely confirmed how I thought an apostrophe should be used, so I am none the wiser. Still going back over some other writing of mine I have noticed that I have a habit of using the apostrophe with acronyms. The problem seems to be that as an unix user I am exceptionally sensitive to capitals, and as such I tend to avoid using them at all, even when it is appropriate. This means that my abbreviations almost always are written in lower case, which then looks very strange with a "s" tacked on the end to pluralise it, hence my use of the apostrophe in such circumstances. Anyway I shall finish this blog with a request that if you ever see inappropriate use of an apostrophe in my writings let me know! That's what the comment section is for ;)

Spam

Spam normally means unsolicited email, but what has me shaking my head today is "comment spam". Get this, someone had enough spare time to write a few bots to examine rss feeds and then follow them back to their webpage origin and start posting random comments on blogs. Now the bots are not dumb, they use open proxies and constantly change their ips, the actual content of the comments is normally fairly meaningless and sometimes random, BUT the url that they use is the actual spam. In my case I already have a poker spam bot spamming my blog thats been up all of a few days. Naturally I have now put some mechanisms in place to stop it but it never ceases to amaze me that people think by putting a comment in an ordinary person's blog that they will somehow generate clicks. sigh

Opening Hours

Someone explain to me how it is that the majority of service industries can only manage to open 10-4 each day and still survive? Why is it that the majority of the work force manages to work at LEAST 9-5 and yet banks, post offices, any government department can only manage to staff themselves for a few hours a day. What's more someone explain to me how shops manage to make a profit when most of their clientele are still at work! I really don't get it, I feel like shouting to all the shops that are closed when I finish work at 6:30 to stay open for another hour or two and I would actually be able to buy something from them! I can't be the only one in this predicament.

zaurus

I have been wondering what to do about mobile technology for a while, by that I mean do you buy a telephone that is also a pda and mp3 player? or do you buy a pda that is also a mp3 player and a phone ? I always like to have best of breed products so the key question was do i sacrifice quality by combining all three into one function? For a long time now I have been very tempted to buy a zaurus, but I have put it off rationalising that I should wait for the next model because while the current model at the time didn't have inbuilt bluetooth, wireless and was running a slow cpu. Much to my relief a new zaurus has come out and, lo and behold, it has almost precisely the same specs as the old one except that now it has a pitiful 4gb hd in it! This has really put an end to my considerations about buying a pda for some time, as I am really only interested in PDAs that run linux as that best integrates with my existing infrastructure. I am still in shock though that sharp would bring out a new model, with all its associated costs, with a tiny increase in cpu speed, a pathetic hd, and still no inbuilt wifi or bluetooth. Their official reasoning is that they are focussing on the Japanese market, but this seems rather shortsighted to me, and besides talking to my friends in Japan they say that wifi is important over there anyway!

Now I have to wait for another decent linux based pda (or pda I can make linux run on well, not have to shoe horn it in like a ipaq).

Email

Email is another topic of interest / rants for me. Few things have had such a great impact on the modern way of life as email and yet we still can't even agree on the term to use! Being a unix user, I was educated early on in how to use email correctly which involved a whole ettiquette (or should that be nettiquette?). This involved not topposting and quoting correctly. It seems that increasingly few people that use email have any idea on how to post so that their message is conveyed as legibly as possible, resulting in a mismatch of horrid text, formatted in all kinds of ways and entire messages quoted, when really all that was relevant was a line or two.
Reading through my inbox this morning I wonder if in my role as security admin I can enforce a policy on how to email :)

Dark Days

I really like Europe, so much so that since I have left Australia I don't really miss a thing about it, well except for the food. Most people I come across invariably ask me at some point in the conversation "so, when are you planning on going back home?". Ofcourse this presuposes that I have a place I consider "home", and after adding up how many times I have moved in my life (34 at last count) it isn't suprising to note that I don't really have a place I consider home. Still, I get some weird looks when I explain that I have no intentions of going back to Australia, everyone in London thinks that Australia is the best place in the world to live, maybe it is, but not for me. Instead I prefer the cold, dark days of Northern Europe and believe me that is precisely what the weather is like right now.
Its hard to get used to, in Sydney it gets darker in Winter then Summer (obviously) but nothing like Northern Europe. Even here in London by the middle of Winter the sun doesn't come up until 9am ish and then its dark again by 4pm, not just the sun has gone down, but DARK. I love it :)

Browsing

I have never liked the term "surfing", as an Australian it doesn't exactly have many connotations with the electronic world, besides which it reeks of lameness. Instead I browse, although I have to admit I am not really what you would call a power browser, still I do spend some time each day looking up various things. I am inspired to write this because of two pet hates, browsers and badly designed webpages.

As a long time user of Linux I have been frustrated over the years by the lack of support for non IE browsers and while it is getting better (MS have done such a bad job with IE that people are actually leaving it in droves) there is still nothing more frustrating then going to a webpage and being told that "your browser is not able to view this site, please upgrade to IE 5+ and try again". Firstly I have no idea what they think IE 5+ can do that firefox can't but chances are they just do the check and reject you based on your user agent (the string that your browser sends to the server to identify itself and its capabilities). In reality you can probably view the site just fine, but because of some silly web designer who thought it was "kewl" to include a check and ban you, you can't view a thing. The other more frustrating thing is when you hit a web page and it is so heavily customised for IE that it really doesn't render at all in anything else. I know I am not alone in this, in fact over the years I have seen many amusing posts about this kind of thing, but it still never fails to frustrate you when you are on the receiving end. Personally I browse for information, and I want that information presented to me in an accessible, available manner, I don't want to have to dig through reems of shit, install 4 plugins and then spend 5 minutes digging through the site to find that information.

Browsers are another surprising thing for me. People continue to use IE. Think about that. This is a product that is so bad that even MS are completely rewriting it and have stopped releasing it as a stand alone product (although that was also due to their antitrust case) It has more security holes then any other browser in existance and probably more then most OSs. Now compare that with a product like Firefox. Firefox is a complete rewrite of Mozilla and has huge improvements over its predecessor. Aside from how good the rendering function is its the features that really set firefox apart, and even though many other browsers are now catching up to them (things like tabbed browsing etc are all firefox innovations AFAIK) there is one thing that still really sets firefox apart, plugins. Plugins allow you to turn your mild mannered browser into a superman of browsing kind. There are so many plugins out there that you can do almost anything you can imagine with them, from turning firefox into a rss reader, to doing dictionary checks with a click, to mouse gestures, to traffic shaping downloads there is a lot there. Click on the firefox link in my "Things I use" section and go see what I mean.

RSS

Being quite an active netizen I have seen the RSS logos around on a lot of the sites that I visit, but I had never really stopped to investigate precisely what it meant. Today, prompted by Sham at work, I did some investigation and am happy to say I have stumbled on the world of RSS. Basically RSS is just a standardized feed of any given webpage, or infact any data really. It is best used with a RSS reader that basically allows you to periodically poll a site for an update and if so it will show you a summary (or in fact the full text its definable) and provide you a link to the full story. I did some research and the best one I have found yet for unix is Liferea which seems to have all the features that you could want and a decent interface. My only issue with it is that as a KDE user I had to install half of gnome to get it working, but it was worth it.

What makes RSS really powerful is just how many sites are now starting to use it. Chances are that your favourite web sites that change information on a regular basis have some kind of RSS feed, including big sites like cnn / bbc / smh etc.

A good introductory link that I have found which covers things like blogs and RSS. A more interesting blurb can be found at jwz's.

It is worth noting that Wordpress , the package I use to power this blog supports RSS feeds out of the box, so in fact you can subscribe to this blog and automatically see the updates as I type them!

hello world

You would think that not only as a geek but as an owner of a web design company I would have had a webpage years ago, but, never having an interest in HTML, I have put it off until I stumbled across blogs, which ofcourse this is one. Basically this enables me to simply post my thoughts / opinions with the minimal hassle and continue to know nothing about HTML :) Currently I am playing around with the presentation and trying to setup a few things that are not strictly speaking a blog, but we will see how it goes. I have too many other things that I want to do and I am only doing this because it is simple so I doubt I will get done what I want done with this page but we will see.