denyerec.co.uk

I did say “month”, I’m not actually missing a moth. Though I did discover that hawkmoths are actually the size of small birds, which is alarming. Especially when you consider that they’ve been trying to take over the world since the Sydney olympics. Moths in general, that is, not just hawkmoths.

Did anyone actually see October happen? Does anyone have any evidence? I seem to recall promising myself I’d take a month off to work on some personal projects to further my coding and photography (Yeah, that Gallery nemesis is still happening, whoda thunkit?) but nooooo, someone had to go and get sick, then ill, then loaded up with work contracts.

Goshdarnit.

To top it off, Fuji are tempting me with a new camera they’re not really saying anything about, Tokina still haven’t released the 16-50 f2.8 they’re teasing the world with and I’m still not yet a millionaire. Though that’s not to rule out the fact that Fuji and Tokina are conspiring against me on this issue.

Yes, I’ve got lots and lots of new photos. Plenty of old ones too.

No, you’re not going to see them unless I pull a finger out, restore my decrepit backup HDD to my new shiney 200gb SATA drive and recatalog everything prior to sending the old HDD to Holland (Don’t ask) and finally start processing some of the 2,000 odd photos I’ve taken over the last month or so. And THAT isn’t gonna happen if people don’t get off my back about stupid print jobs that aren’t worth the money they’re paying for them. Saving that for another day.

For anyone who uses a computer with any amount of seriousness and, also (perhaps oxymorinically, you be the judge) uses Windows, you’ll know that the default file explorer is atrociously bad. Having added nothing new to the mix since the invetion of copy and paste, despite better ideas and featuresets being available since the very first versions of Windows Commander.

Quite why MS feel the need to stifle the way we interact with our precious 1’s and 0’s is beyond me, but there are alternatives.

This one costs £35 which people may or may not view as a reasnoble investment of monetary tokens. It’s called Directory Opus and although I’ve yet to give it a full runaround I’m very keen to. There’s a good guide to the features avialable in this extensive Guide to Opus. Interesting to note that virtual folders and collections are here in full force, even though Micro$oft still haven’t managed to get that going proprly in Vista…

Incidentally I discovered this gem after someone pointed me to a picture portraying perfectly why children and expensive household interiors are generally a very bad idea.

If I can some how sum up the willpower to motivate myself to actual physical action, I’ll be making myself one of these cute little suckers… Data Bear is the solution to your data storage needs, a bold critter who isn’t afraid to dive headfirst into a problem. Or USB port.

There’s a handy service called DynDNS that lets you give a static name to a dynamic IP. Handy for have-a-go heroes hosting websites from home.
Anyhow, to auto-update the IP stored by DynDNS regularly, the use of some client software is advised. Enter DDClient, which happens to run on Ubuntu.

Now, for anyone who’s having trouble getting ddclient to run on Ubuntu in that it’s not picking up their external IP properly, the fix is simple. All you have to do is replace the following line in your /etc/ddclient.conf file :

use=if , if=web

With the following:

use=web , web=dyndns

You can also obtain some information running ddclient -query from your console.

What this does it tell ddclient not to use a network interface (if) but to use the web, and then tells it which web service to use (dyndns). If you leave it to the defaults it’ll just pull the IP from whichever network interface it’s bound to, typically eth0 by default.

RIAA crying wolf all the way to the bank

They sum it up.

Now boycott all that DRM hardware like you mean it!

I just discovered after a lot of pissing around and timewasting (Note, time that I absolutely cannot afford to waste right now) that Ubuntu Hoary and MySQL5 runs with old password hashing enabled by default in the my.cnf file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf)

Line 43 or thereabouts.

If you’ve had trouble with new things being able to connect to MySQL databases on Ubuntu, then this may be a likely culprit. All users created will have the shorter 16 byte password hashes instead of the newer ones.

Annoying to discover this now.

Anyone bored at work today, which will be most people, as well as EVERYONE ELSE, should go and watch this now:
[LAFKON] – A movie about Trusted Computing.

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’m impoverished and working hard to buy bread.

Seriously.

Hah! Mission accomplished.
Update your site Den, go on. Bloody hell, update it man.

Well that would have contradicted one of my new years resolutions. No posts in January. Well by Jove, dagnammit and whopsie, I managed.

Why ? Err, that’d be telling, but at least now I can breathe a sigh of relief and start spouting.

Notice, please, that there HAVE been two photos (or three?) updated during the silence, so perhaps it would actually be best for me to shut up and just post photos. No comments, please.

There are about 3,244 more photos to come but lets be honest, my gallery is waaaaaay not capable of handling that and, yes, if you look through the archives I’ve been saying I’m re-writing my gallery for at least as long as I’ve had one. I’m not promising anything this time because I’ve realised that it never pans out. Just watch out for changes, because yes, eventually, they’ll come. Like bigfoot though if you’re not careful you’ll miss him completely or, worse, get a really shoddy photograph of him disappearing over a hill.

Did I mention that I haven’t gained any weight?