Matt's Blog

I've haven't been blogging amd my writing skills are beginning to atrophy. I wasn't at a high level of proficiency to start with, so any losses leave me very badly off. What I have been doing is learning the basics of windsurfing. My neighbour Kevin has a windsurfer (actually a Bic) that I have taken onto the water a few times --- or rather have taken myself into the water not less than a few times by falling off while the board floats and sail sits safely and securely lying flat along the water.

Weird things pop out of the most mundane looking differential equations. I don't really know how to take it all in.

I just changed the name of the main machine from draisey.ca to free.draisey.ca. I have long been using the name as a proxy for the machine to differentiate it from the gestalt of the draisey computing kingdom but, as the only server on the greater internet, the draisey.ca name for the machine itself stuck; if I hadn't added some Google Apps into the draisey.ca zone I probably would never bothered with the name change. I haven't hit any snags so far, although I just remembered that I shall need to update the reverse DNS records too. (OK, just did that now though It'll take a few hours to filter through the database)

Changing the name doesn't seem to have any adverse effects on ssh, which pleases me immensely. I shut down most of the ssl services years ago as bieng mostly useless. I was going to have to modify my email handling anyway --- let's try a quick bounce --- well that worked so it looks like any modifications I make should be reasonably painless. The database and web server are running well enough for me to key this blog entry, so no great worries there. The clock seems OK.

All seems well.

So I've completed the first part of my Google App migration of the draisey.ca domain. The google accounts are active and ready to go and the domain name system database is set up and seems to have fully migrated out into the wild --- at least my own mail from the house is bieng directed through google now. I haven't yet told the main internet server of its demotion on the SMTP front. I'll have to do this next so I can forward mail from the server through google --- if I just change the aliases file to point to the new accounts I will just end up with a routing loop. I've thought of several ways of breaking the loop that will work, given the extreme flexibility of exim in routing mail, but I've decided that it is hazardous to my well being.

I've decided to move my mail handling over to Google. It amazes me that you can get free email through google on your own domain name. My expensive server is almost completely redundant. Also it is a pain to maintain and its spam filtering performance is much worse that what google can acheive. I expect better levels of service for much less money ($0). I've already started forwarding my personal email through my gmail account and now intend to map over all the family's mail to their own Google App GMail account.

I just finished playing with Puppy Linux on my Dad's Acer Aspire 1690 laptop and was amazed at how well and effortless it ran. I had to download and burn a ~100MiB ISO which didn't take long. The CD was burnt as a multisession CD which Puppy can take advantage of later. After one wasted reboot through the agonizingly slow XP boot sequence, I changed the BIOS to boot first from the CD and let Puppy loose. The boot itself was in text mode and first asked me for special boot parameters, I just hit enter and hoped for the best. Then there was a long pause saying that pup_215.sfs was loading into tmpfs --- I thought the machine had locked up, but it hadn't and resumed its initial boot. Then came a textual dialogue for setting up the graphical screen; I selected the recommended Xorg set-up and all went well. The graphical screen than came up with shocking speed, and I was confronted with an immediately functional desktop. How weird.

Well, Bec's giant wall poster display started to come down today and she is off to Sault Ste. Marie tomorrow. That's a lot of masking tape to pull down.

It was the opening of Bec's and Maria's art show home is where the art is..... It was well attended and everyone seemed impressed. It went off quite well.

I ended up having conversations about epistemology and relationship of truth to reality, conversations about mathematics, very different conversations than on the how pleasing pink can be. Not that pink can't be pleasing, but I don't have much to say on the matter. On matters ontological I'm as ignorant as everyone else; that is, however, vastly better than being the only ignorant person in the room --- I don't think I'm wired to appreciate art. Artistic criticism seemed to be flowing throughout the room, but on a longer wavelength then me. I was immaterial to it --- I think that means the work was good.

Bec seemed pleased. She didn't mind that I left a little early.

This is now running on a server with a shiny new Linux 2.6.20 UML kernel through bytemark hosting. They had surreptitiously ugraded by root filesystem by adding a static /dev directory and updating the /etc/fstab. Hey, that's not what I expected. I don't mind, seeing as was not looking forward to having to pull it off myself, but was quite surprised to discover that my virtual machine had been prepared to accept a newer kernel.

It does seem to work. Magic scares me though.

I've finally put to bed the last of my drupal 4.7 sites. Everything is running on 5.1 now. The migration was pretty smooth despite the vast number of small fiddly bits that needed changing; everything worked pretty much according to plan, which is surprising for combined software/database/server migrations; I seem to know what I am doing!!!