Andy Cunningham

After being tired of pages of rubbish when trying to double check my IP address, I wrote this little site.

www.IPfor.me.uk

Just the answer you want, and a single line of ads.  I hope it’s useful for others.

After a week long trip to Prague, the Aspire One has proven to be a vastly more usable machine than the EEE.  I have nothing against the Asus – I just wish I’d waited and bought the 901 instead of the 701.  But with the offer on the Acer, the decision was made.

The keyboard suffers from the same problem as the larger Dell I have from work – it’s very easy for me to accidentally hit the trackpad and move the insert point while typing.  But the 82% keyboard is perfectly usable even with my big paws!  The display is clear and crisp, and displays enough text to be useful for previewing photos.   I’m not going to get into any photo editing here though – that’s what the pair of wide screens at home are for!

A bit more battery life for longer plane journeys would be good – but at least it’s compact enough to use in an economy class seat!

Pretty much on a whim, I decided to get an Acer Aspire One to play with.  Equally much on a whim, I decided to put Windows 7 RC1 on there.  And I have to say I’m impressed.  This tiny little machine has a usable keyboard, runs W7RC1 with no problems, and has been pretty stable so far (in a day or so of testing).

Compared with the original Asus eee701 it’s a vast improvement – a more usable screen, a better keyboard, and a decent sized hard drive.  I’ve been using it extensively and find it far more usable.

So what to do with the eee?

How to disable the Autorun functionality in Windows

When the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, gets scammed online.

Well, it’s more ironic than anything in that Alanis Morrissette song.

That bastion of balanced and fair reporting, the Inquirer has this tale of woe from a mac user.

PowerBook explodes in London office

Yeah, because mac’s just work without any effort, right?

My job took me to the RSA Conference in London this year where the theme of the conference was the life and work of Alan Turing.  This painfully shy genius helped turn the tide of the Second World War from a cold hut at the now famous site of Bletchley Park.

As part of the theme, Bletchley provided an Enigma machine as well as a number of other variations, some of where were in use as late as the 1970s.

The collision, of course, is that the Enigma messages were sent via morse code.  Thinking about being able to send and received encrypted messages – just random strings of letters – and the whole process of using the machine to code and decode them, gives a whole new level of respect for the difficulties in communication just 60 years ago.

I’ve written a few articles about the move of my home PC to a Linux based configuration last year.  I’m pretty pleased with the results, and I’ve been able to use that configuration for virtually all of the “work” I’ve done on the PC since then.  I still don’t have some things working as well as I’d like – ripping DVDs and conerting them for the Creative Zen is something of a pain.

I still run a few applications under Windows – most notably Tax Calc which I use for (hopefully)  about two hours a year to submit my tax return.  Let’s see if I can beat that this year!

Looking back it was the beginning of May last year that I did the switch, so this is about 8 months on.   In that time I’ve added a second monitor (giving me 2, 22″ widescreen monitors that stretch halfway across my desk).  I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 with a certain amount of grief over VMware device drivers.  I’ve even installed Ubuntu as the primary OS on my main work PC, though it’s main job is running SSH sessions and VMware hosts, so that’s not so remarkable.  The lapdog still runs Windows.  Because Corporate IT Says It Will.

The one disappointment so far is that I tried KDE4.0 and decided it wasn’t quite ready for prime time.  It’s very pretty, it’s worth a look, and as long as you don’t uninstall the existing KDE3 setup, you can switch back by logging out and changing your session type back.   Instructions here – worked perfectly for me.

This take of woe makes me glad that I work someplace where managers have at least some clue.

Email from guy working the weekend:

“I came in today (Monday) to finish up a project I was working on before our big meeting with a potential client tomorrow, and I noticed that there were three or four large air conditioners running the entire time I was here. Since it’s a three day weekend, no one is around, why do we need to have the A/C running 24/7? With all the power that all those big computers in that room use, I doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same time. And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C for the building in that room? I got a keycard from $facilitiesmanager’s desk and shut off the A/C units. I’m sure you guys can deal with it being warm for an hour or two when you come in tomorrow morning. In the future, let’s try to be a little more conscientious of our energy usage. Thanks.

RESULT:

Fatalities: Exchange Server, Domain Controllers, a few Sun boxes that I’m not sure of the usage.
Near-Fatalities: Phone Switch, Apps Servers.

Temperature of server room 7AM Tuesday Morning: 90 Degrees Fahrenheit.

Status of Employee who sent the above e-mail: Terminated.”

Knowing that people who do things this stupid get fired for it: Priceless.

The followup story tells of the sender of the e-mail hiring a lawyer to sue for unfair dismissal.  And realizing he’s not got a snowball’s.

These days of imaginative product naming lead to the chance to write some odd headlines for the blog.

When I moved my home PC to running Linux, one of the things I didn’t think too hard about was the ability to transfer MP3s and Videos to my Creative Zen media player. I googled, and found lots of complicated instructions about building layered libraries to be able to run gnomad2. Well, I started downloading bits, and realised that, as of Feisty, gnomad2 is a standard software package that can just be installed via Synaptic. Download, install, start. Sync data. Job done!

I’ve actually got almost everything running. I still haven’t tried to convert video for the Zen, and I still haven’t fixed the Pocket PC sync – but, to be honest, Calendar sync is probably a bigger concern than the PPC itself. I can sync that at work.