Plantagenet Penguinista

Another dial-up lesson learned post-facto: idly clicking on software packages to install can be a time-consuming idea... For example, deciding to see how Wesnoth is progressing only costs 2011 bytes... not very wearing... but that invites Synaptic to quietly add wesnoth-data (25.7MB) & wesnoth-music (25.6MB), which suddenly adds about 3 hours to your download time... which you (well, I) notice when there’s about 5 minutes left of it. Errr... then you notice some more minor additions... wesnoth-editor (1.5MB), wesnoth-httt (5.1MB) & from the look of the bar-chart, about another 8MB of other stuff (which may be mostly non-Wesnoth [edit: wesnoth-rsg@1.8MB, wesnoth-trow@4.3MB, wesnoth-ttb@0.4MB, wesnoth-ei@1.2MB, wesnoth-utbs@5.1MB]). You’ll notice that I haven’t lost any time at Wesnoth itself yet, either. I guess MySQL will have to wait until tomorrow (sorry, Arjen, PostgreSQL survived the upgrade), or I’ll have to figure out how to add the collection of .deb’s from the DVD to th

Just when you get something established in your mind as safe & steady, some wiseacre changes it. So with Lasca , a game invented by chess champion Emanuel Lasker as a variant on draughts. I ran across this in a HappyPenguin article on the game Ascal , a GNOMEified implementation of same. Meanwhile, Get Moving Tasmania is organising a walk in dear little Tullah here, starting after a trip around in Wee Georgie Wood , the local steam loco . That’ll be good to take the kinder along to. (-:

The upgrade completed, all went well… until I rebooted. At this point, I discovered an unusual feature of the SiS 5513 controller under the new kernel — it gets scanned for SATA drives… & is broken. The IDE DVD drive works fine, but not the IDE hard drive. I was able to swap this bog-slow 566MHz Celeron for a bog-slow 400MHz P2 (albeit with some dinking around with SD-RAM ’coz it only had 64MB & one DIMM socket is broken; & more dinking because the built-in LAN card wouldn’t work) built on an Intel chipset. I did actually get a bonus, sort of, because it has built-in speakers. Hmmm. Starting to seriously exhaust the supply of random/spare computer parts to jam together for making things work.

This was one of the things which appeared in the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon update, & I’m very pleased to announce that it did nothing. That is, nothing broke. Most things seem to go faster, & they all work. That’s a very heartening start to an upgrade. (-:

Ten hours left, it reckons, after days of messing about with DVDs & CDs. It wanted to spend 2 whole days downloading stuff when I tried the CD (the DVD part of the drive is broken), so I copied the DVD via my laptop & ran the upgrade from that. That worked, up until about ¾ of the way through it suddenly wanted me to “insert” the DVD media — & I have no idea what it was triggering on, so I killed it & restarted it again on a real CD. That worked, until it complained that there were about 40 files missing because this was not the real DVD... so I copied the list of absentees, shoved them through a quick BASH script, & duplicated them ( cp -a ) into the APT cache directory, then restarted the upgrader from the CD again. Which seems to be working (it’s unpacking & setting up .deb files) but as it says wants another 10 hours to complete. I have no idea about whether it’s going to try downloading a few more chunks as a part of that, so dialup stays on (/ME waves).

Been doing a bit of private advertising recently, lugging plastic chairs which have messages Sharpied onto them up the Mount Farrell track & parking them to the side, where walkers can rest on them & also read the messages. One thing I’ve discovered about tracks like this kind is that there’s not much point in walking up a 45° slope once or twice. The 2nd walk is just as exhausting as the first. I think I’d better pick up cycling again, as the only other aerobic exercise hereabouts is running (shake meself ta bits) or canoeing — & I don’t have a canoe. The alternative is risking having a heart-crash on the way up a hill (not particularly prone to heart trouble, but who knows?) which is hardly something to look forward to.

Working today with a WinME box locally, & a CentOS release 4.3 server in Perth. The ME box is being a pain. I had to plonk a network card into it, & then somehow get drivers onto it for the card. Naturally, the floppy drive was dodgy enough to not be useful for this, & none of the machines here have a CD burner. Finally worked around the problem child by locating an ancient ethernet card — which doesn’t even have a brand, AFAICT — which ME happened to have drivers for. The card was out of a machine with both PCI & ISA slots, with the older-style (pre SD-RAM) DIMMs — which the machine had none of — & it had a BNC (video-looking) socket as well as UTP. Shrug, it works. The CentOS box obviously has a story behind it, as the files are managed by an app called e-Smith & you can log in directly as root on port 22. All of the shared files went missing recently, & guessing from the debris, I’d put my money on someone running out of space on the server (40GB RAIDed)

OK, a few details (from rc3, ex Gutsy)... Selection tools have been improved out of sight. Well, actually, they&rquo;ve been improved into sight in some cases. You get heads-up display of the options, & the rectangular selection allows you to dynamically add & alter rounded corners. Slight, but nifty new feature. Foreground Selection now has another method available: paint on an object within the general selection area & GIMP will select the whole object. You can re-paint instantly if the clues you gave turned out oddly. Alignment of objects now includes layers, paths & guides; aligned on an object, the selection or the whole image. New menu entries make colour management simpler. More file formats: PS’s ABR brushes; more EXIF stuff for JPEGs; clipping paths in TIFFs; deeper bitmaps & Alpha support in BMPs; PSDs get layer masks; more icon types can be read & saved to. One-keystroke full-screen toggle. Colour profiles. Much smarter Crop tool. Simpler, cleare

One aspect of the Drama Triangle which many people find puzzling is the case where there’s no obvious Aggressor/Persecutor/Attacker. An obvious answer I’ve seen in action is the Phantom Aggressor, which is an accumulation of aggressive events collected by a nominal Rescuer. They use many excuses, but the bottom line is that they need some appearance of Aggression to justify their intrusive Rescuer character, so if there is none then in one way or another, it gets invented. The Rescuer has to take care when doing this that they aren’t seen as they really are — an Aggressor — else it blows their whole plot-line, so they have to go out to dredge up another Victim if they want to continue their “Rescuer” role (which is basically an addictive/obsessive power-hunger at work as a subtle Aggressor, nothing genuinely altruistic).

Grabbed a copy of The GIMP 2.4.0 for Windaz to tweak some colours on & scale an image on this machine. The changes all appear small, but they do add up to a lot. Little things — like being instantly able to scale a paintbrush — make ordinary life easier, but there’s a lot of stuff which new (& PS) users will find amazingly obvious simply because it’s right in front of them rather than tucked away in a menu somewhere. Today’s interesting products included extending Tullah’s sense of humour a little. As you walk over Mount Farrell & first glimpse Lake Mackintosh on your way to seeing Lake Herbert (tucked away at the top), you’ll find a plastic chair there, placed perfectly to rest on & view Mackintosh. Now there’s a second one just where the forest gives way to grassy stuff on the way up, & soon (Sunday?) there will be a pair at the top, then also a pair at the break. The chairs are adorned with genuine Leon handiwork, to wit, the words “VISIT | TULLAH TAV | MUSEUM

Well, moving the TP-LINK router across by two fairly thin-looking walls (about 6m) bought us another 6 or 7dB in the back rooms, & maybe 5dB across the highway, but moving it as far as 25m further on didn’t help the back rooms at all (probably even cost a few dB), & bought across-the-road maybe 2dB if that. So... Mr TP-LINK will be sitting next to the TV (flat on the wall with antenna sticking straight up) & we’ll probably get another router to plonk across the road as a bridge. It does leave me wondering whether the original router site somehow formed a wireless black hole, though. Oh, I notice that Mr Shuttleworth found a way to fill up the Gutsy DVD, specifically Win32 versions of things like Firefox, ThunderBord & AbiWord. No OpenOffice there, but I guess asking for an extra 150-oddMB for that & a few localisation packs turned out to be a little over-hard.

I got an ExpressPost in the mail today, from a sunny Perth mid-Northern suburb, which has to mean that AusPost got clever & shipped it across the Tasman to Burnie, Devonport or at the very least (stretching it for time) Launceston rather than Hobart if it was posted on Monday. Sharon, the postmistress, was quite surprised that it had arrived, but I’d warned her on Monday that it was coming. It contained a Gutsy Gibbon desktop CD, another one labelled “alternate”, & a full DVD. This all proved useful because I was able to use the LiveCD to inspect a system while another box (with a dodgy DVD drive) set about upgrading itself from the “alt” CD as I got my laptop copying (scp) the DVD across the wireless at about 600kB/s because despite being told to not fetch updates, the upgrade fetched a few items down the whoopie-how-fast-am-I dialup modem line, which was going to mean a 2-3 day wait instead of an hour or so, & I hope as I watch linux-image-2.6.22-14-virtual_2.6.22 copied

Comparing a nominally long-range dLink wireless router with a TP-LINK el cheapo box , to light up a laptop across the highway from the Internet link. Mr El Cheapo works out about 7-9dB stronger signals (e.g. -69dB across the road instead of -78dB) with my TwinHead DuraBook laptop, yet only claims +3dB for the antenna, which is a short whip about ⅓ as long again as the dLink’s. That has to be some kind of dipole, but my ARRL knowledge is so ancient that I’ve no real hope of recalling it. Whatever it is, tomorrow will involve some time playing with RG58 cables, switches and/or hubs, & grunting the router around the building to defeat some structural irregularities which remain. I’m of the firm opinion that dropping a second router across the road as a bridge will prove far more effective than relying upon Joe Random Tenant having a laptop with good reception — & would also offer the option of a wired connection since the routers typically come with a 4-port hub (some call it “a

I’m not quite sure how this works, internally, but there’s something mysteriously twice as offensive when someone can’t even be incompetent at you competently. I got a whole — I think “mess” is the correct description — of spam just now, all with the above title, so it looks like they clean forgot to push it through whatever their parser amounts to before they force-fed the Internet with it. The underlying message, of course, is that we’re seriously not worth them caring about in the slightest. We’re less than “a market.” Someone with that much lack of care isn’t even worth despising. If I stumbled across a machine generating that kind of crud, I’d be sure to format the backup systems first. Carefully. With random patterns. Then see what else is on that LAN. Oh, yes, & have a nice day. (-:

…one positively must make lemonade. So I shipped 11,000 pieces of spam to Kylie as ingredients for her quest to find a use for spam. This was a good deal more satisfying than feeding it to a rendering-down script which generates (107,000 so far) blacklisted sender addresses for my email server, especially since it represents about a month & a half of spam (with the server putting a knife through the throats of about 90% of them before they come in the SMTP door). Actually, my spam is down from over 1,000 a day circa two years ago to about 70-100 a day now, despite the overall increase. These figures are after the server bins 90% of them for sins like invalid domain or identifying themselves as an unlisted host. On a completely different topic, I note that I didn’t mention an important feature of Drama Triangles: the participants are typically either blind to their place in this system, or misinterpreting it. For example, it must be OK to help people (Rescuer) but there are so man

Spring must be here, since I can dry clothes on the Hills Hoist in the back yard now — up to 3 rounds a day, exciting high-tech stuff. I think the sun gets up to about 700w/m 2 in between clouds now. Meanwhile, I have a server to set up which has to live on a dynamic ADSL address since the ISP won’t offer static addresses & changing ISPs right now is a bit of a trauma for several reasons. Later, we might get a second ADSL connection with a different ISP, then give the first line the flick when the second is going steadily. This situation won’t last forever, but until then I’ll have to have a cron job polling the router to look for a changed address, then go & notify the name servers when that changes. By using short (5 minute?) timeouts in the DNS records, I should be able to respond reasonably quickly even if a visitor is mid-session when a change happens, & the initial users will be aware that it’s a trial situation so won’t be too fussy. The script shouldn’t be too diff

...one of the interesting & simple culprits to set out in search of is a “ Drama Triangle ” (also called a “Rescue Triangle”) — a situation involving 3 people (or forces) taking the roles of Victim, Persecutor & Rescuer. These simple roles can become quite obsessive, ramping up into proper co-dependencies in many cases. A Victim is helpless & hopeless, frustratingly indifferent to their own situation in some ways & dreadfully obsessed by it in others. Often, a few simple changes in outlook or attitude would put an end to their ongoing suffering. The Persecutor typically attacks them in some way, often by heaping (well-earned, in some eyes) criticism upon them. Finally, the Rescuer wades in with “all guns blazing” to save the Victim. This is often achieved by attacking the Persecutor, & in some cases the roles wind up swapped. A feature which is particularly prevalent in the typical Rescuer (& often in the Victim) is an uneven response to the events around them.

I decided to have a whack at GIMP 2.4, & the easiest approach looked to be bolting the -rc3 from Gutsy into a Feisty machine I’ve set up. One of the obvious updates was libc6. What was not so obvious was the libgcc1 & other “internal” dependencies which that implied, stuff like encryption & compression, right down to replacing a TrueType font with an updated version with a slightly different naming system, in order to please one of GIMP’s dependencies — but this broke a couple of games (Briquolo & CrystalSpace) so I had to upgrade those also (or scrub them off). 77 packages later, down a dialup link (uh, sorry, 79 packages with the games), it all seems to be working — except that this Feisty seems to half-think of itself as a Gutsy, & wants to finish the upgrade. I think that’ll be waiting until I can borrow an ADSL link in Wynyard this coming week before trying an upgrade, else I’d have to sit through (it estimates) two gigabytes down the ’phone line at just over

Well, that was one of the more delicate half-conversations I’ve ever had. The chap concerned (CC) knows another person I know (PIK), very well. CC persists in three main habits: disagreeing with almost everything I base my thoughts on; finding & pointing out the faults (real or imagined, not picky) in practically everything <1> else; inviting PIK on interesting excursions (snow, sand, fascinating architectures etc). PIK is depressive, so you can imagine the combined effect of these attributes on PIK. I think “constant chaos” is a polite but reasonably close approximation. It’s deeply disruptive & destructive, either way. Unfortunately, PIK thinks the sun radiates posteriorly from CC, so I’m immersed in deep pooh if I dare to criticise same. So my strategy here was to continue the conversation, painstakingly avoiding points of conflict, while sailing as close as possible to them (without triggering) to coerce CC into actually thinking about them. Intricate? You’d better b

...well, actually, they do; & to SWMBO, nearly a centimetre in diameter & maybe 10-15cm long. Fairly impressive worms down in a non-apple part of the Apple Isle. Miss 6 went totally spare when asked to fetch a lone slug with her rubber-gloved little hands, though. SWMBO finally felt inspired to work on the front garden for a bit, & it’s got a healthy-looking layer of plants in it now. Might even have an Aram Lily which appears to have squeezed under the fence from next-door-behind’s place, too. The lawn’s showing obvious signs of recovering from the thrashing I gave it with the mower, so it obviously needs another one. Funny, most of the gardens hereabouts are fairly bare & barren... so I guess their owners simply can’t be bothered trying to grow stuff — native plants have no worries, grow straight into the rock as needs be. Back in technical-land, it’s time to learn about web-cams, it seems. Not for this little blip on the map, but there’s a place up in Stanley which w

I’m writing an article for an edu magazine which addresses Open Source, & am hoping to touch on domestic education aspects as well. So... Do you use FOSS for HomeEd? (-: Even OpenOffice counts. :-) If so, please comment to say what aspects of it work well for you, or what you would like to see but haven’t yet.

OpenOffice Writer has just done a different funny on me. I exported a PDF to HTML, opened that with Writer, copy/pasted the results into a new Writer doc, then started doing a little hand surgery on the ex-PDF to tidy it up a little. When I turned a few paragraphs into a table, selected a row, & right-clicked to get a menu to delete it, it went into hyperspace — for 16 minutes, so far. Now, I know that this version of OpenOffice on this version of Ubuntu does the exact same operation just fine, because I’ve actually done it — even while enODTing a PDF (a different one, but same job, same programs, same steps), the only real difference being the hardware (then a dual Pentium 1.6GHz with 1GB of DDR, now a solo Celeron 566MHz with 256MB of SD-RAM) & of course devices like hard disks or RAM typically don’t send apps into hyperspace when they fail — they tend to stop or crash the whole machine. The other oops this one does is very slow Font section when changing a Style (maybe 45 mi

Took the kids for a wander up to Murchison/Mackintosh, then Tullabardine/Mackintosh & it was quite pleasant. We drove past Wee Georgie Wood going for a test run around his track, & at Tullabardine we saw (& “conmversed” with a Pademelon (Wallaby) hopping sluggishly around in the bush near the boat-ramp. This enabled SWMBO to sleep in until about 10:30, which relaxed her somewhat. The rest of the day has been a pleasant release, haunted only by quiet echoes of stuff which happened (or managed to avoid happening) earlier this week.

Monopolies aren’t always so very obvious. For example, today I went looking for ADSL providers for the town of Wynyard. I know Telstra have DSLAMs in the exchange there because I’m dealing with a bloke there on one of their $17 plans, who’se looking for a bit more bandwidth & a static IP. ISP after ISP tells me that they don’t service the numbers I provide (which include the Waratah-Wynyard Council & a large mid-town supermarket). I surmise that Telstra simply have the immense bulk to be able to afford to drop DSLAMs into random exchanges (but not Tullah’s) & the beauracratic stickiness to escape giving other ISPs access to the equipment in timely fashion. Either way, no joy, yet. I’ll try a few who service people I know in Burnie, the next town East of Wynyard.

Had a look at a property south of Yolla today, & noticed a few unusual things about it... Firstly, it had a nice wood stove — not so odd up front, until you notice that there is no other stove, no light fittings on the ceilings, no power fittings on any of the walls; indeed, no power at all. Hmmm. So you ask, & yes, there is no ’phone line, either... Fixing the former (over a distance of a few km) is worth about AUD$30,000.00 including about $4,XXX for a transformer; fixing the latter is probably only a few thousand but the line will be grotty, noisy, & will in no way support anything like ADSL. So... scratch the standard approach. What else can be done? It turns out that a workable RAPS system is down to about AUD$12,000.00 to $15,000.00 for a wind-gen (steady-ish NW winds) plus a modicum of solar panels & for a thousand or so more, we could add one of those Banki-turbine high-flow low-pressure thingies to the permanent creek for a small but persistent source of watt

ROSEBERY HOSPITAL ACTION COMMITTEE C/- # Nameof Street Rosebery   Tasmania   7470 8 th October 2007 The Hon. Lara Giddings, MHA 10 th Floor Executive Building 15 Murray Street Hobart   Tasmania   7000 Facimile: 6233 #### Dear Ms Giddings, Members of the Rosebery Hospital Action Committee attended an announcement by the Prime Minister Mr Howard today in Burnie, at which he pledged $1m of Federal funding to the Rosebery Hospital to restore services cut by the State Government. Mr Howard says “that should tide the hospital over until the State Government can fund [it] with money saved from the Mersey Hospital takeover.” As a result we, the people of Rosebery and surrounding areas, respectfully request the Minister for Health and Human Services to take advantage of the Prime Minister’s offer by immediately acting to: halt renovation work in such a way that the building is safe and serviceable as a hospital; return the beds and inpatient equipment removed from the facility; and commence r

When your Ubuntu Feisty installation mysteriously decides to confuse KMail (running under GNOME, but not on general principles) so that it starts but won’t fetch mail or do anything else useful (the app just goes into hyperspace), the obvious solution is to do some updates, isn’t it? Well, maybe it isn’t, but I had a couple of hours (in which I was thinking about stuff & word-processing but wanted to browse some news & search for more complete opinions at the end of the typing) so I told Ubuntu to get on with the updates while I did my thing... & KMail sprang into life — or rather, was sprunged into life. since I’d shut it off & restarted it — so I suspect that some of the random-looking KDE updates brought KMail some joy. Maybe KWallet was squoze in there somewhere, although none of the package names confessed this. Aaanyway, this ancient machine is now down to one decidedly annoying bug — selecting fonts in OpenOffice Writer’s Styles takes forever — maybe half an hour

...“hicced up” Thank you, AnnéRose, for that age-related chunk of wisdom. (-:

...so of course SWMBO wanted to hang some pieces of cloth on the clothesline to air & rinse. Well according to BOM , she’ll probably get that effect tomorrow afternoon & evening. In other random news, I think I’ve made a deliberate political decision for the first time in over a decade... I’m inclined to vote for Ben Quinn, who seems to be willing to tell his (nee Liberal) Party to get nicked when they want to dictate terms of thought to him (in this case, Ben was listening to his electorate, & his party weren’t). He seems to be able to think outside the political box in practical terms, which contrasts with non-thought (Gilbert & Sullivan’s head of the Queen’s Navy) or the completely wild thoughts of someone trying to make a point. [BTW, thanks, Davyd (via Google) for that last link from your Planet-ish ]

Residents of Issingdown are advised to take cover. )-: However, I did find this interesting photo of Iapetus showing a 16km-tall ridge, on which it appears that some craters were formed before the ridge, & others after. Bit of a head-smacker for people trying to figure out how it all happened, I reckon. There was also this conversation full of mind-blowing little observations. They’re trying to explain it all electrically, of course, but they certainly have a bit of courage to even face that tangle at all!

’T does look like clear skies out there. Might get to push the keyboard aside & get some real exercise, who knows? Well, I had a real win with a webserver this morning, so I don’t need to feel that digitally handicapped. 25 minutes of typing shell commands through OpenSSH should be enough.

SWMBO had idle hands after dinner, so threw some frozen bananas & some milk into the ThermoMix (a super-yewbewdie blender thingy which’ll cook ’n’ stuff if you ask it right) to make some instant banana icecream. The munchkins were suitably impressed & went back for seconds — while their mother trembled from all of the cold. It was truly delicious, & even had a touch of yellow food-colouring in it for that commercial banana-flavoured look. A truly excellent serve, now that bananas are back down from fantasy-land prices per kg.

...although Mount Murchison still has a crust of snow atop it. I got about 5m of lawn re-cleared to garden bed (& I say re -cleared because I uncovered some plant tags & other buried evidence which confirms that there was once a garden there already) & imported a wheelbarrow-load of topsoil from the other side of the football oval. The topsoil is excellent exercise, since I use a small shovel, which makes the operation low-stress but aerobic & this gets followed by about ten minutes’ toting the load back past the oval & across the Murchison Highway. That was well-timed today, since dark clouds were accumulating over Mount Black from the general direction of Strahan, & it started to rain just as I arrived home. Clearing the bed is not good exercise since it’s well-bound-together grass being pulled away in a solid lump, which is quite difficult & stressful (it unrolls back into the ground, if you let it), plus involves quite a bit of bending over & liftin

Well, the weather’s beautiful — if you happen to be a duck. It’s raining, & so foggy that I can’t even see nearby Mount Farrell, let alone Murchison Hmmm. So much for digging holes in the ground today (unless things change), so I guess I’ll spend the day sitting at this keyboard, writing stuff — but you can relax, it ain’t going to focus on ’blog posts. (-:

OK, so like other Planet Linux Australia denizens, I decided to have a day off. This was a slightly ambitious gaol given my two littlies & a sick (physically wiped out) SWMBO, so I wound up being house-Dad as usual... sort of. I fed both children brekkie, then decided to wander around the countryside to let SWMBO sleep (starting at about 07:30), so I grabbed a brace of young’un’s & drove gently up the Murchison valley to the South end of Lake Mackintosh. I stopped to look at the Sophia Adit, an unmainmtained mining shaft used for inspecting the Sophia Tunnel (runs between Murchison Dam & Lake Mackintosh) which proved to be a tactical error since there were no less than two waterfalls flowing alongside it, along with spectacular plonking & dripping sounds from the Adit itself — & a distinct roar from the South (the river). So, muttering to myself about having forgotten the camera, I backed off a few tens of metres, wandered down a Hydro road (as far as the steel ga

I’m wondering if Celerons are commonly wonky in well-known ways? This one, every so often, has the odd application die silently. Sometimes, updating random stuff makes it happy again (as it did for KMail once). It feels oddly MS-Windows-like, but I know it isn’t the software because the machine this replaced was installed from the very same ISO, & doesn’t do this misbehaviour. One recent oddity — only the last few weeks — was to display text boxes (in Firefox) using a tiny, unreadable font. I fixed that by changing the font from Serif to Courier New using about:config since the Edit/Preferences dialogs were empty. Maybe someone will hand me a winning lottery ticket or a forgotten wad of hundreds so I can go out & buy a less crufty set of brains for this machine...

Mr Durabook rolled up from Melbourne yesterday, with a shiny new set of power plugs, & takes a charge like a champion. I did get one grumpy surprise in that the 3-year warranty is only a labour warranty for the last 2 years — which the wholesaler I’d bought it through had definitely not made clear, so I had to pay for parts. Even if they were generous & gave me 9 months back for the time I spent off the air last year, I’d still be over the limit. On the other hand, their repairs are really well done. As well as actually fixing the stuff they had to, they’ve added some nicer touches like replacing the edge I broke off instead of just sticking it down again. No extra parts, no extra cost. As well as replacing the dodgy worn-out inverter which drives the display, they went through & replaced the worn-out wires connecting up the display itself (which they didn’t need to do because it wasn’t actually broken). It feels much more solid & “new” than when I sent it away a week

Visited a customerish yesterday, in Wynyard. From the description, I was expecting a big mess of Win98 & XP systems, but it seems that they’re a little more organised (sorta), than that. “Sorta”? Well, the actual organisation revolves around two servers, which are remote-managed. They wear the princely titles of “server” & “server1” One of them is a Windows file-server, the other is a terminal server. Oddly enough, the backups etc are done through the terminal server, since the tape backup unit doesn’t work on the file-server, & the USB interface works poorly, if at all. The positive aspect from the workstations’ perspective is that they’re all, basically, thin clients. The users start them, start an RDP client, & do all of their work via the terminal server. I gather that this was done for convenience of administration, since the admin (in Devonport, apparently) doesn’t need to ensure that workstations are clocked on or whatever, just has to start a session for t