Plantagenet Penguinista

Jan has found a neat house for my Dad to purchase here in Albany. With several other competitors in the wings, his purchase offer was accepted literally within 5 minutes. For the risk of what you might call technical reasons, I’m not yet able to buy my own house, so this is being bought as an investment & will be rented to me. The house is not quite as large as I’d ideally like, but is very well fitted out & comes with a few really neat gadgets such as a super-efficient reverse-cycle style water heater. It also has (important for Albany) ADSL2 running (at high speed, it’s near the exchange) from a provider who is not Telstra, which will allow me to move my on-line services into the house, simplifying things for the people in whose house the server currently lives. The current owners are quite a unique contrast, & I was impressed to see how very well they do as a couple. Jan really knows the area, really knows what works, & has come up with some good ideas in the past (

...without an update for the kernel. Also, it fails to install wvdial by default. Stuffing this lot onto a Flash stick works for me: libuniconf4.4_4.4.1-0.2ubuntu2_i386.deb libwvstreams4.4-base_4.4.1-0.2ubuntu2_i386.deb libwvstreams4.4-extras_4.4.1-0ubuntu2_i386.deb libxplc0.3.13_0.3.13-2ubuntu2_i386.deb linux-image-2.6.32-9-generic_2.6.32-9.13_i386.deb wvdial_1.60.1_i386.deb You need to make your default user a member of the dip group else wvdial can’t run pppd. For Virgin (Optus) this needs to be pppd’s options file: lock noauth noipdefault usepeerdns -chap This needs to be in the pap-secrets file: ppp * ppp At that point wvdial works from the shell (but under [K]Ubuntu, spits some weird rubbish as kind-of progress messages, which don’t happen under Mandriva). You can then plug in any valid stick, without config changes, as authentication seems to be done by the stick itself.

They seem to have learned a few things from ( not cloned) Firefox, plus it picked up the cookies, bookmarks etc from FF flawlessly. Chromium is generally smoother & faster than FF, except for actually scrolling the page contents up & down. The visual design is excellent... nothing too jarring, but a few logical changes like enclosing both of the Back/Forward buttons within a single rounded-rectangle border-line (which looks pretty much like the rounded-rectangles enclosing each of Reload, Home & the URL field) & overflowing excess bookmarks into a right-aligned Other Bookmarks folder. Oh, & making the tabs look a bit more like individual objects (angled sides etc) which makes them easier to rapidly distinguish. This is Chromium 4.0.256.0 (32803) running under Mandrive 2009.1; to install it on that (or 2010.0), run this as root: urpmi.addmedia --mirrorlist http://eugeni.dodonov.net/rpm eugeni 586 ...then... urpmi chrome ...which is a few seconds’ work over Virgin M

Rest easy. The US National Debt has been officially-officially pegged at over USD$12 TRILLION ($12,000,000,000,000.00). A former Comptroller General stated as fact last year that it had really topped $60 TRILLION, which is more than the entire world’s Gross Domestic Product. About USD$480,000.00 per household. Which is probably not all of the debts (guesstimate around 3× to 5× that). Which means it will be repaid when? The budget shortfall was predicted at $1.6 TRILLION but worked out to "only" $1.4 TRILLION, which means that they are spending USD$180,000,000.00 per hour more than they earn. Hey, I want pay-rates like that! (-: It’s not a wonder that President Obama wants to sign away all political/financial/religious rights (so, responsbility) to the UN at Copenhagen... but why is Prime Minister Rudd just as eager? It becomes increasing obvious that free-as-in-price means about squat. Free-as-in-available will, I think, come to mean everything — not just in software.