Hmm ... I'm not coding quite as much at night at the moment. Why? Is it because I am getting old? Probably, but more likely it's because the missus is getting all excited about writing web apps and it throwing PHP and mySQL around like they're going out of fashion! To recount a recent event, I had to herd her out of the room after she burst over my shoulder, fingers tapping because she wanted to try an SQL that she'd just thought of....

Tune in next week when a new super hero enters the ring .... GuruWife!
Dev. Cretin: "Aiiee, my code - it's no longer obfuscated!"
GuruWife: "Take that, you dev cretin!" *KAPOW*
Dev. Cretin: "Self documenting code? Noooooo!"

So your ISP suffers a major outage problem (yeah, ntl's off the air at the moment - their DNS servers aren't working AGAIN). So, what do you do? Call every 15 minutes and listen to their status message? Of course not - whip out your text editor and edit your hosts file and insert the IP's and hostnames of your essential services and you're up and running again. Hey, why aren't all the other ntl customers online? All this bandwidth to myself! :P

(of course you should read the above as a reminder that you should put frequently used IP's into your hosts file now ... or run your own DNS server, take your pick)

You know you're a guru when ...
... you go to type "interest" and type "internet" instead
... you go to type "myself" and type "mysql" instead
... the first thing you do with your new PC is install servers (apache, php, mysql etc)
... you have a rule to bounce/delete any HTML emails
... any HTML emails you do get you prefer to view as the source code

My copy of "Adminstering Linux Servers using Webmin" by Jamie Cameron (author of Webmin) arrived from Amazon.co.uk at 8:20am yesterday (sat) morning. Not bad considering I placed the order at 9:30pm on Thursday night and chose free (a.k.a slow) delivery. They estimated it would be here Wed/Thu this week ... instead it arrived just over 2,000 minutes after I clicked that Submit button. [hat off]

I decided to move/rename/rebrand my gallery for POV stuff ... since I wasn't doing much POV stuff but I did crank out a great sunset pic using Terragen. It's just so easy!

A lesson on how to follow the road to becoming a guru (count your points!):

1. Download and install VMWare on Windows XP (ok, -1 point for a MS product but hey)
   
2. Download and install Fedora inside VMWare (+2)
   
3. Configure vncserver to run a full desktop and start it (+1)
   
4. Download Knoppix (bootable Linux CD) (+1)
   
5. Boot other PC on LAN from Knoppix (+1, +1 more if the PC is a laptop)
   
6. Run vncviewer on Knoppix, connect to Fedora running on XP (via VMWare) (+1)
   
7. Remotely control desktop (+1, +1 more if you press F8 and choose full screen, +5 if you work out how to connect to the desktop via your web browser)
   
8. Download POVRay for Linux (+1)
   
9. Render something that takes more than 30 seconds (a basic scene, while sufficient for a demo is NOT very Guru like ... +3 points if you render an animation)
   
10. Configure wine (+3) on Fedora to access programs on WinXP (+2)
    
11. Run notepad.exe (+3), explorer.exe (+5) or winword.exe (+15)
    
12. Understand and appreciate where the image on your screen is coming from (i.e., a windows program being run by wine, which is being run by Fedora, which you are connecting to using vncserver/viewer, which is being run on vmware, which is running on WinXP)
    

Over your head? Keep training!

So you've gone and downloaded the ISO's for Fedora but the up2date client doesn't work. Bah! Not a problem, you just need to edit a file slightly.... see http://www.talios.com/read/352720.htm for details (cheers Talios!)

Try Google Lab's voice search (it will cost you a call to the US) at http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html - it's funky :)

vsftpd is a small, easy to install ftp server for unix based systems. It was really easy to install! :)

mybox:~# tar vxfz vsftpd-1.2.1.tar.gz
mybox:~# cd vfstpd-1.2.1
mybox:~/vfstpd-1.2.1# make ; make install
mybox:~/vfstpd-1.2.1# /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

And gurubob's your uncle!

How do you know when you're burning out? I enjoy my life as it seems to be varied enough to keep me interested in it - travelling, working in an office, working at home, travelling more ... but I do spend a lot of time on the 'net, coding or surfing or playing a game. It's a frequent ocurrence that you would find me up at 1am with work the next morning at 7am. I know that this is bad for me (or so they say) and that I should be getting 8 hours sleep a night but I can't help seeing time spent sleeping as a waste (I think of this when I contemplate a long distance drive as well). I'm so ingrained now in this sleeping pattern that maintaining it isn't difficult (although as Loopy can tell you I'm definately NOT a morning person).

It's late and I'm coding (1:40am) and I'm wondering if I'm starting to burn out of that coding enthusiasm - not just tonight but in general. Hmmm... perhaps some more coding will help, push through the barrier.

(although, I gotta admit the code I'm working on right now is pretty sweet :) )

Got HotBar? Trust me, you don't want it.

http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/HotBar.html

http://hotbar.com/downloads/HBfullUnInst.exe (removal tool)
(thanks to NSK@Opus for the links)

In over my head again, but hey I enjoy a challenge. I'm trying to configure sendmail to allow relaying but only after successful smtp authentication - here's a good reference page >> http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/auth.html

We're buying a car today - a 1987 Vauxhall Astra - woohoo! Now all I need to do is rig it up for war-driving. If you're lucky you might see some pics around here somewhere later on. By the way, the insurance for having it on the road is TWO AND A HALF TIMES what we are paying for it!

I found a neat Matrix style javascript effect on DynamicDrive last night. It's very easy to implement and a good effect. Just don't write your biography with it as a long text string is quite slow to resolve.

Uma Thurman 0wnz in Kill Bill. Go see it.

Been offline on the road in Ireland for the last 7 days ... much to my delight I've finally got an IP address again to get my fix with. It was getting a little hairy there for a while *whew*

If you're looking for a text editor (or development suite) for PHP, then look no further than Keith Edmund's "Editor List". Right NOW() there are 111 editors listed on the page with reader comments as well. Check it out at http://phpeditors.linuxbackup.co.uk/

Get your free virus scanner for Windows at http://www.grisoft.com/softw/60/fe/avg6534fu_free.exe

Vietnam moves to oust Microsoft (thanks for the link, Vic)
>> http://slashdot.org/articles/03/10/30/1435248.shtml