Walk Alone

Now that I’ve got my system fully operational, its time to move. But, (pity!) I got exams. So I have to postpone the move upto June. And its a good thing too. Dapper Drake is coming out on June 1. So when I move, I will move to the latest version of Ubuntu. But in the meantime, here’s the POA (thats something I learnt from my CATty friends).

1. Download Dapper Drake from Breezy Badger. Four things - linux hours, cd-writng experience, linux bit-torrent experience and pacenet outage handling experience (those pesky 25xxx errors).
2. Install Dapper Drake and get the net connected . Get Firestarter.
3. Migration shouldn’t be much of a hitch - I’m pretty much used to the suite of applications - Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, GIMP, Dia, GAIM, Bit-Torrent, etc.
4. Transfer my stuff from Windows to Linux, specially the mailbox.
5. Figure out the various paths - Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl.
6. Install Java, only because I want to continue with my applet stuff.
7. FF plugins - Java, Flash, Shockwave and FF extensions.
8. Media codecs - audio and video - maybe VLC player will do?
9. Sync up localhost. Check out sitecopy and an FTP client.

I expect to finish most of this by 15th June.

Along with this, I’m going to overhaul my site (AGAIN). When I get a domain and a paid host, that is.

DokuWiki is coming back. I like TiddlyWiki but I’m going to use it like I mentioned earlier - for special jobs like a CD front-end and stuff like that. DokuWiki is more in tune with what I have in mind for my site. In addition to the usual stuff, the wiki will hold my Linux tips/configs - useful when I have to upgrade.

Seems like this will be the state of affairs for some time now.

The community of Bloggers in my class has reached a critical density - a grand number of 9. And I’ve not considered others who may be publishing on Blogger unknown to me or on LiveJournal or using Wordpress or MT. To keep us together, sort of like adding a sustaining element to a chemical process, I have started a team blog. So far, two of the eight guys have come onboard. The slack may be becuase I’ve timed it right on the first day of Ganeshotsav. But never mind if it sinks. This will be… lets see, my third community site (one team blog on Blogger during Nov-Dec 2004 and a Yabb-driven hosted forum were the first two) which will sink.

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My poor machine suffered the fate of being used by my sister, an administrator-level user suffering from the toaster syndrome. Or worse, a washing machine syndrome. Check this - 2 presses on button 1, 3 on button 2, flick the load switch and you are done. Now, on a PC, 1 click here, 2 there, 1 right click, select an Option, hit Enter, you are done. Sounds similar?

First, she bit my head off - “The Net is not working. You must have screwed it deliberately”. Ahh, sibling rivalry. “The Net” means all the componets from the NIC on my PC to the CAT-5 cable to the area switch (see my previous post) to Pacenet servers to their fibre-optic link to the Internet backbone. Hmm. But this “error” was “Ethernet Controller Detected” and the OS showed no clue of any NIC being present in the hardware. It was as if something had knocked off a module from the OS and the OS was now claiming a new hardware. Oh well. Two rounds of the New Hardware Found Wizard (once with the OS installation disc and then with the NIC drivers disc) didn’t rectify the problem. Then, I simply took out the NIC, did a startup-shutdown cycle and put in the NIC back. Everything was back to normal. Only Gates and God knew what happened.

Then she went ahead and installed something called Hotbar for smileys, wallpapers, customisable toolbars and a local weather conditions indicator! Hell of a choice for an admin-guy, I must say. The thing sat in my sys-tray and whenever I opened an explorer window, it would fire up a net-based setup. Even the un-install required an active net connection. Damn. This lady works in Orange, somewhere in their Customer Care department. Her job usually involves some highly customised software used for call centres. If this is what her computer IQ is, I wonder what Orange must be paying its system/network administrators.

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My site is due for an overhaul. The Matlab thingy fell through. Mainly, because I envisioned a bigger document than I could possibly handle. It was also becoming redundant and I was focussing more and more on how to make it different than Matlab’s own Help, which started dragging it down. This time, the idea is to simply point the reader to specific nodes in Matlab’s Help - it should be better than the reader going through the huge documentation on his own.