As I slave away to finish off the first episode of Dataman I can’t help but think that maybe Dataman is a little cursed. Last night while editing it all together Audacity crashed on me and I hadn’t yet saved. I have crossed my fingers today and hope that a Christmas Miracle can help me get Dataman out on time.
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
I’ve been getting an increasing number of Spam emails giving me stock tips. The emails are solely about promoting a particular stock and have a fairly stock standard body (no pun intended). Is this the new way to try and influence the stock market? If it were to work it would be quite interesting to see the effects.
Today I needed to tweak the startup order of various processes on our RHEL3 server at work. I needed to make sure that the lmtp server (which handles local delivery of messages to our mail database) started before Postfix. If this order was violated, all sorts of bad stuff could happen (like lost mail).
What I found was a bizarre solution, but it works (I’m guessing because I haven’t had the opportunity to restart the server yet).
In the /etc/rc?.d/ directories you place symbolic links to the startup scripts. By naming these links carefully you can specify the order of startup for that particular runlevel. It seems that there is a convention of naming these files S00script_name, so I would recommend sticking to it.
Unfortunately Webmin doesn’t allow for re-ordering startup actions and seeing as I find the startup actions in Linux some of the most complicated things to set up, it is a shame this feature is missing. (You can view the order though)
If I have it entirely wrong, let me know.
Just a little over a week ago I was much like the lovable Ebenezer Scrooge. The thought of Christmas was about as exciting as doing my taxes. But sometime between then and now I have been filled with the Christmas Spirit and not the alcoholic variety either.
I now find myself humming Christmas Carols and contemplating Dataman’s return through a Christmas Special. So what changed my mood so drastically? And why does it happen every year?
Oh well, off to do some Christmas Shopping.
After reading about the decline in religious standards it became apparent that the 10 Commandments were quite old and not ready for our modern lifestyles. Therefore, we at The Mill put forward some new Commandments, or ammendments if you like to bring the Commandments to the 21st Century (at this point I shall point out that I am aware that the Jewish faith has 613 commandments).
Traditionally the commandments have covered important things like don’t murder people (killing is ok, in certain circumstances) and don’t be jealous of your neighbour’s belt sander, but other things, like whether putting mobile phone towers on the top of a church is ok or not are skipped. Or at least, not specifically referred to.
So let’s start simply with one that has probably been missing for a while:
“Thou shalt not do stuff that is so obviously wrong there shouldn’t need to be a rule for it. Sheesh”
This is a particularly important catch all commandment with the intention of weeding out stuff that you should know is plain wrong, like encouraging reality telivision (which may already be covered by a series of Idol references). Of course, just to be sure that reality telivision is covered, we have a commandment just for it:
“Thou shalt not film “reality” and pass it of as entertainment.”
I think that God would use the air quotes in there too.
“Thou shalt reveal your identity if you play a prank within a timely manner”
We all know why this one should be here.
Have you got any ideas for new commandments? Do you think I’ll probably suffer an eternity of torment for even thinking about this? Let me know, post a comment.