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| Vista Ultimate, F7, XP Home & Server 2K3 R2 (Day 2)Well lets start with the bad, Server 2K3 outright refuses to install. F7 After having to reinstall it is running like crap and the Nvidia drivers don't seem to be working correctly, I may just re-install things in XP and Vista I'm not in the mood for rubbish.
XP surprised me with a small drizzle of stupidity when it, without warning me, rewrote my MBR. Those 3 letters have been nothing but headache for the day but Vista has a nice startup recovery tool that reclaimed the MBR and put back in my boot list nicely. Last night I reported that Vista automatically detected, located and then informed me of my Webcam drivers, thoroughly impressing me. Today I can report the drivers won't install so its a waste anyway.
Two things have really left their mark on me today, and those are the Vista Parental Controls and EasyBCD really have to thank 'Cool Cat' for the heads up. It makes the multi-boot so simple and it works so well I just have nothing to complain about. With regards to the parental controls, I've had some time to play with it and I'll be happy to let my younger siblings use the PC. I can limit program access, time at the computer, game ratings and, of course, the level of internet content available to them.
On a big side note I signed my contract to start as a field engineer today, looking forward to starting next week.
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| Vista, F7 Day 1Hell.
That is what it has been so far. I've learned that Vista doesn't take kindly to being second fiddle and it completely hates GRUB. I ended up, after much trial and error, having to reinstall XP Home and Upgrading to Vista to get it work. I'll detail the process later, its 2:27am and I have to be up in a bout 5 hours so I'm thinking trying to put back in F7 is a bad Idea. Yeah, tried fedora 7 and the updates aren't readily apparent and little things like automatically detecting I have a second drive still don't happen so manual mounting and more fstab updating just to access my file drive.
I'll say this Vista is very pretty. Fedora will have to prove its worth with performance, Vista is a resource hog like no other. On a side note, it just popped up and asked me if I wanted to download drivers for my webcam from the time when dinosaurs roamed. I hate to say it but I'm impressed.
Will test drive the parental controls when I get back in tomorrow, well today. Sever 2003 R2 and F7 need to be installed and I'll give EasyBCD a run. Should be a fun day.
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| FC7, Dust and Online GamingF7 download is finished so I should be installing by the end of the week. Hoping the new opensource nvidia driver pans out well and hopefully this release will be even more stable than FC6. Also looking forward to using Firefox 2.0, didn't bother with the manual installtion of FC6 and I dearly miss on-the-fly spell checking.
Recently, FC6 was failing to boot because my cpu cores wouldn't synchronise. Opened up the comp and found and unbelievable amount of dust in the case. Most notably the transistors etc. around the CPU under the heatsink shroud were buried in dust. Cleaned it out, reseated my CPU and carefully applied some Artic Silver and it has gone back working like a charm. I'll have to make cleaning the computer a regular habit, I didn't realise the dust problem was that bad. I ended up, before reseating the CPU, taking out everything and cleaing the case and components. Was a drag but it was necessary.
I had no idea playing a few PC games from behind a router could be so much drama. Port Forwarding, VPNs, Shortcut Target Parameters, Regedits...all to get 2 games working. Long story short, Hamachi VPN and Port Forwarding fix most woes. For some games though, unintelligent games that can't handle 2 connections sensibly, you need to get inventive.
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| RebootHmm the blog shift up worked in my favour, I've fashioned a nice cave here for me to spill my brain on things not quite relevant to my everyday life but matter to me in some way or the other. Keeping my own personal blog seperate and quite recently telling live spaces to kiss my arse.
When something isn't broken you don't try to fix it, its a fairly simple rule. When something is broken, particularly computers, the hard part is knowing what do do next so much like fixing a somewhat broken system of keeping my thoughts in order the next project is to fix my lacking boot list.
Currently GRUB manages my MBR, windows boot disks don't work, I've got 1 kernel version of Fedora Core 6, there is a back up kernel in case I need to roll back and Win XP Home. I'm gonna try to wipe the main drive and use another boot loader and boot Vista alongside Server 2003 and Fedora 7. Yup, they are dropping the 'core' concept and integrating the Core and Extra repostitories...yipee? Its gonna be stress but I'd be a liar if I said I didn't enjoy it some way. Perhaps deriving pleasure from pain is a learned trait. Vista I've all but made up my mind I'm going to hate and replace with XP but I may be pleasantly surprised; the truth is you never know unless you try.
Ah boy, work. A topic that has been nothing but pure stress from mild concern to overbearing worry. Since TBB its been a bit up in the air and again I'd be a liar but if I said I enjoyed it. Some good stuff has happened recently and since I'm writing about it here it relates to IT and in some small way linux since that is the theme here. In the interview on Monday was the most at home I've felt in my whole life, when it comes to my professional side (if it can be called that). In spots I have people I can discuss electricity operated devices with but with the exception of one person that springs to mind no one that really sees things from my end or with the same scope. Monday it was different, I was in the interview talking to the two managers and I didn't have to dumb down a single word. I didn't have to explain or analogize and they got it and in many cases they agreed. If everything pulls through then I could very well be happy at work...that almost sounds blasphemous. Would be a nice lil restart new job and new operating environment at home.
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| Bram Cohen and BittorrentIts people like him that I'm yet to work out if I personally think we need more of...or less of. Sure the bittorrent protocol is his baby and that is amazing, it a really effective and expandable protocol which has taken off and become the most bandwidth efficient method of distributing opensource software. There are many far more dubious uses of the bittorrent protocol but that is the way things go.
Since these uses came about the RIAA and MPAA have taken it upon themself to attack the standard in their never ending quest to waste money trying to stop piracy, but thats another story altogether. ISPs then took it upon themselves to limit traffic for the protocol to save themselves for actually having to give you the bandwidth you pay for and keeping themselves out of the spotlight. Now for the illigitimate uses of torrents I can understand but for getting legitimate software it poses a problem since it doesn't differentiate.
Newton once said, for ever action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction. That holds true in various ways, since the equal and opposite reaction was obsfucation, disguising the data stream so it couldn't be easily identified as bittorrent traffic. The ISP could detect it still but only with great conviction, which the majority seem to lack. Mr. Cohen, being a seemingly idealistic fellow, thinks that obsfucation particularly by header encryption is the wrong way to go about things and was totally uneccessary. His bigger concern seemed to be that it created incompatibility between clients, since some people (like me) won't even allow and incoming connection with plain excryption.
Now onto my point, yes there is a point, out comes the bittorrent mainline client version 5.0.7. We got off to a rocky start since the rpm file distributed on the website needs a few obscure python modules to be installed before it will work (One of which I was unable to find for Fedora Core 6). I realised that I should've just googled the fc6 client, which I did and it worked. Now the new version supports encryption and is natively compiled for linux, a huge plus for me since azureus seems to have an occasional connection crisis and I suspect it has something do with Java but maybe I'm just crazy? Then again, I've had my share of problems with Java so I do have trust issues,  . Our idealistic friend Mr. Cohen has decided not to allow you to choose your poison but his new client will, be default, make the connection based on what the client requries to ensure compatibility.
His method does give way for a very compatible client but what is more important, his singular vision of how he wants the bittorrent client to go forward or the wants of the community which made his protocol relevant? While his dream of perfect connectivity is wonderful, he seems to be a parent that can't quite let got of his child. Of course users like me, that shifted back to mainline hearing about encryption, will go back running to azureus or some other client which allows me to control my ecyption settings.
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