Shin
Mar
28

Bye bye Avalanche

Well, here goes… I’m posting this here seeing as I doubt this would last 5 minutes if I’d post it at AO.
I finally, formally, quit as admin at Avalanche Online, and for the following reasons:
- conflict in management. Personally I think allowing spammers to stay just so the board appears alive is a perfect way to fuck up the community.
And it has been fucked up. Everyone but a few has long since moved on and the forum is a joke compared to the old days.
- Non-involvement of the admin. Edgar was gone for a year. We’re all busy, and we all found time to moderate the place anyhow. If you don’t care just shut the place. And copying bits and pieces from all over the web now to make up ‘content’ is a joke.
- The whole bandwidth soap and the asking for money. I had full admin access to the site, I’ve seen the bandwidth usage. Even after removing the mp3′s it was claimed the site still did way over 100GB a month. It didn’t, it barely scratched 30, and even at that… I pay $10 a month for this site, and that includes 205GB/month bandwidth. Do the math…
- Dragon627 getting booted. He was still active and was removed as super moderator without even getting a notice, with Edgar claiming he couldn’t get a hold of D. Dragon’s always in our chatroom and nearly always on AIM. More bullshit.
- CommS borrowed Edgar a few hundred so he could get his wife over. That was early 2003, to this day Edgar hasn’t spoken to C about paying him back… and he’s borrowed money from more people…

Thanks to everyone at AO who made it a fun place when I started there 4 years ago, but given said points I think it’s time I finally call it officially quits.

And Edgar, you seriously need to change your attitude towards friends who’ve always been there for you. And contact CommS about the money, you don’t live that far away amigo…

Mar
16

Workspace

In a totally random moment I decided to post this pic of the view I have for a rather large part of my waking moments, my workspace:
Worspace
I could have dumped this in the gallery but I figured it was more blog material given my recent comp/OS posts in here (not to mention my rants about work ; )
3 screens, left one belongs to my testmachine, here running the Suse 9.2 proxy/firewall which has already gone live. I reinstalled it yesterday and it’s now running the latest preview release of Ubuntu, which is a GREAT distro for every Linux lover who wants to play with the latest versions of any and all software. Make sure you don’t get the preview release but a stable one unless you absolutely know what you’re doing as things seem to be broken quite a bit (as is to be expected in a beta release). But Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4 are very yummy.
Moving on…. the central screen is my main box, running XP (with an OsX flavored theme ofcourse). It’s a pain in the butt and I use it as little as possible, Outlook still makes me vomit and I’m still twitching for Lotus Domino every now and again.
And finally on the right is the screen which is hooked up to 4 of the servers via a KVM switch.

Mar
13

A little bit of this and a little bit of that

Halfway through March again, time to smell spring.
I’m also halfway through the Novell Certified Linux Professional training having just completed the second administration course. Very interesting stuff, but a bit much to take in all at once during 5 days.
I seem to be fiddling with half a dozen operating systems at the moment, which is cool, I just get random waves of information overkill every now and again.
After having picked up the Mac a few weeks ago I’ve been playing with it a lot and I must say, I’m very impressed. It’s a lot faster than I thought an old G4/350Mhz would be and it’s almost good enough for daily use. Almost, because ofcourse I couldn’t resist diving into the BSD side of things and the poor little box is currently spending a lot of time compiling software using the incredible Fink Commander. Le Mac really does offer the best of both worlds. The standard Mac apps are all beautifully integrated in ways that make the whole end user experience a lot more enjoyable than I thought possible. The ‘it just works’ credo holds true.
And there’s a lot more freeware available than I had imagined. Some of the things I’ve installed and use at the moment include Adium, VLC, SubEthaEdit, Cyberduck, MenuMeters, Growl & TigerLaunch, and that’s not counting all the software I know from Linux.
Some things seem to be noticeably missing for reasons I can’t comprehend.
Everyone seems to be so much in love with iTunes that there’s no real Winamp port. Now ok, iTunes does run a whole lot faster on the Mac but still, I can’t stand the interface compared to Winamp. I want my damn ‘normal’ playlist! I also have yet to find anything that comes even remotely close to Grabit, my favourite Usenet binary grabber.
Still, with the amount of buzz Apple is generating at the moment and switchers crawling out of the woodworks by the thousands (or so it seems), it can’t be long before more of that kind of software surfaces. And if not I still have my linux ports, hehe.

The new version of Os X, codename Tiger is rumoured to be released in April at which time all the Macs will be bumped to 512MB standard, so anyone wishing to buy one would be wise to wait another month.

I’m not getting one because I’m broke as f00k and I got shafted with my contract renewal. A lousy $50 a month rise…. whoopdee-fucking-doodaa. That’s inflation correction, not a raise. That still leaves me about $500 short compared to what I used to make. *grumbles* In a bizarre twist of fate they have agreed to pay me a MCSA training so I’ll actually know what I’m doing with the new SBS 2003 server we just got, I’m looking forward to that. so in a few months time I’ll have done enough and had enough training to go from admin n00b to fully qualified Linux and Windows sysadmin.
Not bad. Now if I could just afford the car check up next week life would look a whole lot sunnier.

C’est la vie.

Work in progress... not home!
Trying to get all/most of the new code working before I start on the eyecandy.