My Web 2.0 Life October 4th, 2006

As I involve my self further and further into the Web 2.0 world I find that more of my life is going online, this blog is one example.
I started out reading other blogs, I suppose because I always thought that everyone had an interesting story to tell and I wanted to know about them, after a while I thought that I might give it a go so that I could have somewhere I could express thoughts and some motivation to go out and see the world (Melbourne) and report back. I am slowly finding more and more interest in blogging which in one way or another had lead me to other places online:

Flickr

Digg

coComment & commentful
last.fm

del.icio.us

scuttle

Comments September 26th, 2006

Ever since I started the whole blog thing I have always wanted a better way to keep track of the comments that I have made on other blogs in case there was a response to a questions that I wanted or it turned into a interesting conversation.

I had seen del.icio.us and how it managed bookmarks but I had also seen scuttle and it had the same sort of concept even though it was a little bit late into the game, but the attractive thing to me about scuttle was that it allowed you to download the source and run it on your own servers, which I have done of course. So I have been tracking the comments Read more..

Posted in Blogging, Computers, Geek, Internet, Technology | 2 Comments »

Nokia 6233 September 23rd, 2006

Finally got myself a new phone, after months of searching and looking at different phones, then looking on ebay and the prices and if I could afford them. I decided ‘stuff it’ and went to the optus shop and grabbed a Nokia 6233.

I was already looking at the slide-phone Nokia 6280 as a possible option and seen the Samsung D600 in action so I was looking at the D900. But in the end it just got to the point where I needed a new phone and didn’t care what I got as long as it worked….well and kinda cool as well.

After years (about 5) of not ever using a Nokia I finally got myself one, honestly I can see the reason that they sell so well. The have a target audicence with each of the line ( I think that the 6 Series is target towards the business audiece) and eveything that they want is availale in the price range. I suppose the big advantage is the fact that the user base is so large there are many people making stuff for them – games and themes are one of the first things that I tried out.

Pretty happy with the phone, I’ve only had it for a week and I’m a little amused that I fussed over features such as radio, mini SD card, message storage, address book. I have just been using it as normal and haven’t really touched any of the extra stuff…well that is until now.

Now I just have to decide if I should upgrade my PDA…maybe I should have got an O2 Mini

Posted in Geek, Personal, Technology | No Comments »

Palm Tungsten|T September 14th, 2006

My first real foray into the gadget world would have to be the purchase of my first PDA, being the Palm Pilot Tungsten|T.
In the early days of 2000 a device of this nature set me back $1000, and at that age it was by no means a small amount, I spent a considerable amount of time repaying it and finally paid it off. The years have passed and it has gone through times of use and non-use but I have always come back to it to sort things out or organise events and things to do, I always find it useful.

First it was using it with Windows and the Palm desktop, as ugly as it is, it does work and keeps all my contacts and calendar in one place, useful for reminding me about birthdays and things to do. I consistently have to plan for things in advance and always seem to forget about them, but with the calendar I was able to plan and remember which helped greatly.
Then came along my first phone with bluetooth (K700i), bluetooth was already being used when I got the PDA with friends who were ahead in the mobile phone game and those who got PDA’s after me. Mainly it was just playing around, passing files to each other, and a great little app that I can no longer find, blueboard let a number of users could share a virtual whiteboard and draw and pass messages to each other….hours of endless childish fun!
Read more..

Posted in Apple, Computers, Geek, Technology | No Comments »

iRiver H10 20gb August 1st, 2006

I have been trying to choose between the iRiver and an iPod, but I was always leaning towards the iRiver for various reasons, mainly the fact that I would be able to manipulate files without iTunes, but as it turns out this isn’t such a band thing.

Recently the choice was made for me with and iRiver H10 20gb, so far I’m pretty happy, it probably helps that I’m slightly technically minded so I don’t mind using alternative methods and using multiple tools to load songs and re-build the database so all the tags get read.

The only thing that I haven’t figured out is how to automatically sync podcasts, which I will be investigating in the next couple of days. The iRiver that I did get is one that uses the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) I wasn’t really big fan of this idea in the first place so I thought that I would give it a shot, turns out it didn’t work too well in my case, were as instead of transfering the audio files across it copied them to a different location and attempted to re-encode them into wmv format…not cool!

Anti-Hero July 28th, 2006

I used to like the traditional hero when I was younger, but as I have gotten older I don’t seem to like them as I used to, don’t get me wrong they still pose the intent of good will and the warm fuzzy feeling that you get after reading and watching them.But as I started to get to know fictional characters such as Wolverine, Spawn and Batman and more recently on T.V and at the movies characters such as House M.D, Riddick (Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick) possibly some of Sin City and even good old Jack Sparrow .

I’m uncertain what it is but I find them so much more interesting to watch, it’s probably because of their instability and the fact that they don’t confirm to the traditional guidelines to what a hero should embody and don’t follow the normal rules.

Wikipedia probably has the best definition:

When the anti-hero is a central character in a work of fiction the work will frequently deal with the effect their flawed character has on them and those they meet along the narrative. In other words, an anti-hero is a protagonist that lives by the guidance of their own moral compass, striving to define and construe their own values as opposed to those recognized by the society in which they live. Additionally, the work may depict how their character alters over time, either leading to punishment, un-heroic success, or redemption.

I hope that there are more stories and characters that emerge as this, because as the traditional hero ( Superman, Justice League, Sir Galahad are probably the best examples) might have had its time, the world today isn’t able to believe that someone can be that pure and wholesome and still be mentally stable. Such characters I think will remain in the realm of fiction, but someone with a flaw that would be his/her downfall that makes them more human, more damaged more like us.

I would like to note the fact that I’m mainly referring to fictional heroes here, there are many cases for people to be considered heroes or to have possible heroic qualities the list is way to long (Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa) and can list those that have fought for a cause or an ideal that should have existed but didn’t, I am not arguing this.

Like The Architect said in The Matrix Reloaded possibly an imperfect world is a perfect one, so possibly making characters flawed like us makes them more believable, it makes sense because many of the comic book anti-heros are some of the most revered that you will come across: Batman and Wolverine are the best examples off the top of my head.

Posted in Geek, Wondering Mind | 3 Comments »

dnsmasq July 4th, 2006

I like playing around with and running services on servers because I think that it’s fun, it’s the reason that this blog runs on its own server at home, that does mean that there are problems with conectivity sometimes and I am forced to fix my own problems, which has lead me to think about moving the blog to a hosted service.

I have been playing around with DNS services for a while and during reading noticed that most people believed that BIND wasn’t up to standard anymore and a more acceptable service to go for would be djbdns, the documentation on the site is great and with other sites like life with djbdns and djbdns rocks and there wasn’t with the help of the above three sites I was able to setup a suitable caching name server for my home network. The only problem that I had was because of the way dnscache and tinydns is setup it cannot run on the same network IP so as a result tinydns will normally run on 127.0.0.1 and dnscache will run on the private or public IP. This worked great for me, except for one reason or another I wasn’t able to get dns lookups for my local machine to work.

After some searching I decided that it would be best to head towards dnsmasq

Ethical Robots June 22nd, 2006

I have just finished a semester doing a subject called ‘Professional Issues in Information Technology‘ which I found immensely fascinating and out of curiosity and a break from exam study I started looking up some topics relating to it on the Internet and I came across this article:
No sex please, robot, just clean the floor

I’ll just mention a few good quotes here:

�We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.�

…identified key areas that include: ensuring human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.

�Scientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen,� said Verruggio. �Robots will develop strong intelligence, and in some ways it will be better than human intelligence.

How far should robots be allowed to influence people�s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy? �The question is what authority are we going to delegate to these machines?� said Professor Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. �Are we, for example, going to give robots the ability to execute lethal force, or any force, like crowd control?�

The whole idea is that there will be a team drawing up a code of ethics for both robots/AI and the scientists who create them.

I totally agree with the article above but there are few things that got me thinking that I want to elaborate on.
Read more..

Posted in Future, Geek, International, Life, Nature, Technology | 1 Comment »

Recover Lost MySQL Password in FreeBSD April 18th, 2006

I had lost the root password for my mysql root account I had it stored in my palm pilot and it had proved stable for quite some time so I threw out the written down passwords.

But then when I went a looked for it in my Palm Pilot the password had somehow disappeared.

So after hunting through some documentation I finally found out how to reset the root password.

These instructions are specific for FreeBSD because that is what my webserver runs.

Everything below has been done using the command line.
Read more..

Posted in BSD, Geek, how to, Technology | No Comments »

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