This thing will shortly be moving to Blogspot. I rarely maintain the thing anyway, and Blogspot provides a nice turnkey solution that requires minimal maintenance. The new site for the blog will be:

• http://blog.futt.org/

Looks like my “friends” at Webfusion are not about to let go. They’ve charged me for another month of service (and I’m using the term “service” very liberally here), and has decided to ignore my queries into the matter completely.

So I guess my next course of action will be to contact my CC issuer, contest the charges, and put a block on any further charges from them.

Update: Fantastic, 3 weeks later and they update my ticket:
We have recently received your email request to cancel. In order to proceed with your request you will need to contact our VPS Team on 0845 0722 881.

Due to some performance (and customer support..) issues with my current host, I am considering moving my domains and stuff off my Webfusion Virtual Private Server (VPS). The options currently under consideration is another VPS provider, such as Slicehost, and Amazon EC2/S3 or similar “cloud computing” offer. Google App Engine is one option, but it’s currently not publicly available and I would have to learn Python…

Right now, the Amazon EC2 option looks kinda tempting, but with their rather arcane pricing scheme I’m not entirely sure what that would cost me.

Update 26/07/2008: I have decided to move to a different VPS host, and will be setting up a shiny new virtual server with Slicehost shortly. That means moving stuff, and updating DNS records. There might be some downtime this weekend ;)

One Last Update:

The move to the new server has begun! The sites will be going down one by one as they are moved, to come back up once DNS has been updated. This can take as much as a few hours.

See you  on the new server!

Got me a 2GB Kingston SODIMM chip for my EEEPc today, doubling it’s RAM. Good stuff! I’m running without swap, and somewhat pushing it with regards to memory usage, so I definitely needed this.

Also got me a 160GB WD Passport 2,5″ external harddrive, for backup and external storage. All I need now is a decent laptop bag for it - the ones I have are a bit too big heh.

Wii homebrew channel! Lots of free goodies for the Wii, mostly point-and-click games ported to run on the Wii. This one requires no modding (warranty-voiding or otherwise). Interesting!

So I got mine! Actually, I am typing this post on it. It’s not available in Norway yet, but a traveling colleague got one for me in the Netherlands. Damn this thing is tiny, and oh so sexy. Of course I got the 20GB Linux version, running a custom Xandros Linux.

This machine really is a beauty. Weighing in at under a kilogram, it’s so tiny it’ll almost fit in your coat pockets. Working with the tiny keyboard takes some getting used to but once you get the hang of it it’s really quite refreshing. You don’t have to move your hands at all while typing for one…

Of course, leaving this thing in it’s pristine factory default setup would be a complete waste, so the first thing I did when I had unpacked it was to tweak the hell out of it. Read on for some of the things you may want to do to yours when you get one, as you should!!

The Desktop

Well the default fisher-price desktop with big colorful icons kinda annoyed me. Fortunately, there is a very easy way to enable a full KDE desktop instead, the so called “Advanced Mode“. Once that was done, I had to tweak some themes and config files to free up some screen realestate. The Eee has a tiny 9″ screen, so you’ll need all the space you can get. And of course, with the advanced mode you will also get access to virtual desktops! Even more space.

KDE

There aren’t really all that many packages in the default repositories. Adding Xandros or Debian Etch repos to your sources.list will expand your selection somewhat, but at the risk of completely hosing your system since there will be conflicts. My solution was to grab individual .debs from the etch repos, creating a few dummy packages to satisfy some unnecessary dependencies.

Now I have some of my favourite tools such as Yakuake (the console), and the kde bluetooth utilities etc.

…and more!!

I’ll update here if I find some other nuggets to share. For now I am too busy having fun with this baby!

As of December 1st, the entire IS (Information Services) department at my current employer is getting outsourced to an alliance between Hewlett-Packard and British Telecom. As a part of that project, I’ll be transferring to HP this December. Went to Oslo this weekend for the HP 2008 Kickoff and had a good time with some of my future colleagues. More as events unfold!

Ever heard of The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry - or IFPI? Somehow, through a donation from a third party, The Pirate Bay has gotten hold of the domain, ifpi.com. The original owners probably let the domain expire and someone snagged it before they could correct the mistake.

Torrentfreak has a brief interview with Brokep, of The Piratebay fame. Well played, mateys!

Working on a plugin to display recent Flixster reviews in a Worpress widget. Flixster doesn’t publish any RSS feeds, but the backend for their Flash applet thingy does suck down an XML-based feed which can be easily parsed. The first beta version of the plugin is displayed in the sidebar on this site (scroll down, muppet!). Currently it’s not configurable without editing the code, and there are some ugly hacks in there. Once I get that all sorted I might release it for public consumption.

Oh and there’s no caching of feeds nor images - better get that sorted too…

So I was going to make this innuendo-laden post about what I do with my stick, but decided against it. This is a family blog after all. Anyway, USB sticks are cheap these days, so I always carry a couple of them with me. The latest acquisition is a 4GB Cruzer which I bought the other day for around €20.

Of course, the first thing you need to do when you buy a Cruzer is to remove the god-awful U3 software that comes with it. Fortunately they do provide a removal tool (it’s on a hidden partition on the drive or something). But once that’s done it’s a very useful drive in a very practical form factor. Now, here’s what I did with my 2 drives.

Portable Apps

The first one is a general purpose storage disk, FAT formatted, containing a collection of drivers and tools that I use a lot at work and when fixing computers for friends and family. Putting installers for useful tools on the USB drive is nothing new of course, and to be honest, not really all that useful. That’s where PortableApps comes in.

PortableApps is a framework and toolset that installs itself on a flash drive, and gives you a portable “Start Menu” type thing that launches and sits in your systray when you insert the USB stick (provided you have Autorun enabled). But that’s not all, there are quite a few useful applications and tools that will install in the PortableApps framework, and run straight off your USB stick without installing it on the computer, saving all settings back to the USB stick.

You can download portable versions of popular freeware and opensource applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, The Gimp, OpenOffice.org, Putty, Winscp, Notepad++ and so on. They all launch and run straight off the USB stick, so for the larger apps you will want a stick with fast read access.

The Rescue Stick

When everything goes south, and you’re left with a smoking pile of debris that will not boot, any number of useful tools and drivers won’t save you. What you need is a rescue cd to boot from. Now a CD is not very practical to carry around with you (unless you’re into really big and flashy bling or something), so why not make a rescue stick?

Using the System Rescue CD, you can do just that. Copying the contents of the CD to your USB drive and running the Syslinux utility will create a bootable USB stick with everything you need to salvage that wrecked PC. Contents include memtest86 and aida for hardware diagnostics, ntfs-3g and ntfstools for salvaging a borked NTFS file system, ntpass to recover lost passwords, partition utilities and boot managers to fiddle with the partition layout and boot unbootable partitions and restore deleted ones, and a stripped down Gentoo Linux system with lots and lots of tools to salvage what’s left.

Those are just some of the many tools provided on this CD. It’s an indispensable tool for any system admin or support tech, provided you primarily work with newish hardware that supports booting from USB devices.