I just clicked about something...

When in your mail logs it says:


2004-04-16 07:41:05 recipients from [218.84.71.28] refused (failed to find host name from IP address)


I had always thought that it meant that it had failed because it couldn't resolve the reverse name of the IP... and I thought "that's not RFC compliant - so why is it enforcing it?"

Looking at the logs just now, I realised that it merely means that it failed (for some other reason), and when it tried to log the reverse name it couldn't resolve it... so it wrote "failed to find hostname..." where it would have normally logged the hostname... perhaps it should just put "could not resolve" or something which doesn't have the word "failed" in it...

It's frustrating sometimes that Debian (and much of Linux!) seems to be set up as a workstation operating system running X - apps like hnb come configured to launch X apps - when I want to use it tucked away on my server... tools like vim require gpm - when I'm hundreds of miles away from the mouse port, ImageMagick requires most of an X environment and epinfo requires digital camera stuff, when both of these tools are good to have for in-situ image work on my webserver...

I've just tried out Flonix build41

Hmmm - it has a fancy media centre app which feels like a full-screen DOS thing - good to hardwire as an interface for idiots - like in a public access terminal, but over-all I wasn't impressed with Flonix at ALL :o(

My (negative) comments are:

• The first thing I noticed was that it didn't give me a boot menu or any boot-option help like DamnSmallLinux or Knoppix do.


• Next it didn't get my video mode right and I was in 256 (or 16???) colours and it looked HORRIBLE!


• Next thing was that the colour palette wasn't fixed, and when you moused over different windows things on the screen would all change colour - YUCK!


• Next when I brought up a shell the default colours are gross.


• THEN, the PS1 prompt has a HASH!!! you NEVER give a hash prompt to a non-root user - that means "you're root, so be careful!" - This says to me that Florent is either ignorant of or doesn't care about *nix standards.


• The next thing is it uses the username damnsmall - you should never use a username that has 9 or more characters - always use 8 or less - it breaks things - you do an ls -l and the columns are pushed out of alignment - i.e. you try and write a script that cuts out the columns you want and does something with them - it will break on this.


• damnsmall is messy in that it uses so much knoppix, flonix is even worse, it has Debian, Knoppix and DamnSmallLinux leftovers all over it - not tidied up.


• I don't know if it was meant to - I'll need to go back and look if I can be bothered with it - it didn't detect or set up any network.


• When I crashed out of X I couldn't re-start it with startx. It may have taken looking around and reconfiguration to restart it, but I didn't try changing the runlevel down and back up again - that may have done the trick.

As a final whinge, the website isn't all that easy to get around - like how to find the download link...

All in all, it looks like a rough hack to serve a purpose, good on him for putting it online for people to use, I hope it's that he's a newbie, not a rough oldbie... but at the end of the day it's not in the same league as Knoppix or DamnSmallLinux...

Turning the "My Documents" icon on and off...

I feel terrible about this, but I've been reduced to being a L00z3d0z3 luser again... new workplace with "thou shalt have thy productivity hobbled by using this inferior gunk on our hardware" - i.e. I have to run Win2K, can't use Linux... geh!

I deleted the "My Documents" icon from the desktop and wanted to put it back a week later for some reason...

I wrote this inf file:


;
; This turns on and off your "My Documents" folder on the desktop...
; Use to restore a deleted "My Documents" icon in Windows 2000
;

[version]
signature="$WINDOWS NT$"

[DefaultInstall]
DelReg=ClearOut
AddReg=MyDocsOn
;AddReg=MyDocsOff

[MyDocsOn]
HKCU,%MD_SWITCH_PATH%,"Attributes",65537,74,01,40,f0

[MyDocsOff]
HKCU,%MD_SWITCH_PATH%,"Attributes",65537,74,01,50,f0

[ClearOut]
HKCU,%MD_SWITCH_PATH%,"Attributes"

[Strings]
MD_SWITCH_PATH="Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CLSID\{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}\ShellFolder"


It says "Installation Failed" when I run it, (not sure what it's missing), but it does actually work :o)

I've been trying to buy a 256MB USB MP3 player (was that a lot of acronyms?) on eBay and I'm GUTTED I missed out on this one! (only by 29 minutes!)
I have a goal to buy one for less than £48 !!! :o) (I still have to pay P&P on top of that = £7.50ish)

Update:

ARGH!

The First Smiley :-)

Believe it ?

Actually, I've got more to add to that...

Take two...

The First Smiley :-)

A CSS table which stays in the right place, but it's hardwired, which isn't very nice :o( http://www.gwyncole.com/blogfiles/gwync/MyCSSTable.htm

Hmmm... I wish you could do with CSS what you can do with tables!!! somewhere, a LONG time ago (like 3+years) I read that the <TABLE> tag was invented for displaying data in a tabular form, not for page layout... well... I'm sorry to say, that while CSS was invented for formatting and page layout etc, it doesn't (yet) do as good a job as things like "I want a box at the bottom of my page, split into three equal boxes which will re-size with the page, and a box on top of that the width of the page... and I want it all to still work the same way in different browsers and I don't want to have to hard-wire specify the size in pixels - so that it will work the same on a smaller or larger screen too..." fixed dimensions for page layout suck - unless you are fixing something like an image along the side of the screen... i.e. It's probably ok to have an image in the top left corner, and something else immediately to the right of it (or below it) and want that to sit hard against it.

It sucks having to have a gazillion nested tables on a page, all that extra overhead of source, and hard to keep track of while working in a text editor... but CSS isn't up to the job yet. Oh, and I LOVE finding pages on the web preaching that you shouldn't use tables for page layout... and then you look at the source of the page and they're... using tables for page layout!

It would be wonderful to have a mobile device to code on!

At the moment I just want something simple like an encryption tool... even rot13

Can you write apps for Nokia 9110i & upload them? It's flakey enough as it is though.

3735928559 = DEADBEEF in dec.

is about the coolest of:

grep -vi '[g-z]' /usr/share/dict/words

Wow! When you search for Great Barrier it's now 9 / 1,710,000 on Google...
Such a long hard slog!!!