Some additional information is available on the BLUG Facebook group and on the Belfast Linux newsgroup.

See you there!

It’s nearly time to get your geek-on… Check out Andy’s blog for the skinny on BarCamp Belfast 2008.

I hope to see you all there!

During a caffeine-fueled session with my domain registrar I happened to lookup professionalcoffeedrinker.com; it was available, all sense went out the window and my money and myself were swiftly parted.

I wonder if this acquisition will have any effect on the Google Juice of the personal brand I have an eye to developing? And before you ask, yes, SEO information has been trickling it’s way into my RSS reader recently.

The fun is happening on Saturday 21st June, 9am – 5pm in the Peter Froggatt Centre at Queens University Belfast.

See you there!

steve@decaf:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}' | sort -rn | head -10
190 ls
80 cd
24 cp
22 sudo
19 rm
14 svn
12 history
11 tar
10 wget
10 vi

And as root:

172 ls
59 vi
56 cd
22 apt-get
20 less
20 apache2ctl
17 apt-cache
15 cp
10 pwd
10 ps

I’m kinda suprised that ls comes out on top each time

I wonder which commands Matt, Aidan and Philip have been using most?

My Mum and myself went to pay a visit on my Grandmother and while stopping to buy some flowers I spotted this on the dashboard:

I couldn’t resist.

Wikipedia artical for those not in the know.

Just before 9am I phoned tech support and was suprised to not have to wait on hold: my call was answered almost immediately. The support guy was polite and after I explained the situation he tested the line from his end and without any messing around scheduled to have an engineer sent out between 12 and 4pm.

At 12:15 my buzzer went and about 10 minutes later I had a new modem. The engineer had quickly tested the signal strength and determined that it was the hardware that was at fault and swiftly had it replaced. Result.

All that was left to do was ssh into my router and bring the external network interface down and then back up again and voila, the gift of broadband was mine again

This incident was a far cry from my experience of NTL’s customer support. Thumbs up for Virgin Media!

I checked the Virgin Media service status page and can see that there was maintenance scheduled for Belfast this morning, maybe this will remedy the problem…

My morning routine has evolved to consist of catching up on RSS while eating breakfast and guzzling coffee, so this ritual has been disrupted and as an alternative to plugging in to my feed reader I had a look through my home folder for one of the many eBooks I’ve downloaded and not finished reading.

The lucky contestant turned out to be the freely downloadable
Trigger Happy by Steven Poole and what a dose of nostalgia it’s been!

I haven’t seriously played any computer games in about a decade now but this book lists many of the titles I invested many hours into when I was younger. I was brought back to the days of sitting hunched over machines like the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Amiga 600 and NES and I’ve even considered investing in a new console although my need to save for my future is overriding my want for something new and shiny which I might not even make much use of.

Saying that though I’ll probably end up grabbing an Amiga Emulator or MAME at some point over the weekend, Virgin Media willing, and catch up on a few childhood memories.

Game on!

One word sums up my opinion of this little device: “amazement.” I'm amazed that something of this size and at a price of £220 can run a full Linux distribution, has built-in WiFi and can therefore allow me to perform all my day-to-day tasks.

So far I have been able to catch up on my RSS feeds with Google Reader using Firefox; i've ssh’d into my home development machine with the included terminal application and connected to the Infurious jabber server via Pidgen. Just a normal day at the office!

I've found the size of the keyboard a bit awkward but I always have difficulty adapting to a new keyboard anyway, and the 800×480 screen resolution is a bit limiting, but I can't find a single fault in terms of performance and if a full-sized keyboard, monitor and mouse were attached then I could use an Eee PC as a daily workstation no problem.

Hopefully I’ll be able to grab an photo of this gadget soon so you all can have a look at it in action.

What you are seeing is a screenshot of my screen session for a project I’m working on.

Editing a Perl script with vi in my web browser, I love it!