Although Flickr is well recognised for its features I’d still like to have an equivalent that I can install on my own server. I prefer the sense of absolute control and ownership that brings. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a photo gallery that meets my requirements which are very similar to the functionality delivered by Flickr. However, that seems likely to change in the near future as I came across idPhoto which is heading in that direction.
Recently my housemate has been having problems with people opening ‘Word’ documents created from OpenOffice. Trying to get more information from the user is difficult as they just use Word and so aren’t overly familiar with document versions. This has been causing delays and lots of stress. So I found the handiest way to get a compatible .doc is to upload the OO file (either the .doc or an OO format document) to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, then saving as a Word document. The end result is a document that happily opens in their version of Word.
Had a bit of a rough time today – spent about 5 hours at the data centre working on my machine after trying to get xen-3.0.4 installed. After building from source, installing it and getting everything under /boot setup, the damn thing kept doing a kernel panic trying to load / . I went round and round in circles trying everything until I eventually gave up and went back to 3.0.2-2 – not without trouble there mind! So now the machine is running and I have my VMs up but there’s hassle around the networking. All I really wanted to do was get Enomalism up and running along with decent snapshotting .. oh well. I think the only way to do this properly is to put in a smaller disk as the primary (then use the 320GB drive as storage only) under a Linux install with LVM from the word go – it’s just been too much hassle trying to add LVM/EVMS afterwards. Time to have a hunt round the house to see if I have any spare disks and start planning what will go on – I think Ubuntu-server might be the job. Probably leave this until I get back from Ireland as I’ve spent far too much time in that data centre!
As I do my own hosting the problem of spam has been something that comes up a lot. I use Scalix so there wasn’t much instantly available when I first looked. A lot of the open source guides tell you about anti-spam measures for Postfix, Qmail and such like. However, I did come across ASSP which is a pretty nifty package. It’s easy to install as it’s just a proxy for your mail server. With Scalix, sendmail is used so I just set that to listen on a different port and then ASSP will proxy connections on port 25. Its anti-spam measures are pretty aggressive so you would probably want to spend some time understanding how it’s going to affect you and monitor quite closely. However, it has really cut down my spam massively so it’s well worth investigating if you want something that will sit in front of an existing mail setup.
After thinking about this for awhile, I decided to add another section onto the blog. This one, as the name suggests, covers wine. Basically, I’m going to keep a record of what I’ve bought (largely in Singapore) and give some quick, rather uninformed, comments. The main thing is that everything is generally affordable (i.e < S$30) and easily available. So you should be able to find them in places like Cold Storage, NTUC or Carrefour.
More meta-content I’m afraid. Got around to doing a bit with the blog again to make it slightly more presentable. The Lucid theme is rather neat but I’m trying to figure out how to make particular settings default (dynamic layout and mint green colouring).
Well not quite, on the lash , as I did spend Saturday not-hungover. Ministry of Sound is becoming a regular Friday night event now for me. So much so that when I got back from New Zealand last Saturday night, I went down there just a few hours later. I reckon I’m more of a Friday night person, the music seems to suit me better.
Last Friday was a FILTH night with Damian Saint which I was looking forward to as I missed the last one while I was in NZ. Detoured off to my usual spot first though; what used to be the ‘Over 25’ room I think? John (I think) and Paul play there and I was glad to get a listen to John again as I wasn’t mad keen on what he played Saturday previously (I think the Friday night sound is my best bet) but definitely liked the sound on Friday. As usual Paul’s choice and performance of tracks was superb. Meant I was kind of late getting down to the main arena to listen to FILTH but it was still damn good with some great sampling of Firestarter and Smack Your Bitch Up.
So the last article was a bit of a lie, I had migrated the database from the WordPress server but I hadn’t actually sorted out the site properly. After plenty of fucking about with LiteSpeed (which seems decent enough) I got 0.7.2 up and running which is nice. Still quite a bit to do, but at least that’s out of the way.
If you’re seeing this then I’ve successfully migrated the blog to the new host. If you’re seeing this through an RSS feed then even better, the feed URL is working as well!
