CYE's EYE

Click Estates – The better way of selling or buying a property

Cye — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:42:14 +0000

A friend of mine has set up his own Estate Agent company. He is focusing on property in Kent after running a highly successful company in Surrey for a number of years. If you know anyone who is thinking of buying or selling please point them to http://www.click-estates.com/. The company is carrying out its services exclusively over the internet so has reduced running costs and can provide services at approximately half the going rate of other Estate Agents, but with all the usual benefits – including advertising property on Right Move etc. Thanks

Murphy’s Law 1984: the more complete a backup/recovery solution becomes, the less likely it is to ever be used

Cye — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:47:48 +0000

With nearly half a century of experience using computers to run their business, Chris M’s company knew that law all too well. Ever since that fateful Wednesday — still known throughout the company as The Crash of ‘68 — they swore, Never Again. And forty years later, they’ve kept their promise.

Over the years, Chris’s employer has come as close to a Perfect Technology Infrastructure as anyone. They hire the best network administrators money can buy and give them whatever resources they need to ensure that the infrastructure remains solid. And that they do.

The company’s backup and retention plan is nothing short of immaculate. Every system they’ve ever purchased — from that old payroll program on the System/360 to that bizarre parts database for OS/2 — can be brought back to life, if not physically than through virtualization. A walk through their “software archive” was a treat for many; new technicians are often astonished to learn, not only of the existence of 8-inch floppy disks, but that the company still has the 8-inch install disks for CP/M. And a drive to run them on.

Naturally, thanks to the aforementioned Murphy’s Law, this elaborate backup and retention is rarely, if ever, called into use. The only excitement the network technicians ever get is that occasional, frantic, “Oh Crap! I accidentally deleted that critical PowerPoint presentation” call. And even that is easily solved by walking the user through their self-service file restoration system.

But a little while back, the network technicians received a restoration request that actually sounded interesting. A production manager needed a report of the “old old” part numbers for a long out-of-production assembly. “Old old” referred an ancient mainframe system that had been replaced by the “old” system over ten years go and finally shut down in 2001. Restoring the “old old” system meant setting up a new emulation environment, mounting the old disk image, and praying that it boots up without a hitch.

This was the first time ever that an actual user had requested such a restoration, so the network technicians were naturally a bit nervous. But thanks to their meticulous planning and procedures, everything went fine. The system booted up without a hitch and the production manager was summoned to log in to the terminal they had set up for him. He sat down at the chair, keyed in his username, and then paused for a moment.

“Now, what was my password five years ago?”

Typical User Issue = TUI

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Ubuntu Web Browsers – The good, the bad, the ..??

Cye — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:18:17 +0000

Well, I’ve been playing on my Ubuntu system for a while now. The one thing I wasn’t expecting to have was formatting problems when viewing web pages. Obviously I started with Firefox 2.0. This seems to cope with most sites, but every so often I come across a problem with the size of text being displayed. This is usually on menus such on www.firstdirect.com. See the screen shot below:

So from this example I decided to view a basic HTML page from www.downthelane.net through Firefox, Galeon, Opera and Mozilla web browsers. The examples are shown below:

From the example site, Galeon and Mozilla seem to display the format better than Firefox and Opera. However Firefox and Opera are the more “polished” products. However I assume Mozilla and Galeon use the same build engine as they are at the same release level. Viewing the same site through Internet Explorer on my WXP box displays the site correctly. I’d be interested in views on why some browsers display the sites better than others.

Sienna Miller, Baftas and a Coke can

Cye — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 22:12:32 +0000

Seeing Sienna Miller in “that dress” at the Bafta’s tonight got me interested in what fan coverage she has. Well the article below from Weird Nations shows the extent in 2005. Did someone really buy her Coke can for £10,000 ??

Sienna Miller’s Coke Can Auction Date: 30-07-05
Finishing Price: £10,000.00
Auction Site: Ebay
Seller: gajones2002
Visitors: 5,700+

Funniest Audio-text ever… well it made me laugh!

Cye — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 23:22:54 +0000

Had this message left on the family phone a couple of weeks ago. Apparently it’s from the father in law, but the text voice sounds like Tom Baker, the actor. Have a listen, have a giggle.

Ubuntu: a newbies adventure – part two

Cye — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 23:02:03 +0000

Well thanks to Paul and Richie (see commented from my first entry)I have kept my focus in keeping to the Ubuntu Path. I purchased an additional 256mb memory for my Thinkpad R50e, and then installed Ubuntu, replacing the existing Xubuntu setup. This time with 512mb of memory I had no issues during the install and the system is fast enough to carry out most tasks.

So the next fun and games was to setup the Dlink Wireless USB device. This initially was a real headache with various website recommending a number of drivers and packages to be installed. I eventually came across some excellent instruction on the Ubuntu community forums. Details of installing the RT73 drivers to allow D-Link DWL-G122 Rev C1 and Linksys WUSB54GC can be found under the setup instructions for the Belkin F5D7050. The instructions are very I clear and I had no problems, with the device working first time.

Next steps are:

map/mount shares on my XP desktop so I can access my mp3 collection from the Thinkpad.
link Ubuntu laptop to my Epson C66 printer currently connected to the XP desktop.

I’ll keep you posted how I get on …

A newbies adventure into the work of Ubuntu

Cye — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:45:21 +0000

Well, at long last I’ve bitten the bullet and thought I’d go and see what this thing called Linux was all about. Many moons ago I dabbled with Unix and loved the fact that the command set made no sense and that it quirks frustrated the hell out of any one who new DOS back to front. Plus the fact that there was a “finger” command cracked me up every time.

Enough of that though.

So lets get things straight first. This is my thoughts on using Ubuntu as a desktop operating system. There are many blogs and site dedicated to the server side, but less to the lonely world of the single user.

So here I am. I have inherited an IBM Thinkpad R50e with a lowly 256mb RAM. OK not very startling, but it used to run W2K fine, and in fact came with WXP. So as it was doing nothing else, I though it was perfect to join the Ubuntu world and give me something else to distract me from the the troubles of the world.

So going to the Ubuntu site and downloading the ISO image of Ubuntu was easy. I then created the ISO image onto CD using CDBurner XP Pro. This is a free utility that seems pretty well developed and as well as the usual CD burning facilities also allow you to burn an ISO image. Pretty handy in this particular case. It only takes a couple of minutes to create the image to CD.

So then I chucked the CD into the Thinkpad and booted. After various chunking noise and about 5 minutes the Ubuntu desktop appeared and I chose the Install option straight away. Now for what ever reason it seems that Ubuntu on my thinkpad was not a good choice. The install just does not seem to get get going, or end up just with a black screen. I guess maybe due to the lack of memory as I can see from various other web sources that others have not had this problem.

So after scouting round various other flavours of Linux including Suse, I eventually came back to the the Ubuntu Web site. There are a number of flavours of Ubuntu, including one called Xubuntu that is designed for lower spec machines and uses the Xfce desktop environment rather than Gnome or KDE.

So in for a penny, in for a pound I burnt myself the Xubuntu install CD. This time no issues at all! Plus my daughters love the cool mouse log-on for this O/S. When installed you can see it is a cut down version of the install package of Ubuntu, missing all the cool memory and processor hungry application such as Open Office. However this doesn’t mean you can’t download them and give them ago with your new free environment. This I’ve done, and although not exactly speedy they are fast enough to be usable even with 256mb RAM.

Connecting to my ADSL router was a synch, literally plugging in the cable, and reconfiguring Firefox to automatically detect the network configuration. From then on I had a happy afternoon downloading O/S updates and applications.

I am using the machine to type up this entry. Firefox has a few little strange actions in Xubuntu, some strange decisions on font sizing but nothing that you can’t get over. In fact that seems to be a feature of Xubuntu (and I assume Ubuntu), some of the font sizing is HUGE. Especially for headers and toolbars. I am thinking of Open Office Writer here.

My only real issue at the moment is attempting to use my wireless USB network adaptor. This is a D-link jobby and has been great in the world of Windows XP. As you may realise getting these types of things running in Linux is a real challenge. After researching on the web quite a bit there are a number of “guides” created by other geeks, but even these aren’t straight forward. So far I have now managed to get the USB dongle to become active, but this seems to slow down Xubuntu to the extent that moving the mouse cursor around is a real chore. I haven’t got as far as attempting to link up to my wireless network as yet, WEP key seems to be a real art outside the MS world.

So that’s enough on my initial adventure. If you have any handy hints (took me forever to workout how to get shortcut on the desktop (or launcher as they are called) let me know. Especially with USB and wireless devices.

Enjoy.

Design your own house or garden – online

Cye — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 20:49:11 +0000

The clever guys at smallblueprinter.com have come up with some on-line tools to let your create your own blue prints for home and garden design. They are easy to use and flexible enough for your basic designs. Below is a sample of what is possible. You can even download an offline version of the tools if you need to.

PS3 v Wii – Bloater or sexy machine?

Cye — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 20:01:39 +0000

Smallest mobile phone in the world – cartoon

Cye — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:12:03 +0000