blog.nixadmins.net

I got myself ADSL back in 2002, since that day I haven’t been without The Net at home more than a few hours during power outages or minor problem with the ISP. Me and my fiance have been building a house for just about a year now and are soon to move in to the new house.

30.4 2008 my old ISP cut my 2M/2M SHDSL line to our apartment and we still live in it. 2 may the new ISP connected the 24/1 ADSL line to our new house.

I brought all the servers to the house first of may and the apartment is really quiet now. We are both used to watch TV series and listen to music located at one of the file servers. So how does it feel? I must say it’s weird. Being at home and not being able to look something up whenever you want. Read email, read the news… I could go on forever. I’m really surprised to see how "hooked" on the Internet I am. A lot of my daily activities are on the Internet, and suddenly the activities are cut of. Well almost at least, as I said I can still surf at the building site but then I loose precious time. *cough cough* like writing this blog post. Well I did it while taking a coffee break.

This makes me wonder are the modern people really this dependent on the Internet? And if we are, is it a good or a bad thing? How did we manage before the Internet, mobile phones, mp3 players? Sometimes I think back to the times when you could go out to the summerhouse and no one could get a hold of you. We had no phones there and for a week or two, sometimes for a longer time the only thing that you’d think about was fishing, catching some sun, swimming and other normal summer activities. No work related calls, no interruptions in the vacation.

Are people more stressed due to this? I’d say they are, you can’t get any real peace anymore. The companies and colleagues assume they can get a hold on you anytime. Setting auto replies to email might cut some of but some still don’t get the hint.

Comment and tell me about your experiences in this.

I need to get back to building my house so I can move in sometime soon and get my Internet back. 

I just found myself a nice application which should make it easier to write some blog posts. If you are running a blog and want a good editor head over to the Windows Live Writer homepage. The interface is clean and easy to use as you can see in the picture below

You can easily insert pictures and change styles. I wish I could use this tool while editing the main site www.nixadmins.net also, as it runs with Drupal.

If you know of a better editor or a good editor to use with Drupal please make a comment and I’ll check it out.

Signing out for now.

Finding time to do some blog / site work seems to be hard right now. All my time goes to the largest project I’ve ever done, building my house.
Hopefully I’ll be moving this month and maybe I’ll post some pictures before we move in. Sorry for this quiet time.

I had a need to get my system up fast so I set up Ubuntu. It’s a nice system and really popular but my favorite distribution is still Gentoo. So after I had the stuff I needed to get some work done while installing Gentoo up and running I started the installation process. I assume you know your way around the command prompt and are familiar with the Gentoo installation process. Otherwise don’t even try this, and if you do, don’t blame me for any possible data loss.

So here is the process in it’s simplicity

1. Install the needed tools in Ubuntu. by running sudo apt-get install dchroot debootstrap
2. If you haven’t alread, partition and format the hard drive you are using for Gentoo.
3. Make a starting point for the gentoo install. sudo mkdir /mnt/gentoo
4. Start mounting the partitions
5. Follow the Gentoo handbook from chapter 5.  Download stages and get installing.

This worked out fine in Ubuntu 7.10 and I’m now back in my favorite distribution.

I’m not sure if there is any harm to it but I also merged xorg-x11 and gnome-light via Ubuntu. This way I had a full graphical desktop as soon as I rebooted.

I usually don’t care to much about politics, but today Erkki Tuomioja suggested that fuel in Finland should be handled with coupons. We are living in the 21st century and someone comes up with something like this. I care about the environment just as much as the next guy, but for a country like Finland to start something like this, for crying out loud. I really don’t think our cars are the main polluters.

Many of us use our car to get to work and back home, I know I do. Instead of raising fuel tax and coming up with totally IDIOTIC ideas like this lower the prices on public transportation so that it would appeal to the general public. Right now riding a train in Finland is more expensive than riding a car, yes you heard me. If you don’t need the car at all the train is cheaper but if you need to make your way to the train using a car, which I would have to do, it’s cheaper to ride the car ALONE from Karjaa to Helsinki. Sure I pay for insurance, the car, wheels and so on and so on, but that’s something I’d have to do any way. So instead of taking the train and pay a monthly fee of 300+ euros I can ride in the comfort of my Audi A6 and have my peace and quiet for 300 euros in fuel cost per month.

I bet you are thinking that, well for that price you’ll still save money going with the train, wrong. I’d still have to take the bus or tram the rest of the way, which also cost a monthly fee. I mean COME ON, are Finnish politicians really this stupid? These prices were with a monthly fee, which is the second cheapest way to travel by train. If I’d pay for a whole year I’d save a few buck, but what if I get really sick and can’t go to work, money down the drain and Valtion Rautatiet makes some profit. If I want to go to Helsinki and back with a normal ticket from Karjaa, how much will that cost, well with the Inter City trains(I wont travel with something that has plastic seats, because it’s not comparable with a car in any way) it costs 16,10 euros, one way. If I pay that in fuel I get about 13 liters of diesel with the prices today(1.189€). Considering my car takes around 7,8 liters / 100 km I drive almost 170km for that. So for the same amount that a train take a person 70km a car can take you 170km.

Now today some f*****n idiot like Tuomioja comes up with the great idea to save fuel by setting coupons, that would mean that everyone got some coupons and that’s the fuel you can buy. After that you’d have to buy coupons from someone that doesn’t use as much fuel as you do. Who the hell is to say how much another person needs to be driving? Are we all kids in this country now? God damn what kind of idiots voted that son of a b**h to the parliament.

I pay my taxes, so I also pay his salary. And this is the s**t they come up with. For crying out loud, you can’t fix the fact that people here use a car a lot. Our public transportation is not really good everywhere, I admit it’s quite ok between my house and Helsinki but it just costs way to much. Public should be cheap, the government should pay for some, our taxes should be put in that also. If you lower the prices more people will start to use trains and we will have less costs in fixing our roads(if you’ve been to Finland you know how bad they are) and could put some of that money back to public transportation.

So to end this post, one image says more than a thousand words. So here is a image for you Erkki

I just got myself a new desktop to the office. We buy HP so this desktop is a DC5700 MT, it’s a middle range desktop with integrated graphics card. Specs are as follows:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 running at 2GHz
Graphics: Intel i915 chipset
RAM: 4Gb DDR2

Eager to get it up and running I put my favorite distribution cd, Gentoo, in the drive and started the install. I’ve been using Gnome for a long time now and as Gentoo was installing I was checking out the latest Linux Journal and saw a preview of KDE 4. I thought, well I just have to try that one out. So after the basic installation was done I started merging KDE 4.

Left the computer compiling overnight and returned to the office this morning eager to see what KDE had to offer. I fired up KDE and I have to say it was a huge disappointment. The system was really unresponsive, everything looked huge on the display, I couldn’t fit anything in my 1680×1050 display. I know this is still new software and there are for sure enhancements on the way, but still this was too much.

The feeling of checking out KDE 4 was really close to the feeling when I first installed Windows Vista, thinking WTF have they been up to. A few hours later and KDE 4 and all it’s dependencies are gone, Gnome is back and I feel at home.

Eventually I will probably give KDE 4 another go but right now it just doesn’t seem mature enough to use.