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how I lost my Linux virginity

This week I am attending an excellent training course on Linux System Administration at Oracle’s offices in Moorgate, near London. The course is given by Harald van Breederode, an excellent trainer who manages to combine deep technical, real-life expertise with a rare ability to explain complex things in simple terms with a sense of humour.

As is traditional, each attendee was asked to give a precis of his/her job role, star sign, experience with Oracle, most embarrassing professional moment, any exposure to Unix (Linux), favourite band and expectations for the course.

singalonga Shearer

Come on everybody. Sing along now.

A mole digging in a hole
Digging up my soul now
Going down, relegation
Ashley and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can die
So low, relegation
Relegation Relegation Relegation

more bizarre toilet notices

My obsession with notices and signs in lavatories continues. Has it really come to this ?

‘When should you wash your hands ?’

‘After your hands have become dirty.’

Arsenal vs MUFC - Champions League Semi Final

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a ticket to the Emirates on Tuesday night so here is my match report culled from my stream of inane drivel on identi.ca.

Preparing for the big game…

‘My wife just gave me the shock of my life. She said ‘We may have a big problem here.’ Thought TV was bust. Turned out son ’lost’ his PE bag.’

‘Saw a couple of Gooners on way to Emirates. Lowered car window and shouted ‘Manchester, Manchester, la, la, la’ at them. They waved back.’

why Ballack, Drogba and Terry need to look inwardly

A lot has been written about Chelsea’s recent exit from the Champions League to an injury time winner from Iniesta at Stamford Bridge that dumped Chelsea out of the competition on the away goals rule to Barcelona.

Inevitably, there has been much discussion about the controversial penalty incidents, the quality of the Norwegian referee, the behaviour of some Chelsea players during and after the match and even ridiculous talk of a UEFA conspiracy.

announcing Minima - an exciting, new minimalist theme for Habari

You see - I’m really wasted in IT. I really should be in pre-sales or on ‘The Apprentice’.

I thought I’d return to my minimalist roots and change the theme on this blog.

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, no need to click through and leave a comment telling me ‘I use an RSS reader so I don’t care about your new theme’ because I already know.

If you think ‘Hey - this theme is simply a blatant rip off of Russell Beattie’s blog, I’m going to run and tell him’, don’t bother. I already know and so does Russell.

memories of Hillsborough

On Wednesday 11 January 1989, I went to Loftus Road to see Manchester United play QPR in an FA Cup 3rd round replay.

As usual, we went for a pint in our favourite pub, ‘The Greyhound’ (or similar), on Shepherd’s Bush Green before finally spurning one last beer and reluctantly making our way to the ground. Loftus Road was packed. The United section behind the goal was full. Stewards opened up another section along up to the half-way line to accommodate the large away support.

the death of Open Micro Blogging

It’s fair to say it took me a while to fully ‘get’ microblogging. In fact, initially Twitter left me as cold as a corpse in a deep freeze.

Inevitably, things change and like an old woman, I reserve the right to change my mind more frequently than my underpants, and in 2008, I started using Twitter to post a continuous bytestream of inane drivel in less than 140 characters.

Last July, when identi.ca launched, I immediately signed up for the open source microblogging service. I even built my own Laconi.ca instance - not necessarily because I intended using it but just to see how easy (or hard) it was to install and configure the software.

consolidation of commenting services

Since I started this blog, I have maintained an interest in various blog commenting services. Back in November 2007, I experimented with SezWho and also reviewed three more similar comment tracking services before finally settling on Disqus.

Competition is obviously a good thing but this is proving a tough climate for small, Web 2.0 companies competing in a small, overcrowded marketplace and we have recently seen some consolidation in this area.

• SezWho - Unfortunately, SezWho ceased trading yesterday with a recommended upgrade path to JS-Kit.
• Disqus - still going strong with recent announcement of improvements to performance and UI.
• coComment - still going albeit with a horrendous interface.
• co.mments - consigned to the dead pool.
• commentful - still alive. For now.

The two main commenting services that appear to represent serious competition for Disqus are IntenseDebate and JS-Kit although I have no personal experience of either product. Anyone out there used them ?

weird subliminal messages from Wiki demigods

Recently, I started messing around with DokuWiki as a replacement for Google Notebook (which Google have helpfully decided to ditch) and Diigo (after the well publicised and unfortunate collapse of another cloud bookmarking service - ma.gnolia).

In recent months I have also contributed to the Habari Wiki (MediaWiki), looked briefly at WikkaWiki and read Michael’s interesting, thought provoking article about his Wiki nirvana wishlist with interest.

Last night, a throwaway post by Douglass Clem about TiddlyWiki resurrected my interest in my own long neglected, unloved local TiddlyWiki which I then upgraded to the latest version and then pondered consolidating that content into DokuWiki.