Something of a rare sight here, my actual blog has been restored and updated. I’ve gone and deleted some worthless posts, which just fill in the gaps (a bit like this one?).

I look back, and see my last posts were in August 2007, so a quick run down on the things that have changed since then. I’m now in Year 13 (Upper-Sixth Form) at school, and leave in a month. I should be off to the University of Portsmouth in the Autumn to study Internet Technology (200 ucas points permitting).

I’m not the head of stage at Shenfield, with my last ever concert being tomorrow, with an eventful year of Shenstock, High School Musical, and the Christmas Concert. You can find photos on Peter’s flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickstone333/). I also got promoted to the Community Team on Invisionize (http://www.invisionize.com/) during August ‘07, and have been there since.

In terms of technical stuff, AppliedIRC moved to a new server (nicknamed big), and version 3 of the website went live. This blog has been updated to the latest beta of Wordpress (2.5 RC2), which looks really good in the admin area.

giggsey, publishing his post, which is enough for now. I’m going to fiddle with the design slightly over the next week.

I’ve been having a problem on my PC with mobprobe abnormally exiting when booting. After some hard work, I’ve managed to find out why and how to fix it. The problem seems to occur when you have a SiS650 motherboard. It seems to be a bug with Ubuntu Feisty, and they don’t seem to want to fix it on the installcd’s, so we can’t do anything about it that way.

I managed to fix it  by upgrading the kernel on the installed system after installing it. Firstly, you need to make sure that you have Ubuntu installed (use the normal livecd version, which should boot). After installation, and rebooting, you should face the error in the photo above. You will need to reboot into your livecd again in order to fix the problem. Once you have it loaded, open up the terminal.

• sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
• sudo mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/ubuntu (Note: Change /dev/hda3 to the main partition of your ubuntu)
• chroot /mnt/ubuntu/ /bin/bash
• echo ‘deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted’ | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list (Note: make sure it is single quotes, and not special chars)
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-2.6.22-9-generic linux-headers-2.6.22-9 linux-headers-2.6.22-9-generic linux-image-2.6.22-9-generic linux-restricted-modules-2.6.22-9-generic linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22-9-generic
• sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list (Note: You will need to comment out the gutsy line at the bottom of the file, by putting # in front)
• sudo apt-get update

Now you can reboot, and your new system should work. Thanks to ubuntugeek for the upgrading kernel instructions.

Recovery CDs, the “easy” way to reinstall your computer if it encounters a fault, but really how easy is it? These disks come with your brand new computer, and you only realise what they are for when you need them. But do they actually help your computer? Lets follow two users, who have problems with their computers and use two different methods of reinstalling their computer back to its default state. From that, we can see if its actually better to use these disks, or use the standard operating system install disks. Continue reading this post…

After 3 weeks of hard cycling, going from London, to the south coast of France, and back up to Paris, the Tour de France is over for 2007. The Spanish rider finished the amazing race in 91 hours and 26 seconds, only 23 seconds ahead of second place Evans. After a Tour, which has been touched by doping scandals, the cycling world is hoping that this year’s Tour was the start of the crackdown on drugs. We can only hope that next year’s race won’t be starting in Brest, with the fears of how it’ll be interrupted with doping.

Although its currently unfinished, I thought it would be best to let the public see Windows Web. This is a CSS and JavaScript project, making my Windows XP machine in a firefox browser window. You can find out more information by clicking the Windows Web link above.

Update: Unfortunately, the Windows Web project has been unedited for a while due to lack of time, and a different Windows theme.

The Tour de France this year is a shambles, to put it simply. With Michael Rasmussen, the yellow jersey wearer as of Wednesday, being dismissed by his team, and the pre-tour favourite Alexandre Vinokourov being chucked out from anomalies in his red blood cells. Whats more dishearting for the Tour is the fact that Vinokourov’s team had to pull out, and Rasmussen’s team is only just still in the Tour, but very demotivated.

Another team,  Cofidis, withdraw from the Tour after a member of their team tested positive for a banned substance, leaving Bradley Wiggins out of the Tour. This behavour has greatly effected the race itself, and riders started the race supporting the doping tests.

Is this is what the Tour de France has become? A competition for the people who can get away with cheating and not get caught. Lance Armstrong got accused of taking drugs to enhance his performance shortly after his cancer, and he fought through to win 7 tours. But for the last two years, with last year’s “winner” still in court, it has turned into a huge shamble.

For those who know me, I’m a Die Hard fan. I’ve seen all three multiple times, and numbers two and three countless times. Of course, with the upcoming release of Die Hard 4.0, it is set in my calender as a film I have to see shortly after its release.

However, time for a bit of truth. When I started writing this blog post, I googled for pictures, and found an “upsetting” article saying that due to the rating, Die Hard 4.0 won’t contain much strong language. Now, I don’t know about any (if any) viewers of my blog have seen the Die Hard films, but the strong language makes the films what they are. So I’m slightly annoyed at it, but regardless, I shall be watching it when it comes out.

I’ve had some people ask me, why do you like films that started before you were born. Well, the action, the language, and the greatness has caught me with the Die Hard films. Whether its the bombs from the third one, the freezing cold snow chases in the second film, or even the lovely lift shaft in the first film. Die Hard is always something that promises heavy action and great one-liners from Willis.

So, until next time, Yippe-ki-yay, motherf**cker!

The fact that this is being written in gedit in Ubuntu shows that finally, my wish has worked. I now have a working Ubuntu system. True its only my old PC running at 800×600 with no mouse and no network, but its better than nothing. I haven’t really been able to explore Feisty, as I haven’t got a mouseball inside my mouse, so moving it is actually pretty hard, but the boot screen and general appearance is good. I don’t know if I’d use this as my primary OS, as I use a lot of Windows based applications which are more to my needs (America’s Army, Whatpulse etc.).

I’m no stranger to using Linux. I’ve had it across numerous servers for over two years and have used it on desktops for ages. I’m a Gentoo fan (which incidentally had 2007.0 released within the last few days). I have my personal uptime record in Gentoo, of 21 days and 18 hours, before I stupidly pulled out the power cable with my foot. I can remember those days like it was yesterday, although actually it was late 2005.
I remember having to do live soldering on my mouse, because I didn’t want to unplug it from the powered-up system in case it didn’t accept the plug’n'play and I had to reboot. And the one feature I used countlessly, [Ctrl] [Alt] [Backspace] restarts the X session, but keeps your system on. This is very useful if a program crashes.

On my Windows (and main PC), I’m still having troubles with Ubuntu, and even 2 days after posting on ubuntuforums.org (link), I still haven’t got it resolved. So I think it was time to give up on it for now, and just continue with Windows (XP, not Vista) until such a time where I am able to get my problem resolved.

So here I am, a Tuesday night, sitting facing my ubuntu desktop, with my keyboard on my knees, and my feet on top of the case, typing away at this blog post, which I’m about to save onto my pen drive and then upload to my actual blog from Windows.

Until next time, see you all :

Dead Penguin Linux (DPL) is a new Linux distribution, made by the gaggle over at Shenfield High School. It’s a lightweight distribution with an incredible punch, capable of running vast and complex systems using the unique processing power of a dead penguin. DPL uses a source based package system called ‘guts’, which deals with most packages within seconds due to the power of the penguin.

Continue reading this post…

So I decided to try this thing called Ubuntu today, not sure what it means. It’s a version of something called ‘Li-nux’. I wish! As people who keep up with the tech news know, the new version of Ubuntu came out within the last few weeks, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn.

I downloaded it this morning, and enjoyed the speed of my internet, and went to install it. After a short install process, I rebooted into it, and that’s where I hit the problems. The output said that modprobe has exited abnormally, which could have meant anything. After much googling, and frustration, and even a photograph of the error (found here), I went to Freenode to ask for help. I was answered with suspicions that modprobe was segfaulting, and its an error that happens sometimes when using the desktop install.

So here I am, waiting for the alternative iso to download, so I can install ubuntu later; live fixing my wordpress blog (which is the current svn) and actually writing this post. I’ll post tomorrow, hopefully from within Ubuntu itself.