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/компютри) 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 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.

User A owns exactly the same computer as User B, and they both bought theirs from the same company. User A has a major problem, and needs to reinstall their computer, so they find the recovery disks, and place them in their CD drive. A few hours later, and after a simple process, the recovery restarts their computer, and they are back running in their operating system. However, they notice that its a bit sluggish already, and has lots of icons on their desktop about the company. They also find out that the basic programs have already been installed.

User B has the same problem, and needs to reinstall. However, they were given a install CD of the operating system they have. So they run that, it asks a few questions which seem a bit confusing, but are able to work them out with common sense, and a few hours later, they are booting into their freshly installed system. They look on their desktop, and only the basic icons are there.  They then have to spend another few hours installing the programs they need onto the computer.

Now we fast forward a few months, both users use their computers for the same reasons, and install the same software. However, User A’s computer is running slower than User B’s. So here is the question? Is saving a few hours of installing software, really worth all of the rubbish that OEM’s install on the computers, regardless of if the user wants them or not. I believe not. Feel free to comment with your views on this matter.

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

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.

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!

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 :

Install Process

The install process can be rather messy, so it recommended that you get assistance on the first penguin that you install DPL on. Firstly, you need to find a dead penguin. A good place to look is the side of major roads, such as the M25 (around London) or the B184 (a small road where I live). You want to find a penguin that is in a reasonable shape, preferably with its head attached and in less than two pieces. The best place to find a penguin, in my experience, it to look under Double Decker buses carrying school children. If you are unable to find a dead penguin, you can find a live one and cause a road accident (although this is illegal, and I am not condoning this), or you could ask for one in your local hardware store.

Once you’ve got a dead penguin, you need to install DPL on it. Before anything else, you need to wash your hands with white spirits, as you don’t want the penguin catching anything from you, and causing faulty hardware. The last thing you want, speaking from first hand experience, is an invalid patch error in your guts.

The next step can be very tricky, and I’d personally recommend a different measurement for the incision. The manual for DPL says that you need to make a 52.6377953 inch cut up the stomach of the penguin. However, I found it a lot easier to use a ruler in mm and cut the appropriate distance. Now for the fun part. You need to remove all of the organs from within the penguin, or the parts of the organs you can see if you got an unlucky bit of road kill. The only organs that should be remaining within the penguin are: the stomach, which is used for the /home/ partition, the bladder, used for ~/.trash/, the heart, which is the extremely powerful processing unit, and lastly the lungs which provide a short term memory, around a twinkling (which for some reason is 2.3 seconds).

By now, you would have cleared out most of the internal organs of the penguin, which just leaves the data transfer to load DPL onto the penguin. For this, you need at least 20cm of CAT5e (Standard Ethernet) cable, and you need to insert it into the bottom of the penguin’s left lung, and then into its stomach. Once this is done, you need to stitch the stomach back up, making sure that you leave room for expansion bays in the future.

Last, but not least, you need to provide power to the penguin. Due to the nature of a penguin DNA, it can power itself by digesting the trash; however, you need to power up the boot process. To do this, insert 3 AA batteries up the penguin’s nose. Be careful that you make the positive ends of the batteries slide in first; otherwise it’ll get stuck in a continuous reboot. Then you’re ready to boot it up for the first time. Gently open the mouth of the penguin, and pull out the tongue, and you should hear some moaning as it boots up.

First Boot

As Dead Penguin Linux boots for the first time, find the nearest screen (TV or monitor) and switch it on to see your newly installed system. Once the system has booted, you’ll have to follow a simple set of questions to continue setting up your system. It will ask you to enter in your system name, your personal account username and password, as well as the size of your penguin.

After these simple questions, your penguin will boot into your brand new operating system. From here, you can install a wide range of 32 programs, from a wireless network detector, to a road kill detector.

Office Opinions

After running this version in the office for a week, we decided that the power provided by the dead penguin is amazing, more than any current servers on the market. However, we did notice a residue of cocaine building up on the desk next to the penguin, although that may be an employee. We would highly recommend Dead Penguin Linux to anyone who wants to try new things out, or the person who needs raw processing power. One can only imagine that with the release of 0.2 in the next few months, more programs and even more power will find its way onto our road killed penguins.

Get Dead Penguin Linux

Although Dead Penguin Linux has been officially released, very few mirrors exist for it. In order to find more information out about Dead Penguin Linux, please visit their website at www.deadpenguinlinux.org.

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.