Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

… I know I did
A radical change in my looks occured today: I’ve cut my hair down to 5 mm
I’ve never done this in my entire life. Oh, well, the only time I resembled this look was when I was very very young.

The new haircut will provide an increased airflow for my embedded CPU and data storage facility - the common name for this is: the brain. This new cooling technique I’m experimenting should also come with a new fashion trend

All this will add a touch of confort for the summer.

Today was the day. My brother bought a new computer for him so our old computer got the chance of becoming our server. We have been using successfully for some time an old P3 @ 450MHz. We have an extra 100MHz now

Big deal some of you might say.
The actual advantages this piece of hardware brings are:
* silent HDD (the HDD in the old computer has a terrible metallic noise)
* bigger HDD (20GB instead of 8.6GB).
* tons of RAM, for what it is going to be - this computer was turned into a PC133 RAM deposit: it currently holds 256+128+64 MB of RAM - I’m not sure what I’m going to use them for

The upgrade process ate half of this day:
* the muscle part took 1h: I had to carry computers around the house, trying to cross wire IDE cables (the 8.6GB HDD is strangely placed in its anciend case and I couldn’t take it out), changing jumpers and so on
* copying Linux from the old HDD took another hour - something might have been wrong about this, it took too long.
* getting Linux to boot took some time - I actually forgot that the “new” server hangs if it’s set to boot from CDROM,C,A, with no CD in the drive - I’ve played a bit with lilo… pretty annoying
* by far the most annoying and time expensive procedure was tweaking a computer which boots perfectly. Fortunately, I was pretty patient. This was the part where: in order to work it needs to be put next to the wires, in order to change it needs to be moved next to the monitor. I’ve moved back and forth a few times only because I forgot to change eth0 < -> eth1 in the DHCP server config and in the firewall script. I didn’t want to change the cables because I had the network cards tagged. Oh.. sure.. I could have chaged the tags - this just crossed my mind - a tad late.
* I’ve also experienced electricity going through my finger, while trying to fit the network wire into the external interface network card - I believe the network jacks (if that’s the way they’re called) are not fitted right to the wire

Anyway, it was an interesting experience. I’ve remembered some of the “joys” of playing with networks.

Everything made me wish I had a barebone computer as a LAN server. Unfortunately, nobody thinks of making a barebone for low-performance computers running Linux. We’ll see about that in the future…

The shots on this page are absolutely amaizing!

Hope you enjoy them at least as much as I did!

A pack of good news for the Open/Free Source Developers:

• June 28, 2005Trolltech released Qt4, the first Qt version to be dual licensed for Windows (Commercial License for Commercial applications and GPL for GPL applications) - I can almost see a glimpse of KDE in Windows right now…
• July 05, 2005 - Orange France Deploys Jabber - one more proof that Jabber is the future
• July 06, 2005The European Parliament finally rejected the software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes - the right way

My T610 mobile has one more day until it celebrates 1 year staying my custody
I wanted to take it to the service to get it checked before going over the one year guarantee.

I’ve spent some time in the last days backup-ing almost everything out of it:

• contacts - this was the easiest part: I’ve send via Bluetooth all the contacts to a T630 at home.
• themes and sounds - I’ve send them via Bluetooth to the T630 mobile
• pictures - I’ve e-mailed all of them via CSD, during the night, at approximately 1KB/sec - I believe they were about 50 left on my mobile.
• messages - I’ve stored some of them on the SIM and.. here comes the fun part… I’ve written the others on the computer. Why so? Well, I’ve kept during the time lots of messages from Christmas, New Year, Easter, my birthday. Some of the messages are really interesting. I’ve got some really creative colleagues. Thereofore, I’ve created a small list of messages received on different occasions and freed my phone from storing them

The only things I couldn’t backup were profiles.

I took the mobile to my mobile provider service and they had a look. The mobile was blocked in their network so I assumed they also do service for them, like they did for my old mobile. They advised me to do turn off a setting to have more stability in the network. They also said I could leave the mobile for a thorough check (just like I initially planned). Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that their service was not put in the list of authorized services to provide guarantee in the mobile’s papers.

My mobile has been working quite well ever since I’ve bought it. It only had a few network glitches some time ago and it didn’t go through that again. I hope the advice the service engineer gave me will definitely eliminate any possible problems for a long time (as we all know, not everything is everlasting).

Editing note: back-blogged entry on July 10th