As my laptop is currently b0rked, I'm currently using a desktop PC as my main machine. This PC has an onboard Intel 865 Video Card, but annoyingly doesn't offer the 1440x900 native resolution of my Dell monitor.

After a lot of searching, I found a blog post which came tantalizingly close to offering a solution. The suggestion in the comments of the post to use a Dell driver didn't give me the required resolution, but another comment suggested using the IEGD (Intel Embedded Graphics Drivers) to build your own driver with the required resolution. I searched the internets quickly, but couldn't find any how-tos, so I decided to just download and install the IEGD and see how it worked (I grabbed the package Intel Embedded Graphics Drivers (IEGD) with CED for 85x). Read more...

I applied for the beta program for Microsoft's New XBox Experience and received an acceptance email today. Hopefully the new dashboard will be available for download tomorrow, so I'll have that and the new version of Ubuntu/Mythbuntu to download. Below is my acceptance email, as my way of gloating!

Here in NZ we have earthquakes fairly regularly. In fact, we've just had one - the house shook a little and made a bit of noise, but nothing major. A great place to keep an eye on these quakes (and to make sure that what you just experienced was an earthquake and not something more sinister, such as the unlikely event of a terrorist attack) is GeoNet. Below is an image of the GeoNet recordings from all New Zealand drums from just after the earthquake:

Read more...

My new NAS is currently rebuilding its RAID5 array, and I figured it'd be good to watch the progress of the rebuild. To this end, I hacked together a quick and dirty script to display the contents of /proc/mdstat at one second intervals. Just place the below code in a file called mdinfo.sh (nano mdinfo.sh and paste), make it executable (chmod +x mdinfo.sh) and run it (./mdinfo.sh). To quit, just press Control-C.

To keep an eye on a file copy (I'll be copying 1.2Tb to my new NAS), you can just swap the command 'cat /proc/mdstat' for 'df' and/or 'df -h'. 'df' shows disk usage and 'df -h' shows disk usage in 'human readable' form. I use both, one after the other, so that I can see a) that the copy is running (as the 'human readable' format changes infrequently once the count is at 10GB or more, even over my gigabit network) and b) how long the copy has to go (as it's hard to work this out from looking at the disk space in 1k blocks). This script I called cpinfo.sh on my server: Read more...

I'm currently preparing to build my new NAS (I'm waiting on a SATA motherboard to arrive) and upgrade the old NAS from Gentoo Linux to NexentaStor. The reason I'm changing is primarily so that I can use ZFS, which NexentaStor utilises (as it's a Solaris-based appliance). This is similar to NetApp's WAFL filesystem (and is currently the reason for a spate of lawsuits between Sun and NetApp), and so should offer decent performance benefits. Nexenta offer a free Developer Edition which allows up to 1TB of data to be saved on the appliance. When you go over 1TB, the data's still accessible but all management functions are locked down.

Well, we made it! Karen and I have just celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary.

Karen leaves for England tomorrow and won't be back for 2 months - just in time for Rebecca's 1st birthday. In the meantime, I'll be putting a new kitchen in the house here in Porirua and Karen will be celebrating her grandma's 90th and sister's 30th birthdays in good old Blighty.

This is an advanced warning for anyone driving in and around Wellington, NZ. I have finally (at the ripe old age of 32) passed my driving test, or at least the first of two here in New Zealand, and am now allowed to drive without anyone supervising me.

There is some good news, though. I'm not allowed to drive without supervision between the hours of 10pm and 5am, so if you need to get somewhere please try to travel between these times.

I was cleaning up my music collection yesterday by using Discogs, a great online Discography catalogue website, to download missing album cover art. I normally use the long-windedly named Album Cover Art Downloader to download cover art, as it's pretty good and can grab images from various sources (amazon.com, yahoo, buy.com) - but there are some albums, especially bootlegs and the like, that aren't on Amazon. While using Discogs I saw that they have artist images (such as the one on the right), and started to download these to use like Album Art images, by naming the file folder.jpg and placing it in the artist's folder (My music collection is organised by First Letter\Artist\Album, e.g. A\Aphex Twin\Hangable Autobulb).

Of course, I quickly realised that this would take a while to complete, so I searched for any software which took advantage of the Discogs catalogue. Although Wikipedia's page on Discogs had a list of software which uses the Discogs catalog

, there wasn't any cover art downloading software listed. After a search on google, I found a slightly shorter named piece of software called Album Art Downloader on Sourceforge. This new piece of software does a similar job to Album Cover Art Downloader, but has a lot more plugins to search different sites for album art - including Discogs.

Well, it didn't take long for the spam to appear on my blog - just a week or two after I enabled comments. At least I now know that someone (or some spider) has spotted my blog (oh, and there's Merryn as well!).

My blog looked great when I saw it today - comments on each and every blog entry. This is where the dilemma comes from. I could delete the spam comments, which advertise online poker and insurance, and add CAPTCHAs to my forms, or I could leave the comments there and bask in the fake glory of having such a popular blog, at least with spammers. Spammers who are kind enough to leave insightful comments such as the following:

Woo hoo!

I've just passed my Microsoft 070-299: Implementing and Administering Security in a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network exam, which is the last exam I'll be taking until after Karen has left for England at the end of July. With this exam, I am now MCSA + Security certified. This complements the other Microsoft, Linux, NetApp, etc exams I have taken in the last few months.

Without further ado, it's time to boast! Here's a full listing of my qualifications (hover over them to find out what they stand for):