Decided to buy a couple of these funny little USB Christmas trees from ThinkGeek. They’re small, cute, lights up in 6 colours and seems like they would be an amusing addition to my desks at home and work for the holiday season. Doesn’t look like the star lights up though, which would have been neat too.
On Fedora’s cutting edge
I’m slowly getting my Fedora box resurrected. After spending a couple of weeks and fitful starts getting FC3 Test 2 loaded back on, the box is finally running. Still working on getting it back to useful shape. The last couple of days have been spent downloading and installing the new packages associated with FC3 Test 3.
Problems like the X.org server refusing to start with build 1.603 of the 2.6.8 kernel, but working fine with builds 1.607 and 1.541. Gnome not being able to open the X display. Messy things like that.
Next task will be to get all the server apps reconfigured to the way I like them and installing stuff like needed Perl modules and stuff. And then there’s the task of restoring databases and web pages I was working on before.
Much work ahead that will have to be squeezed in during my spare time between my real work.
If it ain’t broke, upgrade it.
My Fedora box is dead. Well, it’s not really dead. Lobotomized perhaps.
In an attempt to upgrade from FC2 to FC3 Test 2 using yum it broke. All the upgrade packages downloaded and installed fine, but it never booted up. As my wife said, “Surgery went fine, patient died”.
No problem, easy fix. Just download the ISO’s and install from CD. Should be back up and running in no time. So I download and burn the 4 CDs. Pop it into the drive and boot.
Twiddle twiddle twiddle. No CD recognized in the drive. Darned computer won’t boot from the CD. It used to…but not this time. The CDs boot on the other computers I have, so it’s not a problem with the CDs. Tried to boot of a Win2K CD too, but still no dice. Must be the CD drive. So now I’m stuck with waiting for our IT guys to get around to fixing it. No response from their online helpdesk form (if they’re going to have an online form, they should at least monitor it), so I guess I’ll have to call them when I get back to work on Monday.
Darned computers.
No phishing off the bridge
The folks over at NGS have written a very good whitepaper titled The Phishing Guide: Understanding & Preventing Phishing Attacks. It talks about various types of phishing attacks and how to identify and protect yourself from them. Some of it is pretty technical, but it’s a pretty good read and contains a lot of good information on how to recognize phishers. Definitely something to share with friends and family who might not be quite so savvy to these types of attacks.
Firefox voodoo
Over at the Mozillazine forums, there’s this post about some of the ways you can tweak various Firefox configuration parameters to make Firefox load pages faster.
It’s a long discussion with 21 pages worth of posts. A lot to read through, but definitely worthwhile reading.