Lillesvin Networks

Just bought myself a crummy little mp3 player (Sepia 128MB), which so happens to be very little and have a built-in microphone, so it can be used as a dictaphone. The sound quality isn’t really worth talking about — it’s as non-existent as G.W. Bush’s intelligence, but sound quality or not, at http://lillesvin.net/soundblog/ you’ll now be able to hear the recordings I’ll be making.

So what can you expect? Well, it’s not far from a regular blog (like this) but with me speaking instead. Eventually I’ll probably bump into some guest stars and other strange stuff I come across, which I’ll now have the opportunity to easily record and then mix it all down and put it up here. Expect nothing, but prepare for everything. ;-)

Oh, and by the way… This little Sepia babe hooks up to Linux with absolutely no complaints! Just mount it as an external USB vfat filesystem and you’re good to go! (Do a tail -f /var/log/messages when you plug it in, to see what device it creates for you to mount.) Mmm… Compability…

And one more thing… I haven’t seen any other soundblogs around (I mean, blogging by speech instead of writing), so if noone will prove me wrong, I’ll claim to be one of the very first to have thought of and used this concept. ;-)

Note: Most of this blog entry is in Danish, as it concerns the Danish music site MyMusic.dk and the users of it. So I’m going to start with a top 3 this time.

Top 3 stickers

• The Finnish flag on the back of my Thinkpad
• The “This Machine Kills Fascists” on “that guys” keyboard
• Anything with Psyduck (Pokémon) on it

Oprop!
Endelig fik madsen nok af intolerance, ignorance og dårlige kodevaner. Derfor har jeg besluttet mig for at slette mine profiler på MyMusic.dk og nøjes med at distribuere min musik her på sitet, som jeg jo har gjort længe – og med relativ stor success endda!

Downloads siden medio Dec. 2003

• Migato Estalo Co.: 278 (Oggs: 258 / Mp3’s: 20)
• Laxness 101: 683 (Oggs: 624 / Mp3’s: 59)
• Anders K. Madsen: 1281 (Oggs: 1093 / Mp3’s: 188)

Download statistikken for de samme bands/projekter på MyMusic.dk ligger i nærheden af antallene af downloadede Mp3′er herfra, så jeg går ikke glip af noget på den front. Samtidig slipper jeg for det helvede det er at være Linux-bruger og bruger på MyMusic.dk på samme tid.

Hvorfor? Spørger du… Det kan du se her: http://lillesvin.linux.dk/stuff/mymusic.php. (Som en ekstra bonus er der også lidt skamløs mudderkastning, samt tvivlen på udviklernes kompetence.)

Ydermere, hvis du har shoppet i MyMusic.dks shop, så kunne du måske være interesseret i at læse denne tråd på Hardware Online.

Stumbled across this during my nightly insomniac surfing time.

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
— by Mark Twain

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped
to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer
be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained
would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2
might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the
same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with
“i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12
or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz
ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud
hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

And in other and totally unrelated news…
Gnome 2.8 is out as well as X11 6.8, which has a some nice eye-candy improvements like drop-shadow and true alpha-blending (and other cool improvements/features like XDamage and XComposite.) Watch out Mac-users, your bloody good looking GUI has been challenged.

A little more relavant
is my discovery of Ubuntu Linux. Their website says: “Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “Humanity To Others”. Which they are proving by sending out free (free as in speech and free as in beer) Ubuntu installation CD’s to everyone interested. (No, not even a shipping fee or anything.) They even encourage one to order more, as shipping is usually more expensive than the CD – then you can order 10 (like I did) and give them to friends and family. Of course, like every other Linux distribution, they let you download a free CD-image, which you can burn and install if you can’t wait for the shipping. Information about both methods can be found at: http://ubuntulinux.org/download/.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to say that Ubuntu Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution and comes with kernel 2.6 and the brand spanking new Gnome 2.8 (don’t know about X11 6.8). According to the rumours Ubuntu Linux should be extremely easy to install/setup/use compared to many other Linux distributions – but I’ll have to wait for the CD’s to arrive to try it out for myself, since I don’t intend to download the 509 MB CD-image on this crumby 256k connection.

Got the idea to use some of my 1GB at gmail account (which I only got to check it out anyway) to store backups of my mysql-db and most of the code on this server. Now I just need a way to automate this procedure, so I can make it backup via cron. It appears that gmail is becomming very popular – not only as a mail-service – but also as a backup/blog/you_name_it host. And indeed, the 1GB storage at gmail is certainly way more attractive than the 2MB of n^Hhotmail. Now we’ll just have to see how long gmail is going to put up with this alternative use of their webmail.

In other and totally irellavant news, my birthday is slowly sneaking up so I’ve put up a little wishlist (for my family to see, which is why it’s in Danish), but of course, I wouldn’t mind being surprised by a gift from an anonymous source (as long as it’s not ticking).

In even more unrelated (unrelated to what?) news, here’s a little top 5.
Top 5 cartoons

• Futurama
• The Simpsons
• Darkwing Duck
• Family Guy
• Pinky and the Brain

–
“Live free or don’t.”

Finally I got myself convinced to put mail users in a virtual domain configuration instead of using the systems user accounts (actually a friend (stffn) convinced me), so now I’ve got Postfix / MySQL / PostfixAdmin / Courier-IMAP / ClamAV / SpamAssassin running nicely together. I tried out the tests at testvirus.org and none got through… Nifty!

Now I just need to see some spam and/or virii get through, so I can finetune Amavis. (NO! That should not be seen as a suggestion for you to send me spam and/or virii.)

PostfixAdmin even allows me to create “virtual domain administrators”, so I can assign e.g. med.linux.dk to johndoe@lillesvin.linux.dk and he can administer all email-addresses/-aliases there. ;) This opens further up for the hosting-possibilities for Lillesvin Networks. E.g. now you can have your mail hosted here and your website somewhere else – or vice versa.

Now all I need is a bigger server and a bigger line (633 MHz CPU/128 MB RAM/7 GB HDD (on two disks) on a 256 Kbps/256 Kbps connection isn’t exactly ideal for hosting on a larger scale than 3-4 rarely visited domains.

I guess getting stuff like this done is one of the upsides to insomnia… Unfortunately I have a really hard time getting up and to the university in the morning.