tatey.com

It appears that my [not so] friend, Ashley Kyd is in the process or writing a story, or what appears to be the beginning of an adventure for a somewhat deceased individual. That doesn’t make much sense, but neither does the short extract that Ashley has posted on his website. None the less, I’m somewhat captured by the story and I really wish I could read more :(. If you’re into random funny’s, you should click your cursor over this link immediately! As I stated on Ashleys website, if it was an extract for a novel, I’d have purchased it.

Yesterday was St. Patricks day as well as Flora’s Birthday. Who is she to think she can hijack St. Patrick’s day? Flora is now 18! She threw a party yesterday at Kapsali’s, a greek restaurant located in the Southbank Parklands. While different groups of people believed the party began at 7:30pm, it was actually 7pm and as a result not everyone was there until around 8pm. It was good to catch up with a few people I hadn’t seen for a while, and there were $9 jugs of beer. I bought a jug and scored a free schooner too, How awesome! Flora’s attention was divided up amongst everyone and she was contently going backwards and forwards between the mass. Heh, at one point a belly dancer appeared and when she walked to our area, everyone naturally pointed towards Flora. I said “she hasn’t had enough alcohol to do this yet!” but that didn’t stop the belly dancer from taking her up stage :P. Flora did an awesomely awesome effort, especially if you consider she hadn’t done this sort of dance before. Anyhow, I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

I also have a movie of Flora dancing, and when I figure out how to compress it, I’ll upload it here as well. Overall, it was fantastic night and Flora enjoyed herself, in addition to being overwhelmed with presents. Happy Birthday Flozzzzzah!

People often recognise me as the guy who uses Gentoo. Yes, I’m a strong advocate for Gentoo and support everything that it stands for. Gentoo empowers the user with complete control over their system. It’s almost like a LFS install except with package management. Portage is one powerful piece of software, and with it’s respective use flags, the possibilities are endless. Everything about Gentoo is customizable, you can configure, alter, change and edit practically anything you want. Other distributions include support for Xinerama in their applications, DE’s and WM’s. What if the user only has a single monitor? Why would they require Xinerama support? Obviously, the user wouldn’t. Therefore with a correctly configured Gentoo box, one may ultimately end up with a much leaner OS. This is probably where the perception that Gentoo is “faster” is derived from.

I’ve learnt a great deal of my linux knowledge from Gentoo, and I’m thankful to the distribution for that. However, as I progress through University and other social aspects in my life, I am finding less and less free time. Gentoo’s configurability is ultimately it’s demise (In relation to myself). I require a distribution that works “out of the box”. The problem with this, is a lot of “out of the box” distributions are limited by their flexibilty. Fedora, SuSe and Mandriva are all victims of this.

In recent years, a new distribution sprouted from practically nowhere and has received much attention as of late. I could never understand why as I was under the impression it was simply a newbie’s distribution based on Debian. I guess, in a nutshell that’s true. However, my curiosity for Ubuntu eventually drove me to give it a try. The current release at the time was 4.10 codenamed “Warty Warthog”. Rather bias towards Gentoo and close minded, I installed Ubuntu and was ultimately unimpressed. I didn’t feel comfortable because I didn’t understand the inner-workings of the distribution. More importantly, the lack of root account threw me completely off. I understood sudo and it’s principles but I loved root too much. Typing sudo before each command was rather annoying.

Eventually, my mother bought a computer. It came with MS Windows 98se and she said that it needed to be formatted. My first thought was to format it anyway, since there is no knowing what the previous user(s) had done with the box. I had every intention of purchasing MS Windows XP and installing it on her computer. However, the hefty licence fee made me reconsider my options. It then occurred to me why not use Linux? Realistically, my mother purchased the computer to send emails and browser the web. Why does she need Windows for this? Why does *anyone* need Windows for this? Rather than take the MS Proprietary route, I opted for Fedora Core 4. Ashley Kyd suggested that Ubuntu may be more appropriate. This time round, I had Ubuntu 5.10 codenamed “Breezy Badger”. The experience for my mother was a success. She quickly picked up everything and now uses a completely Free OS on her computer that she can copy pictures to, listen to music, chat on MSN and most importantly send emails. More importantly, I don’t have to worry about virii or spyware and those applications slowing her already slow computer down (P3 866, 256MB Ram)

At the same time, I was currently using MS Windows XP on my desktop. I’m a PC gamer, and I don’t have the time to configure Gentoo as much as I liked. However, after a few months of having the install on my computer it’s starting to degrade. Just as all Windows install eventually do. Seriously reconsidering my options I thought I’d give Ubuntu a try. In my honest opinion, Ubuntu is a cross between a user-friendly newbie distribution that is still flexible enough for power users such as myself to tweak. I’m not afraid of the CLI and I’m quite competent using it. I don’t mind compiling packages from source, since I’ve been doing it with Gentoo for years. Gnome dual-monitors support is fantastic and Adobe Photoshop 7 is running beautifully under WINE. The desktop is feels so stable, and fast. In addition, the fonts are rendered perfectly. I don’t understand why Gentoo fonts are poor when compared to Ubuntu. I assume that Ubuntu dev’s are using a significant amount of tweaks. I’m a fan of the MS Cleartype technology and Ubuntu fonts are *so* close I can barely tell the difference. Of course, I still keep Windows XP installed on a separate HDD for gaming and a big FAT32 partition in the event that I ever need to swap files between both Operating Systems.

Ultimately, my Ubuntu experience has been a positive one and I have no trouble recommending it to my mates and people I come across in day-to-day life. In contrast, this page is still being served off Zingers, my Gentoo powered Web Server and that is unlikely to change. I still *love* Gentoo too much to just completely be away with it. Everything is setup nicely and why break something that works? That said, the HTPC has been having issues lately and I’m seriously considering installing Ubuntu on that. Purely because of it’s great Multimedia support out of the box. I will keep you informed.

UPDATE [06-06-06]: Fujitsu (A participant and organiser of the Ubuntu-AU group) pointed out a valid contradiction in the above post. That is, I expressed that Gentoo would remain on Zingers indefinitely. Admittedly, I took the opportunity to explore alternative flavours of linux, specifically Arch and Ubuntu over the previous Summer holidays. In my most recent post, I have stated that Zingers is now powered by Ubuntu in addition to my justification for switching distributions in the first place. Please understand that after gaining experience and understand of several other distributions that I feel Ubuntu has been the appropriate [and good] choice for Zingers, at least for the next five years. In contrast, I’ve settled for Arch linux on my desktop. Arch would not make an ideal server for the same reasons that Gentoo doesn’t. I hope that this small update will correct any misconceptions.

I was browsing my gallery, repairing some permissions and I decided to click the “Powered by Simple PHP Gallery” link at the bottom of the page. Low and behold, the domain name has obviously expired and is now available for auction. Anyhow, I noticed that site was rather pretty so I checked the source code. To my amazement it was using divs and CSS. It even included a proper doctype. Spam sites conform to w3c, why can’t everyone else?

Reluctantly I made my way to work on Friday and was unfortunate enough to spend the entire day there. After finishing work I thought that I would spend most of the night playing Day of Defeat: Source (Dod) or something equally geeky. I really didn’t feel like going anywhere, I just wanted a nice quiet night.

Anyhow, getting close to midnight I received a call from Flora. She asked me if I would accompany her to the City as she had to pick up one of her long time friends, Erin. I live on the way, and since I was just playing DoD I thought why not? I agreed, and soon Flora arrived at my doorstop. Now, being the lazy guy that I am, I was still in my KFC uniform from that day. Yes, I really couldn’t be stuffed getting changed since I had not anticipated anything. I quickly slapped on some thongs and off I was.

At the first set of lights, we spotted Adam, Flora’s BF and my mate. Waving and beeping frantically, he didnt even notice us until the second set of lights. He was on a cruise somewhere, and we had a mission to go to the City, the Casino to be exact. After entering the Southeast Freeway, it became apparent that there was a traffic jam up ahead. I suggested that Flora should take the Gaza Rd exit and then the next onramp to avoid congestion. Flora said it’ll be alright and continued down the freeway. Low and behold, we came to a stand-still and I just laughed at Flora. We literally didn’t move for about 10 minutes, just sitting there on the Freeway. Then, an ambulance came up behind us, and gees, some people are morons when it comes to getting out of the way. Anyhow, the emergency services soon started to get traffic flowing and off we were, at about 5km/h. Infact, this continued for about the next 2-3km. To our amazement, there were *five* separate car accidents with emergency services and tow trucks at each of them. It was a rainy night with strong winds, and no doubt people ignored these conditions and persisted agaist all ods, ultimately costing them their cars and possibly someone’s life.

Eventually, we ended up at the Casino and with much confusion managed to locate and pickup Erin. From there, Flora suggested McDonalds. Me, still in my KFC uniform was like “Sure, why not?”. Last time I entered a McDonalds in my KFC uniform, I was told that I had the wrong place. Roffle, I was expecting some sort of smart arse comment like that again.

Nope, no comment at all. Not by customers, not by staff. Oh sure, they were staring, but no one wanted to be a smart arse. I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. I ordered my usual Crunchy and Oreo McFlurry while Flora and Erin opted for Sunday’s. Once we’d finished eating and talking, it was back to the car. I had expected Flora to drop me home at this point except that she is like “Oh, come back to my place… we can watch a movie”. I really didn’t want to go home, because I was avoiding having to go out with my Father in the morning. So sure enough, we ended up at Flora’s place. Erin and Flora drank *A* Cruiser and I only had a few beers, VB infact. While I personally wouldn’t purchase VB, that’s what Flora’s mum drinks, or should I say, Flozzah’s mum. Anyhow, Free beer is better than paid-for beer and Flora and Erin were gone off one drink. Roffle, the Cadbury’s. However, everyone was already pretty tired and once the conversation dried up, we just crashed. In the end, it was a different Friday night to what I had expected. Interesting or not, that’s my story.