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This time of year is when Christmas slowly creeps into my veins, it’s the little things, not the advertising that does it. When my wife and I were younger we always started our Christmas shopping the day after Remembrance Day ( Nov 11 ), but that was before the Internet and on-line shopping. We also had a lot of out of town gifts to buy back then, and we wanted to make sure that we got the parcels in the mail in time to get to their destinations before Christmas. We don’t get out to the stores nearly as much as we used to. I assume that is true for a lot of people now ( or at least those reading this blog ) but I still think of those days…

Another thing that makes me think of Christmas this time of year is my blog – believe it or not…

I have to admit that I don’t get a lot of traffic, which is all right I suppose – it puts less demand on me delivering an article every day, but what has happened every year since I wrote my article on trying to find Gipp Forster’s recordings, is that my traffic starts to increase around this time as more and more people start searching for his Gipp’s Christmas recordings. ( I guess the radios aren’t playing him  and his stories as much as they used to ) and the main reason most people find my little old blog is because they are searching for him… I like to think that because of that one article, they have an easier way of finding him and that makes me feel quite warm inside…

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So now that I’ve upgraded to a Karmic Koala, and am happy with most of the results, I’ve decided that it’s time to retire my old system ( all of 3 years…) and see what else I can do with it.

Suffice to say, unfortunately, there are still a lot of things that don’t run well in Linux and  while Windows XP “may” be starting to show it’s age, it’s still runs some of the accessories and tools that I can’t get to run on Linux and so I thought that I would clean up my older machine ( which has run XP for quite a few years now, and gave me some successful results with Ubuntu ) with a clean install of XP and try and get those things that won’t run on my newer Koala machine to run on it…. as I really don’t like having to reboot from one Operating System to the other every time I get a “brilliant” idea….

I unfortunately, of course, ran into a MAJOR problem ( which lucky for you generated this report – and why I’ve been off air working on it pretty solidly for almost a week. ) What happenned was that somewhere in amongst my repartitioning and reformatting my newer 500GB Seagate drive it decided to go into “security mode”. Just what this “security mode” is and does has still left me scratching my head… and there are a lot of others out there who have stumbled across this problem also… most sites refer to it as a “freeze lock”

• www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Hard_Drives/Q_24284906.html
• www.articlesbase.com/data-recovery-articles/seagate-hard-drive-failure-causes-and-cures-856129.html
• www.xipher.dk/WordPress/?p=133

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So, as I mentioned my upgrade to Karmic Koala went pretty well without a hitch, it was certainly a lot easier than any Windows upgrade that I had done AND it went a lot faster and with fewer problems.

That being said, the boys at Ubuntu are almost paranoid about anything that isn’t 110% free and non-proprietary, which over all is a good thing, however I don’t mind free stuff that is owned by someone else if it gives me something that I like…. so in order to continue getting updates for all the “proprietary” software that I had already installed in my previous releases, I had to go into my /etc/apt/sources.list and take the pound sign ( # ) off the beginning of all  my “other” software sources that Ubuntu wasn’t happy with.

So, while I was at it, I thought I should check out my favourite site for “other add-ons” information… The Indexer here you will find more portals and gateways to some really neat stuff that you may, or may not wish to add to your /etc/apt/sources.list

More toys, more toys and maybe an article or two on them in the not too distant future…. stay tuned!

For those who may not be aware “Jaunty Jackalope” is the name given by Ubuntu for their 9.04 version release and “Karmic Koala” is the name for the 9.10 release.

I have been running with “Jaunty” for a while now, but big promises have been made that “Karmic” would fix a lot of what ailed it and while there wasn’t a lot that I had problems with, the big thing that convinced me to move on to the latest version was the promise of better graphic drivers for my ATI card. If you have been reading any of my past postings on this issue, you will note that this has been an ongoing headache/pain in the but for a long,m long time…..

So when a little button popped up on my display yesterday saying “click here to upgrade to version 9.10” I was kinda like a moth to a flame…. what did I have to lose? The worst scenario would be my having to rebuild everything that I had done to date and possibly a few corrupted disks, but what the heck…. I clicked on it and said sure we’ll give it a try……

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For those who follow the goings and comings of the Internet, in particular it’s changes, both by technology and by law must be closely watching the goings on in England these days.

Those “virtuous” organizations responsible for the protection of all the “stuff’ ( sorry I’m trying to be kind here ) coming out of Hollywood and of course all the CD makers are actively leveraging and possibly succeeding in getting the British Parliament to pass an altogether immoral law there to shut down a households ( note I did not say individuals ) access to the Internet because someone copied what the powers may be consider ‘copyrightten material’ and that would even mean if it was their neighbour who piggy-backed on their unencrypted wireless access. So much for free wireless in Britain me-thinks….

What really makes the whole thing quite ridiculous is that both police forces and those super sneaky spook forces have pleaded with the government to NOT implement such a policy as it will then make their job a whole lot worse  ( and quite  possibly impossible ) than what it was before – catching the ‘real’ bad guys…. as this will pretty well guarantee that everyone will eventually move to encrypted addressing and messaging and who knows what else in the future….

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