Monthly Archives: November 2005

Numbness and a Router

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For the past 2-3 weeks I’ve had a numbness on my left hand. Little finger mainly, some of the ring finger, down the outside edge of the hand to the wrist. It feels slightly odd – but only slightly – from there to the elbow. Hand weakness is present too. Very odd. It wouldn’t seem to be RSI, it could concievably be posture as this would coincide with the house move and googling shows little of note. Odd.

Following my post about Sygate, I decided to try the router firewall. All is good except for Syncback – it’s being blocked. Uses port 21 and even if I explicitly open that – which I don’t need when using Filezilla or puTTY – it doesn’t work. And the router has no logs. Clever … so I’m waiting for a Belkin person to ring me back with hopefully a solution.

And it’s snowing here. At last. Though at the rate it’s coming down we could have days of this and it wouldn’t cover the ground. Bugger.

And I said ‘Odd’ thee times in that first bit. Must find another word.

Getting closer with Knoppix

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Tried the LiveCD again … running lspci -vt shows that it can see the chips inside the wifi card (it shows Broadcom) so it’s obviously something else – cardbus controller ? The linux forum post (I’ve forgotten where) said to try setpci -s 0:14.4 subordinate_bus=03 if the value was not 3. Mine was 4 but I got some error message about being unable to open some file somewhere. Hmm.. what I need to do is sit the machines together and try that way – but it’s so fragmented out there (/me points to the internet) that I need to know what I’m after first. Or I could email the guy who seems to be in charge of the Leicester LUG and see if it’s acceptable to saunter along, slide my machine toward someone with much knowledge and say “Please” while proffering beverages :)

Norton kill Sygate

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I mentioned this a while ago – Symantec buying Sygate – and said that the makers of that fine example of bloat – Norton – would ruin a perfectly good firewall. Whoops ! Got that wrong ! No, Symantec are killing off the free firewall. On a business level they may be right. And on a user-level not using any of their products you too would be right (removing all the Norton crap from any machine I’m asked to look at is always step #1). So, the Sygate firewall is good. The Symantec one is not. The Sygate one is free. The Symantec one is too if you know where to look (but it’s still crap). Download your Sygate code now .. while you can.

That was quick.

Reply

One post, three days and it’s #3 on a Google.co.uk search. I’ll find out later where it is on a Google.com search. Three days … not bad compared to usenet, and I’ve not even written anything of note there yet.

Edit: It’s number 3 on .com too. 7 on Yahoo, 2 on MSN, Number ONE on Lycos.

:)

Welsh venue, world claims ?

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BBC

Every religious tradition has in fact denigrated women and seen them as second-class citizens in the past.

Really ? ALL of them ? I cannot believe that is true. Every religious tradition – that’s one hell of a lot. I think he’s at best using a blanket term because he cannot be bothered to check, at worst lying through his teeth and in the middle somewhere is chauvanistic. But let’s say he is right. Let’s say that the Archbishop’s church (and by definition all it’s teaching and conduct) has indeed been in line with all those other “religious traditions”. Effectively what the Archbishop has done is the same behaviour that a naughty schoolboy caught with his friends in the middle of some misdemeanour engages in – “He was doing it too Miss“. Shifting the blame, moving the focus, dodging the issue.

For those that preach forgiveness, why do Church Leaders have such a major problem with the 5 letters that spell out S O R R Y ?

Rockall: Irreverent

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For some reason, I put the feed from the Rockall Times into my ‘UK News’ folder. It really doesn’t belong there, especially with the two interviews posted in the last couple of days. If you liked George Best and you do not have a sense of humour, do not click. The Rockall Times

Branson Spam ?

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Apparently Virgin Poker is the new one in the card-playing game. Everyone who has had a blog longer than 6 months knows that the sudden rush to play poker and the masses of poker games and accessories in the shops had something to do with the phenomenal amount of poker related spam that hit blogs. Comments spam, trackback spam – used by the big companies to drive their gambling businesses. And along comes Richard Branson. New to the game.

“We want to make poker accessible,” said Joshua Morris, a product marketing manager. “There will be no intimidation factor as we are going after the mass market.”

Hmm….

Reinforcing ..something..

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Just went for a walk up to the shop. No idea how far away it is but at a good pace (which is my standard speed setting) it takes ~15minutes. About halfway there an old lady appears from a driveway and starts walking in the same direction towward the shops. She’s around 80 yards ahead and is walking slowly. I’m listening to music and not really concentrating on much when I see that she has half-turned, looked at me and then kept on walking. The distance between us has closed and she does it again. But this time she doesn’t just turn and keep walking, she starts scurrying. She actually speeds up while still taking her small steps and she holds her bag tighter. Having seen this behaviour countless times, I simply cross the road. I don’t look at her (I’m still around 40 feet behind her) but I notice she glances at me and visibly slows her pace. It’s an odd exchange of sorts and I cannot be the only bloke that this sort of thing happens too – and I perfectly understand why it happens, but I can’t help feeling that even though nothing happened that this old lady has had some believe about society reinforced. Is she thinking that because she ‘got a good look’ that I was ‘scared off’ ? Is some other aspect of the situation reinforcing something that she holds to be true already ? Because you can bet she is not thinking “that bloke realised I was scared and moved across the road to make me less afraid” which is what really happened.