Spyker Needs To Make A Retro-Styled SAAB

2010/02/15 — isecore

Not too long ago it became clear that dutch company Spyker will be purchasing SAAB Automobile from GM for a lot of money. I’ve been a bit split about this, but it’s not like I have a lot of say-so in the matter. I think GM is throwing away a big and almost vital piece of their own technology, since most of the other GM-produced marques such as Cadillac depend heavily on SAAB-developed technology.

None the less, the sale will happen. I stumbled upon this little article which urges Spyker to re-introduce a SAAB-branded Sonett, and I’m totally for that.

However, when I started thinking about this whole retro-thing I realized there’s a better candidate for Spyker to bring back. As the above-mentioned article says there’s lots of companies who’ve had success at bringing back retro-styled models. I for one love the new Fiat 500 which is just so cute and sexy. BMW brought back the new Mini, and lest we forget the questionable decision VW made a decade or so back to bring out a retro-styled bug.

So I got to thinking… Why not bring back a retro-styled SAAB 93? The 93 is a classic SAAB, and it’s a damn cute car, especially the ones from the mid to late 1950s. I think this would be a much better choice of introducing than the Sonett, which despite all it’s good things has some issues. The first one is that the Sonett would be yet another two-seater pseudo sportscar, while a retro-styled 93 has a backseat and could function as a family car while at the same time being a neat and sporty hot hatchback type vehicle. We shouldn’t forget that SAAB had quite good results in various rallies with the 93 and similar vehicles back in the day.

I mean, just look at the SAAB 93 from 1959. Doesn’t it just scream out for a retro-makeover and being built with modern technology? Replace the nasty old two-stroke engine from the original with a nice little hybrid and I think it would give the beloved Prius a run for its money. Make a funky, nice retro-styled SAAB 93 with the original suicide-doors, let people have plenty of options when it comes to color and addons and I wouldn’t be the least surprised if it could enjoy the same success as the Fiat 500.

Posted in Cars. No Comments »

The Jungle Room/Soak In The Sun

2010/02/14 — isecore

Look who’s figured out that there’s a perfectly sized little jungle room for her in the kitchen, and discovered that it’s quite nice to sit there and soak up the spring sun.

Posted in Animals, Miscellaneous. 1 Comment »

New Old Server

2010/02/12 — isecore

It seems like eons ago that I started this thing. Back in 2003 I installed what would become this server, and after a while this started to grow. The name (darklands) was inherited from that machines previous owner, and it still felt right. Admittedly I have none of the original hardware left, having replaced everything including the chassis, but the name still sticks.

Debian was the operating system of choice, made as far as I can remember on an impulse and a mild suggestion from a friend. Debian Woody to be precise, since back then I didn’t really know much about Debian and went for the “stable” release.

This installation served well for the next seven or so years. It got upgraded twice (from Woody to Sarge, then from Sarge to Etch) and survived my occasionally wild exploits. It hosted websites, and helped teach me a lot about the finer qualities of maintaining a 24/7 server.

But as time went by it became more and more unstable. Or rather, not unstable as such (uptime when I pulled it offline was 270+ days) but it had developed a lot of personality. Since I didn’t quite know what I was doing in the beginning, back in 2003, I took a lot of -in hindsight- very poor decisions. Decisions which I later regretted and had to endure working around for the next seven years, always being a nagging irritation at the back of my mind.

No more of this now.

I spent a week reinstalling the machine from scratch. After giving a lot of thought to it all I decided to go with Ubuntu Server instead of the previous choice, Debian. Admittedly, since Ubuntu is based on Debian the differences are very subtle, and all in all I’m quite happy with Ubuntu even as a server OS. It’s got the good things about Debian, and very few of the annoying ones.

The reinstallation was surprisingly smooth. I transferred the original machine into a virtualized environment running on my workstation to minimize the downtime while working on the actual machine. This proved to be a good idea, and I’m happy I took the time to do it. It also cemented that VirtualBox is a perfectly decent environment for virtualized computing.

Reinstallation went smooth. Minor hiccups always occur, but with seven years of experience I sorted them fairly quickly. Getting the external services running proved a challenge, but after some tweaking I managed it just fine. Apache, MySQL, all that stuff went up fairly quickly, and with minor modifications and tweaks the original content and configurations could be transferred to the new environment.

Internal services also went up smoothly. In about two days I had gotten approximately 90% of the external and internal services up and running. Quite nice. It’s been running for about a week now, basically just a shakedown to make sure things don’t go haywire for no reason.

Work remains, but now I can do it in the background or at night while the machine hums along and provides the same services it has always done. I’m happy, and proud of myself.

Posted in Computers, Linux/UNIX. No Comments »
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