No more blogging from me for a while. I’m tired of writing stuff and having to defend my opinion as if I was some crazy lunatic. Also, I’m getting annoyingly close to the point where I start writing for my “readers” (yeah, all five of you) instead of for myself, and that’s not good.

So, no more blog for a while.

UPDATE: Sometimes I’m very rash and impulsive. I wrote that it was the negative comments that are forcing me to take time off. This is a bit of an over-simplification. I honestly don’t care much about any negative comments posted. Sure, I get annoyed at them for mostly missing my point, but in the long run they are water under the bridge. The real reason for me to take some time off is simple: I have very little energy and inspiration to write. There’s too many things going on in meatspace, and I’m too stressed out about various issues to find the peace and motivation required to write somewhat decent postings. I’m going to take some time off, completely ignore the blog, completely ignore my feedreader and just relax.

Plus, my frickin’ keyboard is dying. Anyone care to sponsor me with a new Logitech Wave?

Yeah, keen observers might note that I’ve removed the “Ubuntu Linux” page from my blog.

Why?

Well, I realized that it was futile to try to have a static page about such a fast-moving target. By the time I’m even close to getting around to finishing it a new version of Ubuntu has been released, and the cycle starts over again.

Instead I’m going to write a static page about Ubuntu, I’m going to some day create a static page about my thoughts on Free Software, Linux and that stuff. For Ubuntu-related news you’ll simply have to read the blog instead. Or search it.

In two days Hardy Heron is officially released. It’s a bit obvious saying this, but so far it’s the best yet. I roll my eyes a bit when I read about how people try it and are disappointed that the changes aren’t as big as they expected. Well, that’s how Linux works. Small, but constant and never-ending improvements - unlike Windows who builds a hype-machine for five years and then falls flat on it’s face since it’s essentially the same stuff as before.

… seems to be to hire indians to write comments in blogs and produce subtle link-spam to british car rental companies.

The last two weeks or so I’ve had a lot of these comments end up in moderation. The comments themselves look really genuine, and relate to the posting they’re attached to. Most comment-spam looks very generic, like “good job, keep it up!” and such nonsense.

But these seem to be actually written by humans, and is an actual (albeit rather nonsensical) comment on my blog-post. Always with a link to some british car-rental agency or “blog” containing only one entry about car-rental agencies in the UK.

Every single time the IP-adress originates in India. Weird. Well, I guess they’ve outsourced their linkspamming to India as well.

Update (a little later): It seems that these human spambots are now hawking inkjet-cartridges as well. It’s also an excellent example of what these comments look like. This was posted as a comment to my story about the success of getting our laserprinter working under Ubuntu:

Janni | drkuki2000@yahoo.com | [some spam inkjet site].com | IP: 87.202.167.215

Nice post! Finaly good news you could make the printer work. BTW Linux rocks with every application.

If you do a whois in that IP-adress you’ll find that it belongs to an ISP located in Greece. As you can tell from the comment it’s incredibly “life-like” or whatever one might call it. It doesn’t have the trademarks usually indicating spambots since it’s actually almost on topic, as well as not filled with various retarded link-attempts. None the less, I’m not treating this as anything except spam.

Well, I’ve officially decided to move the last two remaining Seagate-drives from my server to my workstation. This sucks, but I’m going to have to be pragmatic about this - they were (for whatever reasons) causing the machine to be unstable, and an unstable server is simply unacceptable.

Supposedly there are a lot of people out there who are perfectly happy with Seagate-drives, but my patience is at an end. I wrote about this back in June (in Swedish) and even though I started to become very disenchanted with Seagate then I felt that maybe things would be sorted out in the future. Thus, I left them unplugged in the server, awaiting a chassi-change.

That chassi-change happened a month ago, yet the problems persist. The only conclusion I can draw is that Seagate-drives are somehow flawed when it comes to being in my server. My workstation currently runs all Seagate-drives, and some of the problems persist, but the difference is that my workstation is not mission-critical. I’m fine with rebooting it every few days. The server however, I cannot accept. I also cannot accept the lockups, DMA-errors and general weirdness that follows in the wake of the Seagate-drives. I cannot accept that whenever the Seagate-drives are attached the server will lockup if the load-average goes above 0.50 since under that load the Seagate-drives for whatever reason decide to squeeze their brains out through the IDE-channel. Unplug them and the machine will run happily under whatever load-average it gets.

I don’t know the causes for the problems, but I do know that a lot of people are experiencing similar problems. The symptom is always the same. The constant culprit is Seagate-drives. I no longer have the time or patience trying to find out why my drives are acting funky, and instead moving them to a less vital computer. After a lot of troubleshooting the problems persist, and while it would be easy for someone else to write off my server as temperamental and fussy about drives that is not the case - virtually every other brand of drives work fine in it, even the old Maxtor 80 gigabyte-drives that I always assumed would fail within the first year. I shrugged at it, since they’d been a free gift, but they’ve been ticking along steadily for more than four years now. This is unlike the Seagate-drives, who have all been causes for more or less intense degrees of grief.

No more of that now.

The days of Seagate-drives in my computers is once again numbered - and this time I’m not going to question my own judgment. Instead, the two drives will be moved into my workstation, and in time all Seagate-drives will be phased out of my life. Whether that phasing will come from them failing and getting junked or from me buying newer drives is really something that doesn’t concern me.

For the umpteenth time I’m trying to make some money off of my blog again. Everything I’ve tried before has been less than spectacular, the only thing that really brought in any money at all was Adsense and that brought me US$12 - which Google refuses to pay me, since it’s below their level for payout.

This time I’m going with Text-Link-Ads. I’ve been recommended them before, but back then I blogged in Swedish and only reached a limited audience. No ads were sold. But I’ll try it again, and this time maybe someone can please buy adspace? If you have a product that needs reviewing I can do that as well.

UPDATE: Anyone interested in purchasing a link can do so here. Perhaps some statistics is of interest?

Unique visitors per month: ~55000
Unique visitors per day: ~1700
Pageloads per month: ~58000
Pageloads per day: ~5000

Two days ago I decided to change blogging languages. I was tired of blogging in Swedish, and I felt that some kind of renewal was needed. I’d been kicking around the idea of switching languages since the early summer at least.

Originally I had planned the language-change to coincide with me and Ann-Sofie moving to Jokkmokk. This move has been indefinitely postponed due to various more or less complicated reasons. It felt kind of stupid then not to switch languages until we’d moved, since that move might take a lot longer than originally planned.

It’s interesting forming my thoughts in a different language now. I’m a pretty decent english-speaker, and even though I’m pretty good at using the english language I’ve realized these last two days that I suffer from something that most people who know a language yet don’t use it on a daily basis suffer from: lack of vocabulary.

I’m a bit of a grammar-nazi, and I can also be really arrogant when it comes to languages. I learned to speak english pretty much at the same time I learned Swedish. This explains my cocky demeanor when I speak english, and whenever I have to stop and think of a word I mentally kick myself for not knowing the word beforehand.

(And in case you haven’t noticed it yet, I have a tendency to be rather stuffy when writing in English. I blame all those british comedies which I so dearly enjoy)

So, this has opened up a new adventure for me: restocking my vocabulary. Finding not only the dictionary equivalents to what I use in everyday Swedish, but also the very essence of what a word means.

I find that there are a lot of subtle nuances to most words. I notice this most clearly when I’m watching a movie. I usually don’t watch english-language movies with subtitles, but due to my lovely girlfriend who’s not quite as good at english as me the DVD-player is usually set to show subtitles. It’s painfully obvious when the subtitler knows the language - but doesn’t know the cultural frame of references the word is used for.

Case in point: We just finished watching Minority Report. Absolutely excellent movie despite Tom Cruise being in it. Dystopian future, food for thoughts, great special effects and a pumping DTS-soundtrack. All the things I like with a movie, essentially. But the subtitles were at times absolutely dreadful.

At one point one of the characters suggest that Tom Cruise take another person to Radioshack. This was subtitled with “Ta henne till en radioaffär!”, essentially “take her to a TV-retailer” or something. Sure, the translation works, but this is where my own language-nazi woke up and got annoyed. In my opinion the proper translation would’ve been “Ta henne till Elgiganten!”. Elgiganten is a large Swedish home electronics-supplier very similar to Radioshack.

Sure, it’s a minor example but none the less these things annoy me. And now I face a similar problem with my own blog - finding the proper frame of reference for words, the skeleton from which to hang a sentence without just grabbing random words from the whirlpool that serves as my brain.

(Actually, while watching Minority Report I sat and wondered what it would be like to work as a subtitler. I’m pretty certain though that a majority of the sloppy translations stem from a lack of time - I bet people doing that work are under very, very tight deadlines and don’t have the elbow-room to lean back and muse about the wording of a sentence. After all, they’re essentially Google Translate but made of meat sitting in cheap chairs.)

Speaking of translations, I’m now going to fire up a text-editor and take a poke at translating another one of the static pages here. Hopefully I’ll finish it. I finished the About-page and it turned out pretty decent.

Technorati Tags: english, languages, swedish, translations, words, writing, blogging

Yes, this is probably the first real, serious, all-out all-english entry I’ve posted here. I can assure you it’s not the last.

I’ve been mulling this over for a few months now, and I’ve finally decided to switch blogging language from Swedish to English. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m keeping myself back by still blogging in Swedish. Back in 2004 when I started this blog I considered doing a dual-language thing, but I was lazy and unmotivated and decided to do it in Swedish. This decision has occasionally come back to haunt me, and I’ve feared losing my small but vocal Swedish audience by switching languages.

But no more! The future for this blog will be in English. Currently most everything is in Swedish, but I’m going to translate and transition everything to english. The obvious exception to this will be my old entries; I really don’t feel like going through 1200+ posts –more than three years worth– and translating them for your questionable enjoyment.

(If anyone feels like volunteering for the task though, be my guest.)

No, instead you’ll have to get to know me the same way everyone else has - by reading my output. This will be most interesting for everyone. I do hope that my fellow swedes don’t take offense at this change - it just had to happen. I’m looking forward to both new and old readers.

This will not be the death of my blog, rather it will be a glorious rebirth!

Now cue the silly yet pompous soundtrack to match that statement.

Perhaps a brief introduction is in order: I’m a whiny almost-30 guy living in the northern parts of Sweden. This blog has for three-plus years been my outlet of choice when it comes to things revolving around my life. My opinions, my whining, my thoughts and my experiences have been the recurring theme. This will not change, so expect a somewhat constant stream of bitching and moaning about how stupid the world actually is. Expect lots of optimistic cynicisms and bittersweet observations of my world. Enjoy.

Så, nu verkar det vara klart. Igår natt satte jag mig ned och började förbereda för bytet till Apache2. Man kan tro att det är en lätt match att uppgradera, och även om jag stålsatte mig för det värsta hoppades jag givetvis ändå att det skulle gå relativt smidigt. Jag har undvikit Apache i flera år eftersom jag lärt mig tillräckligt om detta mycket kraftfulla program och insett att min ursprungliga konfigurering var allt annat än elegant. Men jag har låtit det bero, och eftersom det funkat hittils har jag inte rört det speciellt mycket.

Men iom uppgraderingen blev jag tvungen att kika i min förvirrade och ostrukturerade konfigurering. Efter lite backup påbörjade arbetet.

Och vilket arbete…

Timmarna flög på medan jag hamrade vid tangentbordet. Hur jag än gjorde ville saker inte funka enligt mina egna principer, och min ovana vid Apache2’s något förändrade konfigurationsstil gjorde mig sur och frustrerad. Jag fick ingenting att funka som jag ville, och jag svor och svor åt alla irritationer och ologiska moment som dök upp. Inga vhosts, PHP ville inte funka som det skulle. Etc etc etc.

Till sist gav jag upp, lät Apache vara i ett brutet tillstånd och gick och la mig. Efter en natt med någorlunda god sömn bestämde jag mig för att tackla det igen, och med ett lite kyligare huvud och mer energi bakom pannbenet har det nu ordnats. Fortfarande misstänker jag att det finns arbete kvar, men nu funkar allt som innan. Hoppas jag, jag kommer säkert att hitta saker som kan behöva donas med…

En sak som jag lärt mig är dock något jag vill sprida med mig: Använd inte Fasterfox. Jag har använt den, men många av mina problem igår insåg jag berodde på denna extension. Använd den inte, den är inte bra alls. Hade jag inte haft den installerad hade jag sluppit många av mina bekymmer — saker som jag felaktigt skyllde på Apache2 när det i själva verket var Fasterfox som var skurken. Efter avinstallation försvann många problem, och de som kvarstod gick att felsöka på ett logiskt sätt.

Jag vill också ösa mer beröm över Debian och dess robusthet, smidighet och anpassningsbarhet. Tack vare APT gick det så mycket smidigare att uppgradera till Apache2 jämfört med om jag hade blivit tvungen att göra det på Old Skool-sättet. Jag har svårt att föreställa mig en bättre distribution för servrar, åtminstone inom GNU/Linux-världen.

Technorati Tags: apache, linux, gnu, debian, apt, php

Den senaste månaden har jag utfört en del uppgraderingar i servern. Hårdvaran är identisk, men jag har genomfört en del uppgraderingar som gått och grämt mig sedan länge.

Den första uppgraderingen blev i våras när jag dist-upgraderade Debian till senaste Etch (4.0) och då på köpet fick MySQL5 istället för 4.xx. För några veckor sen uppgraderade jag till PHP5 från 4.xx, detta eftersom de flesta projekt håller på att fasa ut stöd för äldre PHP-versioner. Det gick smidigt över förväntan, jag trodde det skulle bli massor med bök och strul men uppgraderingen tog bara 10 minuter och bestod mest i lite apt-gettande. Efter nån dag av drift betraktade jag det som “stabilt” eftersom ingen klagat över funktionaliteten.

Igår bytte jag bort Exim, den MTA (Mail Transport Agent) som skött mailen på darklands sedan 2003 eller så. Ersättare blev Postfix. Orsakerna till bytet var att Exim verkade ha stagnerat samt att prestandan är allt annat än lysande. När mailvolymerna var mindre gick det an, men Exim orkar inte riktigt med 5000-7000 spam om dagen utan att påverka prestandan på övriga tjänster och blev därför utbytt. Dessutom är Exim hysteriskt svårkonfigurerad, Postfix underlättar iom att den har en Webmin-modul man kan sköta allt via. Very najs. Uppgraderingen gick mycket smidigt, krävdes bara lite mindre modifikationer för att anpassas till hur jag vill ha saker.

Så nu planerar jag den stora uppgraderingen. Apache ska bytas ut från 1.3.xx till 2.xx-serien. Jag har ingen bra orsak till varför jag gör detta iom att 1.3′an har godkänd prestanda och får regelbundna säkerhetsuppdateringar. Hittils har jag använt “if it ain’t broken don’t fix it” som motivation till att undvika den här uppgraderingen, jag är nämligen helt övertygad om att det kommer att bli strul på den fronten.

Därmed sagt, om ni märker av problem de närmaste dagarna så beror det på att jag mekar i Apache.

Technorati Tags: apache, linux, debian, etch, uppgradering, http, www

Idag är det återigen den där dagen. Dagen då jag på allvar började blogga, och då bloggen som ligger på den här adressen (och som Just Du läser precis Just Nu) blev född. Visserligen så provade jag blogga några gånger innan, men det blev liksom ingenting permanent. Först den 26e Juli fastnade jag på allvar.

Så, nu är den här bloggen tre år gammal. Inte illa alls. Jag trodde faktiskt inte jag skulle skriva ens ett år, definitivt inte två år — än mindre TRE år. Den här gången är jag dock inte såpass manisk att jag publicerar mitt egokittlande jubileumsinlägg exakt samma tidpunkt som jag publicerade det första inlägget, utan nu räcker det med rätt datum.

Nu får jag gärna börja tjäna lite pengar på det hela också, för tydligen är man veteran efter två år eller mer i bloggvärlden. Jag har också hört att bloggar tydligen ska vara en kassasuccé. Jag kan inte påstå att jag märkt av det senarenämnda speciellt mycket. Men ni vet var knappen finns om ni av någon bisarr anledning känner för att bidra med en slant. I gengäld får ni… ööh… fler flummiga kåserier från en norrländsk datornörd. Enjoy.

Eftersom jag på senare tid har kommit till den åsikten att om man inte kan ge sina läsare nånting bra, så ge dem åtminstone nånting fånigt. Därför får ni som bonus en bild på min katt Monstret när hon leker med (läs: blänger surt på) en leksaksbåt jag fick i nåt kinderägg för massor med år sen och nu hittade i min skrivbordslåda: