Avast, me hearties!

Not that I’ve followed the tradition like, ever before, but I’m not failing to aknowledge the International Talk Like a Pirate Day this year.

Shiver me timbers! :-)

Spreading the geekness

Tuxa (that’s my wife in case it isn’t obvious) has just assembled her first PC!

I finally managed to get a little bit of free time (the help-desk-like-stuff pile is getting definitely smaller) to get around to assembling the Pundit-R which will be my living-room DVD player and PVR. My current DVD player has been warning me that it will not put up with my demands much longer and so this was the perfect opportunity to go for a full-blown PVR.

So I bought all the components some two weeks ago and it has all been laying around, waiting for me to have the time to put it together.

The curious thing is that Tuxa was so curious about it that she asked me if she could help out with the assembling. Well of course I had nothing to object, quite the contrary.

In the end I opened up the case, got the manual in hand and just told her what to do while she had a blast assembling it all.

So now, after I’ve had all the software installed and put the box in it’s place, Tuxa will have a PVR which she built herself! How cool is that?

Oh and all this fuss is derived from the fact that while she is far from technologically-challenged she is not a geek, not by far. Although I may have to revise that last statement given the recent developments… Oh my, could I be about to loose the status of alpha-geek in my own home? ;-)

Goo

“I Stole my sister’s boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat and flash. Within a week, we killed my parents and hit the road”.

For some unfathomable reason this stuck inside my brain, seemingly forever.

I just got to listen to Goo again, after an ungodly amount of years and by the 3rd or 4th chord of Dirty Boots it just came back to me.

And I can’t remember what I had yesterday for lunch…

Nuno’s helpdesk hot-line, how may I help you?

What a couple of weeks the past ones have been!

I’ve been so busy (I’m talking out of work of course, work-related stuff is something I usually don’t discuss here) I’m actually starting to miss photographing or filming stuff!

Just a quick recap of things I’ve done lately for my own records-sake:

• Ported most of the stuff from my noisy Intel-based home server to the oh so quiet Mac mini. There are still some things to be finished on that front, but most of it is done and I now have the old server turned off most of the time, much to my ears’ relief);

• Setup automatic external disk backup software for both of my parent’s laptops;

• Completely installed and setup my mother’s new laptop (including the above mentioned backup solution);

• Installed a brand new iBook for my mother and did a full length introduction to Mac OS X and the “Apple Philosophy” for my parents. My mother’s brand new laptop had a hardware problem and the store she had bought it from was so obtuse in dealing with the problem that she decided to just get her money back and in the end decided to go the Mac way. Way to go FNAC, just keep on driving your customers away!

• Did a full credit-card payment gateway integration on my brother’s site (not yet on-line);

• Helped a number of people with an unusually high number of winblows-related problems. People still largely think that the guy who works “in computers” and with a degree “in computers” must surely know why their computer has turned so slow and stopped doing this and that and (worse) started doing this and that, even if the aforementioned guy doesn’t use winblows himself and in fact tries to avoid it like the plague. 99.9% of the time the anti-virus hasn’t been updated in oh… more than 6 months or so and anti-spyware is still an alien concept so the guy actually ends up knowing full well what the problem is, which doesn’t help his credibility much when he tries to say “but I don’t use the stuff, how am I supposed to know what the problem is?”;

• Some other random things that needed doing which I now forget.

So still on my plate for next week is:

• Finishing up the home server migration;

• Formating the old server, installing XP on it and shipping it to it’s new owner;

• Doing a full disisfestation of a laptop running winblows which (by the sound of it) must be crawling with virus and spyware and educating it’s owner on the dangers of the Internet and protective measures that must be taken (and in this instance I know that the lecture will actually help so that’s not so bad);

• Assembling the new PVR machine (whose components I bought a full week ago but which are still lying in their respective boxes due to my lack of time), installing it, putting Freevo on it and configuring everything before my current DVD-player finally gives in and gets to join it’s brethren in the big sitting-room in the sky;

• Try to get some free time back in order to actually get to use the new PVR!

But now, for a full weekend of beach, with practically no connectivity!

See you all monday!

iBook reincarnation - take two

Just got my iBook back from the shop today.

Yep, the previous logic board substitution solved the problems I had but gave me a whole set of new ones.

Still I have to commend Interlog (again) for letting me keep my Mac while the new logic board was en-route (which only took 2 days this time around) and then replacing it from 18h00 one day to 9h30 the next day.

Way to go, really!

Now I just hope this board is actually fully working…

XMPP - Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol

This is a page that I created to hold some information I have gathered on the subject (while working on setting up a server) and will have to be revised to make it “cleaner”.

Some relevant links:

• http://www.jabber.org/
• http://www.xmpp.org/
• rfc 3920

DNS configuration to support XMPP

SRV records:

• _xmpp-server._tcp.domain
• _xmpp-client._tcp.domain
• _jabber._tcp.domain
• _jabber-client._tcp.domain

For clients and for older servers the A record of the domain is often used.

Helper scripts

#!/bin/sh

domain=$1

(
    dig srv _xmpp-server._tcp.$domain
    dig srv _xmpp-client._tcp.$domain
    dig srv _jabber._tcp.$domain
    dig srv _jabber-client._tcp.$domain
    dig a $domain
) | perl -ne 'next if /^;/ || /^\s*$/; print'

Changes on portions of the site

Well, now that the Mac mini is finally here, I’m trying to get rid of the big noisy Intel tower ASAP.

Right now I’ve moved a few sites out into the geek-nest server (most notably the wiki which also suffered a software upgrade which may break things a bit) and de-activated some others.

I wanted to try out CenterStage on the mini before putting it to definite use as a server and I did. So now I know it will take a huge time for it to even start to be useful so no problems there. I’ll probably just put the mini to work this weekend, if I have the time. I’m actually active in the whole pvr/media center arena but that is a subject for another time when I’m not so sleepy.

I apologize in advance if anything breaks in the mean time in my site. Migrations usually do that! :-)