Tales from Tammela

My failed desktop that used to double as a server received some new internals last week. Having last built a new box in 2009, the performance of even a basic modern system is impressive. I did stick to my tradition of building AMD-based systems.

I was talking with a friend how the state creates a dependent class. Another friend overheard my comments and complained that I had turned to the police when being harassed. Well, it has turned out to be an unsatisfactory solution. On the other hand, there are no free market solutions available to me. With the police, even the smallest action takes months, and if things finally make their way to a prosecutor, at least a year has passed from the crime to a court date. In a free market world, my and the other party’s insurance companies would get in touch and negotiate a resolution. There would be an incentive to provide a timely resolution this way.

My server had a hardware failure some weeks ago. Keeping hardware running at home was beginning to feel futile, so I started looking for a virtual private server. FAR had one that matched what I needed. To make a long story short, this blog is the first thing I’ve migrated.

Ever since I started using Linux as my main OS in the late nineties, I had been logging in as root or using su to do administrative tasks. Having been an admin for some Ubuntu systems for two years, I’ve found myself using sudo on other systems as well. I think it’s rather amusing how a decision made by one company affects my workflow on other products.

Nvidia drivers apparently caused me some grief again. This server was upgraded to openSUSE 13.1 and the Nvidia drivers were updated in the process. The server was left in an unbootable state with a broken filesystem after the upgrade. Well, the server had to be reinstalled and data were restored from backups. What did I learn? Do not use G03 Nvidia drivers with an integrated Geforce 8200 GPU.

My Xperia mini pro had been plagued by poor battery life. Something was keeping the phone awake and thus killing the battery. The tools that came with Android didn’t reveal the cause. However, by installing Wakelock Detector it became apparent that network location services were constantly waking up the phone. The results from disabling network location services were rather dramatic. Now it doesn’t really matter if I forget to plug in the phone one night.

My previous post was about porting a Joomla 1.5 template to a supported version of Joomla. Well, that wasn’t the whole story. I actually migrated an entire site that was running Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 3.2. It’s nice to be running a supported version again. You can admire my work at et-opetus.fi.

As a part of admining a website, I’ve ported a customised Joomla 1.5 template to be compatible with Joomla 3.2. Well, the php code in the template was poorly commented, which made things difficult. It was a rather interesting one time project, but it wouldn’t be much fun to do again.

The citizens’ initiative Yhdenvertainen Suomi is now open for signatures for a period of six months. The goal of the initiative is to gain the support of 50,000 voters after which the initiative will go to Parliament. The agenda of the initiative is a comprehensive reform of laws to achieve separation of church and state.

My Symbian phone was definitely showing its age, so I thought it was time for a new device. What I ended up buying was a Motorola Moto G. The lack of a physical qwerty keyboard is a definite step back from what I’m used to. Apart from that, I’m rather impressed. It’s good value for 160 odd euros.