Affiliate schemes

I used to hate all advertising on the Net: not because I thought it was wrong; because I thought it was ugly, irritating, and invasive. But things change, and I don’t hate it all any more. Spammers should still be fined and imprisoned, and people who use popup ads should have to pay the Mozilla developers (thank you Mozilla). But relevant banner ads are ok.

Now that I’ve decided that advertising is not all evil, I’ve signed up for some affiliate schemes. I have some websites that aren’t doing much at the moment, so I might as well connect them to sites that are. If doing this can make money without irritating anyone, why not.

So I signed up with TradeDoubler. My original intention was to sign up for just one scheme with a particular retailer for just one of my sites, but TradeDoubler have a long list of partners in different categories so it was quite easy to sign up to lots of relevant schemes. Their list even gave me ideas for some of my other sites.

Fenestration

I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the last year trying to find the perfect window manager, without success.

I had been using WindowMaker for a long time. WindowMaker is great, and I highly recommend it, but I wanted to see if there was another window manager that would suit me better: I’m not a typical user. I hate WIMP systems, but I use them because I like crisp Unicode fonts on my tty and browser, and I occasionally need to use some WIMPy applications.

I switched to ratpoison as it was designed for people who share my WIMP hatred; ion is similar. I would really like to use one of these two, but those occasional WIMPy applications really get confused.

I used Oroborus for many months after that. It isn’t the greatest WM, but it is one of the least annoying, and it allows me to center new windows.

During the next phase of my search I discovered a few interesting window managers that I will keep my eye on: cwwm is small and simple, but has most of the features I want; golem has a set of plugins that can be mixed to get the features I want and ignore the ones I don’t; waimea lets me configure behaviour for certain X events to make it do what I want. Unfortunately, none of these three are ready for me to use in anger.

I’m currently using pwm, believed to be the first window manager to use tabbed windows. In addition it has good keyboard control and multiple desktops, my top 2 requirements.

There are man more window managers out there. I have only tried the ones that have official Debian packages, but I will probably try some others in the future.

Continue reading Fenestration

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PXE booting Debian Linux

My first attempt at installing Debian via PXE had worked, but I wasn’t happy with it.

I tried it with udhcpd again, and it worked, after I removed some of the options from the udhcpd config file to leave it looking like:

interface       eth0
start           10.20.30.50
end             10.20.30.80
opt     subnet  255.255.255.0
siaddr          10.20.30.40
boot_file       /pxelinux.0

ThinkPad T23 BIOS upgrade

I upgraded my laptop’s BIOS today. I wish I hadn’t. After the upgrade the bootloader believed that there wasn’t enough memory to load any operating system. I tried other bootloaders, and they all thought the same.

The IBM telephone support guy was helpful and clueful, which is unusual for someone in his type of job. Maybe IBM have a policy to not employ grumpy idiots. It would be good if some other IT companies would copy that idea.

I reinstalled the old bootloader.

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Don’t use Soundex.

If you need to find words based on approximate pronounciation, use Metaphone (or similar); don’t use Soundex.

The Soundex algorithm was invented before 1880 (yes, 1880). It worked well for what it was designed for: their database was a set of large boxes containing rolls of microfilm and/or paper cards.

Don’t use Soundex in the 21st century! We should have stopped using it in the 20th.

Open Source Open Day

The NIOSC open day was interesting. The attendees were from a range of very different backgrounds, so it wasn’t easy to find the correct balance between tech-talk and lay-speak.

I presented the "Free Software is the Future" keynote address. Of course, I know nothing about the future. The title was something I said in 1996. The current worldwide Open Source buzz is confirming my predictions, although I hadn’t expected the bizarre name change.

Karen spent most of the day sitting at the combined Kasei and Belfast.pm table. This merged with the BLUG table, where Russell and Scott had setup some demo machines that looked slightly impressive until Macinni put up a real exhibit beside them.

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