Right then…..I tried to recover the data on my Suse Drive but alas to no vail. I bought a new drive and installed Linspire on it. It is a really nice Distro and their CNR application installation centre is second to none. But some things wouldn't work, PHP for one. I have thousands of photos and like to keep them organised and to edit them every now and again. LPhoto was just not up to the job, it crashed any time you tried to import more than 500 photos. I also have tons of songs and LSongs couldn't cope witht the number I had. Juk wouldn't install either. It also took an absolute age to boot up. So after having spent $50 on a years CNR subscription I ditched it. I formatted the Suse Disk I couldn't use any more and installed XP on both Disks (200 GB in total). I will install Suse 9.1 on my old XP box and use it strictly as a server as, as far as I am concerned, Any Linux Distro i have tried is just not ready for the desktop. The apps are good but they didn't cut it. The Dev apps are a different story though KDevelop and the likes.

I am now quite happy with mu decision of going back to XP. Everything is working well and I have SP2 installed and AVG installed too so I feel quite secure. Firefox 1 Preview Release is also out so I'm loving that, too (I know it's out on the other platforms too).

So after a hellish week of installas and re-installs and drive formatting and backups galore, I am ready for a week without computers….. No chance.. back to work tomorrow. I found FoxyTunes Extension for Firefox…. excellent, It ties in with loads of media players including iTunes so you can control your music from your Firefox status bar…:)

I was trying to resize the main partition on my Suse Box so I could install Linspire. I was using QTParted from a Knoppix live CD. It finished with an error. I had a look at the partition table and nothing had changed so i presumed everything was ok…… Oh No it wasn't. I can't boot into Suse now as it says the partition is corrupt. I am now trying some of the Suse Repair tools form the installation CD. Stupidly I hadn't backed up email or bookmarks or documents. This is a real pisser. Luckily I only had the system up and running a couple of months so I didn't have “too” much on it. Just my luck…….. Argh!!!

Update: I have since used QtParted from a live cd and it worked a treat and saved my ass big style

I was around at my inlaws house last weekend and was asked to have a look at their PC as it was playing up. They have AOL and seemingly they were getting a ton of pop-ups. I knew that AOL has some pop-ups but not a ton of them so I booted up and logged on to AOL and had a little surf…. There was tons of pop-ups. I had a look at the processes running and low and behold, I spotted Blaster.exe or something similar. I knew then that the PC was probably riddled with all sorts of trojans ad spyware and what have you. I ran Symatec's removal tool for Blaster and then installed AVG Free (from grisoft). I ran the complete test and it found 35 infected files….. sheesh. I have left it running in the background so hopefully they won't get any more.

Last week I started using BitTorrent and came across the Linspire Live CD iso image. I downloaded and burnt to disk. I booted from the CD  with no problems and had a look around and the application list is quite comprehensive. I then thought I'd try my Thumbdrive to see if it found that… Yup and I could write to it (I could not in Knoppix). I then tried my new external hard drive … Yup it found that too and could write to it (Knoppix could not). I then tried my iRiver hard disk  MP3 player…. Yup found it and could write to it (Knoppix could not). No as a distro that doesn't get that much coverage in the Linux community… I think it is absolutely brilliant….. It has most needed apps installed (I'm basing this on the LiveCD) and it has a one click install system too (CNR)… where you can get all manner of apps and utilities (Kdevelop, Apache, PHP, ect).You can also use apt-get and install rpms. I reckon I might dual boot my Suse box with it.

What I find hard to fathom is how Linspire (Formally lindows) manages to get usb working so smoothly without having to fuck about in /dev/ and manually mounting, Suse has been in the game much longer and they can't get it right (they won't even support their own usb mount system either). Linspire has only been around for a few years and I reckon they hav nailed the Linux Desktop to a tee, Granted you have to pay but I paid for Suse too so that's that argument out the window. For any Nooobies (I still consider myself a relatively noob) I would highly recommend it. A+++++++++

My Housemate just got a mini iPod and it is really great. Just like the regular ipod, it just appears in itunes and playlists galore are loaded on. There is one drawback however …. it's Pink.

An update on the memory issue. The memory I bought on ebay did not work. It was defective. I have sent it back under warranty and am awaiting a refund. I then went on the crucial website and 512MB for £50with free delivery. Knowing that this would definitely work, I got it and now have a not too shabby 1024MB RAM.

I'm looking at holidays lately for the middle of November so if anybody has been anywhere spectacular and cheap let me know.

It seems Frank (BigFrankSmyth) is in NZ at the moment and has just eaten the killer kilo steak…. (everybody wants to be like me).

Gmail invites. I've got  5 2 invites if anybody is interested,

The RocheMobile is sadly no longer Irish, It was stripped of it's irish plates last week and replaced with a white and a yellow english one. It was a sad day but I still have the plates to reminisce over. I'v ebeen busy in work and at home but I'm making an effort to blog more now and also to reply to emails as I know I am shit at that.

Anybody know which is better?
http://tsep.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.phpdig.net/, also is any of y'all familiar with web scrapers?

I've added a new feature to the right of the page.. My Moblog (Mobile Blog). I use http://moblog.co.uk/ at the moment and it seems really cool. You email or MMS your picture from your phone to them and it appears on your Moblog. This Moblog has an RSS feed which I have pulled in on my page using my PHP RSS Parser to show the top Moblog Entry.

I forgot to welcome home Enda and Tara too…… see y'all soon

Just bought an external USB2.0/Firewire Hard Drive (http://www.amacom-tech.com/ez2disk.html). It's really nice, 120GB for only £97 [Ebay of course]. My Mac sees it fine and Windows does (I haven't tried yet but I know it will). My Suse box however does not see it which is a pisser but Suse does have problems with External USB drives. I'm gonna try on KNoppix Live CD and try and do my backups from there. Just in case anybody has come across the problem, this is the error I get in /var/log/messages:

I'm Gonna try and get a Firewire card and try that way. There will be no stopping my bcakups then 🙂

I bought some more memory for my Suse Box too off ebay so hopefully that works. I'll have a 3GHZ Processor and 1.5GB Ram……..Nice.

I needed to set up PHP and a WebServer on my Desktop in work and remembered I had read an article about the Abyss web server. I gae it a try and I have never come across a web server that can be set up so quickly… kicks Apache's httpd.conf arse. I have PHP5.0 running to so I can finally get around to trying out some of the new PHP5 features,

On a non-tehnical note, Myself, Gill and two of her Uni buddies tore up Liverpool last saturday.. It was wicked, Tooheys new in Walkabout brought back memories of Sydney (So too did being pissed as a fart not knowing where I was 🙂 )

On the hunt for some wicked fonts…… try http://www.fontfreak.com . I thought it would be a hassle installing fonts in Linux but it was a breeze and they appear in most applications too which is great. All you have to do is download the fonts "True Type" fonts I chose and copy them to the appropriate directory:

 # cp /home/philroche/Fonts/*.ttf /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/

Doing tons of CSS stuff lately and really loving it. I have found some supreb reference sites:

• AlistApart
• IE7
• StuNichols
• W3CShools
• Web Standards
• CSS Zen Garden(Zen Garden Interface Tool)
• Jeffrey Zeldman (his book rules)
• MezzoBlue
• Flumpcakes CSS Optimiser
• Web standards CheckList
• CSS Destroy
• CSS Play

There are probably tons more but these are class.

From a coleague in work, check out http://www.webxact.com/ , a superb tool for seeing what's slowing down your site………… flash usually.