barns.blog

Today we mark the sad passing of the legendary TV chef Keith Floyd. Floyd was a character unto himself and I feel one of the biggest influences on both TV chefs and many others opinions of food – including mine.

Floyd’s love of food and particularly wine was evident throughout his presentations and his infamous phrase “if it’s not good enough to drink, it’s not good enough to cook with” is one that I carry with me today, and is certainly the legacy that Floyd left with me. I am certain that he had some influence on my love of food and wine today.

Rest In Peace Keith Floyd, and salute to your memory.

With the imminent arrival of my Acer Aspire One A110, I have been preparing myself for setting it up to my satisfaction. The A110 comes with Linpus Linux Lite, which isn’t really a product for power users. However, the debate is what, if anything, is better, and what will the A110 run.

I am told that Ubuntu Netbook Remix works well on the A110 and that it has a fairly decent user interface. With this in mind, I set myself to obtaining a copy. Just under 1GB later, I had the USB image and wanted to try it out. Problem is, VMware Workstation can’t boot from USB devices and I was too lazy to make a USB device anyway. With a little help from Google, and http://shadow-file.blogspot.com/2009/08/ubuntu-netbook-remix-in-vmware.html, I set about turning the USB image into an ISO. This is fairly easy and is detailed below.

Firstly, the USB .img file is just a file system dump, so it can be mounted fairly easily:

# mount -o loop -t vfat ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img \
/some/mount/point/

Then, it was a simple case of copying and editing the files. The image is almost suitable for CD, except that it needs isolinux rather than syslinux. This I knew from installing Ubuntu server on a machine without a CD drive last year, then I was going the other way. So:

$ mv syslinux isolinux
$ mv isolinux/syslinux.cfg isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Simple as can be. The final stage is just bundling it all up into a CD image:

$ mkisofs -o ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.iso -r -J -l \
-V "Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.04 i386" -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table /path/to/unr/files/

And we are done. UNR itself worked fairly well under Workstation and has a good user interface. I am definitely planning on installing it onto my netbook when it arrives!

It’s a well known fact that my spelling sometimes leaves something to be desired, but in the world of modern computers, this isn’t actually a problem. However, you need a spell checker that works. Wordpress uses tinyMCE as its editor, which includes a spell check button, so spelling on the blog shouldn’t be a problem: but it is.

For apparantly no reason at all, the spell check module of tinyMCE fails time, and time again, but returns the spelling errors in the error message. After some googling, I came across http://ruxable.com/2009/01/wordpress-spellcheck-ssl-error/ and as a result http://kennyocracy.com/2008/10/02/solution-to-tinymce-fatal-error-in-googlespell/ which indicated what was wrong. The result is really quite simple. A matter of making sure that CURL is installed for PHP. A useful little fix for an annoying problem!

It seems as though I have been quite lax at blogging this year. A full six months have passed and I have not written a single entry. Frequent visitors will have no doubt noticed the change in design, and with it brings a new opportunity to blog more frequently. Much has happened since February, but I will start updating readers with tidbits from my research and other happenings as they come and go.

With 2009 already under-way, progress is happening in my Masters at a steady pace. With just under six months to go until the end of July, my work is in full swing, with a mixture of writing, algorithmic construction, testing and other activities. Over the next month, most of the development work should be completed. This is, of course, somewhat dependant on my teaching not getting too much in the way.

Thereafter, my algorithms and the sfPortscan algorithm from Snort will be tested and statistically analysed. Thereafter, I plan on finalising my write-up and handing in.

In the interim, I have plans to submit papers to several conferences during the course of the year, the first list includes ISSA, RAID, SATNAC, SAICSIT and CISSE (in chronological order of submission dates). I also hope to get a journal article out during the course of the year.

So, onward with 2009…