Caught the following spam in my mailbox: 

I write to bring to your notice that I am the Nigerian new foreign affairs minister and an official delegate from the United Nations To Central Bank Of Nigeria to pay 150 Nigerian 419 scam victims $1000,000.00 USD (One Million Dollars) each. You are listed and approved for this payment as one of the beneficiaries to be paid this amount as compensation.

Hmm. 😉 

Dell’s Printer Driver CD is "special". If you put it in your windows box, you get Windows and Linux drivers. If you mount it under Linux, you only get the Linux drivers. I guess this is a "you don’t need it anyway" scenario, and as such classified as ‘good intentions’. However, it’s pretty annoying if you want to copy the Windows drivers to a fileshare for the other Windows boxes to access… sigh.

Last weekend I got Guitar Hero: Aerosmith from my wife, as a present for our first anniversary. Cool game, and I’m having lots of fun with it although a lot of cool Aerosmith songs seem to be missing (e.g. Crying) – one minor niggle in the star power mode: most people in your audience should be lucky they’re not living in the middle ages, as they would be burned as witches. No other person can clap so much out of sync with the music, you should try it! It really is impossible, and especially it completely gets you out of rhythm 🙁 I’m avoiding star power as much as possible because of it 🙁 (no clapping in the original GH3, as far as I know). The Guitar Hero series rocks 😉

I forgot to mail my original GH3 DVD to Nintendo, so I’ll do that on monday; why, you ask?  Because the original Wii release has a bug in that it only produces mono sound. You can recognize the fixed version by the guitar on the disc print (in Europe, or a star on the US version). Disc swaps are free until August 31, so hurry up if you didn’t do it yet!

Like before :

A convicted spammer fatally shot his wife and young daughter in an apparent murder-suicide Thursday while being sought after escaping prison last weekend, authorities said.

Heh. 

 (link to article )

2 more kittens coming up! 😉

If you’re a system administrator and haven’t heard from Areca RAID controllers, you’ve probably been living under a rock somewhere. Throw out your 3wares, throw out your Adaptecs (if you’re happy with software RAID, keep it), insert Areca for instant fun. 🙂

I’ve been using them for quite a while now and I’m quite happy, mostly in RAID6 configurations, with great performance.

Some things can do with some improvement though…

– Web interface looks a bit dated, but hey, it works

– Expansion of volume set through the CLI didn’t work on my box. Areca says update the BIOS, but it’s at the latest, Areca says update your Linux driver, but hm. Maybe later 😉

– More on expansion: I expanded a volume set, and the status changed to "Initializing(15%)". INITIALIZING. Sounds terribly wrong and datalossy for an online expansion… luckily it was indeed expanding it, as it works fine now 😉 But still. It got very hot all of a sudden…

Luckily it all works grreat now, so as long as they keep this up they’ll always have my Euro’s 😉

This is on Ubuntu, should be the same for all others. You need bluez-utils already installed, and have your phone paired with the PC.

/etc/ppp/pap-secrets

*       mobistar

/etc/ppp/chat-gprs

” AT
OK ‘AT&F’
OK ‘ATV1E0S0=0&D2&C1’
#OK ‘AT+CMEE=1’
OK ‘AT+cgdcont=1,"IP","mworld.be"’
OK-AT-OK ATD*99***1#
CONNECT ""

/etc/peers/gprs

/dev/rfcomm0 115200
connect ‘/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat-gprs’
noauth
defaultroute
debug
user mobistar 

/root/bin/umts.sh 

#!/bin/bash
rfcomm release 0 2>/dev/null
rfcomm bind 0 00:12:D1:6E:9D:47 1
pon gprs
plog -f
poff

Substitute 00:12:D1:6E:9D:47 with your phone’s mac address (see hcitool scan)

Now running "/root/bin/umts.sh" should do the trick!

While upgrading my Ubuntu from 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04 I encountered some errors starting up Konqueror or opening a file chooser dialog. The popup would read "No MIME types installed", and there would be no files listed. Autocompletion on the input box would work though…

After looking around, blaming a KDE version upgrade, or configuration problems, or … I found that the /var filesystem had been full at one point in time, and while there was space now, something got corrupted.

Cleaning out /var/tmp/kdecache-<username> should solve the problem for you if you have it too. (No need to re-login, I think) 

Why is it that when I surf to www.benl.ebay.be, I get redirected to www.befr.ebay.be ? I explicitly state the language, yet ebay decides I speak French. It helpfully offers me a link to get it in Dutch though, which goes to that URL exactly.

When I’m not logged in to Facebook, it also greets me in French.

Above "problems" mostly occur from the Mobistar IP space at work though, not that much from home… Especially the ebay one is pretty irritating, these days I just surf it in French because I’m tired of correcting it every time 😐