Steady as a rock

When I was fixing the Ubuntu setup on the pc of a now happy Ubuntu user, he pointed me to a video on youtube called “Achmed the terrorist”. Achmet is one of Jeff Dunhams puppets and he is a dead suicide bomber who threatens to kill in an increasingly squeeky voice. He also has a christmas song now ;)

Anyway, apparently someone uploaded both his shows to youtube and sure enough I watched them. Jeff’s quite rude at times but overall pretty funny, at least much funnier than many so-called comedians out there. Motivated by this, I searched for ‘ventriloquist’ on youtube and sadly the result was less than stellar.

Until I saw Terry Fator that is. Last year Terry apparently was a candidate in “America’s got talent”, a show I didn’t even know existed. He is absolutely brilliant! Funny, good impersonator, excellent singer and amazing entertainer. If you’ve never seen him, you absolutely should go to youtube and search for his impersonation of Roy Orbison. While you’re at it, watch it all. BRILLIANT!

xs4all, the best ISP in the Netherlands, now offers free wifi at KPN hotspots to its members. This is excellent, since 3 stations I pass when traincoding now have wifi I can use, so I can use documentation when hacking and not look like an arse because I don’t read docs.

The latest quick hack didn’t work properly at the 2nd station, so I looked up documentation, found my error and now I present: nm_unset - a very simple tool with which you can remove wifi networks for network manager from gconf. I simply got tired of having to use gconftool-2 –recursive-unset /system/networking/wireless/networks/$ssid all the time (and of having to explain how to do this to new users on #ubuntu). I’m really hoping that they soon provide something in n-m for this so I can toss this out again.

…oh wait new year

…oh crap, it’s the 11th already

Been quite busy the past weeks, so not much writing has happened. After christmas I finally picked up work on falcon again. Version 2.0.0 was finally finished and Brandon Holtsclaw was kind enough to upload it to Ubuntu, Yeah! Of course a few bugs were found (and fixed) after that, so version 2.0.4 will be uploaded shortly, which is the recommended one.

At work (where we need more linux sysadmins, prod if interested!) I have been working on a project I called imagine, it’s an OS ‘installer’ that can make an image of your harddrive and install it on another machine. That’s nowhere near unique of course, but this thing runs entirely from initramfs so you can simply use network booting and don’t need other media than a server to store the compressed images. Best thing about it is that the COO allowed me to distribute the code as free sofware, so when that finally clears with legal, you’ll see more of it!.