Despite the cold and the train, December’s Humanist Community meeting was well attended and enjoyed by all. After all, the colder it is outside, the more a good Sunday Roast is appreciated! Conversation continued long into the night with this month’s topics including foreign policy, education and what everyone’s holiday plans were.
Over the years, the Worfolk Online network has run a lot of technical websites. Dozens and dozens of them. Each one had a selection of interesting and useful content, which for one reason or anther has since been closed down.
So, we decided to rescue them.
The result is that we’re currently working on importing articles from a number of old websites from our network.
It’s stretching our remit a little further than we already do – most of the articles are about web development and programming, but we thought it would be better to put them on here then for them to be lost forever – though that’s probably a big claim given how old the content is in some of them – it’s things we haven’t been doing for a decade!
Never the less, you may notice that our archives now date back to before the site was even founded in 2005. This is as a result of the new content we have brought on board and with articles dating back to 2002, we are now pulling together resources from the past decade!
Earlier this month, I was invited to a wedding reception over in York. Due to the medication I’m on, I can’t drink, so I figured the most convenient thing to do was drive over. I didn’t want to arrive dead on 7:30 in case nobody else turned up at that time, so I decided to set off at 7:15, allowing 45 minutes to drive there, get parked and find the venue, thereby arriving a fashionable 30 minutes after the start time.
So I set off at 7:15 and got as far as the roundabout by the big Tesco when I ran into road works which had closed off the A64 entirely, so I followed a badly sign posted diversion route which took me up to Weatherby Road.
They seemed to disappear at this point so I kept driving as far as village which I believe was called Cottingham, at which point my sat nav finally provided me a route which was something other than make a U-turn and head back to the A64.
This involved joining the A1, and heading back down the motorway towards Leeds until I got back to the A1/A64 junction. By now I was massively behind schedule but I thought hey ho, at least I’m now on a dual carriageway all the way to York.
So I carried on down the A64, and suddenly saw a bunch of cars with their hazard lights on ahead of me. Next thing I know both lanes have come to a standstill and I can see some flashing emergency lights up ahead of me.
Apparently someone had been run over.
After being sat there for a while with an increasing feeling that I was going to be trapped on the A64 all night, the traffic eventually started to move again as a police officer started directing cars to take it in turns to make a U-turn and drive the wrong way down an on-ramp to the A64 which lead us into a village that was either near, or was, Weatherby.
By this point I had been on the road for almost two hours and didn’t really know what roads there were into York without the A64, so I just gave it up as a bad job and gave up. That meant that not only had I missed my friend’s wedding reception, but I was also now forced to buy dinner from McDonald’s because I had missed out on the buffet. Is there some kind of compensation fund I can claim that back from?
Need to uncompress a .tar.gz file from the terminal? No problem.
tar xvzf filename.tar.gz
Hello everyone! I just wanted to post a quick update on what the status of the site was now.
We first acquired Hardware Tutorials back in 2005, but since then there hasn’t been much content added to it – and indeed the content that was posted back then wasn’t exactly amazing quality. But for prosperity sake, we have kept it.
Never the less, it has always been an ambition to develop the site further and one thing I constantly find myself doing at work is googling for solutions to problems, usually when I’m trying to install something, usually on CentOS. Though that isn’t to say I don’t have my fair share of problems dealing with OS X, Windows 7 and Fedora too.
Rather than just leaving the solutions I eventually find for these problems, Hardware Tutorials seems a reasonably appropriate place to post such solutions – a lot of it isn’t strictly hardware, but as I said in my opening post six years ago, we would almost certainly be straying from that criteria anyway.
So please enjoy the new and updated Hardware Tutorials. Hopefully, you will be seeing a lot more regularly updated content from now on.
Following on from my previous post about installing Git on CentOS 4, CentOS 5 is a whole different story. This is because you actually can get the RPM for Git on Cent OS – but cPanel doesn’t make it quite easy enough to do it.
You see, cPanel likes to take control of a lot of it’s own stuff, so it has a long list of packages which it won’t update automatically, because it will end up breaking itself if it does. As Git has two dependencies from the Perl libraries, this causes a problem.
But we can easily fix that.
cd /etc/ vim yum.conf
Remove perl* from the exclude line, then save the file. Now you should be able to run the command.
yum install git
It will gather all the dependencies and install Git. Final step, go back into the YUM configuration and put the exclude pack in to protect cPanel from its malevolent self.
vim yum.conf
If you’re trying to install Git on CentOS with cPanel, you’ll probably be running into the problems where you can’t get hold the RPM because cPanel excludes all Perl modules. But that is a whole different problem to if you are running CentOS 4.
CentOS 4 doesn’t actually have the RPMs for Git at all. But luckily, it’s actually really easy to install on a cPanel server because cPanel should come will all the dependencies you need.
So, all you need to do is head over to the Git website, download the latest source (I tried it with v1.7.8.1) and compile it – no problems, no worries.
wget http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.7.8.1.tar.gz tar xvzf git-1.7.8.1.tar.gz cd git-1.7.8.1 ./configure make make install
That’s right, I said it. I’m an atheist, and I used the word Christmas. I know, I know, I’m crazy, I’m on the edge, etc, etc. A lot of non-believers don’t like using the word because they think it has too many Christian connotations. But I really don’t have a problem with it.
Why? I guess for the same reason that Reclaim the Night started. I don’t think we should give up the word so easy. Because it’s nonsense that the origins of the holiday season lie in Christianity, we all know it’s nonsense and it really doesn’t bother me that people are occasionally misguided about this, but even if they were, it would only inspire me to explain to them the truth.
Of course, Christians genuinely are celebrating the birth of Jesus, but the rest of us aren’t. Any suggestion we were could equally be rebuked by the argument that actually, Christians are celebrating Paganism just as much. So I don’t even get drawn into the debate these days. For me, as a Humanist, the holiday season is another arbitrary point to celebrate life. family and friendships. But as all holidays are essentially arbitrary these days, it doesn’t make it any less special.
Last Monday saw the end of the 2011 Holiday Food Drive. We packed all the donations into boxes, used the money donated to buy even more, and delivered it all to a local homeless shelter. Thanks to everyone who made a donation or helped out on the day!
Eight years ago, I was outgrowing my current hosting package, and needed to find pastures new. So I headed over to a web hosting forum and found a post about a company named Real Value Hosting. They seemed to have everything I needed, and a reasonable price, so I decided to give them a go and sign up.
Little did I know at the time, but I was actually their second customer to sign up!
Eight years later and I’m still a happy customer. There have been a few glitches over the years as you would expect with any host, but overall I am more than satisfied and their support response times have always been reasonably quick and consistent, which is probably the biggest concern when selecting a hosting company.
As I’ve now migrated my entire online portfolio onto the LAMP stack, I’ve recently retired my reseller account with them, but I would highly recommend it to those looking for a Windows hosting provider.