Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

Mail problems, sigh

Posted on June 24, 2010 by mark

I thought it would be a good idea to install ClamAV and Spamassasin into my mail retrieval process no that I have cron pulling my emails from all my ISP mail accounts to my dev server once a day. Fortunately … Continue reading →

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Youtube is great for recipes.

Posted on June 21, 2010 by mark

I think I’ve watched all the Iron Chef epiosodes now (well those with ingredients I will cook with anyway, can’t see any point in watching the shark fin or sea urchin ones (ugh)). But in searching for episodes I also … Continue reading →

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DosBox

Posted on June 20, 2010 by mark

I dicovered DosBox a few weeks ago. Discovered pherhaps is not quite the right word as I was actively searching for something like that. Basically I wanted to play one of my old games (toon struck) and it refused to … Continue reading →

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Another PC joins the stable

Posted on May 26, 2010 by mark

Found another bargain PC on trademe to replace yet another I have blown the video chip on a motherboard on. Looks like my 17inch LCD is what was causing everything to fry somehow, it just made the new one beep … Continue reading →

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Bother, no 5.25 inch floppy drive

Posted on May 23, 2010 by mark

A slight miscalculation. The old PC I had lying around was a really old one. I was correct about it only having 128Mb of memory and running FC3 becuse I couldn’t upgrade beyong that (and still dual boots Win95, wow). … Continue reading →

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Time to fire up the old antique P100 again

Posted on May 17, 2010 by mark

Yes, I still have one, a super non-powerfull P100 with a whole 128Mb of memory, running Fedora Core 3 (I think, been a while since I had that going). It’s been gathering dust for a while, suppose I better blow … Continue reading →

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USB cables break easily don’t they

Posted on February 9, 2010 by mark

Another fun day not in the office. A week on leave to relax on my birthday and I’ve been working harder than ever, at least it’s on my own stuff. My main backup server was reporting hard drive errors on … Continue reading →

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Remind me why I stupidly decided to use VirtualBox again ?

Posted on December 23, 2009 by mark

Curse virtualbox. The removal of the ability to compact images cripled me for almost a week. Oh yeah, I started using it because responses from the VM in heavy GUI apps was faster in VirtualBox than QEMU. I made a … Continue reading →

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Do not use the default filesystem layout for Fedora installs

Posted on December 8, 2009 by mark

Well I finally got my desktop and development server upgraded to FC12; and what a nightmare that was. For anyone doing a fresh Fedora install DO NOT accept the default filesystem layout !. Updating the FC11 desktop server that I … Continue reading →

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Iron Chef America

Posted on November 11, 2009 by mark

Iron Chef America is one of my favourite programs, but annoyingly it has never been bundled into a DVD distribution and there has never been any intention by the producers (at least from the google searched I spent hours on) … Continue reading →

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