I finally met the famous Philip Greenspun and his dog Alex, through a neighbor who was dog-sitting. His photo site photo.net is an excellent general photography resource for professional or amateur.
Jim on 08.28.05 @ 08:50 AM ET [link]
I needed a web front-end for my new $50 mail server PC. SquirrelMail installed in about 1 minute on Debian. Then I just created a symlink from my HTML filesystem and voila. Instant web mail. Highly recommended.
Jim on 08.27.05 @ 06:26 PM ET [link]
Another computer followed me home from the MIT flea market. It's a few years old and only cost $50, but was perfect for my application. I immediately loaded up Debian, put it in the basement, named it "Hades" (as in underworld) and put it into service as a full-time mail and web server.
Since this move involved some network rewiring, I cleverly bought a spool of about 200 feet of CAT-5 cable at the flea market for $5, some RJ-45 connectors, and a cheap cable crimper for $10. Why pay top dollar for Ethernet cables when I can make them myself for pennies a foot? Well, I'll tell you why. The cheap cable I bought had such poor color coding that I couldn't tell the brown from the orange wires. The crimping tool didn't quite fit right either.
The first cable I made worked fine. "This is easy", I thought. The second cable failed. So I clipped off the connectors and tried again. Failed. So I scrapped that cable and started another one. Failed. Clipped the ends and tried once more. Failed. At this point I gave up and bought a pre-made cable for more money than I would care to admit.
I suppose the devil is in the details of cable making. Stranded vs solid wire, proper color coding, good tools, etc. Maybe I'll learn eventually.
Jim on 08.23.05 @ 08:58 PM ET [link]
It seems somebody on this hosting server got access to some scripts they shouldn't have, and destroyed several users' pages, including mine. Really all I lost was the weblog, but I realized afterward that it's the one part of my site that I don't regularly back up. The kind people at the hosting service (Digital Space) restored a backup from July, so it's not a total loss.
That'll teach me.
Jim on 08.19.05 @ 08:11 PM ET [link]
Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
(please remove the DELETETHISPART before sending me mail!)