This lunchtime K sent me a link to the news story that Robbie Coltrane is being used by police in New Zealand to try to catch a teenage burglar.

I suggest New Zealand police check the local convents. I suspect the thief has disguised himself as a nun and is hanging out with an Eric Idle lookalike.

I mentioned that we'd made a purchase or two recently. The biggest one is that we've bought a house. All things being well, we shall pick up the keys on Kirsty's birthday a mere 74 days from the day we saw the place and put in an offer.

Buying the house has proved a lot easier than buying the house in the UK. It's all good. If you're going to be in the Melbourne area in October, keep the last Saturday free for a housewarming party. Details to follow.

I'm a bit concerned, though. According to Internode's website, they don't have ADSL2+ coverage in our new area. And Google Stret View seems to cover ever street in Melbourne, apart from our new street. What have I let myself in for?

So I have this weblog, or blog thingamajig. It has been sadly neglected recently. Mostly by me. I don't know if you have been neglecting it, too, largely because I have better things to do with my life than trawling logfiles to see who's been visiting and when.

It seems that since I last posted, back in June with this throwaway entry, the commentage box has had a bit of use. So somebody's reading...

Yay Portsmouth!! But Paul Daniels a celebrity? He's certainly infamous...

Paul Daniels is certainly a celebrity.

Then there was this rather strange comment, which appeared twice...

Nice Site! http://google.com

Google is clearly a very useful site, but I cannot take credit for it. Thanks for sharing the link, though. I'm sure somebody will find it useful!

You may remember me mentioning some spam I received...

Regarding this Mary , from Melbourne ( she writes "Melburne" asking for merchandise to pay using her visa card.

The merchandise she ordered is around U$ 400.00 ,but the courier she recommends , "bringingworld" supposedly in UK, charged over U$ 900.00 to get it to her, and we are supposed to pay the courier .We never heard of "bringingworld" courier , neither did the Google. Now any one can cancel a VISA operation after we pay the U$ 900.00 to the courier . . . It does not seem to be a sound business . All be advised . . .

Christopher Svoll

Clearly, Christopher, it does not seem to be a sound business. Perhaps I didn't state clearly enough that the message was spam. I cannot emphasise enough the first rule of spam prevention: Never reply to spam. And while I'm on the subject, never buy products from spam.

Apparently, the colours of this website were changed automagically on July 4. I'd forgotten that I'd done that.

ARGH MY EYES MY EYES. Thankfully this 4th July thing only comes round once a year. This colour scheme is a tribute....right???? Lou x

Sorry, Lou.

Someone, or some process (more likely) wants us to...

have a nice day!

That's very kind of you. You have a nice day, too!

I have another couple of blog entries brewing, both on new purchases. But they shall have to wait until after I have been bouldering.

Email-based questionnaires seem to be doing the rounds again. If I answer these, I usually favour sticking the answers up here, rather than burdening people's inboxes.

Here's the latest one:

SCATTEGORIES - it's harder than it looks! Copy and paste into a new email. When you have answered all the scattergories, send it on to friends but DON'T FORGET to return it to the person who sent it to you. Use the first letter of your first name to answer each of the following. They have to be real places, names, things - nothing made up. Try to use different answers if the person in front of you had the same first initial- which by the way is hard if you already have read their answers! You can not use your own name for the boy/girl names.

1. What is your name: Pete
2. A 4 letter word: Pick
3. A vehicle: Pick-up
4. A city: Portsmouth
5. A boy's name: Paul
6. A girl's name: Pippa
7. Alcoholic Drink: Port
8. An occupation: Postman
9. Type of Clothing: Pantaloons
10. A celebrity: Paul Daniels
11. A food: Pasta 'n' Sauce
12. Something found in a bathroom: Perfume
13. Reason for being late: Passed out on the tram and ended up at the depot
14. Something you shout: Pint, please, barman!
15. An animal: Platypus
16. A body part: Patella
17. Word to describe yourself: Pedantic

I would just like to say, publicly, that I really can't stand "Internet kiosks".

It's bad enough that they charge you $8/hour, but to give you a cut-down version of Internet Exploder 6 where you're allowed one poxy window, reducing the amount of things you can do with the Internets dramatically in that short period of time that you have is really extracting the Michael.

Thankfully there are such things as web-based SSH clients that allow me to connect to a computer at home and access email, web, etc., in a GNU/Screen session, but it's not ideal.

Well... time's up. I'll let you know all about our holiday when we get back to Melbourne at the weekend.

This morning I received some spam. Of course this is nothing unusual. Spam is the Internet's way of telling us that our mail servers are alive, right? What was unusual was that this spam landed in my inbox and that I actually found myself reading it. I shall share it with you, since I haven't shared much with my blog readers recently:

Hello,
Greetings from AUSTRALIA .
I have high interest in you product which iwill want to order by mail,i
will make payment to you by credit card(visa/mastercard) and
i want you to quote me on .....
which i willsend to you later after confirming this mail
MY DELIVERY ADDRESS
130 melbourne central
MELBURNE ,
NSW,
AUSTRALIA
Also, I experience difficulties when it comes to getting items to
myaddress here in Australia, It would best if you contact the shipperwhich
i used in the past.(bringingworld@h..., you can alsonotify them
with my customer
id# SA32051272L.
Regards
Mary

I can see why Mary is experiencing difficulties with getting items (whatever they may be, the email isn't very clear) to her address. You see, Melbourne (with an 'o') hasn't been in the state of New South Wales since the State of Victoria was established in the mid nineteenth century.

This weekend I have upgraded my old laptop to run Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The experience was suitably painless and Hardy is running smoothly. Since I've had my MacBook Pro, I've hardly opened the lid on the old laptop, it has just sat (reasonably) quietly in the corner of the room listening for SSH connections and performing downloads for me.

Under Hardy's predecessor, Gutsy Gibbon the connection to our HTPC (which is still running Windows XP Media Center Edition) had been a little flaky, which meant that often I would transfer files between the two using an SD card rather than simply copying them using smbfs.

It turns out that smbfs has been deprecated in Hardy and the time has come for me to move over to CIFS. This was actually pretty simple, but I understand some people have struggled with the conversion, so I thought I'd document what I did here.

1. Unmount the old smbfs mounts for the last time:

           sudo umount -at smbfs
       

2. Grant all users full access to the mount point:

           chmod 777 /media/mountpoint
       

3. Update /etc/fstab to use cifs rather than smbfs, changing the masks to modes and ensuring that the octal modes have leading zeros, thus.

   Before:

   //server/share     /media/mountpoint        smbfs
           auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,fmask=770,dmask=770,rw
           0       0

   After:

   //server/share     /media/mountpoint        cifs
           auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770,rw
           0       0

4. Mount the CIFS mounts:

       sudo mount -vat cifs
       

And that's it: fast and easy!

I'm going to be brave and unplug from the internets for a whole day next month.

No email, no Google Reader, no Scrabble, no instant messaging or Twittering and no Skype for a whole twenty-four hours. How will I cope?

The day after is, of course May the Fourth, which will mean lots of photo-taking. It should be a good weekend!

For those of you who want to know why I use Ubuntu [and OSX, and FreeBSD, ...], look no further than this article which my good friend Kris Jenkins sent me this morning. The video is a great demonstration as to just how good Microsoft are. I particularly like the piece of software that will return your stolen laptop!

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and wait by the telephone for our property managers not to call.

I'm just playing about with an excellent piece of software called DoubleTake and am using it to stitch together some of my holiday snaps from our recent trip to The Red Centre.

One of the things that it allows me to do is to create 360° panoramas and save them as QuickTime VR files for you to play around with. If all goes according to plan, you should be able to have a wonder around the top of King's Canyon just below these very words!

Yup, that seems to work. Use your cursor keys to move around, [shift] will move you inwards and [ctrl] back out. A higher resolution version can be found Nope... Internet Exploder barfs on it. You can find the panorama here.

Have a jolly nice Easter, won't you?