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I have been using my mac mini for quite some time now but I’ve been wanting to play with OpenSolaris and see what ZFS and Zones can do for me, don’t require much hardware to do the actual testing but my mini didn’t seem that willing to play and I couldn’t be bothered.

Have not had the time to play much but OpenSolaris comes with ZFS as the default filesystem, nothing special to do to get going there, have not been playing with the interesting stuff as snapshots, raid-z etc yet.

Zones, have just gotten started there getting some base zones up and running and I must say getting started was almost too easy. Will see if I get some time to do some actual tweaking here soon.

In general I am satisified with the machine but it could have been a bit less noisy, it is not noisy, just a tiny bit more than my mac mini but until machines are 100% silent I will continue complaining.

I recently re-installed my Mac Mini going from Ubuntu Intrepid to NetBSD 5 returning to what has been my “favorite” platform. NetBSD is as it used to be but has gotten and keeps on getting interesting features, such as PUFFS, LVM and better SMP support. However there are still things missing before I would recommend it for general use considering the still incomplete UTF-8 locale support, lack of binary updates for security issues etc. Let us see for how long I stick with it.

Apart from re-installing my computer I have not been working as much on pekwm as I did before Christmas but a new release, 0.1.0 is just around the corner. The pekwm site is run on a Rails application called Septic which is kind of like Trac but very buggy. Septic is written by myself trying to figure Rails out. Rails is a rather nice development environment but it has one major drawback, resource usage. Running such a low traffic site(s) as pekwm.org and projects.pekdon.net make Rails eat almost a full Gb of RAM which very much is not ok.

I am planning on creating phew, a lightweight python framework for creating web pages and deploying them with mod_python. I will work on APIs and writing some small example applications before actual doing any development to see if I can figure out something useful. If I get enough time and actually get around finalizing the project there are some things missing in Python that’s available under Ruby that I am using in septic:

• Ferret, port of Lucene to Ruby for fast full text search.
• Mediacloth, mediawiki parser and html generator in Ruby.

Anyone interesting in porting those? At least Ferret would have a nice name, Pherret! ;)

I’ve spent christmas up here in Tynset together with Elines family, very nice place with splendid nature, good food and nice people. Just thought I should share some photos taken with my mobile:

Apart from relaxing work has been done on pekwm, 0.1.9 and 0.1.9a has been released and most likely a 0.1.9b is on the way cleaning up after my sloppyness. When that is done the work on pekwm 0.2.0 should start, it’s going to be fun to get some new ideas and concepts going. Stay tuned for updates.

I not so surprisingly got myself some more music, highlights are:

• Ida Maria – Fortress Round My Heart
• Hot Chip – The Warning
• Count Basie – The Complete Atomic Basie

Wonder why I haven’t gotten around getting anything with Hot Chip before, I strongly recomend that album.

On the coding front I’ve been working some on pekwm and with the help of IOError a 0.1.8 release is coming closer. GAL is progressing as well, mako rewrite is done and new CGI support is progressing, will rewrite the client to use GStreamer and GIO for playback of files over HTTP which is a solution that hopefully is more robust and tested compared to streaming directly into mpg123.

All in all I’m very much alive it seems, creating is living!

Due to reasons that you do not control, you might not have the possibility to make things “the right way TM” and are going for an alternate solutiuon.

This applies to all kinds of things but it brings up the question: “Who is to decide things are so wrong you should not be able to do them?”

Honestly I do not know what is a good idea or not, to force or not to force, but it sometimes indeed is rather annoying like right now when I had to compile my own version of smbmount as plaintext password authentication was disabled and not possible to enable via /proc/fs/cifs/SecurityFlags.

Regarding the post title, “Protect me from what I want” is a great song by Placebo!

Just been thinking about what tools to use for what tasks and as always I never come to  any good conclusions.

However, using the wrong tools for the job can cause major headache and reduce the productivity a lot.

Right now it feels like I am trying to fly with the help of a broken toothbrush!

I’ve been spent most of my time lately trying to get up to date and on top of things, a task that seems to be more or less never-ending.

One thing that has been paid far to little attention has been my inbox, to handle that better I’ve started to use sup which allows for quick searching on all my e-mail. Using that I’ve found e-mails as old as 2005 that has not yet been handled, I’m working on it now. ;)

There have however been progress on things, septic is starting to take form as a hosting platform for my projects, a new version pekwm was recently released and I am actually writing this  post here.

Will update… sometime in the future! ;)

This weekend I got visitors from Skellefteå, Per and Aron came over and we had great time. Did not take that many photos, bad me, but there’s some for available in the gallery.

Modeselektor played at “The Villa” on 2007-10-11 and I went there together with Christian and Gustavo after work and it was an amazing night. I do not think I’ve ever danced myself that exhausted before, pure happiness! :)

Modeselektor has a new album out named “Happy Birthday” and if you haven’t heard Modeselektor before you should listen to this “Radio Mix” I found here.

As usual I’m making sure I get hold of more music everyday and some of my latest favorites are:

• Adriano Canzian – Pornography
• Antony and the Johnsons – Antony and the Johnsons

Also I got to know about “Her Ethic” as they played before [:SITD:] at their concert here in Oslo last Wednesday.