Floyd’s love of food and particularly wine was evident throughout his presentations and his infamous phrase “if it’s not good enough to drink, it’s not good enough to cook with” is one that I carry with me today, and is certainly the legacy that Floyd left with me. I am certain that he had some influence on my love of food and wine today.

Rest In Peace Keith Floyd, and salute to your memory.

I am told that Ubuntu Netbook Remix works well on the A110 and that it has a fairly decent user interface. With this in mind, I set myself to obtaining a copy. Just under 1GB later, I had the USB image and wanted to try it out. Problem is, VMware Workstation can’t boot from USB devices and I was too lazy to make a USB device anyway. With a little help from Google, and http://shadow-file.blogspot.com/2009/08/ubuntu-netbook-remix-in-vmware.html, I set about turning the USB image into an ISO. This is fairly easy and is detailed below.

Firstly, the USB .img file is just a file system dump, so it can be mounted fairly easily:

# mount -o loop -t vfat ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img \
/some/mount/point/

Then, it was a simple case of copying and editing the files. The image is almost suitable for CD, except that it needs isolinux rather than syslinux. This I knew from installing Ubuntu server on a machine without a CD drive last year, then I was going the other way. So:

$ mv syslinux isolinux
$ mv isolinux/syslinux.cfg isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Simple as can be. The final stage is just bundling it all up into a CD image:

$ mkisofs -o ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.iso -r -J -l \
-V "Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.04 i386" -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table /path/to/unr/files/

And we are done. UNR itself worked fairly well under Workstation and has a good user interface. I am definitely planning on installing it onto my netbook when it arrives!

For apparantly no reason at all, the spell check module of tinyMCE fails time, and time again, but returns the spelling errors in the error message. After some googling, I came across http://ruxable.com/2009/01/wordpress-spellcheck-ssl-error/ and as a result http://kennyocracy.com/2008/10/02/solution-to-tinymce-fatal-error-in-googlespell/ which indicated what was wrong. The result is really quite simple. A matter of making sure that CURL is installed for PHP. A useful little fix for an annoying problem!

Thereafter, my algorithms and the sfPortscan algorithm from Snort will be tested and statistically analysed. Thereafter, I plan on finalising my write-up and handing in.

In the interim, I have plans to submit papers to several conferences during the course of the year, the first list includes ISSA, RAID, SATNAC, SAICSIT and CISSE (in chronological order of submission dates). I also hope to get a journal article out during the course of the year.

So, onward with 2009…

The world’s knowledge and obsession of Obama really started way back in 2004 when he wrote and delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. It should come as little surprise that it was an incredible speech and I remember thinking at the time (as a young Toastmaster) that he was an incredible speaker.

Today having taken the highest office in the world, he remains one of the best public speakers ever (in my opinion). Indeed, I feel that a large portion of his success has been in his ability to convey his message so eruditely to his audience. The phrase from his November 4th speech: “”But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this moment, change has come to America.” is one that defines his election in time. Even though it is a phrase that actually belongs to another man…

Indeed, this election has been linked to Martin Luther King Jr. on so many levels, and I truly believe that the world has seen a first realisation of King’s “dream”. In many ways this election can be linked to the 1995 election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, but as this election is so influential and in the worlds current crisis, so important, it has been noticed so much more.

All I can say to conclude is “congratulations Sir, may you lead America and the world wisely and effectively.”

2008 is the 20th Year we have “celebrated” World Aids Day and considered the implications of this terrible disease and the virus which causes it – HIV.

It is especially important to those of us who live in Africa, where the disease kills millions every year. Wear your red ribbon today, and do your bit to prevent the spread of Aids. My “virtual” ribbon sits here in acknowledgement of the day.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them. We will remember them.
For The Fallen – Laurence Binyon

Whilst this Armistice Day commemorates the culmination of the Great War, we have also commemorated the fallen of the many other wars which have torn the world. At 11h00 at the British Army Base in Basra, on Remembrance Sunday we began with the commemoration of those who continue to fall in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is particularly true as we remember that this armistice marks the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front – the fighting still continued elsewhere. As we commemorate with two minutes silence today, I salute the fallen and all those who put themselves in the firing line for our safety and the security of the world.

So, Happy 20th Birthday Morris Worm, and in a way, Happy 20th Birthday Computer Security. Read more at Network World.

However, despite the fact that Xubuntu had numerous new features – most of which can be found in other versions of Ubuntu, I have really grown tired of the minimalist look. Having seen KDE 4 in action on another Kubuntu 8.10 installation, I thought that I would migrate. Now they say that this should be as simple as installing the kubuntu-desktop package, but I disagree. What follows is a guide to switching between the ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop packages (and any others such as Gobuntu).

Many sources on the Internet will suggest that to get Kubuntu from Xubuntu, you just need to install the kubuntu-desktop package – but I will contest that this is simply not enough. To do this properly, I feel that you must use Aptitude, as apt-get (and graphical based managers such as Synaptic and Adept) are just not good enough.

This article assumes that you can use Aptitude already, and will just fly though the requirements for removing (x|k)ubuntu-desktop and installing (x|k)ubuntu-desktop. First navigate to the meta-package you are migrating from – in my case xubuntu-desktop and remove it (press ‘-’).  This will not, however, remove any of the packages on which it depends. As many of these are Xubuntu specific we wish to remove them as well. So next navigate down the list of Depends on and Recommends packages and remove those too. (It suffices to press ‘-’ on the line which says “Depends”.) This will break a lot of packages, this is expected.

Then navigate to the meta-package you wish to install (in my case kubuntu-desktop) and install it (’+'). You will find that this will fix many of the the broken packages, but not all. Pressing ‘e’ will bring up the Resolver and you will need to work through these one at a time. In many cases this equates to removing the associated -data package, or not removing the package at all. I found that the built in resolver was not helpful with this many broken packages. This process took roughly 20 mins. Thereafter, pressing ‘g’ twice removes the old and installs the new. As an aside, however, I recommend running Aptitude again to remove other unnecessary packages. You may also wish to purge the config files of those packages you are not using. A reboot later and I had Kubuntu 8.10 working perfectly, and what a delight it seems to be…