June the seventh 2000: Busy times a jpoc journal entry

We were very busy with the visit of our friend Julia and her son. For the duration, I was out numbered 4-1 by Russian speakers but Andrei managed to teach Nikita a little English. He is becoming a real linguist and soon, he will be causing some surprise by teaching his school chums Russian.

Time flew by and we had to take them back to the airport and say farewell.

I'm getting to be a regular customer at the second had shop. I spotted a pair of Sony headphones there last week. The original price was DeM119 and I paid DeM60 for them so that was just about half price for something less than four months old!. I put them on the Hi-Fi and brought their predecessors to the office so that I can listen while I write device drivers.

My friend Uli lent me some CDs last week so I put the cans to good use. The first was another CD by Snuff, the others were by Eels and Arcadion. You can read reviews of the first two of those already and the other will follow soon.

My pace of putting up new material on the web site dropped somewhat while Julia was with us. But there is still a reasonable amount of new material there. We managed to drink most of the wine that I brought back from France so I do have a good supply of wine reviews to post over the next few weeks. The main new ground broken on the web site was that I posted my first two road tests. They took longer to write and format then most other things here and they ended up as multi page entries which took quite a while to sort out and arrange.

The other major development was that I have signed up with the superstats network for site statistical information. That will help me to get a better idea of which of my pages are getting the most traffic and I shall then know where to concentrate my efforts and which parts of the site need more work to make them more interesting.

To make all of that work properly, I need to add some javascript to each page but this is not a big problem, it will just take a little time. If you have a web site of your own and want to find out more about the way that superstats works, then just click the superstats banner at the bottom of some of my pages. So far, I'm impressed at how well it seems to work.

As with the web site, I did less than normal with the computers in the time that Julia was here. My main aim is to get my network going so that we can all use email and surf the net from our own PCs rather than need to queue up to access the little thinkpad that does it all at the moment. I think that what I will do is try to set up that machine as a modem host only and let it proxy the web and run as a local POP server for the other machines. Because it is a laptop, it does not take a lot of power so it is OK to leave it turned on. Also, because it has an internal battery, it is not taken down by power outages so it should make a nice reliable little server for us.

Also, I picked up a nice little goodie at the newspaper shop. The latest issueof PC-Plus comes with a full SuSE linux 6.4 package on the front cover DVD-ROM. So, I shall whack the DVD drive on the second of the PCs from the auction and see if I can get it to work!