Perfect storm

Last January my laptop took a dive when its cooling fan seized. Months were needed to acquire the part from HP. Mainly because it has to be imported to Switzerland. At the same time we acquired two new hosts that included Windows 7 Home Premium. One of them was to become SG’s new workstation/desktop machine and the other was slated to become my new Web Applications Server (WAS). However, since I use Active Directory, I had to upgrade both to Windows 7 Ultimate. Easier said than done since, I had to get the upgrade packages from the States. That took almost 4 months.

Rewind to May2011. At that time I was informed by Livejournal that my account had been compromised. Y’all may remember my posts on it. At the time I went through a frantic time of changing and resetting passwords. They were based on a misspelling of a rather long word but since I depend on login cookies, it didn’t matter. All the login cookies are on my laptop and I didn’t bother to write down the new passcodes. Further, in Feb2012, my mail server’s motherboard dies. You can probably guess where this is going by now.

No problemo, I thought, I just go to using the other new host for my workstation until I can repair the laptop. The problem is that the new box doesn’t have the login cookies on it and I can no longer remember which misspelling I used for the new passcodes, never having used it more than 6 times, many months before. Yes it’s a secure passcode, too secure. With all my domain mail accounts having gone the way of my old mailserver, I was stuck and could no longer access my websites. This has been the case for over 6 months now. Don’t forget that I’m still maintaining 10K words per week on my novels.

My laptop is now working again and I can once more post Winking smile however, lots of lessons have been re-learned. The big one is about complacency. Murphy loves complacency.

Forward ho!

I will be completely redesigning and reworking my network of the next few months. I once more have a mailserver but I am deprecating those addresses. While I can do the anti-spam stuff, I can’t touch Gmail for spam killing. There are still lots of issues but the new house will eliminate many of them. There is a lot to be said for building something as good as you can and then ‘Stop messing with it!?’

One thing though, the Slamlander will be getting his own domain name.


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Last June I wrote about my new phone, an LG Optimus 2x. For a few months I was quite pleased with it and then the performance started to slowly fall off. This is the very first dual-core phone to hit the market. However, it did not deserve its software. It was Android 2.2.2, Froyo, which LG had promised to upgrade to v2.3.n Gingerbread ASAP.

For various reasons, and I am not surprised, the upgrade never happened nor do I expect it to happen anytime this year. To make a long story shorter, I rooted the phone to try and get a handle on what was slowing it down. Android is, after all, a special version of Linux. Much research and customization later and the single thing that stands out is to upgrade to the Gingerbread version, leaving Froyo back in the weeds. I grabbed the most popular and prevalent ROM distro out there, Cyanogen Mod7 (Official website).

I won’t get the nightly builds because I have to rely on this beast and I don’t intend to upgrade it that often. What I learned a long time ago, with Linux, is that the furthest out you dare go is the current Release Candidate for the next stable version. Any further and you are dancing too much on the Bleeding Edge. It’s not a question of if it will cut you but when. Ergo, I got the current RC1 version.

Lot’s of techy stuff later, including getting my phone stuck in a boot-loop, aka bricking it1 , for three hours and the new ROM2  plays.

I can now dial out immediately, instead of waiting five minutes for the background processor to decide to let me have enough CPU to dial out3 . Now the damned thing does everything but dance jigs Winking smile  The only unfinished bit is the sync software betwixt my laptop and the phone. SyncCell has already been acquired and I can then properly torpedo the POS4 that is LG’s PC Suite IV5 .

So, there goes my first foray back into Tinkerland (Linux-ware and the Open Source Community). My next Foray will be an expedition into Ubuntu Linux. It turns out that the current WordPress now requires version 5.2+ of PHP and the highest version I can run under Win2K is 5.1.4. This means that we either have to fork over some serious dinero to M$ for many copies of their current server offering or I set up my web server with Ubuntu Linux and remember how to play with the fools at the Apache foundation again (sigh).

For the moment, my break is over, and it’s back to finishing the current book.



  1. Technical term for turning your multi hundred dollar phone into something only suitable for defenestration. The NV flasher  was instrumental in breaking it out of the loop. It turns out that I hadn’t wiped the working RAM properly. I also had to install the ClockworkMod boot loader into Non-Volatile NAND RAM (hence, the ‘NV’ and the bootloading tool is called Nandroid) []
  2. This is a pet peeve of mine. As a EE I used to play with real Read Only Memory(ROM) chips, including EPROMs. The Android binaries actually get loaded into flash RAM, or NAND RAM, which didn’t exist in the late 70’s. What Android folks call a ROM is actually a executable binary software image file. There are no more actual ROMs these days; it’s all RAM. []
  3. This is the very first ever dual-core phone, remember? []
  4. Piece Of Shit []
  5. One major argument against client-side software written in Java. Client-side code needs to be native compiled to perform well (at all?). []

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