I'm on fire.

[reddragdiva]

Work laptop talks to the office fine — intraweb, email, shared drives, SSH. I'm all set for an exciting weekend of ... sitting on the couch at home in case shit breaks. No, no 3G to connect from the pub. I HOPE YOU HAVE A REALLY WONDERFUL WEEKEND OUT. Bah.

They've adopted the sort of security one would need when giving people a W*nd*ws laptop: it's so insanely locked down it won't even talk to things on the local network beyond grabbing DHCP and sending and receiving pings. When you're in the VPN, it doesn't do the pings either. Trusted client, but breaking it would be Wrong. And resemble effort.

Windows XP is so insanely, ridiculously fat and slow. Kubuntu is much nicer.

I'm glad my laptop battery wasn't recalled.

Comments

[misterfallen.livejournal.com]

Does it have Wi-Fi? If so, come to Stoneleigh, I'll give you our network key, and you can sit in the pub there. :)

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Pembury Tavern (http://www.individualpubs.co.uk/Pembury) has free wifi. And ethernet if you bring your own string. And real ales and stuff.

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

I dunno if it's just my experience, but every linux install i've ever done is slower than xp on the same machine.

[reddragdiva]

I presume it's everything they've done for my comfort and convenience.

[steer.livejournal.com]

How weird. I've never had that experience. Or do you mean that the install itself is slower? (which is because, by default, a modern linux install will also include office software, photo manipulator and a bunch of other standard stuff).

XP tends to be a bit... um... stately once it's installed.

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

No, i mean i find a perceptible difference between linux and windows running on the same hardware. Although i think it's more to do with Gnome/KDE and applications running within X running like dogs (well three legged whippets at best) I've yet to have XP run slowly on me. It's a perception thing really.

[steer.livejournal.com]

That's true... it also depends what software you are running of course. The software I run which is consistent between operating systems is specialist mathematical software almost certainly originally written on unix and ported to windows as a later concession.

Firefox seems to work more quickly on linux for me.

Also you never quite know how many silly things XP has turned on underneath so you might have silly anti-virus software or (god help you) MS office indexing stuff (pretty much malware as far as I'm concerned) going on churning everything up.

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

Or the worst thing i've seen yet for XP which is the google desktop search, which is a godawful bit of programming which has brought almost every system i've seen running it to it's knees. I have to admit, most of the maths/engineering software i've seen running on windows is pretty awfully written and eats up memory like a famine victim at an all you can eat buffet.
Firefox is a terrible memory hog on xp, which is ironic as it's supposed to be streamlined.. Most of the stuff i've had slowing it is dodgy flash/etc based popups and embedded adverts though.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

If it's a Cisco client, try the cisco client or vpnc on Linux instead.

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

Dont you feel dirty? :)

[reddragdiva]

Just wait till I get the ISDN working properly. Yes, ISDN.

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

So...you're moving *backwards* technology wise yeah? :)

[reddragdiva]

Apparently they use that because they've always used that. Rather than e.g. the cheaper option of installing a second phone line with DSL.

I also have a dial-up modem in case both are out. PH3AR.

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

..dial..up..modem...?

Whats that? :)

[reddragdiva]

ENTIRELY COMPOSED OF TENTACLES. AAAALLL THE WAAAY DOOOWN.

I certainly hope you and Mel can still explain how V.34 and V.90 actually work to push 10× the bitrate worth of information down a phone line. Let alone DSL.

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

Id love to explain that,but unfortunately something happened to that part of my brain.

:)

[reddragdiva]

/me makes modem connection noise at you

*skreeeetshhhhhhhh-boingyboingy-screeeetchSCREEEEEEEEETCH*

[vatine]

Oooh, "modern", high-speed modem! (the boingboingboing is a giveaway)

[vatine]

To be fair, the ISDN only relies on BT's switch fabric to be up and a RAS to be up.
The DSL option requires BT's IP network to be up, the magic RADIUS boxes to be up and the DSL on the central end to be up. And, unless one pays for dedicated DSL termination kit, VPN concentrator(s) to be up.

I'd probably go with eth ISDN or plain dial-up, to minimise pain.

[reddragdiva]

I'd go with the phone never ringing ever and me being down the pub for a week.

[reddragdiva]

And that's a particularly strange usage of the term "minimise pain."

[vatine]

It's used in the same sense as "I prefer to use a thin, sharp needle rather than a 2x4 when piercing my chest, to minimise pain".

Ideally, we'd all be basket-weavers on a suitably-temperate mountain, rather than having to deal with bits and bytes. Unfortunately, I don't think "join a commune and never bother with a time unit shorter than a season" is an option right now.

We used to say of the communards....

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

..."you can't talk to them until they run out of money."

I think some of the crafters actually made a living at it if one of them had a day job.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Meh-sometimes having a Real Job seriously does suck. Have some [hugs], and take and you can at least take some consolation in the fact that you won't have to miss B-Movie.

That video is damn cool. I think I feel my inner geek emerging.

[reddragdiva]

I'm sure Arkady can corrupt you. BLOWING STUFF UP IS FUN!

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

I did that last weekend.

[wednesday]

The booze is cheaper from the offie or Sainsbury or whatever, though. You could get tanked at home and fix stuff while drunk.

[reddragdiva]

TV PARTY TONIGHT!

[wednesday]

Beats watching Ground Force sober.

[redcountess]

Just keep chanting the magic words "On. Call. Allowance" :-)

[mofette.livejournal.com]

Ok, I was reading the brian peppers page on wikitruth, and hit random article. It came up with something iraqi news bla bla deleted, so I hit random again and it came up with this:

http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=David_Gerard

and that's the god's honest truth. I stalk when I'm not trying to!

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I've got kubuntu installed on my main box, and I hate it. I liked regular Ubuntu much better.

[reddragdiva]

Matter of taste. Any reason for not switching back? KDE and GNOME apps each work fine under the other.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Don't use linux much at all. I think the complete lack of any setup options and funky ways of adding new stuff turned me off of Kubuntu.