My kind of food around Canberra...

I've previously written (twice) about steak tartare before - well mentioned it slightly. I recently went to Kingsley's Steak and Crabhouse, and after several visits and some feedback, they took on the feedback, and presented me with a really good steak tartare. I enjoyed it so much, I went back and took a photo of another one before I consumed it:
The raw egg really combines well with the sauce, the meat and the other ingredients to make it a very flavoursome and well textured meal. I do suggest you try it, as it's NOT JUST RAW MEAT.

I was hoping to pop over to Koko Black, which is next door to Kingsley's, but unfortunately it was closed. If you haven't tried Koko Black's chocolate, then you must. It's Belgian chocolate which is made in store. And it's delicious! I can't show you any pictures of their products (smeared all over my overweight face!), but I can show you the store:Lastly, I have to make mention of the guys that keep me fed (usually 2 - 4 times a week) - Turkish Pide House Restaurant (the link is not their site - I can't seem to find their site at the moment - also the link points to their Woden restaurant, I visit their Civic location). Great value Turkish style BBQ (Grill) meals!

Linux for work and home - and well done to the Melbourne Victory!

I haven't written for a while as I've been really tired from the long days at work. I've just moved over to a new laptop at work, and it came with a 120GB drive. Half an hour later, it had the Windows image from the company I work for, as well as Ubuntu. No issues with hardware - except if you want "wobbly windows" then you have to tweak the xorg.conf file a bit. Have a look at the Ubuntu Guide (unofficial) for tips on doing this. There's only one small issue with Ubuntu at work. I don't work off my companies backbone network, but work from at outsourced location which is co-located with the clients. I need to set up Aventail VPN to connect to my company's backbone, but the configuration of the current Aventail client is not very helpful. Instead of using the *.cfg files, it wants to have all the variables hand-coded in. If you are reading this, and are able to assist, please don't hesitate to contact me. Credit / acknowledgement will be given!

At home, the situation is still "Business as Usual". Gentoo continues to seamlessly upgrade itself:

root@lasek ~ # uname -a
Linux lasek 2.6.24-gentoo-r3 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Mar 15 13:01:58 EST 2008 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

In the case of the organisation / project, they will be electing a new board (or at the minimum shuffling the people around). It appears drobbins (Daniel Robbins) did not get enough interest to get back in the commanding position, but I'm hoping this will change and he gets the opportunity to "steady the ship" again - unless he doesn't want to.

Lastly, congratulations goes to the Melbourne Victory for their 2-0 win over the Chunnam Dragons from the Korean League. It has been an awesome example in consistency from Kevin Muscat as well for hitting his last 17 penalty kicks ("from the spot") without fail. Hopefully the Victory will be able to advance in the AFC and show how good Australian Football can be.

Back to on-call duties...

Back to being on-call. Goodbye sleep. Hello more money (but I keep thinking if this is truly worth it). Hello to me being a grumpy guy! Maybe I'll post more black and white photos. Looks like me configuring WiFi on my Gentoo PC will have to wait for a few weeks.

Still no WiFi, but a new kernel...

Still haven't gotten to the computer store that sells the WiFi card I'm after. I have called their Sydney store, and confirmed they have the part in their Canberra store. Hopefully I'll be able to catch them before I go on-call again for work -- which is this coming Wednesday.

On another note, Gentoo's issued out a new kernel (although it's more like an update on a previous version that was installed on my machine).

evilric@lasek ~ $ uname -a
Linux lasek 2.6.23-gentoo-r9 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Mar 1 00:08:23 EST 2008 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Well done guys!

WiFi plans dashed...

The computer store I was hoping to go to get the WiFi card installed was closed. Looks like I've got to try and catch them during the week and see if they can install it. I'll let you know if there's any update, but until then, it looks like my exercise of install the WiFi card is on hold.

Gentoo's new kernel, and plans for the weekend

After coming off "on-call" duties for the job I'm doing, I did an update on my PC. The usual mantra is something like:
root@lasek ~ $ emerge --sync && emerge -DNuva --with-bdeps y world

This will trigger off a sync with the world repositories of Gentoo and get you everything that is considered the latest of what is available out there. It will then see what is new compared to your system, and ask if you want to upgrade. Pressing "enter" by itself will trigger that off. After sometime (and hopefully with no errors), it will return to the command prompt. This is where you need to check the dependencies on your system, by issuing:
root@lasek ~ $ etc-update && revdep-rebuild

Now, you need to check your configuration files to see if they need updating. For most configuration files, you just accept the defaults. The only thing you need to look out for is if you have manually changed the configuration file. Then it's an opportunity to merge your customisation into the configuration files installed by the upgrade. Next comes the system as it checks all the dependencies. It may take some time, but sure enough, your systems binaries are now fully aware of their dependencies.

I noticed that a new kernel had been downloaded. The next step I did was to upgrade my kernel. This was done with:
root@lasek ~ $ mount /boot
root@lasek ~ $ cd /usr/src
root@lasek /usr/src $ rm linux
root@lasek /usr/src $ ln -s linux-2.6.23-gentoo-r8 linux
root@lasek /usr/src $ cd
root@lasek /usr/src $ genkernel --menuconfig --kernel-config=/etc/kernels/kernel-config-x86-2.6.23-gentoo-r6 --splash=gentoo all && emerge nvidia-drivers

Wait some more time, and reboot. You'll get this:
evilric@lasek ~ $ uname -a
Linux lasek 2.6.23-gentoo-r8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Feb 21 20:22:05 EST 2008 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Not much to actually do, but huge rewards!

Lastly, my plans for the weekend are centred around the computer again. I own the Toshiba P20, and it's been good to me for about 5 years, but it never had a WiFi card. So my idea is to get a WiFi card installed, get it working on the Windows partition, and then spend the rest of the weekend attempting to get it working under Gentoo Linux. I accept all words of advice, and wishes of good luck!

On call work, well done Mr Rudd, and Ana blogs -- so listen up!

I'm on-call this weekend. It was a killer night the other night, and I was up for more than 24 hrs. I hate it. It drains me. The boss I work for is great. Very understanding, and was up for half the night with me on one of the calls. The picture below is a shot of me (playing around with the timer setting of camera) - after getting up from a long night.

I need sleep! I've got that weird tired look in my eyes. I should be better next week! I need to take more photos (just of things in general). I can't believe it's been 4 months I've been away from my wife. I do visit her (and our puppy) every so often, but it's not the same as living with her.

Secondly, well done to Mr Rudd for doing something recently that the Howard Government couldn't do for over a decade while in office. Well done on saying "sorry". Keep in mind you don't need to apologise to me if you don't stuff the Internet up in the first place!

Lastly, a friend I met recently, who lives in India, set up a blog a few days ago. Ana is asking everyone to listen, so then, everyone have a visit! I'm sure she'll have interesting things to say on it.

Gentoo is still keeping up to date...

I was having a chat (via Gmail's chat) with a friend of mine I used to work with, at the previous company where I was employed, and the conversation went onto Open Source, Linux distributions and eventually Gentoo. He said he wasn't happy with Gentoo, as his perceptions was that since the leader (Daniel Robbins) left, the project has essentially collapsed. He also stated that there hasn't been a recent LiveCD release, which I prompted him to a previous post I made in this blog.

Not so... and here's poof. Yesterday, on my Windows XP desktop at work, my version of Mozilla Firefox updated itself to 2.0.0.12. And after issuing the update commands on my Gentoo machine:
root@lasek ~ # emerge --sync && emerge -DNuva --with-bdeps y world
root@lasek ~ # etc-update
root@lasek ~ # revdep-rebuild

...I've got a freshly compiled version of Firefox which I am using to write this article with.According to the release notes off the website, it was finialised on 7.02.2008. And here's my build identifier from my about: page above:

• Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/2008020912 Firefox/2.0.0.12

Well done to the guys at Gentoo for keeping things rolling!

And if you're reading this blog using another browser that's tied in with a proprietary Operating System, maybe you should visit the Mozilla site and download the latest version of Firefox. Right after you install a better Operating System!

Gmail came back... and it looks fine.

Just wanted to add, as a follow-up to my post yesterday, that Gmail is back, and was up as of this morning. It looked like it happily accepted emails from various sources while I couldn't access it. Strangely enough, I was still able to access blogger and I could connect to gChat (via Pidgin). As I contacted them through their website to report a problem, I still haven't heard back from them yet (even a generic email would have been appreciated). Anyway... all good!

Everyone is human... even GMail.

I can't believe it. For the first time since I've used the service (which is about 4 years), Gmail is down -- "Temporary Error (502)"!



And this can't be the first time, since they already have a help page on it. I wonder what's wrong. Do feel free to write to me if you know, but I won't find out until the service is back up and running.