the disgruntled Linux surgeon

Only 5 days left! Still alive and kicking. Got sick and tired of ubuntu , so I installed debian etch and added testing , unstable and sidux repos. Feels a lot better.

Regarding my previous post about the recovery mode security hole :
http://phaeronix.net/content/crappy-security
where some people didn't believe me, an update was just pushed that fixes this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/friendly-recovery/+bug/220986

Posting this from my laptop right now !

Turns out my laptop's motherboard was covered with an extended warranty because there was a design defect that caused the malfunction.

Site has been successfully upgraded to 6.2, and is now mollom enabled. Thanks Msameer for the suggestion.

Let's see if I can get the gallery back.

Due to security concerns, I upgraded from drupal 4.7 to 5.7.
Image galleries and captcha modules lost. I like this theme, until I fix the old one.
Next up 6.2

my laptop is b0rked. it turns on but the screen remains blank and there is no evidence of booting activity. i am posting this from my mobile.

Trying to find a simple DVB watching program :

* VLC can't handle channels.conf, can read a custom m3u playlist.

* mythtv is too big and messy.

* gnome-mplayer crashes when I choose watch TV from the menu.

* totem / gstreamer stutters and plays choppy video.

* me-TV ; the gui is unresponsive while watching and there is no use of EPG here.

As if I didn't have enough USB gadgets sticking out of my laptop already, I just traded the two extra RAM modules I had for a Twinhan starbox USB DVB-S device. Clearly a winning bargain, thanks Nabil; you're the best.

During the hardy development cycle I discovered this horrible "feature"; While booting up choose a "recovery mode" item from the grub menu, and ubuntu boots into single mode.
So far so good. Now at the end of the boot process it will present you with a nice ncurses menu to "fix xorg" , "root shell" and something else. Choose "root shell" and you get one without even being asked for a password!

holy ****