Email-based questionnaires seem to be doing the rounds again. If I answer these, I usually favour sticking the answers up here, rather than burdening people's inboxes.

Here's the latest one:

SCATTEGORIES - it's harder than it looks! Copy and paste into a new email. When you have answered all the scattergories, send it on to friends but DON'T FORGET to return it to the person who sent it to you. Use the first letter of your first name to answer each of the following. They have to be real places, names, things - nothing made up. Try to use different answers if the person in front of you had the same first initial- which by the way is hard if you already have read their answers! You can not use your own name for the boy/girl names.

1. What is your name: Pete
2. A 4 letter word: Pick
3. A vehicle: Pick-up
4. A city: Portsmouth
5. A boy's name: Paul
6. A girl's name: Pippa
7. Alcoholic Drink: Port
8. An occupation: Postman
9. Type of Clothing: Pantaloons
10. A celebrity: Paul Daniels
11. A food: Pasta 'n' Sauce
12. Something found in a bathroom: Perfume
13. Reason for being late: Passed out on the tram and ended up at the depot
14. Something you shout: Pint, please, barman!
15. An animal: Platypus
16. A body part: Patella
17. Word to describe yourself: Pedantic

I would just like to say, publicly, that I really can't stand "Internet kiosks".

It's bad enough that they charge you $8/hour, but to give you a cut-down version of Internet Exploder 6 where you're allowed one poxy window, reducing the amount of things you can do with the Internets dramatically in that short period of time that you have is really extracting the Michael.

Thankfully there are such things as web-based SSH clients that allow me to connect to a computer at home and access email, web, etc., in a GNU/Screen session, but it's not ideal.

Well... time's up. I'll let you know all about our holiday when we get back to Melbourne at the weekend.

This morning I received some spam. Of course this is nothing unusual. Spam is the Internet's way of telling us that our mail servers are alive, right? What was unusual was that this spam landed in my inbox and that I actually found myself reading it. I shall share it with you, since I haven't shared much with my blog readers recently:

Hello,
Greetings from AUSTRALIA .
I have high interest in you product which iwill want to order by mail,i
will make payment to you by credit card(visa/mastercard) and
i want you to quote me on .....
which i willsend to you later after confirming this mail
MY DELIVERY ADDRESS
130 melbourne central
MELBURNE ,
NSW,
AUSTRALIA
Also, I experience difficulties when it comes to getting items to
myaddress here in Australia, It would best if you contact the shipperwhich
i used in the past.(bringingworld@h..., you can alsonotify them
with my customer
id# SA32051272L.
Regards
Mary

I can see why Mary is experiencing difficulties with getting items (whatever they may be, the email isn't very clear) to her address. You see, Melbourne (with an 'o') hasn't been in the state of New South Wales since the State of Victoria was established in the mid nineteenth century.

This weekend I have upgraded my old laptop to run Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The experience was suitably painless and Hardy is running smoothly. Since I've had my MacBook Pro, I've hardly opened the lid on the old laptop, it has just sat (reasonably) quietly in the corner of the room listening for SSH connections and performing downloads for me.

Under Hardy's predecessor, Gutsy Gibbon the connection to our HTPC (which is still running Windows XP Media Center Edition) had been a little flaky, which meant that often I would transfer files between the two using an SD card rather than simply copying them using smbfs.

It turns out that smbfs has been deprecated in Hardy and the time has come for me to move over to CIFS. This was actually pretty simple, but I understand some people have struggled with the conversion, so I thought I'd document what I did here.

1. Unmount the old smbfs mounts for the last time:

           sudo umount -at smbfs
       

2. Grant all users full access to the mount point:

           chmod 777 /media/mountpoint
       

3. Update /etc/fstab to use cifs rather than smbfs, changing the masks to modes and ensuring that the octal modes have leading zeros, thus.

   Before:

   //server/share     /media/mountpoint        smbfs
           auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,fmask=770,dmask=770,rw
           0       0

   After:

   //server/share     /media/mountpoint        cifs
           auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770,rw
           0       0

4. Mount the CIFS mounts:

       sudo mount -vat cifs
       

And that's it: fast and easy!

I'm going to be brave and unplug from the internets for a whole day next month.

No email, no Google Reader, no Scrabble, no instant messaging or Twittering and no Skype for a whole twenty-four hours. How will I cope?

The day after is, of course May the Fourth, which will mean lots of photo-taking. It should be a good weekend!

For those of you who want to know why I use Ubuntu [and OSX, and FreeBSD, ...], look no further than this article which my good friend Kris Jenkins sent me this morning. The video is a great demonstration as to just how good Microsoft are. I particularly like the piece of software that will return your stolen laptop!

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and wait by the telephone for our property managers not to call.

I'm just playing about with an excellent piece of software called DoubleTake and am using it to stitch together some of my holiday snaps from our recent trip to The Red Centre.

One of the things that it allows me to do is to create 360° panoramas and save them as QuickTime VR files for you to play around with. If all goes according to plan, you should be able to have a wonder around the top of King's Canyon just below these very words!

Yup, that seems to work. Use your cursor keys to move around, [shift] will move you inwards and [ctrl] back out. A higher resolution version can be found Nope... Internet Exploder barfs on it. You can find the panorama here.

Have a jolly nice Easter, won't you?

Over the past few months, I've been having a lot of fun with my Facebook status updates. I particularly enjoy quoting song lyrics and seeing other people quoting similar songs back at me. That's a bit of fun. Recently a couple of people have mentioned that I do this rather a lot and implies that I spend a lot of time on Facebook to set the record straight, this post is about how I do this without visiting Facebook.

I forget if I signed up for a Twitter account before or after Facebook, but that's by-the-by. I didn't use it much because I don't know may people with Twitter accounts and so it's not a huge amount of fun. What is fun, though is that I can update my status on Twitter using instant messaging, specifically Google Talk. That's very cool, because (a) I don't have to visit a web page and (b) I'm usually connected to Google Talk using Adium (on the Mac) or Pidgin (on the PC).

Some bright spark invented an application for Facebook called TwitterSync, which somehow scrapes my status from Twitter and displays it as a Facebook status. I like this lots because it means that I can update my status as new ideas come to mind without being distracted by the cornucopia of notifications that usually await me on logging into Facebook.

As far as seeing my friends' Facebook status updates, I tend to do this, as I monitor most other updates to the world-wide-web, by following the RSS feed (for All Friends Status Updates) in Google Reader.

So that's how I do it!

Why not join something today?

I recommend signing up for Fantasy Formula 1 GP, entering a team (or two) and adding it (or them) into the Murray's Mint league. The magic word is succours.

Good luck!

As reported elsewhere, I'm in Hong Kong (or more correctly, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) for work. It has been a long time since I last travelled for work and had to stay anywhere overnight (the last time I stayed in a Travelodge on the M1 motorway near Sheffield).

I arrived late on Friday night and was pretty bleary-eyed as I caught the hotel shuttle from the airport to Causeway Bay, having got up very early on Friday morning to go to our office in Sydney en route. However, a few things struck me (and thankfully not the bus!) as we journeyed to the hotel. Firstly, it was the first time I had ever seen rows of identical skyscrapers. In fact I don't think I had ever seen even a pair of identical skyscrapers before. Then I noticed that vehicles have yellow registration plates to the rear and white ones to the front, evidence of the British influence still present. I was amazed at how much traffic there was, too.

The Hongkongers love their cars! The grey concrete veins and arteries around the city are constantly brimming with high-performance cars. There are also lots of buses, which seem to raise the temperature of the streets by a degree as they pass by.

Yesterday afternoon I took a walk in the drizzle and found an area where each street seemed to consist almost entirely of small commercial garages, each of which seems to feature mechanics working on German sports cars. I don't think I have ever experienced such a smell of engine oil!

Last night, after a very nice meal, I took a wander around the shops. I was amazed at how bright it was as I left each of them. The sky remained the same grey as it had been during the day, except rather than the sun illuminating the cloud from above, it was the city lights illuminating the cloud from below. I shall not be seeing many stars here!

I think it's too misty to bother going up to Victoria Peak today, so the City Centre beckons for a bit of exploration. I shall leave you with a link to a website I read about on the flight over: We Are What We Do.