I am the god of Hellfire…

I am not sure how many of you have heard about the wildfires in Greece, over the last few days, but it’s quite serious. While having a conversation, I was asked whether I am sad about it or not. I answered no…

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t care about the environment or that I would be happy if every inch of land was covered in cement. No, not at all. I just believe that caring about the environment, is actually caring about ourselves. Who are we trying to fool here? This planet does not need us! Even if we burn every forest, pollute every ocean and river, build skyscrapers all over the fucking place, we are going to end up with a planet we cannot live in. After time, nature will find her way back to where she wants and we will be like the dinosaurs, extinct.

Besides, these fires, are clearly the work of man, whether by accident or on purpose, it makes no difference. I refuse to believe that other countries have a magical way of preventing fires, while we are victims to all those who want to claim the forest for themselves. If you watch the news here, they are talking all the time about “them”, about those who want to build luxurious villas once the forest has cleared. The truth is however, a little bit different. I am old enough to remember how the mountain near where I live used to be, full of trees, and how it is now, full of houses. Houses that belong to middle class men and women, not multi-millionaires with huge houses…

We only try to hide the truth under the rag: There’s not enough room in Athens, so we will make room….

Automatic archives on WordPress

Remember when you wanted to make an archives page for your blog, but you always put it off for another time because adding 600 or so entries – with their links – is more than hard boring work? You don’t have to postpone it anymore! WordPress added a very nice little feature:

Make a new page and in the page body write {archives} (replace {} with [])

It will look something like this and it will save you a lot of trouble!

Easy Peasy on eeePc 900. Maybe not so easy

Until very recently, my eee900 was running on Suse Linux.  I was more than happy with it, I liked the look and feel of it, I liked the fact that it was waaaay faster than windows and generally I thought we two were going to stick together for a long time. I did not know of one little detail though:

Vpn connection. I needed to be able to connect to my workplace through PPTP, since we are using windows machines there, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t make it work. Network manager, had support for vpn, but not pptp tunneling, so I resorted to Google and spent a whole day trying all kinds of remedies to no avail. My colleague, the one who talked me into installing Suse in the first place, had pptp up and running on his own machine and that only frustrated me more. It only meant that there was a way to make it work, I just hadn’t found it yet. When I asked him how he had done it, he said he could not remember (of course) but he could use Norton Ghost to bring his own image onto my machine. I agreed and gave him my eee, because I thought that having vpn was better than having to re-fine-tune suse. Due to a *slight* mistake on his side, I ended up booting in Windows home again (he had used the wrong image to restore on my eee), which solved me one problem (I now had vpn), but created a whole lot more (speed, hiccups, poor performance) .

The dilemma: Keep windows and try to speed them up, or re-install suse?

The windows user in me was screaming for the first option and I quickly found my self  browsing through this thread and installing nLite. For the record, I believe the instructions on the thread above are fantastic and to my knowledge they work like a charm, but something did not go well with nLite, so I wasn’t able to complete them. In the past, I have tried some of the tips mentioned in there though and they really make a difference, but still nothing compared to my experience with suse.

The fact that I failed tweaking XP (or sabotaged my self sub-consciously) meant only one thing: Back to Linux! But should I move back to suse, or maybe try something new. While searching for a linux distro that works well with netbooks, I stumbled on Easy Peasy. The scree-shots were nice, it is based on Ubuntu (ie user friendly). So off with the installation!

The OS installation was easier than easy, you only have to follow the instructions given here. One word of advise though: Use an MD5 checker with your download! It will save you a lot of frustration later ;).  I had to download the iso 3 times to finally get it right but it worked like a charm in the end. Almost like a charm…

The very first thing I tried to do was to set up a vpn connection and – what a surprise – I couldn’t. From what I understood, reading countless web sites, was that pptp is not directly supported in linux, and it’s usually used only for windows vpns. I found some great instructions here, but they are great for everybody else, except me, since I could not install network-manager-pptp. For some reason that I cannot understand, the specific package was not available in any of the repositories that were configured in Easy Peasy. There is however an application, similar to Windows “Add Remove Programs” and when I tried that one, it found a pptp client and let me install it. Be sure to select “All Open Source Applications” from the drop down list!

Now, I need to do some extensive testing, but so far I love it.