We have some software that requires a hardware dongle, which connects to a standard printer port (25-pin DIN, female). Dongles are annoying enough, normally. But now we would like to occassionaly run this software on our new laptop. No, problem, just move the dongle over, right?
Nope. The new laptop doesn’t have a printer port. Just USB and Firewire. . [...]
I was going to post several small items yesterday, to make up for the lull in activity, but my server was down for the better part of the day. When the other admin finally got it rebooted, some of the database tables had some minor corruption, so if you visited late yesterday you might have seen some warning messages. I was able to run some repairs, and everything seems to be happy again, now.
I already run automated backups of all my database tables, which get mailed to an external email account. And there is also an automated backup of the rest of the system, run by the hosting company, but I don’t have direct access to those. [...]
Drinking the Ubuntu Kool-Aid
For quite a while, I had considered nuking Windows from my laptop and starting fresh. A few weeks ago, I finally took the plunge. I started with a full backup (two, actually — a file-by-file backup, and a partition image). I toyed with the idea of dual-booting, but finally decided that I’d try to go completely non-Windows, and see how well I could get by.
After hearing one of my co-workers rave about how impressed he was with Fedora Core, I was going to give that a try. But the DVD he burned for me wouldn’t install for some reason. [...]