Robert Small, The blog thereof.

I’ve been ill. I hate being ill, especially when you can’t even get out of bed most days. I hate the fatigue after the illness. In general, I dislike being ill and all that goes with it. I had tonsillitis as a part of glandular fever.

Well, that’s that, I’m at least partially well now. The unfortunate fact is that I seem to be one of the few people who get a post-illness fatigue from glandular fever, either that or I’m just lazier than normal.

I’ve recently become involved in yet another business. It’s certainly very comfortable and they provide good training, nice perks and a very reasonable wage. They also are open to new people so get in contact with me if you’re interested.

In general I’m getting by in life, my next trip to the States is being planned. I could use some advice there, especially on an inexpensive way to get to Amsterdam airport from Norwich. I love swimming, but not in that cold conditions! One of the annoying sides of my local airport is that it doesn’t seem to provide many flights to anywhere, and those it does are rather expensive. To annoy me more I find the website for it is both badly designed and dysfunctional.

For those of you who know what ‘Project X’ or ‘That Project’ is, it’s now named ‘Footman’ and is coming on reasonably well. In fact I hope to have a working demo soon for internal testing.

V8d Org IRC will be moving to InspIRCd from UnrealIRCd. This move will take place over a set time (probably a day) which is yet to be confirmed. We will attempt to prevent any disruption, but some will be inevitable.

I think this should get everyone up to date with my life; if you have any questions, do comment.

Kind regards, Robert.

Just to mention that I’ve now released a list of the software I currently have on my pen drive.

 http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick#The_Software

I will provide more information on each item in the near future including versions and links. I expect a few of you are thinking of cloning my setup until I release a script.

Kind regards, Robert

Some of you will already know about this little project that I’ve been working on. Basically I’m producing a USB memory stick with all the things which I think it needs. Quoting the wiki page:

http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick

If you’re in a situation where you only have one memory stick, what’d you want on it? If baggage handling lose all your bags and you just have the encrypted hard drive in your jacket pocket and the memory stick round your neck, what do you want on the stick?

You’re stranded on an island (or somewhere with a really poor internet connection) and you want to acquisition a computer for your own uses, what do you want on your stick? Someone else on the island wants you to fix their computer, what do you want on the stick?

In general, what do you want on a memory stick when you don’t trust or want to use your internet connection? This is what the Chute Stick project is meant to provide.

Although there are many different situations where this may be of use and some of them wont require most of the software provided this is meant to be an ‘in any event evacuation plan’. I know a lot of you have already contacted me about this and so there probably wont be that many comment; however, there are several things which I’d love to be posted here:

• Situations where you might need a rescue stick.
• Software suggestions/requests.
• Things to stay away from.
• Suggestions for replacement software, I know I may not have picked the right stuff all the time.
• Suggestions about ways of packaging or unpacking software.
• Ways to make things more accessible to more people.

Of course you could just tell me I’m doing something useful!

Which brings me to another point, what am I doing? Well I don’t intend to distribute too much software, I’d prefer to write a script which downloads and updates software to a memory stick for you. Much of the software I’m looking at is either not free/libre and so I don’t expect to be able to do more than provide a script to get the end user to download and use the software correctly. If anyone is familiar with the gentoo ebuild context they’ll understand more of what I mean, my script wouldn’t require pre-built packages but do it’s own work.

The wiki page is: http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick

Kind regards, Robert.

I’ve created a Wiki for my own personal use, this is where I will provide some useful information as I discover it, for example the progress on my rescue/emergency memory stick project.

It’s located http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/ (here) so feel free to read it and use it as a reference. Currently users are not allowed to register or edit, this may change in the future.

Kind regards, Robert.