A Pipe and a Keyboard

An errant post appeared here for some strange reason.

The Internet is a queer place.

The post in question is over on Smoking out the Truth

Filed under: General on January 18th, 2012 | 3 Comments »

I took a regressive step yesterday.

I scrapped Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) in favour of Linux Mint 11 (Katya).

Once again, I was amazed at the simplicity of the move.  While selecting the sectors for the installation, I simply told it not to format my Home sector.  As a result, I lost nothing and my precautionary backup wasn’t needed.

So why scrap the latest version in favour of an older one?  The answer is that I was having too many problems which in fairness I should probably blame on the laptop and not the software.  Most of my programmes were noticeably slower, with some abysmally so.  As laptops go this isn’t a bad one.  It has a dual core AMD Athlon processor with 4Gb of memory so it’s a fairly nippy machine.  I suspect that its graphics just wasn’t up to the mark when it came to Gnome 3.  But even using Mate or Cinnamon didn’t help.

So now I’m back on Katya and everything is flying along.  I had one mysterious problem in Lisa where I couldn’t detect my network scanner.  It’s a wireless HP Officejet J4680, and while Lisa picked it up straight away as a printer, the only way I could scan was to bring the laptop to the unit and connect via USB.  One of the very first things I did after the reinstall was to check this problem, and there was the scanner ready for use!

My only problem now is that I got somewhat used to the layout and functionality of Gnome 3, and now I have to relearn where everything is.

I suppose in time I will stop looking for the clock in the top right-hand corner of the screen?

Filed under: Linux on January 14th, 2012 | 3 Comments »

I thought I would try a little exercise today.

There is a list of the top 100 Irish blogs at Justin Mason’s site.  Now this list is old, but unfortunately I don’t know just how old.  However I reckon it dates back to some time in 2008.  For my little exercise, I thought I would test those sites to see just how many are still active.

The vast majority are indeed still there .  Some however came up completely blank or are restricted access.  I decided to test the sites I could access and see how recently they had been updated.

How do you define a redundant blog?  I decided that if it hadn’t been updated in the last 60 days then it was probably dead.  The result is a little disappointing.

Of the 100 blogs, over half [53%] haven’t been updated.  If I use a tighter figure of fourteen days, then 60% are gone.

Now the list claims to give the top 100 sites by Technorati Rank so it is not a comprehensive list of all blogs.  However one would assume that to gain a listing, the blog would have to be fairly popular, and the author would have to be reasonably dedicated, to the 60% death rate is a little surprising.

Maybe they are right.

Maybe Irish blogging is terminally ill?!

Filed under: Blogging on January 9th, 2012 | 2 Comments »