Stuart Herbert

My blog used to run on b2evolution, but no more. Unfortunately, b2evo’s admin interface doesn’t work inside Safari, so it was time to either upgrade (with no guarantee of succes with Safari) or to switch.

A few hours later, and I’ve switched my blog over to run off Wordpress instead. To fake the multi-blog feature of b2evo (which was b2evo’s killer feature), my blog’s homepage now runs a custom PHP script, which runs off the RSS2 feeds from the main topics. (The PHP script was a surprisingly interesting exercise, which I’ll cover on my new PHP blog).

Hopefully all the old links and feeds should still work too, but if you find any problems, let me know.

I promise I’ll find some time this evening to expand on Donnie’s post about bringing focus to Gentoo!

In the meantime, it didn’t take all that long to build & boot my first Xen virtual Gentoo machine. Most of the time was spent rebuilding everything with the ‘-mno-tls-direct-seg-refs’ CFLAG, which boosts performance inside the virtual machine.

Things Learned About Gentoo Inside Xen

• Make sure hotplug is stopped before mounting loopback filesystems, otherwise udevd opens files on there, preventing you from umounting the loopback filesystem when you’re done building your generic Gentoo image.
• With a minimal virtual machine configuration, you only get a single terminal inside the Xen virtual machine. Gentoo’s default inittab expects there to be six terminals.

Things Added To The TODO List

• Learn more about console devices with Xen
• Learn more about configuring udev and hotplug

I’m slowly but surely moving everything from my old svn.gnqs.org domain to stuartherbert.com. My diary has already moved, and now my homepage has too.

Update: My photo gallery is now back online.

Kristi and I are back after spending a wonderful September on the Isle of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland. If you like the outdoors, and/or your mouldy old stones, then I can heartily recommend Arran to you.

I’ve started uploading photos from the holiday to my gallery. So far, I’ve put up some shots of Castlerigg in the Lake District, which we visited on the journey up to Arran.

More photos soon!

It’s the last weekend of the summer (or the first of the autumn, depending on how you count these things), and I’m sat here nursing a Lemsip hoping this head cold I’ve picked up runs its course quickly. Not my idea of fun.