OK, nothing particularly new or interesting here but screen savers can make pretty nice desktops so I thought I'd use GLslideshow to cycle through all the images in my "desktop" folder.

This is easily done by first telling Nautilus not to handle the desktop any more, the "downside" of this is if your one of those weird people who have icons on their desktop is that your icons will no longer be available. Also this is not compatible with Xcompmgr or XGL (though there is another way of running a screen saver in as a desktop and running XGL.

Fire up Gnome Configuration Editor and find /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop

Uncheck this and now run your screen saver of choice, for Ubuntu screen savers are located in /usr/lib/xscreensaver

To get the screensaver to work as your desktop simply append -root e.g run the command /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root

I use /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glslideshow -root -duration 30 -pan 30 -fade 5 to cycle my desktop image every 30 seconds with a 5 second cross fade effect.

To make this effect permanent open Gnome Session Properties (command: gnome-session-properties
or via menus System Preferences Sessions) and under the Startup Programs tab click the Add button, enter the command you use to launch your screensaver as a desktop background and your done.

Simple hack with instant results

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I've not long installed InitNG on my desktop running Ubuntu Breezy which was taking around a minute to boot and about 25 seconds to shutdown, which isn't bad at all but it wouldn't hurt to be faster. I heard about InitNG quite some time ago and never got round to trying it. InitNG is meant to be the next generation of init, it will start up init scripts asynchronously rather than in sequence to provider faster boot and shutdown times.

The install was very simple, no problems at all and the results are amazing as my system now boots in 28 seconds, and shuts down in around 8 seconds. That's greater than a 50% increase in boot speed for a few minutes of my time!

InitNG - http://www.initng.org/
Ubuntu Wiki InitNG - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InitNG

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The nightmare came true! I was sitting at my PC and then, blank screen, the noise of the HD spinning down and then silence. A toaster had tripped the power supply, normally I wouldn't care but it's the same ring that my server is on which had been running perfectly for around 60 days! Luckily, the server restarted itself and it's services, otherwise I may have had to cart a monitor and keyboard down to the garage where it's stored as I run it as a headless server.

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OK, there was a time when port 25 was a nice port, free to run the SMTP protocol we all use from time to time when sending emails. Now MS has opened a blog called port 25 and tainted it forever! Never will I look at port 25 the same way lol. Enough with the silliness, what is MS "port 25" blog? Well according to the website it's "Communications from the open source software lab @ Microsoft". Don't worry you did read that last sentence correctly and yet it did have MS and Open Source in it. Some of you may not know but MS has an open source lab, only no one knows it's purpose. One can only assume that they sit there looking over Linux source and trying to figure out what parts they can "borrow" to make their OS work properly .

Anyway back on track, the point of this blog is supposedly to create a channel for communication between the MS OS lab and the FOSS (Free and Open Source) community. Now this would have been funny if I had posted it on April 1st but sadly it's true! MS the anti-FOSS company renowned for underhand tactics want to communicate with the FOSS community. After you have stopped laughing please read the next paragraph.

The main purpose of this post apart from enlightening you about MS's port 25 was to point you in the direction of this article: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/58360/index.html who's writer sums up the feeling and attitude the FOSS will adopt towards "port 25".

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I have been meaning to blog about this for a while but *ahem* I have been busy playing Guildwars .

I started to consider the pros and cons of two hobbies of mine, gaming and programming. Not that I do a lot of the former, in fact it's rare for me to play for more than a few hours a month but that all depends on what game I have to play, some games I can get quite addicted too.

Gaming
Less of a mental challenge
Can be repetitive
Can be dull
Mostly fun if you like a challenge of hand eye coordination
Entirely unproductive
Nearly no useful skills obtained
Less rewarding
You can't play the same game forever

Programming
More of a mental challenge
Repetitiveness is
Can be dull
Mostly fun if you like a mentally stimulating challenge
Very productive
Builds on current skills, can lead to learning new ones
More rewarding
You can keep improving your program for as long as you like

I have spent a lot of hours on GW lately, what do I have to show for it? A lvl 20 Ranger/Monk which is a virtual character with no use outside the game. Had I spent that time coding I would have furthered a project I am working on. The end result of gaming is nothing, the end result of hacking on some code is a finished program which not only you find useful but often others too.

I realise not everyone can program and not everyone would want to or find it interesting, but for those who do or want to spend some time learning how two beacuse it's a lot more productive, rewarding and useful than gaming

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