I've been trying to get the University to fill in a copyright disclaimer for the Free Software Foundation. This was painful at the Manchester and looks like it's going to be similarly so here. So far no one has any clue about who I should even email; I'm working on the business directorate who are supposed to be in charge of IP. So far, they are ignoring my email; soon, I am going to go and sit on their door in person, till I get a reply.

This doesn't bode well though. When I tried to get a login for submit.ac.uk, it took about a week and a paper chase of 6 people before I finally got to the one who knew.

I'm a huge fan of Unison, the file synchroniser. I use it religiously; half of my system is based around it. It has a few quirks, however, and today I fell into one of them. I'm sure I've been here before, but I couldn't remember the cause.

Essentially, it gives a cryptic message about the transferred file disappearing. The basic reason is this; Unison can't cope with a path been included for synchronisiation twice; it twices to synch the file twice, and each time messes with the other.

It was hard, tedious work, but, today, I finally dumped Outlook. Nearly six months of using it and it was driving me mad. No decent threading, slow interface, battery sapping processor requirement and a wrist-aching dependency on the mouse. Awful, truely awful.

So, it's back to Gnus.

The irony is, this is all unnecessary. Our local systems people, ISS, have a daft policy of actively trying to stop people using other clients. This is to reduce the amount of work they have to do, and to encourage the use of Outlooks shared calendars. So, they've switched the IMAP interface to Exchange off. Result, if you want the calenar, you have to use the Exchange email, and therefore, outlook; in my case, the cost of UI is such that it's not worth advantage of the shared calendar.

It's good to be back in the rapid environment of Gnus, though; I can move around quickly, I don't need the mouse and I can control what the email looks like. As a side effect, I'll be back in a programmable environment which will be great for returning coursework and the like.

Windows seems very confused; if you have two network interfaces, one with an internet connection and one without, windows seems unable to work it out; sometimes, it tries to access the world through the wrong one. Confusing. Answers on a post-card, please.

I've been using iTunes, recently, to play my music. It's quite a nice interface; it's sad, however, that it's crippleware. It doesn't include other peoples' shared music in its "recently played" or "most played" lists.

It also lacks a "watch directory" option; if you add music to a directory, you have to add all the files individually: add the directory, again, and everything becomes duplicated. Picasa has this, why not iTunes?

Started to have a look at Darcs today. It's one of the first distributed version control systems that I've looked at in detail; I couldn't see how they worked myself, but it's not that difficult. Everything is a branch and you pass patches around; obvious — at least, once you think of it.

Spent about an hour trying to work out why the aforementioned NAS box was totally failing. The ftp server seemed to be working, the machine seemed to be identifying itself.

Turned out to be the firewall. Windows can cope without a call-back it seems. It looks rather like this was also the cause of poor performance on small files. I've managed to get my network card up to 30% utilisation; saturday it was rarely more than 2%.

Finally got around to buying myself a network attached storage box. I needed this for home backups and mass storage. I bought a Buffalo Linkstation — I've had some reasonable experiences with their Terastation while I was at Manchester.

This is much the same; simple, well put together. It would have been nice if it had sftp or rsync servers on them (particularly the rsync!). The only problem I have with this box is that it seems very optimized for large files; if you are transferring lots of small files, then the speed at which you can get stuff across the network is very, very slow. Perhaps this is windows though, who knows?