I've been trying http://rssfwd.com. Before this I used http://r-mail.org which was okay, but seemed to fail for a lot of feeds. I like Google Reader, but having to go to a different application for just RSS is a pain. I was going for weeks without looking at it. So I am trying email again. It seems to be working for the moment; it has an non HTML layout and (seems) to be able to cope with all the feeds I use.

Guys, this is a PDF tool. Why on earth would I need an RSS reader? I mean, what is the point of that? I already have an RSS reader. I just want to read PDF files, nothing more, nothing less.

Just put a DVD upside down into my windows machine (there were no labels on it, so this was not hard). Windows hung, then told me explorer was not responding, then killed itself, then rebooted. Impressive.

Had to kill this on Ubuntu also. It's eating my entire disk IO all the time making it not very usuable. For the moment, I've just tried turning off the "watching" and left "indexing" on.

I don't know what "watching" or "indexing" actually does. I'm not impressed; this is not windows; having a nice GUI does not mean that you don't have to write technical documentation.

A Vmware upgrade didn't work for me. So I decided to update to Gutsy, the new version of Ubuntu. It mostly worked. Texlive was problematic, but I tracked this down to a copy of language.dat in my TEXINPUTS. Installing from a root console would have solved it, but in the end I just deleted language.dat which shouldn't have been there. Everything else worked straight away, no worries.

Well, except for Xorg of course. It didn't get the widescreen working, nor the track ball scroll wheel emulation. I had to hack the config file by hand. One day, this will all work, but not yet.

I reinstituted incremental backups a few days ago. I have a nice, new, big hard-drive now, so I thought why not. My data is actually copied to quite a few machines, so having a backup on the same hard drive as the data is less of a problem that it seems.

Anyway, a few days later, for the first time in ages, I found today that I had deleted a file I really, really needed but was able to recover it. Let this be a lesson. Backups are good.

I did get this working in the end. Basically, my /etc/samba/smb.conf was wrong and needed fiddling with; gnome even provides a GUI for doing this ("Shared Folders"). Setting the domain and the WINS server and everything works.

Fusesmb is great; I have now symlinked in the machines that I want. It only seems to understand paths like //CAMPUS/machine_name/share which is a bit of a pain; paths like //internal/web which work within CS don't work here. I had to find the machine names by ls-lR'ing through the entirety of SMB space. It's also very slow, so listing directories with a symlink to an SMB location can be a pain.

But, given all of this, it's still great. Having a mount at the file system level rather than in the GUI works well for me. I have command line access, it works in Emacs, I can just forget about it and go about my work.

I've also tried encfs, which is encrypted fuse mounted filesystem backed by a "real" file system. Also, straightforward and works like a dream. One satisfied customer.