The Allseeing Eye of Nothing
Just when I thought there’d be nothing to distract me from a bit of work (which has, in recent times, disturbingly and rather inexplicably become something of a guilty pleasure) I had to encounter a yellow icon in my Azureus under “DHT Firewalled”, which means two things: one, that somehow, somewhere, I’m getting restricted on my torrent speeds and two, that I’m destined to spend the next two hours attempting to fix it.
Attempting. I haven’t fixed it. Neither updating my Java runtime, nor going through endless checking-and-unchecking in the options area, seeding and re-seeding, port forwarding…Ah. I give up. I have pretty decent speeds going, and I shall treat this as a moment of Zen realisation, where I content myself with already-satisfactory speeds, and shut out the din of what-ifs and imagine-what-your-speed-could-bes.
Speaking of computer-tinkery, I fear I might have to give up my casual affair with recreational nerdery and become a professional nerd. By this I mean having a licence to kill…with my technical prowess. Forget the popular cousins of gaming and the now-trendy Linux business. I’m talking hardcore knowledge of the technology, trends and the vendors that move the business.
All because each member of the editorial staff were asked to choose an area of IT specialisation and mean it. I’m talking having a monthly column, becoming the resident authority, working up to availing ourselves to speak at related events.
Unsurprisingly (and now worryingly), I chose operating systems and open source, in a slight haze over my recently kindled love for Ubuntu Linux. I realise now this is like buying a car and suddenly deciding to crown yourself the all mighty sheikh of piston-engines.
Besides, operating systems means I have to be on top of all things Microsoft and Apple, to boot. Perhaps I’ll call for help, from time to time, on this space. I know a couple of you would have lots to contribute. And that would be truly open source.
i love ubuntu and use it at home. i’m forced to use windows at work though :(
microsoft released a public beta of vista. you can download it for free. its a 2.5 gig iso.
A license to kill is good.
I just put people to sleep with my “technical prowess”.
I do admit that it is quite intimidating to now be solely the end-all for OSes in the office. It is a very wide, very deep and worse of all, very muddled topic. Apple and Microsoft plays their cards close to the vest when it comes to their OSes, and Open Source has it’s own unique way of handling things that can make finding information difficult or hard to understand (Upstream? Downstream? Salmon spawning??)
The good side is that, you never run out of things to write about in terms of OSes. Always someone going on about one thing or another about all the various OSes on the market.
Secondly, OSes doesn’t really mean Applications as well. I think you will have to draw a line somewhere if you get tasked to take on a certain application or new software suite just because it has trouble on just one of the big three OSes.
And lastly, OSes are the means which humans interact with their computers, and thus there are alot of human issue to take into account as well that should keep things interesting for you.
All the best, and do keep us up to date on what you are working on so that we can throw our 2bits in.
hey! are you using starhub? My DHT was firewalled too. I removed the router, messed with zone alarm, messed with different ports, closed zonealarm and it still doesnt work!!! @#$%&$#!!!
victor> I am! I’m on cable…Is that the problem? I tried at my friend’s, who’s also on cable, and the same problem occurred. Crap. I wonder if this is the problem.