Recently, through an online conversation with my friend dynek I checked out The Wayback Machine to check on a few of the changes I've made to my site over the years. I suddenly noticed that somewhere between August 30th and October 16th I've made 5 years on the Internet.

I guess I'm surprised by the fact that I've kept this site going for 5 years. Many times I wanted to merely throw it all away, but in keeping it going I have learned about how the Internet, email and certain technologies work.

A while back I looked into the whole auto-tools thing and wrote a quick and dirty guide on starting with it. I lost the guide in the blog change. HOWEVER, after some deep digging, here it is; for those times when you can't remember what bit does what and how they work...

"Hello... my name is wintellect and I've been clean of Microsoft Windows for seven days now..."

It's true. I no longer have any Microsoft Windows systems running at home. On my shelf I see boxes with the Microsoft logo on them - never to be touched again. Over the years I have bought Windows95 (full version on 22 floppy disks), Windows98SE CD-ROM upgrade, Windows2000 CD-ROM upgrade, WindowsME (I'd rather not discuss this one) and WindowsXP install CD (yep, I actually own an install CD for XP!) With the exception of the upgrade CDs, the OSes were purchased as part of a new PC. But no more! I feel I am on a new challenge, a new adventure not taken on by many. Let me state, however, that it was not a choice I openly made; there was a slight push involved...

Last Friday I was given a new PC, a Dell Dimension 4600 (Pentium4 2.26GHz with 1GB RAM and 80GB hard disk.) My intention was a simple one - to make things better - and migrate my Ubuntu and Windows XP desktops to it.

I've been owning my bit of Internet space for about seven years now. Over those years I've gotten to know online friends; people I chat with daily as I log in to IRC or one of the many instant messaging systems I use. But here's the thing, how would they know if I died?

Ok, so my website is the first way to check. The content wont change, perhaps my regular blogging would indicate an issue (assuming I haven't simply given up on blogging - again.) Let's face it, people online don't know my mobile so can't phone me and they're not down the road so can't pop by my house to check I'm ok. An email from them may get no reply their thoughts could be "Is he ignoring them? Or did the email fail to arrive? Or did the SPAM checker flag it as spam and delete it?" and finally, if all of that couldn't confirm it, one day my domain would vanish as I didn't renew its ownership (assuming the server stays online until then.)

There was a time when you could purchase software over the counter and take it home fear free; there was a time when you could purchase hardware, plug it in to your local area network and give it no thought; you would have happily assumed a new computer was virus free. Surely the device would have been clean of any viri as the manufacturer would have built these devices in a safe environment - a clean hard disk before image installation and release, right? Think again...

Much to my horror I was recently pointed at this article (perhaps The X-Files were right when they said "Trust No One"?!?)

I still feel nothing beats holding a book and flicking through the pages. Electronic versions may take up no shelf space and allow for searching for words to get you to the right place (a book index still works fine for me) but there's something you can't beat when it comes to sitting in a comfy chair and holding that book in your hand with a nice cup of coffee tea in the other. Not to mention I find digital copies simply get uncomfortable to look at after a while.

As I look through my computer bookshelf I notice a name being consistently repeated, O'Reilly. They have, for me, proven their worth by providing a solid grounding in whatever computing subject I have purchased them for. In fact, at the time of this writing I have spent over £250 on O'Reilly books over the years (I was surprised by that amount as I was going through my books adding up the prices!)

The word "backup" (in my opinion) is a placeholder; a word that the speaker uses and hopes the hearer understands enough to not question them on it - each knows the why, but not necessarily the how. I say this because in the computing world it's a word that is used extensively, yet everyone has their own way to do it. If you work with computers, in any capacity, you're supposed to know, understand and do the backup thing. But how many of us actually do? There's a lot of "fuzzyness" that surrounds the word...