2007 — Day 73 - widgetisation of the web

The Guardian's "media" section once again entertains. I gather the term "widgetisation" applies to the various binary bits embedded on pages: boxes, gadgets, applications — all very far removed from my humble technology, I assure you! That said, I ordered a new box (of a different sort) of my own yesterday to use as our next server.

Geek alert; specification:

Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHZ) 2x 512K L2 cache (Socket AM2)
2GB Corsair DDR2 667MHz
Asus M2V-MX, dual DDR II, SATA, x16 slot, 2 PCI
2x 250GB SATA with 8MB cache (7200 rpm) as RAID 1 (mirror)
16x DVDROM with 48x CDROM
Onboard 10/100 LAN (Ethernet)
600W (peak) quiet dual rail PSU incl Case fan and CPU cooler

All for £579 although I may yet get dinged by a 2% credit card fee. (I intended to use my debit card but failed to find minor details like its "issue number".) The intended supplier was kind enough to point out to me that I'd failed to request an operating system, going on to advise me that should I be intending to run an unlicenced copy of Windows, I would fail to benefit from security patches etc.

Baby steps:

put ubuntu LAMP on it,
turn on sshd (make sure it runs on boot) whatever that means and,
if possible, use the new "upstart" boot sequence that's recently added, instead of "init.d" whatever that means and,
give Junior a user account, though I'm sure he'd rather be root⁶

If only Junior would be less telegraphic, or use English, progress might be faster.

15 January 2007

Footnote

⁶ A glancing reference to They'd rather be right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. It was the 1955 Hugo-winning novel. Some have said it's the worst novel (so far) to have won that award — I wouldn't dream of commenting. Anyway, it was cut, and then re-titled The Forever Machine in 1957, so it seemed appropriate for a server somehow.