2013 — 10 November: Sunday
The sun is shining, and I am (yet again) freshly great-uncled1 according to Big Bro's bulletin from the Antipodes. This news pertains to yesterday evening, technically, but I'd switched off BlackBeast and — as usual — obviously paid no heed to phone or Tablet. Far too many other higher-priority interrupts. Like feeding myself, and a degree of abluting :-)
A life examined
Quite a fitting task for the morning of Remembrance Sunday?
Seven years ago I asked: "How (in the words of every retiree I know bar one) did I ever have time to go to work?"
Six years ago Christa had (correctly) predicted her death was very close.
Five years ago I summed up my first year without her.
Four years ago my seaside outing included Sammy Miller's Motorcycle Museum.
Three years ago I seemed to be flooded by incoming entertainments.
Two years ago I failed to note where we went for a walk.
One year ago I again failed to note where we went for a walk.
Today? Today, it's time for my next cuppa :-)
Followed by an unscheduled trip out to PC World. In a few minutes. [Pause] Right. Better do something about a late lunch before deciding exactly what to do with my new Netgear ProSafe 8-port Gigabit Desktop Switch. I have it in mind to pop some of my A/V kit back online, as it were.
I might re-site my tiny webserver down here, too. [Another pause] Done. Right, now what about that next cuppa?
And now...
... for something completely different. My first web update from my current Linux Mint 15 system on my Laptop PC.
The three-plus hours that have elapsed between that innocuous sentence and this one were largely spent watching one of my gurus setting up for me on that Mint system a "scheme" to replicate, as nearly as possible, a means of working that matches my preferred modus operandi on BlackBeast. Namely, to have a locally-held set of web files, and easy linkage to the same files on both my internal Pi server and the one that lives on a rack somewhere in Texas. It turns out that running Linux commands inside emulated terminal sessions is a subtly different matter from running them "for real". With a number of small, but cumulatively irritating, gotchas.
On Windows, I just run a pair of WinSCP sessions — one for each web server — that let me edit and update one set of locally-held files and push then on to the appropriate server. On Linux, although the "Connect to server" facility of the Caja file manager works perfectly well in mounting what looks like a pair of network drives, you cannot actually simply copy an updated file from one of them to the other because they at no point "touch" the real system. In this respect, Linux seems just a little bit too clever. Certainly for me, if not for its own good.
The upshot is a customised shortcut to a terminal session into which I simply type:
./setupweb
with "setupweb" being a file "script" that contains two commands to invoke the SSH filing system (having first installed that on Mint, of course) against each server in turn for me then to logon to them. Only then are the two desktop mount points actually "populated" with my files. But the crucial difference is that these are now seen and available as "real" local files that can now be copied between them.
Simple when you know how. Even simpler when you know a patient chum with the knowhow, who will work for free-flowing tea.