Today I am starting an exciting experiment involving fruit and vegetables. It has two main objectives:

1. Save money
2. Eat Healthier (and lose that Christmas weight)

I bought some apples, bananas, tomatoes, celery and grapes to sustain me through the week. Unfortunately the effects are short lived (about 2 hours). I may need to consider a multi-vitamin so that my body can best absorb the nutrients. Feeling as though I was going to pass out I gave up and bought Subway (with chicken) for lunch. I’m feeling better now.

As I slave away to finish off the first episode of Dataman I can’t help but think that maybe Dataman is a little cursed. Last night while editing it all together Audacity crashed on me and I hadn’t yet saved. I have crossed my fingers today and hope that a Christmas Miracle can help me get Dataman out on time.

I’ve been getting an increasing number of Spam emails giving me stock tips. The emails are solely about promoting a particular stock and have a fairly stock standard body (no pun intended). Is this the new way to try and influence the stock market? If it were to work it would be quite interesting to see the effects.

Today I needed to tweak the startup order of various processes on our RHEL3 server at work. I needed to make sure that the lmtp server (which handles local delivery of messages to our mail database) started before Postfix. If this order was violated, all sorts of bad stuff could happen (like lost mail).

What I found was a bizarre solution, but it works (I’m guessing because I haven’t had the opportunity to restart the server yet).

In the /etc/rc?.d/ directories you place symbolic links to the startup scripts. By naming these links carefully you can specify the order of startup for that particular runlevel. It seems that there is a convention of naming these files S00script_name, so I would recommend sticking to it.

Unfortunately Webmin doesn’t allow for re-ordering startup actions and seeing as I find the startup actions in Linux some of the most complicated things to set up, it is a shame this feature is missing. (You can view the order though)

If I have it entirely wrong, let me know.

Just a little over a week ago I was much like the lovable Ebenezer Scrooge. The thought of Christmas was about as exciting as doing my taxes. But sometime between then and now I have been filled with the Christmas Spirit and not the alcoholic variety either.

I now find myself humming Christmas Carols and contemplating Dataman’s return through a Christmas Special. So what changed my mood so drastically? And why does it happen every year?

Oh well, off to do some Christmas Shopping.