Goodbye 2008, hello 2009!
Posted by Stevieb | Filed under General, Site News
Well that’s 2008 nearly done and dusted. It’s been a good year, certainly an improvement on 2007! 2009 is going to be crazy busy, work is very quiet so I’m gonna have to really pull out the stops to make sure the business keeps on the right track. On a site related note I want to move Stevieb.net to a new hosting company. It’s outgrown the server I’m on so a dedicated server is in order I think. This will of course mean a wee bit of downtime, but ultimately will allow me to really push and develop the site to enable me to offer a real wide range of new services. So have a great festive season and a happy new year!
Ignorance is bliss eh?
Posted by Stevieb | Filed under Funny, Tech
This is taken from PC Pro: News: Teacher threatens to call the cops over Linux.
It really does make me wonder sometimes…..
A teacher has thrown a student into detention and threatened to call the police for using Linux in her classroom.
The teacher spotted one of her students giving a demonstration of the HeliOS distro to other students. In a somewhat over-the-top reaction, she confiscated the CDs, put the student on detention and whipped off a letter to the HeliOS Project threatening to report it to the police for distributing illegal software.
“I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom,” writes the teacher, identified only as Karen.
“At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows.
“I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting Linux on these machines is holding our kids back,” she writes.
Not content with completely missing the point of Linux, Karen concluded by throwing down the ultimate insult to the Linux advocates: “This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all.
“I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…”
The HeliOS project members were understandably upset, and quickly fired off a reply.
“Please…investigate to your heart’s content. Linux is a free as-in-cost and free as-in-license operating system. It was designed specifically for those purposes…
“I don’t know when you attended college Karen but the Linux of even two years ago pales in feature and ability to what there is available now… and that in turn will pale in a year’s time. Linux is superior to Microsoft Windows in so many ways, they are too numerous to mention here.”
The letter and reply can be read in full on the HeliOS Project blog.
OpenDNS, I love you!
Posted by Stevieb | Filed under Tech
For the past few weeks at work, I have been having hellish bad DNS problems. I tried EVERYTHING to fix em, but nothing seemed to work, until I found OpenDNS. Some of you out there will have no idea what I’m on about, and will have no idea how big a part a good DNS service plays in your internet habbits. To quote the OpenDNS Founder:
DNS is what allows you to type in a web address and end up at a website; DNS is transparent and yet fundamental to the operation of the Internet. There are two sides to DNS, the authoritative side which give out answers and the recursive side that ask questions on your behalf and holds onto them in case you ask again.
OpenDNS provides the latter, the world’s first highly-available, high-performance recursive DNS service customized with features to make the Internet safer, faster and smarter for you.
OpenDNS allows me to enable smart content filtering, track realtime DNS stats and even helps speed up the serving of pages. There are so many amazing features to this free service, you would be daft not to set it up. You don’t even have to sign up if you don’t want too (but it’s worth it!!), so why not head over and give it a try?
I could watch stuff like this all day….
Posted by Stevieb | Filed under Funny
This is me, Steve Bremner. I’m a 29 year old recruitment consultant in the North East of Scotland. I’m happily married to Becky and have been together for 10 years. When I’m not busy being awesome at work, I’m generally being awesome at home doing awesome stuff. Check out the