Until a few months ago I had 2 internet connections at home - one for work purposes and one for everyone else in the house. With rising speeds on one of the lines, I decided to merge the 2 connections, but retain the separation of networks through VLAN'ing. Whilst a Linux/BSD box is an option, I wanted something that I couldn't fiddle with too much. I'm ultimately providing a service to my housemates, so it should Just Work(TM).

Programming will return to usual computer related bloggery shortly. I've lived with 3 other guys, who I've known for a long time now, for several years. In that time frame we're yet to have a major disagreement over anything. I know they say ‘if you can't spot the crazy in the room, then you're the crazy’, but I'm pretty sure it's all good. This Christmas I decided to surprise everyone with personalised gifts.

All in all for the last 5 years I've worked exclusively from home, and prior to that it was on and off depending on circumstances, and so on. During this time I've often been asked the same sort of questions over and over again;"Is it lonely?“"How hard is it to motivate yourself? I don't think I could get stuff done!“The first question I can understand. Sometimes you do need to see someone else, physically there in front of you, but to be frank, I've never been a great social animal, which probably helps massively.

It's hardly a first, but I did find some of the information out there a bit spread out. So, just incase I need to go through this again, I figured a ‘blog post might be interesting - doubly so as I've not really got anything interesting from work, that I can blog about at the moment! So, a bit of background. The AppleTV (ATV) is basically a dumb x86 PC - Pentium M 1GHz, 256MB of RAM, 40 or 160GB PATA HDD, 1x USB 2, 1x IR receiver, 10/100Mb ethernet, 801.

Over the last few days I've been conversing with Current Cost, a UK based company which produces energy monitoring devices. After I made a bit of a cock up (I eventually wanted a data cable after some testing with the unit in order to graph our rough power consumption and the Trec unit does not have a serial output) with the order they promptly handled and corrected my mistake. When my unit arrived there was unfortunately the wrong sort of clamp, within the day a replacement was on its way with a little extra (USB-to-Serial data cable) to say sorry.

I've had a few people asking me, via various channels, about my “sudden” change in status on the LFSforum. Rather than deal with it individually again I figured a quick post might help.It's correct that I'm no longer a moderator.It wasn't the result of anything I'd done, or any animosity between myself, any of the other mods, or the LFSdevs. Quite the opposite, in fact, and I wish the both the moderation and development team all the luck in the world with LFS.

If you've noticedthat the next Ubuntu Server version (10.4, Lucid Lynx) has the Hyper-V kernel modules packaged, alebit in drivers/staging, I'd suggest not dist-upgrade'ing even your development servers for the moment. The reason is simply that you need to devote time to ensuring that the kernel modules will continue to work with each kernel version - right now you can't seem to rely on the modules actually loading successfully from the corresponding /lib/modules/2.

I'm sorry that I couldn't do this to your face, but I'm writing to tell you that it's over. You might not have seen it, but I've tried to be loyal, but the temptations were just too much in the face of your problems, which I'll admit seem quite small and petty to begin with - but they build and they build. I loved using your beta interface, but it's been in beta for quite sometime, and getting less reliable; the SSL issues that happened during June/July/August and the endless “Server Communication Error"s.