If you can read this, you are accessing my new web server. As with all of these things, there is no such thing as a completely clean transition, so if you notice anything amiss please do let me know.

On a similar note, moving my domain from my ISP to another provider has also affected my email. So if you have sent me email in the last day or two and it bounced back (or I’ve not replied) that is why. Please try again!

It seemed to take pretty much everyone by surprise. Techie-oriented website Slashdot greeted the introduction of the iPod with the words: “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” Even I, on the way home from Tottenham Court Road with a first generation, 5Gb model, thought, “What have I done? I’ve just paid £350 for a walkman!” And I did wonder about the name.

But we all underestimated Apple. Five years later and now it’s difficult to see someone on the London Underground without an iPod and they’ve captured the public imagination in a way that few products have in recent times.

The short story is that if you have a standard configuration things should work entirely as you’d expect. That is, download the archive which, these days, comes as a RedHat “rpm” file. Become “root” and enter “rpm -ivh oracle-xe.rpm” and wait a bit. The install goes away and creates all the required users, starts up the listener and creates a default empty database.

CentOS, for those that have not come across it, is a Linux operating system built from the same source package as RedHat Enterprise Linux but without the support contract.

It’s bizarre. Virtually every American I’ve met has disliked Dubya, yet over the whole country, despite a number of obvious set-backs, his popularity has rarely been in question. Why such a contradiction? How did it get like that and how soon will the US be returning to normal?

This weeks PhotoFriday challenge is Destruction. My entry is a US tank left destroyed in Vietnam. I guess it did more than it’s fair share of destruction when operational.

Please vote for my entry in last weeks “Thin” theme. I’m entry 318.

Last night we went to the Royal Albert Hall to see the Secret Policeman’s Ball, a charity gala in aid of Amnesty International. Despite the great cast — everyone from The Mighty Boosh to Eddie Izzard — beforehand I was worried that the “charity” aspect would take too prominent a position compared with the comedy. Obviously there’s a need to make people remember what the show is all about but often these events become preachy and, ultimately, a little dull.

Sometimes a quote from the article can say more than I ever could:

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.

I think they should look up the word “irony” in a dictionary.

The premise

I have become increasingly disaffected by Apple’s .Mac service, so much so that when I recently got an email congratulating me for subscribing for another year I immediately went to the website and cancelled.

The background

But before we start going into all the details, what is .Mac? Basically it’s Apple’s on-line services that are geared for Mac users but are also usable by those stuck in the Microsoft world. When I first got my iBook back in 2001 it was called iTools. It had a more limited set of features back then, but that included a something@mac.com email address.

I’ve been reading the magazine Wanderlust for a few years now. It’s a great magazine with interesting stories about places that are often well off the beaten path — my kind of travelling! A couple of months ago I took the unusual step of writing a letter. It came in two parts, a comment about my time in Cuba (in response to someone who said he couldn’t find any night-life) and a second, longer piece about my time in Gdansk, Poland (as a counter-point to their piece on long-weekends for less than £100).

I’ve refrained from commenting about Microsoft’s iPod competitor so far as it’s not much of a challenge to mock it when they decide to make one model dung-coloured.

However this article caught my eye:

AppleInsider | Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249

What the headline doesn’t tell you is that they are planning to make a loss on each unit to make that price-point, just like they do on each XBox games console. I can’t think of many other companies that would make a loss of $388 million in one quarter and consider that to be a good strategy worth replicating for another product.