Skyrim has arrived !

Yesterday I received my copy of The Elder Scrolls : Skyrim (PS3) and damn it's great ! The graphics and settings are great! I had to get accustomed to play with a controller and where other games require to memorise every buttonfuction or combination of buttons to survive, Skyrim is very forgiving. Drink a potion or swap a weapon during combat ? No problem; time stops and continues when your done. I like it when game does not require you to be a fingeracrobat. Anyway, read the many raving reviews for more indepth game-info because i'm off playing again :-).

Bye bye Azeroth (5 years of World of Warcraft), Smirre has quit his Warlock-job and wanders around in Skyrim now.

Here are some handy Skyrim links:

http://skyrimcalculator.com/
http://www.gamingreality.com/2010/12/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.html
http://www.elderscrolls.com/skyrim/

and some humour:

Why everybody hates the IT department

IT workers are treated with thinly veiled contempt in many organisations - Tom Brewster finds out why

Read more:  http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/371254/why-everyone-hates-the-it-department#ixzz1eoUi7khP

Good piece. Don't blame the IT-staff if they can't support your iPhone if the company does not free resources to make integration possible. IT-staffers are geeks; technology challenges them but they too have to work within the restraints of the corporate budget.

The latest buzzword/acronym is BYOD: Bring Your Own Device. Although I'm all pro getting your work done on your favourite device, getting the company infrastructure ready for it takes time and money. People often forget that bringing your own, virus-invested laptop, can wreak havoc on the company network(the little people know about IT, the bigger the chance is they have malware on their systems). The ISP of your company can even shutdown your Internetconnection and that can be even more disastrous for business.

So after that little rant, now some IT-humour:

The FreeBSD Experience - Part 4 : phpMyAdmin & Joomla installation

I've decided to include phpMyAdmin in the installation so before we jump into the Joomla installation, we first add......(drums rolling).....phpMyadmin.

The FreeBSD experience - part 3 let's AMP

Now the basics are there, I'm going to turn my VM into an (F)AMP-machine; Apache, MySQL and PHP.

I'm going to use the current versions available in de ports-repository:

Apache 2.2 (v2.2.21)
MySQL 5.5 server (v5.5.17)
PHP 5 (v5.3.8)

Commodore Nostalgia or a real revival ?

I have a bit of mixed feelings about the new batch of products coming from "Commodore" (same name, different company, Commodore went bankrupt in the early 90's) but if you need your dose of nostalgia check out the new C64, VIC and upcoming Amiga machines. No new custom hardware like in the old days but off the shelves x86 hardware building upon the all-in-one concept of the eighties homecomputers. The C64 looks like our old friend.

Let's plug FreeBSD a bit more :-)

Not that I'm a FreeBSD fanboy now but the OS (all BSDs) should enjoy a bit more attention.


link : Infoworld : Why aren't you using FreeBSD ?

Not sure if this is good for my social life: The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim

I guess it will be X-mass before I lay my hands on this one but it will end up in my collection !

For reviews:

IGN
XGN (dutch)

The FreeBSD experience - part 2 post-installation basics

In Part 1 I described how to get a working installation in a VM. In this part I will go through the steps to get some tools on the box to make our lives a bit easier.

I'm going to install :

• bash shell
• portmaster
• portupgrade
• portmanager
• midnight commander
• nano (although I can find my way in vi)
• sudo
• links (a text-based browser always comes in handy)

Linux Mint 11 LXDE

Since Ubuntu released 11.10 I gave up on the main distribution because of Unity. It might be nice for the computer novices among us but for me it's replacing the toolshed workbench for a camping table; I need a real GUI.
After bearing the pain of the dreadful KDE interface for 2 days (GUI is really okay, now get some decent font rendering!!) I switched to Xubuntu (XFCE) although Mint was already a candidate. I still like the Ubuntu distro it's only the interface that's hurting me and Mint wasn't up to 11.10 yet.

Last night I decided to boot our little netbook (Compaq 110) again and although Ubuntu Netbook Edition with (an early) Unity is working really well on this low power machine, I thought it was time for an update. Downloaded the Linux Mint 11 LXDE version, installed it and must say it's really nice and fast. LXDE stands for Lightweight X11 Desktop Enviroment.

First impressions are pretty good. Haven't tried anything special yet (Xubuntu had some solvable minor fileshare problems) but then again the netbook is primarily meant for browsing the web and play music.

Link : LXDE

Link : Linux Mint 11 LXDE

The FreeBSD experience - part 1 Installation

It has been for years since I've done anything useful with a BSD/UNIX-like OS (NetBSD on my Amiga 3000 in the early 90's) and after using Linux for some years now I decided to jump on the FreeBSD bandwagon. Ok not completely because FreeBSD will run in a virtual machine running on my Xubuntu 11.10 desktop :-).

My intention is to create a server for Joomla websites (or Wordpress). Let's see how this will workout.

I will not go in-depth in installing VMWare-player. Just go to the VMWare website, register and download VMWare player and install it. If you like VirtualBox better no problem, there won't be that many differences.