Had some various stability issues with a few apps in Ubuntu Edgy recently, so took the lunge and proceeded with the Fiesty update via the very easy to use ‘Update Manager’.

Anyway, it all went flawlessly, except for one thing - truecrypt. Whenever I attempted to mount my encrypted disks, I was getting an error:

failed to load truecrypt kernel module

Did a few google searches, and found a few solutions regarding recompiling truecrypt, etc, none of which seemed to be a quick fix, or those that were (i.e. modprobe -f) didn’t seem to work.

I was using 4.2a prior to today, and there had been two updates since then ( now 4.3a). Anyway, the easy fix was just to uninstall the old version, and then install the new version.

dpkg -r truecrypt
dpkg -i truecrypt_4.3a-0_i386.deb

Who would of thought!

Also, another bit of news, Virgin Blue (a cheap airline for flying domestic through Australia, and to the pacific) started an airfare sale yesterday, so I was able to grab $137 tickets (each way) to Melbourne (from Perth), for the next Linux Conference. The only downside is, they’re at abnormal times of the day, i.e. 6am and 7am takeoff’s.. normally this wouldn’t be that bad a think, but the day we leave is the 27th’s - which for non-Australians, this is the day after Australia Day (our version of Independence Day).. so no getting trashed that night..

Haven’t had much to say over the last few weeks which is likely due to the ’same-old’ type of work (mainly EGN). Here’s a few things to share, nevertheless.

Mediawiki - really is a great wiki management system. I set one up for EGN recently, and began getting into the whole wiki authoring addiction .. there’s something cool about doing [[page name]]. The wiki user accounts are integrated into our ipb forum using ipbwiki which cost ~$30 AUD for a yearly license, which sort of sucks, but it did save me a few hours, so its money well spent to one perspective anyway.

A few weeks back I also setup a wordpress blog for my partner. I have to say it really is a good little blogger, and I’m actually thinking about switching over to it myself (from drupal). Check out the blog here: kat.akb.com.au.

One of the most useful tools for web dev’s/admin’s is dnsreport.com. It now seems they are under new management, and charge an annual fee for the service after the first 50 queries, which really sucks imho! I hope a free alternative comes out soon - if anyone knows one, please let me know. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just stick to /usr/bin/dig.

(John) Howard hasn’t been doing too well in the polls lately, and with an election looming in a few months time, he seems to be trying all sorts of things, like youtube video’s and so on. Basically, most Australian’s, I think, are just looking for something new after the 11 years of him running the country - even if he does embrace Internet technologies, I don’t think it will help. Kevin Rudd (opposition leader) that I talked about some months ago recently opened his new website: http://www.kevin07.com.au - which a quick glance at the source code would reveal its running on Joomla.

The American election is probably a bit more interesting, as there are about 16 candidates at the moment, fighting it out in nationally telecasted debates, which we (the world) can all see on youtube! A few links below:
Youtube - presidential debate (search)
CNN 2008 Election Portal

After listening to most of the candidates, I really like Mike Gravel (Democrats), and to a lesser extent Ron Paul (Republicans). I won’t give any commentary, as I’m not American, and don’t really want to be, but if you have a listen to them, you might see why.

Oh, it was my birthday yesterday, turned 25! How much does that suck!