I’m back from my couple of weeks in France. The weather was lovely and we even went to the mobile home for a few days. I was there for Pippa’s birthday too.

Work’s been busy-ish since I got back – mainly catching up on what’s been going on since I’ve been away. Weather’s been pretty good for Ipswich too.

I’ve been to the doctors – he said that I’ve probably torn some ligaments (or something like that) in my back, which takes longer to heal than a kneck injury, which is just stretching of the ligaments. A physiotherapist is going to be getting back to me within a couple of days for a consultation.

I’m back in France for some R&R to get over my back pains from the car crash. The weather’s been lovely for a couple of days – at least 28C.

We noticed that the spray job on my car isn’t 100%, so that will be at least another two days faffing around with Citroen.

I’ve added tag support to my blog, so you can see the tag cloud on the right sidebar, which shows what I’ve been writing about mostly – the bigger the text, the more entries. Its more fine-grained than just categories.

I’ve been looking at Fedora 9 prerelease today. Its not working too well with VMWare – the Tools partially install but don’t actually run – so the NIC is down on boot and the screen drivers don’t seem to work. Anyway, it’s got LUKS disk encryption out of the box – i.e. you select “encrypt disk” in the Anaconda installer and it will encrypt the entire disk minus the /boot partition, and prompt you for a passphrase on boot.

I’ve been playing with RedHat Kickstart – which is the Linux equivalent of Solaris’ Jumpstart, basically an automated network install. I kickstarted a virtualised CentOS 5.1 (RHEL 5 update 1) from Fedora 7. It was quite easy actually, you just boot from the CentOS CD, type “linux ks=nfs:….” at the grub prompt and away you go. I had to enter IP information as I wasn’t running DHCP.

I noticed that Fedora’s system-config-kickstart seems to add “%end” statements that don’t seem to be compatible with CentOS’s kickstart parser, but other than that it works. I selected the packages to install, network info etc. and added a few post-install commands to add/remove users, disable services, configure the firewall and do a yum update. After about 15mins you’re all done and have a graphical login screen!

There’s a new show on TV called Breaking Into Tesco’s, which I gather is a Dragon’s Den rip-off in that people try to get their products bought by Tesco.

Well from the new products that I tried in this week’s shop, it must be pretty easy to do as I was shocked how awul this stuff was – and yet it still managed to get past the tasters and quality control people onto the shelves. Luckily as these things were new they were on special offer and quite cheap (all under a Pound):