My nephew came over today for a few hours, we played various Xbox games – he’s mad on driving games like Burnout3 and MX vs ATV Unleashed, although not so keen on Outrun2. He’s much better at Sonic The Hedgehog than me. Surprisingly for a 4-year-old, he could read things like “2 player”, “Sega” etc; and even navigate through the setup menu’s to start a different game. Then finished off with pizza (which he plastered in Tabasco sauce!) cooked in the new oven and doing some washing and a quick walk down the road. We discovered he quite likes gherkins and mixing mayonnaise with tomato ketchup, but doesn’t like green bell peppers (only red ones!?)

I’ve been playing around with WordPress and thought I’d try the WYSIWYG editor again, its been a while so I wondered if the annoyances had been fixed and some real functionality added, but it turns out there’s no difference from when I tried it back in v1.7 days. The way you add links still is not as easy as just putting the HTML in, and the linebreaks are annoying, plus its not exactly Dreamweaver. I think the visual editor in Plone was better.

I’ve also been playing with SSH tunnelling – the magical ProxyCommand in ssh_config allows you to do things like use another machine as a gateway, so host A can go through host B to get to host C and so on. I even managed to tunnel a HTTP session from a machine three hops away to my desktop web browser! Its all described as part of the book Hacking Linux Exposed.

I thought I’d try to see how VirtualBox handles running more guest OSes than the host has CPU cores, so I ran CentOS 4, CentOS 5, Win2003, XP Pro and Windows7 all at the same time. It still only uses a few percent of the CPU, and I’ve still got plenty of the 8Gb RAM left over; plus look at the fancy Compiz window opacity, ooh pretty…..

I just watched Bill Bailey’s Tinselworm standup show, it was OK, pretty average stuff for BB. Frankie Boyle Live was much better, although it did seem to degenerate into slagging off the audience and swearing at them after a while, I guess the guy can’t take heckling!