Site's been down recently whilst I have been moving everything to a new (virtual) server.

The main reason for doing this was because I wanted to start using Gallery 3 for my photo gallery. In order to do this I needed to perform a 'gallery 2 import', a handy module in G3 to import your whole G2 installation, including comments and tags.

Amazon's Simple Storage System or S3 for short, is what I have decided to use from now on (for now until I discover yet something else) to backup my life.

I have been using Seesmic (#seesmic @seesmic) on my Android phone (HTC Desire) for a while now and must say I like it a lot. Just works nice and looks good. Plus support for Facebook is coming soon and I like the 'all-in-one' type of approach.

I wanted to set up a simple home server properly for a long time. Just something that would serve up my media files and give me somewhere to permanently set up some samba shares where any computer can access and store data. I also wanted to continue to be able to backup my (this) website at home. This I was doing using a simple NAS drive connected to my router. I could just FTP into it from the web server and mirror the server as a backup.

Recently got a new netbook in the form of a Samsung N130 to replace my Advent, which met its demise at the hands of my 20 month old. It was replaced on household insurance fortunately and its spec seems basically the same. I think they're all much of a muchness really. Seems like a nice netbook for my basic purposes.

For a while I have been trying to learn some programming skills. It is something I would like to do purely for fun and if I can get to a stage where I have decent programming capabilties then I can enjoy writing applications and perhaps start giving something useful back to the Linux community.

To start with the best intentions, I decided to set up a simple Subversion version control system on my server to allow me to keep control of my programming progress in an orderly manner. This blog entry just simply describes how I went about setting it up.

Subversion is a version control system which one can use to keep track of a project and have the ability to 'check out' stuff to work on then 'check in' the changes, keeping old revisions of work in case you need to revert back to an earlier version. This is great, especially when learning, as you don't need to keep saving new copies of your program as it develops every time you want to try something new in case you mess it up and need to revert back to your previous version.

Since playing around with this new drupal site, plus I have a lot of my personal photos stored in the gallery I really wanted to have some sort of backup strategy, so for now I am using lftp to send the selected data to a NAS device that is connected to my home network.

I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04 on an old Dell Latitude laptop and wanted it to be wireless capable. This laptop did not have inbuilt wireless capabilities so I wanted to get a USB dongle for it. I thought most wireless USB dongle would just plug'n'play with Ubuntu but as it turns out this one did not.