I've been lucky enough to stay away from Windows Vista, having moved to the Mac at home. I've had several chances to play with Windows Vista, but I still prefer the look and feel of Windows XP. A friend who is a Vista user recently had to reinstall from scratch (due to a hardware issue, not a Windows issue), and I needed to use his PC (since reading NTFS filesystems on an old hard disk is something Windows is pretty good at).

The Dell PowerEdge R300 has a Broadcom 5722 network card, which isn't supported by the latest release of FreeBSD (7.0). Patches for the Broadcom 5722 are in the development versions of FreeBSD, but in order to get the development versions, it's easiest if you have net access, which is hard without a working network card.

Seen on BBC Breakfast this morning in an interview about the government's 5-a-day campaign:

Q: "What's in banana chips that makes them healthy?"
A: "Banana"

It's now 6 months since I got my iMac. So what do I think of it?

Apple have launched iTunes Movie Rentals in the UK, and while the pricing is higher than the US pricing, it isn't too bad, considering the usual $=£ conversion. However, the pricing of Apple TV still leaves a lot to be desired.

In terms of configuration management systems for UNIX systems, cfengine is one of the best known, having been around for 15 years. It appears to have a good reputation. Sadly the documentation is pretty dire...

Having a mortgage with Barclays was a result of a discussion with a mortgage advisor when I bought I first house. They worked out the cheapest over three years, so it seemed a logical choice.

The site has been migrated from Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. At the same time I've chosen to change the layout, as it:

1. Allows more options and flexibility
2. Is more standards compliant
3. Allows me to test some changes here before I unleash them on BackupExecFAQ.