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I wanted to write websites, so I learnt PHP. Nice and easy. Lots of example code. I then wanted to write stuff that ran on my Nokia N95 phone, so I learnt J[2]ME. Trickier. Debugging random network glitches/dropouts was a pain. I then went further down the Java path with Spring, JEE, JPA, JMS, DWR etc so that I could write huge Java websites and applications.

I wanted to give myself a challenge, so I've decided to learn 3 "languages". Russian. Erlang. Morse code.

Well, I finally finished the hard part of my diet today.

I had decided that I'd got a little tubby, and had heard about a diet called the Cambridge diet.

I decided I wanted two Tomcats running on the same box, one for "live", and one for "dev".

I'm going to put these notes here, for me, so I can do it again if I stuff things up, and for other people. You can cut and paste these commands blindly, or do them one at a time.

I did this on a Ubuntu "Jaunty" server, with 6.0.18-0ubuntu6.1 installed. Your mileage may vary if you have a different distro/version.

Decisions I made:

• I decided to call my dev one tomcat6dev.

Well, life has a funny way of working. I had planned to take more time, and be more choosy when buying a laptop, but something came up, which meant I had to get one fast.

So I plumped for the Acer TravelMate 5720, with 4GB RAM, ordered from eBuyer, who a: I've used before, and b:, seemed to be the cheapest.

And it's a good-'un.

So. The time has come for me to buy a laptop. I want it for coding, development, and various other bits and bobs. And of course, I have no intention of running anything other than Linux on it.

I can hear spacemen. They talk to me. But they don't answer when I talk back.

No, I'm not hallucinating.

For a long time now, most (if not all) of the astronauts that have gone up into space, to the International Space Station at least have been licenced amateurs. Indeed they used it for "emergency messaging while [the] Mir [space station] was in distress."

It has been said that all of mankind's greatest knowledge is held in sigs. And if it hadn't, it has now.

Slashdot is a site that allows users to put a sig at the bottom of their posts - some of these can be funny, ironic, or insightful.

My favourite is probably: "God is dead" - Nietzsche, 1882. "Nietzsche is dead" - God, 1900

I have saved a few of these over time, and have made them into a fortune file, which you can see yourself.

Ever wanted your own token based authentication, similar to RSA's SecurID?

I have written an implementation of a similar thing for phones and PDAs that run Java.

You can find it, and more info at http://mobfob.calum.org/

Amateur radio is a pretty cool hobby.

You can talk, send data, morse code (YouTube: Is morse faster than SMS?), pictures, or live TV to anyone all around the world.
You can do it from your home, car, or using a handheld in a tent on top of a hill.

Well, another itch needed to be scratched.

I wanted something that would teach me morse code, and I thought the best way was just to have something on my phone, which would play random codes to me, and then tell me what they were.

Couldn't find one, so wrote my own.

I used the cwpcm program from cwtext to generate the tones, and Audacity to record my dulcet tones.

It's tested on a Nokia N80 and an N95, but will probably work on quite a few more phones.