Isomedia will be taking performing maintenance on a router at the Bellevue Co-Location facility starting at midnight tonight (12/15).  The expected downtime is about five minutes.

Shellx now listens to an alternate ssh port, port #443.  This was requested because of a need to be able to connect behind firewalls blocking port 22.

Citadel hasn’t exactly been a resounding success.  It has not been fully functional owing to conflicts with other things present on the server.

Citadel conflicts with Tomcat preventing Tomcat from becoming operational.  Tomcat provides Java containers or servlets. I am going to remove Citadel for now so that I can get Tomcat working.

Tomcat is required by Guacamole. Guacamole provides a means to access a remote desktop with only an HTML5 and AJAX capable web browser.

This won’t replace NX as NX does many things to compress data and reduce latency and has some capabilities that Guacamole doesn’t have yet.  But it will make remote desktops available to many more devices.

After I get this working, I will setup a new server for Citadel.  Citadel wants access to so many resources that it pretty much conflicts with almost anything else on the same machine.  Much of it’s functionality is unavailable now because the web server, and other services are using ports which Citadel wants to use.

Anyone who has an old Nvidia card and is using Windows, I highly recommend you download and install the most recent drivers from Nvidia as they provide a non-trivial performance increase in addition to making the control panel work with the old hardware properly.

I want to thank the folks at Nvidia for making the drivers available for old hardware like my ancient GeForce 6200, it’s nice not to have a vendor abandon those of us who can’t afford to always be on the bleeding edge like so many vendors have.

I’ve also installed Bywater BASIC on shellx. It can be invoked as “bwbasic”, and is in /usr/local/bin. It is more like the old Microsoft BASIC that used to run on Trs-80 model I/III/4’s or the early BASIC that ran on PC’s. It has a built in editor that works as the editor of those BASIC interpreters did.

For those of you who remember the OLD BBS, from 1982-1985, it was written in a modified basic that I called ComBASIC which has BASIC syntax and keywords but also had additional keywords for BBS functionality such as TYPE(filename) which would send a file to the RS-232 and screen paged.

I wrote ComBASIC in Z-80 assembly because there were no host programs available for the TRS-80 in the early days and the operating system didn’t know how to use the RS-232 port.  Also, Microsoft BASIC was painfully slow and I was able to get about a 40% improvement in BASIC interpretation speed, fix some bugs, and implement other things that were just too slow in BASIC.  Them were the days of “real programming”. 🙂

Well, those that miss playing with those old 80’s computers, I’ve got vintbas (Vintage Base) online now for your enjoyment on shellx.  To use it, create a basic program using any text editor, save it with an extension of ‘.bas’, and then run it as "vintbas program.bas".

Sorry no manual page was provided with it.  It’s actually implemented in Haskell, which is also available on shellx for your use.

I’ve added a new webpage that describes how Eskimo North’s spam filtering works and how to customize it to your needs and preferences.

Please see:

     http://www.eskimo.com/support/mail/spam_control.html

WordPress 3.6 has been released.  We’ve updated the version available in /misc/wordpress to version 3.6.

If you’re running an older version, go to your Dashboard and click on the little symbol with two arrows pointing at each other, that’s WordPress updates, and select the update option and it will update to 3.6 automatically.

Our web server has been updated to Apache 2.4.6.  Apache 2.4.5 was skipped because it was never released.

I’ve compiled SpamAssasin’s system-wide rules.  I tested from a gmail account to check delivery times.  Before it took 35 seconds for gmail mail to be delivered to a local mailbox.  Compiling the SpamAssassin system-wide rules reduced that to 5 seconds.