I’ve been forced to move out from my current hosting company (OnSmart) as they are moving out of business.

They first lost one domain for me (kept the money, though) and then had radio silence for a couple of weeks — until today they informed that they are swiftly going out of business. I had reacted a few days earlier and moved to HostMonster.com.

The site moving was surprisingly painless. I made a tarball of the files and dumped the databases, unpacked the files to the new location, and recreated the databases from the dumps. A few configuration file needed changing and then everything works ok. Or at least it looks like that. If you notice any glitches, please inform me.

Fortunately, nomadig.com is not registered through OnSmart. Better keep my domains and hosts in two different vendors.

Some of my Finnish readers may know that I’ve been participating in Enterprise 2.0 ebook project. My chapter related to doing business in the network in modern age has now been published. Unfortunately, it is available only in Finnish.

I’ve recently received a huge amount of various spam messages that have been addressed to Gunnar Selheden @ various domains of mine.

In the past, the spam has arrived with various addresses that are just random. This behaviour has changed a bit for now, and maybe in the future there will be more poor Gunnars as recipients.

I’m curious to know where the name has been picked up. Probably I’ll never know (but you never know).

I’ve been involved in writing a book about Enterprise 2.0. The book will touch a lot of stuff floating around the changes in the industry, as ways of working and communication are in constant flux nowadays.

The book is only in Finnish, as it is intended for the domestic markets. It will be published first in the Internet and maybe later it becomes a tangible printed book.

My Finnish speaking readers can go to www.yritys20.com. For the rest of you, I’ll provide short summaries from time to time, if anything interesting pops up.

The biggest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, run an article about LinkedIn, and I had the pleasure of being an average user with some people picked for short short interviews from my network.

I’m personally using the service for being updated what my former colleagues, friends and other aqcuitances are currently doing and where they are nowadays living. There were some other good reasons explored in the article, such as communicating, finding opportunities and so forth. Now I can also say that thanks to LinkedIn, I ended up in the newspapers…

The frequent readers remember that Nomadig.com has got its own share own spam comments. I used to handle the issue with Kitten’s Spaminator, but recently the sheer number of spam messages forced me to consider new alternatives.

I had read about Akismet now and then, but never had enough energy to give it a try. Then I installed it for a company that I’ve supplied blog, and the results were excellent. It went through the moderation queue and cleaned it up, and then continued sweeping the incoming comments.

I installed Akismet to Nomadig just before our trip to Thailand. After my return, I checked the status and there were over 3,000 comment spams in the Akismet spam queue. Everyone of those would have generated an email to me with Spaminator, so there were considerably less work to do for me.

The current count for the last 15 days (that’s how long Akismet keeps spam messages in the DB) is 4032 comments. I’ve had to check only a handful of spam comments that have slipped through Akismet.

I bought a Mac Mini a few weeks ago, as regular readers may remember… Anyhow, I got the box finally and installed it during the weekend in the living room. My idea is to replace an old Windows HTPC box that is too noisy and takes too long to boot.

The HTPC has our collection of audio and video files that needed to be transferred to the Mac Mini. This seemed to be a simple task, as I have two free FireWire disks, 320GB and 500GB.

The smaller disk was already formatted into Mac format, and I didn’t want to purchase MacDrive, so that option was ruled out immediately.

Thus, I formatted the second disk to NTFS and plugged it in to the HTPC. I moved all files to the disk (a big mistake…), plugget it out and plugget it into the mac. Mac aptly noticed that it cannot read the disk and prompted to initialise it. Of course, I declined and tried again. No luck.

Then I decided to plug the disk into another PC and transfer the files over the network — gigabit ethernet is a really sweet thing…

For some reason, the disk was no longer recognised by the other PC. Cold sweat emerged above my eyebrows… I fought half an hour with the disk and PC, connecting the disk with FireWire and USB to different ports and booting PC once a while.

Finally the disk worked, for a while, using USB, so I could copy one file to the PC’s disk. Then booted and copied a dozen files more. Then booted and copied the rest of the files. Phew! For some reason the mac mangled the disk so that PC could not write it. The disk failed every time some program tried to write something.

Then I copiedthe files to Mac over the network. After spending most of the day, the files had moved half a meter from PC to Mac. Moral of the story: do not connect too big NTFS FireWire drives to Mac and never just move files between computers, copy instead.

I’ve been supporting my parents with their computer for a few years. This Christmas I was planning to have a major changes in the system, as it has been aging.

I purchased a set of stuff as presents and brought a few old items with me, too.

On Friday, I set up a wireless network for me and Sanna to work with our laptops. It also protects the desktop computer with its built-in firewall. That was easy and straightforward, the system was configured in no time and worked like a charm. The second step was to install VNC for remote helping, and that went flawlessly as well.

I also run a few spyware tools, uninstalled an old virus scanner and installed a new one — that promptly told me that there is not enough memory in the system. I had tried to buy memory from Polvijärvi, but as the computer dates back from 1998, there were no DIMM chips available. Fortunately the nice folks of Pekan Kone knew a specialist store in Joensuu, the nearest bigger town.

The store was open on Saturday — to my surprise — and as we had some other stuff to purchase from Joensuu, we got an outrageously expensive DIMM chip and a very cheap used second hard drive for the computer. The rest of the day was spent with the computer, as it failed to find the other half of the 256 MB DIMM and as the disk drive seemed to be corrupt. I was working together with my brother-in-law Juha.

We did everything we could, changed order of memory chips, flashed BIOS and reconfigured Windows. Finally we noticed that the auto-select IDE switch was not working properly and the second IDE channel had two masters. After that the disk drive worked perfectly.

Santa brought my parents an anti-virus program, a web camera with headsets and an USB hub. Juha installed them on Sunday together with Skype. There were no sound from the headset and the video crashed Skype, but otherwise everything was ok.

The audio out was easy, as the volume for WAV was set to zero. Video is not working still this day. We got the video from the camera using Logitech’s own tools, but Skype showed always grey box. While debugging this, I had to reorganise the hard drives, as there were only 20 MB left on C: and the drive was badly fragmented. That speed up the computer, but video problem was still there. I downgraded Skype and upgraded video drivers with no visible difference. This took five hours. At the end I didn’t have too much Christmas spirit left…

Finally the power supply died, as a final insult. We were just leaving, Sanna had dressed Aapo for the trip and I had finished updating Windows. But the computer would not boot. No matter how many times I pushed the switch…

We had to leave with mixed feelings and left my parents to deal with the situation. Fortunately they knew a person skilled with IT hardware and could get the system running again with a borrowed power supply.