Chris Dean’s Personal Website

The Sparks, the Sparks!!!

0 Comments Published October 2nd, 2007 in Cool Videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec

Why Astrology Is and Is not Necessarily All Rubbish

0 Comments Published September 25th, 2007 in My Beliefs.

Think about astrology fora minute - what actually is it?

Well, ignoring all the planetary mumbo-jobo for a second, it’s the matching of the time of the year with the time a person is born.

Before clocks existed at least in wide spread fashion, everybody knows (or should know) that the passing of time (especially when talking about extended periods) was simply measured by more empirical means i.e. the moving of the stars in the heavens, the phases of the moon and so on.

At various points in history, (misguidedly, but no one was to know any the wiser) greater significance has been given to the fact that a certain set of stars passes overhead regularly at the same kind of time every year, leading to suggestions that the orientation of the stars actually effects the course of events on earth.

We now know the reason why certain sets of stars pass overhead at certain times so the belief that they actually have any baring on life on Earth should really be laid to bed by those that still hang onto this archaic notion.

If we get back to the core association of time of birth and time of year however we can reason why there may be likenesses, identifiable traits in people born around the same time, or born at opposing times of the year.

Take my case for instance, I was born on September the 13th 1980 which makes me a Virgo.

What does this mean, if anything at all?

Well it means for a start, in very general terms, that my early life experiences are going to be similar to all other Virgos because, generally the same things happen on a yearly cycle. The end of the summer is upon us and certain events such as harvests and other festivals occur.

I will have more in common with Virgos born in or around my birth year and particularly in my country as the feelings and values of the community around us and the bigger events we witness that may, on subconscious level shape are lives are likely to be very similar.

I do have more to add to this article, but in the interest of getting this out there I’ve decided to let it loose now.

I think there’s enough in there for you to see where I’m going with this - in a nut shell, when we are born does influence our lives; our personalities; our relationships with those around us, but not due to any thing apparently caused by the stars themselves, more because those born at a similar time share similar experiences at valued times in our lives (birthdays, etc) which draws us together, and over years of observation can lead to stereotypical behaviours.

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I Am An Agnostic

0 Comments Published September 24th, 2007 in My Beliefs.

In this section of my blog I hope to outline my beliefs about life, religion, how the world works, etc.

As time goes on I’m sure my beliefs will change and as such a post written now may conflict with a post I write 3 years from now - if this is the case then so be it - that is the nature of personality, just take the views expressed in the most recent entry as being the most applicable at that time.

Also I invite you to (intelligently) challenge my beliefs. Why? Simply because, in my opinion, without a good reason to believe the things you do there’s no real point in believing them at all.

I’m open to all arguments against the things I post here and I will discuss any topic, however for any zealots out there who suggest I believe Christianity or any other religion just because they do and they must be right, don’t bother. Give me a good reason why you’re right and I will happily debate it with you, and you may change my mind about a subject, but just “Because it is so” is not a good argument to base any discussion on.

So let me start off by stating that I am an Agnostic person.

The web defines this as:

An Agnostic [1] [noun] [OW] embraces a worldview in which the existence of deity is unknown or unknowable. Derives from the Greek agnostos, a = without, gnostos = known or knowledge. “Agnostic[ism] [CE] was coined by Professor TH Huxley in 1869 to describe the mental attitude of one who regarded as futile all attempts to know the reality corresponding to our ultimate scientific, philosophic, and religious ideas.”

What this means to me is that we are beyond the ability to know everything; why we are here; what the universe is apparently expanding into (more about this here); what the meaning of life is; what happens once we die; and so on.

All we can ever possibly do or achieve directly is that which makes living life easier for us and those around us. Those around us may be your family, your friends, your community, your country or even the globe if you are in a direct position or lucky enough to influence those areas, but that is essentially it - nothing more.

Of course there is a lot we can not achieve by the same token by making life disruptive to those around us or by doing nothing at all, but overall I believe the human spirit to be good natured, and that good natured people beget good natured people.

You scratch my back I’ll scratch yours; karma; love thy neighbour; one good turn deserves another; whatever you want to call it the general message is there all around us and it doesn’t belong to one religion or set of beliefs - it’s a basic human fact of survival. And if only others truly realised the meaning of that maybe, just maybe the world would be a better and more tolerant place to live in.

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Adding Additional Software Repositories To Yum

0 Comments Published July 19th, 2007 in Linux.

I’ve added this post here as I’ve found it useful in the past, and the original site (http://soundlinuxtraining.com/portal/mod/book/view.php?id=2330&chapterid=30) seems to be offline, so I’ve rescued it from the Google cache and re-posted it here, mainly for my own reference but if anyone else finds it useful too all the better:
Other distributions have nice graphical software installers that serve as equally functional tools to
their command-line equivalents. In true Red-hat fashion CentOS isn’t one of those. You may have
noticed that the Applications -> System Settings -> Add/Remove Applications GUI doesn’t
always include the stuff you want. That’s because it only installs software off the distribution CDs.
Not real bright that one isn’t. The other GUI is the up2date program which handles all your system
updates. This works great but doesn’t allow you to select a package that’s not already installed.
Hrmph.. So back to the cli we go.

Yum is the cli tool used on CentOS to install software. It’s fairly good but the default CentOS OS
retains nearly 100% compatibility to RHEL4 so if Redhat didn’t include it neither will CentOS. You
can break that compatibility by adding more software archives though. Some are tested by CentOS
and some are third party.

CentOS Plus The CentOS Plus repository is already set up on CentOS 4 but it isn’t enabled. The reason for
this it breaks compatibility with RHEL4. If you want to install software from it on a case by case
basis just enable it for that one operation

[root@shuttle ~]# yum –enablerepo=centosplus install <packagename>

If you decide that RHEL4 compatibility isn’t that important you can just enable it in the
/etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file. Scroll down to the [centosplus] section and edit the
enable=0 to equal enable=1

#additional packages that extend functionality of existing packages
[centosplus]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Plus
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/centosplus/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4

CentOS ContribThe CentOS Contrib repository is already set up on CentOS 4 but it isn’t enabled. These
packages are contributed to CentOS but have NOT been tested by the CentOS team at all.
You’ve been warned.

[root@shuttle ~]# yum –enablerepo=contrib install <packagename>

If you want enable contrib all the time you change the /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
file again. Scroll down to the [contrib] section and edit the enable=0 to equal enable=1

#contrib - packages by Centos Users
[contrib]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Contrib
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/contrib/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4

Fedora Extras for CentOS (from Karan)To add the Fedora Extras (prebuilt for CentOS) repository to CentOS:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://centos.karan.org/kbsingh-CentOS-Extras.repo

If you want to track updates using up2date:

echo “yum kb-centos-extras http://centos.karan.org/el4/extras/stable/$ARCH/RPMS” \
>> /etc/ >sysconfig/rhn/sources