el rinconcito

I don't run my opera unite services that often, but I had them on today and actually got a note on my "fridge." Yay! Thanks Carol.

Opera explains the Unite services in detail here. I'm primarily into messaging and communicating with others, so some of the unite services suit me. Unite is included in the latest release of the Opera browser by default, though you do have to turn each app on, which is good, so you aren't running anything you didn't intend to.

When I am home, I leave my computer running 24/7 with all my messengers on. I like chatting in real time, but I also like getting messages when I get up in the morning that friends have left me overnight. The Opera Unite "fridge" is kind of cool for this.

I also used the "photo sharing" application twice today to serve a few pics to friends in places where my usual method is blocked, i.e. flickr. You know some countries block flickr and youtube, right? This gets right around that, as does e-mail, usually.

So, there is some fun and usefulness for me in Opera Unite, but there are a few hindrances.

Very few people, myself included, run Unite for more then a few minutes or hours at a time. Those who do almost invariably leave the password setting turned on, so you cannot casually view a picture or leave a message. A password is great for many situations, but I usually just want to show or view a few casual pics right then and there! Asking for a password makes me move on.

Also, just a couple of beta versions ago, leaving Opera Unite running all the time would eventually make the browser freeze up on me. That seems to be fixed now, but I am still not accustomed to leaving a web browser running all the time.

Well, there ya have it. I like it. It's cool, but I haven't popped the cork out of the bottle yet. It's new stuff, though. Maybe the richest potential is still to come.

Opera Software still has a sense of humor all the time. See the image below. It says, "Opera Unite is running fine." That's cute!

For quite awhile now this machine has been acting strangely (posts here and here), then suddenly everything is OK again.

The problem was that the hard drive kept showing errors, or the swap wouldn't mount, or the main partition wouldn't mount. I ran an fsck manually one time after the system went down, and it fixed a lot of errors, then the system went down again. I'm not that much of a geek about these things, so I have to guess at what to do as best I can.

I kept checking the IDE drive connections and even replaced the cable one time. Same problem.

I wanted to drop in a new SATA hard drive to see if the old IDE drive was what was giving problems, but I had to flash the BIOS to get it to work. This machine is about five years old, I think, and probably SATA's weren't around that much back then.

Anyway, once I flashed the BIOS, all is OK again. I didn't even install the new drive. Why would the BIOS make any difference? It's the same firmware that has worked correctly for years. I'll cross my fingers. All is running well for three days now, but probably it will go down again after this post.

All this reminds me of an English car I had many years ago. I would replace the brakes only to find out that some wiring went bad afterwards. I'd repack a wheel bearing and then the muffler would fall off. That car was the master of strange unrelated problems. The computer seems to be acting the same.