Right, my server is almost ready. I just need to get the kernel, which surprisingly enough I've managed not to keep and it's coming in quite slowly. It wouldn't be so bad, but the network keeps falling out so I need to restart the download, which my desktop (through which everything goes at the moment) only allows after a while. Why? I stopped wondering some time ago with regard to Windows and networks.

I expect for the server to be fully operational tomorrow midday, maybe with the exception of the wireless connectivity. On the one side, I have to hand-write the start-up script for it, and on the other, I have to use ndiswrapper for one card, and a not-so-stable driver on the other. It works, I've seen it work, I've patched it to work (actually compile, but let's not go there) and the only real problem is that I need to use the USB one.

It still amazes me how after so much time, you still can't get two computers showing non-ASCII characters the same way. I still can't manage to transfer accented/umlauted vowels or letters with "drawings around them" (by which I mean ñ, ç and the like) correctly.

I'm trying to standarize on UTF-8, which would show promise if everyone else decided to join in. At home, I've decided to use that so I can host my files on the server and download them from any OS or architecture and have it display the same. I've managed to do it (more or less) with PuTTY, emacs and bash, but much work is still needed.