Older blog entries for Al (starting at number 79)

Woo. Friday evening at last. The last couple of days have dragged somewhat - probably something to do with impending holiday :)

Most of my time in the last 24 hours has been spent trawling through documentation for the 9110 trying to work out how to make it work as an modem for my laptop. I figure I can't go on holiday without a network connection. Anyway turns out that if you set the baud rate of the cable to 56K at both ends and various bits of ritual sacrifice you can now get it to dial in at 9600 (the max for data calls on all but the Orange GSM network).

Lots of packing to to do. Tomorrow morning at 10:40 I get the Virgin Train to Edinburgh for a week. Superb!

I always find it hard to focus at work when I'm about to have a few days holiday! This is made even harder by the boss being away as well.

Sendmail is a pain in the neck. Sendmail in a Cobalt Raq is even more of a pain as I can't be dealing with the stupid frontend but the admin tools kept overwriting my changes. Anyway this machine we're co-locating came to us with some interesting sendmail configs. I shoud have checked it for open relay but it seems I forgot. MAPS didn't. I remember now why all the other machines are moving to exim.

Lots of holiday planning. I'm off for 10 days at the Edinburgh Fringe as of Saturday morning and to use up my holiday days I've just booked another short holiday to harass Bryce in NC.

Meanwhile my brother is off to Canada for two months traveling in the Rockies so we had a sort of farewall meal at a restaurant near my parents place.

Today is Mr B's birthday and so we (the usual group) head down to the bowling alley for a few games... interupted several times by obvious faults in the game control software... "What can you expect, it runs on NT!" said the manager... amazing! We got some extra free games out of that.

Dinner at TGI Fridays (a US themed restaurant near the bowling place) which was a lot of fun but rather loud. It's the first time I've been to that one in Bristol (there are two) since the incident with Alan and Bryce... hopefully the poor girl didn't lose her hearing... I would feel most bad.

Afterwards we saw The Parole Officer which was very funny indeed. I doubt it will make it to the US though.

Oops, a weeks worth of stuff nearly...

I was pretty startled to discover on Monday that a mis-configuration on my ISDN Lan Modem meant that inbound traffic was not, as I had thought, being rejected but was in fact being rewritten through the NAT to my Linux box. Various bits of security testing, verifying, and trawling through logs have convinced me that there was no compromise... but I've not paid nearly enough attention to the security of the box. I found this by chance as I attempted to see how the NAT handled SSH traffic in (better than I'd imagined!). Since I need to SSH in I've secured the machine somewhat now :) Various problems with 3com intelligent NAT were overcome in the process.

On Thursday I managed a very uneventful (and remarkably timely) trip to to London to see Ted T'So talk about the past, present and future of Linux as he sees it. It was an entertaining evening and I got to see a few UKUUG conference faces again.

This weekend I have to spend catching up on OU work and perhaps some house hunting... if I can be bothered. If I can't I'll learn some more Java and Exim (which is soon to replace Sendmail on all the machines at work)... oh and it's the balloon fiesta so I'd better go and see some of that too!

Seems I'm still going to London for the UKUUG talk which will be by Ted Ts'o rather than the scheduled talk by Tim O'Reilly.

Figured I'd have a bit of a play with the newly arrived free SimCard from Genie/BT Cellnet. Free SMS and WAP might be nice but I'm reluctant to change from my current provider Vodafone.

Between watching the last ever episode of Voyager I tried to install JBuilder.

Things improved somewhat towards the end of the week. Started doing stuff with Java which is painfully complicated to get working - far too many environmental variables and bits that aren't compatible and an old 6.2 Red Hat release on my PC doesn't help. Never mind, it's working now.

The Regatta down on the harbour was somewhat fun over the weekend (damp yesterday but sunny today). Spent various bits of the weekend reading documents on the UK Government GovTalk site and related documents all over the place. Good to see they're embracing the net - just the implementation is bad.

OpenSSH has annoyed me by not being quite as portable to Solaris as it is to Linux. Most of the chroot() stuff doesn't work. It doesn't work in SSH (fi) either. Took me a lot of messing around to acheive the desired result considering the client requires a W32 client too.

Tuesday I watched Das Boot... the directors cut... 3.5 hours. Wednesday I saw some fantastic live comedy in Bath at the Theatre Royal. Must spend less money this month, MM is very unhappy and keeps showing me red overspend marks :/

Too hot to sit in front of computers at the moment. The sooner people bring to market cheap flat-screen monitors the happier I will be as I'm sure they're the biggest source of heat both at home and in the office!

Various bits of bad conference news today. Firstly it seems that Red Hat have canned TechWorld which is rather a shame - I was looking forward to that. And despite the site being still up Linux Expo b'ham is apparently cancelled too, as is ApacheCon. So what am I going to do this summer? Firstly I've booked my train tickets to see Tim O'Reilly at the UKUUG. I also took advantage (despite problems getting back from the UKUUG Linux Developers Conference earlier this month) to take a Virgin Train to Edinburgh for The Fringe... the perk being the offer that means I can go first class for less than flying... I'm up for that!

Meanwhile it's been hot here recently (30C is hot for here!) It was so nice over the weekend that we went for a walk on Saturday to South Wales and were so impressed we went back on Sunday to do some house- hunting in Chepstow. Looks like a definate contender for moving house next year. Decided to attend more small restaurants after a definately un-satisfactory trip to one of the more plastic places in the Cribbs Mall (bad site but you get the idea). Also saw Tomb Raider which I quite enjoyed.

Now if only it would cool down a bit I could get on with some work.

Work improved a little so far this week. Mostly entirely by accident and circumstances - probably not for the right reasons at all!

Went to the cinema on Tuesday to see Shrek which I thought was hillarious.

I must get on and finish the work I was doing for the LDP. I feel rather bad I started a task and haven't touched it since - but I've had very little free time, and I've managed to fill that... mostly realising my haphazard approach to learning Python was somewhat flawed and I had to go back and read some bits of the early pages of the manual to make sure I understood stuff. Very annoying.