Older blog entries for Bleep (starting at number 60)

I seemed to spend the entire day trying to build Apache, a task I can normally complete in my sleep, with my eyes closed, my hands tied behind my back and only using my feet to type. The Apache+PHP + gd+pdflib +SSL combination is something I would not be wildy overestimating if I said I'd built over 1000 times (333 times a year over the last 3 years of working seems quite low actually). The developers decided however that they wanted some new toys, so we bunged in pspell and a bunch of extra graphics libraries and a few extra bits of memory management.

It was apparent from the fact that Shift+PgUp didn't go back far enough to see what had actually failed first and I had to play with redirection that things were not all as healthy as one might like. By lunchtime it was looking like I might have cracked it but the code elves got at it while I was at lunch and mangled the pspell code. It eventually built into a binary at 4:25pm and I decided that I would leave any testing until Monday when my nerves were less jangled. Produced a patch file against what's called internally "Build 18" against the vanilla sources, repatched and built clean.

Wandered home at 6 for Mothers birthday. Amazing Thai food at a place just up the road from them. Lots of fun. Went down the road to look at the church which is now lit up by flood lights. It's looks much better than the picture. Very nice.

This morning did not start well. The request from Mr C to put his drying in on my out this morning met with a complication - our inability to open the washing machine door. We've had this problem before, in fact we had it on Sunday with some stuff of Mr W's. After much discussion we decided the best course of action was a new machine. Mr C removed his clothes by force thereby ending the troubled life of the old machine.

The morning was a blur. The afternoon involved trying to move the department planning to MS Project, spending three hours creating a task with subtasks, and the heading off to find the wall planner - it's easier that way.

Picked up Mr W on the way home. Went shopping for washing machines. Ended up buying one of these from here. Put it in car. That was fun. Cleaned kitchen, installed, plumbed. Everything is nice again.

Wednesday

The letter from Dell arrived today. The laptop did not. Grrr. The house insurance policy documentation did though. This weekend we need to sort that out.

Spent much of the day learning about, and setting up IDS software. It all happened very quickly (thankfully).

Trundled home where we were accosted by Nicky who arrived unexpectedly in her new car. This did mean she joined us for the quiz night at the local pub. We did OK(ish). 73%. People who got two more questions right won. We will try again next week!

Thursday

The laptop is still in Production. How long does it take? Grrr! On the subject of cool tracking I got to start tracking the package of books Bryce has sent me over. There's been lots of refreshing going on today.

Decided on a new network map today, and the implementaion of the DMZ as well as the private server network. Instigated the first of the new sendmail cf files to co-ordinate all outgoing e-mail via one hub.

Argued with the landlord about doing work on the house which involved me suggesting that he might be forcing us to move out, him suggesting that he might give us notice anyway, me trying to smooth things over. The problem is it's going to be inconvenient any-which-way.

Fell asleep (fitfull) and woke up at 1am remembering I have to go present hunting for Mum yet before tomorow. Sorted out IMDB account. Grrr!

There's something to be said for making major purchases at 9:20 in the morning on a Monday. I now own a laptop. Much money exchanged hands and I got some upgrades. It's a PIII 750, 256Mb, 20Gb, 3 year on-site warranty, DVD, case etc. Nice.

On the way home I had the displeasure to experience an accident. This was not so nice. Phoned the police who decided I should stay in all evening so they could come around and talk to me about it. So I did, they didn't. Grrr.

Dublin accomodation still needs to be sorted out. Bad news.

Oh, and I worked out I can save about 150 quid a month on my direct debits starting in April. This will be good, just need to write a few letters to some people. Oh, and I got a quote from my current car insurance people that's 160 quid less than my current one. Even assuming interest on payments monthly I should still be about 10 quid a month better off! Need to wait another month till it needs renewing and see what they quote me!

Did some OU work until I discovered I had to take some notes and I don't have my book, which brings me to my final point? Where is it? Bryce?

Been a nice weekend day of doing nothing today. Late up, junk food for lunch, shopping, more shopping and some messing around in the evening. Cool!

Did finish writing the front page of my new www site. The rest of the content is to come soon!

OK, two days...

Friday

Finally got pissed off with the dashboard display reading "Oil service" for a minute when I turned the car on and took car to garage for service. Went to collect temporary car only to find out they'd given me a Fiesta! Now I own a VW Passat (huge fast car) they give me a Fiesta (Small, slow, heap of shit). Anyway took keys back and got cab to work.

Did virtually nothing all day. Lots of talking, lots of waiting, and very very little working. The whole day was punctuated by people phoning me with odd bits of news such as the money being in my account for the laptop and my car having a broken steering column.

Tried to buy a laptop from Dell but was thwarted by their desire to stop me impulse buying. In the end it looks like I have to wait till Monday - and then wait 10 days for delivery! Grrr! Collected car post service and with fixed steering. Bank balance not so good any more.

Saturday

Lazed around all day today. My Uni course started today and this involved lots of reading and sending messages to online conferences. All sorted now. Sorted out the house contents insurance with Endsleigh which has gone down since last I arranged it. Booked flight to Dublin for next month with RyanAir. I now have no-money and 2 weeks till payday - waaaah!

Well the sleeping thing is getting better at last - sadly this means I had very little excuse for being 3 minutes late for work this morning other than being quite lame this morning. The pancakes were nice for breakfast though!

Spoke to management about not particularly liking some of the questions on the AIDS risk assessment form from the life assurance people - they think I'm either a) gay, b) a drug user, c) prone to excessive bleeding. I mean, there's invasion of privacy and then there's stupid, and this is stupid. Da bosses were remarkably fine about it!

So I fixed a few bugs with some of our PHP, filled in my timesheet, had a meeting, and then realised it was time for home. Eeek! Still haven't finished our production Apache rpm.

Argued with landlord about rebricking the house. He seemed oblivious to the hassle getting the ISDN and satelite dishes was going to be - I'm not sure he expects the bill either - he's in for a surprise.

Sorted out car warranty docs for the poor cars trip to the garage tomorow, she's very nervous, as is my bank account.

So apparently it's Give me grief day today :(

Didn't get any sleep last night - I think the jetlag managed to catch up with me. Tired when I got up, horrid traffic etc. Not impressed.

People spent most of the day nagging me, mostly about things I wasn't even responsible for :( More RPM stuff, I think this might turn out to be very handy in the future - we can put all the patches and buildconf into one place and use yet still build a machine specific version - ace :)

Argued about laptop, work doesn't want to get me one. Specced up a Dell that's pretty much what I wanted but I didn't like the APR on their finance option. For a laugh I phone the bank to ask about a loan - and they were fine about it. Odd. Should be sorted by Saturday or Monday. They offered me a credit card too! Ace.

First day back in the office. Enthusiastic despite the traffic, lots of good (new) ideas!

Only 5451 e-mail messages and enough voicemail to twice crash the system in a "You have <pause=long>" where it should be telling me how many voicemail messages I had.

Decided to start with RPM. I see some coolness in RPM that I'd not noticed before - mainly as a way to standardise our Apache builds but using this recently discovered (well recently discovered by me) rebuild feature and some hardware discovery stuff. Very cool. Didn't get very far, rpm -Uhv rpm* died and rpm didn't work there-after. Had to reinstall and was majorly sidetracked by the crapness of the JetDirect software in our printers.

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

(Bah, you'd have thought I had no net connection the lack of entries!)

Wednesday 31 January

Thursday 1 February

Decided during the morning that I wanted to do something this afternoon that didn't involve food in particular (not that I'm sulking or anything but I do think Bryce might tell me some of the more "eccentric" aspects of the US society before I get bogged down in them). The idea was to go to see Cary today but apparently we got a bit lost (very lost I think).

The idea was to have an American burger for lunch, a real American burger. Somehow we ended up at Wendy's. Now in recent years my diet has gotten quite a lot better (not that you'd know) and this was quite mad... the grease, eek! Well I've tried one, and I'm not sure I ever want to again!

Ended up in Raleigh (downtown) which turned out to be quite a good thing. Spent a while driving around trying to work out where the hell we were, then looking for interesting things to do, found something that looked interesting! Lots of looking for parking ensues... found somewhere and headed back in the direction of the museum. The North Carolina Natural History Museum was damned cool in places (Folklore, Portrait gallery) and not so good in others (sport). When we finished there we ended up at Natural Sciences museum. Even cooler. Lots there.

Headed back to the car and the idea was to get some food on the way home but somehow we ended up at the cimena finding out what was on (so we could plan the evening) and ended up booking two films of which one started almost immediately. The first Traffic was an amazing film. The second film AntiTrust wasn't so good, but it wasn't as bad as it might have been.... and it was a very Gnomish. Hurrah! It was late when the films finished. Home for sleep!

Friday 2 February

Ended up spending most of the day at RHAT today, and Bryce was up before about mid-day which was strange - I didn't get to spend the morning checking e-mails and the such-like. Odd. Some mild hackery with BIND9 and the domain service stragery document etc. Bryce mostly in meetings. I was mostly reading UKUUG stuff and Open Uni stuff.

Went to the RHAT lunch haunt (it surprises me that Bryce knows where this is!) for lunch where they were having a free cake day. Needless to say no-one mentions this till after I've ordered enough food for lunch anyway! One of the people serving there is wearing a RHAT cap - this tells me something about the eating habits of the RHAT engineers!

Off to the mall to spend rather a lot of money on my credit cards :/ Did get some shirts and some of those nice GAP t-shirts that they've decided they're not going to sell in the UK any more - when I suggested (somewhat indignantly) to the woman in Bristol GAP that I would just have to buy them from the US I really did mean it!

Bryce came and collected me again and it was back to RHAT where Bryce played lots of games table-tennis and I did more constructive things (like attempt to empty their supply of Mountain Dew) and discuss issues like Credit Card verification.

Pizza for dinner which seemed to finish Bryce off and having returned to his office for some piccies we headed home - armed with reading material for me and an overwhelming desire to get the diary up-to-date before I start forgetting things!