Older blog entries for Seri (starting at number 5)

Wednesday: E-Mail from heaven, I'm so happy I could sing, my previous company is no longer trying to take me to court and is willing to accept my offer, that potentially makes me £3000 better of, I am so glad they saw sense, I doubt I could have afforded the legal fees if they hadn't.

I'm currently distressed that someone has rated me as a journeyer, makes no sense to me.

Tuesday: Feel guilty about lack of participation in things Linux related, so I'm spending a large chunk of time answering questions on the LFS mailing lists. Keep being pestered to start tidying up the cables in the server room, our IT 'Manager' is threatening to remove access, if only he would my life could be a better place to live, ho hum.

Am still getting to grips with the trust metric system on advogato, was surprised when I logged on this morning to find I'd been certified by a few people, nice to see. In turn I went through each of the people looking at the projects they were involved in and being distressed that I had actually used most of them so I was aware of the quality of coding, used this knowledge to rate them in turn. Not sure if that's right but it works for me.

Hmmm, talked someone though how to move the /boot partition onto another drive and I carried out the instructions my self to make sure I hadn't missed anything, then moved it back, X locked my machine and rather the use SysRq I just rebooted, guess who forgot to rerun Lilo?
Had the lovely LI prompt. One tomsrtbr+loadlin later and I'm back in business.

Moderate success on the Advanced Server Howto, left DNS be for the mo and carried on with squid and squirm, still cannot decide between Apache Proxy and Squid, Apache seems to do a better job of getting cache hits but Squid can do a hell of a lot, setup squirm so that it blocks 90% percent of web adverts, gave me a warm feeling inside.

Monday: Work is extremely boring, project has been 75% signed off, we're just doing housekeeping now, means sitting round all day, ocassionally running some performance tests.

Ho hum.

Went to see an old friend to show off the car, had fun driving round London back roads.

Sunday: Shoot the people who try to include SCART sockets on devices, none of them are standard! Woke up this morning with my Daughter complaining that the Nintendo doesn't work, investigate the problem, the Nintendo has picture but no sound, spend the majority of the morning trying different wiring combinations. Should be easy:
TV with 2 SCART Sockets
Sky Box with 2 SCART Sockets
Video with 2 SCART Sockets
Nintendo with 1 SCART Output
Stereo with 1 SCART Input (not strictly true but close enough)
Should be able to wire TV to stereo so all sound from TV will also go to stereo, should then be able to wire Sky into TV, should then be able to wire Video into Sky and lastly Nintendo into Video, when I do I get no sound from stereo (bugger) Finally after much head scratching I get it sorted.

Discover that my server is still rebooting itself, worry that the processor may have already fried and is merely finishing its death throes. After investigation it appears that it randomly decides to reboot when the lid is closed, bizarre bahaviour, it can wait a random ammount of time, implement a temporary fix by jamming a thin book under the lid to stop it tripping the close detection button.

Get sidetracked away from DNS by Squid and Squirm, have fun getting them configured to block all traffic from ad sites, then try to tackle getting the Apache proxy server to route through them, is probably very easy but I can't think straight atm.

To tired, job for another day.

Saturday: Good intentions have a funny way of being easily forgot until it's to late. Had big plans for today, I should have gone to the gym (still vainly trying to pursue fitness), then gone into town with Ranj to look at DVD players, after that I could devote the day to sorting out DNS. What actually happend, I woke up late with the headache from hell, said stuff it to going to the gym, met with Ranj and tootled into town, wandered around aimelessly looking like the living dead, brought some new CD's (PJ Harvey, Daft Punk and Death in Vegas), then tootled home, never made it as far as looking for DVD players, phoned on the way home by the wife to ask if I could get some compost (the moment the suns out she gets all these gardening ideas).

Started tinkering with the server, came to the conclusion that it's overheating (the server is a small P233MMX Laptop), after some dissasembly I've found that the chassis cooling fan isn't being powered. Snipped the wires and soldered on some new longer ones then investigated wiring it into other sources of power on the mboard, all too high, the fan wants 12V and all the ones I'm finding are 48V, good for cooling, bad for noise. Hit on a brain wave, dig out an old variable transformer, cut of one of the connectors that I never use, set it to 14V and then wire it up to the fan, presto, it's running slightly faster with no noticeable noise increase, admitidly it now uses up an extra plug socket but so what.

Decide to leave tinkering for a while whilst I investigate storage in the bedroom (spurred on by the fact that whilst looking for the tranformer I filled the living room with all my cables and useless gizmo's), decide to buy some new wardrobes and end up trying to fathom the strangest logic ever.

Point: Acording to wife we can't afford two new wardrobes which with all the fittings come to about £350, so we decide to buy one this month and one next. Get to Ikea and walk out with no wardrobes but two bedside cabinets, a new chest of drawers and a new TV unit, total cost £400, all chosen by her, where's the logic?

Well my productivity time has been eaten away, got back at about 6:30 and finished putting Ikea furniture together at about 10:00 and then spent a further 3 hours trying to wire the SCART sockets up correctly, am now to tired to be productive.

Friday: Feel a bit of a fraud, have opened an advogato account although the ammount of development I actually do is minimal.

Never mind, I'll make it up with the ammount of documentation I'm churning out (oh my how we love those HOWTO's).

Trying to skive out the office, one of the first days in ages that the suns been shining and the skies are clear, god I hate the British climate, problem, supposed to be going into town for drinks, unfortunately this is one of the few times that we have the option of a babysitter, should I risk a womans wrath?

Hmmm, still have to finish the auto DNS section of the Linux Advanced Server Howto, linking in the DHCPD to auto update DNS records isn't as easy as it seems.