Advogato blog for elwell

Firefox3 / google / UK

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:06:27 GMT

When I'm roaming I'm fed up with the default google search plugin redirecting me to google.ch at cern and thus providing me with german pages.

Simple enough fix on osx - vi /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml and change

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
into
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.co.uk/search">

Tada!

Fizzicists

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:05:43 GMT

Y'know what worries me? I'm out in Geneva just now at CERN - sharing a flat used by the Glasgow ATLAS scientists. Supposedly a rather smart lot.

...except the batteries in the TV remote control were the wrong way round.

Nosh.

Thu, 7 Jun 2007 01:04:35 GMT

Just thought I'd mention "L'Aviation" - Steak, Chips and Yummy sauce. All a mere spit from the number 9 bus stop too.

Furlong Floppies

Wed, 6 Jun 2007 08:06:14 GMT

Tired of confusing Mega and Mibi bytes? Hard disk choices getting you in a spin? well, FEAR NOT - Sanity is at hand. Most old-timers like myself will remember the 3.5" floppy disk (yes, the thing that you kept all your hard work on, mistreated and then wondered why you couldn't print your assignment at the deadline). Each held 1.44Mb of data and so....

Stack em all up, and a furlong (220 yards, or 201.16m) of em would contain 87.782 GB.

I hereby propose that we all use the new SI measurement of "furlong floppies" to describe data.

Windows 0 : Linux 2

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:04:49 GMT

I've just traded up an IBM P4 workstation to a brand shiny new Dell E520 Dual core goodness. Well. Semi goodness. According to Wikipedia I have a 915 chip and it's the 9x0 ones that support x86 virtualization. Boo Hiss.

Anyway, Threw in a ubuntu AMD64 install and it's up n running in 30 mins. (once I'd nuked the 'orribly nasty "Vista Home Basic 32bit" install off it. I was looking forwards to all the aqua toys but thats apparently an upgrade...

XP install not so smooth. Blue Screen complaining of "Stop 0x0000007B" - probably the SATA Raid card? Well dells website doesn't have any handy "Use this driver disk to install XP" links and following a v good scotlug virtualisation talk I decided to throw on QEMU following this guide

Videotastic

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:04:49 GMT

No, not another youtube one, but a 1975 classic featuring touch screen menus, electric bikes, distributed monitoring, a gripping title sequence, and of course, facial hair. Intrigued? head over to SPS : the control system and enjoy :-)

Wireless hacking

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:04:49 GMT

So my shiny macbook pro that I was promised with the new job turned into a battered R50e Thinkpad. Ho Hum. Still at least it has built in wireless.... hmmm. maybe not. Enter a Cheap n Cheerful Edimax EW-7108PCg PCMCIA card. Works fine under linux including kismet using ra0 - it's the rt2500 chipset driver.

However I'd like to make use of a decent external antenna for better range, so opened it up and discovered the antenna consisted of 2* 18mm tracks with no obvious points to solder in a pigtail.

"It's Big"

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:04:49 GMT

Experiment visit to ATLAS today. Flip. Tis impressive.

On a more mundane note I discovered this snippet while trying to get our areca raid cards monitored with SNMP on the out of band management

Basically if you want to avoid errors such as
snmpwalk -v1 -c community_name -m ./compile/snmp/areca1.mib mgmtaddress Areca
Bad operator (_): At line 20 in ./compile/snmp/areca1.mib
Areca: Unknown Object Identifier (Sub-id not found: (top) -> Areca)

Then you need to add -Pu to your command line

bash: apt-get: command not found

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:04:49 GMT

Minor Rant. There's nothing wrong with Redhat clones, and Scientific Linux is packaged nicely as the rest. However, running a 3.0.5 version on a Laptop, without any decent music (mp3) support when the latest is 4.4 is getting to me. Time... for a swift Ubuntu install.

Just another Perl Hacker^W^WBlogger

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:04:49 GMT

Caught up on userfriendly and yesterdays seems remarkably apt...