Older blog entries for gregf (starting at number 6)

14 Mar 2001 (updated 14 Mar 2001 at 12:41 UTC) »
A trip to Augsberg
Thought id'e better write an entry. Haven't done so for a while.
I went to Germany 7/8/9-03-01, with the MD and Director of Fujitsu Siemens logistics. Left Heathrow london at 3:30, landed in Munich at 6:30 there time. Taxi was witing to take us to Augsberg. Arriving at the hotel for 8:05 and having Dinner booked for 8:15 didnt realy give me much time to shower. Nevertheless i managed it. We had food in an old cave, set in anchient German times like 400 years ago. The beer was great, and the food wasnt anything special, just raw veg. and meat. We all drank as much as we could, and traditionaly if you didnt obide by *there* rules you could end up in the block n shackles. I was a good boy, but Richard (MD) ended up in there for reason uknown to me? (I think he had a solitary drink). Richard is into his late night partying from what i could observe and we proceeded to some local studen bar, had a beer (rather quickly i must add) then ventured on to this cool nightclub. I drank cocktails of everykind, danced & danced away the night, until I was approached by this beutifull blonde German girl. She had like diamonds in the corner of her eyes, i thought the were unusual as ive never seen that befor. She was 19. Why do i alway attract the young girls? In a way she remminded me of my Ex girlfriend Victoria Ray. So I felt kind of at ease and happy with her. Drank some more danced a little more although starting to feel tied now. The watch says 3:45am. Time to go. I was the last one to leave ;-) but only quarter of an hour latter. Err, I got lost for 1.5 hours trying to find my way back to the Hotel. I had to be on the coach leaving for the factory at 8:15am. *nightmare* The day was intense, but i realy injoyed it. Most of all the factory tour was very impresive. A hugh factory producing everything from system boards to lifebooks, servers, proffession pc's, consumer pc's, hard drives, and much more!
A good trip
6 Mar 2001 (updated 6 Mar 2001 at 19:53 UTC) »

This week has been a busy one so far, and will continue for the rest of the week. The company has dicided to change software as an improvement to both knowledgebase and employee workload. It's called SAP. This is basicaly an SQL database will be used to create purchase orders, control billing, shipping, invoices etc. Directly linked with all Fujitsu Siemens Companies + Factories around the globe. It wont affect me as i'm technical and dont get imvolved with these aspects. However im obliged to learn the proccess regardless. So, training Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, then on to Ausberg in Germany for Thursday and Friday. The weekend is my own, then im of snowboarding at the Three Valleys in France. Then back to work for further training.

27 Feb 2001 (updated 28 Feb 2001 at 22:09 UTC) »

Still got alot of catching up to do, if I am to get right up to speed with C programing. So ive registered a project of my very own called Gdopewars .

Gdopewars: The front end is built using Glade (a free Gtk+ Gnome user interface builder) and the backend is programed in C. I am hoping that this will help develope my skills, and bring me up to where i should of been 1 year ago when i negleted my programming criteria to develope my networking skill to which I must say im running at full speed ahead. I've updated my HTML skills conciderably started writing XML, SGML. Sometimes alittle Java just for the sake of it. The initial concept of gdopewars was solen from my good friend Ross Golder when it was just a foetus in the making. Feel free to drop in on irc.gnome.org channel #techbot and talk to me Viper or Spectre. Any help will be much appriciated.

8 Feb 2001 (updated 28 Feb 2001 at 22:12 UTC) »

At last my cable connection is up & running well. So far i,ve achieved a 14.5hr uptime withhout any hitches. Still got to get it fine-tuned, and update my dhcpd.conf file. Im getting an error----->No subnet declaration for xxx.xxx.xxx. not a major problem. I just need to rewrite my dhcpd.conf file for my new card (eth1) + reconfigure my gateway machineTechnical info. Appart from that all is nice & sweet on the networking side & hopefully now I can get stuck into more devolpment work. Im going to create some modules for techbot based initially on the non-GUI GNOME libs (glib, libxml etc)

5 Feb 2001 (updated 8 Feb 2001 at 11:32 UTC) »

So it's Monday morning again...I had a rather busy weekend, sorting my old unwanted hardware at home out, and making space in my room for more clutter. I seem to have gathered nearly every piece of hardware possibly imaginable over the years, and looking at most of the stuff, I just havent had time to play with half of it. Router --> Switches --> RAID controllers --> I could go on forever....
Cable is still down, but apparently an engineer is on the way, Aah, as we speak I have just recieved a call from the engineer & he is on the way :))

I went to ross's leaving_party on Saterday night. spectre turned up from Nottingham on the train. Arriving at about 3pm with some time to hack for a few mild hours. I showed spectre my new laptop, and endeavoured to get the web-cam working. Because its a new piece of hardware, there are no supported drivers for it, we tryed a few generic drivers to no avail. I will have to try and build one myself.

Make : - Fujitsu Siemens.
Model : - FPCCAM04
P/N : - CP044236

I'll let you know if I make progress......out for now!

25 Jan 2001 (updated 25 Jan 2001 at 17:22 UTC) »

Having a pretty demanding day at work today. Everyone seem s to want to talk to me at the same time. Ive configured 4 Scenic L's, 1 scenic X, and a half dozen various lifebooks. Im worn out and cant wait to get home in front of the fire with a nice cool glass of beer! The B-Series lifebooks seem to be the worst. There an ultra portible laptop with minimal devices. Therefor everything has to be attached on the fly, and this can cause difficult installations. I had to create my own boot disk so as to enable a loadable module device driver for a pcmcia card bus.
I hope all the guys in development appriciate all my work. I seem to sort all there junk out for them....

12 Jan 2001 (updated 24 Jan 2001 at 10:24 UTC) »

Been devoting alot of my spare time @home upgrading all my hardware & bringing them all up to spec. Looks like i'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Additionally i have updated my homepage (first time in nearly a year), which provides me with links and technical info. for my mc's :) So what's all this for? Well basically i'm plugging into NTL's cable network after many years dial- up at 56kbps. I WILL be keeping my old dial-up connection for backup, i've got static IP which is allways usefull. NTL doesn't provide static IP im not sure yet but i recon i'll be released every 4 hours by the DHCP server. I wounder if there is a way round it somehow, although the chances are i would be leased the same IP address. I've just called the support line and already i'm not happy with the service im getting from NTL! I called them on 18/01/01, gave them all my account details ofcourse, they in turn advised me an engineer will call me in three working days. It's been 6 days and they tell me that an engineer wasnt booked so now i have a fixed date on the 31/01/01 sometime between 8:30 & 12:30. Mmmm. I've then got to call the support line again with my MAC_ADDR and wait two hours for the DNS server to be updated......

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