Older blog entries for iDunno (starting at number 46)

Right - long time no post... so here goes... last week was a bit of a nightmare, main server at work had a disk failure, backup server was about 2 to 4 weeks out of date (ooops), fortunately a fair chunk of the data was on a raid array in the main server when we got it back, but that was it. Spent a week rebuilding and putting measures in to place to make sure that there was a backup at all times that shouldn't be more than 2 hours out of date.

Also, been working on jewel again (well, not so much on jewel, but the new incantation, still not worthy of putting anywhere, still in *VERY* early stages of development while I learn ObjC while rewritting it), hoping to get something out by the end of the month at the latest.

And, also, going to actually finish packaging ircd-hybrid 6 very soon (hopefully by the end of this week). It's been a while since I played in the tree though, so thinking about making the source package make 2 packages, one geared for high volume networks, the other geared for standalone servers. Thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Otherwise, life is still (just about) ticking along, wish there was more to it, but hey, can't have everything I suppose, you win some, you lose some, I'm just having a nice long losing streak.

Anything else? hrm, don't think so, could do with a change of scenery, maybe its time to take a real holiday. Normally end up back at my dads, or wasting it in a pub, probably wouldn't be a bad plan to just get away for a bit.

hey ho, I've not posted for a while now, I'm slacking on all fronts really... on the plus side, now working behind a bar for a bit which is kinda cool :) Still working at paston, and its been a nasty couple months, need something new to do and take my mind of some of the shit hitting the fan in various aspects of life, that's where the bar work comes in handy, chill out without drinking far too much and spending all me money :)

Really need to start working on jewel sometime soon, but have kinda lost all faith in my code (thanks to a certain person that shall not be mentioned here). Sorry slef I will get back to hacking jewel, just as soon as my heads got back in to the right frame of mind. Need some time out from all things computer related that aren't compulsorary (read: work) at the moment.

Ahh well, we're nearly at christmas, god knows what's going to happen then.

Hrm - oh, it appears that I missed the bit about my sister having my nephew in the front seat of her other halfs car on the way to hospital, that was a phone phonecall we got at 8am (having been drinking till 4am), this was the morning after my other sister got remarried... we think the baby wanted to escape the poison^Wwedding food ;)

Thats it for now.

*SIGH* alls fair in love and war, apparently. Just not fair to me :)

Hrm - well, it appears I've not posted for a while, so here goes nothing...

Been a little interesting over the last few weeks, my car is dead *AGAIN* and this time some nice person has broken the passenger side front window too, which really did round off thursday last week (having not been able to start the car, and being an hour and a half late for a meeting). Ahh well, that can wait, my feet still work so that's now my main form of transport.

Jewel development is, erm, somewhat stinted at the moment, largeish project for work that I'm hacking on, don't really feel in the mood to fix jewel after that.

Life generally sucks, but I'm sure it'll get better soon. (I hope)

The ALUG meeting last sunday went quite well, if a somewhat low turnout. Got a few more machines running Debian/GNU Linux and generally had some fun.

Hrm - can't think of anything else at the moment... oh, except I'd really love to see the entire of the UK get wireless broad band for free right now, but that's just a pipe dream.

More later, maybe

In other news, not a lot has happened, waiting for slef to get the jewel repository back so that I can start hacking on that again, not seen much wrong recently, but it would be good to finally either owrk out how to bolt a true external root menu in or to get our own in.

Also, finally got my comfy computer chair half sorted. If only the rest of life was so simple as stuff that can be machined, huh? ;)

Seems a little bit of a shame that Intel are being sued again, and by the same company no less... will they ever learn not to steal patented material? Ah well, long live AMD is all I can say :)

It appears that Microsoft are going to appear at the UEA this friday, Chicago was planning to do something on that day to promote linux. Personally, I think that the linux promotion needs a lot more planning and thought, there's not enough time before friday, and, more to the point, it seems a waste to try to fight Microsoft, rather than listen, and the produce a list of alternatives. The latter stands a better chance of winning at the end of it, and could, in fact, bring a lot more students in to the game.

Hrm. Back to the red wine I think.

Later.

Well, I've been slacking a bit on the diary entries recently... so here goes...

We got the mac up and running... then david accidently formatted the disk yesterday (or was it the day before, I can't remember), remember everyone e2fsck -f is not what you really want to do to check the disk :) Ah well, its back on its way again.

I've just spent a week at my dads away from work. He took the week off too, so its been kinda fun. We even sorted the car out (*YAY*).

Anything else? hrm - probably... ahhhh... the OAI layer is more or less done, it supports the neccessary verbs for the minimal implementation but should be easily extendable for further use (yay!).

Hrm - nah - that's it for now :)

Ho hum, been a 'fun' day... went to do some shopping earlier in the car (which was slowly but surely dying anyways), parked in Tesco car park, did the shopping, came out, and hey presto, ignition system appears screwed :( decided that as it was a nice day I'd wander back home, nice hours walk. Ah well, does however mean that the car is still at tesco, and I have no idea what to do with/about it for the next little while, may just have to get it towed away and scraped (ho hum). Ahh well.

But, on the otherhand, we got a powermac remote booting for the setup of debian (*YAY*), that was fun, and sommit that worked... it's still chugging through the install at the mo.

Hrm, what else... Oh, I've not felt like coding at all this weekend, just not been in the mood for constructive stuff. (Saturday was 'fun' too, my machine kinda died for a bit, at least now X is back up and ssh working :).

Tra la la, oh well, back to work tommorow.

Well, OAI-PMH layer for cocoon more or less finished, couple finishing touches and its there, then the testing schedule and we'll show the rest of the world and (obviously) release the code to the rest of you :)

Happy bunny, just spent the last few hours in da pub with the usual crowd playing cards, been kinda fun as always :)

Ho hum, now, all that's left to make life totally great is a good woman that can put up with me!

That's it for now... signing off, slightly pished.

Brett.

Well, its been a while since the last post so here goes...

I've now taken a different approach to the OAI-PMH layer for cocoon, using Xindice as the backend and writing my own 'crawler' solved a *LOT* of the problems I was having with using Lucene. Almost got bits working now, GetRecord is more or less done, just about to start writing in the rest of it. Its not back for 2 XSP files, a Xindice database, and a couple of stylesheets all in all :)

Had a reasonable week at work so far too, which is good, even got to go home early yesterday (*YAY*). Hoping to have a demonstratable copy of the OAI stuff by the end of tommorow, which will be nice :)

Been a bit of a pain that I have been stuck in this office with the phones most of the week rather than doing exclusive OAI work, but hey, it could have been worse. Generally I've not been bothered and have been able to get on, but it would have been nicer to have been in the other office with my home machine :)

Hey ho, anything else? Probably. Dunno what yet though...

Maybe more later. Lets see :)

Well... its all good fun, innit. Been playing with PRCS with slef and the jewel project. We've now got the icon menu more or less sussed, only bug that I can see currently is that when we have windows with no titles they appear as blank entries in the menu (which is a pain), thinking about fixing this using the WM_CLASS as the text.

Still need to get the root menu sorted for jewel, but that's currently behind getting a debian directory in there so that we can create .deb files quickly and easily from the source tree (which will be handy).

Still hacking at OAI when I get the chance, should get lots of time to play in the next couple of weeks (*YAY*), and hope to have a working version by the end of it.

What else? oh, life, well... currently a little skint which is fun so awaiting payment at the end of the month. Also got a bloody parking ticket for parking in a street that I have a permit for, grrr. Sent them a letter today, hope that that should get sorted by the end of next week.

Think that's it for now :)

cooo - so, its been quite some time since my last entry then... well... what's happened? hrm. we've made more changes to jewel, got all manner of fixes in there now, including changes to the keyboard handling (not being able to change desktops with the numlock key on *REALLY* bugged me) and some changes to the icon menu so that it now also lists normal windows.

Also got the oai components to compile in to cocoon without cocoon falling over, so hope to get some more done to actually use them (the current XSP doesn't work, not sure where its wrong though, it could be the java behind it at fault...). Still not sure if I'll stick with lucene for it, but I need a test case before I can tell.