Older blog entries for pjdowner (starting at number 44)

New Hardware: I got a call from a friend whilst in work telling me that Lidl (Supermarket chain) had Nokia data cables in their bargain bin. This meant a diversion on the route home to pick one up for 10ukp which is 20ukp cheaper than a phone shop. I also got a smart card reader given to me which will be fun to play with when I get spare time.

Old Hardware: Was woken up on Saturday by a loud noise coming from the Gnome2 box 5 metres from my bed Leapt out of bed fearing dead hard disk. Immediate shutdown, removal to a kitchen work surface (to the absolute delight of my parents) and diagnosis revealed faulty PSU fan. Disection of PSU and removal of dust resulted in fully restored and working PSU/Fan. Reinstallation of box in bedroom and power up resulted in different loud noise, this time it was the 30gb hard disk (sigh). An e2fsck -cp resulted in a booting system but I no longer trust the disk.

Hacking: Spent Sunday playing with a gnome Bubblemon applet and trying to port it to Gnome2 untill I found a version http://g2as.sourceforge.net/ that already works on gnome2. It is however different and the person that I was doing the other port for still wants it done so time was not wasted.

Debian Mirror Leant a 17" monitor to a friend for a week on Sunday evening and picked up 10 cds whilst round his place. The cds contained 2 day old Debian Sid (unstable) debs and I'm using them to build a local debian mirror as my connection is too slow to download them all. I haven't had this much fun disk swapping since the old days of 15 disk Amiga adventure games, I think I'm being spoilt by using an OS that can be fully installed over a network.

I have bandwidth throttling now thanks to squid, which means I can leave dist-upgrades running through the day without parents complaining about slow access.

Sat in on the debian commitee talk about gnome2 today, learnt a few things about gnome1/2 debian related problems. I eventually got bored of the repeating of issues and tuned out, but they did seem to fail to figure out how to deal with the fact that the Gnome2 desktop is a replacement for the gnome1 desktop and not an upgrade.

Arranged this weeks SWLUG meeting in Cardiff which will hopefully go better than the last Cardiff meet.

'This week I 'ave mostly been programming in Perl' due to the fact that I got fed up with some simple tasks in work taking far too long. I did try and then fail with batch scripts before I installed the win32 version of perl. I then subsequently spent time improving my perl.

The trip to Ireland was good fun, spent time playing Freeciv, trying to beat wine into working on my laptop and watching dodgy zombie movies and Kevin Smith's New Jersey Trilogy. There was also some time spent drinking beer, I did however freak out when I realised that I was the only person in an Irish pub drinking Guinness. The Stenna Line Ferry sucked, quite exactly what anyone who is not into watching dodgy comedians and bands is supposed to do on a 3 hour journey is beyond me. They used to have cinemas on board, all I can say is thank $deity for 6 hours of laptop battery life.

My patch to make Googlizer run on Gnome2 was accepted by Alan, which I'm happy at but I really should have sent it at him earlier as it's been sat here since June.

Started off the day playing with gnome2 which I'd been rebuilding from cvs this week. One or two nice new features and found out a few things about Nautilus that I never knew before.

I then eventually (the Hunagrian Grand Prix distracted me) went back to porting some applets to gnome2 until disaster struck, when grepping the source to some other applets my hard drive started making a loud grating noise. Turns out my 30gb IBM drive has developed some bad blocks an e2fsck -c (thanks to robot101) seems to have sorted it out though and ide-smart (cheers for pointing this out zx64) doesn't seem to think it will fail anytime soon.

This week will probably involve me updating my website a bit more and getting ready for a trip to Ireland on Friday and possibly the purchase of a non-IBM hard disk.

I've been playing with squid and IP tables and other stuff in the last week because I'm finally going to replace my Smoothwall box with a Debian machine. This is because the Debian machine is acting as an Access Point for my Wireless Network, I am amazed how well^Weasily it worked. For the interested few I have a netgear Ma301/401 using the HostAP_plx driver.

Found out today that the company I am contracted to does actually have some Linux software, well they supply code to download images to the devices they sell which they say compiles on Linux so I'll have to take my laptop to work and have a play I think.

hmm, ok so up until Thursday I was having an ueventful week. I had been casually looking for work to replace my NTL job, then suddenly the agency that put me in NTL and who I haven't heard from since November, contacted me at work. I have been told I start a new job on Monday doing embedded C. What can I say, I'm stunned, after all I've been trying to break into C programing jobs for a while. More news will be posted on Monday when I know exactly what I'm doing.

With regards Linux related stuff I haven't done all that much this week, what with work etc. I've mainly been trying to get Gnome2 working after giving up on compiling from source I have been trying the vicious build scripts but they seem to have been failing at the glib compile. I'll look into it when I have more time.

The only down side of this week, well next week really, is that my new job means that I doubt I'll get to Swansea for Alan Cox and Dick Porter's talk. Still I guees I'll catch up with a few people later at the SWLUG meet.

so another interesting day, woke up too late to seriously play with anything before going out. Played with my parents friends p133 and sorted out a few problems, then spent the rest of the afternoon reading up on cvs. I then lost in a game of badminton and returned home to play with cvs.

CVS woes: I'm playing with cvs in order to check out gnome2, so I was dumbfounded when I was refused connection to anonymous cvs at gnome.org. I tried cvs from my other machine - connects fine convinced it's a config problem I try playing with the settings. Four hours later when my other machine gets bounced trying to log in to cvs I realise that the machine I'm tring to log in from has cached the ip adress of a borked server, change the command to use the ip address of a working server and I'm in first time. Ah well live and learn, prehaps had I known cvs on this machine works then I would have noticed straight away but this was the first time I'd used cvs on it and another server a friend had pointed me at had also refused me.

I'm now too tired to actually bother checking out gnome2 from cvs, I'll leave that for tommorow I think, well I've got to have something to look forward to whilst I'm at work.

21 Feb 2002 (updated 21 Feb 2002 at 01:53 UTC) »

ok so it's been a while :)

Quick Update: Been made redundant from NTL, Booked hotel/flight for GUADEC, no job lined up so as of March 3rd I'll be unemployed.

Machine rebuild: Ok so I've been putting this off for a while but finally got around to it. Swapped the 13gb and 30gb drive around so I now have a decent drive as hda. Installed Debian and have it currently running enlightenment. I've decided to play with gnome2 so following the advice of someone from #gnome, I removed 1.4 (which I'd spent ages configuring under the illusion it'd run happily with 2). Today I've been busy sorting out enlightenment and playing with more command line apps than I've ever had to before, I've also been reading the developer docs on gnome.org.

Tommorow will be fun, looks like it's time to learn cvs properly and check out gnome 2, this is inbetween giving a friend of my parents some advice on a 5 year old windows box and a game of badminton. Should be interesting.

sorted out the home net access for a while. BT's Home Arseway is being installed soon which will give me 64k ISDN and my parents will have their phone line back.

I've been doing a lot of reading recently, all technical stuff and all Linux related. It's also all being done whilst I'm at work, whenever I'm not on a call I'm reading up on either the Linux kernel or GTK+ etc.

When I've not been at work my new web site is being played with, although it's not going live yet. I've also started to arrange a hosting deal with a friend, so expect a link to a new home page soon.

This Xmas thing is really bugging me, decorations went up in the workplace this week and it annoys me that I can't get away from this over-commercialised (is that a word?) holiday. Wake me up when it's over please.

ok, no internet access from home has meant I haven't updated this as much as I should have done.

distrowars: this was a cool event organised by the Irish LUG, Telsa + other half had told me about it a while ago and I had been looking forwards to it for ages. Kinda sucked that I didn't know until about 6 days before the event that I could actually go. This meant a rushed flight booking,

getting there the day before the event and a hotel 30 mins walk from the center of dublin but it was cool. I got to meet up with jf who I met at the UKUUG Linux event in Manchester earlier this year. I also spent most of the weekend with davej and another friend that I knew from university. I met mikegtn and a lot of other people whose names I can't really remember. Lots of beer was drunk and most importantly a lot of it was drunk in a brewery yay!

return from .ie was annoying due to a 3 hour delay, this had been preceeded by a 1 hour delay on the flight out. I had also managed to get rid of all my .ie currency (which seems to consist of strange moon coins) before finding out about the 3 hour delay and due to a dead cashpoint spent a distressingly long amount of time trying to find some place in the departure loung that would sell me food on my visa card, before finding out that a small cafe right next to my departure gate was the only place that would serve me but I had discounted it as being too small.

Not much else has been going on, new job is ok and I'm now trying to organise a talk for the SWLUG (no I'm not giving the talk).

hmm I am noticing that my posts seem to be coinciding with LUG meetings, obviously I havn't had so much to talk about recently.

Ouch: Due to a skating accident last night I can currently only see 1 knuckle on my left hand. It has been swelling up since the accident and whilst the Ice I put on it helped it has not helped enough. I also seem to have developed a stiff kneck (probably from when my face hit the ground), bruised knees, bruised right hand wrist, sore back and cut lip. nevertheless I'll probably be back out sakting again by next Friday but it did make todays task difficult.

Car Buying: This week has mainly been spent reviewing finances and looking at cars, lets just say a week spent looking at cars . finance packages, bank statements etc is absolute Hell. What was worse however was trying to test drive a car today with aforementioned injuries. Driving a car is bad enough when you're not used to the controls, but when you have difficulty using the gear stick due to a swollen hand and have trouble turning your head it can be quite dangerous, luckily the test driving took place in a largely dissused Industrial Estate. I struggled through however and eventually ended up with a White Fiat Punto which is the exact same car as my Mum's but hers is red. Lets just say that I am not pleased with the colour but it was necessary to just get any car ASAP for...

New Job: I start work on Monday for NTL's Luserphone, it's not actually for NTL but as tech support for Tesco/Virgin etc who have contracted their ISP support out to NTL. Not ideal work but I need the money and they let me wear whatever I want to work and let me surf the net whilst working.

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