Older blog entries for riggwelter (starting at number 53)

Have moved my diary to www.rubberturnip.org.uk

Well, it's been summer, and now it's not! During the summer, I worked at Soul Survivor, gained another year of age (I'm now 26 - eek!) built a lot of packages (13 updates to usr local bin since my last diary entry) and, oh, lots of other exciting things I'm sure.

Was 13st again this morning, I had got down as low as 12st5 , and was 12st7 Saturday morning, but it was an especially take-away/eating-out oriented weekend, and I really put on. Going to try to hit the gym this week, and am being rather more strict with myself about food again now.

Doing a training evening today for the word projection team at church, in order that we can change to Presenter by Discovery Systems rather than the (increasingly ropey) system we're surrently using. It's impossible for us to go on holiday at the moment, because I'm pretty well the only one who can fix it if something goes seriously wrong (if it goes slightly wrong Amanda can fix it...)

Migrated to the new MySQL servers this morning, had to get up before 06:00 to get in to do it before office hours - serious killer, especially after a faily latish night last night.

It's now 13:28 and I've only had one coffee all day, I'll get through somehow, finishing work early today to compensate, will nap before going out tonight (jazz gig, mmm...)

The new DB servers had such an impact on the performance of our (already high performance) web sites that our developers noticed it the moment the tested the sites, makes me wonder what the hell we were doing ever having the DBs on those lousy MIPS (Cobalt) boxen...

Course, once we've moved all the rest that those boxen do off of them, they can be put to use like installing Woody on them, and running them as name servers or something.

Next major project will be overhauling the company's mail infrastructure, trying to get away from non-free software. We'll likely investigate MessageWall as a replacement to MAILsweeper, and then we need something to replace Exchange. Were it just mail, it'd be simple, but just about the whole company uses the bloody shared calendaring, and as yet there's no free backend calendar server for Evolution.

Ah well, it'll come together, I'm sure it will :)

Built Apache on the first of our new MySQL servers (cos they double up as our web development servers)

Took 10 seconds!

Yay!

England 1-2 Brazil - gutted, absolutely gutted. Came into work early to watch, and it was well painful!

A couple of friends (Assistant Pastors of our church in fact) had their first kid this morning, a boy. Totally made up for them.

Well, for a while now, my DSL has been sorted - dogy micro-filters was what was causing the noise on the line and (it would seem that) a dodgy USB controller was causing the link to be unreliable. PC is also back from the repair guys, with a new mainboard and some serious uptime!

Spent most of the morning upgrading Apache servers to overcome the vulnerability reported by ISS, also in the process of installing new MySQL servers, which is actually quite a nice project, especially when using SuSE 8.0.

I've fallen back in love the GkrellM as well, being online 24/7 at home makes being able to have all sorts of monitors available constantly like that is a real boon, and I don't really miss the desktop space too much.

Well, time for a TODO list I think...

  • Rethink www.rubberturnip.org.uk
    Since I launched usr local bin I've not done anything to Rubber Turnip at all (save for fix my Jabber contact info). Not surprising, considering the amount of time u l b takes up in addition to my full time job. Think it might be time to retire it as a projecty type site, and make it a normal geek-personal site
  • Sort out the noise-on-line ADSL problem
    Of course, first I need to get my PC back from the repair guys. Once I do, I really need to get the problem where having my ADSL modem connected to the line (or indeed, any micro-filters connected) puts so much noise on the line as to render the phones unusable. Hopefully Pipex support will be able to help me. It has occured to me that it may have something to do with the fact that I have old cheap & nasty phones, and it may be resolved when we invest in newer phones. It would be nice if I didn't have to do that just to be able to be online 24/7 at home though - just adds to the expense.
Gosh, only two points, but they'll do for now, bet your life they'll get added to :)

Making a lasagne tonight - yummy, can't wait, really hungry...

Wow, is it really that long since I posted anything?

usr local bin is just about 2 months old now, is has served just short of 25Gig in that time! Nearly 3000 people have downloaded AbiWord 1.0.1 alone, which is great.

13st dead this morning, have revised my target weight to 12st by the end of June, which should put me right at the top of my ideal weight range for my height, reckon I can easily make it, and have got stable at it by then. After that I'll plan a steady drop to around the middle of the range, and then I'll be able to remain within the range quite nicely.

usr local bin is getting quite busy, I've put three new sets of Evolution packages up in two days, not to mention the recent AbiWord release.

Still, people seem to find it useful, so I don't mind. :)

Finally got through, and they're going to get BT to reset the card again.

Tech support person also reckoned the customer services dept would be able to sort out some kind of refund, but their line is engaged...

Wow, I'm getting to be quite slack at updating this... :)

I'm now 13st 6, and feeling quite trim already, less than a stone to go till I hit my target weight for the end of June - quite a nice thought.

ADSL link is getting to the point of me considering it useless. About a week and a half ago, the DSLAM for my line locked up. Took almost a week to get it reset by BT, after which point I managed an amazing 15 minutes (or so) of connectivity, before it locked up again - what a joke. I'm currently in a queue for Pipex's tech support line. That's an improvement from not even being able to get through, which is normally the case.

Someone on one of the Evolution lists mentioned that there seemed to be no gnome-spell packages available for SuSE 8.0, so I put some up on usr local bin

My new PC is also causing me problems. When I built it I used the AMD supplied CPU cooler. A decision I now think may have been a mistake, it keeps randomly powering down, sometimes just a matter of minutes after booting. It even does it if I just run it in the BIOS config. At first I thought it was just that the CPU was overheating because of the AMD fan, so I replaced it with a CoolerMaster, which keeps it about 40 degrees (F) cooler, but the same thing keeps happening. Wondering now if I've damaged the CPU by running it so hot for so long, which could explain why it's still powering down.

Have now been in the queue for ten minutes...

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