Conveyancing

Used a great firm of Solicitors for my Conveyancing called NBM Solcitors

Clam antivirus

I have been trying to set up Clam antivirus again and I must say I find milters a little bit confusing. I did previously have clam working on a milter and moved to Panda as work had Panda and it included a Linux version. This set up without a hitch, however they have now stopped their Panda licences so I am moving back to Clam. I installed all the Clam kit from the Dag repositories (clamd, clam-db, clam-milter etc.) and installed. I can get the Clam daemon (clamd) working fine, and I am well used to setting up milters using sendmail M4 but the miter itself is the problem. I cannot start the clamav-milter program, at least it doesn't show in ps -aux.

Blogger

Just had to change my Blogger password. I don't usually trust emails with links asking about account information but it seemed to be bonafied in this case as the link went to blogger.com.

Server crashes

The Chelmsford server has been crashing randomly, about every 3-4 days, from the first day it was installed (2-3 years now). I have tried lots of different things but it seems quite random. I tried Memtest86 which is used to check the RAM. The instructions say that if the test itself crashes the problem must be more serious (motherboard or processor related). The test did indeed crash in my case at 57% hence the need to get a new server. The worst problem is keeping confidence in data security from the staff.

BT

BT are useless. Under instructions from BT I got a migration code from Easynet as I wanted to migrate my account to BT. I phoned up BT several times trying to give them the migration code and they kept saying someone would phone me back. In the end I was given a number for my "Account manager" who would, of course, phone me back. After a week I phoned this number only to find out it did not work. Now the Migration code has expired and I have ordered another. I am inclined not to use BT because of the terrible service. This is what happens when companies make so much money they can't be bothered to service their customers any more.

First post from Mac

Well I am using the swishy DashBlog blog entry poster widget and I must say it is damn sexy! I love my Mac already but it is taking a while to get used to all the little differences. At first I thought not having a right button on the mouse would be bad but it has turned out not to be a problem at all, in fact right clicks seem a bit stupid now. Worse though is not having a scroll button for reading down text in the browser. Although now I couldn't do without my wireless mouse so I won't migrate to the mighty mouse until they make it wireless. All my Open Source stuff works like a charm on here which is great. Now to post and see if it posts entries properly (unlike the linux blog thing which messed the title of blog entries up)

apple mac g5

got my new computer now, but haven't got a blog applet for it yet so have not been writing up my blog enough lately. at the moment i am trying to solve how to precompile jsp pages for a war file. the strange thing is that i can build a war from my project and upload this. i can extract all the files from the war using untar or some extractor (can't remember which) and the resulting directory installs fine as a web application but if i try to autodeploy the war it fails. it seems so dumb to me. well i am off to look for a decent os x blogger thing. maybe a widget...

mac

waiting for my g5 to be delivered. it is exciting. i hope it comes before christmas though

Conveyancing

This may appear a s a shameless plug for a company but here is a link to a website I made which I am quite proud of NBM Solicitors

3

oh yeah and i had to pay over £100 for a "cancellation fee"

3

I have finally cancelled my 3 contract. It turned out they hadn't even set it up as a business account! When I joined them I phoned their business sales line and kept reminding them that I wanted it to be a business account! They are the worst pile of shit

g5

i really want to buy the new g5 as it is so sexy but need to make sure it does all the things i can do on linux eg ssh, word processing, spreadsheet, eclipse, tomcat, eXist, email, web browsing, bzflag.

fedora core 4

i am really happy with my setup on fedora 4 now. i have cured the overheating problem now. there is a daemon called microcode which is supposed to be something to do with the processor. i turned it on and now it seems to run better. don't ask me!

i am getting a little bit addicted to this tank game called bzflag. there are some really funny people who play and the game is so much fun. you drive around shooting other tanks and you form teams (with humans over internet) to capture the other teams flags. when you pick up white flags they give you a special weapon. lasers and guided missiles are the most fun. the game was donated to the open source movement from silicon graphics i think. they used it to show off their hardware. it is hard to believe it is a free game.

painting

my painting is taking a while but it is very relaxing

painting

i have started doing a massive painting of the church in plaza alta in algeciras. it is fun and looks like it may turn out ok.

tomcat

finally got tomcat to work with my old configuration. had some troubles due to using the new version of mysql with new connector. i hope the new setup runs ok on the old server. they have changed a few things in the new version of mysql - namely tinyint(1) has become a boolean which returns true or false. had to change to tinyint(2) to make it work. seems to be ok. also blank dates i.e. 0000-00-00 are not returned as null anymore so do not parse well. this is fixed in the jdbc connection string by using ?zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull.

i have a bad feeling about the outcome next time i do a web system update...

aftermath of upgrade to fc4

i haven't been able to do any development since upgrading to fc4 as i cannot get my project to run on tomcat. it runs fine but torque cannot connect to mysql for some reason. i keep thinking i will sort it out soon but can't find out how!

3

I have found the '3' experience utterly dumb founding.

I have been with many mobile phone companies before (vodafone, orange, t-mobile) and had got used to their most common practises and stumbled into '3' thinking I was a fairly savvy consumer. It turns out '3' isn't a normal mobile phone company.

Everything started OK when I got the phone quickly and my number was transferred over without a hitch.

Then things started to go wrong.

Sometimes my landline would ring and people would say 'Haven't you got your mobile switched on?'. The phone line seems to be intermittent at best. Regularly when attempting to make or receive calls the line is not functioning. When dialling '333' however it works fine and the operator says 'Well if you can dial me there can't be a problem, can there?'.

The web browser only seems to have coverage when you are close to the centre of cities. Forget using on a train or in a car (the only places I ever used to use WAP).

All my Motorola phones have had bluetooth as standard since years ago. I assumed (wrongly) that the V975 would have bluetooth - why shouldn't it? When I tried to connect it to my friend's car bluetooth system I found out it didn't. Turns out '3' doesn't like bluetooth as they don't want anyone getting hold of their 'secrets' inside the phone!

Most mobile operators offer international calling at the time of setting up the contract. I found out to my peril that '3' does not. When I arrived in Poland I called '3' to activate my international roaming (you would have thought it was simple in this day and age) I was told it was not allowed to be activated while I was abroad.

I activated the international roaming when I returned from Poland and was soon off again to Spain. I am always wary of making too many calls while abroad when I don't know the operator. When I was with Orange I knew the calls were relatively OK and could judge my phone bill. I made 2-3 calls from Spain to England, short calls too. My bill was £103. Explain that!

The other day I lost my telephone at the gym. I called '3' to report it lost and was told that I would not get another handset as I was not insured. At no point was I offered insurance by '3' and usually I am used to getting a years free insurance from my mobile company. After the fact I went to '3's website and found a small footnote saying 'Sorry, but if you've only just joined us, we can't offer you phone insurance at the moment. We are working on it though, so watch this space for details.'. Thanks for being so polite! Nice to know I missed the boat on that one, I guess I will have to suffer then!

When I had finally had enough a friend said: "Why not reduce to line rental and pay them off in one go? It is usually only about £7 a month". I have 6 1/2 months to go so that would equate to about £40. Fine. But don't forget '3' isn't a normal phone company. Apparently their minimum 'line rental' is £20 a month which is extortionate. That leaves me paying £120+ to be rid of them.

weights

oh yeah i am in so much pain after my first weights session since getting back from spain. ouch!

fc4

have upgraded to fc4 via yum. it has made the system a bit raw (as i had it almost perfect with fc3). i have installed eclipse and it seems fine - although under fc3 the jdk consumed 250MB of memory and the gcj version seems to consume twice as much!

need to get tomcat working and see if it will run the software ok. also seems to be an ldap module which comes with eclipse. i can test whether it would be a good time to switch to ldap authentication.

there is also a bugzilla module with eclipse but i cannot moke it work very well. it seems to be browser based and a bit resource heavy.

the new kernels along with the latest bios update seem to make my fan stop being so noisy and allowing the chip to ramp up to full speed. it cannot be a hyperthreading processor as specified when i bought it as the smp kernel did not detect two chips even with acpi=ht.

volume control back

after all this time finally managed to get volume control to work again in fedora gnome. i think a new version of the volume control made the settings in my home directory invalid. running gst-register-0.8 as root makes it reregister all the settings.

when are they going to finish

uploading the internet?

motorbikes

my dad bought a new r1 last weekend. it is pretty sexy with the exhausts running under the seat. looks like a bit of a rip off of the moto guzzi that my mum was on. met mum dad richard and vicky last night at the 'diner' for a belt buster. they are off to the races at donnington park and had a group of about 6 bikers with them.

spain

off to spain on sunday which should be fun. graham is borrowing the house which will take a weight off our minds and hopefully help him out. also i want to get used to the idea that when we go travelling we can rent our house out to get a bit of income (or at least to cover our mortgage).

now ely has internet access i should be able to carry on with most of my duties while i am away. still a bit worried about billing full amount while away so i am going to make sure i communicate constantly with everyone and keep a list of what i do so that i can justify the bill if it is necessary.

poorly

i have been feeling a bit under the weather the past few days. slightly better today though. might be all the strenuous weight lifting i am doing which is causing me to feel low!

free weights

i am acheing today after trying out free weights yesterday. weights machines are good for a quick tone up but free weights really make the muscles tired and shaking. they get right into the sinews rather than isolating the muscle and trying to bulk it. it is easier to lift the weight as it is just an object you are trying to lift instead of a straight motion which makes it difficult to push properly.

weather

i wish it would make its bloody mind up! hopefully it is going to get better for the weekend...

xml is the dogs nads

i have been playing with transforming xml documents a lot recently and have come to the conclusion that xml is the dogs nads. most data tables in a database could very simply be turned into small xml files and referred to directly in xsl transformations reducing a lot of need for heavy database coding which becomes extremely complex. prototyping is made super fast in xml and i am sure if archiving could be made efficient even large tables could be turned into a large number of smaller xml docs.

very impressed!

fedora core 3

i keep updating fedora with yum. it updated my kernel but there were no updates for nvidia or ntfs kernel modules. so i stayed with the kernel-smp-2.6.11-1.27_FC3 release instead of moving onto the kernel-smp-2.6.11-1.35_FC3. Then they delivered an "upgrade" for the 27 version security module selinux. This prevented my system from booting as security was too tight. So I had to boot into the newer kernel which luckily worked but had to use the VESA drivers. Had to wait ages for the nvidia drivers. But anyway the volume control applet has just stopped working (in the 27 and 35 releases).

Surely someone at fedora must test the most basic functions of the OS (like the volume control) before upgrading the whole kernel? I would like to get more into reporting these bugs myself but with something this basic it seems staggering!

kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.11-1.35_FC3

aaaaaaaaarrrgggghhhhhh

weather

i am loving this hot weather. lounging around by the pool, going to the gym, having barbecues. i don't hate living in this country so much at the moment.

fedora core 4 released

whoopee!

fedora core 3 yum upgrade broke ndiswrapper

the strangest thing happened over the weekend. i did a yum update and when i rebooted the wireless card wouldn't load. the only major packages that were replaced were the livna nvidia rpms as far as i can tell. oh yeah, and selinux. i had to readd the modprobe ndiswrapper kernel module onto the modprobe.conf file. i wonder what package this is a part of?

anyway, got it working but it is interesting that i was reading an article about how the linux development cycle is too fast and blaming the distributions for releasing the experimental code before it has been tested.

now i take objection to this. the community is all the developers in the world and we are supposed to be using linux as our OS and also helping to develop it. now if i didn't experience this problem and report it how would it be discovered (i.e. how many people are going to have my config?). the development team can't be arsed to check every little thing before they release much needed updates to the community. they are always quick to release new patches if they accidentally break something else.

i think the only motivation behind attacking linux is jealousy of the vast and experienced user base and speedy, no-nonsense development cycle.

weather

i am getting a little tired of this shitty weather!

station mac filter

i didn't want to enable wep on my wireless router as it slows the connection down due to the overhead of encryption. also, i could not be bothered to find out how to configure wep with ndiswrapper. i also thought that i find it exciting when i manage to connect to the net with my laptop in unexpected places and thought i would leave it open for other people.

i had a change of heart however when my neighbour came up and asked if i had a wireless network. i said yes and he started blathering on about wep etc. i tried to explain that i knew all about it but these tech savvy people these days *yawn*. last thing he said was if i didn't mind it not being secure he would start using it.

so i added the station mac filter so only the pcs on my network can use it. so there!

i have realised maybe we don't really want to share our stuff with everyone. what an ideal world it would be if we did!

poland

just got back from poland. it is a really cool place - cheap beer and really nice home cooked food. you get around 6 szlotty to the pound and a beer will cost about 5 of those as will a meal!

you can still see the socialist influance but they have already come a long way to eradicating any sign of it. they are very romantic people - they tend to go out in couples and be very quiet and touchy feely. the people are amazingly good looking - you could spend a day in a bar just watching the women walk past and never have to look away!

on the down side they do not seem to sell macdonalds breakfasts - it is only big macs for breakfast when you are desperate enough to need a macdonalds i am afraid!

eclipse user library

cool! i always had loads of jars listed in my eclipse projects which got in the way and now i have figured out how to package them into a user library. what i need to do next is get tomcat to link to this user library and then it will be able to run the appz. this should make deployment a bit easier too. who knows, my war files may actually deploy automatically!

detergents in petrol

my car manual says that i need to make sure i use petrol which doesn't have detergents in it. on close examination all fuels now contains 'engine cleaning detergents' even asda shite petrol.

now why this stupid rise in adding detergents to petrol? i don't remember engines getting their insides all dirty before. i thought engines were meant to be a bit dirty (like christina aguilera).

could it be that instead of selling us the product we want at the lowest price they are 'adding value' by diluting the product with cheap shit detergents which degrade the fuel economy of the car etc.

wankers

co-op fairy cakes

i am going to blow the lid off this whole corporate scandal. co-op are selling fairy cakes which have not been cooked right and the bottom half of the fairy cake is getting stuck to the paper.

they have the cheek to charge twice as much as asda for their fairy cakes based on the 'convenience' of their stores (as if anyone doesn't have a car these days) then they sell inferior products like this.

i've got my eye on you co-op you evil evil faceless corporation

macdonalds sauces

when i used to drive thru macdonalds i got used to asking for the sauce at the first window. they were always happy to provide whatever sauces you want no questions asked. then one day the reply became 'they will give you the sauces at the 3rd window'. after driving to the window, parking, waiting for them to get this and that and shove it at you i have completely forgotten about the sauces.

when i get home i realise i have forgotten the sauces and its too late. if i were 'eating in' i would just ask for the sauce and get it so what reason would they have for trying to deprive the 'drive thru' customer of sauce?

especially when a 'chicken mcnugget' meal depends almost entirely on sauce and they don't even do the 'what sauce do you want with your chicken mcnugget' shit any more.

and macdonalds wonder why they are going down the shit tube. they invented consistent food and now they are trying to change it. way to cripple a winning formula bud.

updated nbm site

nbm solicitors

3 phone

finally activated my 3 phone which has been sitting idle for a month, waiting for my orange contract to expire. i made a video call to my brother and was instantly surprised at the quality. suddenly it went from being a voice call to a face to face conversation!

i am quite glad to be rid of that strange phone that i had to buy to run out the last of my orange contract. i got a really strange lump in my ear from using it. i am sure it was cooking me with radio waves or something.

ntl cable

found out that 2Mb connection is the same price as my 512Kb connection. went online to find out if i could upgrade and i could. now my connection is 2Mb but i am left wondering why they didn't upgrade their existing customers or at least let them know and how long i have could have been upgraded. now i am tempted to "downgrade" to the 1Mb connection as this is still faster than what i had but will save me a tenner a month. hmmm...

i am getting a bit sick of companies treating existing customers like shit and only wowing their new customers.

3 peaks

tried to do the 3 peaks again this weekend. it started snowing though and we had to call it off after whernside. i think 2 out of 3 was not bad considering the conditions. my calf muscles still hurt but apart from that i don't feel too bad.

v70

we have bought a v70. it is really cool - automatic gearbox, 2.4 litre engine, leather seats etc. it is a bit of a beast and has made me enjoy driving again. we are going to drive down to spain over easter to "test" it.

i guess i don't need the v40 towbar anymore!

ntl cable

i keep getting disconnected from ntl cable for short periods of time. it is really annoying

online casino

i wonder if there are any online casino clients that run on fedora?

car

we have gone off the idea of a mondeo or a vectra. now we are looking into v70s. our v40 has been such a good car and we are very attached to volvo. the fords and gm cars seem really plasticy in comparison. if we decide to buy a flat in spain we may need to hang onto our car for a bit.

towbar

i think i am going to offer to pay that guy's listing costs for the towbar. i asked him to send me the wiring instructions before i would send him the money. after a couple of weeks he sent me a bizarre diagram of the lights on the back of a trailer. i hope i don't get a red mark on my ebay account.

livna again

again i am left waiting for livna to update their nvidia packages to be able to use next kernel.

top request

this is my favourite thing that staff say to me when they can't get something to work on their computer - "Can't we just have the old one back?".

v40 towbar

bought a towbar on ebay for 51 quid (although the guy says it will cost 27quid to post it to me!). It looks great - a proper volvo detachable towbar. he says the electrics all work and that he has instructions with it but i have requested that he send me photographic proof as i am a bit wary. i am worried about buying an unfixable part.

i hope he doesn't get cheesed off and sell it to someone else cos i really want it. maybe i should just pay and get on with it. i can always ebay it to someone else. the trouble is he might have stolen it from someones car and i don't want to buy stolen goods because i don't want to deprive anyone of anything. if he has all bits it is certainly bonified.

hooray

livna packages have been released

livna packages

have upgraded to the latest kernel on fedora but the livna nvidia packages have not come out yet. the version is 766 and i am stuck on the older kernel (maybe 741) until they release that package (i am not going back to doing it the hard way!).

why oh why can't nvidia release the source for their graphics cards so it can be included with the kernel and then i wouldn't have to keep installing it. i am sure creating good hardware is more important to a graphics card manufacturer than buggering about with drivers. they could also benefit from a bit of prodding and poking from the open source guys. hey, they may even be smart enough to help with a few optimisations!

flu

i am so ill at the moment. i feel like there is serious pressure inside my head. keep getting phonecalls from work though which is not very relaxing.

volvo v40

sofia and i were thinking about trading the car in for another. we went to look at a ford mondeo automatic diesel but it was nothing special. after the test drive we were just glad to get back into our car. volvos are really nice.

this leaves us with the problem of our trip to spain in the summer. we need to get a towbar fitted on the car so that we can stick all the stuff in a trailer. i have ebayed the roofrack and roofbox. what a waste of time! no space at all in those things!

volvo quoted £372.54 to fit one which is frankly outrageous. a local towbar specialist quoted £200 which seems more reasonable, although i have been trying to investigate what is involved with fitting one myself. there is a towtrust towbar on ebay for £40 but it looks like a bundle of wires that i wouldn't know anything about.

also trailers aren't cheap. i wonder if my dad will let me nick his?

2 months

it has been 2 months since i posted to my blog. time is going so fast at the moment. it doesn't seem that long since i upgraded my computer.

if having fun means that time goes too fast maybe i should start drinking heavily, get into a heavy depression and start arguing constantly with my family in order to make my time on this earth seem a bit longer.

or maybe not...

FC3 blog entry poster

woo hoo! just updated the FC3 blog entry poster and now it actually runs up without error. now i can post to my blog again!

whoops

accidentally deleted the /usr/share/java file which had all the jars in. now i need to backtrack and remove all the rpms which had those files and reinstall. the reason i was messing about there in the first place was because it didn't seem to be picking up on the jars in the jvm. oh well

jpackage

also - rather than adding all the jar files in WEB-INF/lib i can just install the package (making sure to add it on the server too!). this is going to make my war files a lot lighter and ant file simpler.

hooray - breakthrough!

previously i would unpack a version of java and link all my programs in there. now i have discovered jpackage which allows me to integrate a really nice solid tested java platform inside linux. it has made things 10 times easier, and now i have tomcat and eclipse sitting on the same platform and i just need to put it onto the server too. wierdly all the fonts have gone even nicer all over my system and things seem to have calmed down a bit. it is almost as if i had been working by trial and error a little bit before and now i have stabilised in relation to java.

there are still some tricky bits like building rpms from nosrc rpms but that is fairly easy when you get the hang of it. also getting java3d to work was a bit funny but now i am more confident. happy bunny today!

cpuspeed

my computer kept overheating and turning itself off which is worrying not to mention annoying. then i noticed that cpuspeed had turned itself back on and was trying to control the processor speed (badly). but this made me look at the processes that were running before the conk out and i noticed that eclipse and yum when they run make the processor run at a constant 100% which explains why my fan has been a bit loud. now i have disabled cpuspeed i don't crash any more but can't run these two important applications without my fan making me go deaf!

i may roll back to an earlier version of eclipse (i have already gone from 3.01 to 3.0) but i think the problem may be something else. if i was a paranoid type i might think it was to do with java and suns recent honeymoon with microsoft!

asda bread

i have noticed a few times now when buying "brand name" bread from asda that it is stale. the bread has been useless for sandwiches, and toast is the only thing it is good for. i thought these bread makers were going downhill and obviously started buying asda bread thinking it was all freshly made etc. then one day i bought one of my favourite "leading brand" breads from the spar and it was great! fluffy tasty not at all stale. needless to say i won't be buying bread at asda again and i think these cheap tactics show how the supermarkets are muscling in on everyones territory.

new speakers

at the weekend i nicked my brothers old amplifier and speakers. the amplifier is a pure sound yamaha 180 watt @ 8 ohms and the speakers were minimax. the sound was dreadful and muffled. martin came round last night and we tried the speakers off rosana's stereo and the sound was perfect, so today i went to richer sounds on mansfield road and bought some mission speakers. now the sound is really great so i am listening to loads of tunes to hear all the bits that i have been missing on all the shite stereos i have been listening to.

essex

went to essex for dinner on saturday. it was really nice although i am drinking far too much at the moment. it was a proper roast beef dinner except with no yorkshire puddings!

the whole family were there, my brothers and parents and babies, except for vicky and rebecca who haven't come to a family do yet.

sofias family

sofias family have arrived from spain last night to stay for a week. they have brought loads of lovely spanish food and wine. we are taking sofias sister out tonight for cocktails. i am probably going to get really trashed.

reminds me that i haven't had a holiday for ages (even though i took 6 weeks off in summer). i think i will take it easy this week.

ah ha

there is another line in /etc/security/console.perms which has dri in it and this needs to be removed or it keeps setting the permissions back on the nvidia files. also there is something wrong with the driver that it doesn't copy the nvidia dev files into /etc/udev.

you would have thought someone at nvidia would have tested it worked before releasing it!

just remembered from last time

lines on video are related to not having the nvidia driver set up properly.

FC2 -> FC3

have now upgraded to FC3. it has changed quite smoothly. the main problem is reinstalling the nvidia driver. i have heard there is a community version of the nvidia driver which would make it ten times easier (also i should be using ndiswrapper for wireless instead of driverloader).

anyway, my glxgears does not work due to a permissions problem with the driver and now i can either log in as myself without 3d rendering, or log in as root with. this is quite a setback considering my career is programming 3d graphics

FC2 to FC3

going to upgrade to FC3 today. already started and have a huge load of packages downloading. using yum to do it from this tutorial here.

has new kernel, new evolution and it looks as if gnome is upgraded too. exciting!

please lord do not let me be rendered computerless!

panda chinese restaurant

went for an all you can eat buffet at the panda in sherwood last night. i was suprised that it was pretty good. woke up with a really dry mouth though so it must have been generously salted!

finally got my hard disk

had to drive to mansfield yesterday to pick up my hard disk as the delivery guys wouldn't bring it over again. it had to be sent to graham's house as the company cards are registered there now and simply wouldn't deliver to mine on first order.

it is a bit on the chunky side and has a really nasty bright blue light on it that flickers. i wish there was some way to disable it.

i have already transferred a lot of crap off my computer and freed up about 25 gigs. i am sure my computer is running a bit faster, then again i did only have a few megs left on my drive.

crap expands to fill the space given to it...

cold day today

it is brass monkeys today. the car doors were stuck shut when i tried to open them. thought the door handles were going to snap off! the view from my new house is really far over loads of houses. if i was an insulation salesman i could tell exactly which houses needed roof insulation from here. most of the houses have snow on but there are still one or two...

anyway, global warming seems like a good idea on a day like this!

bought some badminton racquets

after russell introduced me to badminton some weeks ago i have finally bought some racquets. this should save me a bob or two on racquet hire and now i can practice with sofia at david lloyd.

the racquets were so cheap though (£5 for two including three shuttlecocks). i would advise getting better equipment. the racquets are okay but the shuttlecocks are made of cork and if they get anywhere near the rim of the racquet they fly off at weird angles.

can be alright if it means the other person can't hit it though!

ordered my 250gb hard disk

fed up of my hard disk running out all the time so i ordered the HD. bit of a reckless business decision though...

external hard drive

i really want an external hard drive to put all my data. every CD i have seems to break after five minutes especially with my evil son scratching them and playing frisbee.

i need one at least 250GB like this one hd. maybe use the company card....

the trouble with the external hard drive thing is that i can see myself loving having it, and keeping all my stuff there, and being able to plug it into other computers etc. but after a while i will get paranoid about backing up and need a second identical disk to copy everything on to. i will then need a program which compares the content of the two drives and just copies the changes for speed and i have not checked this out on linux yet (yes yes i know it would be easy on windows).

then again, who says my hard drive on my laptop might not fail anyway. i would still be up shit creek. actually what if the web server breaks down? that has all my cvs on it!! (note to self: buy new machine with raid disks)

we cannot let ourselves get worried about these things.

i suppose

i should post when i have solved a problem as well as reporting the problems. after russell read my blog he got the idea that linux is hard work. well i choose to live on the cutting edge so i always have to put up with the fact that upgrades may cause errors. i do try and commit bugs to gnome etc. but linux is great, there are no problems with it on my laptop at the moment.

the thing is when people ask me - "what do you do when windows suddenly does something unexplainable and shit like it always does?" i say put linux on! it is more stable and i never have problems like that any more.

everything is the way i want it on my computer now

moved into my new house

have moved into my new house with views over sherwood in nottingham. it is a modernish house (1973) and is really warm compared to my old house (pre 1900). oh yeah and not having to park my car on the road any more, i hated that! especially in the shithole i used to live in when people would beep at you because you were blocking their way!!! have a garage now too which has basically become a dumping ground for all my crap. need to fix it up with shelving etc. still it is warm and dry unlike my old damp cellar

News story about Linux being for people who steal windows

I think everyone should be able to buy computers free of preinstalled software. I have bought many computers from Dell and it takes longer to scrub their installation of junk than it does to start again. If windows was offered at the same price but not installed that would be great, and Linux users could opt out and just install whatever they want instead.

Some people may steal software, this should not reflect on the majority.

inspiron 5150 overheating FC2

I have given up trying to figure out ACPI, cpuspeed, cpufreq and all that jazz which allows a laptop to function normally. Everything seemed alright for a time, although the fan was constantly at high speed - not on Windows XP though, the machine was always quiet on XP. Then the computer kept overheating and cutting out. To resolve this I eventually disabled Speedstep in the BIOS and it has been fine since. I assume that the computer should work better with speedstep so I need to look at cpufreq daemon.

please forgive me for i have sinned

for not keeping my blog up to date

just got connected

just got my laptop connected to wireless broadband router in spain

and

video is choppy

why linux is annoying

clock keeps changing time, screen doesn't go off when lid closes, screen doesn't blank after a set amount of time, ACPI doesn't work and fan continuously goes.

nvidia 4kstacks driver

woohoo! nvidia have released the 4k stacks version of their linux driver and now i can go back to standard fedora 2 kernels. the linuxant driverloader standard rpm worked fine too which was a worry as that is the only other nonstandard driver i have.

this means i can configure my kernel now, rather than being stuck with an 8kstacks kernel, and benefit from updates. also can use kernel-ntfs etc

resized partitions

just resized partitions so now linux gets 10gb more at 25gb and windows has 13gb. this must mean that i have almost made the leap completely over to linux. i still may need to go into windows to check visual basic stuff and mdb files so for now will need to keep it.

usb problem

in modprobe.conf i had:

alias usb-controller ehci_hcd

alias usb-controller1 ohci_hcd

i found out that it is now:

alias usb-controller usb-uhci

alias usb-controller1 usb-ehci

aumix

went into aumix and turned up pcm2 and now it seems to work ok. what is pcm2????

intel 8x0 soundcard problem

got my soundcard working earlier but now it seems to have developed a crackle. it was playing fine earlier. under FC1 the sound was fine but it used OSS rather than ALSA. i heard ALSA is the way to go so i will have to crack on and try and solve this.

mouse working

got mouse working by doing modprobe usb-uhci which was in my modprobe.conf file as alias usb-controller usb-uhci. wonder why it didn't initialise?

usb problem

USB Controller Intel Corp 82801DB (ICH4) USB UHCI

lists it in /sbin/lspci, but kudzu does not see it

upgraded to fedora core 2

thank god! at last i have managed to upgrade to FC2 via yum. however i now have a few problems...

i am back on to a synaptics touchpad mouse because the kernel has failed to recognise my intel usb (hub?) controller. stupidly i deleted the configuration from kudzu so that i am finding it hard to go back and fix it.

i have an inspiron 5150 and was told somewhere that the 2.6 kernel was going to fix the problem with the ACPI events not firing. it doesn't seem to have yet, needs more investigation but i think a mouse is more important right now.

problem with £ sign

trying to track down a strange problem in either mysql, java or torque. on my development machine my website pulls out pound signs (£) ok. on the server it pulls out a question mark (?). the strings are stored in a longblob.

this must mean there is a problem with the character sets in either java or mysql. however i am having trouble tracking this problem down on google.

on local machine i have mysql-3.23.58-4 and j2sdk1.4.2_03, on remote machine i have mysql-3.23.58_1.74 and j2sdk1.4.2_01 so i suppose the first thing to do is upgrade the remote machine to have the exact same versions.

how irritating!

sftp

still haven't fixed my sftp problem. it seems math::gmp doesn't work with redhat 9 very well. have tried changing the cipher but it makes no difference it still need the perl gmp stuff. gmp is installed on the system fine, i guess perl just can't interface with it.

frozen bubble

wow! frozen bubble is really addictive. thought i had been playing for ten minutes but when i finally stopped it was 52 minutes. sheeeiit!!

david lloyd

aahhhh.....just had a relaxing workout and swim at the health club. lovely

ODBC-ODBC bridge

having trouble with a slow Access OLEDB connection over a network. the mdb file is 120Mb so it is no wonder really. then realised that Access ODBC driver doesn't support remote DSN. no wonder really otherwise people wouldn't have to upgrade to MS SQL Server.

looked at a company called easysoft which make this component to allow remote Access access. also works for linux which is great. oh dear looks like it is going to cost £800.

don't think we'll be using that then!

trying to look for alternatives like iODBC, unixODBC (which shamelessly plugs easysoft) perl DBD. looks like it is going to be tricky to set up the server, let alone trying to find a windows oDBC driver which will connect to the linux dsn.

Why am i getting involved? this is not even my problem!

Math-GMP

found a bug submission at CPAN with exactly the same problem as I am having - here. doesn't look good as it was submitted last july

Math::GMP

currently trying to get Net::SSH::Perl to install on redhat 9. it has so many dependencies and one of them is Math::GMP which does not want to install. don't know what is wrong with it, there doesn't seem to be much on google either.

hooray

finally got the blog entry poster working on fedora. now i can post entries without having to go into a browser