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!