44 posts
Well, that’s Christmas over for another year. We went to visit my family in Gloucestershire and surprisingly neither of the kids were wheezing too much. Something always seems to bring on their asthma whenever we stay for more than a day but this time we managed to keep it …
Went to Nottingham to do a spot of Christmas shopping this afternoon. It was utterly packed in the Victoria Shopping Centre and we didn’t really manage to find anything except cookies. Note to self - remember to do all Christmas shopping online and in October/November next …
After just three months of having the bathroom finished, three of the four spotlights in there have died. They all went within the last two weeks. The only one still working is the one that had died and been replaced before the bathroom was even finished!
Mike sent me this link tonight. http://www.ecospheres.co.uk/ They look really cool - it’s a shame they’re quite expensive for the large ones. Look at the Trade->Exhibition page, the ecospheres there must be at least a metre or so across - I can only imagine the …
A friend at work pointed out this url to me earlier. http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html I really can’t tell if it’s a serious attempt to “educate” parents or a spoof - it’s just so completely and utterly wrong. …
We went off down to London on Saturday to see the grand opening of the new Apple Store on Regent Street. Unfortunately some people had been queuing for a day or two like this person (check their entries for November 19th-20th 2004). The queue was absolutely huge by 10am so we …
Having recently tried to install a new machine at work with Fedora Core 3, I’ve decided that I won’t be getting myself a MegaRAID i4 IDE RAID card at any point.
It’s only the 18th of November (or was a couple of hours ago when I took the picture) but we’ve got snow already. Not just a light sprinkling of some powdery stuff, but lots of real huge wet flakes. This is a picture of the top of our fiesta after just a couple of …
Excuse me? It’s not even December, let alone December 25th and already we have Christmas decorations up in the local Iceland store in Beeston and the council have put up the Christmas lights throughout the town.
I’m starting to think that Maxtor disks aren’t as good as I thought they were. I bought 3 about 10 months ago, shortly followed by another one. All the same model and size, and created a linux software raid RAID5 array out of them.
Finally it looks like the car might be completely sorted out :) On a completely different note, I was sent a link earlier on instant messaging. The link was http://www.sockbaby.com/ - totally bizarre, but quite cool, set of short video clips.
For a couple of months, I’d been getting the “engine problem” light and each time it went to the garage, the onboard computer reckoned there was a different fault. The vacuum pump, glow plugs, mass air-flow sensor and oil level all caused it at one point or …
RANT MODE ON I just opened up my mail program and found 81 new messages (since last night!) Of those 81 messages, 4 were personal and the rest were blog notifications about new comments.. some nasty little blog-spammer has gone and added spam about casinos and various drugs to …
Well, after 3 weeks the pool had turned a nasty green colour, had emptied of water a fair bit compared to when it was full, and the water on the rain cover (plastic dust sheet) was occupying more of the space in the pool than the water inside was! Had to drain the pool and …
Went out to check how the pool was doing yesterday. It’s been there a week and no-one has yet ventured into it because of the awful weather we’ve been having. After all the rain last week, there was quite a large puddle collected in the top of the makeshift cover (an …
I never realised how much I hated floppy disks until today. They’re slow, clunky and unreliable. It should be a simple matter to transfer a 1.1Mb RAID card firmware update to a machine with no O/S but no.. first the floppy drive in my PC doesn’t have the power …
Bought a small paddling pool for the kids today - 6ft diameter, 25 inches high. Got it home from B&Q and found that it was more the kind of thing you fill up and leave out for the summer than a 10 minute fill and empty when you’re done sort of pool. It takes a long time …
We popped over to North Wales (Llandudno) last weekend with barely 18 hours warning. Note to new visitors - we’ve been there before.. see 26 July 2003 for more. It was Friday evening and we just figured we’d get away from the mess of a gutted bathroom in the early …
Windows Update says there’s a critical update for Windows. Critical to me implies that it’s absolutely vital to the smooth running of your PC. The description of the update left me wondering so I took a couple of screenshots of character map before and after the …
When attempting to make a slave disk into a master disk (and remove the previous master), it always helps to look at the documentation for the correct manufacturer and model of disk.
Ok, so they’re not ant people as such.. just your average run-of-the-mill black ants. Unfortunately they were all over the dining room and downstairs toilet - not just normal ants but winged ones as well. After trying Nippon bait, B&Q ant spray (on the ones outside) and …
Managed to drop my powerbook (and bag) today and although the padding in the bag prevented any major damage, there’s now a bit of a dent in one corner where the bag landed upside-down on the one part that had virtually no padding. :( I really must invest in some kind of …
Just happened to walk past our oven at midnight and it said “24:00”. A minute later it was back to “0:01”. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a digital clock say 24:00 before, usually they run from 00:00 to 23:59.
We went for a daytrip to Gateshead yesterday with the main purpose of visiting an art gallery. On the way there, we passed the “Angel of the North” sculpture and stopped to take some pictures. There was also plenty to take pictures of down by the river near the art …
Updated my network programming tutorial to answer a question that someone emailed me about it. Tried to compile the library on my mac last night and found that half the makefile was wrong, some of the includes didn’t exist on OSX and that you have to use ranlib on the .a …
Just been planning a day trip and using Multimap to give me driving directions, it came up with the following step that just made me laugh. 100 miles into the journey it reckons I should (driving not walking): 18 Turn right onto PAVEMENT and proceed for 0 miles If the whole …
…computer case! Lori found a system called Lubic yesterday. It’s a cross between Lego and Mecanno and lets you build either computer cases or just general models. For those in the UK, Maplin Electronics stock the kits at between 30-50 pounds. Since the sides of the …
Despite what several people have said about upgrading from Fedora Core 1 to Core 2, I decided to have a go on my linux box at home (the one this site runs on will have to wait until I have figured out how to upgrade from RedHat 7.3 to FC2).
Went to Harry Ramsden’s, the fish and chip restaurant, yesterday evening since we’d never been there before and didn’t feel like cooking. It’s quite expensive, on a par with Little Chef, around 8 or 9 quid per adult but the food is really good. …
Since Fedora Core 1 was installed on my linux box at home, I’ve noticed that connecting to it via ssh from Windows or OS X always resulted in strange characters appearing in man pages and certain terminal based applications. I’ve finally figured out how to stop …
Having installed MySQL for OSX from Apple’s UNIX & Open Source downloads section and Server Logistics, I found that the Perl module DBD::mysql wouldn’t compile and install. The solution it seems is to compile it by hand (oh, the horror!) Download and unpack …
These days when someone says they enjoy “online gaming” you probably think of 3d games engines with lots of monsters and vast quantities of bullets being fired by players all using the internet to connect to each other and play against each other. Either that or one …
Just finished reading Persuader by Lee Child. It’s a story about an ex-MP (Military Policeman, not Member of Parliament) who goes around getting involved in all kinds of violent stuff, usually involving at least one government organisation such as ATF,CIA,FBI,DEA,etc. …
Time for a couple of dreadful jokes. Q. What do you call a man with a spade in his head?
Doh! It seems that Apache::Template (the mod_perl interface for Template Toolkit and a cool looking module) isn’t compatible with mod_perl 1.99 and Apache 2.0.x. Unfortunately I don’t want to downgrade the server I’m using to mod_perl 1.26 and Apache 1.3.x so …
Artemis Fowl, Artemis Fowl : The Arctic Incident and Artemis Fowl : The Eternity Code - a trilogy worth reading. These stories are full of fairies, goblins, and other races, together with a “Mud Boy” named Artemis Fowl.
Having had a chance to read through most of the new Template Toolkit book from O’Reilly, I have to admit that it’s far more impressive than I first realised. Extra plugins and filters can be written and added into the basic templating system to provide extra …
Tom sent me a really weird link tonight. You thought installing RedHat Linux was easy? Try Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (note: no badgers were harmed in the making of this blog entry)
It’s just typical. I wait a couple of months for the new Template Toolkit book from O’Reilly to appear on Safari (the online bookshelf) and then when I give in and buy the paper copy it appears on Safari a few days later. I don’t know what the book is like yet …
We visited Leicester the other week on the way back from a daytrip to London and found a bookshop called Borders had sprung up in one of the out-of-town shopping centres. We didn’t get to stay there too long last time as it was getting late and having driven to and from …
If you like Drama, and Action, I can highly recommend the following shows: CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) CSI: Miami Spooks from the BBC Links are courtesy of TV Tome
Well, I’m now up into the top 1% of users in terms of work units for SETI@home - rank is 46,744 out of 4.8 million users. Why do I do it? I don’t really know - I used to run the distributed.net RC5 client but once the contest was over, figured I might as well use …
Ok, I’ve finally switched. Now I’ve had the chance to use MacOSX I’m quite enjoying it. There’s all the power of unix but also the pretty GUI stuff that I’ve grown used to using Windows as a desktop.
Well, despite my blog entry at the end of December, the snow didn’t really settle. It was quite disappointing. One of my New Years resolutions is to blog more often.. given the months between entries last year, that shouldn’t be too hard.