87 posts
Since we were upgraded to the 10 meg service, there have been a number of problems with the connection freezing. Reset the cable modem by pulling out the power cable, and it starts working again fine immediately. Having jumped through the hoops held by NTL’s broadband tech …
Thanks to NTL, we’re now enjoying the wonders of 10Mbps broadband. There was some doubt as to whether it would actually get upgraded before Christmas as various sites (such as BBC News and The Register) had reported earlier in the year but NTL came through as promised. …
Some new podcasts that I’ve subscribed to recently are: Hometown Tales - ghost tales, strange stories and legends. Scott Sigler’s Ancestor - Sci-fi story by the author of Earthcore The Tech Guy - a radio show on KFI 640
For the first morning in several days, there wasn’t ice on the windscreen of the car like this picture from yesterday. Instead of ice there was a 6 inch crack starting down near the passenger side bottom corner. At first I thought it was just water running across the corner …
In the last few days I’ve been getting maybe 5 or 6 bits of blog comment spam through each day. The weird thing is that they’re not advertising viagra, cialis, dodgy websites, poker or anything like that. In fact, they’re not really advertising anything as such, …
On the latest episode of TWiT (This Week in Tech) there were some sites mentioned, amongst them was Steadman, a band who have put loads (all?) of their tracks online for download. I listened to some of them and they’re pretty good, go have a listen for yourself!
OSX 10.4.3 was released a few days ago (October 31st). There are quite a large number of fixes in there but an interesting one was “MS-DOS formatted volumes, including the iPod Shuffle, perform better and consistently mount (become available) in the Finder.” This …
PC Gamer (December 2005) has a whole page about Urban Dead in it. I suppose this means more publicity for Kevan’s game and some fresh survivors for the zombie hordes to munch on.
As promised (in the previous entry), here are the pictures from the 2005 Mac Expo. I didn’t take a huge number and some of them turned out a little blurred. I guess I needed that digital camera magazine subscription afterall! The Adobe stand. The Wacom and Softchaos stand …
We got to go to the Mac Expo in London at the end of last week and saw some pretty interesting stuff. Last year we were mostly looking at the various printers that were available because Lori needed information for her degree, this year it was more gadgets and software. …
As a followup to my previous MySQL bug post, I tried PostgreSQL and didn’t like it all that much. I found there was too much of a learning curve for someone who’s only really used MySQL to any great extent. It’s probably a better alternative for someone who is …
It seems that in gaining over 100,000 players, Kevan’s Urban Dead game has managed to find a bug in MySQL that causes corruption of indexes. Unfortunately no-one at MySQL AB is able to replicate the bug so it can’t be tracked down and fixed. More information can be …
Found this link in the http://thisweekintech.com/ show notes (and heard about it on the podcast episode 24). http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050921-5337.html Although I don’t play World of Warcraft, I think that’s just a fantastic twist to the game.
Ok, it’s not quite as bad as the title makes out.. well actually, yes, I guess it is. Just had the NTL bill through for this month and it’s about 50% more than normal - the reason for this is that they’ve decided to go from billing 1 month in arrears for …
I’ve been playing around with a few voice over IP products for my powerbook just recently and it has to be said that some of them are pretty good. I tried iChat AV as that seemed like the obvious choice because it comes free with Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) and since I tried it a …
It seems the south east coast of America is getting a bit of a hammering from storms at the moment. We had Hurricane Katrina at the end of August which devastated New Orleans and now it seems that Hurricane Rita is about to hit Texas around the Houston area within the next few …
This assumes the following conditions: the Linux gateway is forwards all outgoing traffic after rewriting the source address as the external IP (i.e NAT) the incoming policy is to drop all packets unless they’re related to an existing connection. Both clients are running …
Just found a link to http://sxc.hu/ - stock.xchng - whilst trying to find some stuff on CSS and layouts. Also another site that I’ll be looking into is http://www.sitepoint.com/ which has a fair bit about CSS layout. Not sure I’ll buy the book that’s on there, …
Looking for a new house? Check out On One Map - very clever. Thanks to Andy for the link.
The primary drive failed in one of my servers - luckily since it was using mirrored drives the system carried on running until I could get PoundHost to replace it. However, since it was the primary drive when it was replaced the system wouldn’t boot and they had to use a …
Found Graeme’s nerd test score in the Planet NottsLUG archive from back at the start of September. Took it (click the button below for your chance) and sorry Graeme, you’re not as big a geek as me (but is that something to be proud of?)
Sitting here in front of the laptop the last couple of nights I’ve noticed that for no apparent reason my iPod wakes up and the screen goes bright for a few seconds before going back to sleep again. At first I thought there was something on the clickwheel but it’s …
Having ordered a new server, I finally got it yesterday. I thought I’d set it up to act as secondary nameserver, backup mysql and general user-data backup but when I started backing up some of the data from the old server (via rsync over ssh) I found that every few minutes …
It’s a shame it’s so much hassle to change my email address and scrap inbound email to one of my older addresses. Things like having to let all my friends know the new one and adjusting mailing list subscriptions etc. I’ve got several legacy addresses that seem …
Just found a cool feature in iCal. You can add a “Birthdays” calendar to it by going to Preferences and then ticking the box near the bottom that says “Show Birthdays Calendar”. No big deal you might think, and that’s what I thought.. until I noticed …
Pogosticks aren’t just for kids! Got sent this link tonight, well it was the link to the movie but I had to go digging on the site for more info afterwards. http://www.yoyoguy.com/unicycle/#FB1200 Check out the Flybar 1200 at the url above. The video (quicktime format) …
Here’s an update to the previous entry regarding losing my phone addressbook. In the Apple Address Book application (in OSX) if you select all the names in the Name column you can right click and export all the vCards in a single file. You can also use the bluetooth option …
MY 6822 died yesterday, it powered on and then just as it establishes a connection with the Orange network locks up with a message “Contact service”. Yes, that’s right. My fairly new phone.. the Nokia 6822 I’d only had since June. With it went all my phone …
Just recently I’ve been wanting to do some basic graphics stuff in OSX, copy & paste some bits of image, paint onto the canvas, average run of the mill actions that MS Paint would do easily enough. The problem I’ve found is that OSX seems to lack any kind of …
Whenever the server is rebooted, I’ve noticed that the time goes a bit screwy and jumps forward an hour, having tried a few different settings I found that it wasn’t just this server but others were having the same problem.
It seems that every few days something goes wrong with the server. Just this morning it died for some unknown reason and I had to get it rebooted. It was still pinging and services such as pop3/ssh/http would connect but then no banners/prompts etc would appear and the service is …
I normally refrain from posting about work but this is a bit of a special occasion. I’m finally leaving the company I’ve been working at for the last 6 years. When I first joined, it was called WebFusion, then Host Europe, and finally PIPEX. With each name change came …
I’ve been trying out a few things in mod_perl just recently, getting together a small basic framework that handles sessions and generates an entire site (apart from images) from a bunch of Perl modules. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be but I’ve got …
Kevan’s new site http://www.urbandead.com/ was mentioned on Metafilter and as such has managed to bring the server to a crawl for the last couple of nights. Seems Apache running suexec, running perl, running the main script on the site isn’t so helpful.
Decided to upgrade the server this site runs on to 2GB of RAM today. Kevan (who writes some interesting things) launched a new game at http://www.urbandead.com/ in the last week or so and the server was creaking a little under the weight of all the hits but mainly due to the …
RSS - Real Simple Syndication. It’s a way for me to publish my blog entries (but it could be anything really) that can be read by another site for inclusion into their pages. One example might be a news site that publishes an RSS feed so that you can include the latest …
It’s official. Lori now has a degree - a B.A. (Hons) Fine Arts. The graduation ceremony was today and it took less time than I thought it would. It was held in the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham city centre and inside it was absolutely packed with all the students in the …
Well, the latest book in the Harry Potter series has been out for a few days. I actually heard about it in a podcast I was listening to on Saturday morning (16th July) whilst on my way to Tesco for some groceries. I went into Tesco and right in front of the entrance was a huge …
Thought I’d put my Google Adsense code into a couple of my old web games to see what they come up with… Rock, Paper, Scissors - a web version of the classic game. Throw a snowball - Seasonal script that lets you throw snowballs at people over email. The adverts on …
It’s been a few weeks now since the last comment was posted. Either the changes I made to the comment system have broken the whole lot, or else it’s defeated the spammers finally. Hopefully it’s the latter option! Wish I could remember what I did to the comment …
Andy sent me this link earlier via instant messaging… http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6410585172 A very amusing eBay item listing.
We decided, rather spur of the moment, to go to the beach on Sunday afternoon and ended up going to Skegness since we’d never been there before. Not a bad beach really - it was quite quiet considering it was a pleasant Sunday afternoon. I was expecting there to be more kids …
It seems that lots of people were keen to try out iTunes 4.9 and the sheer volume of downloads was why a number of the podcasts were timing out. I tried them today and they all updated fine however there is an intermittent issue where iTunes complains that the podcast isn’t …
Got sent this link earlier… http://www.octodog.net/ It’s a thoroughly strange product but I guess it makes hotdogs more interesting for kids.
The long awaited (well, since the world wide developers conference earlier this month) iTunes 4.9 release is out! The main new feature is support for podcasts through the iTunes music store. I subscribed through iTunes to a bunch of podcasts that I currently download using …
Ok, tried to sort out the online account feature on Orange’s website. Password doesn’t work so I click on the “I’ve forgotten my password” link. Now most places will just email you a new password or a link to a reset your password page, even a bank …
Having recently been upgraded by NTL to a reasonable 3Mbps cable modem and enjoyed a hefty speed increase, we decided to sign up for one of those 8Mbps Bulldog ADSL accounts at the end of last week. After a week of waiting for the results of the line test, I got a phonecall from …
I just recently switched my old Orange number back from a pay-as-you-go to a contract and got a free new phone into the bargain. Having tried a load of phones out in various shops, I finally settled on the Nokia 6822. Nothing special you might think, it’s just a phone.. but …
I tried installing IPTables::IPv4 so that I can manage firewall rules from a perl script but unfortunately the ‘make test’ stage failed in such a way that it setup some rules that blocked all traffic to and from the server! To be honest, that’s a pretty bad …
I finally decommissioned my old server today. Everything is on the new one which is behaving fine (probably jinxed it now!) I brought the old one home as it’s just a little desktop machine and just right for the kids to use.
Well, on the whole the migration of the sites from the old server to the new server went relatively smoothly. Just a few minor hiccups with missing Perl modules and permissions on files. I’ve got some pretty looking bandwidth graphs using rrdtool but nothing’s …
Due to various reasons, I ordered a dedicated server today from PoundHost. Quite a good spec, plenty of disk space, and 850GB of data transfer per month. Compare that with the current server - limited disk space, was a good spec 2 years ago, and 30GB of data transfer. The only …
Today’s the day that Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) was released to the public. As promised by Apple, pre-orders have been despatched in time to arrive today. We weren’t in when the van from TNT came to deliver it so we decided to go and collect it after work. Lori phoned to …
Problem solved thanks to Canis. The trick is to install the iPod updater software in Windows. Reboot the PC (as requested by the installer). Run the iPod updater and plug the iPod in. Restore it (note that it will wipe everything on it) and plug into the mains charger as per the …
I was lucky this year - I got an iPod for my birthday so now I can listen to audiobooks and music on the go without the hassle of running out of unique tracks after 60 minutes of CD or the joy of tapes being chewed up by old cassette playing personal stereos. I had planned to use …
Even after the 9 hour flight back from Dallas to the UK, I can’t believe I’m still jetlagged, or at least have my internal clock screwed up. Bed at 6am, up at 2pm.. not good considering that I have work tomorrow and it’s almost 3am and I’m not that tired …
Thanks to not looking at the map on the way back but relying on signposts, we ended up missing the turning from I-10 back onto I-49 and went about 80 miles too far along I-10 ending up in Westlake, LA. Instead of going all the way back to Lafayette, we turned north onto US-171 …
Walk out from Margaritaville away from the river and most of the shops seem to make way for what appears to be residential, with the odd shop advertising voodoo, tarot and other kinds of mystical services. A few blocks down and we’re on Bourbon Street, pretty quiet road …
Although we found the restaurant on friday evening, we didn’t eat there until saturday evening. They have a queuing system that during busy times conveniently places you in front of the bar for about 10-30 minutes before you get to sit down and eat. We had a nice meal and …
One major attraction in New Orleans is the Aquarium of the Americas. It’s got sharks, jellyfish, and all kinds of other fish. There’s also a section that has parrots, an alligator and turtles. This is a lionfish that was at the aquarium. Here is one of the seadragons, …
We walked from the hotel down the river to the French Quarter in search of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville which is a restaurant that had been recommended to us. It also gave us a chance to see some of the other sights of the French Quarter. We saw the French Market, the …
Last time we went to America, we visited Harrah’s in Shreveport, LA and there were people wandering round with huge cups full of coins from the machines. This was just a year and a bit ago. Harrah’s in New Orleans had similar machines but instead of dealing with …
We got to New Orleans, checked into the hotel and having driven up and down most of the one-way streets, more by accident than anything else, we had a reasonable idea where various places were and how to get there. Given it was getting late we went to the Riverwalk shopping …
Texarkana to New Orleans is roughly a 420 mile journey which should take (according to mapquest.com) 7 and a half hours. Lori and I left the kids with her family and did the journey on our own. Although quite a lot of the tourist attractions in New Orleans are the kind of thing …
Mention “weather” and “Texas” in the same sentence and everyone seems to imagine hot scorching sun, not a cloud in the sky and high humidity, but it’s not at all like that. It’s more like the weather in the UK - when it’s cold and wet, …
I noticed when we first arrived that some of the quarters (quarter of a dollar - single coin) had various states on them. Figured I might try and collect them all - until tonight when I found out just how many there are already out. Seems that approximately every 10 weeks, the …
We landed about 30m early but this time saving was soon swalled up by the immigration process that I’m sure took significantly longer than the last time we were here. I guess it’s partly to do with the US-VISIT process. This basically involves digitally taking …
Despite my prediction yesterday that we’d have a McDonalds breakfast, we didn’t. By the time we’d managed to get all the baggage checked in, we figured we’d better get through the security gates into the main departure lounge as it was getting a little …
After an uneventful drive down, we checked into Le Meridian hotel which is right next to the north terminal at London Gatwick airport. Very convenient for the flight tomorrow morning at 10am. We should be able to wake up, pack the cases and walk to the terminal ready to check-in …
Well, it looks like the changes I made a while back aren’t having any impact on the number of comment spams that are being posted here so I’m going to have to try a couple more ideas at some point. For now, I’ll just keep trimming them out of the db so you …
Apple Mail likes to prompt about self-signed certificates when connecting to imap or pop servers over ssl. Unfortunately this gets rather annoying after a while so here’s how to import the self-signed certificate into your system. This is based on a hint from Mac OSX hints …
For several weeks now (since a logrotate version upgrade) I’ve been experiencing postrotate scripts that weren’t working. Putting it down to a temporary glitch I just ignored it but today I finally decided to work out what was up.
Was pointed to a strange site called Where’s George earlier. You enter the serial number off various denomination dollar bills and see who else has had that note and where. Having wondered if there was a UK version, a quick google found Dosh Trader.
Woke up on Wednesday morning to this… Not a huge amount of snow, but certainly enough to turn everything white. There was also a fair bit of ice around - saw several cars and a van slide around the road a bit whilst on my way to drop Harry at school. The snow and sleet has …
Happy Birthday to my wife Lori who, as I write this, is currently on her way back from a talk at the Tate Modern in London and should be arriving back in Nottingham in about 10 minutes.
I’ve got a new server to replace this one, the primary reason being that with all the sites and services on here there’s less disk space available than would be nice. There’s also the fact that the server is a little slow at times, and is running a really …
Well, once again I’ve got a failed disk in my Linux software RAID array. That’s got to be the third one that’s been flagged as failed within the last 6 months - they’re Maxtor 160GB drives. The last one that failed had a comprehensive PowerMAX test run on …
After having seen at least 12 spam comments added in the last couple of days I finally decided to do something about it. As it’s a fairly widespread problem, there are plenty of pages explaining what to do about it. Some of them are easy to implement but easy for spammers …
Had some problems with MySQL replication yesterday. I setup a new slave to join a bunch of existing ones and found that although ‘LOAD DATA FROM MASTER’ worked fine, once it had got an up-to-date copy of the data that was all it ever had. None of the new transactions …
Went back to Maplin Electronics yesterday and got an Mapower enclosure. It’s new so isn’t in the catalogue yet but it has an Oxford 911 chipset for the firewire side of things. It works with the mac just fine and even lets you boot from it using Alt to select a boot …
Well, I’ve had my powerbook for almost a year now and although OSX is nice enough, at times I try to compile applications (as in download source, ./configure, make, make install) and it just will not compile. Figured I’d try Fedora PPC (core 3) and although it’s …
It seems not all firewire drive enclosures are equal. Those with an Oxford 911 chipset apparently work properly with OSX and you can boot off them. The one I got today from Maplin was unfortunately not an Oxford chipset but a Prolific PL3507. It works ok in so far as it mounts …
Those new macs that were announced during the latest Expo in SF are just so cool! The Mac mini - G4 processor, up to a Gb of RAM, 40 or 80Gb disk and as many connections as a 15" Powerbook. Firewire 800, firewire 400, USB 2.0, ethernet and modem, with an optional Airport …
The biggest problem with having a holiday and not really going out much is that my body clock tends to get all screwed up. Wake at 12pm (lunchtime) and go to bed at 4am.. wouldn’t be so bad except I have work on Tuesday. I guess I should go to bed now.
I’ve been meaning to write this entry for a while but never quite got around to it. It’s probably not all that interesting, but I really want to write it because then maybe when one of these things happens, I’ll stop thinking “Must complain about that (to …
I’ve just spent the best part of 9 hours installing a Fedora Core 3 User Mode Linux (UML) filesystem and configuring it so that it works. It’s been a learning experience for sure, but once I’ve backed up the virtual disks, I can play around with various things …
It’s 2005. Happy New Year to everyone. Not much to report except that I spent a quiet night in front of the computer experimenting with mod_perl examples from my new practical mod_perl book (see entry about Christmas).