Hmm…

That last journal entry was interrupted by my most favourite user who by her own stupidity had managed to cause her mailbox to corrupt nastily and get 13000 error messages put in it and wanted me to fix it.

In this case, Emacs was my friend.

Grrrr… users!

Underworld Stargate

Last night I went out to the cinema with Kat and John to see Underworld. I’ll give a more detailed spoiler view of the film later in this entry, but for those who don’t want to be spoilt my thoughts of the film are that if they’d had had a little less action and a little more character development they could have had a *FAR* better film as the basic plot ideas could be quite interesting.

Afger returning home I decided that I’d not go to bed straight away but instead look at the tape I’d made of the first episode of season 7 of Stargate SG-1 which my video had watched for me earlier in the evening. Again, a detailed discussion of this will take place after the cut but suffice it to say that there was a very knowing set of references to Star Wars.

Aha! Spoilers ahoy, mi’shipmates! Aha!…

Oh my goodness!

Guess what?!

You can’t guess, can you?

That’s right, i have a social life again! 😉

Friday night I was out on the town after happy hour with John and Paul. It seems things are starting to look up now that the postgrads have been paid by NERC.

Tonight, I’m off to see Underworld.

It’s all go, you know.

Anyway, on other news, I picked up 3 games at the Games shop for £20. Not bad for £6.66 a game concidering that the games weren’t THAT old, being “Black&White”, “Diablo II” and “Microsoft Flight Simulator 98.” OK, so the last one isn’t so hot.

Catch-up

I can’t remember how long it’s been since I last updated this, so I’m going to assume that it was about a week ago.

I finally managed to finish building KDE 3.1.4 at work only to find that they’ve broken the logout part so the session doesn’t close properly. This is a real pain as it’s a show stopper bug as far as rolling out the update into general use.

Last Friday afternoon so silly person somewhere in north Oxford probably had the fright of his life when he cut through one of the two main power cables feeding the University’s science area and damaged the other cable. The upshot of this was that an e-mail went around warning that there MIGHT be a power failure sometime in the afternoon and to take action. OK, so, what action can you take about a possibility? You can’t shut things down ‘cos there might not be a power failure. Anyway, about half an hour after this useful e-mail the power went off. I was then told that it would be off for the whole weekend so I turned everything off at the wall and everyone went home.

Anyway, as it turns out the power came back on only about an hour after it went off, but this was long after everyone had gone home.

It’s taken me until yesterday to get things back in order. A couple of hard disks didn’t spin up after the failure. Oh well.

Last weekend I visited Graham, Rachel and little Chris. Saturday was spent wandering paths around Odium and watching signal crayfish (nasty american invaders!) fight amoungst each other for small holes under logs. Sunday was spent doing not a great deal, I think. We did try going to the little trains for Christopher but there was a fete going on so there were long queues.

Other than that I’ve not done anything, really.

Aaaargh!

I was 2/3rds of the way through building KDE 3.1.3…

Guess what happened? Yes, that’s right, they flippin released 3.1.4 with security fixes!

Aaaaaargh! The b*stards!!!!

rm -rf kde-3.1.3
mkdir kde-3.1.4 kde-3.1.4/src
cd kde-3.1.4/src
wget -r ftp://……/*
cp kdebuildtools/* .
buildit >& build.out

Oddments

Alec seems to think that iut’s possible that the CDROM drives Scan had on sale on Friday might have not been legitimate as they’re in Sun Enterprise 250 colour and have Sun firmware so he’s likely to be contacting Sun’s corporate security people to find out.

I’ve started building KDE 3.1.3 at work.

Kids around where I live seem to be having fun firing exploding fireworks down the roads and running away. These are extremely powerful ones and are pretty dangerous.

The one of the workmen modifying the lift near my office is a whistling jukebox. He got through at least 6 or 7 different tunes, all with oddly varying tempo and slightly out of tune.

That is all.

Today’s been good, clean fun.

Well, even though I didn’t get to bed ’til gone midnight last night I was awake at about 7am with a mild sinus attack. So, while waiting for the anadin to take effect I decided to start the process of installing the recommended patches for Solaris 8 on my SPARCstation 4.

After a false start or two I got it going.. by which time it was 9am and time for Broadcasting House on Radio 4. It wasn’t worth going back to bed, so I went downstairs and made myself a cumberland chipolata(sp?) sarnie for breakfast. I’d cooked the sausages last night as I needed to cook the whole lot in one go and could only eat 5 of them.

Anyway, after Broadcasting house I put my mind to using the good weather to do the “big” washing, that is larger items which are best dried outside. Hence, I put the towels in the washing machine and discovered that I’d very little washing liquid left. Oh well.. I’ll have to go out again today.

In the meantime, while the patching was in process and the washing was being washed, I looked into installing the SCSI CDROM drive I’d bought from Scan for £12. I opened the SPARCstation 4 and discovered that I needed an internal SCSI cable and a mounting kit.. so I turned to the SS5 next to it. I hardly turn this on anymore so I decided to pillage it for parts. It’s an older SS5 so has the slimline CDROM drive, unlike the later SS4’s. Anyway, after slight modification of the mounting kit and transplanting the SCSI cable the CDROM was alive.

I had thought the drive bezel looked suspiciously like the colour for a Sun Blade 1000 when it arrived yesterday.. Well, probe-scsi confirmed my suspicions giving in part of the product info string “SUNX32”. Hmmm… Maybe Sun or Toshiba are dumping their excess CDROM stock.

So, a trip out to get washing liquid and failing to find anywhere to buy Blutac and a wash of the bed clothes later, along with watching telly and having dinner I find myself at the end of the day waiting for my skillet to soak so that I can finish cleaning that.

I’ve now two last tasks to do tonight. Firstly to put the rubbish out and lastly to make the bed.

Work again tomorrow. Hey-ho.

PC update

Well, the entrails have been transferred from one case to the other now. I’ve still got to replace the motherboard chipset fan with one which isn’t out of ballance so as to stop that buzzing and I’ve as usual connected the LED plugs for the hard disk and power lights the wrong way around.

I still need to check out the ZIP drive as I think I might have pulled its IDE cable out.

As for the case itself, wiring all those fans was a bit of a nightmare. I need to build a proper wiring loom as some point so that the wrens nest can be cleaned up. Also, the tool-less PCI card system is a bit of a no-hoper. I needed to use screws in the end due to PCI cards having their PCBs higher than the top of the metal shield, preventing the clips on the securing mechanism from moving into position.

I’ve got the USB and firewire ports on the top of the case wired up. However, I have no way of testing the IEEE port. Oh well.