It’s been a rather fun but exhausting weekend.

Saturday I was up early (for a Saturday morning) for the drive up to Matfen Hall, just outside Newcastle. After a long journey, including an interesting time trying to pay for petrol after the station’s tills crashed, I got there at about 2pm.

I later met up with and went off to Hexam in search of Daffy Duck socks.. A quest we failed.

The first night’s event was a rather pleasant meal.

Sunday started with a rather nice, relaxed cooked breakfast followed by a walk around the grounds. This was followed by a quiet tea in the conservatory with alecmrss, sleipnir_ and alonella. sleipnir_ and I then wandered over to the Black Bull pub for lunch. They didn’t actually have sandwiches on the menu but instead rustled up roast beef sarnies from the roast beef dinner they were serving, and very nice they were too. They seemed a nice lot in the pub though a bit absent minded as I kept having to ask them to take money for their wares. It’s a wonder they keep in business.

By this time it was about 1pm and time for me to get ready for the main event of the day, the wedding.

It’s probably easiest to describe the rest of the day in pictures, which you can see here. However, the quick version is:-

• Met up.
• Had drinks.
• Grim and Holly were wed.
• I went elsewhere to transmit the pictures to junk
• Photos
• Food
• PARTY!!!
• Bed.

Yesterday I had another lovely cooked breakfast, talked to Grim’s parents, uncle and aunt before saying my goodbyes. It was then a very long journey home as I went via the Vindolanda Roman fort then then a journey to Carlisle and home via Ullswater and Windermere. That was a long journey, having started out at 10:30am I finally reached home at 6:45pm. I slept well last night.

Take one old office server.

Remove old Pentium II 250MHz processor.

Strip from old teaching PCs a couple of ethernet cards, CDROM, a Pentium III 450MHz and some memory.

Add old 18GB UltraSCSI external hard drive.

Mix together well and add MandrakeLinux 10.0 Official.

Garnish with Apache2 and sprinkle liberally with SquirrelMail and iptables.

Bake at sysadmin mark 7 for 5 hours.

The result is a new webmail server, NAT gateway and logging telnet server.

Have a look at this image from the Cassini probe. Now doesn’t the outline of lighter “highland” with the “caldera” on it look a lot like the east coast of Scotland/England.. with on the left a hint of Wales? The Caldera seems to be somewhere around Lincoln.

Spooky!!!

(Just for Tribalw0lf… :-))

Over the last week I’ve been playing with MandrakeLinux 10.1 beta 2 x86-64 edition to see how good it is as a general use OS and a day-to-day machine. In that period I’ve installed it on my laptop at home and on one of the researcher’s new Sun W2100z workstation. So, what’s the verdict?

Well, other than one or two glitches in the install (in expert mode it turns off the USB keyboard after the first dialog but before the second so you can’t get further than the second dialog and the bootloader section is broken) everything seems to work fine. Well, fine as long as you’re not trying to use some programs which were compiled on other systems ‘cos a few of the 32 bit libraries are missing. Copying these off other machines got the software working again. Of course, Mozilla plugins for Linux don’t work ‘cos they’re 32bit and the x86-64 version of Java from Sun doesn’t include a browser plugin, how helpful.

The one big problem, however, is the problems of building programs for 32bit machines on the system. Only a very few libraries are available (which don’t include any of the X11 ones) which rather stops most compiles in their tracks. It looks like if I get the replacement desktop machine I’m hoping for I’m going to have to have it dual-boot in 32 and 64 bit Linux. Oh well.

Anyway, I’d better sign off. I’ve got a boring meeting to attend.

Nothing to see.. Move along. Move along.

One word… Yuck!

It’s an object lesson in how to make things look prettier but a lot harder to use.

Whoever thought of the drop-sideways javascript menus should be shot now!

This evening I travelled down to the quaint old English town of Godalming so as to celebrate the T-2 weeks and counting stage for ‘s wedding. As sort of almost stag do but not in the usual sense.

Normally, you would expect a stag do to involve inbibing lots of alcohol, stripper etc. etc. Instead, we had a rather pleasant meal in an Italian restaurant (‘cos all the other restaurants in Guildford seemed to be full) followed by a walk to settle the nice food before raiding Wagamama’s for white chocolate and ginger cheese cake to take away. It was then back to the cars, back to the house for the consumption of said cheesecake followed by watching a very cheesey film which someone had managed to get on DVD even before it’s come out in the cinema.. “Alien v Predator” We all agreed that it was worth the amount of money spent to watch it and no more. If you like cliche then you’ll like this film. The final entertainment was watching shoot things with a light gun on the PS2 and torturing a furby.

And so, I am now home and have to try to get to sleep. Night all

Well, the laser printers have gone up to the “recycling centre” where a burly bloke snatched them in turn and threw them into the back of the bin.

It’s a pity that “re-cycling” computers these days probably means shipping the stuff by bulk carrier half way around the planet so that small chinese kids can smash them apart and the older people in the community extract the precious metals using really horrid chemicals and causing massive local pollution. It would be better if the machines were shipped to the third world to be lovingly cared for by local people who have no computing equipment otherwise in their retirement years… before being shipped off to China……..

As for the Apple Laserwriter Pro 630, I remember ordering it from M.E.Electronics, unpacking it for the undergrads computing lab as it was just being set up ten years ago.. and now I’ve disposed of it.. symmetry.

This week has been another of work-work-work. (More of this later.)

However, I have done something, even if it is a bit of retail therapy.

Last Sunday I put an order in for a new ADSL router thingy in preparation for moving my ADSL connection from Nildram to Zen (Which I see are dropping their prices on the 1st November, so I’ll wait ’til then to change). The Draytek Vigor 2600G duly arrived on Wednesday and by the evening I had it set up well enough for it to be useful.

Today I did another radical thing, I bought a new printer. OK, this doesn’t sound very radical but this is the first printer I’ve bought since the summer of ’88. Oh I have had three printers since then, a LaserJet II, an Apple LaserWriter Pro 630 and a Sun SPARCprinter e, but these were second hand and mostly great fixer-upper opportunities where I’ve had to fix something before they were usable. The purchase of the Vigor router with its USB printer print server function gave me a window of opportunity to have a network printer at a reasonable cost. Specifically I’ve been wanting a colour printer so I could print out my digital photos in draft form for some time but have always shyed away from inkjet printers as they drink massively over priced non-light fast ink. Colour laser printers have now just come down to a price where they’re even thinkable though networked versions are very much overpriced.

So, what did I buy in the end? An HP Color LaserJet 2550L from PC World for £299.99 (only about £10 more expensive than Dabs and without the pain and hassle of getting it delivered). OK, it effectively only has a manual feed tray but it is a Postscript printer (important for me seeing the variety of OS I run). I can get the 250 tray unit later if I want it. It’s a good £100 cheaper than the version with the network build in.. so that effectively makes the cost of the Vigor £50.

Anyway, now to work things..

I finally managed to get the undergrad systems fully up and running, with only a couple of glitches on Friday when the freshers tried to log in for the first time and one of those was Mozilla Firefox’s fault (loading an update page and not allowing users to move from it). The lab did need some electrical rewiring before I could tunr all the PCs on at once, however.

Thursday I spent creating a new way of generating our mail alias file by first transcribing the original flat file into a series of files, one per alias list and then writing a perl script to generate the alias file used by sendmail from the components. It was good to actually do some programming again.

So, other than retail therapy, have I done anything? Not really. I did get my hair cut but that’s about it. Tomorrow I plan to take the old Apple Laserwriter and the Sun SPARCprinter e (which kindly donated to me earlier in the year) down to the Redbridge recycling centre.