Well, last night I got spamc working, re-installed Gallery2 and managed to get that to work and transferred all the albums into it from Gallery1 and also got the ADSL statistics working again. So now the only outstanding issue is the temperature monitoring, which is basically out of my hands as the nVidia nForce 5 chipset I2C bus controller isn’t supported by either the ACPI system or lm_sensors.

Tonight I have a whole load of cleaning and clearing up to do in preparation for my parents’ arrival on Thursday as I’m out at the monthly Oxford Uni sysadmin social tomorrow evening. I’m just going to have to set my DVR to record “Stargate SG-1” and “Battlestar Galactica” tonight while I do the chores (and get it to record “Stargate Atlantis” tomorrow evening as well).

Oh, and happy birthday to me… not that I have any presents to open or cake to eat. Oh well.

Well, I can’t remember how long it’s been since I last did a proper update of this journal thingy, so I’ll give a quick resume of the last couple of weeks:

My inheritance came through so I’m now debt free. Yippee!

My Mum’s gone on anti-psychotic drugs to suppress her agitation and imaginary friends.

I’ve worked lots.

That’s about it really.

So, we come to this weekend. Due to Scan Computers International Ltd taking nearly a week to deliver the parts for my replacement (quiet) home server, I spent practically the whole weekend building the thing and getting all the services transferred from my old server. The reason for the haste is that my parents are coming up on Thursday and hence I wanted the spare room as quiet as possible. My old server had two very noisey fans which made it sound like a vacuum cleaner so when my parents (or anyone else) stayed I had to either shut the machine down or unplug the fans, which sent the CPU temperature through the roof.

The new machine is very quiet, except for an annoying ~50Hz vibration which resonateds through the floor. The case has three large, slow fans and the CPU fan is controlled by the motherboard. This is also helped by the processor being the energy efficient version of the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ so the heatsink/fan doesn’t have to work so hard.

Anyway, practically everything’s working now on the new machine. The only excpetions are spamc (part of SpamAssassin) doens’t work when run as any normal user for some unknown reason, I’m not getting all the syslog information from the router so my on-line ADSL graphs aren’t working and the motherboard sensor system isn’t supported by either lm_sensors or ACPI so my on-line temperature monitor won’t work. Oh, there is one other thing, the Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 BIOS has broken ACPI tables for the IRQ handling, so I have to boot the kernel with the “acpi=noirq” option otherwise the kernel will just hang.

Just as I was closing the curtains in my bedroom before going to bed at around 10:30 tonight I noticed that the clouds were blowing away leaving a crystal clear sky and the Moon shining brightly. Having been waiting for just such a night for ages so as to take a photograph of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History by moonlight I gathered my camera and tripod and drove into town.

Now, until today there have been lots of 6′ high steel fences around the front of the museum ever since the morning after the gales a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, the workmen have left the day-glow orange fence around the lawn in front of the museum. Still, this may be the last time this year when the conditions are right (clear sky and a moon high in the sky and in the west during semi-civilised hours) this year so I had to take the chance.

I took 13 shots in the end, varying the focus (as it was too dark for the auto-focus) and the exposure. I think this, the last one is probably the best of the crop. What do you think?…

Updated
I’ve updated the image to a version after changing the colour balance and slightly cropping it.

I’ve just listened to an item on the BBC’s 6 O’Clock News about the mapping of dark matter using Hubble images. Within this item was a classic journalistic grabbing of the wrong end of the stick:

“Scientists shot a beam of light from the Hubble telescope and watched how it was bent (by the gravity of the dark matter).”

Of course, what the astronomers actually did was to examine the images of light sent out by the very distant objects and then modelled what shape of dark matter would generate those distortions. Part of this modelling would probably have been to run simulations involving ray tracing back along the line of sight with different configurations of dark matter. THis is probably what confused the poor journalist who probably had a media studies degree and no idea about astronomy or science in general.

Well, it’s been the last day of 2006 and not a great deal happened. The telly was really bad and the weather was worse. Could that be a good summary of the year gone by? Hmm. Maybe not, at least the weather’s not been too bad.

This time last year I had my holiday in northern Norway to look forward to and my Nan was still alive. My Mum was a bit better than she is now as she could at least sit and have a bit of a conversation for more than a few seconds.

So, what does the new year have in store? Well, other than some financial re-organisation, there’s nothing planned. I imagine that next year will be just like last, except without the trip. My Mum will deteriate further and my Dad will probably have even less time to do the things he feels that he should be able to do. Globally, I can’t see much changing for the better there with the current (and probable future) encumbents in the political spheres.

That all sounds as if I think that next year is just full of bad things but that’s not the case. It’s more that I see the new year as merely an indifferent continuation of the last 15 billion (if you can really measure time before the Earth oribited the Sun in years). Just like the Universe itself, it’s not good nor bad, it just is.

Not such a busy day today. I got up late and pottered around a bit before lunch. This afternoon went for a bit of a drive around the Lizard Penninsular and watched the waves crashing onto the rockas at Coverack before travelling up to Helston to fill the car with petrol ready for my return journey on Tuesday. On the way back we popped into Tescos to get a couple of things. Exciting, eh?

After our return I helped my Dad with a couple of electrical items such as replacing a light switch, re-wiring a light fitting and replacing a wall socket. That sort of thing.

Again telly’s been naff, so we watched a recording of the “Hogfather” instead.

You can always tell when I’ve recovered from the rigors of work on my holidays in Cornwall as I start getting the energy to tinker with computers again.

Today I spent time finding out that the new QuickCams are better supported by a different driver because Logitech are using cheaper (and poorer quality) chips in thier devices. Still, it does mean that I got the webcam working under Linux and the webcam’s microphone working for only Skype under Linux but no other application. (Though as Skype for Linux doesn’t support video the rest of the camera isn’t much use for that application.)

After this partial success I turned to finding a suitable source for an updated (and not crackable) version of the Broadcom WiFi driver for Windows XP for my Acer laptop. Broadcom do not release the reference drivers for their devices, even to Microsoft, and rely upon the OEMs to release them. Some manufacturers, such as Dell and HP/Compaq, are prudent and update drivers for their old systems. Acer, amongst many others, don’t, which puts their customers at risk of security vulnerabilities. This is a horrible way to treat your customers.

There is a similar problem with ATI not supplying generic, reference drivers which will install on laptops and relying upon the OEMs to update them, who, of course, fail to, leaving the customers not being able to run certain software. (Unless they use a special hack with the non-laptop version of the drivers as the problem is merely with the installer refusing to install on anything but hardware blessed by ATI.)

Anyway, after finding an article describing how to use the driver from a Linksys PCMCIA card I got it upgraded under Windows. I then tried the same driver under Linux with ndiswrapper with no success. So I searched for a better source and Googled for the HP/Compaq driver and finally found it. Still, ndiswrapper won’t load it so Linux is stuck with the old (and broken) driver for the time being. However, seeing as the HP/Compaq driver *IS* the reference Broadcom one I uninstalled the hacked up Linksys one and installed the proper Broadcom one.

This evening I watched “Mrs Henderson Presents…” which passed the time.

I can’t believe it’s the ninth installment already… anyway.

Today was the day I did my regular trip to Carleen to visit Meriel and Chris. As usual it was a mixture of talking, tea and tinkering with old PC bits trying to resurect them. Good clean fun was had by all.

This evening there wasn’t much on the telly so watched “The Best of Top Gear” followed by the rather cheaply made retrospective on BBC saturday morning TV programmes, “It All Started With Swap Shop.” Some presenters have weathered better than others I must say. I must say that some of the clips made me think, “surely it’s not *THAT* long ago I watched that?!” This was especially true of the clips from “Going Live!”

Well, it’s the end of another day. Only four more days here and six more until I’m back to work. Blurgh.

This morning we drove over to truro so that I could pick up a USB 2.0 High-Speed PCI card for my Dad’s PC to make updating his iPod rather faster and to look for a simple docking station for the iPod similar to the one I bought a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, PC World were out of the docking station, but I did manage to get him the PCI card for ~£15. A bit on the high side but still cheaper than mail-order when you factor in the postage.

For myself I got a stack of 50 DVD-R media and a Logitech QuickCam so as to make using Skype on my Linux/Windows laptop. I bought a Logitech as I thought that they were well supported by Linux and were about the only webcam other than the iSight which worked on a Mac as well. The only one I could find at a reasonable cost and with a microphone was the “QuickCam Messenger.” Little did I realise that this is pretty well the only QuickCam not properly supported under Linux. (Actually, it’s this latest version of this model which doesn’t work.) Also, Logitech don’t supply a MacOS X driver for it either, unlike their older webcams. Thankfully, there is a free driver for it under MacOS X which seems to work in everything but iChat.

After lunch I put the card into my Dad’s PC and then got on with trying to hack the two Linux drivers for “QuickCam Messenger” cameras to get them to work. Well, both drivers give the same error, or rather they get the same error back from the USB driver layer of Linux. This part of the kernel seems to think that the device has “stalled” or, having looked at the source, basically not played by the USB protocol as understood by the Linux 2.6.17 kernel.

That basically took the rest of the day.

Got up late, after which we went on a drive into Helston in search of milk. Having found an open garage with a shop we returned.

After lunch, went for a walk.

Other than watching telly and eating, not a lot else happened.