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.

Just before I woke up this morning I had a very strange dream which left me feeling good, so I’ll recount it a little…

It start with me cycling home from work. When I get to the roundabout on the edge of the housing estate where I live which is also on the edge of the countryside I see that the area which was once fields has now had a large, high class flat development built upon it so I go to investigate. Within the development I find that a large, very posh hotel is part of it with lots of people milling around. I park my bike outside one of the new shops and lock it to a road sign before ambling over to the hotel.

I walk through the front door into the lobby. There i find a couple of women who are giving out leaflets advertising parties which will be going on every night. They’re both dressed in fancy dress themselves. In this case the fancy dress is in one case almost bedroom wear, being made of shear fabrics and very small underwear, the other a scottish lass is in more normal party wear. I get talking to the scottish lass and get on famously. She explains about how she got the job and how she’s enjoying it. We get on so well that we start putting our (one arm each) around each other before the three of us go outside so that they can give out more leaflets.

While we’re out there one of the lecturers from work comes along and gets given leaflets, at which point I notice some oik trying to pick my cycle lock so I make my excuses and run over to my bike and shoo off the potential thief.

However, after I return I find the scottish lass has started to ignore me as I’d said that I was afraid that I couldn’t afford to attend the parties… at which point I woke up.

Strangely, despite the rejection bit at the end, the whole dream gave me a sense of well being and has given me a boost to the morning. It was mostly the sense of closeness I had when holding that nice scottish lass. Maybe that’s what I need in real life and just not in my dreams?

Discworld: Which Ankh-Morpork City Watch Character are YOU?
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So, there you have it.

Well, a bit of a breakthrough on the undergrad lab front.

I’ve managed to get all the old and news users set up on the new server for both Windows and Linux use. Well, I think I have. The test ones I’ve been playing with seem to work anyway.

Work’s still really busy.

I am actually making headway with migrating the users from the Sun server to the Dell/Microsoft one. It’s a pitty that Integrix/SFU’s tar barfs on files generated by Solaris tar or GNU tar and the build environment is too broken to allow GNU tar to compile. It means that I have to use cygwin to extract the user data but cygwin REALLY screws up the NT file permissions in interesting ways. I seem to have got NIS/NFS working fine with the prototype client machine when it’s running Linux.

Somehow I’ve got to find a way of making the global group policy only apply to a certain set of machines rather than all the machines in the active directory. I have until the 11th to get these software things done as well as all the hardware to configure and work out how I’m going to image the client machines (I’m thinking knoppix + dd + NFS at the moment).

Oh, on top of this I have postgrad user accounts to set up, then do their induction on the 1st. Oh, and a new professor who has needed his new machines built, two workstations and a laptop plus two printers.. none of which have been plain sailing.. Oh, and the entry system where people keep forgetting that they need to register their cards, so I’m having to stop sporadically to do those as well.

Anyway, I’m knackered. Another early night tonight.

It’s been a VERY busy week at work. (I dunno why, but I almost typed school there.)

Basically, May, my colleague, and myself have to migrate our undergraduate teaching computer system from a Solaris UNIX server to a Dell Windows one. This includes moving all the data and the accounts.. Oh and making the Dell an NFS/NIS server so that the dual booting PCs can use the home directories under Linux. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that the Dell server will straddle two sets of IP addresses, the internal, private 10 network and our public 163.1.22 network. Add to this that the server cannot be a proper DNS primary server as the Oxford University DNS is a single, flat file with all the hosts being named host.unit rather than delegating authority and it makes setting up Active Directory nearly impossible.

After four reinstalls of Windows Server 2003 (resetting A.D. screws up the machine totally, so a re-install is necessary, it seems) I think we have a mostly working service on that front. Now “all” we have to do is get the user accounts set up properly and the data moved. This, of course, is going to be a major problem in itself. I’ve imported the password file using the “Services for Unix” migration tool, but I will need to go through each entry doing all the final settings.. Only a couple of hundred there. I just hope that it actually works.. Oh, and then I have to create all the profile directories and share them and set their permissions.

We also have to unpack and install all the 34 PCs, create the disk image on the prototype machine, including getting all the applications installed before imaging it and finally put the image on the machines.

All this has to happen in 3 weeks, before the beginning of term, ready for classes to use it for practicals almost on day one.

If you add to this the fact that we also have to service all the normal day-to-day problems in the department, induct the new postgrads who arrive in a couple of weeks, install a few new Sun W2100z workstations, two of which need to run Windows but Sun doesn’t supply the drivers and I needed to find the right ones to allow the Windows install to actually see the disks. Oh, and then there’s the new access control system with the swipe card management with software which makes it as difficult as possible to add cards.

I think you get the idea about how busy it is at the moment.

Anyway, today’s been pretty quiet. All I’ve done is shop in Oxford for wet weather gear. I’ve found a decent waterproof coat with integral fleece (Sprayway) and a day-glow yellow lightwieght waterproof jacket for cycling. The last one replaces my old cycling waterproof jacket which is a mere 20 years old exactly.. It was bought just before going to Uni for the first time. Unfortunately, its waterproof properties have failed even though it looks OK. Even after several dousings of waterproofing stuff it still lets water. I wonder if the new jacket will last that long.