Here are a couple of pictures from my walk with Rachel, Graham and Chris on saturday afternoon. I hope you like them..

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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.

ESTJ – “Administrator”. Much in touch with the external environment. Very responsible. Pillar of strength. 13% of the total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Extroverted (E) 51.85% Introverted (I) 48.15%
Sensing (S) 63.64% Intuitive (N) 36.36%
Thinking (T) 84.38% Feeling (F) 15.63%
Judging (J) 58.06% Perceiving (P) 41.94%

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

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.

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.

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.

(Reminder to self… stop trying to make puns for Subject line.)

Well, let’s see. What unexciting things have I been up to this week?

Well, work’s mostly involved dull and boring things purely getting things ready for the new term such as spending 2 days trying to get quotes for consumables. Yes, it took 2 days to get proper prices out of 3 firms, all because they wanted to beat the others on price. Maybe it is a good idea to find the cheapest supplier, but I could have saved a whole load of time, and hence to the department almost as much money they’ve been paying me for that time, as I saved on cheaper prices by merely going to the first supplier.

Oh, and the rest of the week was spent creating new accounts and updating software. On that front I’ve still got KDE to update in the next week.

Other than this, I’ve had a couple of nights of extremely poor sleep patterns and met Kat and her boyfriend Stu in the King’s Arms last night.

Yesterday, I finally decided that I needed to replace my current PC case with one which is better at removing heat and is quieter. So, in the afternoon I went onto the Scan web site where I’d seen the Thermaltake Xaser III models which had had good reviews. Amongst other things they have a front panel with a temperature read-out and fan speed control knobs. As always, I looked on the “Today Only” page and saw that they were selling off SCSI CDROM drives stupidly cheap. eg. The Toshiba 32x one I went for was £11.16 (yes, that’s not a typo!).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, ‘cos I couldn’t find a way to get special delivery (to get Saturday delivery) on the items using the web interface I phoned them up and ordered those two items and 256MB of PC100 memory for the iMac.

At 8:15am this morning the whole lot arrived in a yellow and green Initial City Link van. Pretty good service, I’d say. Still, I did pay £15 extra for the priviledge.

My first impressions of the PC case are as follows:-

Good points

• Looks pretty good.
• Has lots of fans which are controllable.
• IDE cable management buit in.
• Nifty no-screw PCI card fixings.
• Nice, screwless drive fixing mounts.

Bad points

• The aluminium is rather thin and flimsy. I’d have expected sturdier stuff from an expensive case.
• The fans are fitted but each has a big power connector on their cables and all the connections are left dangling so that the purchaser has to do all the wiring up. I’d have thought that Thermaltake would have kitted the case out with a wiring loom with all the fans attached to their fan control front panel. It wouldn’t have taken much to do.
• The side panel is a sod to get off. There’s been no real thought in the engineering concerning this.

In Thermaltake’s defence, the basic chassis is one they’ve bought in and modified. Still, for such an expensive case, £111, I would have thought they would have at least connected up all the equipment they put into it rather than leaving all the wires dangling horribly. I’m going to have to get some cable tie pads to stick around the thing. I may even get some sound deadening matterials for the sides and top so as to stop the thin aluminium from drumming.

On the doors of the contractor’s safety barriers we currently have over our
lift doors at work we have the following notice:-

KONE

DANGER DO NOT ENTER

THIS LIFT IS BEING MODERNISED FOR
YOUR SAFETY AND COMFORT.
WE APPOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE
CAUSED WHILE WORK IS IN PROGRESS.

Why do I have this urge to place an addition to this at the bottom?:-

SHARE AND ENJOY

Strange isn’t it?

PS. This was also posted to Bullet’s GENERAL folder, but who cares?

This afternoon i decided to go to the Harcourt Arboritum at Sutton Courtney. This was mainly as I’ve never been and partly because I wanted a nice quiet walk away from people and their noise.

Well, other than the £2 parking fee, which I feel is a bit steep for what is mainly a research facility and partly a public park, it was a nice enough place to spend an afternoon, if it were not for the constant din of internal combustion engines.

OK, I should have known that as the place was near a pretty busy road that there should be some road noise. However, this road seems also to be used as a raceway by a gathering of motorcyclists who love to produce the wail of high RPM motorcycle engines when riding. Add to this the pretty well constant drone of light aircraft overhead and the hiss of tyre upon tarmac and you come to realise that you can’t actually hear anything which isn’t man-made.

I walked as far as I could away from the road and lay behind the curtain of meadow grass and finally found at least semblance of quiet where I could here the jackdoors cacking, the pheasant croaking and maybe, just maybe, the call of a raptor of somekind. Even so, I only managed at most a 30 second break where I couldn’t here the drone of an aero engine.

Oxfordshire is such a crowded place, it’s impossible to get any peace.

On another front, I noticed when I got home that my car’s odometer now shows 20012.. ie. I’ve now driven precisely 20000 miles since I picked the car up from the dealer on the afternoon of the 9th November, 2000.