Andrew's diary

Thursday, 30 October 2003

One year since we got engaged and, aptly, today we finished the wedding invites. Phase 1, at least.

Installed Debian on Robert's machine (DeadRat 9 was much too slow) using the prototype Debian Installer in Salvare. Much better than boot-floppies and Debian-Installer, even if I do say so myself ;-). Of course, I've got the advantage of not having to support multiple weird architectures (yet anyway).

Mum and Dad got back from Guernsey, some point shortly after Buffy finished - having seen the whole season, I now realise why Willow's map caught fire: it's not just her being odd.

Wednesday, 29 October 2003

IDS lost his confidence. Or rather, the Tory MPs in Westminster lost confidence in him. It seems, though, that Michael Howard might be the only contender.

Watched the last Indy film after starting the wedding invites.

Tuesday, 28 October 2003

Rang T-Mobile: "not our problem, try Sony Ericsson again. If it fails outside warranty: tough." Sony Ericsson were more helpful: "send it back to Celestica, if it fails again outside warranty we'll see what we can do" Fortunately, I also asked them if there were a local service centre - Champ Telephones in Coventry are and were open all day with the technician only out for lunch between 1-2pm. Set out to Cov (again) and, surprisingly, they fixed it. Apparently the "proron" (or perhaps "poron") needed replacing, whatever one of those is. FWIW, it was pronounced p(r)o'ron (rhymes with "Enron").

Monday, 27 October 2003

Arrived in Southam at 10:45 to find Robert just getting into the shower - so much for a quick turn around and straight into Cov. Eventually got into town, went to Maplin, bought the ribbon from the market etc. We then struggled to find Matalan - hoping to buy a nice winter coat. Unfortunately, they didn't have any.

T-Mobile won the stakes in most rapid response to my email, shortly followed by OneStopPhoneShop. Unfortunately they said different things. I'll phone them tomorrow and get it all sorted. Quoting "fitness for purpose" and Sales of Goods Act might make it sound like I know what I'm talking about. Which, of course, I don't.

Went to Jo and Mark's for dinner. We had something called "raclette" which seems to be of the same school of cookery as fondu. It was, erm, different - enjoyable certainly but not something to have every night ;-)

Sunday, 26 October 2003

Didn't do much today, watched Raiders of the Lost Ark - even if they are trying to rebrand it as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The only change seems to be the removal of the reflection on the glass between Indy and the snake in the Well of Souls.

Saturday, 25 October 2003

Phone still knackered. Sent emails now to T-Mobile, OneStopPhoneShop and Sony Ericsson. Don't hold out much hope to be honest :-(

Went out with Dave and Linda to Wetherspoons for dinner (mmm, mixed grill) and then to the cinema to see League of Extraordinary Gentleman - it was quite cool, but not exactly amazing.

Friday, 24 October 2003

Woke up with a very bad head - which meant didn't go to work in the morning, so missed the Clubhouse at lunchtime for farewell drinks. A cocktail of painkillers and Imigran meant that I managed to get into work by 13:30. Did the bits of handover which were still necessary and then got a surprise as I got a leaving present. Well, two in fact! Indiana Jones DVD boxset and Family Guy series 2. Very cool :-)

Thursday, 23 October 2003

Worryingly, my T68i's started showing the "No access" method again. It's worked fine since it came back from Celestica a few weeks ago. However, if it carries on doing it tomorrow I'm going to try and get T-Mobile to sort it.

Tuesday, 21 October 2003

Another lateish day at work, and it doesn't look like they're going to diminish as the scope of the audit's come in and it includes "websites" - whether that's data, hosting, processes, procedures, something else or all of the above is unclear.

More happily, Dave's booked a big bunch of tickets to see The Matrix Revolutions on 5th November - hopefully the film will be better than the second...

Monday, 20 October 2003

According to "which sci-fi character are you?", I'm Jean-Luc Picard. Cool :-)

Another late day at work: this time until 7pm as there's now general subdued panic over the audit. Unfortunately, the trivial and unimportant aspects are getting focused on (and not only by us) whereas the gapingly huge holes go on...

4 days to go...

Sunday, 19 October 2003

Hmm, I think I must have broken something - Onyx has reduced the average load on the server from 3-4 to 0. If anyone finds anything broken, odd or just not quite right, please let me know ;-)

Saturday, 18 October 2003

Developed a new CMS for bleb.org and since testing's for wimps - ;-) - deployed it. The TV pages are about three times as quick, minimum. But Onyx still has some issues to work out.

Caught most of the BBC's The Big Read - interestingly the best book, for me at least, in the top 21 is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - even though on a technical basis there are many flaws with the book.

Friday, 17 October 2003

Started off as a quietish day at work, however around lunchtime we had to compile a list of "all websites at Hursley" - by the end of the day and without any clarification as to what they meant by "website". The UNIX group scanned every host and found 632 web servers but we were there until 6ish categorising and sorting the list.

Unfortunately, that meant Allen and Carol were already there when I got home, fortunately Mel had managed to leave work early and was there (almost) on time to meet her parents.

Thursday, 16 October 2003

Got into work early expecting to find a deluge of email about audit etc. Nothing. Well, nothing audit related anyway. In typical style there were numerous meta-discussions yesterday but a) no decisions taken and b) no-one informed me. Later in the day actually managed to do some definitive work on it with Petra; whether it's enough or not, who knows?

Unfortunately, the morning was rather hectic as as well as trying to sort this I also had a visitor from Southampton University to see how we manage large web sites - seemed like a nice chap, and even if he found it interminably boring didn't show it ;-)

After work, we went to choose the fixtures, fittings, colours etc. for the nice, spangly new bathroom which was almost, but not quite, a feat in fruitlessness.

Wednesday, 15 October 2003

Bad head, but managed to get up in the afternoon to see if there were a mass of emails about the presentation template, contents etc. Fortunately(?), the VPN wasn't working so I pondered rewriting the bleb.org CMS in mod_perl along a JSP pre-compilation design to save some system resources: the new box is fast, but averaging a load of about 3-4 so far. Initial speed tests are very encouraging, this might even be releasable.

Tuesday, 14 October 2003

Long day where things broke (which is expected) but people affected by the presentations expected me to know the answers to their questions which, of course, I didn't. Fortunately, the decision was made to scale back our scope and let the rest of the lab suffer ;-)

Port 80 got opened on the appropriate firewall so the server should (finally) be back to the world :-)

Monday, 13 October 2003

It seems the audit team want 15 x 1-hour long presentations in the first week they're here, and guess which mug's been roped in to help produce them? Not only do they have to show the processes that we use within our own department but all of the ones used in the lab. Gulp.

Sunday, 12 October 2003

Got the new bleb.org server installed, thanks to Chris. It's been a struggle to get it up and running, but now I've got a rack mounted server that I control with a nice VIA M10000 Nemehiah Mini-ITX motherboard, DDR RAM and 7200rpm UDMA 133 hard disk. The hardest part of the whole thing was getting the only suitable case manufacturer to sell me one of the blasted things. With the fan, the M10000 is much too loud to use in the lounge in a PVR, for that one of the fanless boards would be a much better bet.

Took the opportunity to update my diary for the new server going live and, hopefully, something for any users I've got to see when they come back after a couple of weeks of downtime :-(

Saturday, 11 October 2003

Got the loft sorted now the insulation's done. We had to move everything into the top loft as the insulation's too thick to lay stuff on!