Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
04 2006
I've given in trying to work around the fundamental brokenness of iTE's shonky chipset (Specifically their IT8212 chipset) and have managed to source and install a Promise IDE controller. So far, neutron (my fileserver) has come up and found all the disks for the RAID sets. (With the IT8212 based card, the RAID1 set would only come up with the disks on the motherboard controller and I would have to manually reassemble the array afterwards to put the rest of the disks in - not a big issue, but something of an inconvenience.)
I'm currently running an fsck against the TB RAID5 volume, due to the ITE chipset writing arse to the disks. Hopefully, this is the end of my instability problems with neutron and she'll go back to being the faithful, reliable workhorse she's been before I sullied her PCI bus with the spawn of some crazed loon in the employ of Integrated Technology Express. Express route to pain and suffering more like... I'd like to let some Chuck Norris pain and suffering be integrated into people who release this crud onto the market.
posted at: 11:07 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Again I'm in the station, wanting to make the 12 minute journey to Halifax. Today the train is running 15 mins late (according to the board.) This is even more impressive given that these trains are supposed to run every 15 mins. What a crock of s**t. I will find the next politician who questions why people in Britain don't use public transport and laugh in his/her face!
</rant>
posted at: 16:52 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
From a conversation on an IRC channel earlier today - made me laugh... (edited to include relevant portions of the conversation only)
<lyda> the great part about working in an office next to a busy intersection is that you get to hear people discovering new things. several times a day i hear people learn about a new feature in their steering wheel...
<Stewie> lyda: the turning feature?
<lyda> Stewie: no, the other steering wheel feature. what happens when you push it.
<lyda> dgold: car horns. i could choose to be annoyed at people who honk for an inordinate amount of time. instead i choose to believe they're idiots learning a new skill...
I have a Panasonic TV and a Sony video recorder - but fortunately Sony were smart enough to allow the video remote control (Model number RMT-V259) to be programmable so that it can also control the TV. Unfortunately, when the batteries run low, it forgets which TV it's supposed to be controlling and stops working :-( To save myself time looking for the manual next time, here's how to program the remote:
Plugging an eyeToy USB camera into my Mac appears to do nothing more than uselessly add it to the enumeration of USB devices. I'm mildly disappointed that noone has ported the D-link drivers to add support for this device on OS X. Oh well: the world is a better place without having to look at me anyway...
posted at: 01:45 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
Tonight, while watching Ghostbusters II, Sinéad told me that in middle school she had been a Ghostbuster. Well... Gail, Lindsey, Julia and herself had performed a dance to the theme tune of Ghostbusters. I am ashamed.
posted at: 22:10 | path: | permanent link to this entry
When the strange presenters of Tikkabilla on CBeebies tell the four year old about rubber ducks floating in the bath, point out (helpfully) that ducks float because they are a witch.
I blame Monty Python for this - and am willing to suffer the wrath of the mother when she discovers what nonsense I'm filling her child's head with - all in the name of comedy ;-)
posted at: 14:44 | path: | permanent link to this entry
As some of the more pedantic readers of my blog pointed out, the search function is not now at the top of the sidebar, as previously claimed, but rather somewhere in the middle.
Yes! I moved it. I think it fits better where it is.
That is all.
posted at: 13:09 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
In the tradition of not actually providing any useful material whatsoever, here's another collection of vastly amusing - yet completely content free, or at least of limited use - links. Yay me!
A few times of late, I've noticed that my blog has reached some kind of critical mass whereby I cannot easily find an entry I'm looking for - without relying on the power of grep or similar, that is. A small amount of perl later and I have a very basic search function, that also (helpfully???) highlights where it finds matches. This is still quite buggy, but it's good enough for an initial release. It's something I'll work on as time permits over the next few weeks.
You can check out the shiny new search box at the top of the side-bar at www.signal2noise.co.uk/blog .
posted at: 02:48 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Heard while taping cables down 5 minutes before curtain from an entering little old lady:
little old lady #1: "Do you think that's where the piano will be?"I had just wired in a bunch of mics and a pair of stage monitors around the rather heavy piano - I certainly wasn't going to be moving it. People amuse me :-)
little old lady #2: "Well that's where it is now, I suppose."
Today was the first time in months that I took a train. I was impressed to see that absolutely nothing has appeared to have changed as the train utterly failed to appear at the designated time. I rechecked the board and a "Running 8 minutes late" had appeared. The train arrived 11 minutes late and departed a full 13 minutes after the scheduled time. I was going one stop - 12 minutes.
It's good to see that after a significant break from the daily hell of public transport in Britain, the train service can still be relied upon to be utterly pants.
posted at: 17:30 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens, ... yadda, yadda, yadda... there are a few of my favourite links:
Far more important Creme Egg links (from my sister, who thinks I need to be edumacated regarding the delicious yumminess of gooey candy treats.)
Regarding Ryan Air diverting a plane to Prestwick (it was supposed to land
in Dublin) today:
[17:27] <kevin> a ryan air flight had a security alert due to a suspect package
in the last few minutes. at a guess i'm going to say the package contained
books and pamphlets on good customer service, how to maintain decent employee
relations and info on how to start a union.
[17:28] <davew> kevin: you're a cynical, vicious man. i commend you :)
posted at: 17:39 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Today I have observed that enlarging an ext3 volume is quite quick. Making one smaller is quite slow. (In fairness, I did pop 127GB of test data on it...)
ho...hum...
I have also observed that Babylon 5 is still great
- and Infection
(Caution: Spoilers!) is one of my favourite episodes. Yes! I'm sad -
I have favourite espisodes of B5. *cry* etc.
posted at: 04:26 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
A particular note of thanks to bfree, paul (Jakma), dredg and others, who gave of their time to assist me in working around some of the most God-awful hardware I've ever had the displeasure to use. I'll write up a full report at some other time, but the long and the short of it is to avoid iTE chipsets, particularly the IT8212, like the plague. They are shonky pieces of broken tat. In my case, the card managed to completely 'remove' the SCSI card and any devices attached to it at boot time - not hugely useful if you want to boot from a SCSI attached disk...
Thanks guys.
posted at: 04:04 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Honest - last posting on the subject. I realised I'd accidentally assigned the backtick incorrectly to be associated with the Shift modifier. Confused the hell out of me while writing some bash script on my Mac today. I've updated the keyboard layout file with the correction. Hopefully that's the last of the bugs worked out of it - and I'm typing much faster and using backspace a lot less on my Mac now - it's all good :-)
posted at: 02:15 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Can people not make computer hardware that just works?!?!? Installation of some new ATA/133 cables makes the PCI IDE card detect a drive on the secondary bus, but when I transfer significant data to it, it craps itself. Great!
I've been kinda suspecting that the IDE card I got has been broken though, so I had purchased a replacement. I'll not comment on the stupidity of where they placed the IDE connectors on this card (clue: they're surface instead of edge mounted - which meant insufficient space to put connectors on and use the next PCI slot at the same time - How... Fucking... Intelligent!)
Replacing the IDE card revealed the following:
I have finally tackled and overcome my issues with the iBook keyboard. Thanks to some more poking on the internet I came across Ukelele which allows you to build up the XML keyboard definition files using a graphical editor. Starting from a UK keyboard layout, I've managed to put all the keys that I could think of (or at least the ones that were annoying me the most) in the right places. I am now happy.
To save any other Irish or United Kingdom keyboard users the hassle, just:
When a small child, under pressure of interrogation, admits she's put a "small bit of toilet paper" down the sink plug hole, don't assume that your definition of small and hers tally in any meaningful way.
posted at: 19:47 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
The feature length pilot episode of Babylon 5 I watched last night was, of course, The Gathering, and not In The Beginning as I stated earlier this morning. Though both DVDs occupy space on my shelves.
I suspect there is a lesson to be learned from this - possibly something about not staying up until 4:10am and writing blog postings at that late hour... ;-)
posted at: 14:59 | path: | permanent link to this entry
I just recently received the 5th and final season box set of Babylon 5 and since I'm the self-professed SF fan that I am, I've decided to try and watch the entire thing from the start again. Tonight was the turn of the feature length pilot episode, "In The Beginning."
It's good stuff. I'm looking forward to the next 100 hours or so of it. Now, off to bed to read some Iain M. Banks - specifically "Feersum Endjinn."
posted at: 04:10 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Thanks to the many people who turned up for the Saturday session - lots of new faces and instruments, which is always nice to see. I'm working on the website and will bring my camera at some point to grab some more up to date photos of the people turning up and playing.
I didn't get a chance to talk with Peter (the ever helpful landlord) but I will see about moving to a larger room as our numbers seem to have outgrown the snug. Also, I have some conflicting views on whether the pub is closed next week, or not. A member of bar staff pointed out that as far as she knew, she was working all next week and that the person who helpfully informed us may have, in fact, been drunk. I'll e-mail people with information soon, but I'm currently assuming that the session is going to go ahead as normal.
For those of you who dont know what I'm talking about: Sinéad and I run a traditional Irish music session in a local pub every Saturday afternoon. Things will all become clear when I publish the website ;-)
posted at: 23:49 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry
Bringing the most 'unique' parts of the internet to you... or something... definitely something...
I'm now on the third server chassis with Hetzner and I'm hoping this one will just work. I'm going to let some tests run for a week or so before migrating any live content over again.
posted at: 12:32 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
They really really suck! My Hetzner server has died again - it's certainly looking like a hardware issue now, which will mean I'm on to my THIRD server with them in an attempt to find one that works.
To add insult to injury, neutron (my main fileserver here at home) died last night as well. Last timestamp on my monitoring system was 2006-04-07 07:29:35, at which point in time nothing exciting happens - though I am somewhat suspicious that the e-mail regarding the backup of skynet was not sent through - so it could be a PCI IDE card issue (Replacement is on order to see if that's the issue.)
In short, computer hardware sucks. It should just work, and doesn't - for no good reason. wah wah wah wah wah wah! Bugger!
</rant>
posted at: 09:14 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
I would quite like to be developing a website right now - but my shiny new server from Hetzner has died - again. I've already had the hardware replaced due to the first server allocated just randomly crashing. And now, 4 days later, the next server dies for no apparent reason too. Their service seems to be pretty good - each time I've requested a manual reboot it's been done within 15 minutes - but my blog has been down from 6am this morning until I realised it was missing after lunch. Fortunately, I've not migrated any serious services (No, I don't take this blog too seriously ;-) ) over to it yet - but things are not boding well.
I've set Stress running for a couple of hours on the system now - so hopefully I'll see a replication of the failure and get somewhere close to figuring out if I've got another faulty chassis.
posted at: 15:45 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
And the blog is migrated... mostly... to a new server. Both old and new servers are running in parallel now so there shouldn't be a break in service for those of you who read the shonky tat I irregularly scribble here. I have learned a couple of things from this:
I'm migrating my blog to a bigger and better , faster and shinier server - so response times for pages should improve greatly over the next few days. The current blog is/was running on a somewhat overloaded PIII class machine, which was also hosting a number of other CPU / I/O heavy dynamic sites. I'm still going to use blosxom as my blogging platform of choice, largely because it's perl and I've made some customisations that I quite like now. Niall has provided me with some details on how he got comments using blosxom, so I'll look into a method of adding feedback in the near future as well. Thanks for that Niall! :-)
New blog services will be served by an AMD Sempron 3000+, so it'll be a noticeable difference for anyone reading my blog locally.
posted at: 18:25 | path: | permanent link to this entry
I've been to many gigs where the sound technician's primary goal seems to be to render the entire audience deaf - in fact, young people today seem to measure how good a gig was by the numbmer of days they lose their hearing for. This gig was no exception, though after about 8 or 9 tracks the sound tech. did manage to achieve a rather satisfactory balance (everything was equally too loud) which I rather enjoyed through my -16dB ear protection.
This is the first gig I've attended where the lighting technician appears to have taken on the challenge of blinding the entire crowd - and doing a fair to middling job of achieving success! I've been dealing with lighting for years now, though I still consider myself to be an amateur- but along the way I've picked up a few 'rules' that were completely ignored tonight.
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