Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
05 2009
It seems that pain-au-chocolat tastes nicer in France. Perhaps it's because of the nice weather, the lovely meal I had last night, the proximity of the 4 swimming pools + jacuzzi, or the fact that I don't have to turn up to the office for another week or so? Vive la France! ;-)
posted at: 09:24 | path: | permanent link to this entry
My sincere thanks to Kev for passing on the wisdom of a taxi driver he met earlier today. While discussing politics with this driver, Kev elicited a cogent explanation for the current state of Irish politics. According to our learned driving friend, women have too much control in Ireland, and when it comes to election time they vote for candidates based solely on appearances, voting - one must assume - for the good looking politicians. I feel Mssrs. Cowen et al should feel flattered.
I remain unconvinced, though this explanation did provide me with a good laugh.
posted at: 20:31 | path: | permanent link to this entry
For all you Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans and fans of its author Douglas Adams, today is Towel Day, 2009. For those of you who do not know where your towel is, shame on you!
To quote the Hitchhiker's guide itself:
"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.-- Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have 'lost.' What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."
I've recently forced myself to find the time to play and record a little more music, to whit I've purchased a copy of Apple Logic Studio Pro and have dusted off a few of my mics and cables.
When I was starting to learn guitar, many many years ago, and playing music with a church Folk Group (Yes, the Folk Group, with capital letters!) I wrote music to the words of one of the Hosannas - specifically the Hosanna 64. Though it's been performed numerous times over the years, I suspect that this is the first time my version has been recorded. The Milford Folk Group in Limerick do a pretty mean version and if you wish to use my music as part of a liturgical celebration or event, please feel absolutely free. If you like it, or have suggestions for improvement, drop me a line at the usual address.
Dear Linux driver gurus and Intel, Please unfuck your drivers and make my laptop usable again. If I wanted to reboot this often I'd install Windows 95. Thanks, Gar.
posted at: 18:45 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Had I finally found love, or at least a truly overzealous stalker? Had one of my more contentious blog postings hit slashdot and elicited a flurry of responses from the internets?
Alas, no - a handful of e-mail addresses for one of my domains were abused as return addresses for spam originating in "SaudiNet, Saudi Telecom Company" - resulting in numerous poorly configured mail servers dutifully sending a flurry of backscatter towards my inbox. Fortunately, my spam filters caught most of it, though still allowing some 1,500 through.
Special bonus points for the likes of bmx.pvnet.cz who correctly identified the original message as spam, blocked its delivery but still felt it was appropriate to send backscatter in my direction. *sigh*
posted at: 05:51 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Today I've disabled the IPv6 reachability of my blog and websites, removing the AAAA records from DNS temporarily. This is a temporary state until Easynet permanently fix their sixxs.net tunnel broker service. Apologies to those who use services on my machines via IPv6: this temporary disabling of DNS should result in your user experience getting better, since applications should no longer hang, or delay for long periods as they try in vain to route to the IPv6 address.
As a more permanent solution, I'll be looking to Hetzner, my hosting provider to provide native IPv6 connectivity to my equipment. Hopefully IPv6 services will be restored soon.
posted at: 08:24 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Since I returned from the UK, I've had the best of intentions to donate blood, something that is done on a 'gift' basis in Ireland - there is no payment, monetary or otherwise in return for donating. There is, however, the feeling of something achieved and given back to society or even perhaps a life saved in the future thanks to a donation today.
I had no idea about how easy, difficult, painless or otherwise the process would be, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the professionalism and caring shown by the staff in the blood clinic in Dublin who were happy to explain the entire process and answer any questions I had. As a first time donor, I filled in a single page questionnaire (tbh, the most painful process, given my allergy to surveys ;-) ) had an interview with a nurse to confirm that I was okay to give blood that day, a finger pin-prick test and Haemoglobin test from a doctor, and then straight on to giving blood - requiring a single needle in my arm, delivered with the minimum of fuss and pain. While to call the whole procedure painless would be a little disingenuous, to refer to any of it as painful in any way would be equally inaccurate.
The moral, go and donate blood if you can. Drink plenty of water for a day or so beforehand, and if you know your blood type, you can check on Ireland's remaining blood stocks here. You can donate every 90 days in Ireland, and I've already added a reminder to my calendar for the next time.
posted at: 08:42 | path: | permanent link to this entry
...if I post it (on my blog) they will come...
posted at: 10:41 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
...on the way to the train station this morning I encountered bright sunshine, gale force winds, rain and sleet.
...on the way from the train station this evening I encountered a pub, a Kev and a Mark, several pints, a quiz in which we got 6 and one third but did not win pints, many puns - all bad, Keith Chegwins Little Swap Shop of Horrors, some kind of delicious quasi-nourishment wrapped up in appetising looking Abrakebabra wrapping, a discussion about draining and why some mental images are not appropriate for the pub - or anywhere!, many texts to and from the Nor'n Oirish Jacuzzimastah, stuffing and a bag of chips, friendly locals, and a lovely piece of chocolate that I'd forgotten about from last night.
If the walk to and from the train is a philosophical metaphor for our meandering journey through life, then I think the lesson to be learned is that using an iPhone becomes progressively harder for Americans as they consume more alcohol. I bet that's not a user interface test Steve Jobs thought of...
posted at: 00:58 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Having upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Jaunty a week ago, and having completely failed to find the time to do a clean install over the weekend I found myself contemplating whether the upgrade was worth it.
Currently, my opinion is no! If you're happily running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) then my recommendation is strongly to stick with it. It's not perfect, but it has a Network Manager that works (more than once per reboot) with 3G / HSDPA / HSUPA / GPRS / GSM modems, and if you use your machine with a secondary monitor or a projector, the Display configuration utility also works.
Since my upgrade to Jaunty, I've had to reset my display settings to something usable by manually copying in a known good /etc/X11/xorg.conf file every time I've attempted to use more than the internal laptop monitor and I still have the annoying X11 hang bug caused by Intel i915 hardware/firmware/drivers or DRM/GEM. I already documented the requirement to kill trackerd in the face, so the only real advantage I see to the release at the moment is an increase in prettiness of on-screen status reports (for volume, brightness, etc.) and OpenOffice.org 3.0. The upgrade doesn't even give me the latest version of Netbeans (probably only of relevance to people who develop software using Netbeans, I'll admit.)
My recommendation is to stick with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and manually install OpenOffice 3.0 and Netbeans 6.5.1. While I have no intention of migrating away from Ubuntu, I do hope that perhaps the next release will be a little more tested prior to release.
posted at: 08:55 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
I've been having periodic hangs of X under Linux for quite a while - since Ubuntu 8.10, in fact. Since the hang is something that largely doesn't bother writing anything to logs it's taken me quite a while to track down what the issue is - and I now suspect it to be the Intel i915 chipset drivers for Linux. This is getting increasingly frustrating as I see the complete hang almost once a day now, making my laptop effectively unusable.
Symptoms include the screen freezing, and possible corruption of the image on the screen. The keyboard gets locked out completely, except for the power button (which will only respond if you hold it in for 4 seconds to power the machine off.) The mouse may still work, and you may still be able to move the mouse cursor around the screen, but clicking has no effect. You can verify it's not a kernel stop / hang if you install an SSH server and use a second maching to log in remotely. While performance is poor (I suspect some loop is cycling trying to recover the i915 driver or hardware) you can view logs and interact with the box in the normal fashion, verifying that networking, the kernel and everything else except X, the monitor and keyboard is running happily.
What makes it extra annoying is that the failure mode stops you doing a clean shutdown of the box, even remotely. 'halt', 'shutdown', 'reboot', 'init 1', and anything else I tried completely failed to unwedge the box, possibly indicating that the kernel should be a little more harsh about killing things in the face when told to - but there's a fine line to be drawn there I'll admit, particularly with respect to waiting for older, slower hardware to respond, flush buffers, etc.
You may be susceptible to this problem is you see things like the following in your logs:
[drm:i915_setparam] *ERROR* unknown parameter 4 [drm:i915_getparam] *ERROR* Unknown parameter 6 [drm:i915_get_vblank_counter] *ERROR* trying to get vblank count for disabled pipe 0
[drm:i915_gem_entervt_ioctl] *ERROR* Reenabling wedged hardware, good luckwhich I think says it all. I was unable to reproduce production of this error line this morning.
Frankly, a disappointing result - though I'll accept I might be a tiny bit biased. Leinster had better win the final so that I can at least rest in the knowledge that an Irish team win the cup.
posted at: 21:51 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Many years ago I stumbled across the writings of one Mil Millington. For some strange reason, I was reminded of his excellent Things my grilfriend and I have argued about when Rach suggested mid-discussion that I:
I cannot even begin to contemplate the implications of this...
posted at: 00:19 | path: | permanent link to this entry
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