News and Progress

Well, I’m not feeling well today, but thats a side issue. I have made some moves in various directions that are quite interesting (to me at least, nobody else will gve a crap probably). I can’t imagine why my good friend Holdsworth described my blog as self-obsessed and boring techno-bollocks 😉

I spent most of the weekend celebrating my new job or recovering from celebrating, so last night and today have been groggy affairs. I did manage to install Coppermine and have a look. At first glance it seems pretty cool and I may well end up using it. I should probably install Gallery for a comparison though.

I also have concluded that I need to learn the Red Hat Way of doing things as I’m going to be using it at work. I know the Debian Way reasonably well, but I’m going to be administering Red Hat boxes. This means I need to hurry up and finish the crap old P200 machine so I can take the disk out and swap the box in for my current Smoothwall, thereby releasing my Celeron machine back into interactive service. I will either be using that or my Dell P3 machine to play with Fedora Core on, unless I doing even more machine juggling and move my uni project over to the Dell box and put Fedora onto the Athlon 1200 box. But thats dangerous, I might lose my project if I fuck it up. I’ll have to think about how I’d do this. I guess I could just image the drive. I also need to decide whether I should start with FC3, which is out now, or wait until FC4 comes out on the day I start work, I would have preferred to look at FC before I start, but is there any point when the new release is a week away. Ooh, also Debian Sarge should be out tomorrow which means I can install my Sparc machine with something useful.

Oh, a random conversation also reminded me to try to install Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Linux. Following these instructions it was a breeze, I’m really pleased. I finished the first 2 levels in just under 2 hours. Thats one of the few games I really like.

Among the other minor triumphs was having a look at Eclipse. I’m going to need a good IDE for work. Jono was demoing it at the Wolves LUG meeting the other day. I also noticed on his desktop a load of Bluetooth icons, so having tried and failed to send files to my phone via bluetooth, I phoned him up and he suggested gnome-obex-send which worked a treat. Little did I realise at the time was that he was in Stuttgart attending GUADEC. The conversation ended pretty sharply when I discovered that, but I still think an international mobile to mobile call is going kill my phone bill.

The Hackers FAQ for Managers made me laugh. It’s a guide for managers who are trying to manage a hacker. Hackers just don’t seem to make sense to the business oriented mind of a conventional manager. It made me laugh because I recognised some of my own traits in there, like ‘percolating’ which is where you sit there playing games or other non-productive things while you leave your subconscious to mull over the technical aspects of a complex problem. I do that all the time, do something unrelated and let my subconscious take care of things for me. You can’t force ideas out if you’re not in the mood, they come to you when you’re not thinking about them.

In other news, I got an Ubuntu t-shirt. Wow. Thats soooooo cool. Also Liverpool won the European Champions League. Big congratulations there. Aq’s book, DHTML Utopia is out, but his cat died. Congratulations and commiserations.

The final thing I wanted to say was that Jono I have started trying to think of something really cool to do for something for What the Hack, assuming that it goes ahead. I was thinking of maybe an open Gallery or Coppermine server that people can put their weird photos on, Jono thought of an SMS thingy hooked up to a speech synthesis thing so we can all just sit there and crack up at other peoples photos of weird stuff, or this croaky Hawking-esque voice saying freaky stuff. Whatever we do we will broadcast the hell out of it at WTH so other people will join in. We really hope to make our tent a bit of a cool party focal point for people to come and hang around and do interesting stuff. If you have any suggestions, put it in the comments or mail me direct.

A few other things have happened too but I have real world things to do, I can’t sit here all day. I’ll let you know as things happen.

New Job

Tadaaaaaaa.

Got a new job today, just found out so I thought I’d let everyone know.

As of the 6th June I will be a junior Linux Systems Administrator for a secure web services company in Telford called erm… Secure Web Services.

As most of you will know, I am currently penniless so this is a big deal to get my ideal job so quickly. I’m really looking forward to it.

Wages are pretty good, I’m not going to broadcast it here, but provided they are happy with my progress I’ll be getting a pay rise in 3 months. The first month will essentially be intense training to get me up to speed and then I will be regular, non-junior team member being as much responsible for things as everyone else. They are a smallish company so I will be getting more or less 1 to1 training.

Also involved will be PHP, databases, networking, security and all manner of other things aswell as administering Linux servers. Being a smallish company means there will be a lot more variation involved and I will have to be quick to adapt to new challenges, I won’t be stuck continuously doing the same repetitive task, which I guess is essential in maintaining my interest. I love fast moving environments, I much prefer that to being one of thousands of cogs in an engine where I am just doing the same thing all the time.

For the moment, I have an assignment to finish off for this evening so I’ll be off. Being busy as always and now having to sort my entire life out by the end of next week so I can start work, I would prefer to recieve over inflated congratulations, ego massaging and promises of sexual favours by email rather than phone so I can crack on and reduce my todo list down from around 15 things to 1 or 2.

Woo! I rule 🙂

Looking at Coppermine and WTH

I’m looking at Coppermine. I’ve been looking for some kind of gallery to go with with my blog and website, just as a pic dumping ground and Coppermine looks like it does this, looks nicer than Gallery and also acts as a subject catagorised file repositry. Thats great. I haven’t actually installed it yet though. This post, like many of my recent ones, is just to remind me to look at it when the uni stuff is over and I have a job lined up.

This kind of thing is more useful since I’ve been thinking about stuff for What The Hack, assuming it goes ahead, for places to dump photos and other so that people can see what I’m up to while I’m there. Other things include a a wiki for me to scratch my ideas down on and maybe a live webcam but I don’t fancy carrying my webcam around when I’ll already be loaded down with stuff and I certainly don’t like my chances of trying to secure my username and password to an ftp server while sitting in a field full of some of most capable computer security experts in Europe who are all drunk and stoned…

Still I’d like to think of something really cool to do at or for WTH. Something really cool. Ideas to the usual address or in the comments.

Been Doing

Lots of things.

After my blogathon on Monday, I spent all night searching for and emailing people about jobs. Thanks to all those who replied. Including Jono who wants me to take his dog for a crap every lunchtime until I find an IT job.

Yesterday I spent a few hours looking at the job responses, listened to LUG Radio season 2 episode 16, read a few blogs and then spent the rest of the day until about 3am working on my assignment.

To be honest it wasn’t that hard, I compiled Apache about a month ago but got stuck when my assigned port number was wrong. Then when I was given the right port number, I set up the virtual hosts wrong and was getting forbidden errors. Mostly I just did some reading of the Apache docs which got me on the right road and I set the rest of the stuff up with a bit of hacking.

Awstats was a pain in the arse to set up as it doesn’t seem to take any notice of where you tell it to put the config files so I had to hack the awstats.pl script itself to use the right path. Maybe I ought to file this as a bug. I have much pretty done most of the A, B and C grade stuff with the exception of setting up SSI with the X Bit Hack. I also need to set up a cron job to update awstats. I might also do a few extra A grade bits and pieces, just to make sure of the highest possible grade. I hope to do that today along with the D grade stuff, before I go to the Wolves LUG meeting tonight and give a most likely drunken [to the tune of Blue Moon] bom be be bom be bom be bom bom be be bom be be dang a dang a dong ding a dang a ging-a-ling a lift home.

After the meeting or tomorrow I hope to finish off any residual bits of the assignment and tidy up the html pages to be actually reasonable in appearance. After that I can get back to talking to people about their suggestions and offers of jobs applications, to filling in the million forms I have for uni, try to get back to the doctors and selling to things to raise some cash.

Thankfully some money raised by my Internet sales has transferred into my account which means I have some money for my sister and I to take my parents for a meal as their birthday presents (both are within a week of each other and my mum was away for hers) and also cover some of the upcoming bills for next month.

Sorry if this is a little dull, but it’s just an attempt to document what I’m doing to see whether I really am busy and doing a lot of stuff or just thinking I’m busy and not really doing anything.

I Hope You Die

If you are one of the useless, clueless, tasteless, know-nothing wankers that buys these things, which means they can afford to waste my life with their horrifically irritating TV adverts up to twice per 3 minute break.

Really. I hope you die of the most horrendous, agonising ass cancer that your God can produce. Really.

What The Hack Under Threat!

Yes. The Mayor of Boxtel, the Dutch municipality under which the juristriction for the location of What The Hack falls, has informed the organisers that they must apply for a permit for the event and that he fully intends to reject any such application as it will endanger law and order and public safety.

I found this story on The Register first of all, then read the What The Hack anouncement and the press release. It doesn’t seem to have hit Slashdot yet.

Maybe I will be here for my girlfriend’s birthday after all 😉

Damn I’m prolific today, thats my 8th post.

I Will Be Your Host

I forgot to mention that I will be hosting the Lightning Talks Stage at LUG Radio Live and have a ticket for LUG Radio paintball the next day. I am also, by nature of being the local boy that knows all of the bars and clubs, most likely leading the night of drinking after LRL 😀

It looks like a great number of interesting people will be exhibiting there according to the LUG Radio Live blog. Wow.

See you there 😀

VoIP

I’ve been looking at VoIP recently after hearing a lot and then reading Ade’s VoIP posts and have installed the Ubuntu Linphone package. It didn’t seem to work at first as I couldn’t contact the sipomatic test program, but then, the manual didn’t say that I had to start sipomatic manually before making the test call. So I did just that – started sipomatic manually, called it and it worked. Yay. Sadly I don’t have anyone to talk to that I know of and I have to work out how to get it through my smoothwall. I don’t fancy trying to set up a sip proxy so that the outside world can talk to me.

I might have a look at Skype, just to see what the difference is. Yeah, yeah, let the free software people rain down on me with complaints. I just want to see how it compares. I’d also like to look at asterisk@home at some point, as it’s all employable skills, but I’m a little too busy at the moment.

Shameless Job Plea

I need a job and you can help.

I’m about to finish a Computer Science degree and I’m looking for IT work. Preferably Linux admin work, but general IT support or any sub-section of similar computing employment will suffice.

You can contact me at adamsweet at gmail dot com and remember that the thoughts and comments expressed here are not representative of my technical or academic ability, or of my intelligence in general. In case you are thinking the opposite, that means I am more capable and intelligent than I demontstrate here 😀

Thank you for listening.

What to run on Sparc64?

I have a Sparc64 machine, a Sun Ultra 10 which I installed Gentoo on but it’s just a little too much aggro to look after. Who wants to set a machine to recompile everything overnight and hand-merge the new config files once a week when a Debian dist-upgrade takes a fraction of the time. Frankly I prefer ease of use over speed of use first of all, I can strip a system down if I need to. Anyway, I digress.

I’d like to run Debian on it but I’m waiting for Sarge and also to hear if Sparc64 will get axed after Sarge. It’s also a good opportunity to look at FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I’d like to look at OpenBSD first of the two, just to see more of the Unix world and I looked at FreeBSD briefly once before, but OpenBSD doesn’t seem to support my PCI Sun Happy Meal 10/100Mb ethernet card and I can’t find any CD isos. Yes, it’s lazy, I can’t be arsed putting another card in there and trying to work out how to boot the installer from floppies or a network. I just want to plug in and go. I might be hideously wrong of course, more research involved there I think.

Debian it is then, probably, unless you think I’ve missed another free, non-obscure minority Linux or Unix for Sparc64. I Suppose I could look at Open Solaris or even Solaris Express

Beloved Mailing List Frustration

I’ve been growing disconcerted recently with the Wolves LUG mailing list, the lifeline of our LUG. We have a growing amount of new people which is always good, but we also have a small number of people that persistently post rubbish. Some of the new people got annoyed at the amount of posts and suggested a forum as an alternative. Thats not an unusual thing to suggest by new people, but being new to the list and list culture, they didn’t really understand the way things work on a list and consequently flooded the list with repeated statements of the same points which ended up in several near flame wars. Personally, I was probably a little hot-headed in my approach to the issue of list flooding (JUST STOP!) but also quite reasoned I thought on the forum debate.

Essentially, I put the issue down to the large amount of useless and meandering non-technical discussion that has been increasing steadily over the last 6 months. Many of the large contributors to the list have backed away almost completely from posting on there and have noted that the list is ‘a bit shit these days’. I also put it down to the really bad readability of some of the posts on the list. About a year ago, one newish poster got a serious roasting for repeatedly ignoring direct personal requests to adhere to some kind of readable posting format and he responded in an equally volatile way. After some consideration and some reconciliation, the flamed party saw the sense between the flames and became reformed and the flamer became quite good friends with his flamee. As a side effect of this we became more tolerant towards poor email technique, html posters and top posters were politely asked not to do so, but we let most other things slide.

We’ve always prided ourselves in the fun side of the list and always been proud of not being a dry, technical list. Jokes and banter have always made up a large part of the discussion. However in recent times, the not so funny jokes and unproductive chatter have begun to drown out the useful technical stuff and the witty repartee has disappeared with most of the long-time list members.

So now we find ourselves in a situation where the list is full of crap, I could quite happily killfile a small but prolific number of people there and I’ve gone from reading every email on the list to deleting 75% of it on arrival. It’s a sad way to be. With the silence of most of the people that used to use the list I’ve found myself filling in with a lot of the technical assistance, but this recent row was too much for me. I lay awake all night thinking about how to temper the poor state of the list content with the unintentional and likely to be repeated bollocking that got given out to an unwittingly naive poster with appalling list etiquette. I wrote out several different mental replies to the recipient of my wrath after he complained that such attitudes to new people, not just by me, would put people off both us and Linux, which is a terrible thing to happen. As he stated, idiots can use any operating system, which runs directly parallel to what I was thinking, that bad manners aren’t operating system dependent, but nevertheless, he pissed me off for his bad manners and we responded by giving him and some other new people a terrible impression of Linux people.

As I said, I lay awake trying to verbalise my feelings about his and others’ bad etiquette, our reactionary response and the solution to this continual problem. In my flame I had said that we can all help stop people feeling overwhelmed by making our posts more readable and not meandering way off the point within a thread, leaving several different strands of the same thread talking about different things. I also pointed that he had arrived in the middle of a large technical thread and a large number of other heavily discussed non-technical threads. His lack of a threaded email client, the unusually high traffic of the list in the few days since his arrival and the lack of readable threads meant he felt overwhelmed and thought a forum would help. Mostly people disagreed but his continual flooding of the list, saying the same thing pissed me off. The solution is, in my opinion, better readability, less drivel, better manners on his part and more tolerance on mine. But I said that and the problem of useless posting persists. It’s strange how I’ve gone from enjoying the off topic posting to hating it. It used to be funny or useful and now it’s neither.

Anyway I’ve trying to formulate all of this into a post that would be readable on the list in such a way that people would stand up and take notice, rather than fan the flames of the ill-feeling. Instead I’ve just decided to stop posting there altogether for the time being and delete most of what is posted without reading it. I will in the future, read the new technical threads and post assistance where I can help, but for now I just don’t care to read or post. At the moment, the content of the list isn’t worth the effort of writing something like that.

This is of course just my disappointed and slightly reactionary opinion. I feel bad for saying this publicly as I know it will appear on Planet Wolves and for not saying something on the list itself, which may appear cowardly (it’s an effort and aggro thing, not fear of conflict). Some people will agree and some won’t, but I really care a lot about the LUG and particularly the mailing list as the primary source of our community spirit and the publicly archived version of our shared knowledge. I’d hate to think that people might read our archives and think we talk a load of rubbish and don’t actually know anything useful.

Whatever you think I welcome your opinions either as comments or as private emails, though don’t expect me to go into it with you if you start to rant about how wrong I am. I’m looking for a solution to how we can make things better without ramming etiquette or ‘stick to technical discussion only’ down people’s throats.

The Secret Band

The band I mentioned a few weeks back, that are being looked after by my former band‘s lead singer with growing assistance from myself have been getting growing radio and news coverage. I will be responsible for the more business, communication and technology related side of things, while my former bandmate will be looking after the musical development and day to day handling (for the time being). I wrote a rather good press release a few weeks back and hope to put this with some good photos and a blistering 3 track demo CD, complete with ‘enhanced CD’ video footage which I can then tout to radio stations and record companies. I’m also probably going to be building and looking after the website and roping in people I know with expertise in graphic design and video editing.

These guys stand a great chance of breaking through if things go their way, they really are the only unsigned band I’ve heard in years that are good enough, they really surprised me as they all have quite serious behavioural and academic difficulties. It’s incredible how it all seems to work. I hope to be able to say more about them in the future, but it’s difficult at the moment as we’re trying to keep it under wraps due to the nature of the people involved while they develop and we get the surrounding infrastrucure in place to market them to A&R people. I’ll tell you all about them when we’re ready to go.

Say Something Useful…

Well it’s been a long time since I actually said something useful. In fact, so long that I can’t remember what I’ve been doing. For this reason this might be very dull as I cathartically reproduce my existence for the last 3 weeks in an entirely dissassembled order.

Well, I downloaded the Maxtor Powermax utility to assess the state of my disk. After running through the tests I was pleased to see it was fucked and gave me a code to use to request a replacement. So I sent my disk off and am awaiting a replacement. So thats that sorted.

I’ve sold a load of unused equipment, books, DVDs and games. I’ve made about £80 so that puts me close to the target to be able to pay off next months bills. Still means I can’t go anywhere or do anything but I have a lot of stuff left to sell, mostly books which seem to sell slowly. In the mean time I’m trying to apply for financial support from the uni, but as per usual they aren’t replying. I have nothing left in my bank account and 5 pence in my wallet. I only have my credit card left.

I went to the doctors and have been given some tablets thus adding weight to my application for extenuatiung circumstances for my final year project and modules, but they made me so nauseous I couldn’t get out of bed for 2 days and I had to stop taking them after a week so that I could actually do anything. I have to go back to the doctor for a change of prescription, get a doctors note for uni and enquire about the skin sample they took from my weird crusty hand thing (non-contagious ;)).

After 3 weeks of trying to contact my personal tutor, he finally replied and I met him on Friday. My hopes were high that I would get some kind of answers regarding where I stand and the procedure involved in applying for extensions but all I got was more forms and an even longer list of people to email. Which means it will take infinitely longer to sort out. It was relieving to have the guy finally get in touch but it left me pissed off that I was actually getting further away from a resolution.

As in previous posts, I have been running around trying to get a million things done for the last few weeks. My list of things that require immediate attention stands at around 12, though some of them are not exactly critical. I’ve spent a week trying to build a machine for sale out of all the parts and cases I have lying around, but I have had to start from scratch again 3 times until I realised the disk was damaged (these are untested salvage parts). The best machne I can make is a P200 so it’s not exactly worth it, but I decided I can turn it into a new Smoothwall box and get my current Smoothie, a leaving gift from my work placement, a Celeron 433, back in more worthy service or sell it.

Talking about work, I am in desperate need of a job. IT work, ideally Linux, is preferred quite simply because it will pay more and I will be happier doing it, but if it takes too long I’ll have to do anything I can get. One thing I won’t do is bar work. I did bar work for about 9 or 10 years on and off and it totally did my head in the last time. It’s horrible work after a certain age where the social setting isn’t what you want, it pays badly and most often, licensees treat their staff badly as they have no other world to think about, the job is their life and they see very little outside it. I liken it to shows such as Big Brother where the people are taken out of a regular lifestyle and all of the big life issues are managed for them and all they have to focus on is the miniutae of day to day existence, which means people go nuts over small issues because it’s all they have to focus on. I refer to it as ‘micro-focus’.

If you can offer me an IT job, or put me in touch with someone who can, please get in touch 🙂

My girlfriend however has just found a job as a trainee dental nurse. Having put a lot of effort into her CV, covering letter and interview skills with her, I am really pleased for her. It’s her first serious job and it’s as good an opportunity to make a proper career for herself that she is likely to get for quite a few years and one that is quite well paid. It seems to be going well and I’m really proud of her.

I managed to get some really cheap books the other day, I was delighted. It’s a long time since I actually bought some non-computer books and had time to read them. They had to go on my credit card of course as I don’t have any real money, but 4 great books for £12 is an opportunity I couldn’t miss. I got:

I’m really pleased with this lot. The Clash have been my favourite band since I was about 15. I’ve only just started this book but it is by far the most detailed account of the group’s history available. It includes interviews with not only the band and pivotal, perpheral figures, but also school friends, old acquaintences and people who worked with The Clash that have previously remained silent.

I’m probably the last geek to read HGttG, but it was recommended to me a few years back and I never got around to reading it. The recent film release means that the books are getting released again at knock down prices. I’ve always liked George Orwell, though admittedly my reading goes little further than 1984 and Animal Farm. I love that twisted political outlook so it will be interested to read one of the not so well know books. I’d liketo get my hands on Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Burmese Days and so on.

As for Lolita, well I’ve seen the film and I love these kind of 20th century classics, as I do George Orwell, but the books are most often far better as everyone knows. For £3 it seemed too good a book to ignore. I also wanted to buy a couple of other books on Bill Hicks, Ian Curtis of Joy Division and also one about the Stone Roses by John Robb who incidentally once produced a recording session for my band (the results were appalling and largely scrapped), but I could see the cost spriralling. As an aside, I really would like to get hold of some Bill Hicks DVDs, I saw one once and it had me in stitches, as does Doug Stanhope.

I have an assignment due in on Friday and an exam on Monday. I’ve been doing this assignment for about a month now and until last week I’d been given the wrong port number which meant I couldn’t access my server outside uni and I had to work out the problems blind via SSH. Inside uni, I was getting Apache ‘Forbidden’ permission errors. Now I’ve been given the right port number the thing just started working until I changed a few details and now it doesn’t work again and I can’t remember what I changed. I have a week to sort it out, install a stats analysis package, do some SSI and a few other things. it’s not that hard and I should get an A if I can sort out the problem and do the rest in time. I really need a good mark here as I couldn’t get my last assignment to work and I was dismayed to get an E, even though it had some stuff required for a C.

In other news, I’ve had a reasonably cheap and chaotic few weekends. 3 weeks ago I had to go to Huddersfield again to take my girlfriend to visit her sister, it’s something I could have done without but the petrol was paid for so all I had to do was pay for my own drinks and food. That was cool and uneventful apart from getting a bit lost on the way home and losing an hour or so by missing juntions and going the wrong way around Manchester on the way visit my friend carl who had a Belkin Bluetooth dongle (F8T003) and a Belkin KVM switch for me. We stayed a little longer than intended at Carl’s and with getting lost, probably took an extra 2 or 3 hours to get home. The bluetooth dongle was a gamble and thankfully works with Linux as I didn’t know which model it was in advance. I backed up my new phone using MultiSync, and , I can get stuff off using Gnome-Bluetooth, I just can’t transfer any files to it for some reason.

The weekend after was a quietish one, with a party at Celine’s flat for her birthday, just about 8 or 10 people and a lot of beer. This weekend I was feeling tired, grumpy and was dragged to somebody’s birthday party in a nightclub. My girlfriend had to buy most of my drinks because I have no money of my own and I was miserable company until she was hideously drunk and started getting depressed about herself. She has this delusion that I am the most handsome, attractive man in the world, which is nice but wildly inaccurate.

The night after was Jim’s birthday, Celine’s boyfriend and friend of mine and Carl’s from Scumbag College. I have to say, Jim’s one of the coolest guys I know, I really wish I saw more of him. Nevertheless, from feeling tired and grumpy the night before, amplified by the fact that I didn’t get to stay in as I had wished and was now hungover to boot, we were quite late getting to Celine’s flat, carrying little more than the beer we had left over from the previous week. I was in a shitty mood for most of the day until I’d sunk a few beers and chilled out. As hard as it is to motivate and communicate when I don’t feel up to it, good company is hard to beat.

As the early hours drew upon us, my girlfriend received a call from her sister saying that their mother, who had gone on holiday alone to Egypt to visit people she had met over there previously and was due back early Saturday evening, had still not returned or been in touch. Their mother had promised and failed to call earlier in the week and was fairly reliable with such things, the sisters were a little panicked, assisted by growing inebriation. As light began to dawn, my girlf was getting pretty hammered and further calls to and from her sister whipped them up into a frenzy and they began to fear the worst when they called their mother and her phone didn’t respond. Being fairly sensible about such things and it not being my mother, I assured my other half that it was most likely a flight delay and promised that we would contact the airline and various authorities if there wasn’t any news by the morning (which was only a matter of hours away). She then went to the loo and didn’t return and I found her crying in the bathroom, having just swallowed most of a bottle of wine. That was scary, I would be upset as she was if it were me, but the alcohol she’d consumed beforehand had made her panicky and the bottle of wine would have almost certain impending vomit and inability to walk potential. The next hour wasn’t fun believe me, but I eventually got her off to sleep and kept an eye on her to make sure she didn’t vomit in her sleep. Thankfully we recieved a call around 9am from her mother to say she was ok but the flight had been delayed by 5 hours, she had no phone signal at the airport and there were no payphones for several miles to call on. Panic over, but my poor princess was in a desperately hungover state until mid afternoon 😉

Finally, I have made an upgrade request to my broadband account. I am currently on a 512Kb connection with no transfer limit for £22.50 with Freedom to Surf and I have been reluctant to change my account over to a higher speed connection due to the increased fee and the transfer limit they place on the deals. However, they have recently upped the transfer limit to 100GB per month, (I currently do about 15GB per month) with no fee increase so I emailed their sales team to enquire about the fees I would be subject to if I were to move to 2Mb. F2S replied today to say that the cost is approximately £1.50 per month more than my currect deal for 4 times the speed with no extra fees provided I have been with them for 12 months, which I just about have. So, subject to a line check, I will have 2Mb broadband within the next 10 days at amost no extra cost. I really recommend F2S to anyone looking for ADSL in the UK, if you want to know why you can email me (addess on my website), nothing radical or secret, just details of why I think it’s a good service.

I have a few other things to post about, but I’ll do them in other posts. They’ll be above this one. This one is really just a ‘touching base’ post about whats going on right now.

See you in a minute…

Even More Famous

A long, long time ago, in a far away galaxy, I wrote that I had suddenly discovered by reading my domain stats that people actually read my website. Quite a shocker at the time. I was even more shocked later that day to discover that the mighty comic genuis and Ubuntu hacker that is Jeff Waugh had linked to my blog regarding my then vapourware (en_gb sp.) Ubuntu Jingle, inspired by the LUG Radio joke about the Um Bongo advert. Jeff, being syndicated through Planet Gnome, Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu caused a pleasant flurry of hits over the following weeks that meant I had to produce the jingle.

So then I checked my stats a few weeks ago to find the domain stats control panel for http://www.umbongo.com in my referrers list. Hilarious. So now I’m watching them watching me watching them. Thankfully they don’t seem to be upset by the jingle, well I haven’t heard from them anyway. I don’t know, maybe it’s free advertising or something. Relieved.

The jingle itself was included in LUG Radio episode 25, with Aq doing the words over the top.

Forward to today. I check my domain stats again, I like to know whats going on, it’s good to see where you hits come from, check for 404 errors, see what google search terms point at me etc.

I see a referral from ubuntuforums and investigate. Maybe someone checked out my blog after reading a post on there or something. Nope, it’s a LUG Radio listener called Saik0 (sadly I can’t find a web address, so no link) pointing out my jingle and doing some good LUG Radio advocacy at the same time.

And check this: he made it his Ubuntu login sound. Thats gonna crack him up after a while, but wow. I feel all important. I just wish I had been able to do a better version. By the time I did it, I’d had so many hassles I just wanted to get it out of the door. It sounds muffly to my ears. Maybe I’ll do a better one soon.

But for the uninitiated, here’s my original (~3MB uncompressed .wav).

You can download LUG Radio episode 25 from here (aka Season 2 Episode 13). The jingle appears at just after 57 minutes, but you should just listen to the whole show anyway 😉

Or just get the snippet of the LUG Radio version of the jingle from here (104KB .ogg in .tar.bz2).

So, thanks Saik0 😀

Oh, incidentally, if you want some other Um Bongo goodies, like a Windows screensaver, the Um Bongo theme tune, mobile phone ringtones and wallpapers, have a look at the Um Bongo downloads and the Um Bongo mobile phone downloads. There, that should keep the lawyers happy.

And drink it in the Congo 😀

More Hard Disk News

Like anyone apart from me cares…

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 40% 1594 6323152
# 2 Extended offline Completed: read failure 40% 1594 6323152
# 3 Extended offline Completed: read failure 40% 1594 –
# 4 Short offline Completed: read failure 60% 1594 6323152

Ulp.

After advising someone about this the other day, it took a recommendation from Dave Goodwin to point out that I should look at smartmontools. They essentially ask the disk itself to report it’s S.M.A.R.T. status and also run some checks. Most of the point of this post is to remind myself in future what I did and what to read.

With the help of this and this and the surrounding pages.

A quick self test failed as you can see above

# smartctl -t short /dev/hda

So I ran a few long test, which also failed as can be seen above.

# smartctl -t long /dev/hda

I ran several commands which told me:

# smartctl -H /dev/hda

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

# smartctl -Hc /dev/hda

Self-test execution status: ( 116) The previous self-test completed having
the read element of the test failed.

# smartctl -A /dev/hda

told me that 7 drive attributes were in the pre-fail stage but haven’t failed yet.

# smartctl -a

informed me that it encountered 459 errors before the test failed and


Error 459 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 1583 hours (65 days + 23 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an unknown state.

After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
— — — — — — —
40 51 01 d0 7b 60 e0 Error: UNC 1 sectors at LBA = 0x00607bd0 = 6323152

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
— — — — — — — — —————- ——————–
25 00 01 d0 7b 60 e0 08 00:16:05.184 READ DMA EXT
25 00 02 cf 7b 60 e0 08 00:16:04.000 READ DMA EXT
25 00 08 cf 8e 60 e0 08 00:16:04.000 READ DMA EXT
25 00 08 37 0a 60 e0 08 00:16:04.000 READ DMA EXT
25 00 08 07 1a 60 e0 08 00:16:03.984 READ DMA EXT

Interesting is that the output from the top thinks I have approximately 1594 hours disk lifetime left. Thats about 66 days! Yeah I know it’s not exact, but it knows better than I do.

Either way, if the drive fails the test on a read failure then it’s starting to die. The Linux Journal article recommends moving all data off the disk, which I did a few days ago and also looking for a vendor tool that will either remap the bad sectors or give me an error code to use when requesting a replacement from the manufacturer. I think I’ll do this and also try it on my other drive that died (both Maxtor), then see how long the warranty is for. If it’s a year, then I should get a replacement drive. I might try the supplier for a replacement first though.

I’m glad I’m using Linux. I check my logs reasonably often just to see if things are ok, under Windows I’ve had disks die in the past and knew nothing of it until the machine started to fail to boot.

Damned Hard Disks

In my miserable post, I forgot to mention that the 5 month old 160GB hard disk that houses my now unused Windows XP installation is starting to flake. I keep getting a shitload of these in my logs:

Apr 29 11:14:23 localhost kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Apr 29 11:14:23 localhost kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=6323152, high=0, low=6323152, sector=6323152
Apr 29 11:14:23 localhost kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 6323152
Apr 29 11:14:23 localhost kernel: NTFS-fs error (device hda1): ntfs_end_buffer_async_read(): Buffer I/O error, logical block 6323089.
Apr 29 11:14:23 localhost kernel: NTFS-fs error (device hda1): map_mft_record(): Failed with error code 5.
Apr 29 11:14:23 localhost kernel: NTFS-fs error (device hda1): ntfs_read_locked_inode(): Failed with error code -5. Marking corrupt inode 0x3dca as bad. Run chkdsk.

There seems to be about 4 bad sectors (48078695, 48078696, 6323151 and 6323152) from what I can gather, however I can read the disk fine and have copied all my important stuff off. Windows doesn’t seem to be complaining yet, well I only boot into it about once a week to check hardware for comparison against Linux (like my faulty TFT monitor) and I don’t actually do anything with it as such. Strangely, these errors only appear in the logs if I haven’t just rebooted after being in Windows.

While I don’t much care for Windows, I could lose it without a care, I was going to swap my hard disks around and put /home on the nice 160GB disk as I have about 5 or 6 GB spare on my 60GB drive that currently houses /home. I got down to about 800MB and had to delete a few big files that I don’t use much. I would have preferred to keep them though.

Now I have to try to convince the supplier that it’s a faulty disk and get them to replace it which means I have to pay to return it. Pain in the arse. Not only that, but this disk was the replacement for an 18 month old disk that I lost in November and now I’m having to replace it again, while I have another disk right next to it that I’ve had for around 3 years without ever having a problem (touch wood).

Fucking flaky hardware. Thankfully I’ve never been cursed myself with an identifiable hardware problem, possibly due to the fact that I’m great at diagnosing the cause of hardware faults, though I was responsible for someone elses machine that had such problems. It turned out to be flaky BIOS power management on an SiS motherboard. Turned it off and the problems went away.

Who should you vote for?

Just did a quick political quiz. Results unsurprising:

Who Should You Vote For?

Who should I vote for? v2

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour 3
Conservative -27
Liberal Democrat 43
UKIP -19
Green 43

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against. The Greens are also anti-Europe.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

I voted neutral on the things I don’t really know that much about, like Europe – I don’t have an economic mind, but I didn’t vote against a ban on public smoking. However coming out as a Lib Dem and Green voter doesn’t surprise me.

I think the Labour party have come up with an interesting argument against voting for the Lib Dems. They know they’ve pissed off a lot of their supporters who will now vote Lib Dem, but they’ve tried to strike fear into them by claiming that if 1 in 10 Labour voters were to vote for the Liberal Democrats, then it could let the Conservatives into government, which I don’t think many people want at all. FUD. It might be true, many people now view the Lib Dems as the rational alternative to the Labour party who many have lost faith in, unlike the Tories who are the sinister right-wing alternative. Labour will lose far more votes to the Lib Dems than to any other party. The outcome will be interesting. I think I might bring forward my plans to live in another country if the Conservatives win the election, or the BNP win any seats. Horror of horrors. Or might it be called a Holocaust?

Busy doing everything and nothing

As always.

I’ve got a million things going on and not enough time to do them all. My cold has now gone thankfully, but I’ve spent the last week in a flurry of activity.

I’ve been trying to restore some order to the wreckage of my degree, but none of my lecturers seem to be replying. I’ve been trying to salvage myself from financial disaster by finding a job and selling everything I don’t need, thats spare machines, a lot of books etc. Although this is early in the process, again nobody seems to be replying. I think it’s overdraft extension time again, but this will max out the overdraft as far as it will go. I really don’t know where my money has gone. I know I’ve bought a few expensive things but they went on my credit card. I looked at my bank statement and can’t see what I bought. Food. A few nights out. Nothing that extravagant. I now have to tax my car and live on the change until I can find a job. Now consider that I don’t officially finish uni for another 6 weeks and I have bills in that period that total £220 (phone, laptop repayments, internet connection, credit card repayments…) not counting car tax, food, travel or entertainment.

Hopefully my ass on a street corner near you will not be amongst those things for sale…

So aside from all that I went away to Shrewsbury for the weekend 2 weeks ago (cost free!), with my girlfriend and a load of people from uni, which was great. I’ve been trying to give up smoking again and have been getting through a load of nicotine gum, though I’ve nearly run out and buying some more isn’t an option.

My beloved TFT monitor is being collected today as I’m sending it back for replacement as the image ghosting is not good enough for me, I spent a lot of my credit card company’s money on it and I’m not going to settle for an imperfect picture. So now I’m back on my big, dull, 1983 looking, uncomfortable feeling 17″ Dell monitor at 1024×768. Man, does it feel pokey and up-close after having a nice 17″ TFT sitting at a comfortable distance away at 1280×1024. I’ve been spoiled after only 2 weeks.

I’ve also spent a couple of days trying to sort out a decent CV and covering letter for my girlfriend who has been offered a place on a dental nursing course. To take up the offer she has to find her own placement in a dental practice, except all of the ones she’s phoned have just told her to fuck off. She’s never done anything like this and I’ve always been pretty good at getting jobs and doing interviews and so on so I did all the letters and CVs and prepared them all for being mailed out. The very day after the mail out she got a call offering an interview so I then spent the night prepping her for the interview before going for a few drinks with a friend of mine who has had some bad news about a family member.

On Saturday night I went with a few people to a friend’s house for a few late night beers. I don’t think anyone was sober but my friend started to embarrass me by making claims about my sexual habits in front of a few people I’d never met before. I decided to give him some back, which pissed him off and we ended up arguing and he asked me to leave. Prick. Seems it’s ok to say embarrass me in front of my new girlfriend and some people I’ve never met before, but another question entirely when I do it back, backed up by some evidence.

Today and yesterday I’ve mostly been trying to sort my life out as much as I have done every other day for the last few weeks. The list of things to do doesn’t seem to get smaller. Tasks for the next few days include go to the doctors to find out whether I’m losing my marbles or not, vote, go to the dentist which I can’t afford to pay for but they were going to take me off the register and I’d have to find a new dentist because I haven’ t been for so long, make some PCs to sell so I can keep my ass a narrow passage, try to get in touch with my lecturers again and try to find a job.

I think I have to go to Huddersfield this weekend, the petrol looks like it will be paid for but it’s still something I could do without as it will involve a night out and I can’t afford it.

Oh, I just remembered the main thing I wanted to talk about in this otherwise depressing post. Yesterday the former lead singer of my band gave me a call for the first time in a long while. He now works up in the Laked District as a sound recording lecturer at a college. He asked for my opinion on a band that he recorded.

They’re all 16, school dropouts on behavioural grounds, have been together for around 4 weeks and to be honest are quite possibly the best unsigned band I’ve ever heard. Now I was a professional musician for 5 years, I’ve seen almost as many unsigned bands as the entire A&R department of Sony and EMI etc put together. The songs are great, the musicianship is flawless and they have a male vocalist, a female vocalist and male rapper who all sound great which means they can pretty much do anything they want to. This is not some cheesy, bunch of shit, thrown together, ‘lets play crap pop songs’ effort. These guys are for real. After giving him my opinion, which was essentially (though naturally I was far more verbose at the time) that they’ve got it made if they can hold it together when the spotlight falls on them and that they are allowed to mature physically a little (they look young and their voices sound young), he asked me if I would be willing to get involved. I’m quite excited by this, people who know me well enough will tell you that my opinion on music is brutal and mostly right on the button. I either love it or hate it, which means they are great or it just may not be my taste, the alternative is that I don’t care which means they weren’t good enough to provoke a reaction. I have no real middle ground with good bands and this band amazed me. Unfortunately however, with all my crap going on I can’t really do much for now. I need a job and I need to sort out my degree. Then I’ll be able to think about it, but I won’t waste too much time looking a gift horse in the mouth. I think I can really help this band go somewhere and I think they’d appreciate my attention to detail and my ability to focus them into a cohesive unit and saleable product, which in terms of career prospects and their own success, is what needs to happen for them right now. Lets see how this one develops.

Anyway, I better call it a day for now. Apologies for the depressing drivel.

Peace.