It’s nearly 4am and we’ve had 2 hours sleep. We’re just leaving for WTH and Jono’s grumpy 😉
Monthly Archives: July 2005
2 days
Before WTH. Mako is already there, maybe I can talk Aq and Jono into interviewing him for LUG Radio.
Services-Admin and Istanbul
I’m looking forward to Services-Admin hitting my desktop. I think Ubuntu users in particular have been aching for this for some time.
I’m also looking forward to Istanbul hitting my machine as it will be useful when recording stuff for use in demos and tutorials. I ought to look at vnc2swf as a comparison.
For F*cks Sake
My PC is dead again. About 2 weeks after I managed to get it up and running. This time it won’t even turn on. The PSU stinks of electrical burning and so I’ve took it out altogether. Sadly I don’t have another one but I was planning to buy a new case anyway. One that has a sufficient ventilation.
It stands a chance that this is what caused my last motherboard to burn out and the poor ventilation in the case as the cause of my repeated loss of hard disks.
Advice kids: don’t put your valuables in a cheap safe.
Preparing for What The Hack
Aq, Jono and I are leaving for What The Hack in a week. I have spent all night sorting stuff out in preparation.
I found out that our cheap residential BT cordless phones are suitable for use with the WTH internal phone system. I found out that O2’s billing department don’t know what my call tariff charges are.
I still have a million things to do so I’m going to go. I have to make business cards, I have to put some thought into T-shirts for WTH, I have to find my girlfriend a birthday present for while I’m away :s and I have to get a load of stuff on the very day we leave.
Sorry for this one folks, just emptying my brain onto the net.
O2 are Shit
I discovered today that O2 can’t tell their arse from their elbow.
It took their struggling billing department monkey 30 minutes to conclude that he couldn’t find out what my call tariff costs are. What? The fucking billing department don’t have access to my tariff information. What’s that all about? 30 minutes, no doubt on a premium call rate.
All I wanted to know was the cost of data calls when using the built in modem on my handset via my laptop, the cost of GPRS calls, the cost of calls from my mobile while in the Netherlands to a UK O2 mobile and vice versa and to make sure that International Roaming was enabled on my contract.
To be fair to the guy on the other end, he was kinda new and his system for some insane reason didn’t have the title of my phone tafiff with a button next to it that told him what my call charges were. Surely thats a basic principle of database design – the linking of relevent information for presentation in simple reports.
Nor could he issue a letter or leaflet telling me what my call charges are. Isn’t that insane? Why not? Isn’t it a common customer request? My tariff is 2 and a half years old and I can’t remember what they are, but damn, why can’t they do that? Why don’t the billing department have the relevent call charges at their fingertips? Surely thats one of the main things people want to know from a billing department.
After 30 minutes the guy came back from the data services department to tell me that GPRS calls are 12 pence per minute, data calls using the modem are 35 pence per minute, but when using the mobile phone modem with a laptop the calls cost £2.35 per megabyte. Eh? Whats the difference whether I use the modem to make a data call from the handset itself or use a laptop and a bluetooth connection to phone to use the modem.
Let me clarify, I need to be able to use a dial-up modem connection in the event that one of the servers at work goes down and I need to SSH in to have a look at the problem. I could be anywhere, I could be in the middle of the woods but still have my mobile phone and a notebook. How does it make any difference to O2 whether I dial straight from the phone or use the laptop to dial using the phone modem.
I know I’m repeating myself but I find this contradictory information frustrating. Either that or there is some vital piece of information that I have missed. I’m not a mobile technology expert to be honest.
Fucking O2 are shit and it probably cost me £30 if not £45 to find out. I hope this turns into a google bomb.
Fixing my PC with initrd
Fucking hell.
So as people might know (hell, I’ve complained about it enough), my main workstation broke down. Removed all of the components from the board and no difference. So it was either the CPU or the motherboard itself. I put all of the parts into another machine and it ran fine.
Well I have work to do and I need Windows for some of it and I don’t have a spare machine good enough to play some of my games, which meant I needed a new motherboard and/or CPU. After some faffing I spotted a tiny burnt out component on the board so I took pot luck and bought a new Socket A motherboard that fitted the bill as closely as I could find at short notice. Seems most people aren’t stocking many Socket A boards these days as everyone is moving on to bigger and better things, but being skint as usual I decided it was better to just buy a replacement board than a replacement machine while I wait for 64 bit support, PCIE and ATI graphics etc to be known to work well together. Not much point in buying a 32 bit machine now when I would have upgraded to 64 bit next year anyway.
So I bought a board with SATA as I need the extra disk channels. I have 3 PATA disks, one for Windows which needs to go on hda, my Linux system disk which needs to go on the SATA controller as my other disk, my enormous Linux /home doesn’t work with the SATA converter I have and so needs to go on hdb. I also have 2 optical drives which of course need to go on the other PATA channel.
So, I install Windows and I boot from a live CD to alter the grub and /etc/fstab settings accordingly. All works fine. Nice boot menu, Windows boots fine. Try to boot Linux. Umm. No. pivot_root error and can’t find initrd. Shit. But it works fine on hda. Try all possible permutations of disks and controllers, but one always fails.
So I post to Wolves LUG mailing list about whether I will be attending the meeting and say I won’t as I’ve been fixing my PC and I need to get it up and running but the SATA controller is being an arse and Linux can’t boot from it. Dave Goodwin pops up and offers some advice. I follow through and explain what I have done so far and he says do this:
You should just need to do the following to “fix” your problem :
Edit /etc/mkinitrd/modules and add in the sata modules necessary for your card, as well as probably scsi_mod and sd_mod. (Just list the modules, one per line).
Then, try running :
mkinitrd -o /boot/mkinitrd.img.custom `uname -r`
(Where the output of `uname -r` looks pretty like 2.6.10-5-K7.
Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst (or edit it at bootup) and get it to use your new custom image, and cross your fingers 🙂
And it worked. Gawd bless him. I’m so grateful to him for picking this up. I was expecting to spend the rest of my days swapping disks over to do any work. It took me a week of testing and diagnosing to get this far and probably 3 weeks before that of working out where the problem lay and getting a spare machine to work on.
Life can now continue, but what a ball ache.
Upgrade
I finally moved to WordPress 1.5.x. Hopefully this will reduce the weight of comment and trackback spam I’m getting. I’ve held back from doing this as I didn’t want to break my theme, but I then found Tom Raftery’s version. Applause to Tom.
This means comments are enabled again on new posts.
I hope to add my hackergotchi to the heading and so on but that can wait for now.
In the meantime I plan to install Coppermine before I fall asleep so I’ve got somewhere to put my LUG Radio Live photos. A post is forthcoming about LRL but I’ve been far too busy rebuilding my PC to write one.
Update: photo gallery of LRL is here and the photos taken on my phone from the night before are here.
Shocked
The bomb explosions in London have freaked me out.
It’s easy to think, as I have done, that it’s a shame for the people caught up in such incidents like the Madrid bombings and the World Trade Center aeroplane collisions and sit there watching, feeling like it’s a million miles away and that something like that could never affect you personally.
I was listening to the radio as the news reports came trickling in. As the details started to flow, I began to read the BBC News website and I felt a sudden urge to cry as I read the details of what had happened and it occured to me how close to home it all was. It could have been my friends. It could have been me and my girlfriend on a weekend trip. It took me until around 1:30pm to realise that 2 of my close friends live in London, 1 only over the road from Euston train station, the departure point of the bus that exploded which was full of people as the tube had already been closed down. Thankfully I heard from the friend that lives by Euston that she was fine. I still haven’t heard from my other friend, but as far as I know she doesn’t work in the city centre any more.
Anyway, my heart goes out to anyone affected. I can’t bear to think how it must feel to be still waiting to hear from your loved ones.
Peace.