Simon’s Journal

I got Wake On LAN (WOL) working on my server today, its nice to be able to turn it on from any machine on my network (including my rourter!) without having to wander to my computer room. I use ether-wake as that send magic packets, the wol package uses UDP which doesn’t seem to work.

I’ve just bought from eBay, a Linksys WPS54G wireless print server, so that I can print to my laser without having the fileserver powered on, and I can move it to a better location across the room. I’m keeping the inkjet on the fileserver as the print server doesn’t support the scanning function.

Also from eBay, I’m also getting a new WiFi card for the laptop I’ve given Mum as RT2500 support seems to be useless in Fedora9, Ubuntu 8.04 and CentOS 5.2, this one is an NEC WL54G which does 802.11B, A and G+ up to 108Mbps, which will be interesting to try with my Buffalo router which can do 125Mbps G+, I bet it doesn’t work due to the implementations differing. Well 54Mbps will be fine anyway with the Freebox. Hopefully this will work better as it can use the kernel-based ath5k or third-party MadWifi Atheros AR5002X drivers.

We’ve 99% finished the shell, we moved the snooker table and sofa in now its carpeted. Dad’s mounted the scoreboard and cue rack etc. I’ve even put my mini fridge in there to keep the beers cold! The landing and lounge in the main house look so much more spacious now too.

Update: just watched The Babysitters, about a bunch of teen babysitters who offer “extras” to the clients. It was OK, gets a bit serious after a while with them devolving into druggie-thug-pimps.

Just watched Doomsday, which was a really good film about a deadly virus that was contained in Scotland by rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall. It had some of the cast of Dog Soldiers and was a kind of Mad Max meets 28 Days Later, the car chase scene near the end was just classic black comedy.

Yesterday I watched Freebird, which was a rubbish biker/stoner movie set in Wales.

The other day I watched Starship Troopers 3, which was typical STT stuff, although a bit more adult this time - with nudity, gore, politics and even some religion, amongst all the bug-zapping of course!

Last week I watched Mr Brooks, which was a pretty good movie about a retired serial killer forced back into the trade by a witness and his daughter.

I’ve been doing some Python/GTK+ programming - an IMDb scraper with NFO output to go with XBMC, as their built-in scrapers are slow, inaccurate and don’t give you any control, plus to get an NFO file (and optional cover image) its a two or three stage process. I’m thinking of using Glade3 for the GUI design, as box-spacers are OK for basic dialog boxes, but when you start having multiple windows it just seems like too much code devoted to layout.

We’ve been working on the shell a bit more today - loft insulation and carpet on the stairs, and thinking of getting the roof tiles replaced.

Its been way too long since my last post, and now I’m back in France I have plenty to write about in the Personal category and a few for the Movies category, so much that I’m going to leave it for another day or just skip it altogether!

So I thought I’d bung in some quick techie snippets instead:

I’ve been playing with Oracle 11gR1 on Linux and 10gR2 on Solaris today, coding up some auditing scripts, which has gotten me back into Bourne Shell programming, ooh its been nice. I’ve also been using Git a lot more too, although mainly from the CLI rather than the QGit GUI - which is nice, but not my thing really, GUI’s just seem to slow me down.

Yesterday I finally got my RT2500 wireless card working in the laptop I’m giving Mum. I ditched Fedora9 and CentOS 5.2 as RedHat seem to be doing their best to destroy wifi - indeed a recent kernel patch stopped any wifi but Atheros chipsets from working at all. Anyway, I hate to say it, but I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop and wireless worked out-of-the-box.

I’ve been playing with OSXBMC on the Mac Mini - although now they’ve renamed it “Plex” and are merging with some skin-project called CenterStage. I played my first HD movie on my new 24″ widescreen monitor and its great!

I’ve converted my middle bedroom into a computer room, so now have half a dozen computers and God knows how much network equipment all buzzing away with their flashing LED’s in just one room - and not where I’m trying to sleep! I’ve been looking on eBay for a print server, but they’re either too expensive to ship from the UK or the French are dicking around, so I think I’ll give up.

When the shell’s finished (pretty soon) I’ll probably move one of the PC’s in there, with an old CRT or something - I’ve already wired up the CAT6 and a gigabit switch!

I’ve done my pre-France shop, wow Asda is a crazy place on the weekend - especially when you don’t know where anything is and end up wandering for two hours. Good point is the ability to chat up young women whilst looking for baby stuff for my niece.

Everyone was complaining that they’ve stopped stocking the stuff they usually buy and how much better Tesco’s would be - although I went to Asda as I find Tesco’s has never got any stock!

Mouthy cow on the till saw all the shopping and remarked “I hope this is a monthly shop”, I should have told her I have an eating disorder or some wasting disease! The staff are hired from “Morons R Us” I think though, as at least three I asked had no clue what was even in the aisle they were standing in!

Also the decent aftershave is in a separate display stand by the exit for some unknown reason, not with the shaving equipment in the aisle with the Old Spice and Brut.

I’ve still got to get perishable some stuff from Tesco and will be driving around with the shopping and hoover in my boot for the next few days as I can’t be arsed to lug it all up and down three flights of stairs. Getting two monitors, printer, PC, laptop, clothes etc; in should be interesting.

Funnily enough I got home and thought “wow I don’t have any food in” as I’ve completely forgotten to do any shopping for myself for the next week; fuck it I’ll go to the local Tesco tomorrow or something.

I also went into town this morning - God I had forgotten how awful that place is, and they’ve done something to the carpark which resulted in me driving into and out of about three spaces over two floors trying to find one I could A). get into; B). get out of my door, and C). not have the wanker in the pimped out Nissan or enormous SUV next to me scratch my car. Why they have two spaces separated by a stone pillar and sometimes also a drainpipe I’ll never know! Plus the driving lane isn’t wide enough to allow you to reverse into a space. I assume its a special carpark for cyclists or Mini drivers…..

Marks & Spencer was pleasant at least - straight in, got my pants (easy directions around the store) went to till (also well signposted) complete with tasty checkout girl, paid, left. Job done. Wilkos wasn’t too bad either.

Went to two banks - one to sort out an extra business card, well their computers were down so a very tasty clerk scribbled something on a scrap of paper, so I doubt that’ll get processed. The other bank I went to to check my change of address said they won’t have received the paperwork yet as it takes 10 working days to go up to head office and back again - despite the form saying to send it to your local branch instead of head office.

Update: I managed to get all the shopping, the hoover and some computer bits in the boot, so should be fine with the rear and passenger seats for luggage.

Work was incredibly boring today as I was waiting on a vendor to sort their shit out before I could do my testing. That didn’t happen, so I did about an hour’s work today - mainly updating the bug-tracker, sorting out my laptop and helping with the IPv6 stuff.

The whole world seems a bit slow today - there didn’t even seem to be anything happening in the news.

I got my new 24″ monitor - wow 1920×1200 desktops are absurdly large! Its quite odd to see the intarweb stretched that wide - and emails that aren’t correctly set to wrap at 76 columns end up on practically one line!

I thought I had a dead pixel, but it only showed up on work’s desktop, not the laptop so I think it must have been a rubbish VGA cable. I can’t wait to get home and connect the Mac up to its DVI port and play a HD movie via OSXBMC!

I also got three USB keyboards (Logitech) and mice (Microsoft) to go with the Mac and laptop and replace the rubbish ebuyer keyboard I have on the fileserver.

I’ve got physio again tomorrow, I really wish it was a Thai massage parlour or something instead of the house of pain it is!