M&D came over and helped me clean up my houses after the plumbers’ mess. The plumbers have actually been quite good at cleaning up, but the brick dust etc gets everywhere. The place is lovely and clean now and I’ve put some summer stuff like fans in the loft for a few months as well. The plumbers aren’t quite finished with the central heating yet, although they say they will be within 3 days, they only have the thermostat, hot water tank and a bit of piping in the loft to do now.

Yesterday was my niece’s first birthday. Everyone came over to my place and ate/drank way too much – it was like Xmas, especially as I’m having leftovers for lunch tomorrow! Amelia was very happy and not at all noisy, Jacques was having fun too. Pip has some photos and I made a video – ripped using the Mac’s Firewire/iMovie and converted to DVD-quality MPEG on my new Linux box at astounding speed, it transcoded about 3Gb of DV to MPEG2 in 8mins.

Over the last few days I’ve been installing a few different instances of Oracle into VirtualBox machines. To ease the OS install headache I made a CentOS 5.2 guest with all the Oracle kernel optimisations and filesystem layouts as well as the required packages (such as the legacy C++ libraries). I then cloned that twice – once for Oracle10gR2 and once for Oracle11iR1; using the instructions here; which are essentiallty: clone the VDI file, register a new VM, change the UUID and mac address and attach the new disk.

The gas installers have finally come back to finish the job – although they seem to be staring at the sewage pipe they broke and the longer bit of replacement pipe they brought with them with baffled expressions! Its quite a warm day today. I installed VirtualBox on the new Core2Quad last night under Fedora9. There seems to be an issue running XP under VB – it uses 100% of one core of the CPU, I thought it was because I installed XP64, but it seems its a bug in XP in that it uses an ACPI kernel – the fix apparently is to replace it with a standard kernel, but it can’t be replaced in XP64, only 32-Bit.

Just watched Hancock, which was actually an OK superhero movie with a difference – this guy didn’t really want to be a superhero and was a bit depressed! I’m currently installing Fedora9 on the new PC, its going to be replaced by Fedora10, but I just wanted to check the hardware was all Linux-friendly and it seems it is – the installer found the SATA2 controllers fine and they’re running at 3Gbps, it identified the 1Tb drive fine and hdparm -t reports 117MB/s!