I’ve been trying to convert a load of old DVD-R’s to AVI files as its easier to have a fileserver full of movies than to search through hundreds of discs. Its taken days to do just half a dozen or so – mainly due to bit-rot and scratched discs, but also due to old versions of DVDShrink3 and CloneDVD2 corrupting the disc structure, so programs like CloneDVD Mobile and DeVeDe are not only taking 2-3 hours to do the transcode, but also hours to read the bloody discs and correct the structure.

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.

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!

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.

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!