Oct 23 - Nov 16
Right, Ok,.. so I'm seriously lacking in keeping the diary up to date.
Summary: Been doing various campaigns crawling up various mountains in the area. (Gawd but was I unfit when I started). Have lost a lot of weight (thank god) but still need to loos a hell of a lot more (wail).
Obviously been touring the tourist traps around the province. Some good, some downright outragous in prices. Seems the head of the tourist board here just got severely slapped down for some highly dubious misspending over a long period of years, and rightly so when you go out and start looking for the tourist board information on the province. I could do a significantly better job by myself after a few weekends and with a better camera.
Finally go all the components for my personal machine sorted out. I don't ned it just yet, but I think I'll up the memmory to 2Gb when I have some cash to play with and look into water cooling the CPU though it's relatively quiet as is. Might get an exhaust muffler for the PSU though even if it is very quiet already.. Got the second of the ICY dock systems (removable HD system) installed so I moved one of the 3 disks I had off the onboard promise raid controller onto the onboard ICH4 controller for two reasons. 1) you can't boot off a disk on the secondary controller 2) linux is currently only handling that promise controller and disk at udma2 speeds instead of udma5 (though the maxtor can do this mysterious UDMA6). I cna get about 40Mb/s off both disks similtaniously now and about 47Mb/s singly (they're both on the same channel because the CD rom is on the other channel and locks the IO system to udma2).
BT finally came through and I got the boadband connection I'd been hoping for (512K download/256K upload). Unfortunately they sent me a USB ADSL modem which look a while to find all the appropriate software for for linux use, so I had been stuck for a few days using WinXP to searc out the appropriate kit. (Sidenote for BT broadband folk using the BT voyager USB ADSL modem, you want to grab the latest eciadsl kit (personally I built it from the tarball theough you might like to use the prebuilt rpm/deb packages). Pretty well the worst that you'll have to handle is the eciconf.sh script which you need to run in the X11 enviroment being a Tcl/tk application though there is also a eciconftxt.sh script for text only use. Just wander down through the options. The only tricky bit being the VPI and VCI settings which for BT are 0 and 38 respectively).