Older blog entries for MikeCamel (starting at number 43)

Flanders and Swann
After a spate of gripping and Ogging, I'm currently listening to some Flanders and Swann - absolutely marvellous!

my day (and iPaq heads up)
Meeting in Reading, which is the other side of London to me, and then some, so up at 6:15 (that's ante meridian, folks), and off the Witham station. It was only when I got there that I realised that there was a tube strike on today (yes, the very one to which RossBurton refers), but it was too late to start driving, so I thought I'd chance it. Got into Liverpool Street around 8:15, and started queuing for a taxi - they were few and far between, but I got lucky, in that after only about about forty minutes, the person at the front got into a taxi and was happy to share. The driver went down the line, and as I was going to Paddington, which was close to his passenger's destination, I got to go - five of us, in the end. Traffic not too bad, and I was there in about 50 minutes. First train cancelled, but second got me to Reading for 10:25 - only 25 minutes late. However, getting back was hell - Liverpool Street was closed due to power outages, and I spent over 45 quid's worth of time in the taxi getting to Stratford, the next stop on the line. The train was packed and late, but I sat opposite a couple of Compaq guys, who were playing with the latest iPaq - bluetooth to a GPRS phone, and very sexy. They suggested delaying to the 3970, which should have _much_ better battery life. Linux is, they assured me, in mid-port. Good news. Got to Witham around 1725. Thanks to Neill for warning me about Liverpool Street!

my evening
So, what's a guy to do after a serious day's travel in London? Go to see Minority Report, of course - which wasn't showing for an hour and a half (I'd arrived 10 minutes to late for the earlier showing), so went to watch Spiderman, instead. A little too much CGI for me, but quite amusing. Bugged by the ending, though - why does he have "nothing to offer" but friendship? Yeah, right.

Fallen Angel
Got home, wrote some more javadoc comments. Dull, but it needs doing. Floated the idea to some mates the other day, and it went down well, which pleased me. Also need to add time-stamping to the protocol. Then create a version for XML, then write up the protocol and the framework, then socialise it (raph, yes, that means you), then go for an RFC. Phew!

printer
Sorry this is a bit long, but should have said: got a new printer (Epson Stylus C80) to replace the one I've given to Moo (Catherine). Took forever to get CUPS to see it, then to realise that I needed to install gimp-print, then realise that it's gimpprint-cups or something in Debian, then install that, etc.. But it's working now, and very good. Why, oh why is printing such a pain to set up?

Denny
Hey, Denny - the Posse love you! So - do we know the whole story yet? Are you prosecuting? Were the police helpful? Did she run out of bricks, or what? (-;
-The Bursar.

Mike who?
Got one of those wierd emails today, to one of my lesser known accounts (very little spam, thank heavens), from a guy called Mike Adams. Turns out that he's changed his email address, but at least he gave me a form to send him SMS messages. And enough information to track down his web pages. Seems like a nice enough bloke, lots of pictures of him and his wife, etc., but I have to admit that I don't know him from Adam. Which, I guess, is quite ironic.

Fallen Angel
Wrote some javadoc comments for Fallen Angel (the distributed trust engine that I've alluded to before) last night, and it's going to take more time than I thought. Must get in touch with raph to tell him about it at some point, I suppose.

dog
Want a dog, want one now. The Newfoundland Club have us down for a rescue, but nothing yet. Sad. It seems that Kate (my mother-in-law) has latched onto our having a dog (though, as she rightly points out, they're more the size of ponies) as an alternative to her having grandchildren for now. However, as we don't seem to be about to produce either for her in the near future, I guess she's going to have to wait a while.

mikeszcz
Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea is good, but it's far from my favourite. If you're looking for other short fiction by him, try "The Snows of Kilimanjiro", which I have down as the best short story ever written. For longer works, "The Sun Also Rises", and "For Whom the Bell Tolls". I get annoyed with him after a while (and he's not exactly great with female characters), but he writes dialogue like noone before or since.

Weekend
Was supposed to go to a work summer party on Sunday, but the weather was so nice that Catherine wanted to stay at home and garden, so I stayed at home and read (and moved things in the garden from time to time). Beautiful weekend, and two great barbecues. Was going to write some code for Fallen Angel, but it was too lovely outside.

802.11
I've been thinking about getting a standalone Access Point, as the PCI card I'm using doesn't really have the range I need to get around our (fairly large) house with any decent bandwidth (or at all, in some places). However, as I've just had a buy a new printer to replace the one that I've given to Catherine because the XP drivers for her old one are so cr*p, I might hold off on this for a while. I'll either go with the Netgear ME102 or the Buffalo Airstation WLA-L11G - any comments about using these with Linux systems (specifically on ease of admin) would be appreciated.

rillian
CUP's all well and good, but I'm not sure I'd be worshipping it! I worked there for a while, and hmmm. Be aware that the Pitt building in the centre of Cambridge isn't where the real work gets done - that's in the Edinburgh Building, out on Shaftesbury Road. Just a note - I created their website in 1994 - we were the first UK publisher with one, and one of the first 20 publishers in the world with one. It was still in the times of "if you build it, they will come". How are you enjoying the UK?

work
Wrote a job spec. for a role I'd like to fill today. It started off as a discussion document, but someone suggested I stop beating around the bush, as there's clearly a need for it. Security ... We'll see.

mates
A bunch of mates from where I used to work got told yesterday that 10% of them will be laid off. They should hear by the end of tomorrow. Decimation, literally (although people tend to use the word to mean very few people left, it came from the Roman army's practice of executing one out of ten men in disgraced units). Morale's low (surprise, surprise), but I hope that none of my friends are in too much danger. They're "considering their options" (read "looking/asking around for new jobs) anyway, but the market's not good ATM.

8 Jul 2002 (updated 8 Jul 2002 at 11:46 UTC) »
marriage
It's our seven year wedding anniversary today! Not an itch in sight, and we're both very happy (well, I am, and she says she is!). We had to be up at 6:15am this morning so that Catherine could get to London in time, and as a result, it was only when she texted me on the way to work that I realised that we'd both forgotten! Presents later.

cdrecord
As I finally moved our CDRW from Catherine's machine to mine (hers runs WinXP, which doesn't seem to want to burn any CDs at all), and I've been reading lots of security books recently, I thought it was high time I did some backing up of data. So I made an image (mkisofs), and then tried to burn it to a clean CD (cdrecord). Hang, big time. Button at the front of the box big time.

So, next time, try it as root. No obvious reason - just thought I would. Same problem. Reboot, try it from the command line, without going into X (sometimes X gets upset, in my experience, and won't respond to the appropriate 3-finger salute). Hang. Same, as root. Hang. Time to do some searching on the 'Net.

And it turns out that if you've got your CDRW hooked up to an off-board IDE card (mine's a Promise one), some people have big problems. So, I think, let's try moving my HDDs to the IDE card, and my CDRW to the onboard. Much swearing and pulling and pushing of connectors, then power and reboot. Machine doesn't immediately find boot partition (which is fair), and tries to use BOOTP. Interesting - I escape it. It finds LILO (which surprises me), and the boot partition. However, it panics on not being able to find the root partition, which is also fair. I'd wondered whether the ide bus had a direct mapping to hd* devices, and now I know.

Pull machine apart again, reattach HDDs to old IDE interface, move other drives around. Reboot - machine comes up. Spend some time changing soft links in /dev, checking /etc/fstab, and then try cdrecord. Joy. So, in the hopes that others will find this account useful, here's something for the search engines to fix on:
"cdrecord CDRW IDE card Promise hang".

health
Remember I said that I'd gone to see Catherine down in Sussex, because she was unwell? Well, I picked it up, and was up at 4am on Saturday morning throwing up and the rest. Not the nicest weekend, and I must have been mad to agree to see the parents-in-law on Saturday. Oh well, I did spend most of the day asleep in the car while they walked around Stamford, and they did give me a well-done present for passing the MBA, so it wasn't all bad.

being a good husband/friend
Catherine's away in Sussex (about 1.5-2 hours drive away) at the moment, on work. I was working from home today, and she phoned to say that she was ill - nothing life-threatening, but not at all well. I told her to go back to the hotel, and to bed, and offered to come down. She told me to stay where I was. Spoke to her again a bit later (she'd at least gone to bed), and she wasn't sounding any better. So I hopped in the car, which made me very popular indeed when I turned up at the hotel room an hour and forty-five minutes later. I'm home again now (she didn't fancy waking up extra early so that I could get to work near enough to 9am), but it's nice just to do the right thing from time to time. That's love, that is, and I feel happier knowing that she's not dangerously ill.

grip
Well, isn't grip better behaved with ide-scsi? Certainly is. The extra 512Mb of RAM may be helping, but the CPU usage seems well down, and I can now listen to oggs via XMMS and rip at the same time, and even get stuff off the modem(*), which is a huge improvement. Still a bit jerky typing from time to time, but that's all part of the fun. So, my recommendation is that you definitely run grip with ide-scsi (unless you already have a SCSI cdrom drive). Don't forget to add /dev/sg0 (or appropriate) in the config, and to give the appropriate group access to this device (generic SCSI).

(*)Note - after some experimenting, this bit turns out to be rather less true than I'd hoped...

interest rankings
These are new since I was last here. Interesting to see them in action. Important not to regard them as "I'm a good person" marks, of course. I was rather a karma wh*re on /. - until I got to 50, of course. So I'd better try to be sensible about them this time.

Independence Day
As a Brit, this is a bit of an odd thing for me (glad to let you have your independence, chaps, if that's the way you treat good tea, etc.). However, I recognise the importance of the day to Americans (USAmericans, that is), and it's sad to see that it's been spoilt by a shooting in Los Angeles airport. I hope that the rest of the day goes well, and safely.

Scary, scary, scary. I should have included, in my last entry, which was around New Year, a resolution to keep posting to Advogato, which I haven't done. Well, hopefully I'm going to start again. I've managed to finish an MBA (how many m*n*g*rs on Advogato, let alone MBAs?), and now I'm thinking hard about what I want to do. Probably security consultancy - I've got a good technical grasp of the technical issues, and I'm commercial enough to deal with the business issues. Well - let's hope.

It's been good to spend some time (virtual) with the Posse - thanks guys! What else have I done? Well, the new (debian) box is up and running, 802.11b is working, I've now got a gig's worth of RAM, a GeForce 3 Ti200 and a 17" TFT, which makes sitting in front of a machine lots more fun.

I also thought very hard about starting a new company, and decided not to. The other guy involved agrees that we should open-source the software instead, which I think is very positive. I with I could pretend that it was because we care, but it's more about lack of funding - sorry. Give us some time to get our thoughts together, but let me give you a preview - it's about groups and communities, and democratically securing them. Believe me, it's nice, and the crypto works (I wrote it, and it _still_ works!).

Last but not least - all of my emails are now signed - I finally got gpg up and running. Mike Bursell, MikeCamel - you'll find the key in the obvious place. Should we support signing in Advogato?

Good to be back - I'll try to keep this up.

Happy New Year in just a few hours. Resolutions?

  • more coding - particularly in C
  • try to get that PhD proposal accepted
  • work more from home
  • new box + debian
  • some other ones concerning my wife which are none or your business. (-8

I hope that you all have a happy and prosperous New Year.

life
This is probably it for a few days because, like others here, I'll be away from a decent network connection over Christmas. Off to my parents in Somerset, and then Catherine's, near Loughborough. Many Scousers expected.

machines
Why, oh why, oh why can't I get my Prism 2 cards working? Not on Win98 (not my first choice), not under Linux. I've just moved to 2.4.17, and there's supposed to be support, but I'm having problems with CardBus dependencies on kernel compile. Not the slightest idea. Heigh-ho. Need to get some sort of network sorted for when we knock through into the new house, and at the moment it looks like it might be a matter of drilling through. Not a good thing.

politics
I don't usually play politics too much, but for the first time in my life I felt strongly enough about something yesterday to write to (email) my MP (member of parliament ~= senator?). Under the new Terrorism Act which the UK government has just pushed through, the police can imprison foreign nationals without telling them what the charges are against them. I find this suspension of the ancient right of habeus corpus not only concerning, but also a disgusting move. I believe that the state has a duty to protect its citizens, but this is not acceptable. So, I emailed my MP - I feel quite virtuous for caring enough, and doing something about it.

Christmas and New Year
A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you. To those of you who don't celebrate the Christian festivals, or for whom New Year occurs at a different time, may you enjoy the season with your loved ones, and have a relaxing and fulfilling time. Advogato counts as family, now, so I'm sorry not to be spending it with all (well, some!) of you, too.

-Mike.

books
Finally finished Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It was a good time for me to read it (although it occurred to me that any time would probably have been a good time to read it), and I wish that I had a little more time just to chill and think about it. Unluckily, I've got an assignment for my MBA which I need to be getting started on. ZatAoMM was good reading: I've been doing quite a lot of work on "knowledge" recently (partly for the MBA), and it slotted some of it into place. If only it had taught me a little more about motorcycles, too. (-8

weekend
Office party on Friday night was good, and we didn't get to bed too late. Spent Saturday morning present shopping, and had a nice rest of weekend, including leaving Moo to do the wrapping (at her suggestion), doing a big recycle run (how do we get through so many bottles?), more MBA work, a post-wedding party on Sunday evening (ridiculous time for it), tuning my pppd on-demand settings (now connect at 50+kpbs, was around 19kbps), and stuff. Life seems good.

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