Older blog entries for Seri (starting at number 3)

3 Apr 2001 (updated 4 Apr 2001 at 10:26 UTC) »
Monday: Work is extremely boring, project has been 75% signed off, we're just doing housekeeping now, means sitting round all day, ocassionally running some performance tests.

Ho hum.

Went to see an old friend to show off the car, had fun driving round London back roads.

3 Apr 2001 (updated 3 Apr 2001 at 12:15 UTC) »
Sunday: Shoot the people who try to include SCART sockets on devices, none of them are standard! Woke up this morning with my Daughter complaining that the Nintendo doesn't work, investigate the problem, the Nintendo has picture but no sound, spend the majority of the morning trying different wiring combinations. Should be easy:
TV with 2 SCART Sockets
Sky Box with 2 SCART Sockets
Video with 2 SCART Sockets
Nintendo with 1 SCART Output
Stereo with 1 SCART Input (not strictly true but close enough)
Should be able to wire TV to stereo so all sound from TV will also go to stereo, should then be able to wire Sky into TV, should then be able to wire Video into Sky and lastly Nintendo into Video, when I do I get no sound from stereo (bugger) Finally after much head scratching I get it sorted.

Discover that my server is still rebooting itself, worry that the processor may have already fried and is merely finishing its death throes. After investigation it appears that it randomly decides to reboot when the lid is closed, bizarre bahaviour, it can wait a random ammount of time, implement a temporary fix by jamming a thin book under the lid to stop it tripping the close detection button.

Get sidetracked away from DNS by Squid and Squirm, have fun getting them configured to block all traffic from ad sites, then try to tackle getting the Apache proxy server to route through them, is probably very easy but I can't think straight atm.

To tired, job for another day.

3 Apr 2001 (updated 3 Apr 2001 at 11:53 UTC) »
Saturday: Good intentions have a funny way of being easily forgot until it's to late. Had big plans for today, I should have gone to the gym (still vainly trying to pursue fitness), then gone into town with Ranj to look at DVD players, after that I could devote the day to sorting out DNS. What actually happend, I woke up late with the headache from hell, said stuff it to going to the gym, met with Ranj and tootled into town, wandered around aimelessly looking like the living dead, brought some new CD's (PJ Harvey, Daft Punk and Death in Vegas), then tootled home, never made it as far as looking for DVD players, phoned on the way home by the wife to ask if I could get some compost (the moment the suns out she gets all these gardening ideas).

Started tinkering with the server, came to the conclusion that it's overheating (the server is a small P233MMX Laptop), after some dissasembly I've found that the chassis cooling fan isn't being powered. Snipped the wires and soldered on some new longer ones then investigated wiring it into other sources of power on the mboard, all too high, the fan wants 12V and all the ones I'm finding are 48V, good for cooling, bad for noise. Hit on a brain wave, dig out an old variable transformer, cut of one of the connectors that I never use, set it to 14V and then wire it up to the fan, presto, it's running slightly faster with no noticeable noise increase, admitidly it now uses up an extra plug socket but so what.

Decide to leave tinkering for a while whilst I investigate storage in the bedroom (spurred on by the fact that whilst looking for the tranformer I filled the living room with all my cables and useless gizmo's), decide to buy some new wardrobes and end up trying to fathom the strangest logic ever.

Point: Acording to wife we can't afford two new wardrobes which with all the fittings come to about £350, so we decide to buy one this month and one next. Get to Ikea and walk out with no wardrobes but two bedside cabinets, a new chest of drawers and a new TV unit, total cost £400, all chosen by her, where's the logic?

Well my productivity time has been eaten away, got back at about 6:30 and finished putting Ikea furniture together at about 10:00 and then spent a further 3 hours trying to wire the SCART sockets up correctly, am now to tired to be productive.

30 Mar 2001 (updated 3 Apr 2001 at 11:01 UTC) »
Friday: Feel a bit of a fraud, have opened an advogato account although the ammount of development I actually do is minimal.

Never mind, I'll make it up with the ammount of documentation I'm churning out (oh my how we love those HOWTO's).

Trying to skive out the office, one of the first days in ages that the suns been shining and the skies are clear, god I hate the British climate, problem, supposed to be going into town for drinks, unfortunately this is one of the few times that we have the option of a babysitter, should I risk a womans wrath?

Hmmm, still have to finish the auto DNS section of the Linux Advanced Server Howto, linking in the DHCPD to auto update DNS records isn't as easy as it seems.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!