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OCTOBER 2003 |
30th October 2003
Damn the past week has been boring, apart from last night - had a nice sit and tea with Jon in Harrow. I've been mainly learning about things recently. Changed the Exim config on dmesg to run MailScanner and Spamassassin on incoming mail. Played around with my .procmailrc file. Been learning a bit about SIP recently too, going to install a SIP proxy on dmesg one of these days. Also, its good to mention that Knoppix is outstandingly good, and Colin McRae Rally 3 on my Athlon machine using my new gamepad is sooo addictive.
Track of the day: Limp Bizkit - Faith
21st October 2003
w00t, I woke up this morning and my laptop had finished its 'emerge sync && emerge -u world'. This is it, its finished! Yes, it finally finished installing Gentoo! Today I'll have a day of not compiling anything. To a normal person this installation time sounds extremely long, but I have been using my laptop for this whole time while its been compiling stuff so its no big deal at all. I can also stop any emerge operation and continue where I left off by doing a 'emerge --resume'. Anyway, yes, Gentoo is great - I'm convinced my optimal compiled system is much faster than not. ACPI works perfectly, everything boots very fast, the fan does not always spin on my laptop, the pre-emptive kernel is great, it uses a small amount of space, its all fantastic.
Track of the day: Jamiroquai - Destitute Illusions
20th October 2003
Track of the day: Stereophonics - Who'll Stop The Rain (acoustic)
19th October 2003
Do NOT see 'Cabin Fever' and waste a couple of hours of your life. Jon came down to Harrow this evening and we went over to the cinema to try and catch a showing of Kill Bill. But, lo and behold it was sold out (no, didn't book in advance because I am stupid) so we thought we'd see something since he'd made it all the way here. You know a film is bad when you are just itching for it to end - and Cabin Fever is definately in that category.
Track of the day: Travis - Writing To Reach You
16th October 2003
dmesg.printk.net is back up courtesy of Markus and Jon who put on the new fan while I was out last night... thanks guys :)
Track of the day: Rootjoose - Mr Fixit
15th October 2003
Went from home to my dads shop in Tottenham and emerged some packages on my laptop that had been sitting there on ADSL still installing Gentoo. I then head over to the other side of London to Richmond to meet Markus just after lunchtime. After wandering about, talking and noticing how lovely Richmond is I gave him the fan and headed off to St. Pancras. Fast train to Nottingham where I finished reading Ben Elton - High Society. Its an alright book, came together well in the end, some small parts were a little slow but quite thought provoking and a good read. Messed about for a little while and then back to town to meet Mike, Ceri & Kelly for a gig tonight at Rock City. DJ E.A.S.E. & Paul Godfrey... its going to be great. Took some photos for Impact Magazine too.
Track of the day: Blackstreet - No Diggity Allstar
14th October 2003
w00t, the fan arrived :)
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Track of the day: Ludacris - Rollout
12th October 2003
Went to Telehouse in the early afternoon to find dmesg in the rack with the power LED on, but an unresposive machine. The fan on the power supply at the rear was not spinning. I pressed the power button on the front and wooosh it powers up, syncs its disks the fans front and rear come on and it seems fine. I wonder whether somehow it did some stupid power management thing... Jon and Jo arrived shortly after and we found that there was no sign of any trouble in the logs (which means possible hardware issue) but dmesg was alive for about an hour now and things seemed ok.
Just as we left, dmesg must have fallen over again. Bummer. Jon gets clearance to go back in the evening and I have to head back home while munching on Penguin Mints (yum).
Well, Jons in TFM4 again, rebooted dmesg and then trying to figure out whats up with it. It could still be a power problem. Also could be a faulty motherboard... though its unlikely, especially since its been so long since the Taiwanese Capacitor quality problem. Being sensible (Jon? Sensible?) he runs 'sensors' and notices the CPU temp high... checks it again, its getting higher. I think we found the problem. The fan on the back seems fine, the ones on the front seem fine... must be the CPU fan. The fan speed is being erratic, so I order a new Vantec CCK-7015 and be done with it. Should be here on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Jon sets about madly redirecting DNS entries to his home machine on ADSL to catch email before dmesg crashes again - Jon, you're 1337.
Track of the day: Limp Bizkit - Faith
11th October 2003
3:12AM... something bad happened to dmesg.printk.net. Jon, Jo & I have clearance for going into Telehouse tomorrow and rebooting it. We're anticipating some kind of hardware problem (power, maybe?), its unlikely to be software (~30 day uptime so far, no major changes).
Track of the day: A - Going Down
10th October 2003
Got bored of the bloated and horrible Debian (Debian rocks, but with the amount of stuff that I apt'd in curiosity, and with Sid in general, it had issues) install on my laptop and thought I'd try something new. Grabbed the Gentoo Linux Pentium III prelinked CD set, borrowed Sids PCGA-CD51 cdrom drive and set about backing up a couple of things and reformatting my laptop killing the Windows partition (w00t, now got some disk space). Started off the install, running IRC mail and web at the same time in consoles so I wasn't missing much... I wonder how long it'll take?
Track of the day: Incubus - New Skin
9th October 2003
Met Jon and Jo in London today to go to the Linux Expo in Olympia, London. I went last year, and probably the year before... but this time it was actually fun! I met lots of interesting people, Dave Green from NTK, Anton Altaparmakov (the Linux NTFS guy), met Chris Ball again (now working on Dasher, which is a stunning project) and some London 2600 people too amongst others. I went to the Apple, HP, IBM and Sun stands and asked about job opportunities (hey, what did I have to lose) and got a friendly responce and useful information. Also met some interesting OpenBSD folk, talked to them for a bit about stuff and got myself some more little blowfish stickers and a OpenBSD 3.3 poster. It was a good day, and a meal with friends in London was a great way of finishing it.
Track of the day: Vanderslice - Bill Gates
5th October 2003
Went to Ikea today and got myself a new wardrobe because my old one was wak. The new one is absolutely humongous and the plan was to get some of the built-in metal-wire-style drawers to go in the bottom and some shelves for the top (this thing is floor to ceiling baby). Anyway, they didn't have the drawers but they're getting them next week so thats cool. This thing is a monster... and it required careful maneuvering and some painful muscle power (from my sister!) to get it assembled. There is not enough ceiling clearance for it to be rotated from lying on the ground (there is just enough space for the side pieces to be put down on the floor) to standing up, so half of it had to be built, and then turned upright without the bottom attached, and then all lifted into place. It was a proper mission, and took many more hours than I thought. Was well worth it though.
Track of the day: Ozomatli - Guerrillero
