Diary Febuary 2002

Wednesday 27

Got to work early so I could leave early. Managed nearly 2 hours work. Then got dragged off to a meeting for 3 hours, about 10 minutes of which was interesting and a further 15 was potentially useful. Development produced another final build leaving us 3 hours to run a 72 hour regression test. Forunately, it failed in the first 10 minutes :0 Left work in time to be home for parcelfarce, who did actually manage to deliver. Unfortunately, the new motherboard has exactly the same probelm as the old.

Tuesday 26

Didn't do much at work, as test spent most of the day waiting for development to produce the final build (which is meant to be fully tested by thursday am, yeah, right). It appeared at 4:30, just in time for me to go home to wait for my motherboard (on which I paid for 5-9pm delivery). Got home to discover that Parcel Force believe that 7:50am is between 5pm and 9pm. Incompetant fules.

Monday 25

Finally got fed up waiting for dabs to replace my motherboard. Phoned them. They apologized profusely, said that they couldn't replace it as they are no longer made, so to order a replacement, which I did. Then went to work. As a result, I was rather late back and did nothing productive.

Sunday 24

Wrote a deeply cunning script to backup /home, and in the process of testing it nuked some of the older files (rm -rf home in the wrong directory. DOH! Still, nothing terribly important seems to have disappeared. Released sendip-2.1 - hopefully in time to keep the debian folks happy.

Saturday 23

Waited in for ages for the NTL guy, who eventually cam, twiddle a knob, said "That should be OK now" and left. He had, indeed, fixed it. And I did managed to find out exactly what the knob he twiddled did. It seems that the cable tv and cable modem share an incoming signal. The box on the wall has a cunning booster that boosts the signal, then splits it. The knob adjusts how much of the boosted signal goes to the modem and how much to the TV. This doesn't sound like a particularly sensible way of doing things... Fixed yesterdays's sendip bug, I think. The compile problem was really an alignment problem, and there was anothing problem caused by static variables in shared libraries on many archs being unwriteable.

Friday 22

Cable modem broke again. NTL say they will send an engineer to fix it between 10am and 4:30pm tommorrow. I'll believe it when I see it. Some debiam bloke found a compile problem with sendip-2.0 on m86k, which needs to get fixed. This means sendip-2.1 will be out RSN.

Thursday 21

Worked. Almost managed to convince myself that some of our code might work by the time it is released. Cable modem died again. 2.5.5 didn't boot because reiserfs is broken as usual. Seeing as I've been intending to chuck it for ages, now seems like a good time to do it. Just need to find somewhere to back up 20Gb to...

Wednesday 20

Worked. Shopped, due to there being no food in the house. Got rained on. Started playing with 2.5.5. Got as far as getting what should be a sufficient set of patches to make it compile. Hacked the webcam driver around a bit to make it build. Got jfs to compile eventually after a very odd hack. It seems that if IREAD_UNLOCK is called in the wrong (or, in this case, right) place, it causes wierd asm errors in rwsem.h. Only 2 unresolved symbols. This thing might even boot!

Tuesday 19

NTL fixed the cable modem (although, since they didn't actually say they'd done anything, or phone, or come round, or anything, it probably actually fixed itself). Cable TV disappeared, but only for 20 mins. dabs claim they haven't yet recieved bounce's motherboard which was sent next day delivery 4 days ago. GRRR.

Monday 18

NTL broke. The cable light on the cable modem went off. GRRR. Their techsupport bloke claimed the power level was wonky and said they'd send an engineer out to fix it.

Saturday 16

Warmish and sunny. Helped friends from work move house.

Friday 15

Worked from home in the afternoon, waiting for bounce's motherboard to be collected, which it was. That was the highlight of the day.

Wednesday 13

Worked. Removed bounce's motherboard ready to send it back. Attempted to decide what education I want in the next year.

Tuesday 12

Went to grandmother's funeral.

Monday 11

Worked.

Sunday 10

Slept. Worked. Played Civ (without sound).

Saturday 9

Worked. Watched Monsters Inc., and wasn't as impressed as I expected to be. Not bad though.

Friday 8

Worked.

Thursday 7

Work got even more hectic. Filled in an online returns jobby for bounce's motherboard. It should be collected next Friday.

Wednesday 6

Got a steering wheel and spent the evening playing with it. The drivers that came with it didn't work, but an upgrade on the manufacturer's website did. Bounce's (onboard) soundcard stopped working.

Thursday 5

Upgraded bounce to a Celeron 900, 256Mb. This took the entire evening.

Monday 4

Upgrade for bounce arrived, but didn't have time to play with it. Work is getting hectic.

Sunday 3

Played Civ. Played London Racer. Attempted to get 2.5.3 to work. Eventually persuaded it to complile, and mostly work. JFS needed a little hackery for the new configure stuff (which, by the way, is niceish). The web cam was more complicated since all the USB structures have been renames, and some have changed subtley, but it works agian now. I still can't mount my 1st CDROM drive, but the second works ok. Not sure why. Might be an ide-scsi thing, maybe. Will investigate when I get around to it.

Saturday 2

Slept. Played London Racer. Played Civ. Watched some TV.

Friday 1

Very little of interest happened. It rained, lots. And winded lots. Making the drive home rather interesting. It was, in several places, a choice between driving through a minor flood or moving a branch. Ho hum.