August 2005 Archives

So, after 4 years of hard work (honestly, and not several trips to New York, Madrid, Athens, Nice and more) Kathy finally submitted her PhD yesterday. It's a weighty tome (and I confess I still haven't read all of it), and she's glad to have got rid of it I think. Now we just need to wait for her supervisor to sort out a viva for her; last we heard he was having difficulty with getting an external examiner. :(

Which leads nicely onto TFM, who took nearly a year from submission to viva I believe. This happened yesterday as well (is there something in the air?) and he passed with minor corrections. Yay!

Congratulations to both Kathy and TFM!

I got a phone call just before 5 yesterday afternoon from the window man, saying he had slot free today and as luck would had it my windows had arrived and was I free and if so could they come and fit them today. I'd originally been planning to take the day off when they came to do the fitting, but at such short notice and with Dom on a RIPE course today and Simon in London for an install I didn't really feel I could do that. However it worked out ok; I spent the morning working in the kitchen (after realising that a) I have a laptop, b) I have a wireless card and c) I have a wireless network in my house. Doh!) while they worked upstairs, and then I moved upstairs after lunch. All in all the process was pretty painless, aside from having to make sure I was up and dressed before they arrived. And now I have nice new windows at the back of the house rather than old wooden ones I'm worried about falling out.

And all that means that soon I get to buy a new laptop so time to do some more research and talk to Matthew the God of Laptops about what's likely to be hassle free under Linux. I shall corner him at the Debian UK BBQ tomorrow.

rejs just ask about the origins of "and a pony", usually after a list of other desires which is starting to sound implausible. Anyone any idea where it comes from? I figured it's a reference to whiny teenage girls, but I can't find anything more concrete easily.

[noodles@pot ~]$ ssh -C ox.compsoc.net
Oxford University Computer Society network
------------------------------------------

This machine no longer accepts user logins.

Well, that's that then. It's nearly 8 years since I got my Compsoc account, back in the days when most people didn't have a Linux box sitting on their desk (in fact I think I had a Compaq Aero 4/33 running DOS at the time). Since then I've been a Compsoc Sysadmin, president of the society and more recently an aging hanger on. It's still sad to see it go however. The main problem seems to have been a lack of undergraduates who are interested in actually maintaining the network, probably coupled with the lack of demand from most current members for an account. I believe there are still a reasonable number of events, which is in contrast to Cambridge, where the SRCF seems to be still going strong, while the Cambridge University Computing Society seems somewhat dormant. Odd how these things work out.

Kathy has a Motorola C975 on 3 PAYG. She's used it a number of times to take pictures when she hasn't had a real camera handy and wanted to get a cable to get them off the phone. eBay of course provided and it arrived this morning. Aside from it being a bit dodgy (needs some wiggling to get detected, but the seller is sending me a replacement) there's the issue of software. It came with some Windows software, but my only Windows machine has slightly dodgy USB to say the least (it was dodgy under Linux and FreeBSD as well, so I can't blame Windows here).

Plugging it into a Linux machine caused the loading of the cdc-acm driver and lo and behold I had a /dev/ttyACM0 and could talk AT to the phone. Which would of course be more useful if 3 actually did real data instead of just walled garden stuff. Further looking around led to the discovery of moto4lin which supports the "P2K" mode of the phone, which lets you upload/download files and Java applets. Except of course it doesn't support the C975. It'll recognise the phone is there, get the model number and free space available but can't actually get a file list. I've filed a request for C975 support as there doesn't seem to be a mailing list or even web forum for discussion of the program. I possibly need to get USB working under Windows and do the usbsnoop thing. Unless anyone out there has got one of these working with Linux?

When I bought my current laptop (a Compaq Evo N200) I told myself that if it lasted 3 years and I made reasonable use of it then I could justify buying another one. 3 years have passed and while I'm still very fond of my N200 it's getting a bit long in the tooth. Aside from the fact the batteries are going (I used to be able to get 4-5 hours out of it, now it's very temperamental and can die without warning), the lack of memory expansion options (192MB is the max and that's how it came) is annoying and has been so for a while now. In addition it would be nice to have built in wireless/bluetooth.

So, I've been looking around for a replacement for the past few month in preparation for this. Originally I'd been quite keen on the look of the HP TC1100 Tablet but it was pointed out that they're actually quite bulky. Laptops Direct has a neat comparison feature where you can limit by things like weight, so I tried that. It seems that I can get a 12" screen these days (the N200 is 10.4") without that much larger a machine, which might be nice. Currently I'm leaning towards a Toshiba Portégé R200 which has built in wireless/bluetooth, 512MB RAM and seems generally quite funky. It'll probably be discontinued next week knowing my previous luck.

Anyway. Windows. When we moved in 2+ years ago one of the things the survey flagged up was that the windows on the back of the house needed replaced (very visibly so). The front had been double glazed, but the back was still timber frame single glazing. We've been putting it off and putting it off since then. So I decided that I needed a carrot/stick approach - until the windows are sorted, I can't have a new laptop. However we've now had 4 quotes, selected a company and signed up. Survey happened on Saturday, so hopefully within 6 weeks the house will be fully double glazed (and I can have a new laptop). Yay!

Why didn't I cotton on to the incredible usefulness of l (filter index list) in mutt before? I've been using it a lot recently, but for the first few years of using mutt I'm not even sure I knew it existed. Really useful when dealing with huge mail boxes and trying to find stuff.

Rather scarily it's become apparent over the course of this evening (with Burly and Rachel, people who've known me for years) that I've lost a year of my life. Specifically, my Upper Sixth year. I don't remember writing a handful of articles for the school magazine, I don't remember debating the bust up between the Head Girl and her best friend and I don't remember breaking the unbreakable power supplies in Physics. Er. I'm sure there's even more I've forgotten. If anyone who knows me from that period wishes to regale me with tales of what I got up to feel free to email...

You know, no one wished me a happy Sysadmin Day, let alone provided me with gifts. Bastards.

I've seen a few queries about multicast recently and I know the BBC are heavily trying to push it (no doubt so the next time something goes up in smoke they can try to shift less than 10Gb/s of traffic), so I decided to investigate further. While the Linux kernel has support for various bits and bobs it seems the userspace routing tools required to actually run a multicast network are sadly lacking. The only maintained code I can find is Xorp, which falls down because a) C++ for core code scares me and more relevantly b) it doesn't support OSPF. While various people seemed to have asked about it in connection with Zebra / Quagga there doesn't seem to be anything recent (I found some code from 2000, but it has large warnings all over it). Pointers welcome.

I'm not quite sure there's a whole lot of point in multicast yet anyway (not that this will stop me trying to sort it out - I'm a keen supporter of IPv6 even though it's not really there yet either). With the ADSL system in the UK there's no saving to be made across BT's ATM network, or even into the central pipes at the ISP end. Maybe that'll change and BT will do some sort of evil PPP stuffing magic. Cable modems strike me as more likely to get the facility first though, given they're a broadcast domain under the control of a single provider already. It'd be really neat if the new NTL Video on Demand was a multicast system, but I suppose that doesn't work with unique start times.

Oh, and while I remember, see Madagascar. I'd feared the penguins wouldn't be in it enough, and they're not, but it's more than I expected. The monkeys are good too.

Not a lot of visible productivity over the last week really. I spent the start of last week at Simon's with Dom, who started at Black Cat on Monday. So it was mostly trying to get him up to speed with all the things Simon and I Just Know, because we built it all. He seemed to take a lot of it in; I don't know if this is an indication that our systems are good or that Dom can just assimilate information speedily. :)

Then back to Norwich on Wednesday night and my parents arrived for the weekend on Friday. It was good to finally see them here again; we've had Kathy's numerous times but mine always claim to be too busy to come over. Though given the amount of good wine and food consumed that's probably a good thing.

All that's meant little time for other projects however. I still have to look at moving my EPIA-M code for LinuxBIOS over to the new SVN repo (my code is currently based off the old Arch stuff). And I haven't written any smartcard code yet. Or done anything with the E3 for months. I did manage to make a shortlist of double glazing people to ring, but I really don't want to actually ring them...