Diary March 2001

Saturday 31

Got to Michelmersh by 8am to get the bus to Torquay for a band contest. Consumed much beer. Had no sleep.

Monday 26 - Friday 30

Worked ridiculous hours. Band Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. Dinner at a friend's Tuesday. Too knackered to do anything Friday (after working until around 10pm).

Sunday 25

Discovered than man getopt is misleading in a good way. Sendip-2 now works in theory, but is untested, won't work on *BSD, and has some glaring bugs. Heaven is pretty stable. Still got lots of crap installed and a few essentials missing tohugh.

Saturday 24

Winchester Ameteur orchestra concert in Winchester (suprise, suprise). Spent the morning asleep, the afternoon rehersing and the evening performing. One of the other trombonists parked in a rather soggy field, and had to be towed out. I did the towing during one of the bits we weren't meant to be playing in. This resulted in my car getting extemely covered in mud. Got the bugger out in the end though.

Wednesday 21 thru Friday 23

Forgot to update diary, largely due to doing far too much work and being out every evening. Heaven arrived. Not much else of deep significance happened.

Tuesday 20

Cold got worse. Snowed all day, but didn't settle. Just started settling slightly at about 6:15pm, just in time for it to turn to rain and then stop. This helped make a decision. I'm going on holiday somewhere out of the country before easter. Yes. Heaven didn't arrive. Heaven was meant to arrive. This is not good. Should arrive tommorrow though, apparently. Bleugh.

Monday 19

Got a cold. Grr.

Sunday 18

Up at 6:30am for the Malaysian GP, and it was one of the best GP's there has been in a very long time. Very impressive. Spent much of the rest of the day getting sendip-2.0 to a point where it might be releasable soon. This included untangling the spagetti that the RIP code has become. Made a significant size significantly hot chilli, intending it to last most of the week, then ate it all. Oops.

Saturday 17

the.earth.li is down, and some of my mail got bounced. Not my fault. Did lots of sendip stuff. I am now pretty much up to date with bug reports, patches, etc. Discovered that sendto() overwrites your nice wrong ip checksum with the right one. Haven't yet found a way to stop it doing it. Arg.

Friday 16

Something went bang big time in the server room, and broke lots of stuff. Not good. Did almost nothing at work, it being a friday. Caught up with some of yesterday's email. Got an email asking if I could give somebody information about a "Brian Roe" who was born in a place called Oakley. If anyone knows, tell me and I will pass the information on. Other than that, it was a farly uneventful day.

Thursday 15

Nothing interesting to wrote. Was out from 8am to gone midnight.

Wednesday 14

Wrote very many sick shell scripts. s/\//\\\\/g appeared more times than is sensible. Found a computer called stonehenge that is big, old, and nobody knows exactly what it is. Discovered AIX won't install itself on a full hard drive, which is not exaclty suprising. Hacked some more opium stuff. Phoned simply and told them that they are completely incomptetant (they lost my credit card details, and my email explaining why I wsan't goning to send them in plain text). Opium now has a function with a 4 line prototype and a one line body..

Tuesday 13

Persuaded TSM to work. Aparently ADSM can get really confused if it has a password in its config file that expires. Or something. Some random bit of software nuked deepthought's $PATH and $PATHEXT variables, which took me ages to figure out and very little time to fix. Try it sometime. Windows says amusing things when it forgets that .exes are executeable... :) Did some more opm stuff, mostly fixing things I did on Sunday.

Monday 12

Nothing happened.

Sunday 11

Never quite got around to getting up. Spent most of the day doing things to opium. Also got wibble working properly, and experimented with bridge utils. Bridge stuff got as far as discovering that if I bridge eth0 to eth1 on oakley, then everytihng on eth1's network stops being able to see anywhere else. At all. Which is distinctly odd. Wibble involved figuring out how the hell redhat's up2date thingy is meant to work, then getting iptables to let it get away with it. It lets you set an http proxy, but doesn't actually *use* it to register. Ho hum. Opium can now theoretically parse almost all its command line arguments, and call various backends depending on what it is meant to do. It is kindof hard to test though, since most of libopm.so is currently populated with stubs.

Saturday 10

Decided to give Tesco Online a second chance. Cleared some of the backlog of sendip patches still left from when I was in the states. Started a redhat 7.0 install on wibble. Ordered heaven. Redhat 7.0 took over 4 hours to install, and it looks like I'm going to have to configure lpd by hand, which is a pain in the metaphorical arse. Oh well. Tesco delivered correctly and on time.

Friday 9

How difficult can it be to get the contents of a CD from a laptop in Hursley to a laptop in San Jose? Well, it took us the whole day. Which was a convenient excuse for doing nothing productive at work. Didn't do a whole lot in the evening either. Minor scare when somewhere within 5 miles of Hursley (Sparshott College) was declared to have Foot and Mouth. It was later declared not to.

Thursday 8

Departement lunch in Calais. Left at 7:45 am (ugh) and got back about 9pm. Lunch was actually quite nice, despite being french. Much wine was purchased, and much was consumed. A good day all round.

Wednesday 7

Hey, guess what, worked 8ish until 6ish again. Had a friend come over for dinner, so didn't get a whole lot done in the evening. brctl still segfaults. Earlyish night, due to needing to be at work at 7:45am tommorrow in order to get to calais for lunch. Hrm.

Tuesday 6

Worked too much again. Tesco managed to fix the order. Did some backing up. Spend hours trying to figure out why at 6x speed CD writing, the FIFO only just remains full when mkisofs on a smb mounted partition, and piping it into cdrecord. Never did figure it out. Nothing is maxing. Very odd.

Monday 5

Worked 8:30 to 6. Tesco failed to deliver the bits they failed to deliver before, and when this was pointed out, they said "Oh, we're closed now, phone tommorrow. It might still be on its way." Bloody helpful. Fixed deepthought's ability to dial into the IBM network (having broken it when thinky became deepthought). Which remeinded me to figure out a cunning way of figuring out exactly what it does - answers on a ecard, please. Got extremely pissed off with the incompetant fools who call themselves FreeServe. An interesting name, when they are neither free, nor do they serve.

Sunday 4

Was almost out of bed by noon. Tesco shopping did arrive on time, but what they delivered and what I ordered had very little in common. I won't be using them agian. Upgraded glibc, which involved upgrading gcc. Upgraded X. Amazingly, nothing important seems to have broken. Except, that the new gcc will not compile itself. Seems to compile everyitnh else fine though.

Saturday 3

Was out of bed by noon. Experimented with Tesco Online shopping and wasn't very impressed. They didn't have everything I wanted, or if they did I couldn't find it. Still, ordered some stuff so we'll see if it arrives on time. Watched the Australian GP.

Friday 2

Worked 9am to 4pm. Absolutely bloody freezing. Had to drive the car through disinfectanty stuff on the way home because of Foot & Mouth Disease. Watch Australian GP qualifying.

Thursday 1

At work from very shortly before I got up to very shortly before I went to bed.