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...

David gave me a broken Cisco ATA-186 (a VOIP SIP adaptor; lets you plug 2 phones into the network). Apparently it wasn't talking to the network and he was going to skip it. So I took it apart, nothing obvious, plugged it in, got a network link light, tcpdumped and discovered it was DHCPing. Er. Ok then. This had been tried multiple times previously by David. Go figure.

Now all I need is for my Philips DECT 511 to finish charging so I can play with it as a VOIP handset. I'm hoping it might be nicer than the Grandstream 101 I have, which Just Works, but cordless would be nice. Also I noticed it has a pad of 9 pins on the base station, and a similar set on the handset on the battery. Wonder if there's anything neat that can be done with that. Google doesn't show anything that looks hopeful unfortunately. Too many things to take apart, not enough hours in the day.