Sitsofe's diary for March 2001

27 March, 2001

Freeserve are being pathetic again. Threatened my friends by saying that my diary would eventually be published on the web. I reckon there's demand for this stuff - I've already had one person asking how far back they go (last year but with giant holes in it). Cleaned SUCS room. Met up with John Tucker - I need to contact Alan Cox. Need to remember which articles I was going to write - Computer game addiction, OS neutrality, Why I care about web usability, Why laziness is bad, What my computer science course is like, Windows CD woes, House 'o horrors, Updated biography, Tips for programming, Getting started with Linux, What went wrong in the project, University course fear and stupidity.

26 March, 2001

Wore my Kung Foo T-shirt and weather was bitterly cold. I blame DaveB. Replaced door (the computer that runs the SUCS door card swipe system) but didn't get replacement door's network access working. Next project - backup server for SUCS using SCSI software raid? Long day, long night doing compilers. Like Daft Punk's new album. Didn't get to bank on time.

25 March, 2001

Woke up took washing to Uni, ypserv on SUCS died. Dragged it back to life. Weird ftp accesses. Spaghetti experiment - messy but it tasted quite nice.

24 March, 2001

Downloaded Black and White advert in the morning. Shopping whilst tired is horrific. Had to get it twice because a Winamp (which I downloaded a new version of) plugin crashed windows. Night of the living SUCS. Kernel oops then yp problems, wouldn't shut down properly. Bought a pack of CDRWs for SUCS. Upgraded Mandrake to newer RPMs from the Linux Format cover DVD.

23 March, 2001

The lunch conversation was kind of twilight zonish today. Informed by "tr" that the bin was emptied yesterday but sonic points out that tr somewhat diminished this by leaving some rubbish in the room. Jason worked tirelessly to swap hardware between machines so we could get the replacement old door up and running. I turned into Van de Graaff generator and promptly earthed myself through bits of hardware and Jason. Freeserve connection went wrong when trying to connect for Dave (Brooks).

22 March, 2001

Signed for house and all the drama that involved. Found out I couldn't log on but this was because my whole account (and password) had been reset. The LIS appear to have closed security hole (must detail it here some time). Reworked the submission form template I had made ages ago to use tables.

21 March, 2001

Mark Jones thanks us for turning up to his lecture before urging us to get all the absentee students to turn up. Jason and Jo have been reading my plan - I dunno how interesting people find it though. Jo wanted a mention - "Hello Jo". Contacted the LIS about my broken account. Deleting my profile didn't help (I could have told them that).

19 March, 2001

Just managed to present my graphics. Presentation went well but I wonder what I'll get overall? Probably not too high. Showed Matt Poole the house of horrors shots and he discovered that I actually have a website and promptly found that my biography page is 2 years out of date.

17 March, 2001

SUCS broken today. Looks like someone mysteriously rebooted silver. The new installation hadn't been thoroughly tested and it couldn't boot itself. No boot disks would work properly. Justin eventually came down to fix it.

16 March, 2001

SUCS upgraded today.

Coursework coursework coursework. Nightmare of Computability. Overnight job to get compilers finished on time. All coursework out of whack.

House

Weened David "theraven" (Chisnell) off house and continued looking elsewhere. Met with landlord. He seemed impressed by the camera.

12 March, 2001

Talked to the accommodation office about house. They suggested that we look elsewhere.

11 March, 2001

Revisited house off horrors and took more photos. The resident who was in was seemed to be pleased to point us to some of the more nasty parts of the house after we explained what we were doing. Uploaded house of horror shots to Need to rehouse them permanently in the photos section.

6 March, 2001

Fixed two debilitating bugs in the group project this morning.

Decided to give Dia a second chance and it actually helped me to draw the DFA diagram neatly even though it stumbled and locked once.

5 March, 2001

The LIS don't seem to have fully recovered from whatever happened on Friday. It also appears that the techies don't keep the helpdesk staff well briefed either. In the morning upon discovering that the server where my directory is kept (and thus all the edits that were done on Friday) had gone down I went to the helpdesk and was told it would take around an hour to fix.

One hour later it still wasn't fixed and I had to go to a lecture. After the lecture I go back to the helpdesk and it appears the person I had saw previously had gone off shift. The new helpdesk person was completely unaware of the problem and was forced to phone the techies to find out what was going on.

The finishing touches were put to the group project document although as always some horrible spelling errors managed to slip through anyway.

4 March, 2001

Spent the whole day catching up with events on the web.

3 March, 2001

Did some typing for my Mum and played with arthur's digital camera (that I thoughtfully decided to take home). Started printing out home photos and my Mum liked the camera so much she suggested that we buy one.

Took a trip back to Swansea and somehow managed not to do very much at all.

2 March, 2001

Well today was the day that it was all meant to happen. I spent the morning typing up some more algorithms only to delete the word document after I finished saving to go to lectures. This algorithms document really doesn't want to be written. I finish typing up the latest updates to it and manage to press delete and enter just after Word closes thus chucking away the edits that I just spent the past few hours on.

I ate lunch (sandwich, crisps, Pepsi) in five minutes during one of our breaks between lectures. Then back to the millstone as I try to type up the dreaded algorithms.

About an hour before our presentation it is clear that something has gone wrong. People are milling about but not actually doing much. Word arrives that the network is down. Sure enough, computers complain that the main server cannot be found and those logged on cannot reach network drives or even send packets across the network. The delay drags on long enough to mean that all subsequent teams would also miss their times and we are told that everything will be postponed until Tuesday. Of course, we had all our stuff from this morning on sucs but no bargain could be struck to allow a lenient private and most importantly favourable demonstration of our project in the Linux lab.

I pop down sucs so that I can do some surfing but it turns out that one of the main routers is down. All in all this delay may work well. It gives us a chance to proof read the documentation more throughly, prepare a more organised presentation and tidy up the rough edges. I don't know whether I will do something to tidy up the need for overall testing though.

I also got to go "home home" today back to Yatton. My Mum's printer (an Epson 760) and cd drive had arrived the previous week and had been sitting ready to be unpacked and installed. It took a while, but I managed to work out that it was possible to pull off the front panel from the desktop and then pull out the casing that housed the drive bays to allow access to the side screws. Unfortunately this didn't happen until I had unscrewed almost everything else. The whole process proved to be satisfying and I even managed to make a big mess by leaving dirt clods, manuals and packaging all over the place.

The one small problem that I encountered during the whole thing was the Epson driver disk not booting correctly. Oh, and the noise the cd drive makes when it's spun up...

1 March, 2001

Today is boycott day so I don't attend any lectures and instead continue on group work. More group project stress as the documentation needs to be finished and a presentation prepared ready for tomorrow. Due to our presentation being so early, we today is really the last day that we have to finish everything.

Much of day was spent sifting through code and adding comments so that it was clear what was happening. Some more unit tests were added but it was no show for the overall tests and what we currently have is unusable. It such a pity that it looks like it's going to end this way - I have attempted to work consistently and finish off my parts of the code but it just doesn't seem to be happening. Things that should have been finished have been allowed to slide preventing other team members from finishing their parts of the project.

Yet another reason why I dislike working up in the computer science labs: the computer I was working at didn't have M$ Word installed so I was stuck using notepad. Because I was working so late, I locked my screen and went to tea. When I arrived back I unlocked my screen which then briefly appeared as it should do before disappearing. The computer would not respond to a ctrl-alt-delete so I was left with no option but to reboot it. Turned out that I hadn't saved for a while so I lost a whole load of changes...