Sitsofe's diary for January 2003

31 January, 2003

Noisy morning

At around 12.30am I could hear music coming through the wall the head of my bed is against. A quarter of an hour later, unable to get to sleep I put on my dressing gown and nipped outside into the freezing night.

After ringing the doorbell several times and presumably waking someone up I got chatting to someone on the first floor of the house who explained that the house was split into flats and that the entrance to the flat of resident making the noise was round the back of the house. He also explained that he could hear the music through his ceiling too. I wasn't in the mood to stand out in the cold so I retreated back to my room and after slightly quieter period the music gave way to some classical guitar playing.

The big freeze

The day continued its downhill bent many hours later as I decided to have something of a lie-in to recover from the hassle of the morning.

The morning stared with a leisurely surf to see what was new on the net and a chat with my friends online. By the time all this had finished it must have been mid to late morning and I was more than happy to jump into the shower for my morning wash.

Like all experienced shower takers, I point the shower head away from me until the water reaches a satisfactory and stable temperature. Well today the temperature was stable but around the freezing cold mark. No problem, I've seen this happen before — the first weekend I was here the same thing happened and spending half an hour finding out where the boiler was I spent another half an hour working out how to get it to light.

Alas, today's problem was a little more fundamental than the pilot light being blown out by the wind.

I soon learned that the small circular light which kept coming on was an indication that the boiler had failed to light itself. Neither my adhoc press the on/off button nor following the instructions helped matters leading to the rapid conclusion that if I wanted to remove the stench of general unwashedness I was going to have to brave a nice icy shower. Did I mention that the weather has been unusually cold lately?

I don't think I will ever convey the agony and overwhelming feelings of stupidity that I felt during that shower. Over the years, I have experienced several things that I dearly never wish to experience ever again or in fact wished to experience in the first place had I known better and that shower falls squarely into that category.

During the shower one thought managed to rise above the primal urge to scream. Tansco (the local gas company) has dropped off several notes saying that some work would be taking place. Here is the contents of the note:

Further to our recent letter, we have now started the mains and service laying work we informed you about.

Due to the nature of this work, we hope to be able to give you two day's notice when we require access to your property. If we cannot arrange access it may mean that your gas supply is disconnected until entry can be arranged.

Our team leader will be contacting you to make the necessary arrangements to discuss any queries you may have.

We we will try to keep disruption to a minimum and we apologise for any inconvenience which may be caused. Your co-operation is greatly appreciated.

One of the problems with the note was that we had never received the letter mentioned within it. This note was our first notice that any work was being done.

After shaking feeling back into my numb appendages I did a quick test on the cooker downstairs. As I suspected, no gas came out. I ate a long delayed breakfast and headed out the back door, noticing that the door to the shed was ominously open. After shutting the shed door I headed off towards the University...

...and noticed there was a huge digger and truck digging up the road. As I was walking along I got chatting to one of the workmen. I asked him about the note and the two days notice and he said that the note indicated that the work would happen two days after we received it (that wasn't my reading of it). He also mentioned that they didn't think they had access to the property but if I would stick around then they would re-enable the gas supply to the house. Fifteen minutes later and a trip to the shed and the house and the gas was back on.

30 January, 2003

Radio silence

Just a quick heads up for the various people I used to chat to during the day - my company has introduced several new policies, one of which is no chat programs (there is an internal chat network for talking to other employees).

Cube

This evening art introduced me to Cube - an open source first person shooter that has a feel not to dissimilar to Doom. Weighing in at a tiny 8Mb it really is a fun achievement and its simplicity makes for fast, kinetic games. The game engine seems to be heavily based on the quad-tree data which runs well even on modest hardware (my Athlon 850 with a GeForce 1 runs it at top speed). The network code is susceptible to extreme cheating but this isn't a problem if you can trust the people you play with. If this is your sort of "thing" and you haven't already started playing it, why not read further details in an O'Reilly article on Cube.

29 January, 2003

Happy birthday Jason!

Jase has been a longtime (well four years) University friend and I wish him all the best on his twenty-mrph birthday. It's not so old really... and who's counting eh?

Drowsy delayed demo

The rain has been keeping me up at night and I got into work sometime later than I had hoped. Unfortunately, I picked the day of a demonstration to a potentionial client which hardly creates the correct impression. In an effort to make up lost time I worked across the lunch hour and all the way up to around half past five. By the time I got home I was feeling pretty tired.

I can't answer the door of a house I don't live at

Jo and her boyfriend Chris popped round today to look at rooms in the house I'm staying at (Chris is looking for a place to live). I hastily ate tea in preparation of their arrival at 6.30pm and set about watching the backdoor while my landlady watched the front door from the front room.

I can't pinpoint the exact time I decided to take a break and check whether they were online but I received a very abrupt message from a Friend who will remain nameless saying that they had arrived. This sent me yo-yoing between the front and back doors checking for any sign of Chris and Jo and leaving me throughly baffled as to where they were.

I decided to put and end to the speculation by phoning up said Friend and asking where they were (in hindsight I could have phoned Chris directly since I had his phone number). It turned out they had got the wrong address and had been standing cold and unloved outside a house half an hour! Why the people inside didn't answer the door I'm not too sure...

I have to admit to shouldering some of the blame for this mix however. I had given Friend my phone number but with some of the digits in the wrong order (I still can't remember my telephone number off the top of my head). I could have phoned Chris (but I didn't remember I had his number). It is also not impossible that I gave Friend the incorrect address. Not so long ago Gareth dropped me off at my house not longer after I had first moved in. I couldn't remember my address which led me to wander through the backdoor of a neighbour's house.

I wasn't trying to sabotage Chris' attempt to find a room, really I wasn't. He was just unlucky and fell prey to my special brand of confusion.

Anyhow Chris eventually got to look around the house and both sides seemed pretty pleased with the other so the odds are good Chris will be my next housemate.

27 January, 2003

Thank goodness for the firewall

Hmm it looks like bagpuss.swan.ac.uk might have been infected with the Slammer worm. Without a firewall I suspect that some of the computers in the office may have been similarly hit because Windows Update seems to ignore installations of the Desktop Edition of SQL server.

Back online

Although I'm back online at home it's not easy to catch up a month's surfing in only three days. It's going to be at least a week before I get back to regular on the diary.

Birthday's past and present

My (self written) birthday reminding program currently says the following:

Simon Little's birthday was 5 days ago.
Jason Bees's birthday is in 2 days time.
Janet Wheeler's birthday was 19 days ago.
Sitsofe Wheeler's birthday is in 14 days time.
David Little's birthday was 5 days ago.
Guy Whitby-Smith's birthday is in 19 days time.

Apologises to David and Simon for missing their birthdays.

25 January, 2003

Cable modem day

Within an hour of turning on the 'ol firewall I was seeing evidence of what later turned out to be the Slammer Worm.

18 January, 2003

The diary is not receiving many updates (less than one per week at the moment) because I have moved to new accommodation that does not have Internet access. Consequently I've lost my rapid write/upload work flow and can no longer easily incorporate links from the web (I would have to remember them from lunchtime and type them in manually when I got back home!). The good news is that a cable modem is being installed before the end of the month so I suspect that updates will be more frequent thereafter.

15 January, 2003

I spent several hours after work doing research on wireless Ethernet solutions. I actually used up most of my time over the weekend doing this too.

The following sites proved useful to me:

• Seattle Wireless page (especially the Hardware Comparison)
• Linux Wireless HOWTO
• Consume mailing list archives
• Linux wlan mailing list archives
• Beginner's Guide to Wireless Linux Networking

In the end I plumped for two Netgear ME401 PCI cards and one ME102 wireless access point. The main reason for the access point is because I would like to use a 486 to do the firewalling and I was uncertain whether a PCI card would work in it (I have seen people warning that some cards like the DLink 520 will only work in a PCI 2.2 slot and said slots only became commonplace on PII speced machines). By plugging an access point into the Ethernet card of the 486 I bypass any potential grief.

One of the other problems I found was the cheapest cards tended to be newer cards that are based upon the TI chipset which current lacks drivers for Linux (let alone OpenBSD) in any shape or form. Manufacturers often updated old product lines to use this chipset (the DLink 520 was Prism based but the 520+ uses the TI chipset) and all the 22Mbps cards use it too.

Gareth has kindly purchased the equipment I need from Ebuyer.com. I would have purchased it myself except Ebuyer will not deliver to anywhere but the address on your credit on the first order and Dabs don't accept Switch due to fraud. I decided not to go with Dabs because their branded kit was slightly more expensive and their unbranded stuff is Actiontec which apparently have poor range.

8 January, 2003

Happy Birthday Mum!

Something of a disaster as a day. Sometimes, it's just better all round to say nothing and do nothing.

In the evening I went to a SWLUG get together in Cardiff. Getting down there initially looked troublesome — I couldn't get a lift with anyone I knew and the train would have been too slow. However Ben (one of my work colleagues) lives in Cardiff and gets a daily lift so I ended up getting a lift with people I don't know.

After popping round Ben's pad, I headed off to the the pleasant coffee bar in central Cardiff where the SWLUG meeting was being held. Things were a bit too smoky for my liking (I'm just glad my asthma has died down in recent years) but the people were friendly and it gave me an opportunity to ask questions about wireless LANs in preparation for setting up my house.

In the end Justin (aka Arthur on SUCS) ended up answering most of my WiFi questions. Speaking of Justin, I discovered that he and Sharon got engaged across Christmas (why am I always the second to last to know this stuff?).

Being at the meeting also gave me the opportunity to find out more about Mono (Ximian's attempt to bring .NET to Linux) from Dick Porter (who works for Ximian). It would certainly be cool if we could use Apache/Linux/Mono rather than the IIS/MS .NET combo which which seems to be sometimes have trouble spotting a recompiled program.

Since I wasn't getting a lift back I really ought to have checked out train timetables sooner. I now know Dick always seems to have an extra new gadget on his person and this one was a mobile phone thing with a flashy colour interface to train timetables. Very neat but typing using predictive text is not my forté. Another person drew me a map to the train station on their PDA which proved most helpful. Ah maybe one day I'll have enough money to buy fun gadgets...

As usual the trains were running behind schedule but things worked in my favour as I was able to catch a train that I would have otherwise missed. My three attempts to buy a ticket all failed (the ticket office in Cardiff was closed, the ticket machine wouldn't accept notes and I didn't have enough change and the conductor walked straight past me when I called out to buy a ticket). Helpfully there was a ticket inspection happening at Swansea so I was able to buy a ticket there (lucky me).

7 January, 2003

The computer I thought I had "fixed" is very much still broken. No matter, it is being replaced by new one in a week.

6 January, 2003

Just a quick note to inform people that until I get Internet access at home updates will be highly intermittent (they will certainly not be daily like last year). Sorry but having to mess around with floppy disks rather than being able to update as I go kind of puts me off.

5 January, 2003

Woke up late and thought I would use some of the time to shuffle through my collection of backups in preparation of one day putting some of the stuff on the web (this has turned out to be one of my longer term plans — I've been meaning to do this since the first year).

Realised I had plugged my speakers into the wrong socket on my soundcard when I couldn't hear some background bleeps during the Propellorhead's Take California track.

4 January, 2003

Diagnosing computer errors

Spent the first part of the afternoon trying to make a boot diagnostics CD after Windows 98 kept blue screening when I put a BSD disk in the floppy drive. In the end I had to make a floppy disk too because the CD would periodically throw up errors. Ended up formatting the disk from Linux.

Around 3ish I went into work to see if my diagnostics program could identify the fault on the computer that Vicky (another one of my work colleagues) uses. It seems I never have the time to look at these things during the usual day (too busy) so I figured I use a few hours on the weekend to try and squeeze in all the stuff I didn't finish during the week. Her computer would randomly reboot at will with no warning error dialogs or blue screens. The diagnostics hung when trying to probe PCI hardware which was a touch confusing. After bypassing that test the rest of the diagnostics ran incredibly slowly — in fact a computer slightly slower which I stared up quite some time after it finished the tests long before her computer did. I ended up skipping many of the hard drive tests. The tests hung again while trying to test the video hardware.

Since the tests were inconclusive (and long) I tried switching various things in the BIOS to see if that would help matters (including resetting the BIOS to it's factory defaults). Initially the computer was fine - happily opening and closing Word files while crunching Dnetc blocks in the background (so it was unlikely to be CPU related). The memory also seemed to be fine. It was only when I went to try an run Office Update that the computer suddenly went and rebooted itself.

This sudden rebooting continued to happen despite all manner of BIOS changes and pretty much as soon as the CD drive started to spin. In the end I disabled DMA on both channels from within Windows 2000 and the update finally finished itself (but not before it had to uninstall the botch job of the other installs).

During my many hours there I also learned that the only computer that would not turn itself off automatically from Windows 2000 was probably that way because it's BIOS was too old. Windows 2000 supports ACPI and will generally not use the older APM by standard by default because it could be quite flaky. Even if I had been able to patch the BIOS (which I couldn't because I was unable to identify the motherboard - seems the maker failed to put their number into the BIOS) to a more modern revision it wouldn't have helped unless I reinstalled the machine because Windows cannot change the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) except during installation. To think I swapped to ACPI under Linux at a whim one day because I wanted to be able to press the power button to turn off my computer (I switched back to APM sharpish though when the computer wouldn't automatically turn itself off at power down though :)).

I also used the opportunity to sign up for a Google Groups account and see if I could find out why ASP.net sometimes fails to spot that the project has been recompiled (and continues to use the old version thus masking fixed bugs).

3 January, 2003

Huw was away again due to persistent stomach problems. Tried to get in contact with John Sharp (my University supervisor) concerning my project but ended up with an answer phone instead.

2 January, 2003

Back to work. Over the holidays I ran a brief user test on the website we were building to try and uncover some of the problems with it. I also investigated the date code that was having trouble on our hosting server and fixed it up. So one of the first thing I did was to commit the fixed code which promptly stopped things compiling. In my defence I would like to point out that it's difficult to test that sort of thing when you are fixing code in Vim over a modem and you can't actually compile the code because the compiler runs on a completely different operating system which is much less pliable to remote administration. But hey, Gareth had a fix for my error soon enough.

Poor old Huw (one of my work colleagues) was forced to go back home after throwing up in one of the toilets (thanks for the tip off on which one mate). Ploughed on with fixes to the project. Helped Ben throw away .# files that were actually needed after overwhelming number of conflicts were thrown up when he updated his source tree.

1 January, 2003

Ah another year goes by. After waking up nice and late I spent the day sorting out backups, nearly moving moving my Linux home directory on to a Windows partition in the process. It a slightly worrying that there are so many security updates for Mandrake 8.2 that they take up around half a CD by themselves but given the whole thing came on three and they don't do binary patches it's not so surprising.

I'm getting lax - it has been more than six months since my last burned off my backup CDs and I think I've left Windows 98 on for more than a year without reinstalling it. I just haven't the strength to do it today though (besides, I spend most of my time using Linux anyway).