Category Archives: General

Day 2: Church

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Yay! I’m actually going to get to church this week, for the first time in 4 weeks 🙂

(Yes, for those readers who don’t know, I’m a Christian)

Reasons I haven’t been to church the past 3 weeks:

  • Week 1: Moving servers from old datacentre to new one
  • Week 2: On-call busy weekend. Worked 22 hours in 24, I was asleep Sunday morning. There’s a story in that itself…
  • Week 3: Moving servers again. Yay, 2 down, 1 to go.

So this week I get to go to church, and next weekend I don’t, as we’ve got the last server move. I’ve been trying to find a new church at the moment, which is harder than it sounds in London. At the moment, I’m going to one that my friend (and old youthleader) Roger is working for 🙂

If anyone reading knows Rog and Terry – Roger has picked up Terry’s ‘Bones’ 😉

Week 2’s story… A server failed during the day (partitions went read-only) and so I had to go to the datacentre, to replace the hardware. (That was when I was twittering about a debian install being stubborn about picking up mirrors. In the end, a reboot and reinstall from scratch sorted it – its routing table was stuffed.) Started to go in at 2000 Saturday, arrived back in town at about 0030 Sunday. ish.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling. I need to run to catch the tube 🙂 Hopefully tomorow’s blog will have a bit more content and a little less rambling 🙂

NaBloPoMo – Starting is always good…

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Danni blogged about starting NaBloPoMo, or writing a blog post every day in the month of November. This is for those who can’t take part in the “write a book in a month” NaNoWriMo

So, I decided to start as well.. maybe I’ll actually get more active online again 🙂 Not quite sure what I’m actually going to write about over this month, but we’ll see how it goes.

US Election

Erm.. yes. Well, to be honest, I really couldn’t care less about the US election. Yes, I know the guy that gets elected will change the world (probably for the worse. Sorry guys, but your track record isn’t that good.) But I don’t care. Why? What will me worrying, thinking and reading about the US election give me?

Useful knowledge? Only if I’m an American. A sense of inclusion? erm… not an American. Warm fuzzy feeling? Ok, so now I’m just getting silly.

I can’t affect it in any way, so why should I spend my time reading up on it, and worrying on it? However, for those Americans who are reading, I’m not anti-american! (Most of the time 😉 )

Flatmates

Argh! They can be so frustrating! Its in our lease that we shouldn’t smoke. And they do. This morning, I was woken up by a guy from the downstairs flat, livid that again, he had lots of cigarette butts under his bedroom window. Unsurprisingly (in a 2 bed flat), the window just above his is my flatmates.

Then, we had an argument about the electric bill – apparently £40 is too much for 2 months, and she wants to move us to a different provider, which I really don’t want to do, because our provider is Good Energy (100% renewable). Not sure how that one’s going to turn out.

Early last month, I put the central heating on… next argument. Apparently, having the central heating on in October is madness, even though the temperature in the flat at the time was 15 degrees centigrade. Sorry, but that’s too cold for me when I’m sitting still for an hour or 3 next to a computer. (I’m a computer geek, what do you expect!) Finally defused that one, by agreeing to pay 2/3rds of the gas bill. (When she has her boyfriend around, who doesn’t help pay for any bills [apart from sky tv]). I feel like my kindness and “sure, I don’t mind that you have 3 friends round, I don’t mind that your boyfriend stays all the time and doesn’t help pay” attitude is being abused, and I don’t know what to do about it or how to deal with it.

The gas bill thing got brought up this month as well – apparently I have the central heating on FAR too much. Is 2 hours in the morning, before work, and 5 hours in the evening after work too much? Please comment!

Work

Of late I’ve been working a lot. We’re moving Data centres, which is interesting – the new one is quite good, if a bit isolated, but its tiring. Still its fun getting to see every server we have 🙂

I have a couple of things I want to get done (like upgrading our internal wiki), but getting round to it is proving difficult due to the move increasing our workload. (Thankyou hardware raid array for deciding to wipe your partition table instead of rebuilding with your nice shiny new hard-drive, causing one of our sysadmin genius’s to have to rebuild it.)

Firefox undo close window/recover closed window

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[Kirrus: Say hello to my brother, Garreth, who wrote this post. He’ll be posting every now and then :))

I am in the habit of keeping a million tabs open and having Firefox automatically restore them when I reopen

([main]\{startup}\when Firefox starts – show my windows and tabs from last time).

Unfortunately this time I left open a popup window and clicked the X close button, thereby killing all my precious tabs!

I have seen on a forum that this can be avoided by clicking File\Exit, but I’m already in the habit of Xing everything, and besides I needed my tabs back!

I found on another forum the name of the file sessionstore.bak, so I did a search and lo and behold it found a couple of session files in my Firefox profile directory. I cracked open the .bak one in notepad and there amidst loads of junk was the urls/tabs I had open.

How to

  1. I Searched for sessionstore.bak, and opened containing folder
  2. used ‘taskkill /im firefox.exe’ (yes windows xp does have a handy kill command :P),
  3. deleted sessionstore.js to the recycle bin,
  4. renamed sessionstore.bak to .js and
  5. started firefox again.

Firefox of course falls for my fake ‘crash’ and prompts me to recover my precious tabs. A swift click later and Lo and behold my tabs were restored!

I’ve now installed session manager add in again and set the ‘undo close window’ feature. Apparently Mozilla are going to integrate the feature in 3.1. (That is 3.1 not 3.01, so not just yet :'( ).

Enable Undo close window and set that number of tabs to high!

Enable Undo close window and set that number of tabs to high!

What OS does the universe run on?

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A friend of mine writes and draws his own comic, Jayden and Crusader. He’s drawn a “Computers of the Gods strip” page, which of course ends with Ubuntu

Find it here: http://www.jaydenandcrusader.com/2008/08/15/the-computers-of-the-gods/

He always appreciates contructive comments, though make sure you read his comments after the strip 🙂

Hello

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Sorry for the large gap in my posting. I’ve just moved to London and whilst my work is internet-related, did not feel it right for me to use the office PCs & net connection to blog, whilst I await a broadband service to be connected at home 🙂

I do like to keep some separation between home and work.

Anyway, I finally signed out the office 3G USB stick, so that I can have internet access at home. (To check it works, when I go on-call this weekend and get woken up at stupid hours in the morning when servers go down, because trust me. They will. Of course. That is the only reason. Being able to blog again is only a happy side effect. *ahem* 😉 )

So far, it seems to work ok. I’ve not had any problems really, apart from having to add a new section in my firewall configuration so that the relevant holes will be opened in my laptop’s defence. If you’re interested (comment) I’ll post the version of the stick we’ve got, and how to make it work in Hardy.

Also, this connection is of course, compressed like nothing by Vodaphone. So much so that images coming down look… well very bad. Anyway, as most of what I do online is text based, I’m not crying too much. Just one question, for those of you with 3G compressed data-sticks: Is the upstream also compressed to corruption? I’m asking, as I have a set of images from my camera, that I really should look at uploading, but I don’t want them to be compressed on the way to flikr, or this site.

Right. Its late, and I want to go to bed. Night all 🙂

Time, privacy and its lack thereof

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Over the weekend I watched “V for Vendetta”. Its come up recently in a forum I frequent, specifically the quote at the beginning – about ideas being impossible to kill.

Its wrong.

Ideas can be killed. Eventually. It takes time, patience, and willingness on the part of those whose minds you are changing.

I wonder, do you ever worry about this country? (I’m talking to the Brits here. Sorry everyone else, this post is aimed at the UK, our laws and situation though you may find parallels about where you live.) We have a government that (almost) no-one likes. We have a leader, who at best could be termed ignorant. At worst a devious schemer.

Not worked out what I’m talking about yet? This is what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the erosion of our privacy. I’m talking about the surveillance state we are in. Do you even know what powers our oh so wonderful government has over us now? Read some of the above links. Heck even the Information Commissioner, the guy supposed to be looking after our privacy as relating to computers is saying its here!

I’ve been reading all these news items one by one, slowly, over a period of the three or so years that I’ve been watching and reading all articles that come up in BBC News’s tech section. As I’ve read them one by one, and not put them together, I haven’t worried too much. Till now. Apart, each are only merely slightly worrying. Together, we’ve got a problem. If you’ve not already, I recommend you now go and watch “V for Vendetta“, and then read “The Traveller“. Then continue reading below the line.

———————————————————————————-

You think the technologies to create this don’t exist? As someone who sits on the edge (or maybe inside) of geek-dom, I can say with knowledge and certainty, they do. We could be living in George Orwell’s 1984’s level of observation in a simple matter of 6 months. Heck, if you’re in London, you’re probably already carrying at least one unique ID tracker, most of which can be read remotely at 30 feet (or more). Your RFID Oyster card. Your mobile phone. Your RFID chipped passport. Your RFID credit/debit card.

Don’t believe me? Read up on RFID and RFID skimming.

Literally, all we have to do now is wait, as our last safeguards are removed or bypassed, and before too long all it will take to bring us to the societies depicted in “1984”, “V for Vendetta” and “The Traveller” is one crack pot power maniac in government. Need I mention, I don’t have a high opinion of Gordon Brown?

Its not as if it hasn’t happened before in history, one man taking over a democratic country and turning it into a dictatorship. But much worse, as in our country is all the tools needed to *keep* our country in a dictatorship and aid its passage to one.

Now, I can say all this, as we’re not there yet. However, I see the day fast approaching when I would be arrested for what I have written here, and asked to relinquish my encryption key’s pass phrase. (You’ll have to torture me before that happens.)

Someone once told me, that we’d never get to the point where the EU constitution comes into play. The treaty that was ratified by the UK merely a few weeks ago, was basically the EU constitution.

I have heard many times, “I’ve got nothing to hide”. No, not yet. Until you have to hide your sexuality. Your Race. Your religious beliefs. Your musical preferences. Your secrets.

I leave you with a link and this old, poem. How long before it becomes relevant once more?

=======================

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out.

=======================

Click Here to talk to others worried about this

Want to know more? Click the image.

Want to fight? Click the image.

Will you remain silent?

Hancock, Books and photographs

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Hancock

I went and saw this film with my brother and a couple of mates today. Was good, up to a point. Certainly, Will Smith is getting better – he appeared to play the part flawlessly, at a level I’ve not seen him act at before.

My one, slight moan, is that they included a brief, guarded and pointless sex scene. I guess, it *may* have been included to make a point, but it felt more like a box-tick exercise than anything else. Apart from that, an enjoyable way to while away a bit of time.

Books

Stack of booksBooks, I finished a Colin Forbes book this week. Awful. I had to put it down mid-way, and read a completely different book as a break before I picked up again. It felt so rough! And to think, I used to like his books. Fit his usual formula to a T, felt contrived, with a few instances of what PBEM RPG players call “SuperHero Syndrome“. In a Matthew Reily book, I can forgive SuperHero syndrome: he does it with such flair! However, it is not forgiveable in a Colin Forbes book. Which is a shame.

I started to read a Clive Cussler book “Dark Watch” a few weeks back. I got half way through, an OK book, till I got to a line of pure placement advertisement, which put me off completely and utterly. Here’s an extract. (For the copyright fiends out there, this is fair use!)

“Juan found a parking spot a few blocks from the court and spent the next two hours walking the neighborhood, sipping black coffee from a Starbucks. He felt he should have bought his coffee from a local vendor instead of an international franchise, but it had been months since he’d had a taste of his favourite brew. He made a mental note to contact the company’s Seattle headquarters and see if it was possible to buy their special equipment for the Oregon.” [Oregon is the wet-merc ship he captains.]

Oh dear. What an abysmal excuse for an advert. At the very least, it could have been subtle! Stopping at “it had been months..” would have been fine. I have stopped reading the book. I’ll finish it sometime, but not yet. When I’m not so irritated at that advert. At least on the web, it is generally fairly easy to spot, and ignore, them. A bit harder to when you’re engrossed in a story.

Photographs

I’ve been trying to use F-Spot on my laptop to manage photos. Unfortionately, it has a nasty habit of freezing my laptop totally, when I click “OK” on certain dialog boxes. Quite frustrating. So, another question for those reading, what image management software would you recommend ? It has to run nativly on Ubuntu Hardy, but apart from that, pick whatever you like (including web-software). I have a large collection of photos (my camera’s counter recently went over the 1,000 mark), which I want to tag and organise. An effective search function is a must, so that I can add relevant photos to my blogs from my collections.

Books going free!

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Hello all. I seem to be gaining books at an alarming rate, what with my current commute. So, I am going to give you first refusal (before I put these up on Bookmooch) on two sets of Elizabeth Moon books. Both of which I would love to be able to keep, but which I don’t have the space to.

So without further ado, I am offering these books to the first person who emails/comments for them. Full postal addresses if you please, UK preferred, but I will send to the US if asked.

The Serrano Legacy – 3 compendiums (paperback)

Vatta’s War – 5 books (paperback)

I also have Kevin J Anderson’s the Saga of the Seven suns, collection or close only (All 7 books. Its big. I live near London. Email for more info)

James Patterson’s Four Blind Mice. As this came from the US, I’d be quite happy to ship it back there.

My Email address is: kirrus@kirrus.co.uk

In unrelated stuff, I let my 5-a-day launchpad group subscription expire this weekend. Boy, it doesn’t half nag you! I got an email every day for _7_ days, saying “you’ll get one more email, when its expired”. Annoying by half. Unfortionatly with my nasty commute, I’ve not got the energy required for triage 🙁

Irony

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Now, this is what I call irony.

Currently, I’m going past this poster every time I go through a certain underground station.

(Cookie for the first person who guesses which station *).

As you can see, its an advert for the John Twelve Hawks book “The Dark River”, which apart from being a good read, contains a insightful set of images about our current existence in a surveillance state.


Almost directly opposite this poster, almost staring at it, is this delightful example of exactly that surveillance state:

In other news, I still think that Daviey (of  Ubuntu-UK Podcast, amongst other achievements, fame) sounds almost like one of the London Victoria Tube station announcers. Something in the inflection of the voice…

Work is going well. I’m quite tired and haven’t had much time spare to do much I like. I’m coming to realise that I can’t afford to run a car, and live close to work. Great. Sell the car, or put up with 2 to 2 and a half hour commute. Wonderful.

Lazyweb, whats your advice?

* Note, cookie is entirely virtual and is a figment of our collective imaginations.
As long as you don't actually want to look at it, feel it or eat it, its exists and can be won...

Trains

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I’ve been running around on the Train & Underground system recently for my daily commute into work. (Currently 2 1/2 hours each way… I need to move closer ;))

Firstly, I much prefer Welsh trains. They have a conductor, who’s nice. The best experience I’ve had of a train in Wales, was of the conductor holding the train a couple of seconds to allow the ticket machine to finish processing my debit card and spit out my tickets. The best experience I’ve had in England, was a train that was on time.

I’ve not had a bad experience in Wales, but in England, I was once accosted by 5 toughs, whilst on the train and told to hand them my ticket. At this point I was travelling on a “Permit to Travel”, as there’s no ticket machine or office at my starting station. From the outset, they made me feel like I was a criminal. They phased me enough that I managed to miss my stop. I was late to work that day. Thanks, Southern Trains.

Last week, I had the lovely experience on the Tube, of having a guy sitting next to me lean across/against the seat divider enough that I couldn’t avoid him touching me. I find human contact uncomfortable in the extreeme unless I’m expecting it and I know whom its from well.

The photo is one I dug out of my archive. I will upload the full-size version to my flikr account if requested.