Spent all yesterday evening and most of today in bed with a cold. I best be better for tomorrow have got to go to work, need to sign off on all the crap I’m doing at the moment. Please let us hire a Full Time QA Engineer soon.
Monthly Archive for November, 2003
been playing with a Sun Solaris box which I had to rebuilt because downgrading Oracle is a near impossible task unless you are someone who deals with Oracle on a day to day basis. So I chose to rebuild the Sun box, installed Solaris however I chose to leave APM and DHCP which is fine, except when you have a Windows DHCP server, since it loses the hostname, have wasted at least a day monkeying around with Solaris, Solaris Patches and Oracle. Once I finally had the machine working nicely yesterday I find out that the CD I’m trying to install from has a massive scratch on it. Hence the reason for the failed install attempts, and probably the reason for the failed downgrade in the first place. Distributed working has some downsides, machine in Cambridge me in London, hence me not hearing the high pitched noises the drive makes whilst trying to read the CD.
On top of all this I think I’m getting a cold.
My Powerbook shipped today, so it left the factory in Taipai that means it’s gonna be at least a week before I get it. I have now ordered a memory upgrade from Crucial and some other accesories from the Apple Store, mainly a sleave and a new mouse since the Microsoft one I bought a couple of months ago sucks so bad because of the cable length.
A friend and old colleague of mine, Tony K is visiting London from New York with his wife Barika. So we are going out for drinks this evening with the ex-work and work crowd, should be good haven’t seen a few of them in ages.
… but I have decided to go to work anyway since everyone would seem to be doing the same, the plan is to meet up and have a big get together in the evening should be great. It was our company meeting today, and it’s probably a good thing I went in since with the last couple being good news I didn’t want to be the one not present. Plus I suspect we will get some figures today which is what I want to see, I’m probably going to be deciding what I do next based on how I feel come the end of this week.
Ended up having kebabs and a movie last night, went to see Love Actually. I liked Notting Hill and to a lesser extent Four Wedding, Love Actually just leaves you in a feel good mood. Not going to rant on much today, just want to give it my hearty recommendation. My only complaint is that there should have been more Kiera Knightley, but that is just me talking. Then again ask Andrew Lincoln’s character he knows what I’m talking about.
The usual crowd where all there, Apple had a very large presence they even had a massive Apple Store section. I spent a good 20 minutes twidling with the iBook G4, and I have to say it is a solid bit of kit, and at the price point Apple have set I think they are on to a big seller, the only thing I don’t like is the 14″ models they are just to cumbersome. I had a goood play with the 15″ Powerbook, but in the end decided to put in an order for a 12″ Powerbook as planned, my hand was pretty much forced because Apple where offering a very healthy discount which accounted to basically free Airport Extreme card and a frre hard drive upgrade, roughtly £130.
On top of this they offered a 6 month interest free payment plan are they mad. I was tempted to say chuck in a Dual G5, but I didn’t. So with some luck in a week or two I will have this little beast. I’m just hoping that Apple doesn’t do anything drasctic at Macworld.
I ran into an old friend Ehab, who I have not seen since graduating from university, though we do sort of stay in touch via e-mail because we have a few common mates. Ehab is currently working for HP, as a retail channel manager which it would seem has many perks.
As for the rest of the show the usual big retailers where all present the biggest presence was Micro Anvika and Gordon Harwoods. Adobe where there in force pushing Creative Studio. Microsoft where there demoing Office and Virtual PC. The Games Area was pretty impressive G5s everywhere. I played with a G5 at length on the Apple stand, wow what a cool machine everytime I get my hands on it, I’m just in awe. Perhaps after MacWorld NY or Boston or whatever next July I might be able to justify one. iPods where selling like crazy, and at good discount rates about £15-£25 off depending on who you went to.
Just as the news the whole Michael Jackson broke late Monday evening, I started to think maybe this is just a publicity stunt, but then when you saw what happened on Tuesday you pretty much have to think there must be some validity to the whole thing.
Though I have come to terms with my original theory as being a little outlandish, I’m going to present some of the evidence that lead me to this conclusion.
1.) Jacko, released his new album on Monday – the very same day the story broke.
2.) Ricky Gervais released his standup DVD on monday which has Gervais in MJ’s Thriller pose.
3.) The Bo Selecta DVD Series 1&2 Box Set has the MJ glove embossed on to the cover.
Now I can see that this is pretty weak, but take a look at how Virgin are promoting the new CD.
Well I thought it was hilarious, maybe my mind just works more funny than yours 
So much for trying to book tickets for the Lord of the Rings exhibit, all booked out for tomorrow, I can’t believe that this thing is so busy, I know that ROTK’s release is nearing but 2 whole weeks is madness. Going to have to make alternative plans for tomorrow.
Been playing some more with Python and wxPython, I like what else can I say however the age old problem of finding time to hack for fun is just making things difficult. So under the umbrella of some Web Services work I had thrown my way I have had a look at the McMillan installer for Python. Which at work we are sort of already using. I’ll carry on tinkering when I get the chance.
It is the London MacExpo today, tomorrow and Saturday, so I have taken the afternoon off tomorrow to go to the show. Not expecting anything just want to have a play with the new iBook and Powerbook 12″ so I can make my mind up on which to get. I’m leaning towards the 12″ because it offers the desktop replacement features, operating with the lid closed and larger screen resolutions. However the other problem comes is do I go a standard model or a BTO machine.
As for the iPod situation, my friend Rich flew off to New York with his girlfriend Jo, and their friends Beth and Phil on monday. So I have requested a 40GB iPod if he can manage to source one in Manhattan, I suspect it will be tough because of the christmas run up. I’ll just have to order one from the Apple Store.
has to be one of the worst movies ever made. That is all I’m going to say. Anger Management on the other hand is a very well thought out Adam Sandler film, and Jack Nicholson is just great, I just love how the ending comes together, a must see movie.
Didn’t manage to go to the Lord of the Rings exhibit. Actually didn’t do much this weekend actually, started planning what I want to do with another website I’m working on and few things that I need to do on mine. I got a couple of movies out of blockbuster, Dark Blue and Head of State. Head of State was quite funny, and Dark Blue was good, glad to see Kurt Russell doing things.
Another week comes to close, been playing with bits and pieces as well as doing various things at work including a stint of QA work on one of our products. Got a chance to play with a bit of Python this week to deal with some Web Service wrappers we need for an integration piece we need for one of our server products. SOAP is pretty straight forward in the Python and Perl world, I remember doing the same thing in Java a year or so ago and it wasn’t as striaight forward as we first thought. Then again things have stabilised a lot as far as Web Services are concerned since then so it probably is a little unfair to compare.
Going to try and go to the Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Science Museum tomorrow, but that depends on if any one is willing to come with me, hate going out to these sort of things on my own.
Been listening to the new No Doubt song It’s My Life which is of course a cover of the Talk Talk hit from the 80’s. I always liked the original as well, but there is just something special about the new version. The video is pretty good as well, No Doubt are putting out a greatest hits album at the end of the month and this is one of the new tracks on the album. Though I’m not an outright No Doubt fan I do like most of there tracks, plus I have some of there earlier albums, Don’t Speak is one of my favourite tracks from the early 90s.
Installing Fedora would have been a straight forward excercise however because I needed more diskspace on Friday I took the CDRW out of my PC, and put in another 60GB drive. Which meant I only have my DVD-RW in the external firewire enclosure and the installer does not support installing or upgrading from firewire based devices. Since I have Redhat 9 on the box I thought I can do it by hand, which is possible, it’s just takes while. Took me around 2 hours dinking around with the 3 cds to get the right combination of core packages so I could pull the rest using yum. (apt is not there by default, has to be installed seperately.).
Well I got it working nicely, had a few issues with X which seemed to effect MPlayer and Zapping (TV Viewer), however it seems I’m not alone on this. Firewire worked once I got the modules aliases right, (Don’t know why they changed from my previous 2.4.21 kernel, hmm.). However it would seem I need to recompile the kernel to get PPP and VPN support to work correctly getting symbol errors, probably wait till PPTP Linux guys get a install FAQ together. Don’t really want to waste too much time dicking about the kernel, patching it like crazy.
Fedora definately seems like a step in the right direction, however I won’t be recommending it to new Linux users yet unless they are willing to fiddle a little and learn a lot in a short time. Redhat now look like they are saying that debian has had it right from the start, Debian could really use a nice gui installer but then who is going to support an installer on 15 architectures, which is an horrendous task. Redhat sight that as being one of the reasons for dropping support for other architectures in the past.
Went to get an 20GB iPod today, unfortunately sold out everywhere I looked. Looks like I will have to order one from the Apple store however they are stating 7-10 for build times for 20GB and 40GB drives.
Meant to pick up some drives for my dead mail server however got to the computer fair as everything was sort of winding down, looks like I’ll just have to order from dabs at some point. Might actually get a IDE controller as well to experiment with the SPARC. Came across some bit of Open Firmware magic which might address what I’m trying to do.
Been waiting for some DVD to show up but because of the postal strike I guess they have got stuck in the mail backlog which is sitting at the sorting office across the country. Hopefully they should show up soon. The posties returned to work last week however the resoultion to the strike is that the union ‘has an understanding’ with the Royal Mail. What does that mean? Does it mean they will strike again soon?
I have to say I was quite impressed by Dabs though last friday because I had ordered some small items and a hard drive, I had stated 3-5 days as the delivery option, ordering late on Wednesday evening. However because of the strike they bumped my order to next day with parcel force, so it was here on the Friday. I’m guessing this was a general thing rather than them just loving my custom.
On another note it’s my brother Wajih’s birthday today, so I just wanted to say Happy Birthday to him.
The first official release of Fedora Core is out. I’m gonna start downloading that now and get it installed over the weekend. Looks promising a debian style distro with Redhat packages, with the Redhat polish. Althought they make it quite clear that it is a ‘testing’ release. It would also seem that there are some issues with installing from firewire.
Going to see Revolutions tonight after all. Still not as hyper as I was about Reloaded. I was reading some reviews earlier and I suspect a slashdot thread due quite soon, since it’s nearly the time for the first showing. Still not quite sure what is going to happen, not sure if it is going to be better or worse than I will post a detailed review afterwards.
Here is a picture of our Tesco delivery man as I promised last week.
I’ll see how the hit counter goes over this little experiment I don’t think it’ll be as big news as the MS guys but it’s worth a try.
Just three days to go to Revolutions, the marketing drive behind Revolutions is no where near what we had for Reloaded some 6 months ago. I’m not super excited it about either since I my expectations have become slightly lowered after watching Reloaded again recently. I say this knowing that I will be able to get opening night tickets without a problem since my local cinema will be showing it on 2 screens. The later showing at my local cinemas are always bear anyway, though I suspect them to be a little more busy than normal.
This mid-week release trick is really being rinced by the studios to make the opening week figures look really good. The Return of the King will use the same trick as I’m sure the next Harry Potter will.
Need to finish hacking my X-Box as well today, just discovered that the v1.5 board needs 2 additional modifications, just as well I checked for other install instructions. The blue led seems to be behaving fine, still amazed by the fact that I didn’t total the main board after dripping some solder directly on to the board, and turning the board from green to white.
