Archive for October, 2007

Up till now I’ve used a fairly limited taxonomy system. I had three categories – general for my blog posts, video for my video blog posts and gossip for things to be syndicated to SoC Gossip. This dates back to when I was blogging on Nerd Federation and the posts were organised into channels. It’s a bit out dated and not very Web 2.0 these days though so I’ve finally got round to implementing tagging instead of categories.

So from now on posts will be tagged, usually with multiple tags. There are also new URLs, though the old URLs for the categories will still continue to work in that they will redirect to the new URLs.

You can tell when the end of term coursework deadlines are approaching. The days get longer, or at least shifted later. No longer can you go home after lectures, some actual work is required. Work that normally lasts long into the night.

It worries me slightly then that we are still in October and the season has already begun. Last night myself and George left DEC-10 at 2:15am. Granted it wasn’t literally “all night” but when you have to be up the next morning for lectures it’s late enough. I added up all the deadlines we (well, I, it will fluctuate slightly depending on your program of study) have a total of 10 deadlines between now and the end of the term and that isn’t counting all of our FYP work.

It’s going to be an intense year.

My new CPU having arrived for my would-be Windows server arrived yesterday so having 10 minutes or so before uni I decided to install it and boot the machine up. So I took the old CPU out, put the new one in, connected everything back together again and plugged it all in and booted it up. The lights on the front of the case now come on. That’s it. Still no output to the monitor! I’m not entirely sure what could be wrong with it now, I’ve replaced the motherboard, I’ve replaced the CPU, I’ve replaced the memory. That’s basically everything in the machine. What else could be wrong?

Well, another day, another few hundred pounds piled into my file server.

I’m now on my second motherboard, third RAID implementation, waiting for a hard drive to arrive back from CCL, second graphics card, the list goes on.

My new RAID card arrived this morning. I eventually managed to get it installed and wired up. I didn’t want to go in at first because the card was bent (physically) but I managed to get it in. I then booted into the BIOS setup to find my hard drives were registering was SATA-150.

I took them out and after some searching around was told I needed to remove the jumpers on them. Apparently Seagate ship all their hard drives set to run as SATA-150 rather than SATA-300. So I removed the jumpers and put everything back together again.

Booted it up again and created the RAID partition. Booted up into Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop via the Live CD to see what would happen if I tried to install it. It couldn’t detect any drives. So I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 Server (alternative install) and ran that but that couldn’t detect any drives either.

High Point so supply the source code so that you can compile your own drivers which is what I may end up doing. There are no instructions on how to do this though and most of the people on the Ubuntu forums generally agree that it doesn’t work with Ubuntu. It seems to want me to save it to floppy drive though. I don’t have one. Why would I?

So I could always just give in and install Windows Server 2003, that should be nice and simple right? Well, almost except according to the install instructions on my manual I need to boot into Windows Server 2003 (you know, before I’ve installed it) and run the software to burn the driver to floppy drive (which again, I don’t have).

The moral of the story is this. If you are thinking of building yourself a file server with RAID, to save yourself a lot of hassle, rather than doing it in hardware, simply write down every binary digit by hand onto a writing pad. It’s a lot easier.

Every time I move onto a new computer I realise how some of the default Firefox settings annoy me. Such as it searching Google.com instead of Google.co.uk. Luckily it’s easily fixed by adding Google UK from the huge list of available search engines on the Mozdev page.

It’s strange how much people can change. It’s also perhaps worrying that I am now old enough to have people I haven’t seen in so long to be able to say that. That said, perhaps they haven’t changed at all and if time has done anything, it has simply changed your perception of them. Thus resulting in the discrepancies between your perception and the person themselves.

Last night was Wendy House. It’s been a while since we had a good turn-out to Wendy though last night was really something that would have to be stretched to pass as an old school turnout. Only a small selection of the circle made it down (though a better performance than reason months at least) and of those that did, even less stuck around until the end.

All in all, it was quite an unexpected selection of faces that lasted the night. Gaz decided to come down, who given he is only doing a very limited second year this year, I haven’t seen in uni for many weeks. John’s appearance was also a much welcome one as we haven’t seen each other in a few months so it was good to catch up.

Finally I also ran into Krystina who I haven’t seen since high school. It took me a double take to recognise her as the perception I had of her was similar to that of most people I knew at high school – not a particularly good one given I class most of them as failures with no hope of ever achieving anything with their life. In reality she was looking great and provided some quality gossip, which is really the most important thing. It was great catching up as we had both high school and The D to talk about.

So there you have it. Seeing old friends again, just another great reason to go to Wendy.

I read an interesting article on FastCompany.com recently about Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg entitled Hacker. Dropout. CEO. It discusses the origins of Facebook and is well worth a read.

Today my replacement motherboard finally arrived. Huzzah! I eagerly installed it into the computer, put it all together and got ready to connect the ATX power cable to the board. But wait, it isn’t long enough. How does that happen?

So that afternoon I ran down to Maplin and picked up an extention cable. I then plugged that in allowing me to connect my motherboard. I pulled the monitor cable out of the back of my desktop, plugged in a power cable and started the computer up.

Nothing happened.

Apparently the motherboard isn’t dead (despite us testing every component and working out it was the motherboard). I’m sure I did test the CPU but that it the only thing I can think is wrong. I’ve tried two motherboards, the first with a graphics card I had just bought and the second motherboard had integrated graphics so it’s very bad luck if it was one of those.

So now I have two motherboards for this machine. And the one I’m not using in the machine is bigger than the one that is installed in my machine so it doesn’t fit in the box or even the anti-static bag so it’s currently sitting, wrapped in a carrier bag, on my desk. Fantastic.

I feels like ages since I’ve had a night out. Mainly because it has. I actually haven’t been clubbing since the start of term (before then even) as far as I can remember so I headed down to The Fav to catch up with the TKD social. Managing to get an entire drink in there my lack of conscience got the better of me and I headed down to Wire. Got there at 11 and left at 1ish, so it wasn’t too bad, I just dislike how much indie I don’t recognise. All in all, not a bad night.

Having come off a weekend of non-stop fun from the student activities conference during the day to closes at work during the night (neither of which saw us get out before 3am) it’s been a long weekend. Indeed a long few weeks. Thankfully I managed to get home for around 10 last night and after having done a few important jobs I pretty much went to bed and got a good night’s sleep in which seems to have recharged my batteries.

Getting down to some work though it really occurs to me just how much we have to do – so far we have coursework for GI31, DB32 and SY33 as well as 3 GI31 labs and 7 SY33 labs. Granted this has been over the last three weeks as a lot of it is weekly lab exercises but this is as well as all our PD31 work and our final year projects (which also has a big deadline this week!). While I’m already wading through most of the exercises, it;’s a scary thought to think just how much work could build up if you don’t keep on top of it.