Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

On a morning I wake up and flip open the laptop screen. I VNC into my desktop and turn off the movie I had playing last night. To take myself up I turn on some rock music at a decent volume. I then proceed to check my email, check Facebook and get a few other jobs done.

The problem is, where do I go from here. If I’m getting up at a decent time it’s still gloomy outside and I need to turn a light on. But this requires getting out of bed before I really want to. I then need to get dressed too.

With all our advanced wireless technology I feel these are problems I shouldn’t have to deal with. How can I further automate mornings so I don’t have to deal with them by getting out of bed? USB desk light perhaps? Do they make ones you can control from your desktop? That would solve step one. Now I just need some kind of robot…

My server has been suffering quite a lot of downtime recently which on top of the less of revenue and amount of hours I have had to spend fixing it rather than doing uni work has had a far more important consequence – I have been unable to rant on my blog!

In order to solve this sites are getting moved around to new servers including my personal site which is now located on Jennifer.

Having read Kieran’s post which in turn leads on to Dan Zambonini’s post about which programming language gets you most sex it got me thinking. While it does, as Dan correctly points out, vary from situation to situation, you really don’t seem to be able to go wrong with Dot Net.

Think about it. People like myself and George we’re Python FTW. I generally use Python for my “real” programming projects (generally I just script so something that runs on my desktop is rare :p) because it’s fast. Just like me in the bedroom. While I doubt the same is true for George we both share the commonality of singledom. Admittedly George fairs much better than my own barron wasteland of a romantic life but bare with me.

How about say Kieran and Raby? Well Mr. O’Shea sold his soul to X-Lab for the summer writing in Dot Net (because secretly he’s just a big Microsoft fan boy :D) and is currently in a long term relationship with Heather that has gone as far as mystery weekends away so you know it’s serious. Meanwhile Raby is currently working for a year at CSC who code a lot in Dot Net after doing a summer intership of C#. The result? No shortage of ladies. Let’s just say, the girl in his profile pic isn’t his girlfriend ;).

Lessons learned? Getting laid starts with the Dot Net framework ;).

Having given up on getting my £25 KVM switch working I then spent more than double that on getting a new and better one. Does it work? Of course not.

It all plugged in file and seemed to work. The lights light up on the front when I eventually got it plugged in (it look me hours as I had to go to the Riley Smith Hall to reclaim a multi-socket) but when I began typing I noticed that it was dropping key strokes.

Try and write a sentence when connected to a Belkin KVM. You’ll have trouble. 20% of the letters will be missing. What are you supposed to do with that?

It also suffers from Windows thinking you are connecting and disconnecting hardware each time and making annoying noises because of it as well as failing to do whatever it does with regards to my Razer software that normally appears in the system tray. Oh it doesn’t work with half of my function keys just in case I wanted to use them which I will when I get back into WoW too.

I called Belkin and they said what they always say. Try rebooting your machine. Genius. That is what you get for employing non-English speaking idiots in your call centres. They said check if the keyboard was recognised by the BIOS when in the KVM which it was as it obviously was when I plugged it in or it wouldn’t have booted. It was still dropping keys though. They had given me a reference number to ring them back on though. So I did. “Belkin is closed” said the automated voice on the line.

Is anyone else having problems with Facebook’s AJAX? Not that it isn’t working and this doesn’t just apply to the AJAX, it applies to pages as well but you can’t just click refresh with AJAX, the point is, I end up on clicking things like event confirmations and poke back links and the AJAX isn’t loading in the details, presumably because it lost the connection with the web server. As previously mentioned this is a much bigger problem compared with normal pages when you can just click refresh. Generally though, I just think Facebook’s servers have been a little unresponsive lately.

Aztec is now in bits on my floor having had the floppy drive taken out of it. I plug it into Olmec and boot up this time using my Ubuntu Server 7.10 alternative install CD in it. It goes through the normal stages. I manage to find a floppy disk, stick it in my desktop, stick my USB pen in the desktop and copy the driver over to the floppy disk. I then take the floppy disk out and put it in the floppy drive now attached to Olmec. Meanwhile Olmec decides it can’t find any hard drives and asks me if I want to load a driver. I say yes and trawl down to the bottom of the big list of drivers it gives me to inform it that the driver isn’t on there. It then attempts to load from the floppy drive but in fact just stops with a blank blue screen at this point.

I’d actually given up on it loading and started blogging when I suddenly got a message saying it had failed to load any drivers from the floppy disk. It wasn’t like I was being impatient – we’re talking a 10-15 minute wait here. I tried it twice with no luck. I also tried loading the HighPoint drivers that come with Ubuntu (though not for my RAID card) with no luck.

Next plan – I insert the CD into my desktop and the floppy drive so that the setup program can create a Windows driver disk. I’m sceptical about doing this on an XP box for a Windows Server 2003 install but it doesn’t seem to make a difference as the program will create drivers for any OS including Linux distros and only had one option that seems to cover all versions of Windows. Except that now Windows can’t read my floppy. It says it isn’t formatted. Even though it was when I copied the file over 30 minutes earlier. Even worse, it says it can’t format the disk now.

I install a fresh floppy disk and this time Windows reads it. The CD however can’t. It just brings up an I/O error message. I insert the original disk and Windows brings up a formatting box. But then gives me a nerror saying it was unable to complete the format. I take the original disk out and but the second one back in. Having re-launched the HighPoint software it allows me to continue this time. It also appears to complete successfully.

Turns out the floppy drive in Olmec wasn’t actually working. I manage to get it working and go back to Ubuntu. This time Ubuntu detects it. But instead of loading the driver as it should have done it decides that the floppy disk is a hard drive and suggests I partition it to install Ubuntu onto. I eventually find a way round this but Ubuntu then just says there aren’t any drivers and refuses to do anything.

Back to Windows. I get as far as it asking me to load the extra drivers and insert the floppy disk in. It can’t find them. I try it again and suddenly it can find them. It finally picks up my hard drive and begins partitioning and then installing Windows. Finally we might be getting somewhere.

Ok, so I give in and compile this driver. Now I need some way to get it onto the system. I’m working with Ubuntu 7.10 Server (alternative) which only seems to accept floppy drives. No problem though, I’ll just use Live CD and mount my USB pen into the system.

So I download Ubuntu 7.10 Server and burn it to CD and boot into that. But I don’t get Live CD, I get a text based installer. Strange. Does Server not come with Live CD anymore? (Did it ever?). So I give it and decide to use a Desktop version, I don’t have Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop so I end up going for Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop instead as I have that downloaded and burned to CD already.

After for what seems to be forever of booting up and another age after selecting start or install Ubuntu I get a load of errors about X and I get a shell prompt. Fantastic.

I come back to it a few days later and try to boot it. It just stalls on verifying DMI pool data. Having taken the DVD-ROM out to use for a different computer I insert that back in. This is after reseting the BIOS to fail safe and not getting anywhere, the fiddling about with it and not getting anywhere.

I finally get it to boot of the DVD-ROM with any disk I have to hand – it turns out to be Windows Server 2003. It goes through all the setup and tells me it can’t find a hard drive. I restart and hit F6 to load additional drivers this time (even though it loads HighPoint RAID drivers by default). I ask to specify the drivers. Windows tells me to insert the drivers into drive A:. I don’t have a drive A:. Awesome.

So the plan from here is to turn my Windows server off so I can take the floppy drive out of that, turn my Ubuntu server off so I can get it to, plug that into my new file server then put everything back together again and hope it all works. What is the betting it won’t?

Continuing to play around with Windows Server 2003 I found out I needed to install Visual Studio (as just as a got a Windows install, Mangos removed their pre-compiled Windows binaries and said you had to compile your own). Luckily I can get that to play around with through the academic alliance licensing my school has so it’s more of an inconvenience than a stopping point.

It turned out to be quite a sizable inconvenience though. I downloaded the ISOs and burned them to CD. But when I tried to install it (several times) it would get to about 75% done (that’s on CD2) and then complain about not being able to read a file. Apparently, this was a problem with Samsung DVD-ROM drives (random) so I eventually resorted to installing Daemon Tools and mounting the ISOs that way.

That got me a little further but it just complained about other things. I ended up clicking ignore on two files, which looked fairly important, to be honest, but I was beyond caring at this point. It eventually installed and wouldn’t you know it, even compiled the Mangos files and everything.

So I’m moving on although now I’m having problems with phpMyAdmin of all things lol. Apparently, it’s not the idiot proof even though it’s just a case of extracting the files to a directory and opening it in your web browser. Cletus, try to dump something in the lake…

Stumbling through a series of blogs I noticed that the debate over Google punishing sites for selling text links has flaired up again.

Having read over Danny Sullivan’s post, while I agree with some of the points, I think it’s important to state why I disagree with others. First of all, I feel like Google is telling me what to do with my site. It seems hypocritical that I am being told I cannot sell text links on my website from a website which generates the majority of it’s revenue from selling text links!

Secondly, yes I am free to ignore Google if I wish, continue selling text links, Google can’t tell us what to do. But of course, in reality, they can. Google provides a huge amount of traffic, often more than any other source. They effectively have a monopoly on search engine traffic so we have to follow their guidelines. When Microsoft abuse their massive market share there is public outcry, competition commission get involved, etc. But when Google say “you’re not allowed to make any money from simple text links anymore if you want anyone to visit your website” few people seem to see a problem with it.

On that point, I think it is also important to point out that Google is explicitly doing this maliciously. This isn’t a few algorithm roll-out designed to re-adjust the search engine results so that you get better results. A lot of it is human review of websites to decide whether they are making money or not and punishing them accordingly.

Finally, it’s certainly worth noting that there will be civilian casualties from this move. Because, when it comes down to it, there is no way to differentiate between sites that are buying and selling links to gain PR and sites that are just buying and selling links innocently. How about sites such as my network which aren’t even selling links but just link to each other? I mean, are hyperlinks just banned now or what?

I have finally re-gained my internet connection after being offline for over 12 hours. I still have awful noise margins though. My browsers refuse to load web pages because they are so used to it being down that they aren’t even responding to hard refreshers any more. MSN also outright refuses to connect. And if I want to check the status of anything it takes my modem longer than a web page the other side of the world to respond and when it does it fails to load some of the images and/or CSS.

I never had to deal with any of this BS on cable.