Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

Does anyone remember when Google used to have web results?

I’m starting to feel the strain from coursework a little more than expected. Having done quite a few late nights this week I was hoping I would have somewhat of an easy week this week. That said I didn’t do much coursework last week but I still feel I have loads to do – I have loads of SY to do, I still have some GI to do, there is a fresh let of labs I need to complete on top of that and in the background there is always my FYP plus I have a fresh set of PD tasks to do from yesterday too.

Time failed to stop again. As of last Friday I am officially 21.

After having been for lunch at the Eldon I went to Tiger Tiger in the evening with my parents. You don’t realise just how crap pub food is until you go to a proper restaurant and it hits you, “ah, this is how steak is actually supposed to taste.” Needless to say, I enjoyed the meal, especially given my parents picked up the bill.

Then yesterday so I could do some quote unquote celebrating with my friends a few of us headed down to Nando’s for a meal. That was another interesting experience, I didn’t realise it was such a cheap fast-food style restaurant (you have to go to the bar to place your order and get your own cutlery) but never the less the food was good. We ended the evening in The Old Bar where I suspiciously wiped the floor with John at pool (he used to be a right shark, I’m sure he was letting me win) and grabbed a few drinks with the small selection of people that had made it down for the traditional Monday nights in The Old Bar.

I finally figured out what was wrong with one of the computers I am currently troubleshooting. The motherboard wasn’t getting enough power. It wasn’t that I had forgot to connect something, it was that my PSU didn’t actually have a 12v power cable. So I ran down to Maplin to get one of these and finally got the machine up and running.

Having managed to install Windows Server 2003 I booted up to find that it defaults to the classic Windows 9x look still (as does Windows Server 2008 I believe). It’s quite minimalist when you start it up, there is a security configuration help file on your desktop and the recycle bin in the bottom right corner. Also the system tray is empty – completely. There are quite a few other querks too such as it still ships with Internet Explorer 6 and it won’t let you change the security levels.

I’ve yet to fully play around with it as a server though so the fun is yet to come.

Our SY33 lectures have recently been taken over by Paul Townend which has been an interesting experience. While Karim’s lectures were good lectures, I’m really enoying our currently lectures. This is probably mostly attributable to the subject matter as we have now moved on to talking about web services which really interests me.

It’s been interesting to see other people’s opinions though. One fact that does seem to be becoming apparent is that we are all really getting into our own areas. I have had a lot of people tell me about how boring SY is at the moment. Meanwhile if I was to go off on a rant on how boring some other modules are they would defend them.

Either way it’s quite a nice change to actually be enjoying a lecture or two.

As I previously mentioned, I went down to the Christian Union’s House Party this weekend. It was at Quinta Hall in Shropshire by the Welsh border. Having been out for my birthday on Friday I got up at the far too early time of 6am so that we could head down Saturday morning. We made it about 11:30 just in time to miss the morning meeting and get straight on with lunch.

We got there and walked into the hall to try and find someone. Wandering through a few corridors it really reminded me of the mansion in Resident Evil. Nobody around, classic old stylings and so quiet your footsteps were the only sound you could hear. Spooky. Luckily we eventually found someone who informed us C.U. were in a different building.

That afternoon was seminars, I choose to go to “Science vs. The Bible (Or not…)” which was delivered by Anna and Luke. I’ll talk more about that later but it was pretty interesting. Afterwards me and Michelle walked into the village of Quinta which contains a shop and a pub (and not much else!). So we bought some stuff and had a few drinks in the pub. Finally that evening there was a Christianity Explorered talk on the holy spirit by Carl Gibson.

The previously mentioned seminar brought up some interesting opinions. Naturally it turned to evolution where Anna tried to encompass all views so not to exclude anybody but the problem is, that some people just have really stupid views. How can you believe in microevolution and not macroevolution? They are the same thing! Perhaps we just need better education, maybe they think they are actually different.

Sunday consisted of a main meeting in the morning which was the concluding series of talks on the book of Jonah by Morris who was the weekend’s guest speaker as it were. There was prayer and worship also. It was interesting as with all the evangelism and debating I see through my official capacity, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the C.U. just spend some quality time worshipping King Jesus (heh, some of the lyrics were so cheesy I had to stop myself from laughing).

All in all it was a decent weekend. It was a bit of a drive but through some beautiful countryside, there were some interesting talks, I got to spend some time with Michelle and meet some new people. Cool stuff.