Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

I’ll be away at the Christian Union’s house party so I may be out of contact this weekend. I’m hoping I can get phone signal and connect my laptop up via the bluetooth modem but none the less, responses will be a little delayed until next week.

It’s referendum time again. Last year was great. The first round of referendum’s gave us freedom of speech. The second round banned it. So what’s on the plate this year…

• Should the union stock more 99p sandwiches? Exciting!
• Increasing representation – basically, they want more people to vote. What happens if this gets rejected? Will only certain people be allowed to cast their ballot?
• Should Jack Straw’s life membership be reinstated? Who cares? How is it life membership if it only lasted so long?
• Plastic bags, not paper bags – I’ll give them this one, this is actually a useful motion.

Exciting so far huh? But this time we actually have one interesting motion. Hard to believe I know, but true (depending on your outlook).

The item of interest is motion 4 “Nestle Boycott.” Basically, the Nestle Boycott needs to be renewed or the union will once again begin stocking Nestle products. Huzzah! It’s important we stop boycotting Nestle. Why? Because we’re not children. I’m a third year undergraduate at a Russell group university. I am quite capable of making up my own mind as to whether I would like to boycott Nestle or whether I would in fact like to buy their products.

We don’t even stock Nestle baby milk! It’s not even like we are boycotting the product that is (claimed to be) causing problems in the third world, they are completely different arms of the company we are dealing with here. At the moment it’s not even explained why we are boycotting Nestle. Granted the motion resolves to put up posters telling students why there is a boycott but I’m sure the last motion to boycott Nestle did too and where are those posters? Why not put the posters up and still stock Nestle products? We’re all educated adults, we can make up our own minds.

Having seen a recent episode is the new series of QI I was hugely disappointed. It just wasn’t QI. It was jazzed up, garish and just generally not up to the usual standard. That said having just seen another episode, perhaps it was a one off. Not that the standard hasn’t dropped because I still believe it has but there is at least some hope for it yet.

Thursday saw Microsoft’s Premiere Field Engineering section come in to the School of Computing to try and grab some recruits. It started out with a lecture in the morning at which I picked up two t-shirts and a USB stick (as well as several pens though none of them actually worked lol). This was followed by some technical demos, which despite suffering technical problems at every turn was quite interesting.

Finally we hit The Faversham where the conservatory had been reserved along with a bar tap of £400. Disappointingly it took us about two hours to drink our way through it, though not by lack of effort on my part.

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.