Journal: January 2007

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OMG WFH LOL
Thu 25/1/07 (Link to this entry)

God, it's nice being able to do your day's work from the comfort of your own room. Today I was using my Sunray at home setup to get my teeth into some development work while the rest of the guys handled the usual hectic workload of the lab. It's amazing how much you can get done without the distractions at work - I squashed a fair number of bugs today, which will make administering the lab with our booking tool that little bit easier.

The most satisfying part of today's experience was raising a ticket to get one of the other guys to do a bit of legwork which I wasn't able to do, seeing as I was around five miles away from the lab. The cool thing about this was that it let me help out an engineer who'd been waiting for a bit of hardware to be fixed and I didn't even have to be in the lab to do the physical part :-D

Snow
Wed 24/1/07 (Link to this entry)

Bah. Just when you think that the howling wind and the biting cold are the worst the weather could possibly throw at you, it goes and snows. It took some serious willpower to walk out the door this morning and get the bike out the garage... I thought about heading for the bus before remembering that I'd missed the one that would get me there in reasonable time. Denied.

However, as they say, when life gives you lemons you should kick it in the balls and tell it to make you a pie. I therefore took the opportunity to play with my camera a bit, seeing as the woods on the way to work reminded me of a Scottish forest with all the snow-covered conifers. The small boating lake even looked like a wee loch.

The above is usually one of the more fun bits of my ride in to work, being a fairly long downhill slope that gives my legs a bit of a rest after the only really steep climb on my route. Today it was a bit more hairy given the conditions (particularly the headwind - felt like being slapped with a sheet of ice), but it was at least very pretty.

Frustration
Tue 23/1/07 (Link to this entry)

At work we often get the opportunity to play with the very latest kit, sometimes before it's even released to the public. This week we're helping some engineers test a new storage product (which is still essentially in beta) before it gets installed at an external site. It's rather frustrating because we keep running into issues and as yet we've no official documentation to work from, merely draft copies of training guides. It's taking up a lot of time in a pretty busy spell for us in the lab so it's a bit of a pain.

I was rather looking forward to heading out to the pub tonight for a bit of relaxation as I'm a bit stressed out at the moment, but unfortunately that's been called off. Sometimes it seems like nothing ever goes right in life... I swear, if there is a God then he's got a sick sense of humour at times, the big git.

Oooh, cash
Sun 21/1/07 (Link to this entry)

It's nice being handed £300. Even when it's money that you're owed, it's still fun to have the cash sitting there in your hand. I handed Roy's PC back to him tonight and to his credit (geddit) he produced all the dosh in cash. I'm tempted to break out the wad at poker next week for a joke (2/7 off-suit? All in for £300)...

I'd also like to take a moment to link up some funnies that I added to my links page today: a great gaming-themed UF cartoon and a hilarious collection of photos from CES from the website with the coolest domain name in the world.

I f***ing hate the British booze culture
Sat 20/01/07 (Link to this entry)

I've never been one for drinking heavily, mainly because its depressant qualities work rather more quickly for me than for others. However, the other main reason is that I'd hate to turn into the kind of inconsiderate shithead who will try and stage a Nirvana concert downstairs at 2.30am when there are people in the house trying to sleep. I now see the downside to Craig having a drumkit and several electric guitars in the house.

In other news, I've pretty much finished Roy's PC now which means I will hopefully be free of having to do this kind of thing again for a good while. The experience with Craig's PC has somewhat soured me from ordering hardware online so I think I'll be sticking with World of Computers in Glasgow from now on. That means I can have a few months off from doing 'homers' - huzzah!

Ye gods I am tired
Fri 19/1/07 (Link to this entry)

I'm faced with something of a dilemma at the moment. On the one hand, I now have all the bits I need to upgrade Roy's PC (which I've been waiting to do for a while). On the other hand, it's been a long hard week at work and I'm sorely tempted to curl up in a corner and go to sleep. Decisions, decisions...

A fun car ride
Wed 17/1/07 (Link to this entry)

My heart sank this morning when I looked out of the window. It was absolutely bucketing it down - not a nice prospect when you have to cycle to work. However, I managed to avoid the rain because Jay was kind enough to offer me a lift to work, which was damned good of him given that it's not directly on his route. However we got a little held up by an incident on the A30...

The above was at the junction between the A30 and the road leading to our house, causing massive tailbacks in every direction. In case you can't make it out (I couldn't get a very good picture), that's a van on its roof. It appeared to have been in a high-speed crash with a Mégane and overturned. What is it about cars being rolled around here?

Seeing as I had the camera out, I took the opportunity to snap something that has mightily amused me every time I see it. Everyone else around here seems quite blasé about it - I guess they're just used to it, being in a heavily militarized area. Either that or they're just boring.

I'd love to see the road rage incidents...

(BMW Driver) "Here mate, I'm going to be f*** late for work, you going to move that f***ing thing or what?"
(Tank) <turret swivels around>
(BMW Driver) "Er, right you are mate, carry on"

For f***'s sake
Mon 15/01/07 (Link to this entry)

Ever have one of those days where it seems like you just can't do anything right and the world is out to get you? From the moment Mac (Craig's dog) puked all over the floor just as I was leaving this morning, I knew it was going to be one of those. We were putting our secondary lab in Solaris House back online today and I think I'm now actually further away from having my bit done than I was this morning...

Let's see... first off, I couldn't find a portable fibre analyser. I spent about half an hour looking for the bloody thing and even got Paul to come over and help me look. Then, just as I was sitting down to email the engineer to ask if a different one would do, what do I see but the fibre analyser tucked under one of the lab benches. Cue Victor Meldrew noises.

Then I had just started moving lab machines over to the new network we created for them when I got asked to power on a 6800 for an engineer. This is a midrange server the size of a rack which has 24 processors, oodles of ram and six 1,700W power supplies. Expensive. So I dutifully got to work on it and promptly ran into all sorts of problems. At first the system controllers were playing up - one wasn't responding over the network and the other's hostname wasn't resolving properly. Having fought with it, I discovered the first just needed rebooted and the second just needed its entry flushed from the nameserver's cache. Cue more Victor Meldrew noises.

It was at this point that I noticed that two of the aforementioned power supplies were disconnected and that they were newer than the other ones. After checking with Paul, I went about upgrading all of the supplies in the machine (you can do this with the machine running, which is pretty cool). Just as I removed the last one to be upgraded, there was a loud CRACK noise and the whole thing shut down. No Victor Meldrew noises at this point, just whimpering. I thought I'd just mullered a server with a list price of over £100,000.

As it turned out, the power track to which the machine was connected had overheated and some connectors had melted, so we went about fixing that and recabling the whole area to distribute the power better. This seemed to go OK although it meant having to rearrange two racks (which I had spent a fair bit of time on Saturday cabling up). This part of the day didn't involve any Victor Meldrew noises or whimpering, it was more sort of Tarzan-like grunting as I shunted the bloody things around.

As this point I was feeling pretty fragile, so I suppose that I at least have an excuse for trying to connect to the consoles of the 6800 before powering the stupid thing on. This was further confused by the fact I'd accidentally typed the wrong command and had connected to its (working) counterpart in the main lab so it looked like half of it was working and half of it wasn't. More Victor Meldrew noises ensued as a result of this, followed by a serious bout of whimpering when I powered it on again and another loud CRACK ensued. Having run out of time for the day, I decided to cut my losses and go home before anything else broke. I'm now scared to go and make dinner in case the cooker explodes :-(

SunRay at home, at last
Sat 13/1/07 (Link to this entry)

In the words of Lewis, SunRays are ace. I've finally managed to hack together a VPN setup which allows me to use a SunRay at home just like at work. It's very speedy, only a little more laggy than in the actual building itself - it certainly kicks the arse off a VNC session. My sincere thanks go to both Lewis and James for their advice on setting this up. Obligatory picture of the wootness follows (not pictured: me dancing like a little girl):

Left: my SunRay session running on one of our Solaris servers at work
Right: Ubuntu running on my PC acting as a VPN router for the SunRay

It's been a productive day. I was at Sun from nine until seven working in our secondary lab in Solaris House, which was basically being completely recabled so that we can move all the machines onto a new subnet. At the same time we were cleaning out lots of old machines and moving others around so we can make room for newer gear. In summary, I'm fecking knackered.

I've also implemented a basic RSS feed for this page so for those of you out there who use RSS (for example in a newsreader or on the personalised Google homepage), you can use the new link at the left of this page to add it if you so wish. Please don't bug me asking for it to provide more info - I'm handcoding it just like the rest of this site and to be quite frank I can't be arsed :-p

LEAVE ME ALONE :(
Thu 11/01/07 (Link to this entry)

Just today, no fewer than five people have asked me for some kind of tech support (not including at work, where it's my job so fair enough). I don't mind doing it really, it's nice to be able to help, but there literally isn't enough time in the day. It's also nice to do something else with one's life once in a while! The parts for a PC I'm upgrading for Craig's girlfriend's dad will be arriving tomorrow too, so no rest for the weary...

Right enough, one of the things I've done is replacing the crappy Belkin router we have with the free BT Home Hub thing Craig got given when he signed up with BT. This should hopefully be more reliable than the aforementioned Belkin P.O.S., which needed rebooted every five minutes and wouldn't let Maddy's laptop connect over the wireless network.

In other news, I've manged to work out why vpnc wasn't working (this is the software I was trying - and failing - to use under Linux to connect to Sun's network from home). Lewis has an identical setup and it works for him, but not for me - apart from one small difference. He has a newer kernel; Ubuntu installs the basic i386 kernel by default, something which I had missed somehow. Fixed now :D

Bonus!
Tues 9/1/07 (Link to this entry)

I had a rather nice experience at work today. Late last week we ended up running around setting up equipment for a SunRay administration course to be run for some employees, three of my workmates among them. Well, today we got told that the course hadn't been fully subscribed so there were enough spare spaces for Anton, James and me to go on the course too. I believe the term is 'wootness' :-D

Apparently I'm Spiderman
Sun 7/1/07 (Link to this entry)

I was just having a look through Lewis' blog to see if he'd written anything about getting vpnc working under Ubuntu to connect to Sun's network. No luck on that front, but I came across the "Which Superhero Are You?" quiz. I'm no closer to getting vpnc working, but now I know that if I were a superhero, I'd be Spidey.

The test is here should you wish to take it. I have to admit I'm quite pleased with being Spiderman, I've always thought he was somewhat cooler than most superheros - less smug. What I'm wondering now is whether this puts me in an interesting situation with regards to Kirsten Dunst :-D

Finally...
Fri 5/1/07 (Link to this entry)

The replacement motherboard for Craig's new PC has arrived at last so I've finally gotten the new machine built. It's blisteringly quick - having a dual-core CPU really makes things snappy. Tomorrow I'll finish off the Windows install and get some games running on it so somewhere down the line I'll hopefully be giving Craig a good hard shockpaddling in BF2 :-D

It's been pretty busy at work for the two days I've been in this week. I've been running around all over the place replacing disks, helping engineers send out parts to customer sites, providing hardware for testing a new SATA analyser, swapping pci cards around, trying to fix bugs in the lab booking tool, and so on. What's more, it looks like it'll be even busier next week since three of the guys will be away on a course (for which we spent most of this afternoon setting up equipment - bah). I think I need to subcontract!

One of the more interesting things we've been doing is the first round of telephone interviews for next year's student interns. Paul's been involving us interns a fair bit in this, which is really interesting as it's letting us see the other side of the interview process - what sort of impressions can be given by different kinds of answer, what sort of things you look for in a candidate, and so on. I even got to ask a few questions to one of the candidates, which was a bit daunting!

There's been a good mix of different kinds of guys (and one girl) with widely different levels of technical ability so it looks like it'll be very interesting choosing which ones to go for. What's faintly alarming is that I'm not convinced I'd have gotten through to the next round of interviews if I'd been interviewed by the UK guys and not the American lab manager, Peter Spence... looks like there's a silver lining as ever!

Well, I'm back
Wed 3/1/07 (Link to this entry)

Well, my brief sojourn at home in Glasgow is over and I'm back in Camberley. The trains were a nightmare as a fifteen-minute delay due to some faulty points led to me missing a connection. This meant I had to wait an hour and ten minutes for the next train going that way, which of course put me into rush-hour time on the final leg, which meant I was very glad to see Jay pulling up into Camberley station's car park to kindly give me a lift home.

It's been great being up north and I'm disappointed to be back down so soon. I really could have done with another week or so, but hey - life goes on I guess. Plus Mum's packed enough food and goodies for me to be able to live on chocolate and jam for about three weeks :D

Well, it's straight back to business as usual for me, as the weekly poker night is on at home. Right enough, I might end up cashing my chips in early given how tired I am!

'Mon the hoops!
Tue 2/1/07 (Link to this entry)

Last time I was at Parkhead, I saw Lubomir Moravcik score from a corner in a 4-1 drubbing of St. Johnstone. Well, today my Dad and I visited Paradise to see a very satisfactory display by the Hoops against a determined Kilmarnock side. Big Elvis got his debut and seemed assured and confident - it's good to see the big man in action for a real football club rather than a soap opera :-p

I tried catching some of the play on my camera as we had superb pitchside seats (huzzah for Mum!), but sadly failed to catch McGeady's second half goal which happened right in front of us. It was a superb flowing counterattack and in the excitement I forgot to hit the 'record' button! Instead I guess I'll have to make do with the clip above (wootness to YouTube for the hosting) showing one of Celtic's four second-half efforts to hit the post...

Happy New Year
Mon 1/1/07 (Link to this entry)

Hope everyone had a great time over New Year's. I'm just back from a quick wander around Loch Ardinning (picture below) with my parents and Ian, an old family friend. As Ian remarked, one of the nicest things about Glasgow is that while it's a big city, it only takes twenty minutes' driving from your front door before you're surrounded by glorious Scottish countryside without a building in sight.

I have to admit I'm shivering as I write this - I made the mistake of getting a hair cut yesterday which means all of my body heat is fast disappearing out of the top of my bonce. Still, I guess it's better than having to brush my fringe out of my eyes or being accused of having a mullet (even though it wasn't anything like a mullet - damn noobs).

And before anyone asks, my new year's resolution is 1280x800 (it's nice having a new laptop with a shiny widescreen TFT :-D ).

< Entries for December 2006 | Past entries archive | Entries for February 2007 >

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