Journal: May 2007

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What, that's it?
Mon 28/5/07 (Link to this entry)

I've just fallen victim to something that thousands of people all over the world have had to struggle to come to terms with. It goes beyond all logical reasoning; a cruel and senseless blow with no chance of retribution or reconciliation.

Why the fuck did they go and cancel Firefly after only thirteen episodes?

I've been meaning to watch the series for a long time, having heard nothing but glowing reports from all who have watched it. Having watched the lot over the past two days (and nights...), I can attest that those glowing reports were all accurate; the show is incredibly funny, very clever, and has great depth for such a short run of episodes. Whoever decided to can the show deserves to be shot, and hopefully someday will be.

YouTube is f***ing harsh
Fri 25/5/07 (Link to this entry)

I was checking something on my YouTube account earlier when I noticed this. More than just a little bit harsh, I feel :-(

I thought to make friends you had to do things like going out and socialising or joining clubs or whatever. Now they're telling me that all I have to do is upload some videos and I'll be flocked with new mates. I wish I'd known about this earlier! I wonder if it works for getting a nice girlfriend too...

A world of difference
Mon 21/5/07 (Link to this entry)

For a long time Lewis and I have been bemoaning the fact that Chris' desk is utterly disgusting. It tends to be coated with sweet wrappers, sweaty cycled-in clothes and unmentionable growths at the bottom of coffee cups. This offends Lewis because he's a clean freak, and it offends me because I have to sit next to Chris. While Chris was away we decided to take matters into our own hands. Hover your mouse over the photo to see the results.

Of course, we had to downgrade his monitor to stay in keeping with the new minimalistic look. It was nothing to do with spite or gleeful anticipation of seeing the look on his face or anything nasty like that. Sadly, Paul made us put his old one back as he feared Chris might go on a rampage upon seeing his beloved 24" flatscreen being appropriated for someone else's dual-head setup...

Veggie power :-D
Sun 20/5/07 (Link to this entry)

I was extremely pissed off a week or so ago upon discovering that Snickers bars were no longer going to be veggie. Apparently so were quite a few other people, because there's been a massive backlash and Masterfoods have backed down, saying they are going to start being veggie-friendly again. Just shows what you can do when you show a company they're losing out on potential customers. Now I just need to work out what all the safe 'best-before' dates are.

Another bit of the news that's amused me lately (and my mum emailed me saying the exact same thing) is the below picture from the BBC News website. Don't the squaddies' faces just say it all?

I can just imagine the rough'n'ready squaddies being really impressed by the toff with the posh accent coming down and completely failing to apologise for landing them in this mess. Is it just me or is this 'farewell tour' Bliar is having just a little bit distasteful? Maybe he's just going around trying to find someone who's glad to see him. Better luck next time, Tony.

Incidentally, it looks like my geek-fu is not as strong as I had thought. Whilst typing this entry up I discovered that I put the - and = keys back the wrong way round :-(

Where the hell does the @ go?
Sat 19/5/07 (Link to this entry)

Everyone is away this weekend so I've been looking for ways to keep myself busy while some workmen fit new double glazing in our house. One of the things I decided to do was clean out my keyboard (yes, I really was that bored), which was utterly rank. This resulted in me discovering a fun new game for all the family to enjoy: putting all the keys back in the right place.

This was considerably harder than you might think. It is a true testament to one's geekery if one can put all the keys of a keyboard back completely from memory. I'm ashamed to say that I achieved this feat, although it took me a while to decide which way round the @ and # keys should go...

Sadly, I appear to have mislaid one of the springs for the spacebar, so if anyone happens to be throwing out a Microsoft Natural Multimedia Keyboard at any point, spare a thought for a geek with a wonky spacebar!

Inside a Blackbox
Thu 17/5/07 (Link to this entry)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the technology that we get to see and work with at Sun is fantastic. In our team we get access to the latest and greatest tech to come from Sun, and in some cases we get to use it day-to-day. Geek heaven!

Today Sun's "Project Blackbox" tour came to Guillemont Park and we were able to go for a guided tour of one of Sun's most innovative up-and-coming products. Basically, it's a datacentre in a shipping container. This is a really clever idea with a surprising number of applications. It could be used to move server rooms where they're needed at the drop of a hat; for example, if they're needed at the scene of a disaster or if they're part of a military operation, or even simply because they need to be close to a cheap power source.

It's striking how well-engineered the whole thing is. It's clearly been designed by people who know exactly what's needed in a server room, which is more than can be said for some of the server rooms I've seen. A good example of this is that the container can sustain nine Gs of force without damaging the equipment inside. One of them's actually been dropped six inches and no harm was done! Finally, a product that's safe from Chris Talbot!

In other news, I'm feeling pretty good at the moment. I got quite a lot of useful project work done today, including crushing a particularly tricky Java bug (race condition - nasty). Plus, as of last night I am seventy pounds richer than I was before, having cleaned up at an eight-man poker game. Unusually for me, I hit quite a few good hands and was lucky enough to be able to make the most of them. I'm a bit worried that my rent might be about to go up suddenly!

Fun and games
Sun 13/5/07 (Link to this entry)

This weekend's been quite fun. On Saturday I went to the cinema with Charlotte and James to see Fracture, which is a very clever psychological thriller with Anthony Hopkins at his best as an incredibly-intelligent-yet-totally-mental villian. It's an interesting one since you know exactly 'whodunit' from the outset, but you can't see how they're going to nail the bastard. Good stuff and highly recommended.

It's been Craig's birthday this weekend so Saturday night was a bit mental, resulting in some fairly raucous and drunken goings on in the early hours of the morning. Sadly I wasn't able to capitalise on the others' drunkenness at poker since I only got two good hands all night, but I did at least end up a couple of quid up. This is more than can be said for Craig and Spenny, who had each blown nearly a hundred quid the previous night at the casino. Must be nice to have money to throw around!

Sunday afternoon saw a trip for myself and Charlotte to Basingstoke to check out a snooker club which I'd found on the 'net which turned out to be pretty good. It's like a bigger version of Partick Snooker Hall in Glasgow where I've spent many hours with Ford, and I have to admit that it made me a bit homesick. I can't wait for July to come so I can come back up and see everyone again. Of course in saying that, I don't want to take anything away from Charlotte as she's been great company all weekend despite feeling a bit under the weather. It's nice to have good friends :-)

Three heads are better than one...
Thu 10/5/07 (Link to this entry)

Paul came up to me yesterday with some bad news: he was going to have to take my nice SunRay 170 away because he needed to give it to someone else who needed that exact model. Happily, he had some good news too: he had ordered some new SunRay 270 units (upgraded versions of the 170) and I could nab a couple of them. While I was halfway through setting this up he decided to lob another one in my direction just for fun, so I now have a three-headed SunRay setup at my desk. Supreme wootness :-D

Amazingly, I've found that I'm able to make really good use of all that extra screen space. In particular, programming with Eclipse (my Java IDE of choice) will be very nice now that I can keep all the extra informational windows open at once - saves me switching views and perspectives all over the place. Another added benefit is seeing people go past with looks of wonder, astonishment and intense jealousy on their faces :-p

xkcd = lol
Tue 8/5/07 (Link to this entry)

I can't remember who it was who first linked me to the fanstastically geeky and absurd webcomic xkcd, but whoever that person was is a good person. It's quickly become one of the websites I check every day for updates - sadly there aren't new strips every day, but it doesn't stop me checking anyway. One of my personal favourites:

A lot of xkcd is very much geek humour but there are some gems in there that anyone can 'get'. It's totally off-the-wall and surreal, but he also makes some really good points without compromising the funniness of the strip - good example here. There's quite a few strips in there that I really identify with, too - which is why I like it so much, I guess. I'll not link them up for fear of embarrassing myself :-/

Back in business
Sun 6/5/07 (Link to this entry)

Whenever there's a big gap between entries in this journal, it's usually because I don't have anything interesting to write about. Not so with the latest gap; I'm afraid to say that it's been purely down to complete lethargy on my part. Here's what's been happening over the past week or so...

Voting

On Tuesday I recieved my postal voting papers for Thursday's Scottish elections. This wasn't very good, given that the election was on Thursday and I wasn't able to post them until after getting home from work on Tuesday evening.

I wouldn't be surprised if my vote has ended up not being counted, given the total balls-up they seem to have made of things. I can only take solace from the fact that those who were too stupid to be capable of filling in the papers properly were probably also too stupid to make an informed decision on who to vote for...

Card-fu

My skill with cards has been strong this week. In addition to a modest gain at Craig's weekly poker session, I managed to embed Lewis' Sun ID card into the ceiling at work. We're still not sure exactly how I performed this feat, but it still remains impressive nonetheless.

I was kind of hoping that it would be permanently embedded into the ceiling so that Lewis would have to carry the ceiling tile around the campus with him. It would have made putting the card into SunRays quite amusing, too, since the tile would have blocked his view of the monitor. Sadly, he was able to yank it out without much effort. Denied :-(

Catch 6922

One of the things I've been doing at work recently is setting up some stable storage hardware configs in our secondary lab. The idea behind this is that if an engineer isn't familiar with a bit of storage kit, he/she can reserve one of these systems to play around with it for a day or so. A noble proposition, but sadly one which is based upon the aforementioned storage hardware being in good working order...

All four of the storage arrays I've had to set up for this have had some sort of hardware problem, ranging from failed disks through missing controllers to strange software issues. Most of this has been straightforwardish to fix, but the George Bush Prize for Incomprehensibility has to go to the StorEdge 6920 array's management software for the hoops it's been making me jump through.

This particular 6920 is a piece of ex-customer kit which we've been given for lab use. No wonder the customer gave it back - it was in a right old state! One of the things you have to do with storage arrays is 'map' volumes (which are chunks of storage space) to hosts (which are the servers which use the storage). Only hosts which are mapped to a volume can use that volume. Well, this array had entries configured for some volumes and hosts which no longer existed, so I wanted to delete them. Seems simple? Not on your life.

First I tried to delete the volumes. Seems sensible, right? They don't exist any more, so I wanted to just get rid of them. "Nay," said the 6920, "thou shalt not delete volumes when they art still mapped to hosts.". Bah. So off I go to delete the host entries. Quoth the 6920, "Nay, thou shalt not delete hosts when they art still mapped to volumes.". Thankfully, I wasn't physically next to the 6920 at this point; otherwise I'd have gone Fawlty on it and given it a Damned Good Trashing.

The next step was to try and delete the mappings between the hosts and volumes. This should do it, I thought. This time the 6920 didn't even give me the honour of an error message. Instead, it decided to grey out the 'mapping' options because the volumes were "in an unknown state". I fought bravely on for about an hour with this, trying everything I could think of, but the bloody thing wouldn't budge. In the end I had to contact an engineer who is an expert on these arrays and ask him to fix it using the service interface. No wonder Sun have just EOLed this product!

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