Apps as containers (by alaric)

As I have mentioned before, it annoys me that many applications try (subtly or otherwise) to appear as the 'containers' of your data; they are both editors of a particular type of object, and a browsing/management interface for that type of object. The insidiously widespread case being applications that have 'Open' and 'Save As' menu items that pop up mini filesystem browsers, only showing the types of documents that application cares about and hiding others.

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Fireworks (by alaric)

Last night, we went up to Barrow Wake Viewpoint, which looks out over Gloucester from a hill, to see all the fireworks displays (public and private!) going on over the city. Jean loved it, and called them "pretties". There were a lot of families up there - somebody even had a barbecue going...

Then the next morning, the air outside at home smelt crisply of nitrate combustion products 🙂

Is it normal to want to assign every object you own a serial number, then keep a database? (by alaric)

I've been doing some systems work in a rack recently that uses redundant systems. Two optical fibres come into to two switches which are connected to two routers and two load balances, and every server has two or more network interfaces (since there's internal and external VLANs).

So there's rather a lot of cables in there! Since the spare length is all neatly bound into a bundle, finding the other end of the cable you're looking at is a bit of a pain.

So I'd like to number each cable, label each end of the cable with its number, and add cable numbers ot the "what's in what port of which switch" spreadsheet.

Most cable marking systems, however, have to be applied before the plugs are attached to the cable - since they involve a sleeve that goes over the cable. This isn't good, since I want to label existing cables.

Hunting about online, I found these folks who do a nice line of markers - including the PC range of snap-on markers for existing cables. Lovely!

They've sent me a pack of samples, so I can experiment to see what fits best on my cables:

...and it looks like PC40 is the best size for CAT5 UTP.

Everything is normal (by alaric)

I'm back in Cranham after another week away. I came back late on Friday, and the first thing we did Saturday morning was go and pick the van up from Holbrook Garage, where it had been in for some minor repairs: the reversing lights had stopped working, the right headlight was being intermittent (sidelight and full beam mode worked OK, but when set to dip, it was merely sidelight-bright, but sometimes it worked OK), and the coolant temperature gauge only ever read above 'very cold' when we were sat in a creeping traffic jam in bright sunlight for a few hours.

All niggling little things that I had wanted fixed for a long time, and had had brief attempts to fix myself, but now we have some money coming in, fixing niggling little problems like that is on the cards once more (before they become expensive problems).

The van was ready and waiting for me, and the first thing we noticed as Sarah and I set off down the M5 for a day out was that the temperature gauge did indeed rise until it gratifyingly pointed to "Normal":

It's nice to know you're normal.

Anyway, we proceeded to visit Bristol for lunch and a walk about, then headed over to explore Weston Super Mare and see the seaside (even though it's not really the sea per se, it's the Severn Estuary), before making our way back home.

Then on Sunday we took Jean out. We tried to go to Bristol Zoo, but all the car parks were full, which lead us to suspect it would not be a pleasant time to visit, so instead we walked around Bristol again with her.

We came across a green square, where some air cadets where dismantling a glider and putting it in its trailer, while some army cadets were taking down a portable climbing wall. I presume there had been some kind of event on, which we had missed, but Jean was entranced by the glider. She demanded to go and see it, shouting "Plane! Plane!". Afterwards, we saw some people doing acrobatic leaps in the square, and Jean tried to copy them, which was rather cutely comical, too.

We had a relaxing weekend, since we'd both had a hard week beforehand (I worked all day and spent most of my evenings in a data centre fixing things!), and we have a hard week ahead of us.

Which I am now starting... with a bad cold. Sigh...

Big Voltmeter (by alaric)

My mate Seth brought me back a lovely big AC voltmeter from India, where the power distribution systems tend to reflect an earlier, more exciting, time where things arced and crackled, and everything was made of Bakelite.

Anyway, it's meant to mount on a panel, and the rear of it just has two exposed screw terminals. So I had to do a bit of work to make it usable.

Firstly, I obtained some crimp terminals - a nice set with eighteen different kinds, including rings, spades (male and female), forks, and butt splices in three different sizes.

Anyway, I really wanted it for the ring terminals, which would securely attach to the screws on the back of the voltmeter. So upon returning to home, I went to Maplin and obtained a large enough box, then spent a pleasant hour or so in the workshop with my father in law drilling holes in the box so that I could mount the voltemeter on it. We also scraped away some paint from the inside of the mounting holes, exposing the bare metal, so that I could attach another ring crimp terminal to the mounting bolt as an earth connection. Better safe than sorry!

The end result is a nice box with the voltmeter mounted on it, with no exposed live metalwork, and a standard mains plug on the other end so it can monitor my mains voltage. This is a pretty useful tool, since we do get power cuts and brownouts and so on quite often out here, and the lights often change brightness at random...

As I write, it's reading a bit over 230v, while earlier, it was reading more like 225v. At some point I'll ask Sarah to turn the shower on (our biggest load) and we'll see how much the voltage drops - because I know the lights usually dim when the shower comes on 🙂