Deaf, dumb and blind (by alaric)

The scene: I'm happily working away in London. Sarah is at home, and finds that the Internet connection is down. So she resets the wifi AP and the router and so on, but it doesn't get better. So she rings me.

I can't ping the router from afar, and a traceroute ends at an address that I don't think looks like the last hop before the ADSL link from memory, so I file a ticket with the ISP and get on with work.

But there's no reply to the ticket, so I ring, and sit in a queue, which eventually hangs me up.

So I google and find:

186k, Elite Internet, Mailbox Internet Services Go Bust?

Ah. Apparently my broadband ISP has become one with the Force. So Sarah can't get any work done at home, and I'll have to figure something out so that I can get some work done when I go home, and we'll need to join the queue for a MAC code to migrate to a new broadband provider, which we'll have to choose. And I doubt we'll get back any of the money - we paid a year in advance...

Bleargh...

Post Christmas Dinner (by sarah)

Today we went to my brother David and his girlfriend Michelles house for a post christmas/new year lunch. There was lots of chopped peppers which Jean woofed down, homous and pizza!!! We were in hevean.

Then there were gifts, we handed over Jeans tea towel with her drawing on plus some bits I'd made. They did something similar and we got an old copy of one of their films as it was in a box set one of them had got for Christmas - this seems a sensible way of doing things to me. They've been having a few issues due to the credit crunch in that David lost his nice manager job just after they had sighned on the morgage. He is now temping at just about anything.

We had a lovely time, mum and dad had got them stuff for the new house which included a gravey boat - most of the pictures I took seem to contain it or David playing with it :/ Oh and yay!!!! I have a camera again!!!! Mum and Dad bought it as a joint birthday and christmas presant and it is twice the resolution of the old one though I am currently running on its internal memory which is a whole 10 pictures :/

But yay!!!! and here are the picks including lots of cute Jean ones and yes she's in her chinese outfit again. Unfortunatly last night we watched KungFu Panda so she now keeps hitting people 🙁

I had to take arty shots I just couldn't resist - sorry!

Ivan and Sam’s New Year Party (by sarah)

For this New Year we headed down to my cousins house for a party, as always we got lost on the very last bit of the journey and Ivan had to come out and find us - I was navigating but the map didn't go down to a fine enough detial ok!

There was lots of food and lots of kids! Jean had a great time as there was basically a room full of children throwing balls and things at each other and there was a mirade of pepper pig videos and the like. Ivan and Sam also have a fish tank 🙂 Jean loves fish we take to the garden centres locally just to look at 'Nemo's' (Becca and Olly have a lot to answer for!).

At mid night there was the the popping of party poppers and as always I ended up with a wig of the paper strings - this time Jean put it on my head 🙂 We all had an attempt at Auld Langs ey and by the end Jean was the only on of the 'babies' still running about full of energy but then she had had a nice long sleep all the way from Gloucestershire to Essex!

Jean was shy at first but cheered up when we changed her into her satin pink party dress - all the other kiddies were dressed up and she felt abit out of place I think - she had her sparkly silver shoes and all would have been well if she hadn't tried to walk away from me whilst I was trying to tie the bow around the waste - I stepped after her and trod on the belt and she kept going and there was an ominous ripping noise and so she ended up with her belt ribbon tied as a braclet around her wrist instead.

'Mummy you broke my dress!'

'Yes well if you won't keep still when I say things like that will happen.'

It was a good party and we even got warm mugs of tea as we stayed to help tidy up - they offered for us to stay the night but Al wanted to get back to Highgate.

(hopefully at some point I'll get the photos on here:/)

Puzzling properties of my mind (by alaric)

On Saturdays, I take the train home from London.

I was feeling particularly groggy last Saturday; I was tired for some reason, I had a lot to carry (three bags, two heavy ones and one bulky one full of clothes), and I foolishly decided to pack and get straight on the Underground without going out to buy and then eat breakfast, in my desire to get home to my wife and child soon.

So after climbing the steep hill between my lodgings and the underground station I was already running a bit short on blood sugar. Which is probably why, while navigating a route around the underground lines they had closed for maintenance over the weekend, I got on the Victoria Line in the wrong direction, and nearly got on another line in the wrong direction while making my way back.

I grabbed some food at Paddington and leapt onto the next homewards-bound train; there were no free seats so I crouched in the vestibule with my bags, wolfing down my food, then leaning blearily against the wall while my body verified it really was food, so that it could afford to release my final reserves of nutrients to keep me going while it processed the new bounty (although, as it made it abundantly clear to me, it would rather I slept while it did this).

I got off at Swindon to change for the Stroud train; it was 2:35pm or so, and the next train to Cheltenham Spa was at 3:00pm or so, so I rang home and told them to pick me up from Stroud at 3:30pm, then went and sat down.

Some ten minutes later I glanced up at the indicator board, and saw that the next train was actually at 3:15pm. Odd - I must have misread it. I rang Sarah up and said I'd be a quarter of an hour later. It was still a Cheltenham Spa train from platform 2, though.

So at 3:10pm I went to platform 2, which was a little terminating platform used for the branch line up to Cheltenham, and got onto the train. It pulled off, and the inspector came to check tickets; when I showed him mine, he said "But this train doesn't go to Stroud. We're going to Westbury! You'd best get off at Chippenham and get the next train back to Swindon!".

Bleargh.

Well, I did that, and made it onto the correct train this time, and got to Stroud at about 4:45pm instead of 3:45pm; I wonder what time I'd have made it home if I'd not gone the wrong way on the Underground, too.

But through this whole day of bleary groggy failing to manage to comprehend even something as simple as the rail system, what did I while away my long waits doing?

Analysing distributed algorithms. A specialist topic far more involved than rail route planning.

How I was finding that a welcome rest from trying to figure out which train to get on, I don't know.

Or does this just say something about our rail system?

A stressful upgrade – and a design for a better backup system (by alaric)

My server cluster has been having lots of outages lately - which I traced down, after much experimentation, to probably being the ethernet driver in NetBSD 3.1 (which I was running), since the machine in question (as luck would have it, the NFS/NIS server; mental note, make the other server be a NIS slave so it can run on its own...) seemed to just disappear from the network but be perfectly happy if spoken to over a serial console - but ifconfig wm0 down ; ifconfig wm0 up would then hang it.

So, since a machine with the same Ethernet interface but running NetBSD 4.0 was running fine, and I could see there'd been a lot of commits to the driver between the versions, I decided to upgrade it.

Easy enough, right? Stick in the NetBSD 4 boot CD, boot, select Upgrade. But then problems struck; my /usr and /var are on a RAIDframe mirror set, and the install kernel didn't have RAIDframe installed. So I just let it install into /usr and /var directories under the root directory, and then booted into the new system, mounted the RAID, and copied the new /usr over my old one in order to upgrade all the binaries while leaving /usr/pkg and /usr/local untouched.

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