The Curse again (by alaric)

Eargh.

I've been laid low with something flu-like the past two days, but that's not the problem at hand; it just adds a little extra horridness to it all.

Somebody wanted some information from Sarah before school time today, and since it was late last night when Sarah had the information, we decided to ring at eight in the morning to pass it on rather than eleven thirty at night, since they might already be sleeping.

So I set the alarm for eight, and had my phone to hand (with the number in). And went to sleep. I was woken by the alarm, turned it off, then found to my annoyance that the clock said eight twenty - I'd slept through twenty minutes of alarm, mainly thanks to only having gotten to sleep around one o'clock and being ill, so I poked Sarah awake, handed her the phone, and she left an answerphone message - at the time, I though this meant the whole family had probably already left and we were too late. Afterwards, we drifted back into our troubled sleeps.

I then naturally awoke at half past nine (since I work from home, my normal routine is to wake up at nine, to start work at ten).

So, imagine my surprise when I found I had a voicemail message from this person, rather annoyed that we'd woken them up by ringing at twenty past five that morning...

I still don't know how this happened. I distinctly remember turning the alarm off, and seeing it was twenty past eight before waking Sarah to make the phone call.

This suggests three possibilities:

1. My alarm clock played a mean and nasty trick on me. It shifted three hours ahead in the night, then shifted three hours back before I woke again. (Yes, the alarm was set for eight, not five; I'd not slipped up in setting the alarm or anything simple like that, and the alarm clock's time does currently match what my watch, wall clock, and NTP-synched computers say). Which is actually possible, since it does synchronise to the MSF time signal; perhaps it received a corrupted time signal, but then reset itself when it received a non-corrupted one later.
2. I dreampt of the alarm clock going off and me stopping it, and woke naturally from this, then saw the ...:20 on the clock face and thought it was 8:20 because that's what I was expecting (and 8 and 5 look similar on a seven-segment display)
3. The Painswick telephone exchange is using Time loop logic as part of an experimental new generation of infinite-bandwidth broadband connection.

I suspect (1) is the most likely. But either way, it's incredibly depressing.

Plague! (by sarah)

We have been down with the 'plague' ie bad colds for the last two weeks - its not been good - Jean the first to be ill is just about over it, I the second to catch it am still feeling really grotty though better than the three days I spent in bed, now Al is sickening and has had to drink large quantities of cough mixture 🙁 He gets sinus stuff bad so we have all the joys of post nasal drips with him - not good.

Just thought I'd best blog as I havent for ages!

I've also currently got an acting up pelvis - sigh - its clicking painfully agian. Its my own fault I slipped over last week at the capfire - but like away from the fire and inbetween groups - it was a bit embarrasssing as I couldnt get up and the elderly camp warden and Al dressed as a Yeti found me and helped me up. I was carrying my coffee at the time, so that was split on me and was ouchy hot as the mark on my finger testified the next day!

I also fell out of the van yesturday as I thought our back tire was on fire (long story) this added to cold and damp (I dont care that Al says its warm!) has been a bit of a pain 🙁

Anyway enough of the maoning and self pity - hopefully I'll be back on form with the posts soon!

Kitten Technologies (by alaric)

For some time now, I've been sitting on the domain kitten-technologies.co.uk, intended as an outlet for my "intellectual property" - whereas Snell Systems is me for hire to do bespoke stuff, Kitten Technologies is meant to be my more generic packaged outputs; all open source stuff for now, although I have plans for some more commercial things later.

Anyway, I've slowly been working towards a fairly decent automatic release management site, based around all the projects being in Subversion repository and having standardised filenames at the top level of each project root (LICENCE.txt, README.txt, VERSION.txt, etc).

But with the successful upgrading of my server infrastructure to Apache 2, I can run Subversion over HTTP, meaning I can finally allow public Subversion access (with the option to give other people commit access to individual projects in future), so I've now got the project management page up to a state where I'm not ashamed of it any more.

So, for example, I've recently been messing around with a server status monitoring package, a bit like Nagios but done in a way I prefer, which I've called The Eye Of Horus.

There is a main project information page, and a download page which links to the latest official release, and to a nightly dev snapshot tarball; and gives the public read-only Subversion URL (http://svn.kitten-technologies.co.uk/horus/trunk/), and links to a subversion browser to look at the revision histories of everything.

Right now there's only me working on any of the projects, but if others collaborate (I have a few potential takers for Horus, since it seems there's a lot of minor dissatisfaction with Nagios), I can give them Subversion commit access, and set up project mailing lists as required; but I may integrate issue tracking into the Kitten Tech site itself, if it seems useful to let others submit bug reports and the like.

Halloween! Eeek! (by sarah)

Yesturday was the fifth Halloween(four yrs) me and Al have seen together as a couple - Halloween is actually the date of our first date!

We went for a wonder around Cheltenham and then like all those years ago we went and had dough balls in Pizza Express - the staff where all funkily dressed and we took Jean with us in her little spider outfit. The only strange thing was that as we came up to the van to load Jean in to head to Cheltenham it was a blood/firey orange sunset with a scary cloud formation that really did look like some sort of ethereal skeleton horse galloping through the skies - even Al commented on the fact it looked like this complete with colour!

This I have to say stupidly unnerved me - it just looked so creepy.

So after the meal we haeded back and I did a record punkin carving in about ten mins so that it would be glowing at our window at midnight - silly imagination running wild I have! We also made sure all the cats where in and worried when at 10 too Al found Babara collecting apples from the stream or some such. As the witching hour approached I had my remeberance/ancestor candle things I light for the dead alight (I know light appears to many times in that sentance!).

We then tidied to occupy us whilst the spookies were abroad then feeling a bit silly and sheepish we blew all the candles out and went to bed having a discuession on the fact that I have evolved my own symbolism and Al being proceeding to be the fourth person to state that I had come up with the protents or fundimentals or some such of Chaos Magik. What ever it is - it made me feel better - I have always burnt things like candles or presants I've made for the dead - I think it started when Nanny Pym died when I was like 7 - I had already made her birthday card and I found out she was going to be cremated so I chopped it up and burnt it cos obviously smoke rises and goes to heaven and then the particles get reconstrated in heaven. You should have seen how worried I was when I found out that rubbish was burnt! (I'm serious!).

Well that is a lot of silly waffle so I think I'll go to bed now!

p.s. edited cos I had an off by one error moment as Halloween is our 0 if that makes scense and I just counted the yrs!

Residual Current Blues (by alaric)

Bah. Yesterday the RCD tripped, shutting off the electricity supply to the house, while I was standing in the kitchen.

This means that, somewhere, something's leaking electricity. An RCD measures the current that goes out to appliances on the Live wire, and measures the current that comes back via the Neutral wire, and if they differ by more than about 100mA (in the case of our unit), then it knows that coulombs of charge are going awry somewhere - which is usually a dangerous situation, since it means either a short to ground of some kind (which can start fires due to electricity flowing through things it shouldn't and making them hot) or a short to ground via a human being, which is usually rather unhealthy.

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