Bloody Vista!

Apart from deciding to go for x64 which caused a whole load of its own issues, Windows last night decided it was time for some updates and the obligitory reboot.

Very kindly of course, Windows waited until the middle of the night to do this, thus waking me in the early hours of the morning when the black screen with bright white writing appeared to inform me that my registry was stuffed. I duly turned off the computer and went back to sleep.

I returned home from work today thinking I would fix the problem. Tried booting 'Last known good configuration' and tried booting 'Safe Mode' but received the same error message over and over.

I went for a hunt around for my Vista media. After a good 15 minutes of searching, I found the disk and booted off it, selecting the repair option. Apparently my system volume had bad sectors. I then restarted my computer and exactly the same problem occurred!

So I booted off the disc again and again it told me that it had to repair my system volume and told me to wait... restart... same again!

Around I go again - note that the process of booting from the DVD takes a while... especially if you forget to press a key when prompted! - and after a couple more attempts and the advanced CLI that I opened up to run chkdsk /F for myself, it eventually tries to fix the registry.

Same message again! I'm starting to get a little annoyed by this point but I persevered to no avail.

My computer is now reinstalling Windows in the faint hope that I might be able to resolve the problem and then perform not too many tasks to get my computer working 'properly' again... at least this might fix my problem with Windows only using one of the tuners in my dual-DVBT card!

Another Walk

Following my little walk on Friday, I decided to go on another walk today. I was a little unsure about the weather but it was warm and sunny and the 24 hour weather forecast showed nothing but overcast skies.

I set out walking, spotted some ducks and got some nice pics with lovely reflections. The weather could have been nicer but I was even able to get some relatively nice landscape shots.

Anyway, about three-quarter's of the way to the Hand and Dagger (my usual point for a half-way pint!), the weather turned and it started to spot on... then we had sleet... then full on snow! How much did that annoy me!?! (I just had a fleece on!). I got a couple of pictures with snow... this one of the lambs was taken while I hid under a canal bridge at Salwick.

Canal Walk

Today I went on another of my little walks down the Lancaster Canal. As always, I took my trusty camera with me (Canon EOS 10D). I came across the usual pair of swans, although they weren't together today.

Just as I noticed the swimming swan, the sun poked its head out. Thinking that the swan would do one, I thought that I would take a picture from the rear to begin with... the swan clearly liked having his picture taken because he turned around and came closer! I thought that it was going to jump out of the water and attack me at one point!

Here's a couple of the pics anyway.

Flexing

My broadband connection through Eclipse (link on the right), allows me to 'flex' the speed up temporarily. Although I know that my line is pretty poor I thought I'd perform a little experiment and given that an hour of flexing to 2Mbit is only 5p at the moment it will hardly break the bank!

I chose Speedtest.net to perform the tests and from there I used the Maidenhead and Dublin servers to test against.

The results were (download/upload):

• Standard speed to Maidenhead = 544kbps/528kbps
• Standard speed to Dublin = 619kbps/528kbps
• Flexed speed to Maidenhead = 692kbps/527kbps
• Flexed speed to Dublin = 652kbps/530kbps

My conclusion from this little test is that my line could handle a little more speed but it is hardly worth the effort (or money) realistically.

If I lived in an area with better lines, nearer to an exchange, this model would be great because you could just flex up when you need to download a big file. I wouldn't be surprised if some people could double their connection speed for that 5p! For me, unless BT get their arses into gear and sort out their infrastructure, I don't think that there is much point in me flexing again.

ADSL Speeds

Today I thought that I would spend some time seeing what sort of speed I actually get on my ADSL line - those of you that know me will be aware of my living out in the sticks and so being limited to an appauling speed :-(

Anyway, as long as I am getting my full 512kbps I'm happy. So off I go to www.speedtest.com and run a few tests. A representative result of my tests to different servers in the UK and overseas gave the following result:

I then decided to run some more tests...

www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk - 629kbps/531kbps

www.kbps.co.uk - 530kbps/-kbps

From my limited experiment, I can see that the results vary quite a bit but I can pretty safely say that I am getting around 600kbps download and 530kbps upload which IMHO is pretty good for a line tat supposedly is only good for 512kbps ADSL. I particularly like the upload speed that Eclipse Internet gives me :-D

Phillips Pronto Remotes (on Linux!)

Some of you may know about my little project at home which will ultimately mean that that I have a Linn Knekt multiroom sound system, Comfort Alarm system (with home automation stuff) and multiple Pronto remotes.

I recently purchased 5 Prontos from eBay (one for each family member) and now need to program them but have found ProntoEdit to be a PITA to work with... plus it doesn't work on Linux :-(

I have found a project called Tonto (see http://giantlaser.com/tonto/ ) which is written in Java. I haven't fully tested this yet but it does look promising and is supposedly more intuitive. I will update soon on this!

What I will say is how to run the bloody thing in Ubuntu because that was a bugger to set up!


First you need the latest JRE...
apt-get install sun-java6-jre

You then need to extract tonto to /usr/share and edit the tonto.sh file to point to the jre...
JHOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre"

Then make the tonto.sh file executable...
chmod +x tonto.sh

Then simply run tonto.sh and the job should be a good 'un ;-)

More on LinuxMCE

Since my recent foray into attempting to set up LinuxMCE I have purchased a second-hand Hauppage HVR-1100 tuner. This has much better support in Linux! It should be noted that IMHO the picture quality on the GDI BlackGold cards is far better and less affected by poor signal quality.

The only difficulty I had was that I had to recompile the Video4Linux DVB drivers - I believe that this is an Ubuntu problem but it isn't exactly hard to do ;-)

Anyway, I re-installed LinuxMCE and it works quite well... I'm undecided whether to switch back to vanilla Linux with MythTV or not though - I'm not using LinuxMCE to its full potential and I haven't got time to investigate more at the moment.

LinuxMCE

I recently spotted a news item on AutomatedHome about the new release of LinuxMCE (http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Software/LinuxMCE-0704-Released.html). Basically, the project aims to be a Linux replacement for Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition... with extra bells and whistles.

I have been using Windows MCE for almost 2 years and I have found it great as a PVR using my two GDI Black Gold digital tuner cards. I have found that it is a bit limited though... particularly if you want to intergrate it with other systems.

One of the biggest of these drawbacks is extending it to other rooms - this requires a Microsoft Media Extender and even then you can't watch live TV in the secondary room. With LinuxMCE, thin client devices boot from the 'core' machine and media can follow you around the home... this can be seen to good affect in the video on the LinuxMCE site.

Anyway... I checked compatibility for my existing hardware and all seemed well... I downloaded the quickstart ISO (a DVD featuring Kubuntu and LinuxMCE - which is itself a collection of several other projects) which took an age due to its size!

I proceeded to install the distro on my PC and all went well until the initial hardware setup wizard began. No output on the screen! I tried every combination of the number keys to get a resolution that my DVI-connected TFT would accept to no avail. I then tried the second DVI port on my graphics card and it worked straight away! That was a serious schoolboy error!!!

I then followed the rest of the setup wizard (which includes a number of video with a lovely woman telling you what to do) but at no point were my TV cards detected :-(

By reading the dmesg output it seems that my card type isn't automatically detected. This has been my major stumbling block as there seems to be nothing on the net about my particular card in Linux. By editting the modprobe.conf I have successfully got Linux to recognise one of my cards but that is as far as I can get.

I cannot seem to make the card play any further... either through the LinuxMCE wizard or MythTV. I'm not going to give up now that I have got this far and I'm hoping to have an influx of people telling what to do. An update will be forthcoming when I crack it ;-)

Neglecting my blog

I've let things slip a little and haven't updated my blog for a while... partly because I have been busy with bits and pieces and partly because I haven't done anything of any particular interest :-(

Anyway, I will try to remedy that soon.

In the meantime, a quick note... I found a dual-head PCI-X graphics card (in fact it is a quad-head card!) although Beryl isn't playing yet. I have also spent a bit of time playing with Joomla for the work's website - some nice pics there too now :-)

VMWare Server (Part 1)

Also tonight I have installed VMWare Server on my Debian Etch laptop. After my last attempt, when Etch was still Testing and the kernel headers were conspicuous by their absence, I was surprised with the ease with which it installed.

This has given me a cunning plan for my new workstation at work... I have just purchased a HP ML350 G3 to use as a workstation and I think I will now install Debian Etch onto that too so that I get the groovy eye candy and the power of Linux. My Windows admin tasks could then be performed in a VM running Windows Server. My idea of running Server is so that I can install Citrix and connect in to that remotely to access things - rather than using the generic server farm that I would have to share with all the other lusers ;-)

Now I just need to find a PCI-X dual-head graphics card with 3D capability to run my twin NEC MultiSync LCDs :-D

Part 2 will tell of my success ;-)

Citrix Fun

If anybody doesn't already know... I love Citrix!

Anyway... since getting my X60 laptop, I haven't been able to run the ICA Client :-( It turns out that this is a known bug to do with UTF-8 locales - something that Etch uses by default.

After trying the recommended work arounds to no avail, I discovered that the only bit that wasn't working was the selection of the applications from the browse list (ignoring the warning messages when running wfmgr from the command line).

If I type the application name in manually, I can connect to my applications.... YAY!!!

I know that this configuration isn't ideal but I can put up with it for now because it works. I was a little dissapointed not to have any replies to my post on the Citrix forums though :-( Usually you get a response within the hour (and a good response at that!)

Upgraded works laptop - Lenovo Thinkpad X60 running Debian Etch

I have just upgraded my works laptop to a very lovely Lenovo X60 after reading about how easy it is to install Linux on Thinkpads at ThinkWiki (an excellent site).

The laptop is unbelievably thin and lightweight whilst still having an excellent spec (Core Duo 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM and 40GB HDD). I will probably upgrade the RAM soon and the hard disk may need an upgrade but it will do for now ;-)

The installation of Debian went well too so I thought that I would detail some of the specifics here...

1. A stock install of Debian Etch was performed from CD without problems (I did not choose to use a mirror during install)
2. Removed some bits of rubbish from the install
3. Updated the distribution after specifying a mirror in /etc/apt/sources.list
4. Added a few of my favourite packages (such as gaim and synaptic)
5. Followed the instructions on ThinkWiki to enable some of the Thinkpad-specific bits and bobs (such as tpb for the special buttons and acpi for hibernation and the like)
6. Installed packages to enable wireless (it uses an Intel 3945 chipset so the following packages were needed - firmware-ipw3945, ipw3945d and ipw3945-modules-2.6.18-4-686)
7. Followed the instructions at http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install/Debian to install Beryl... I then needed to change the 'Rendering Path' in 'Advanced Beryl Options' to something other than 'Automatic' because the contents of Nautilus windows did not display but now all the wonderful wobbling and cube effects work OK
   
8. Checked that my USB-Serial adapter worked... it did without having to do any configuring!

PyKota Update

Today I have been mostly migrating to PyKota from Print Manager Plus... as I have mentioned earlier.

An updated guide on how I have been doing this can be found at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=78029#78029 - still a bit of a work in progress though at the moment.

There is one little niggle with doing this mid way through the year... a lack of abiility to export the existing print quotas into PyKota from PMP. What this means is that anybody who doesn't have approx. £2 of credit left (the default balance given at the start of the year) has to be manually created in advance with their initial balance set. You can probably imagine that this is taking some time (approx. 1000 to do!!!!!).

Qemu - My fault for being bleeding edge!

Those that know me will be aware that I am a fan of Debian - I love the package management and you don't get the dross or quirks that come with Ubuntu et al. Anyway, since the announcement that Debian Etch (or v4) was to be released back in December I figured why not upgrade?

Unfortunately, Debian being as stable as it is means that they won't release a version until ALL the major supported platforms (something like 9 out of 15) are completely bug free. As you can guess this is pretty tricky to do... hence the slow pace of new Debian releases.

Because I couldn't curb my enthusiasm, I've been using the release candidate (aka Testing) and I'm very pleased. Anyway... I digress.

As a result of my using this 'bleeding edge' OS, I'm currently running kernel version 2.6.17 which is perfectly stable IMHO. However, to test out my Pykota instructions (see earlier post), I wanted to install VMWare Server (another one of my favourite profucts) but to do this you need the kernel header files and for some reason these haven't been made available in the Debian repositories!!!

What does all this have to do with Qemu? Qemu is an open source virtualisation product which is very easy to install on Debian since it IS in the repositories.

After downloading the Debian Testing install disks (again - I keep leaving them places!) I've started up the app and kicked it off installing. All seems to be going well so far (touch wood) and I will write an update when I've had chance to test it further. It has certainly got around my problem for now though so I should be able to test my Pykota instructions ;-)

PyKota - Another update!

Following on from yesterday's update, I managed to find some more time between a Nedap meeting, meeting with the architect and cabler for the new extension and ringing DELL to arrange for a new motherboard to be sent out to take another look at PyKota.

I tweaked some accounting settings and re-added the test users. The printing AND accounting now works a treat! YAY!!!!

As a result, I decided to publish my installation notes on EduGeek so that others can learn from my experience. I will be refining these to create a 'proper' installation guide as soon as I get chance.

In the meantime, anybody who is interested can check out the guide at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7100

Update on Pykota

OK... so I've been playing with this Pykota lark in every free minute that I've had at work (and many at home too!). I'm sure that it could be a lot easier than this but I'm still learning... I'm by no means a Linux guru.

When I've got the whole thing working, a howto guide will be produced... this is something seriously lacking with Pykota IMHO. There are lots of installation guides but they all seem to make a lot of assumptions and miss significant (if menial) parts out.

Anyway... back to the progress so far. I have configured CUPS with Samba - this was relatively easy. As I mention above, Pykota was the tricky part but it all seems to be working now, bar one 'tiny' detail... it isn't counting the pages :-( This has a knock-on effect in that it prevents the user from printing :-s

Anyway... back to trawling the net for ideas and re-reading the config files.

A Quick Guide to Thin Client Computing

Many people on EduGeek have recently been looking into thin clients as a way of reducing TCO in their schools. Many of these people have turned to me as I am somewhat of an authority on this. As a result, I promised to write a little guide explaining some of the basics. The guide can be found at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7035 - enjoy!

As a background, my network setup uses 6 terminal servers running Windows Server 2003 and Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to server approx 200 thin clients... most of the clients in the school are thin clients.

Eagles of Death Metal @ The Manchester Academy

So... the long awaited Eagles of Death Metal gig was last Saturday at the Manchester Academy. I haven't been to the Academy before (only Academy 2) and I was impressed by the venue. Beer was cheapish (only £2.45 for a pint of Grolsch which is VERY cheap for a gig!) and the room was just the right size.

The support act was Mother Vulpine... a pretty heavy indie rock band comprising of a singer/guitarist, bassist who bounced around like Zebedee, a drummer and a female guitarist. I was quite impressed... their music was OK and the female guitarist wasn't too unppleasent on the eyes ;-)

Then the gig started proper and when EODM came one we bounced our way to about 5 rows from the front! It was great and everyone was having a good time! The only problem is that it was a little warm and cramped so I had to bounce back a couple of rows to try to cool down. My old age (of 25) meant I later had to go back further still as the sweat was still pouring off me!

EODM were fantastic and played a great set. It really was one of the best gigs I've been to in a while. Definately worth watching again!

Kaiser Chiefs @ The Manchester Apollo

On Thursday Pete, Kath, Caroline and myself went to see the Kaiser Chiefs at the Apollo in Manchester.

The first support act were called Ripchord and can only be described as The Beatles on speed with a touch of Geaorge Formby chucked in for good measure. I was not overly impressed.

The second support band were called Th 1990s (I think) and they were much better.

Next was the Kaiser Chiefs who were very good - although not quite as good as the last time I saw them. The set was a mixture of existing material as well as material from their new album which I believe is out tomorrow.

The gig itself was quite short, finishing at approx. 10.45 but it then took us half an hour to get out of the car park!

On the whole then, a very enjoyable evening.

Motorola KRZR

Well my Motorola RZR finally gave up the ghost the other night. The battery had been going for a bit and I think that I have had it nearly 2 years. Anyway, on Friday night it finally packed in and will now no longer turn on!

Anyway, Sunday I got around to ringing Vodafone and arranging a phone upgrade. After a good chat about the cheaply available handsets and my requirements, I decided to shell out £25 for a MOTO KRZR.

The phone arrived yesterday, whilst I was out but from using it to make a couple of calls and send some text messages it seems OK.

The thing that did worry me slightly was the slowness of my old RZR but this has been much improved and the clarity of the keypad is far better too. The silver mirror finish puts my black RZR to shame and it certainly looks dated. This finish looks equally good on the included bluetooth headset too.

Talking of bluetooth, the bluetooth connection worked flawlessly when transferring names from my PDA. I'm also glad to see that Motorola have finally decided to implement a 'proper' phone book that allowss you to save multiple numbers with each name.

Jodrell Bank and the Dog Inn

Well yesterday I had a lovely day out with Caroline, taking advantage of my holiday.

It was decided that we should go to Jodrell Bank because we often see the large Lovell Radio Telescope from the motorway.

For the princely sum of £1.50 each we were admitted entry to the small visitors' centre and, after declining tickets for the shows in the '3D Theatre', we had a quick look 'round and watched some videos about the Lovell Telescope - although the screaming kids making a lot of noise made it somewhat difficult to concentrate.

We then had a walk around the base of the Lovell Telescope, which was unfortunately parked and so wasn't much to look at, before have a look at the 'Granada Arboritum' - a rather pleasant landscaped area full of trees.

After having a good look around we ventured off in search of a pub with a humorous name... we had a couple that we had found by trawling the web earlier in the day but the directions (courtesy of the RAC) sucked. We did happen upon 'The Dog Inn' and it was decided that the name was suitably humorous (plus it was in Lower Peover - which is a funny name in itself).

The pub was quite quiet, only a few customers other than us and the service could have been a little quicker but the food was excellent and the atmosphere was lovely too.

Wolfmother @ The Manchester Apollo

Well, last night we braved the elements and went to the Manchester Apollo to watch Wolfmother.

By the time we reached Domo's in Farnworth, the snow was falling quite heavily but we got some lovely chinese food and then off we went... by the time we reached Manchester the snow had vanished... although this didn't prevent some stupid woman nearly driving into the side of me!

The support act for the evening were called Wolf & Cub. Their set started well... 2 drummers and a prog-rock style! This soon deteriorated into some trashy indie rubbish.

Anyway, the support act was soon finished and Wolfmother came on. Wolfmother were far better and it was most enjoyable. Very loud and some strange 'chicken-dancing' by the lead singer!

CUPS and Pykota

I decided a couple of days ago, after reading more about the capabilities of Pykota, that it may be the way forward for print accounting and management. For those not in the know, Pykota is an addon to CUPS (the printing subsystem for Linux) which does lots of clever accounting and reporting stuff on a print server.

Some of the particularly interesting features of Pykota and CUPS are:
* Users are not charged if the job does not print
* Jobs can be 're-processed' to add headers and the like that could include the username!
* Ability to save PDFs of all the jobs printed for keeping an eye on the little darlings
* Windows clients only need a single printer driver - CUPS then converts to the relevant format for the printer

We currently use Print Manager Plus and I don't have an issue with it. I recently upgraded to an MSDE backend and since then it has been VERY stable (not that it was unstable before) and it takes care of charging the little darlings like it should.

The reason that I decided to take the plunge with Pykota though, is mostly cost. The annual software maintenance is approx. £200 and if this cost can be saved it could be better spent elsewhere. There is a nominal fee of €25 for Pykota (I paid £25) which is a kind of donation to get access to the downloads of current and future releases - even just for an initial play it's probably worth it and it supports open software too.

Anyway... software downloaded and armed with a spare server from the cupboard (loaded with hard disks in case I want to start saving PDFs) I began the install.

I'll post more soon... possibly a mini-howto. It's just a bit of a steep learning curve at the moment since I've never run a Linux print server before.

StumbleUpon

I heard about a great Firefox addon in Linux Format recently called StumbleUpon - you can check it out at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/138/

Basically, it gives you a button in the toolbar which you press and you will be sent off to a random web page based upon your pre-defined preferences. This thing is great for finding new sites and general time wasting when there is nothing on TV.

EduGeek @ BETT

It's taken me a while to get these pics up but here we go...
Monday - The Week Begins

We arrived relatively early on the Monday to begin the preparation of the stand and were presented with an empty shell.

Nothing could really be done until we had some hardware stand so we decided to go off for a wander amongst the ensuing chaos of stands being built to find our very kind sponsors to collect bits and pieces.

Anyway, we had pretty much no luck fining anyone... in fact we discovered some people wouldn't be turning up until Tuesday afternoon! However, we eventually managed to grab somebody from Promethean so we could set up the interactive whiteboard and projector that they loaned us.

Of course, all the time that this was going on, Tony was being mithered by work about SIMS stuff which made my eyes glaze over every time he tried to explain it to me.

By this time we had begun to start getting hungry so we popped off for lunch... to a traditional english pub - except that the entire menu was made up of curries! Quite odd. Upon our return we didn't have to wait long for a delivery from LapSafe - a nice kiosk to display our fancy web site on :-)

Tuesday - Not long to go

So Tuesday came and we eventually got some hardware. Firstly a box on loan from Stone Computers to run demonstrations on and connect to the Promethean board.

Then came the SmoothWall box - kindly donated to TickMike after we'd been let loose on it!

Then, in the afternoon, came the monster DELL server (which we would later name BEAST). This quad-dual-core Opteron with 16GB RAM and SAS drives was quite something. The only problem was that it had no OS and no setup disks.

When we did eventually get the server going, it was quite something to look at as it sat there without breaking a sweat with 6 virtual machines running!

So anyway.... there wasn't much time for picture taking during the show's opening hours. Steve Thomas from Novus did get rather tired of the standing at one point though.

And Tony made time to print some additional promotional material.

Finally a quick thank you to Art Lader - our Moodle Evangelist that was flown in from the States by Sun to help out on our stand. Well done for pulling that one off Tony ;-)

I'd also like to thank Jo (aka LinuxGirlie) of Koroshi fame.

Another thanks to our sponsors who had people helping out on the stand. Of course there was Steve Thomas (Novus), two experts from RM and two experts from Solutions Inc. (Apple experts). We also had a helping hand from Mandy Brereton and Sacha at EuroLaser (who also donated 2 laser printers as prizes and are generally very nice to everyone).

If there's anyone or anything I've missed out (I know that there is a lot!) I'm sorry.

EduGeek North West Christmas Gathering

Yesterday was the Christmas Gathering for EduGeek members in the North West... organised by Dos_Box himself!

We had hoped for a larger turnout, however only 4 of us made an appearance. Despite this pitiful showing, a good time was had by all with drinking and a nice curry.

Nagios Update

OK... Chris pointed out that I am a numpty... spotting that I hadn't installed a VRML plugin into my browser. Plugin installed, I can now view the 3D status map... not that it's very exciting!

I have also just found out why my icons were missing. For some reason they weren't in the website folder! This is very strange because I remember putting them there and I have even changed the permissions on them. :-S All fixed now though :-D

I spent an hour or two today splitting my config files into template-based versions. This was easy enough to do but it was very time consuming - I'm monitoring a lot of services and hosts! What this should mean, is that I can more easily add new hosts and service checks to existing hosts.

All that remains is to complete the NRPE_NT installation on the remaining servers and possibly passive SNMP trap checks for devices like the SAN and Citrix which don't respond to SNMP get commands.

Oh yeah... I need to fix the mail on that box so that it emails me properly ;-)

VPNs and Nagios

This last week, I have mostly been playing with the new VPN that CLEO have set up for me. After much argument, trying to tell them that the ACLs were wrong, they finally caved and admitted it!

Since then I have been playing with my Nagios box in the evenings - sad I know...

I have uninstalled the installation of Nagios that I installed using the package in Debian Unstable in favour of compiling it myself. I found that the installation structions documented this quite well and barring a couple of minor problems it went on painlessly. I only need to fix the icons for the hosts and the 3D status map now.

I have re-installed all my old config files successfully too and can now process 'external commands' successfully (the main reason for switching to the compiled version).

Tonight's forray into Nagios has involved the setup of NRPE_NT. This involves installing a service on my Windows Servers so that plugins can be run when the check_nrpe plugin on the Nagios box polls them. This has allowed me to monitor disk usage, memory usage and CPU utilisation... items that should prove quite handy!

My next task will involve the installation of NRPE_NT onto the remaining 11 boxes, fixing the problems with images and splitting my config files into neat little template-based ones ;-) Maybe a job for the weekend?

I'll also post something about my trip to Edinburgh soon :-D

Ross Noble in Manchester

At the weekend I went to see Ross Noble at the Opera House in Manchester. We had rather good seats, 3 rows from the front of the circle, which allowed us to see all the hilarity unfold. Right from the outset, you could tell we were in for a treat... a short animation with dancing characters asking people not to make a noise and ensure that their telephones were switched off.

Mr Noble started by heckling the late comers and it just got funnier and funnier from there on. Skits about 'Cheeky Cheeky Muslims' (involving pearly-queen dancing), arse-faced children being bummed in the face by baboons and much more besides had us all in stitches!

For anybody who has the opportunity to see Ross Noble live, you MUST go. I cannot recommend it enough!

Where did I go?

Thanks to Chris for pointing out that my blog vanished!

Something bizzare appears to have happened to my Blogspot space... a quick republish and all was well. That will teach me for neglecting my blog I guess. :-D

It just gets better!

OK... when I just think I'm starting to make some inroads into my HUGE workload, the next problem crops up. The stoopid standalone licenses for Sibelius were registered by phone on Friday and I today enterred the magic numebrs into the machines... first machine i get to says "invalid registration code" - I tried every possible permeatation of spaces to no avail! The idiots at Sibelius have given me the wrong code!

Next up... the 30 wireless laptops have stopped talking to the network. I take all 28 out of the trolley (2 are dumped elsewhere at the moment) and find that the WPA authentication on ALL of them is buggered! I restarted the Bluesocket controller to see in a vain attempt to get it working again... fat chance! I knew that these things were going to make my life hell!

Then... the deputy head announces the latest SIMS upgrade. Of course I have to install this since the stoopid county support team installed SIMS on a partition that is too small. This upgrade should have been a simple 5-10 minute job. I was quite impressed that I got it installed in under 1 hour and I only had to run SOLUS 5 times and DBUPGRADE 3 times (with the /nobackup switch)!!!

Anyway... tomorrow is another day and I'll have to see what I can think of with the wireless. Here's hoping that it all magically starts working ;-)

Those Bloody Macs

OK... after weeks of trying to sort out the 11 new iMacs for the Music Department, I finally got them into a state where I was pretty much happy with them.

I have an image with the basic software on (albeit with incorrect permissions on ONE file for some dodgy old piece of software). The macs are connected to an OS X server for locking them down with Open Directory and they authenticate against my Active Directory network. Not bad considering I'd never really touched a Mac a couple of months ago.

Anyway... back to these iMacs... I decided to take the plunge this afternoon and take them over to the room where they are to live. This would also entail moving some PCs out the way... into the room next door.

I slowly went around the room unplugging and removing the PCs and pulling the iMacs out of their boxes and associated swathes of packaging! After plugging the things in I set off NetRestore loading the image onto them and when this was finished I renamed them and sorted out the OD and AD authentication.

So from 2pm I plodded through this and by 5.10pm I had fully installed 7 iMacs and the eighth was still loading the image. In the meantime, the two music teachers had been wandering back and forth through the room... . Obviously it's my fault that it's taken me 8 weeks to get these things into a workable state without their stoopid Sibelius software which I haven't had time to sort out the new network licenses for after they puchased a load of dumb-ass standalone ones... each requiring an activation key that you have to telephone for.

So tomorrow I will have to install the remaining three Macs (which are already built and what-have-you) plus plug in all the PCs which I have abandoned in the other Music room. These will also need to be rebuilt because the music-types aren't happy with what software is installed! Then of course there is the other work for me to fit in around them!

I've finally got around to the VLANs

For ages now I have been putting off the setup of the VLANs on my switches for the implementation of my Bluesocket wireless network. With only a skeleton staff in School at the moment, the time has finally come and with the installation of some new switches imminent, now seemed like as good a time as any.

I decided that to configure the switches I would use my shiny iBook G4 which I got a while ago with the idea that some of the network managlement tasks would be easier using the BSD-based OS X. Before I could begin, I downloaded and installed the drivers for my 'Prolific' USB-serial adapter. I then found out how to communicate with the switches... you simply open a terminal window and type:

screen tty.usbserial 9600

The tty.usbserial is my iBook's device name for the serial adapter. IMHO this is a lot less hassle than using HyperTerminal in Windows.

Anyway... starting at the outer-most switches in the areas of the School that are currently not being used, I have been reconfiguring the switches (remembering to give my 'data' VLAN an IP address for later configuration) and labeling the up. At the same time I have also been tidying some of the cabs, using different coloured patch leads for uplinks, wireless links, telephony links and 'regular' ports. I've even got some new cable management bars to help things along!

Once all this is done I will move the Bluesocket controller into the server room (I'm pretty happy with most of the config now) and start mounting the APs and, if all goes to plan, they will all connect to the controller automagically.

Today I have been mostly... installing Sophos

For several months now, one of my servers has been a little overloaded. It is a dual Opteron 248 with 4GB RAM but it has been performing the following roles:

• Exchange 2003 Server (for 1100+ users)
• WSUS Server
• Sophos Enterprise Manager and Library Server
• Print Server (including Print Manager Plus)
• Retrospect backup

As you can imagine, it didn't like doing all this (especially the huge email database combined with the two instances of MSDE for WSUS and Sophos). I decided that the easiest thing to move was Sophos and the re-homing coincided nicely with the release of the latest release of the admin software. Having downloaded the package from the Sophos website, I unpacked the files and set about installing it my second DC. All was going very well until the installer tried to set up MSDE. No matter what I tried I could not get MSDE to install... even when I tried to install it from the redistributable fresh from MS. It was most odd; the MSI installer crept along until a couple of blocks from the end and then sort or re-wound with no explanation other than a message in the event log saying that the MSI installation had failed! After this had annoyed me for nearly an hour, I decided to approach the problem from a different angle... enter SQL Server 2005 Express. I installed this and then just told the Sophos installer to use this instance rather than installing MSDE... easy as! After then going through all the EM Library options, I left the server downloading the Sophos AV packages for 2000/XP, OS X and Linux over lunch and upon my return all was well. The new version of the EM Console works well and all the installations went flawlessly. I was particularly impressed by the new policy-based system. Time will tell how well this continues to work and I must admit not all of my machines were on.

I officially HATE SIMS .Net!!!

Up until now, I haven't really had too many problems with SIMS - not as many as most. Admittedly, there is the usual voodoo that needs to be done to the file permissions to let it run and auto update using SOLUS... plus the strange problems that FMS seems to throw up but all these things are easily overcome.

yesterday, however, all hell broke loose. I don't usually do the updates to SIMS; leaving it to the deputy head instead... he seems to like doing it so why upset him? ;-) When the download of the new packages with SOLUS 2 went tits up it became my problem though. This was approach. 11am.

I eventually re-downloaded the packages only to find that there wasn't sufficient space on the disk partition to perform the DBUPGRADE backup... this is due to the cr@p way that our local SIMS support people installed it and is worthy of a rant in itself. After removing everything I possibly could plus compressing lesser used files I managed to have 1.84GB free... still not enough it turned out (despite the fact that the database is only 1.73GB!).

By this point it was 5.35pm and I decided enough was enough and I went home.

This morning I waited for 45mins for the support desk to open, only to be told to re-download the packages another couple of times only to prove that there wasn't enough space to do the upgrade. The support guy then told me about the '/nobackup' switch which allowed me to run the database upgrade... this eventually finished at about 1.30pm.

After the database upgrade, I then had to download the packages AGAIN and after another 45 mins the setup started to run and eventually ended successfully.

At this point I then had to go around 13 workstations to make sure that they all upgraded properly and that the permissions mentioned above were OK. Obviously they weren't and some of the machines required intervention... it was 3.40pm by the time I had all the machines finished.

All in all, it took about 13 hours of my time to do this upgrade. Ridiculous!!!

On the upside, the new GUI looks quite nice and the front-office staff like the new easy-access icons that happen to give them access directly to the areas that they use most often.

I am dreading the time when I move the database files in a couple of weeks though. I'm definitely not going to pay the local support guys £70-odd per hour to do it for me though until I know it's going to be too difficult!!!

YAY! MCE Works Again

For a while now, I've been struggling with Windows XP MCE... in particular I couldn't watch a handful of channels (including Channel 4 and E4 which I watch a lot!).

After copious Internet scouring, I came to the conclusion that it was something to do with the dual Black Gold Digital TV Tuners that I use. I think it was a recent MS update that mangled it.

Anyway, I eventually found an update to the drivers... from v5.11 to v5.17 (although I had to get the updated drivers from the Evesham website rather than GDI's). After much wire fiddling, re-scanning, registry hacking (deleting the bit to do with the tuners) and more re-scanning, it all now works.

It was a little late to record the new series of Lost, although I've managed to watch all the episodes so not too much 'lost' but better late than never I suppose.

I can now thoroughly recommend these cards again - the picture quality is great! MCE is now great again! I can now automagically sync the recorded programmes with my Creative Zen Portable Media Center! 'YAY' all round!!!

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter Multiplayer

Right... I just got off my first go on the Internet multiplayer game of Ghost Recon. It's pretty good, even if I'm not!

Most people appear to play on the 'Domination' style of game. This involves wandering around the map to out-number the opponents in different zones. As a bonus, you re-spawn when you (inevitably in my case) get killed.

I think that I will be enjoying the nultiplayer for some time ;-)

Yesterday, I was playing the multiplayer on my brother's XBOX360. Although the games have the same title, they are quite different. The attitude of the XBOX Live players is different too, taking a less strategic approach to gaming. Just an observation - not a bad thing because sometimes people sniping you from on top of some remote building just pisses you off!

MMC In Vista

I was having a quick look at the MMC in Vista earlier and it came to my attention that EVERYTHING is done using a MMC of one form or another. This could prove promising for further customisation and locking down systems at a later date. Even your standard folder explorer is a MMC! I think that the MMC writers at MS were probably the second highest earnest after the Wizard writers ;-)

Along with this new MMC-centred view, a load of new and glammed-up MMC snapins have been added. Performance Monitor and Task Manager have been combined to form the shiny new Performance Diagnostics - by far and away my favourite new MMC. This also includes clever graphs about reliability and all sorts. Well worth a look... even if it doesn't help to explain the constant hard disk reading and the 68% memory usage when idle!

I have yet to check out the new GPMC and other gubbins (such as the printer stuff) - I need to be connected to a domain for these features but they should be good if the local tools are anything to go off.

Maybe I'll get chance soon ;-)

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter

I'm not a big gamer but, since I acquired my new machine, I have been eager to see what the stupidly big graphics card can do. I decided to buy the latest in the Ghost Recon range of games and try my hand at killing some rebels.

I installed the game and though... why not try it at full res with all the trimmings? I do have a Pentium-D 3GHz with 2GB RAM along with the nVidia GeForce 7800GTX (256MB) after all. It didn't like this and locked up on me :-( So since then I have been playing it at a lowly 1024x768 without issue ;-)

I must admit, a lot of thought has gone into the game graphics and it looks really good. The controls took a little getting used to and I don't think I've ever played a game like this before where you can't jump. I do like the way you control your team members though and they generally do what you ask of them - only occasionally getting in your way and they usually stand where they tell them too.

I'm still rubbish at playing these games so I haven't attmpted the multiplayer yet - a little more practice first methinks. When I do, I'm sure it will be good and I'll update all you keen blog watchers ;-)

More on the woes of wireless in Vista

OK... so I managed to blag a different NIC off a teacher - a Liksys WPC54G Wireless-G adapter which uses a Broadcom 802.11g chipset. Again, I could not connect to the AP successfully - no matter what combination of encryption I tried.

This led me to have the genius idea to upgrade the firmware in the AP. I flashed the AP (not by revealing myself to it!) and I found that I could connect if I set the AP to use no security. Things were looking up... or at least they were until I re-enabled the encryption and it all went tits up again.

So, at the moment, I must conclude the wireless still sucks in Vista and I will be continuing to use a wired connection... an unsecured network is not an option in this area!

On the plus side, the paging problem doesn't seem as bad as it was and I know that TFTPD32 runs in Vista! ;-)

Stay tuned for more!

More on Vista

I've been playing with Vista a little more today. Today's topics will be the 'Windows Sidebar' and WiFi.

The Sidebar is not automatically enabled in build 5381 so I had to have a hunt through the annoying wizardy-things. I eventually found it lurking in the depths of the Control Panel. Anyway I enabled it and immediately decided that suing the 'always on top' option was out of the question on a 4:3 screen. Secondly, I'm left thinking, "what is the point?"

There is a big analogue clock which looks very pretty but you may as well use the (easier to read) digital clock in the taskbar. An RSS reader could be handy, except you only get two lines of each feed item and the text is tiny too. A PostIt Note-type pad could prove handy for jotting things down and there is a CPU/memory usage 'gadget' that showed me how hard my machine is working just typing this!

Onto the disaster that is wireless networking. Until I have a different NIC available, I cannot promise that part of the problems aren't due to the D-Link DWL-G650+ cardbus adapter that I am trying to use. My AP is a 3COM 8250 which has had no problems with MacOS X, Windows XP or Windows Mobile.

After trying every type of encrypted and unencrypted connection, I couldn't get a connection between the laptop and network. When a connection was made, no IP address could be gathered. Most bizzarre!

As an aside, something else that I have noticed, is that the laptop is CONSTANTLY reading from the hard disk. This certainly does not bode well and I'm not even sure why it is happening - it's not as if it needs to be paging!

More to come soon ;-)

A few pictures from today

I took a few pictures around the house today.

I began with the pond. I was looking for frogs and newts but they had decided to hide so I had to settle for the fish. The first one is some odd fish and there appears to be lots of them. I haven't got a clue what they are.



There are also some goldfish.



I then decided that it was about time to take a couple of pics of the new lambs. These Hebredian sheep rarely have more than one lamb at once and are supposedly bad parents. You can imagine our surprise to find twins. Pretty cute eh?



Finally, I checked out Tom's chicks. These were a little more tricky to get a decent picture of, due to the chicken wire, but I managed to get a couple of half-decent ones.

The Vista trial begins!

Firstly, a big thanks to Nick Umney of Microsoft UK for kindly getting me an invite onto the Windows Vista Beta 2 program.

I downloaded the DVD ISO of the x86 version of Vista (Build 5381) last night... it only took three and a half hours on my cable connection! I then installed it on a HP nc8000 laptop this morning.

The install was very easy, asking only for a couple of details and then going off and doing its stuff. After about 1 hour I had a laptop running Vista! I then just had to tweak the display settings because they were in 8bit mode for some bizzarre reason and install a driver for the cardbus.

So after a day of on and off usage, I've not found Vista to be nippy by any means but it's not as slow as I thought it may have been. I've also noticed that the MS 'Wizard Designers' have been earning their money. EVERYTHING has a wizard and it is VERY annoying. You also have to confirm stuff all the time - "Do you want to do this?" "Are you sure you want to do this?"

I'll update the blog more as I get increasingly pissed off or find nifty little features. I'll also mention how to make WiFi work when I figure it out properly - it hates me at the moment!

Rebbit!

I've been meaning to post this pic for a while. I was really impressed by it!

The image has not been editted in any way. All I have done is 'processed' the RAW image into a JPEG and shrunk it down to display on the web.

I hope you like it ;-)

The Towers of London Gig - Tuesday 02/05/06

Last Tuesday I went to see The Towers of London at 53 Degrees in Preston with Pete.

We started off the evening in Greyfriars with a few pints of reasonably priced beer and a reasonably priced meal. This was then followed by another reasonably priced beer in The Ship.

When we arrived at 53 Degrees, the first support had almost finished... the music from these guys (Gundown Sunday) was rather good although the female singer wasn't all that great. The second support (Hooker) was much better with their punky, rocky, style.

Following Hooker was the main act. The Towers of London permormed admirably and a great time was had by all.

As for the venue itself, upstairs in 53 Degrees, it was pretty good. There wasn't too many people there and the smallish room meant the atmosphere was good... we were also able to stand right up front to see all the action ;-)

There's was also a handy chap in the gents, dispensing soap and handing out towels... quite odd really. He also had a large selection of cheap fragrances and gave me a couple of lolly pops to take away with me :-D

Bank holiday weekend...

So it's nearly 3 o'clock in the afternoon on Bank Holiday Monday. It's great not having to work, although waking up to discover that you broke the boiler the previous day when you touched it causing the control panel to drop off and the bleed valve for the heating circuit to empty water everywhere outside! After downloading the installation instructions and discovering how to refill the heating system up to the requisite temperature for the thing to work again, I was able to have a shower!

I've been on my third walk in three days. Each one was just around the block (approx. 70mins) taking in the sites of the prom and coming back past the golf course. Today, I may have even got some good pics of waves crashing against the sea wall... I'll check those out in a minute (see below for one of the better shots from today). Even though I wasn't down by the water I still got a little wet from the spray!

Other than my walks, it's been pretty quiet. I've now got a fully functional Zen Portable Media Center which is working great. I'm starting to get into podcasts and I think that they could be useful for keeping abreast of new technology. There's also the commandn.tv video podcast with the very hot presenter ;-)

My parents have gone away again... Switzerland this time... so we'll see what state the house is in when I pop back there tomorrow. I will be in Preston to watch The Towers of London at 53 Degrees with Pete. Should be good!

The EduGeek Conference North 2006

OK... I got back this morning from my outing to Rochdale for the much talked about EduGeek Conference North 2006. So what was it like? I'll start at the beginning...

On Tuesday afternoon I finished work at 4pm as usual, grabbing a couple of terminals and some CDs as I walked out the door - these would later allow me to do my talk. I sat in the car, fired up TomTom and stuck in the address for Rochdale CLC and off I went.

The journey was going great - not too much traffic, used the correct lanes on the motorway, etc. - and here I was in sunny Rochdale. The lovely woman in TomTom then politely asked me to turn left, then right and then turn around - all within the space of about 3 seconds! At this point I knew that I was going to end up VERY lost.

I soon gave up and after 2 phone calls, lots of directions and a couple of laps of the block I eventually arrived at the CLC. Upon my arrival I found out that one of the PCs for my talk (a 'RM One') contains some wonderful new Intel network card which does not have drivers for Server 2003! This meant a VERY QUICK re-think! VMWare to the rescue again!

So I left Server 2003 installing as Tony turned up (8 hours after he was expected!). We then made our merry way to the Moorcock Inn. Upon our arrival, Tony announced that he had not booked a room! Russ and I explained that when we both told him to 'book the room,' what we actually meant was 'pick up the phone, ring the hotel and book your room NOW!'
Anyway, I very kindly allowed him to use the spare bed in my twin room... how generous am I?

So, Tuesday evening we had a lovely meal at the Moorcock and a few beers before Beeswax, Nathan and Mark left us.

Wednesday morning we were up nice and early and downstairs for breakfast at 7am. A very nice breakfast in fact - full english! Then off to the CLC for just after 8am to continue with the set up and welcome people. Of course a lot of people were late due to problems finding the place! Other than that all the talks went well (mine ran smoothly!) and reviews, etc. can be found at www.edugeek.net and www.edugeekconference.net. The food was good and people were able to do lots of networking - plus everybody went away with a prize (even if it was just a Netgear wifi sniffer). The biggest problem of the day was when I went to get a cup of water and crashed the water cooler! A swift powercycle seemed to fix it though ;-)

Following the conference, we all (well some of us) piled down to a local curry house and had a great meal. A great time was had by all and Oliis very kindly took care of the bill. Russ and I then went back to the Moorcock and had many more beverages.

A good night's sleep followed and another great breakfast before Russ and I popped back to the CLC to help Beeswax with the tidying up.

All in all I had a very good time and had a good chat with a few people and learnt a bit too. Now I just need to fill in the expense form for the hotel.

Time for an update

I thought, since it's my birthday, it would be a good time to update my neglected blog!

A lot has happened since the last post. Not least, the replacement of my old system for a new Dell Dimension 9100. I know I hat Dells but this was too good to miss for the money - Pentium-D 3GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard disk and nVidia GeForce 9700 GTX!!!

The new machine works brilliantly and Doom 3 looks fantastic on it! I'm also able to run several virtual machines simultaneously too using VMWare.

I have also upgraded and added to my camera equipment. I now have an awesome Canon 75-300mm lens with an image stabiliser. This has allowed me to take some brilliant wildlife pictures (which I will soon post). Another upgrade is the Speedlite 420ex flash. This flash is great and has lots of switches, lights, tilting and swivelling bits, etc. I'll no doubt never use it to its full capacity but it should allow me to take some great pictures since it works with the camera to work out the flash timing.

I'll post more soon about what's been going on - along with the pictures of the frogs!!!

I can see clearly now...

OK! On Friday I picked up my new specs and bought a new monitor (NEC Multisync 2080UX+ TFT). My new Gigabyte Geforce 6600 also arrived on Friday to complete my visual treat.

Since then, I've been mostly enjoying having the ability to see (after wearing no glasses for a month or so due to one pair breaking and me misplacing the others) and playing Doom 3. I say that I have been playing Doom 3, more precisely, I've been playing Last Man Standing which is an awesome co-op multiplayer mod for Doom 3.

My new graphics card and monitor really do make playing LMS a treat. The performance is truly amazing and I now just need a bit more RAM and a faster CPU to bump the performance another couple of notches :-)

Bundled with the card was also a game called Thief - Deadly Shadows but I'm yet to install that. I'll update on that and Earth 2160 (when it arrives) as soon as I've had chance to 'test' them.

The new graphics card

My shiny new graphics card with possibly the biggest heatsink I've ever seen - it's mounted on both sides of the card with a heatpipe between the two halves!

The League of Gentlemen - Live!

On Wednesday, we went to the Apollo again - this time for the League of Gentlemen. A very good (and rather funny) show.

The first half of the show was open auditions for the 'Communitivity' that the Legs Akimbo Theatre Company were to perofrm. The idea was that members of the Royston Vasey community would perform in a nativity play.

The second half was a pantomime featuring all the characters that hadn't featured so far.

It was great how they managed to get all the characters in and I would definately recommend it if you like the TV show.

A fun-filled weekend!

Well a busy and enjoyable weekend was had.

On Friday I went to watch the quarter-finals of the snooker at the Guild Hall. We watched Steven Hendry play David Gray - Hendry won - and we could clearly be seen on the TV. :-)

On Saturday I then went to the Apollo in Manchester to watch the Kaiser Chiefs. Not a bad gig. Supporting were the Cribs (appauling!) and Maximo Parks (not bad - although Caoline thought that they were rubbish). The Kaiser Chiefs performed well though - since I'm not a huge fan I didn't enjoy it as much as Caroline but they were good.

I was a little dubious about the parking, however. We parked down some street where we paid a guy in a yellow jacket £5 to look after the car. Sounds even more dodgy than it seemed at the time - if that's possible. At least my car was still there and unharmed when we got back to it so all was good. Caroline's a little concerned about leaving her car there on Wednesday when we go to see the League of Gentlemen (more about that after the event).

Sunday was then spent at home stripping wallpaper in my bedroom. I now have 4 walls and a window so the end is nearly in sight - there is a lot still to do before the house will be finished though.

The keyboard & mouse arrived!

Well the keyboard and mouse arrived a couple of weeks ago now and they're are brilliant - at least the mouse is. I'm not sure that the keyboard is wirth it but the bundle only coat £10 more than just buying the mouse and a cordless keyboard may come in handy at some point.

I'm yet to really test the kit since Doom 3 has been playing up - I keep getting jittery graphics. This could be due to only having a GeForce FX 5200 but it has worked fine in the past so it must be somthing I've done recently - I've been playing about with Omega drivers and they may have cocked something up.

The proper test can wait until I get a new machine - I'm just biding my time until I can get a cheap dual Xeon workstation. I'll then do a fresh install and see what happens. :-)

The singles pool tournament

I participated in my singles pool match at the Queens arms in Kirkham on Wenesday. As I feared I didn't make it past the first round. I made several silly mistakes - one costing me the second match. In fairness, my opponent was rather good and went on to win the second round aginst an excellent young player from the Wrea Green Institute.

Vikki faired better on Thursday at the Huntsman in Kirkham. She won 2-1 in the first round and then lost 2-1 in the second round. She was rather unforunate but played impressively.

My uneventful life

Well... other than ordering (and not receiving) my new mouse, I haven't really been up to a great deal.

Things are slowly getting better at work and the light at the end of the tunnel can now be seen - hope it's not a train ;-) My server room is nearly finished too so I'll soon be able to move them into their very own air-conditioned room which will be nice.

I'm off to uni on Thursday too - should give me a rest from the nagging.

Will it ever arrive?

I decided over a week ago to take the plunge and splash out on a new keyboard and mouse since I've never spent any money on either for many years. I decided that I may as well get one of the best available and plumped for the Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 3100 Laser.

Anyway, Ebuyer have totally pissed about with my order and I am still waiting. :-( How upset am I? Very!

I was hoping to have had a good play with it by now to let the world know whether it was worth the £65 but alas we shall all have to wait.

Another Ebay Bargain

I have received my new camera lens - another Ebay bargain. For £45 I have bought a 70-210mm AF lens (not a Canon one unfortunately but still quite good).

I will just need to go somewhere to take a couple of pics with it so that I can show off its splendar. Check back soon for an update.

Some good news!

I've finally started to receive good news about my network migration...

I today received several boxes of second-user thin client terminals (Compaq T20s) to replace all the machines in the sixth form ILC which simply refused to boot Thinstation (I think it's some wiered implementation of the embedded i810 graphics). I will also liberally scatter these around some of the other rooms.

Tomorrow, I should be receiving 30 brand spanking HP thin client terminals to replace the room of machines that refuse to allow Etherboot to run from the hard disk (God knows why this is!).

I've also heard good news about my new power supplies to the temporary and new server rooms so I will soon have a 50A supply for my UPS and I will be able to turn everything on!!! :)

To round things off nicely, I have found that my problem receiving email may not be at my end and Chris is going to be working with me next week to help me tweak and fine tune some stuff so that all will be completed! (Now I just have to get out of making Nedap cards)

The Saga Continues...

Well the network migration is continuing to go wrong. I still have no server room, although a temporary space has been found next door to where the server room will eventually end up. Unfortunately, there is not enough power to turn all my equipment on and I need a 50A feed for my UPS!

Incoming email is screwed - I can�t see any reason for this being the case and can only assume that something is going wrong upstream. Outlook Web Access and IIS in general on that server is also screwed though so hey ho!

Once I get the new server room and build my final 2 Citrix servers things should start to look up. Then I�ll just need to tweak the Citrix servers to iron out the remaining problems, retrieve the old shared areas from the old servers and fix Exchange.

Anyhoo - it does look pretty cool already!

Southport Airshow

Yesterday I went to the Southport Airshow with Caroline. I was a little reluctant at first, due to the ridiculously early hour that I had to rise (8am no less!). I�m glad that I went though because it gave me a chance to try out my new camera.

There was lots to see � including helicopters, model planes (look at the size of some of them!) and the Red Arrows. I think you can agree that some of the pictures look superb.

There was one slight drawback, however, in that we forgot to take any sun screen and I now look like a lobster (after it has been boiled to the end of time!).

Not a bad pic, eh?

My New Toy

I’ve finally found myself a new camera to help me take up my new hobby of photography.

I decided that it might be quite fun to get some gear that will let me do something more artistic than my Canon IXUS 700 (a damn good camera in its own right!) could manage.

Just in case I didn’t like the hobby as much as I thought, I decided to go for a 2nd hand Canon EOS 300D – a digital SLR. I found one for an incredibly good price on Ebay, complete with the 18-55mm lens kit, a 2GB compact flash card and a little bag to keep it in.

I’m rather impressed. Stay tuned to see some of the shots that it produces.

Blackpool Illuminations

The obligatory Illuminations walk had to be performed at some point.

As always, it was just a bunch of lights above the prom. Due to my laziness we missed the fireworks which were set off from a barge between Central Pier and North Pier but we did see hundreds of biker-types on Goldwings with flashing lights and crazy horns and the like.

We also had a quick walk along the beach in the dark. I do not recommend this - particularly since the tide came in ridiculously quickly just after we came off the beach! All in all, not a bad night out and all this walking must be doing me some good! :-)