Right - it's now back from the other repair centre (that they no longer use) and in the proper repair centre. The nice man on the phone said that he'd write an e-mail to downstairs, and print a copy and take it to the manager saying that it should be rushed through or a replacement sent, so, hopefully, I should see it before the end of this month (fingers crossed).

That is all.

Well, having phoned acer again, the laptop is now back in the "awaiting parts" stage of the process, apparently it's awaiting a new "LCD cover". sigh someday I might get it back, you know :)

In other news, I might have accidently ordered myself a new desktop box, a nice shiny AMD64 3000+ jobby (939 pin version, muchly nice), 512M RAM, 120G HDD, Dual Layer DVD writer... you know the usual type things. That should arrive sometime this week... so at least I should have something that works RSN :)

That is all. Might update later in the week if there's some more news on the slaptip.

Right, here comes the summary, around about the week before the 9th of December my shiny new AMD64 laptop developed a fault with it's DVD drive, it still being under manufacturers warrenty (I only got it in August) I phoned up and organised it to be collected on the 8th December, I followed it through City Link and noted that it arrived at the destination for repair on the 9th December 2004. This, I thought, was quite damned good and speedy, City Link went up in my estimations and all was well.

I left it a couple of weeks, then phoned Acer to find out what was happening, they said "We're awaiting a shipment of parts", fair enough, I thought, that's not so bad, hopefully I should get it back shortly after christmas. Nope, phoned again between christmas and new year, still awaiting parts, then they shut for a bit (from ~ 30 December to 6 January), phoned again after this period, still awaiting parts. Phoned basically every other day for the next couple of weeks, to see if there was any progress. Nothing, still awaiting parts. That was until this week, magically, the parts arrived, and on Wednesday I was told that it would be going through testing Thursday, and that if it got through that, I should get it back on Tuesday. Phoned Thursday to see what the outcome of the testing was, they hadn't actually yet tested it, (after I eventually managed to get them to look in to where it was, this is now becoming a time consuming task, as I have to explain to whoeveritisontheendofthephone what I was told the last time so that they can find anything out). So, phoned today, went through the ritual explaining to them where my laptop was, and, lo and behold, we found out that it had failed the testing.

Of course, being the efficient people they are, they can't actually tell me what it failed on, or what parts it is now waiting for. sigh.

Hopefully it'll come back sometime this year, this is starting to get a little ridiculous, we're only what, a week and a half off them having the laptop for 2 months, that's just silly.

Random wibble over, will keep you all posted on the progress of the repair of my laptop, if I can extract the information out of the guys at Acer.

Or, how to break a Netgear router in one easy step... this evening I 'accidently' installed a broken firmware image on to my poor little Netgear DG834G... it killed it, in a previously (to me) unseen state. Panicing slightly, I booted in to XP, threw a network lead between me and the router, and fired the recovery tool at it. No joy... pondered for a bit, tried again... still nothing... pondered some more, held reset button, took out power, put power back in, yay! flashy lights! that looks pretty... fire up tool again, nothing. Keep wondering what it's got against my network interface... try the tool on the wireless interface, I get a stage closer, it doesn't whinge about the network card, weird. I then realise that I'd removed the wireless interface from the bridge a few days ago in XP... hrm... removed the bridge entirely, fired up the recovery tool, pointed it at the correct interface, prayed, and was amazed as it found the device. Watched it upload the firmware, and then verify it. Watched it reboot itself and waited for the lights to come on. YAY! It all came back nicely (except that I still haven't fixed the minor bug in my firmware that doesn't seem to get dnsmasq up correctly).

Anyways - all back up and running now, I'll break it again in the not too distant, to fix the dnsmasq foo :)

OK - so we've got a very simple backup set for windows boxes on our work network, an rsync of the smb shares happens daily, 3 shares for each machine. Now, our sales guy's machine has just dropped its disk, this in itself is not a big problem, as everything should have been backed up ~ 11am this morning (which it was).... UNFORTUNATELY since I set up the shares, someone decided to change his e-mail client (yes, OK, I know, he should be using imap and we wouldn't have this problem, that's the next issue), and so he's just lost ~ 3 months worth of e-mail, the most important of which being his sent-mail.

sigh.

On the plus side, this might finally get more people using IMAP to our server, and so this situation not recurring :)

I suppose the next problem will be finding him a machine to use in the mean time.

Neeed beer!

I've started using Audio Scrobbler to keep track of what I listen to when I'm playing music, it appears to be a reasonably good system, if slow at times. The extra features, like listening to lastfm.com streams of other peoples personal tastes is proving quite good, meaning that I can listen to stuff that I might like before I buy it, and widening my experience of music.

Also, I've packaged the xmms-scrobbler plugin and have that in contrib in debian unstable, which is quite nice. It's the first package that I've got sponsored, many thanks go out to Steve McIntyre for sponsoring me.

It's been an interesting day, all in all, debugging various things, not least someone using the package and it not submitting (turned out they were using, in effect, an internet radio station, which audio scrobbler plugins do not submit data about, it's part of the protocol specification).

12:51  * john prods iDunno with a sharpened tree, some more.
12:51 < Dave> john: try talking
12:51  * iDunno wobbles his leg even more.
12:51 < Dave> sometimes he even listens
12:51 < john> fuckwit.
12:51 < iDunno> Dave: really? when? :)
12:51  * john breaks iDunno's legs
12:51 < Dave> 'sometimes'
12:51 < john> ;-)
12:51 < Dave> duh
12:52 < iDunno> john: cool, I can claim compensation.
12:53 < john> yeah.. from the imaginary criminal injuries compensation service.
12:53 < Dave> cool
12:53 < Dave> imaginary compensation
12:53 < iDunno> yup, they've taken 2 billion off you and it's in my imaginary swiss bank account.
12:53 < iDunno> accruing imaginary interest.
12:53 < john> hehe
12:53  * Dave imaginerily robs the swiss bank
12:54 < iDunno> and being use to launder other imaginary money.
12:54 < john> imaginerily?
12:54 < john> is that an imaginary word?
12:54 < Dave> yip
12:54 < Dave> 10 point to john
12:54 < john> woo.
12:54 < iDunno> Dave: you're going to imaginaraly rob and imaginary swiss bank?!
12:54 < john> 10 real points?
12:54 < john> yeah. just imagine.
12:54 < john> :-/
12:54 < Dave> iDunno: its been done
12:54 < Dave> IN MY MIND
12:55 < john> see.. he was just imagining.
12:55  * iDunno watches the imaginary money launderers imaginarily hunt down and assassinate Dave
12:55 < Dave> not imaginarily assassinate?
12:55 < john> mm.. imaginary death.
12:55 < iDunno> (with imaginary large black dildos)
12:55 < Dave> is it just imaginary that they are large?
12:55 < john> mm.. imaginary dil...  er, wait.
12:57 < iDunno> well, given the "hole" object is an imaginary Dave robbing and imaginary swiss bank, I think that they can either be entirely imaginary, or, do you mean you want a small black dildo?
12:57 < Dave> not too bothered
12:57 < Dave> since they're imaginary
12:57 < Dave> they can be big, if you'd prefer
12:57 < iDunno> well, obviously a large black dildo would be easier to assassinate people with than a small one.
12:58 < Dave> what about a flesh coloured one?
12:58 < Dave> does that alter its killing abilities?
12:58 < iDunno> of course it does...
12:58 < Dave> more 'ewww' factor
12:58 < iDunno> black is the only way to go, for the embodyment of evil.
12:59 < john> you should add some imaginary spikes.
12:59 < john> for more evil.
12:59 < Dave> that is evil
12:59 < iDunno> imaginary spikes on an imaginary black dildo, for use in assassinating an imaginary swiss bank robber... hrm... yes...
13:00 < Dave> wait
13:00 < john> ?
13:00 < Dave> i'm not imaginary
13:00 < john> true.
13:00 < john> or is it?
13:00 < iDunno> that could hurt a bit.
13:00 < iDunno> Dave: of course you're imaginary...
13:00 < iDunno> you're only words on a screen
13:00 < Dave> i am not
13:01 < Dave> words on 5 screens
13:01 < Dave> proably more
13:01 < Dave> i bet dave is a fairly common irc nick
13:01 < john> and a watery skinbag in that chair...

I recently purchased the 3 series box set of Black Books, and have managed to watch all 3 series in the last 3 nights, it rocks. Plain rocks. Everyone should have it, good, light entertainment, easy to watch, and, best of all, it has Bill Bailey :)

Well, at 4pm our shiny new Win2k3 webserver fell over, it appears that it's killed a disk, and that the motherboard is knackered. Won't even get to the BIOS anymore :(

Left work ~ 6pm after me and Dave had got the new system installing, hoping that we can install the secure cert on the server that is needed but we have no key for it (unless we can rescue one from the other disk, which is unlikely).

Ah well, nearly time for the pub now, might nip in to work tommorow to kick it some more, depending on if the MD calls or not :)

Temporarily assigned the IPs to a linux box which serves a page saying "it's broken, should be back monday", so at least there's something there.