After talking to Kinnison this morning, and finding out about typedef and using it for function pointers, I cleaned up the code that I'd been working on to do with dynamic backends in onak, it's certainly much cleaner to read now.

I finished tidying the code this afternoon to fit more with Noodles' coding style, and am quite happy with the code now.

Details on how to grab my version are available from http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/onak.html along with links to the project.

At a request from quinophex I have build some ubuntu hoary packages for xmms-scrobbler. If you're a hoary user, and you would like to use these packages, they are available from my archive at:

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ubuntu/ hoary scrobbler

Sources available at:

deb-src http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ubuntu/ hoary scrobbler

I'll try to keep these in line with the debian packages as much as possible, but as I don't personally run hoary, there might be some delay between the two.

Hope that people find this handy.

For the last godknowshowlong I've been looking at adding 'dynamic backend' support to the onak keyserver, I've just finished cleaning it up and it seems to be working nicely. There's probably some more work to do on it yet, as I think that it fails in naughty ways when it can't load the backend, which is a pain, but should be fixable.

Details on how to get my changes are available from my onak development page.

Yesterday morning my ikkle sister gave birth to her third child, a 2lb 5oz baby girl called Jasmine. Ikkle sister is still in Nottingham City Hospital at the moment, which is where they sent her last Friday, due to lack of beds in other hospitals that could cope with a baby being born under 28 weeks. She's not sure when they're moving her back to a sane county, like Suffolk, but she's hoping that it's sometime next week.

Right, the laptop was picked up on Tuesday for repair... The laptop is now back in my possession, having got back from the repair centre. I'm quite impressed that Acer seem to have fixed the problems they were having last time I sent back the laptop, or maybe it was because I made sure that they knew I had the Acer Advantage warranty.

Hopefully, this time, it'll stay working ;)

Wooo!

In other, better news, I got a patch accepted in to the bazaar project, fair enough, it was only cosmetics, changing the output of the various help commands to fit with what actually works in baz instead of tla, and fixing the bits that said tla that should say baz, but hey, it worked, and it got accepted. Go me!

Paston's main webserver and currently reasonably main mailserver (as well as primary DNS), went down this morning. The disks in the SCSI RAID array died (oops), and took the raid array out. John and Dave are now reinstalling all the packages after pulling the data backups from the USB disk (yay for backups!). Hopefully it'll all be up and running again RSN.

Today is not turning out to be a good day.

At approximately 1.30am this morning, the trackpad stopped functioning on my laptop, it's still detected, but it can't be used, at all, ever. To go with this, the DVD drive that was apparently "replaced" is still not functioning, at all... So, in a moment of insanity, I phoned Acer again, this time going through with my Acer Advantage stuff, and so it should get through the other end a little quicker than last time (I hope so, 2 months is a lonnnnnng time).

Tommorow morning, between 9am and 1pm, a nice city link man shall be once again picking the laptop up and taking it away to be delivered to the people at Acer. sigh, bettings on the wait this time, guys?

Ho hum,

Laters.

Tarquin, in his infinite wisdom, has once again published things about ALUG that are completely biased, and only related on his findings in the group, for the full blog entry see his blog, it's about 2 thirds of the way down that page.

ALUG, as many of it's members will tell you, is not an unfriendly group, except to those that repeatedly act in a nasty and malicious manner to the group. Tarquin is well known to many people, including several that I know outside of ALUG, and they all basically have the same view of him, he's an arrogant muppet who deliberately sets out to alienate people. Before he left ALUG the first time, he actually told two guys that they were homophobic, never mind the fact that the guys in question where (and still are) going out. He has an abbrasive attitude and often posts things under pseudonyms to try to fool the general reader. I have found him to often upset entire groups of people that he is involved with, and I know some of the RUNG members have left because of him.

Many of the ALUG regulars have met many times, and we get on very well, we had a fantastic christmas meal organised by Kirsten Naylor and Adam Bower, and I'm sure none of the people that did attend felt threatened by any of us by the end of the night.

We hold monthly social meetings in the City Gate in Norwich, where we have actually gained another 2 members recently (waves at Peter and Luke).

We are not unfriendly to new people. We like new people! We like to spread our knowledge with our peers. We do not like people spreading FUD like Tarquin does.

This post is my view only, of course, and should not be associated with the entire group, but I am very upset by the continues abuse that Tarquin gives to the group. The first time he left us he posted inflammatory material about the group to the GGLUG list.

So, in short, don't let Tarquin's jaded view of ALUG influence you, he has just repeatedly upset most of the core of the ALUG membership repeatedly, and scared off some new members in the past.

If you've got down to here, you must be utterly bored. Go find a sysadmin and give them a hug ;)

Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, is going to be knighted. Can anyone understand what the hell he's done to deserve that? Of course, ripping money out of our education system so that they run Microsoft Windows and Office is a worthy cause, and obviously one that I fully support </sarcasm>. But seriously, why the hell should he get to be a KBE. Have the standards really sunk THAT low?!

/me wanders off to vomit in the corner for a bit.

OK, I've got the telly on in the background at the moment, working on some evil php and then BT's new broadband advert came on... "Share your photos almost instantly with BT's 2M broadband", it said. Now given that all BTs offerings appear to have a consistent 256k upstream, and to share photos you're going to be using upstream bandwidth, not downstream, how the hell is it going to be quicker to share photos with BT's 2M offering than it is for me to share them from my shiny Black Cat Networks 512k connection? Having bounced around the BT site lots to check that I wasn't going mad, I eventually found the bit that says that upstream is 256k, on the other hand I also saw all the evilness that is the bandwidth caps. And thus ends my short rant of rantyness about BT. For now. Probably.

Well, been working at home for the last couple of days, currently sitting at my dad's, but will have to be back in Norwich sometime later tonight ready for the company meeting tommorow. Now have my own ikkle desk at my dad's that sits in the corner, with my back to the telly. Much goodness.

It's getting close to pay day again, under 2 weeks to go now... If I can manage to not spend much more this month, I should eventually actually have some spare cash next month... wooo! Though, that should really go on the credit card bill (booo!).

The laptop is still working (yay!) and still has a damned nice keyboard (IMO), now, if only I could get it to go to sleep in linux nicely... If I throw it in to S3 mode, the kernel dies on me (as I wasn't expecting). Oh, and I suppose I should also take a look at getting some battery status out of this beasty, there are apparently people that have managed it, I should look at the kernel patches sometime when I've got time.

The work project is ticking along, but needs lots more done to it by Friday afternoon (scary stuff), and to be completed by Monday. It's been a nightmare of a project, but at least it looks reasonably pretty at the moment.

Anything else? Hrm, dunno, probably.

Right, there's a new package for xmms-scrobbler, I've thrown the URL at Steve McIntyre, so when he gets a chance to review it and upload it, we'll just be waiting for it to get throught NEW again (still from the move between contrib and main). If you're impatient, or the previous version is not working for you, then you can add the following to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list file and get the new version from there.

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ unstable scrobbler

Hopefully this fixes lots of the bugs from the last version :)

Well, there's a shiny new version of the xmms-scrobbler as source from upstream, I should have the package for it built and ready for upload in the next couple of days (hopefully tonight). There's lots of bugs filed against the current version, I think that the new version fixes several of these, including the ID3v2 bug that I fixed but hasn't made it in to unstable yet.

Keep your eyes open, we should get there RSN.

Right, that's all the sites moved off of the broken server on to the other server, aspseek set to index the right places (and in theory running) and everything appears to be working... time to leave it for a couple of weeks to make sure.

Many many thanks to Dave for the help during that.

Now, lets settle back down to what I was supposed to be working on and what I have a meeting about on Friday.

I've been fighting with one of our webservers for most of the afternoon, and slowly moving all of the sites from it on to a different machine, as it appears to be dying entirely. Hopefully we should have the remaining sites over there tommorow morning, then there's just the waiting till everyone has confirmed that they all work.

Many thanks to Dave who was also working till 6pm, I finished about 30 mins ago for the day, having had one real break of 30 mins, and a 20 min drive since ~ 3.30pm when I got to the server room to fit the other machine with a new disk to take the sites.

And now, I think I shall consider sleeping.

Right, we now have back in my possession my shiny laptop, and it even appears to be working, lunchtime shall tell me for sure, when I throw HL2 at it which is the reason it went for repair in the first place.

I'm currently sitting using aforementioned laptop, which still had my shiny nux partition, which should probably be apt-get upgraded RSN, and have it already all set for doing the devel for work, it's much more usable than my work desktop that dies at random points during the day (mainly due to syncing 2 80G USB drives).

So, all in all, it's a good morning... now, if only Scam would actually send the bits for my new desktop, all would be well with the world.

As I can't (yet) re-whinge about Acer (need to pickup the laptop first and check it), I think I shall whinge about Scan... Last week I placed an order with them, around about Monday, and was given a delivery date of Wednesday, I then got an e-mail from them saying "Sorry, due to blah blah blah crappy excuse, your order has been delayed", which I then got again on thursday, friday, saturday, sunday... I'm waiting for todays now. SIGH. Looking on the tracking system, it's not even been "picked" yet.

See, why can't everyone be as nice as the people at Advance Tech? They managed to phone me to check some changes to my order, and, not only that, managed to deliver stuff to me the next day.

That's all for now, maybe later a posting about something more interesting.

It would appear that my laptop has been repaired! And not only that, they've shipped it back to me... Of course, they didn't tell me they'd shipped it back to me, and so I have to go pick it up from City Link tommorow, but hey, I FINALLY GET THE DAMNED THING BACK!

YAY!

Right, having now talked to them, they're now trying to get me a replacement, woo, but they're awaiting "Authorisation", and they won't know about that till Monday. SIGH.

In other news, 90% of my new box arrived today YAY! Can't use it yet though, as the graphics card hasn't arrived yet, and I haven't got a suitable one to use. Ah well, at least that lot should arrive before monday, assuming that scan aren't being shite.

I'll snap some pictures of the bits that have arrived later, just cos I can :)