Within Reason

Moved

Posted by Ceri Davies Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:43:00 GMT

Since it was set up, this machine has lived on my gateway FreeBSD machine in what has since become the boy’s bedroom. It moved from there to my own bedroom, and I recently started turning it off at night to try to save power (and sleep better!).

This led to a number of people emailing me about outages - which was quite flattering; didn’t realise anyone would care about my crappy blog that much - because they were in a timezone disparate to be trying to get to it during the hours I had it turned off.

Therefore, and with the realisation that I could get a hosted solution for $12/month (US), I have moved this blog to a Solaris^[1] zone hosted at Gangus Internet. Service (technically and customer-servicely) so far has been absolutely impeccable.

If you are reading this, I guess the move went OK.

[1] Which is not a reflection on FreeBSD in any way. Questions such as were asked after this commit are unnecessary :)

Posted in General, Solaris | no comments

On interfaces

Posted by Ceri Davies Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:27:00 GMT

On our way to work, there is a crossroads.

The crossroads has traffic lights on each spur, and Stef has discovered that if you press the button at one crossing, it has the effect of causing all the crossings to be activated. Therefore, on the way past the first crossing she hits the button so that by the time she arrives at the crossing that she does want to take, it has made the lights go green.

I pulled her up on this as an abuse of the interface, warning her that there were no guarantees that this functionality would be present in a future version of the lights and that it was users like her who caused headaches for developers trying to refactor and improve older software.

She just shook her head.

Posted in General | no comments

What to do...

Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:22:00 GMT

I’m feeling really deflated in front a computer of late.

I think this is a mixture of:

Reaching the “write everything up” stage of a fun project I’ve been working on for the last 9 months (perhaps I will write about this sometime);
Not having time to focus on anything at home (Max is lovely but all-encompassing);
It seems that I have read the entire Internet;
Shouty old dicks being rude to each other in a particular open-source project every time I open my mail.

Even while reviewing the new Absolute FreeBSD I had to print everything out and annotate with pencil.

So if you’re wondering where I am, or why I haven’t responded to an email, meh.

Posted in General | no comments

Marriott hates babies

Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:05:00 GMT

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been taking the boy to Water Babies, where they help babies to gain confidence in the water, teach them how to grab for a static object when they fall in, and finally work up to getting them swimming on their own underwater.

The sessions are for half an hour each week at Cardiff Marriott hotel’s leisure club, and have been held there for a couple of years. This is apparently all too much for the members of the club, a number of whom have complained about the sessions and had the classes ejected. Not only does this mean that 20 sets of parents have to rejuggle their weekly schedules and travel arrangement, but due to the new venue being far away from my work, it means that I can no longer watch my son swimming.

So, shame on the members at the Cardiff Marriott leisure club, and shame on Cardiff Marriott for not having enough sense of righteousness to tell whichever miserable bastards complained about babies learning to swim to get a life.

Posted in Consumer, General, Hermann | 1 comment

Been a long time, been a long time...

Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:26:00 GMT

No, not another blog post opining after the last time I posted.

Like most folk who have to get a variety of jobs done, I have a Windows partition squirreled away on one of my desktops, and had occasion to use it just now. Unfortunately, according to the Event Viewer, the last time I did this was on June 15th 2006, so now I have to suffer applying a year’s worth of updates first. Arrgh.

Update, 20 minutes later: Wow, that was quick, my system is unbootable.

Posted in General, Software | 1 comment

Has it really been that long?

Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 29 May 2007 18:53:00 GMT

Wow, 24 days passed really quickly…

The trials we were doing with Veritas Cluster Services for UNIX worked out nicely; I’ll have some stuff to write up regarding a consolidation project that I’ll be finishing up in the next few months. On which note, I haven’t forgotten the Solaris Cluster on the Cheap series, I’ve just been crazy busy and away a fair amount of my spare time.

We had a pair of x4500s turn up for some trials today. First trial was getting the damn things to the server room; at 96kg each when boxed it was a matter of removing all 48 disks, the power supplies and the service controller from each, leaving the chassis to be lugged a little more easily.

Huge congratulations to stitch and Dick; they know what for, but I don’t know if they want it common knowledge.

To close, I just discovered that a 16 week old boy can happily hit you from 3 feet away, if you see what I mean…

Posted in Clustering, General, Sun, Veritas | no comments