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Welcome to cobaltfish.com

Beginings of compiling
On 11/01/10 at 23:54 cobaltfish wrote:

I've skipped doing a helo world program and waded in with the source code for navit.
I've cross compiled it to run in the scratchbox emulator/SDK that nokia provide, and even managed to package it into a .deb too. The virtual ui only runs when its in i386 rather than arm mode, and I've had navit work there. However, when I installed the deb compiled for arm onto the handset, and ran navit, it seg faulted.
After much reading around, I have found that the likely source of the problems is with freetype:

 #0  0x410b80c8 in waitpid () from /lib/libc.so.6
#1  0x4105d4ec in do_system () from /lib/libc.so.6
#2  0x4105da04 in system () from /lib/libc.so.6
#3  0x41178b10 in system () from /lib/libpthread.so.0
#4  0x0001b520 in sigsegv (sig=) at debug.c:67
#5  
#6  0x406c5650 in FTC_Manager_LookupFace (manager=0x22fbc8, face_id=0x230ab8, aface=0xbee336cc) at /home/bifh1/fremantle-arm-prereleased.cs2007q3/work/freetype-2.3.9/freetype-2.3.9/src/cache/ftcmanag.c:327
#7  0x406c76f8 in FTC_CMapCache_Lookup (cmap_cache=0x22fcf0, face_id=, cmap_index=2, char_code=87)
    at /home/bifh1/fremantle-arm-prereleased.cs2007q3/work/freetype-2.3.9/freetype-2.3.9/src/cache/ftccmap.c:396
#8  0x406fa9c8 in font_freetype_text_new (text=0x1e2ab4 "Westpark", font=0x22aec0, dx=, dy=) at font_freetype.c:201
#9  0x4023de18 in draw_text (gr=0x86978, fg=0x149520, bg=0x149460, font=0x22aec0, text=0x1e2ab4 "Westpark", p=0xbee63890, dx=64393, dy=12182) at graphics_gtk_drawing_area.c:401
#10 0x000207d0 in displayitem_draw (di=, dummy=, dc=) at graphics.c:857
#11 0x411d07a8 in g_hash_table_foreach () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#12 0x0001f89c in graphics_displaylist_draw (gra=0x625f0, displaylist=0x5c870, trans=, l=, flags=1) at graphics.c:1696
#13 0x0001fda8 in do_draw (displaylist=0x5c870, cancel=0, flags=1) at graphics.c:1892
#14 0x0001ff90 in graphics_draw (gra=0x625f0, displaylist=0x5c870, mapset=0xc3480, trans=0x5c620, l=0xc6dd8, async=0, cb=0x0, flags=1) at graphics.c:1963
#15 0x00025cdc in navit_draw_async (this_=0x5c478, async=0) at navit.c:203
#16 0x00025cf0 in navit_draw (this_=0x0) at navit.c:209
#17 0x0002a02c in navit_handle_resize (this_=0x5c478, w=1080990344, h=-1092405556) at navit.c:264
#18 0x4075cb90 in gui_internal_resize (data=0xa3200, w=800, h=424) at gui_internal.c:4502
#19 0x00019438 in callback_call (cb=0x81f38, pcount=2, p=0xbee83b08) at callback.c:175
#20 0x00019584 in callback_list_call_attr (l=, type=attr_resize, pcount=2296504, p=0xbee336cc) at callback.c:219
#21 0x000196b4 in callback_list_call_attr_args (cbl=0x0, type=attr_resize, count=2) at callback.c:235
#22 0x4023d860 in configure (widget=0x77458, event=, user_data=) at graphics_gtk_drawing_area.c:653
#23 0x4023eba4 in expose (widget=0x0, event=0xbee83f10, user_data=0x2) at graphics_gtk_drawing_area.c:664
#24 0x4036c630 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#25 0x4036c630 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0

I found in redhats bugzilla, and a few IRC logs references to aliasing causing the problems in bug 513582 My next steps are either to try and get some freetype libraries recompiled for the phone which have been fixed, or disable the parts that use freetype. The latter is quite a poor option
Once I have something that is remotely worthy of being called alpha quality, I will add it to this site, and try and get it involved somewhere with the community

0 comment(s)

Linux on phones
On 07/01/10 at 14:03 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, I've certainly got out of the habit of blogging! Its been about a year since I added anything on here. Anyways...
I'm now the proud owner of a nokia n900 running Maemo linux. Its got a fairly decent selection of packages, but is some what lacking in others. I dont think there is currently a maemo optimised package of openoffice, and it would be good to get some satnav on it too.
With regards to sat nav, I've already had a go at compiling for my media box navit, and I think it should be possible to get it working nicely. Once I've got the maemo sdk installed and working, I will add some info to the projects area on here. I've had a look around for festival pre-compiled for maemo5, but not found it yet, so it will be another package to compile

0 comment(s)

Stars and such like
On 20/01/08 at 22:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I've re-ignited my interest in astronomy again. Its been a while since I've done much in the way of serious observing. I did see a few shooting stars while camping this summer (when it wasn't raining!) but haven't done that much else.

I have got myself a new camera and a equatorial mounted telescope, which should mean longer exposure pictures aren't quite so hard, and wont result in huge star trails. However, I have just spotted that my web based auto-resize image script doesn't like my image files-it something about 10 megapixel files being to large....

Some of my pictures are loaded onto the web albums in picasa, but I intend to get them up on here too.

I came across on sourceforge a little tool that looks like it could be useful. Its called Observation and is designed to help amateur astronomers log their observations. Its java and xml based, and can output html, so I intend keeping some kind of archive of what I see online.

Finally, here is one of the many pictures I've taken of the orion nebula and surrounding area of sky:

0 comment(s)

Mythtv
On 06/10/07 at 15:30 cobaltfish wrote:

Over the last couple of weeks I've got myself a small stack of components and started to build myself a media pc. I picked up a nice small case-about the size of the average set top box, a micro atx motherboard and processor, and all the trappings. I've put into it to get tv, a Hauppauge winTV nova-T pci card (it has space for only one card-pci or pci-express) a laptop sized slot loading dvd-rw drive and also attached a usb soundcard, to ensure I get a digital output for my speakers.

I've now got kubuntu 7.04 installed and have myth able to pick up tv, although the digital itv signal here seems no-existant. I'm now working with getting the remote control to work as I want. Alsa is outputting sound, and the usb sound is now set as the default soundcard, however with myth running, I dont have control over its volume via alsa.
The kernel that I'm running at the moment (Kernel 2.6.20-16 ) has ir_common running, which interfers with lirc which is what many use to configure their remote control. Rather than reconfiguring the kernel to exclude ir_common I am working on setting up the appropriate keymaps so that the remote control keys do the appropriate functions in the program. So far I have only mapped the power button to the escape key for exiting the myth frontend, but will work on more, now I know how to do it. I used xev to display the keycodes of the pressed buttons and created a .Xmodmap file in ~/ to map it to a function.
More will be posted, if I ever remember to post stuff up here!

0 comment(s)

Travel
On 06/10/07 at 15:19 cobaltfish wrote:

I've now taken most of my annual Holiday. One week was my normal week of camp in norfolk, and was the weather bad! Not so bad as the year before, as the huge stakes that hold the side of the marquee down didnt spend the week trying to pull out of the ground, but it did rain atleast once on every day. But we all survived, and a large heater was used in the main marquee to keep peoples clothes dry and have somewhere warm to disappear to.

Since august, I've also been over to Germany. I flew into Lubek airport (or Hamburg if you believe ryanair! I stayed the week in a fairly cheep hotel in Hamburg. I got there and asked for the reservation I'd made in my best (school based) german, and got the reply back that there had been a problem of water in the rooms, and I was now in a hotel a few doors up the street. I took me a moment to understand, and by the time I did, they offered to speak in english. But I did try and use german :-)

The week before last, I took a visit to a colo facility on Isle of Man, and set up a stack of gear for my company. My ears wear aching after several days of being blasted by air-con, and my legs from standing about configuring servers. But we got all the kit configured so at the minimum, we can access them from the main office to finish the configuration.

0 comment(s)

Mythtv
On 06/10/07 at 14:30 cobaltfish wrote:

Over the last couple of weeks I've got myself a small stack of components and started to build myself a media pc. I picked up a nice small case-about the size of the average set top box, a micro atx motherboard and processor, and all the trappings. I've put into it to get tv, a Hauppauge winTV nova-T pci card (it has space for only one card-pci or pci-express) a laptop sized slot loading dvd-rw drive and also attached a usb soundcard, to ensure I get a digital output for my speakers.

I've now got kubuntu 7.04 installed and have myth able to pick up tv, although the digital itv signal here seems no-existant. I'm now working with getting the remote control to work as I want. Alsa is outputting sound, and the usb sound is now set as the default soundcard, however with myth running, I dont have control over its volume via alsa.
The kernel that I'm running at the moment (Kernel 2.6.20-16 ) has ir_common running, which interfers with lirc which is what many use to configure their remote control. Rather than reconfiguring the kernel to exclude ir_common I am working on setting up the appropriate keymaps so that the remote control keys do the appropriate functions in the program. So far I have only mapped the power button to the escape key for exiting the myth frontend, but will work on more, now I know how to do it. I used xev to display the keycodes of the pressed buttons and created a .Xmodmap file in ~/ to map it to a function.
More will be posted, if I ever remember to post stuff up here!

0 comment(s)

Travel
On 06/10/07 at 14:19 cobaltfish wrote:

I've now taken most of my annual Holiday. One week was my normal week of camp in norfolk, and was the weather bad! Not so bad as the year before, as the huge stakes that hold the side of the marquee down didnt spend the week trying to pull out of the ground, but it did rain atleast once on every day. But we all survived, and a large heater was used in the main marquee to keep peoples clothes dry and have somewhere warm to disappear to.

Since august, I've also been over to Germany. I flew into Lubek airport (or Hamburg if you believe ryanair! I stayed the week in a fairly cheep hotel in Hamburg. I got there and asked for the reservation I'd made in my best (school based) german, and got the reply back that there had been a problem of water in the rooms, and I was now in a hotel a few doors up the street. I took me a moment to understand, and by the time I did, they offered to speak in english. But I did try and use german :-)

The week before last, I took a visit to a colo facility on Isle of Man, and set up a stack of gear for my company. My ears wear aching after several days of being blasted by air-con, and my legs from standing about configuring servers. But we got all the kit configured so at the minimum, we can access them from the main office to finish the configuration.

0 comment(s)

Apple Store
On 05/07/07 at 23:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I've been talking about visiting the apple store on and off for a while-work has given me a few trips into london, but never that near the store. However Tuesday was different-I was playing courier with content for one of our customer platforms, and that involved me going past the store on Regent Street, on my way out of London. So I kinda got side tracked into there, on my way to oxford circus to find a tube to Liverpool street.
I'd love to wax lyrical about how amazing it was, but at the end of the day, its a computer shop. Yes, for shiney, and interesting computers, but they're still computers at the end of the day. I'd like to have bought one for myself, but with a desktop and laptop of my own, and a work laptop too, I dont exactly need any more machines at this given point in time. Ipods for that matter too. I have an adiquate car stereo, and thats the time when I would listen to mp3s. With iPods not storing tunes as standard file storage, they inherantly are incompatable as usb mass storage of tunes for playing though anything other than specialist software. So I bought a few peripherals instead, so it didnt feel like a total waste of time in there!

0 comment(s)

Apple Store
On 05/07/07 at 22:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I've been talking about visiting the apple store on and off for a while-work has given me a few trips into london, but never that near the store. However Tuesday was different-I was playing courier with content for one of our customer platforms, and that involved me going past the store on Regent Street, on my way out of London. So I kinda got side tracked into there, on my way to oxford circus to find a tube to Liverpool street.
I'd love to wax lyrical about how amazing it was, but at the end of the day, its a computer shop. Yes, for shiney, and interesting computers, but they're still computers at the end of the day. I'd like to have bought one for myself, but with a desktop and laptop of my own, and a work laptop too, I dont exactly need any more machines at this given point in time. Ipods for that matter too. I have an adiquate car stereo, and thats the time when I would listen to mp3s. With iPods not storing tunes as standard file storage, they inherantly are incompatable as usb mass storage of tunes for playing though anything other than specialist software. So I bought a few peripherals instead, so it didnt feel like a total waste of time in there!

0 comment(s)

Fita *
On 05/07/07 at 22:28 cobaltfish wrote:

I completed my first ever world record status, and first ever fita star comp on saturday. I think I came out as the lowest scoring recurve, but still, someone has to be bottom. I think most people of a similar caliber to myself made the intelegent decision to not shoot given the weather. It certainly managed to rain well towards the end of the 50m. The main problem I had was it caused my arrows to drop by about 40 cm. With an 80 cm face, that puts them well out of the middle, and consiquently my score for a couple of ends suffered. That said, I put some good ends in too, getting a distance total of 230 at 70m which I was pleased with.
The weather dried off well enough to make bbq and camping ok overnight. I managed to use my new bbq and tent. The mini barel bbq I'd had for a couple of years suffered a bit at busa and gained an extra "air vent", right in the centre of the bottom 1/2 so got retired. The new one is stainless steel, and sits higher off the ground, so should be a better cooking height, when lounging about in folding chairs after spending the day shooting. It certainly seemed better that height than the old one.
The new tent-its 2 skinned, so doesnt seem so much like its going to leak in the slightest of showers, and has space to dump stuff outside the inner section during showers to keep worst of damp off things.

I've not got any other competitions coming up, but I would really like to get some 1st class scores on the board this season. I keep ending up just a handful of points short

0 comment(s)

Fita *
On 01/07/07 at 23:18 cobaltfish wrote:

I completed my first ever world record status, and first ever fita star comp on saturday. I think I came out as the lowest scoring recurve, but still, someone has to be bottom. I think most people of a similar caliber to myself made the intelegent decision to not shoot given the weather. It certainly managed to rain well towards the end of the 50m. The main problem I had was it caused my arrows to drop by about 40 cm. With an 80 cm face, that puts them well out of the middle, and consiquently my score for a couple of ends suffered. That said, I put some good ends in too, getting a distance total of 230 at 70m which I was pleased with.
The weather dried off well enough to make bbq and camping ok overnight. I managed to use my new bbq and tent. The mini barel bbq I'd had for a couple of years suffered a bit at busa and gained an extra "air vent", right in the centre of the bottom 1/2 so got retired. The new one is stainless steel, and sits higher off the ground, so should be a better cooking height, when lounging about in folding chairs after spending the day shooting. It certainly seemed better that height than the old one.
The new tent-its 2 skinned, so doesnt seem so much like its going to leak in the slightest of showers, and has space to dump stuff outside the inner section during showers to keep worst of damp off things.

I've not got any other competitions coming up, but I would really like to get some 1st class scores on the board this season. I keep ending up just a handful of points short

0 comment(s)

what to do with a web cam and shooting
On 07/06/07 at 22:52 cobaltfish wrote:

I've remembered something I've meant to say in my last update. I've done a bit of experimenting with recording my shooting, as I know various things (like how high my elbow is) need sorting. So I figured I'd borrow my dads mini digi camcorder. But its battery was flat.... so I remembered that the mac book I have, has a web cam. I didnt know how to use iMovie on it at that point, so I pointed my browser at youtube, and connected to the wifi, and recorded straight to youtube. Apologies for the lack of editing on the clips, but it was an interesting experiment:

I took a few more, and raised the laptop to get a better angle of me:

The next day, when the camera had some battery, and I knew how to use iMovie, I compiled this clip, with a spot of editing (once I figured a way of importing the microsoft .asf formated file to a mac, so it could play/edit it. (the answer was to install ffmpegx for transcoding the video, then import the output for editing!

0 comment(s)

what to do with a web cam and shooting
On 07/06/07 at 21:52 cobaltfish wrote:

I've remembered something I've meant to say in my last update. I've done a bit of experimenting with recording my shooting, as I know various things (like how high my elbow is) need sorting. So I figured I'd borrow my dads mini digi camcorder. But its battery was flat.... so I remembered that the mac book I have, has a web cam. I didnt know how to use iMovie on it at that point, so I pointed my browser at youtube, and connected to the wifi, and recorded straight to youtube. Apologies for the lack of editing on the clips, but it was an interesting experiment:

I took a few more, and raised the laptop to get a better angle of me:

The next day, when the camera had some battery, and I knew how to use iMovie, I compiled this clip, with a spot of editing (once I figured a way of importing the microsoft .asf formated file to a mac, so it could play/edit it. (the answer was to install ffmpegx for transcoding the video, then import the output for editing!

0 comment(s)

Norton + BT-Yahoo! broadband = pure evil
On 07/06/07 at 00:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I got the lucky task of sorting a friends computer out after work yesterday. I'd got told that it was wireless problems. TBH, they were just the tip of the iceburg. For starters the machine was unbeliveably slow. I know it wasnt too high a speced machine-256 MB RAM, couple of ghz cpu, but enough to plough its way thru xp home edition, which it did when I first set it up on the broadband. But no. It was making a 486 laptop seem blisteringly fast.
So I try and pull up task manager, only to get (eventualy) the message that the administrator had disabled it. Now, if I was a normal user on a windows domain, with a particulary nasty sys admin who'd locked it out, then I wouldnt be too fussed. But it was xp home, at home, with me logged in as an admistrator.
I coax it to let me reset a user accounts password (the password had been lost), as I thought maybe it was just this profile that was messed up. The other profile seems fine, but gradually ground to a halt, and taskmanager seemed to die, so in frustration I reboot it. to find... yep, task manager had be disabled by the adminsitrator. I was nearly convinced that it was a virus at that point, so getting a date set in diary to visit with a more complete set of. At that point I thought about other possable causes... I set at removing the infestation of BT and symantec software. Even by 1/3 of the way through the un-install, the performance had improved. By the end of it, after a reboot, the system seemed like a new machine.
To make matters worse, as part of the install procedure, Norton internet security had forced the removal of the other firewall and antiviral software on the machine!

So lessons learned... norton internet security-keeps things secure by never giving your computer a chance to access the net!

0 comment(s)

updates
On 07/06/07 at 00:17 cobaltfish wrote:

I have been so busy the last few months.

Isle of man went suprisingly well for me. I shot a couple of personal bests, beat my score from last year, and got a medal! I came 2nd last year, but had to settle for 3rd this year. I'm amazed that I did so well.

The roads of the island were equaly fun. We clocked up a few more miles, and visited a number of our old haunts. Cregneash is becoming a regular place to visit when the weather is nice, which it was on the monday when we went down there. We also went up the steap side of Snaefell-I think the road number is A14. That was quite an experiance! :-)

Since then.... Well, I've done my first outdoor competition of the year, the Canadian 1200 up at Bronte archery club. I wasnt made to feel all that welcome by the organiser, which kinda sucks given that I was an (associate) member of the club. But I enjoyed it all, once the competition got going.

Work is keeping me busy, as ever. But its still enjoyable, which I think is the main thing

I visited the suffolk kite festival the other weekend, and got myself a 3.5 sqr m quad line. Its got some serious power in it. I dont think I optimise its strengths just yet, but it seems good fun to fly. I've had it drag me a short way, while lying on my back. That was funny to do, though I dont think I'll try that trick again in a hurry.

I think that covers most recent events...

0 comment(s)

Norton + BT-Yahoo! broadband = pure evil
On 06/06/07 at 23:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I got the lucky task of sorting a friends computer out after work yesterday. I'd got told that it was wireless problems. TBH, they were just the tip of the iceburg. For starters the machine was unbeliveably slow. I know it wasnt too high a speced machine-256 MB RAM, couple of ghz cpu, but enough to plough its way thru xp home edition, which it did when I first set it up on the broadband. But no. It was making a 486 laptop seem blisteringly fast.
So I try and pull up task manager, only to get (eventualy) the message that the administrator had disabled it. Now, if I was a normal user on a windows domain, with a particulary nasty sys admin who'd locked it out, then I wouldnt be too fussed. But it was xp home, at home, with me logged in as an admistrator.
I coax it to let me reset a user accounts password (the password had been lost), as I thought maybe it was just this profile that was messed up. The other profile seems fine, but gradually ground to a halt, and taskmanager seemed to die, so in frustration I reboot it. to find... yep, task manager had be disabled by the adminsitrator. I was nearly convinced that it was a virus at that point, so getting a date set in diary to visit with a more complete set of. At that point I thought about other possable causes... I set at removing the infestation of BT and symantec software. Even by 1/3 of the way through the un-install, the performance had improved. By the end of it, after a reboot, the system seemed like a new machine.
To make matters worse, as part of the install procedure, Norton internet security had forced the removal of the other firewall and antiviral software on the machine!

So lessons learned... norton internet security-keeps things secure by never giving your computer a chance to access the net!

0 comment(s)

updates
On 06/06/07 at 23:17 cobaltfish wrote:

I have been so busy the last few months.

Isle of man went suprisingly well for me. I shot a couple of personal bests, beat my score from last year, and got a medal! I came 2nd last year, but had to settle for 3rd this year. I'm amazed that I did so well.

The roads of the island were equaly fun. We clocked up a few more miles, and visited a number of our old haunts. Cregneash is becoming a regular place to visit when the weather is nice, which it was on the monday when we went down there. We also went up the steap side of Snaefell-I think the road number is A14. That was quite an experiance! :-)

Since then.... Well, I've done my first outdoor competition of the year, the Canadian 1200 up at Bronte archery club. I wasnt made to feel all that welcome by the organiser, which kinda sucks given that I was an (associate) member of the club. But I enjoyed it all, once the competition got going.

Work is keeping me busy, as ever. But its still enjoyable, which I think is the main thing

I visited the suffolk kite festival the other weekend, and got myself a 3.5 sqr m quad line. Its got some serious power in it. I dont think I optimise its strengths just yet, but it seems good fun to fly. I've had it drag me a short way, while lying on my back. That was funny to do, though I dont think I'll try that trick again in a hurry.

I think that covers most recent events...

0 comment(s)

shooting time!
On 26/03/07 at 13:58 cobaltfish wrote:

Hmm IoM could be interesting. This afternoon I shot the back of an arrow off! And that was outside, with it being cold damp and windy, and no target face cos the damp was disintegrating it! Been a while since I've done that. That said, come the head to head on the last day, I know I'll be flagging a bit.

0 comment(s)

shooting time!
On 24/03/07 at 17:56 cobaltfish wrote:

Hmm IoM could be interesting. This afternoon I shot the back of an arrow off! And that was outside, with it being cold damp and windy, and no target face cos the damp was disintegrating it! Been a while since I've done that. That said, come the head to head on the last day, I know I'll be flagging a bit.

0 comment(s)

to much gadgets
On 16/03/07 at 21:01 cobaltfish wrote:

well, here I am, on the train just past doncaster, having already used this laptop to connect via bluetooth to phone to internet, and with that, thru to work to do some reconfiguration of servers. It was so slow, espec whe then going over a vpn to the clients site, which is slow at best of times. But I managed to reconfigure the re-writes on an apache box. It takes me back to the good old days of dial up. Slow, but it gets there most of the time, if patient. It also encourages good typing on the command line, as it can take a sec for the character to register on the terminal.
I guess I need more challenges for locations to work from. The trouble is, with satelite phones the internet can now be got any where-even on south pole if really needed. That said, spain is the only place I've gone away to, so Antarctica may be a little bit over the top for hunting for off site work locations.
(I'm blogging to distract myself from the domestic between the people on the seats accross the asile from me)

0 comment(s)

at 3gsm
On 14/02/07 at 15:45 cobaltfish wrote:

wow-its big here. I have some pictures of parts of it that I've seen. I think its over 900 exibitors, so a lot of stands to see, ranging from mobile phones, to base stations, to indistructable laptops. I got people ot pour water over the panasonic tough book as a demonstration. People at work thought I was a bit over excited by that idea!
Anyway, I landed ok last night, and got to the restuant where everyone from work was, a couple of hours after they finished eating. The passport control barely glanced at my passport on the way off the plane!
No major problems so far-We had a network cable work itself loose, and thats about it. The stand we've got looks really good. I'll get round to uploading some pics at some point

0 comment(s)

to 3gsm
On 13/02/07 at 18:40 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, my first trip abroad has come up-I know, 22 years and the furthest I've been away is Isle of Man!
Anyway I'm in the departure lounge at Stanstead Airport, with a nice two hour delay on my flight. "Operational Difficulties being given as the reason-maybe they just cant think of a real excuse!
Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to be tech support on my companies stand at 3gsm, which is like the biggest mobile devices etc show in world. I'm hoping for a chance to walk arround-there should be lots of shiney toys there, so will be taking pictures-I've even cleared out memory cards for the occasion, and have my own collection of toys to take. (My hand luggage got searched cos it triggered their sensors cos of all the electical goods it had in it)
I eventualy boarded about 3 hours late.
Take off didnt seem nearly as exciting as people seemed to make out. I cant say I noticed the g's holding me into my seat as much as I expected, but I did notice the cabin pressure.
I have a window seat. I had a great view of a wet stanstead airport at take off. Its now all black... wait! I can see a light!! Oh-just the wingtip light again!

** this would have been posted while waiting at stanstead airport, if orange hadnt decided my login to my blog was adult content! **

0 comment(s)

p990, osx and usb support
On 20/01/07 at 23:53 cobaltfish wrote:

I've managed to get usb support in os x with the p990. On the blog of Magnus Norlander, a file has been released (the author takes no responsibility for what the file may do etc) But what it does, is lets os x correctly identify the phone as a composite device, rather than just a communications device. I think changes were made to the linux kernel to do this kind of thing also-I noticed comments next to a change in one version.

Again, I take no responsability for what the file may do etc etc.... but it worked for me with my p990

0 comment(s)

Small update to website
On 20/01/07 at 12:23 cobaltfish wrote:

I've made a small update to my website, to prevent people not putting names in when commenting, and also, to email me when comments are made. This way I should keep on top of the spam comments I get from time to time. I also spotted that my listing of blog entries on the side isnt working perfectly either-I had a variable set to the year (when I updated the page code) rather than what the system date is.

2 comment(s)

New car stereo
On 20/01/07 at 12:10 cobaltfish wrote:

I've finaly replaced my car stereo, from the rubbishy rover one, which only had a tape slot in its favour, as that meant my mp3/minidisk/phone could be plugged in.
I bought a Nikkai USB (theoreticaly) compatable stereo from maplin cos it sounded like what I wanted. However, it didnt work with many of my usb drives-the only one with any decent capacity was my 250GB USB, and that being a normal hardisk in a usb caddy, I doubt would last, even if i got a 12v supply to it. It also has a very bright screen, which was quite tiring to have in the corner of my eyes shining, during night time driving. Seeing as 1/2 my driving is at night, I figured it realy wasnt for me.
So I decided to spend a bit more money, and get a brandname I'd heard of. I got a kenwood KDC-534UA as it had all the functions I need, and also has a red key ilumination, similar to my cars interior lighting!
Once I'd ordered it, I rediscovered how much fun living in a vilage is.... delivery companys realy cant be bothered sometimes in finding the house. City link in particular. I decided to check where it was on monday evening, having been expecting delivery on the friday. turns out that they had attempted to deliver but "Delivery point closed (Carded)". well-there was no card at the house. When I phoned the depot, I mentioned that there had been no card. I was then told that it had been left at the black door, to which I responded "but we dont have a black door"! Anyway, drama aside, I went and collected it during my lunch hour.
The KDC-534UA seems so much better than the nikkai-its less fiddly to press buttons, clearer layout, it has a sensor for if the car lights are on, to dim the display. The usb compatability seems a lot better too-it works with my phone (P990) when its set to have the memory card as a usb disk. It doesnt however work with my creative zen nano. But given that I carry my phone with me anyway, its as useful to be able to plug it in at home/work to change the tunes loaded on it, and in the car to listen to them.

2 comment(s)

what-another comet
On 11/01/07 at 23:44 cobaltfish wrote:

yep-I spotted another comet. This time without binoculars and lots of searching. I saw the pics that bbc had in their science news, and decided to work out where and when to look. The charts I found were saying for about 30 mins after sunset, only for next couple of days. I checked sunset time for Ipswich, and wandered outside at about 4:44 pm to take a look. And there it was! The comet is called Comet McNaught. I dont have any pics to post. I'm taking a camera to work tomorrow in the hopes its clear and I get a chance to look again.
I managed to point the comet out to a couple of people at work. They were bothe impressed with it.

In other news... work is still keeping me busy-had quite a busy week this week, with anything from hacked servers to failed our isp's dns servers failing and them not being too cooperative-I guess its all part of lifes rich tapestry!

0 comment(s)

oops-2 months went by!
On 17/12/06 at 00:35 cobaltfish wrote:

Wow-this work thing is really having an effect on my perception of time-it doesnt seem like 2 months have gone by. Anyway, since I last got round to saying anything....

• I managed to spot the comet in the end.
  I also tried my hand at multi-frame exposures and combining them to create one (hopefully) better image. Considering all I had was a 2 megapixel digital camera, that wasnt tracking, and I combined the images by manually adjusting them in gimp, I was quite pleased


• I've had more visits to the data centre for installing and configuring the servers we have in our rack. I even got to drive down there with one in the car boot. Its certainly an experiance driving in london. But I survived


• Guildwars nightfall came out, and I got my copy. It seems good, tho I've not really progressed very far, 'cause I decided to finish factions with my main character


• I've started work on a slightly silly project, that will create a usb device. More should go up on my website at some point


• I've got my first ever mac! Its a macbook, coloured white. I'm writing this post on it. Its actually one of works machines, but I get to use it on the condition that I help people at work when they have problems with macs, and that it may occasionaly be needed for testing.


• I've got a new phone. I got it today. Its the shiney new sony ericsson p990i. its definately still a bit buggy-I've had the email and web-browser causing crashes mostly, but its nice having built in wifi, usb support (only with windows at the moment it seems, but it looks like code is being included in kernel 2.6.19-rc6 that will give linux support. os-x support is also lacking. It seems sony ericsson said that it would be isync compatible, and then didnt put the required bluetooth profiles for this in the phone in the end.
l

• and finaly, I only have 2 days work before my christmas holidays. I'm looking forward to having a break-I've ended up working quite hard at work. But I enjoy my job, and as far as everyone there is concerned, it seems I'm doing well

0 comment(s)

Juicy!
On 07/10/06 at 20:59 cobaltfish wrote:

I can tell that I'm back in the countryside again. Aside from late night star gazing, I've made some apple juice
This afternoon, I helped use up some of the windfalls and small apples from this years crop. a bucket full of them got turned into about 5 litres of apple juice. The only additive is vitamin C, which helps stop it going brown, and the apples are pretty much organic too, so all in all a nice healthy drink! I've not tried any yet, but if its smell is anything to go by, it should be good!

With the star gazing, I went outside again 4 ish and tryed a bit more to see the comet-I was able to see some stars just about, that were magnitude 6. I dont think I was quite looking in the right place on my first session, but the moon and distant clouds, aswell as trees on the horizon made life.. interesting! But I did see a nice bright shooting star pass from Orion towards Sirus.

1 comment(s)

Juicy!
On 07/10/06 at 19:59 cobaltfish wrote:

I can tell that I'm back in the countryside again. Aside from late night star gazing, I've made some apple juice
This afternoon, I helped use up some of the windfalls and small apples from this years crop. a bucket full of them got turned into about 5 litres of apple juice. The only additive is vitamin C, which helps stop it going brown, and the apples are pretty much organic too, so all in all a nice healthy drink! I've not tried any yet, but if its smell is anything to go by, it should be good!

With the star gazing, I went outside again 4 ish and tryed a bit more to see the comet-I was able to see some stars just about, that were magnitude 6. I dont think I was quite looking in the right place on my first session, but the moon and distant clouds, aswell as trees on the horizon made life.. interesting! But I did see a nice bright shooting star pass from Orion towards Sirus.

0 comment(s)

Too much moonshine
On 07/10/06 at 03:28 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm trying to spot a comet called Swan (called SWAN after the Solar Wind ANisotropies instrument, which measures solar wind, on the joint NASA/ESA spacecraft)
The trouble is, its full moon out there, and although its 3 am, it feels almost light enough to be a murky day! I've tried looking with my little scope earlier this week, but its not that good. Also, I've been struggling to find a good north / west horizon to spot it from (evenings) or (early mornings) north/east. But a short walk to beside a field gives some better results.
The sky glow and high altitude murk is such that I was able to pick out a star at about 4.26, but the comet is supposedly anything between 5 and 8, and with the intensity being a logarithmic scale, thats quite a difference.
Here's a link to an image of the comet 2006 SWAN (The SWAN instrument has detected other comets too-I think the first was about 2002)
I hope I do get a chance to spot it-its been about a decade since I've seen a comet! And that was Hale-Bopp-quite a comet!
Its now clouded over totaly, so I guess I best call it a night

0 comment(s)

Too much moonshine
On 07/10/06 at 02:28 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm trying to spot a comet called Swan (called SWAN after the Solar Wind ANisotropies instrument, which measures solar wind, on the joint NASA/ESA spacecraft)
The trouble is, its full moon out there, and although its 3 am, it feels almost light enough to be a murky day! I've tried looking with my little scope earlier this week, but its not that good. Also, I've been struggling to find a good north / west horizon to spot it from (evenings) or (early mornings) north/east. But a short walk to beside a field gives some better results.
The sky glow and high altitude murk is such that I was able to pick out a star at about 4.26, but the comet is supposedly anything between 5 and 8, and with the intensity being a logarithmic scale, thats quite a difference.
Here's a link to an image of the comet 2006 SWAN (The SWAN instrument has detected other comets too-I think the first was about 2002)
I hope I do get a chance to spot it-its been about a decade since I've seen a comet! And that was Hale-Bopp-quite a comet!
Its now clouded over totaly, so I guess I best call it a night

0 comment(s)

Old wheels
On 30/09/06 at 22:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I'll try and get back into blogging again

I decided to get some new tyres for my car-the ones on it seemed a bit worn. They still life left before passing the need for 1.6 mm of tread, but with winter coming, I didnt want to be caught out, with 200+ miles worth of commuting a week.
When I got to the tyre place, they pointed out that they wernt all knackered. But showed how that atleast 2 of them were van tyres! That may explain why I was wheelspinning in 2nd gear while pulling hard through a junction on the way there! They checked my spare, and that turned out to be an original 1994 tyre (all be it worn out) The guys there were nice and honest, and said I didnt need all 4 done, so did the 3 worn (2 front and spare) and put the odd tyre out in place of the spare. I suppose its one way of spending a chunk of my first pay cheque!

In other car related news. I found out whats the problem with my radio having rubbish FM reception. The arial seems to be dead. I fitted a bit of wire (telephone cable) to a galvinised nail, and had better reception than with the roof mounted one! Also, I have sunglasses, ready for the winter season. I survived all summer without them! The daily commute is east in mornings, so into the sunrise, and then west at sunset. The glare can be so nasty, so I figured I could afford them!

0 comment(s)

Old wheels
On 30/09/06 at 21:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I'll try and get back into blogging again

I decided to get some new tyres for my car-the ones on it seemed a bit worn. They still life left before passing the need for 1.6 mm of tread, but with winter coming, I didnt want to be caught out, with 200+ miles worth of commuting a week.
When I got to the tyre place, they pointed out that they wernt all knackered. But showed how that atleast 2 of them were van tyres! That may explain why I was wheelspinning in 2nd gear while pulling hard through a junction on the way there! They checked my spare, and that turned out to be an original 1994 tyre (all be it worn out) The guys there were nice and honest, and said I didnt need all 4 done, so did the 3 worn (2 front and spare) and put the odd tyre out in place of the spare. I suppose its one way of spending a chunk of my first pay cheque!

In other car related news. I found out whats the problem with my radio having rubbish FM reception. The arial seems to be dead. I fitted a bit of wire (telephone cable) to a galvinised nail, and had better reception than with the roof mounted one! Also, I have sunglasses, ready for the winter season. I survived all summer without them! The daily commute is east in mornings, so into the sunrise, and then west at sunset. The glare can be so nasty, so I figured I could afford them!

0 comment(s)

Data centre
On 29/09/06 at 22:59 cobaltfish wrote:

Yesterday I was down in london with a trip to a data centre to deploy some servers.
We set off from work at about 8:30, and made it into London by about 11:00, and then had to undload the kit, take stuff out of boxes and get it up to the suite we were located in.
Quite impressive-the stacks and stacks of hardware in there-I dread to think what it was all worth, seeing as the kit we had prob topped 30 grad, and it wasnt even uber expensive stuff. It was about 20 servers plus firewalling, so 30 grand is a tame estimate. We had a medium density rack-cos we may draw about 30 amps from everything. We spent a couple of hours loading the rack mount rails in, and fitting the hardware (putting servers into the rails above head height is .... interesting) before taking a short break for food (and to escape the noise of goodness only how many fans, and a much needed sit down) before cabling it all in-power, network, the lot. It was kinda confusing deciding the temperature the room was at-it was kinda warm, with the heat chucked out from servers, yet cool from the air con!
By 6 ish we were all done, and ready to get home, but had the rush hour trafic of london to negotiate. The cyclists-both pedal and motor were insane! I'm suprised more arent injured, the way they launch themselfs into non-existant gaps, and jump lights. I'm glad I wasnt driving. Needless to say, we made it back in one peice, and live to tell the tale!

0 comment(s)

Data centre
On 29/09/06 at 21:59 cobaltfish wrote:

Yesterday I was down in london with a trip to a data centre to deploy some servers.
We set off from work at about 8:30, and made it into London by about 11:00, and then had to undload the kit, take stuff out of boxes and get it up to the suite we were located in.
Quite impressive-the stacks and stacks of hardware in there-I dread to think what it was all worth, seeing as the kit we had prob topped 30 grad, and it wasnt even uber expensive stuff. It was about 20 servers plus firewalling, so 30 grand is a tame estimate. We had a medium density rack-cos we may draw about 30 amps from everything. We spent a couple of hours loading the rack mount rails in, and fitting the hardware (putting servers into the rails above head height is .... interesting) before taking a short break for food (and to escape the noise of goodness only how many fans, and a much needed sit down) before cabling it all in-power, network, the lot. It was kinda confusing deciding the temperature the room was at-it was kinda warm, with the heat chucked out from servers, yet cool from the air con!
By 6 ish we were all done, and ready to get home, but had the rush hour trafic of london to negotiate. The cyclists-both pedal and motor were insane! I'm suprised more arent injured, the way they launch themselfs into non-existant gaps, and jump lights. I'm glad I wasnt driving. Needless to say, we made it back in one peice, and live to tell the tale!

0 comment(s)

Employment
On 17/09/06 at 16:03 cobaltfish wrote:

I guess I best update again.

I have now got a job after my time over in Cov on a training course. I start on monday, and have discovered that one of my school mates works for the same firm. What's more amusing is that my dad used to work on the same site that I will be at, but for BT. I'm just glad I'm not going to have to be covering most of the entire length of the A14 in a day any more.
I've clocked up about 400 miles this weekend! I took a detour to bradford from coventry on friday, passing lots of broken down cars and such like on the hard shoulder. There were a lot of speed restrictions, it felt like it took for ever. But I made it to Bradford and went out and relaxed and chatted with Cat and Paul. I had to then go back to suffolk via coventry cos I'd left my laptop there!
My car is doing good. I'm pleased with its efficency-it does about 40 MPG, depending on how hard I drive it-I suspect I could even get it up to 45MPG if I decided to go a little slower and do 60 the whole time! The boot space is quite good too-as I found out before term ended, with getting about 6 bows in it, and people inside the car too. I now get to drive in rush-hour to get to work. Its only about 22 miles, but it may take a while, depending on how many car accidents there are between home and work. For the sake of my sanity I need a new stereo. The FM reception is... well more it isnt! And yesterday the tape adaptor was being crazy, so I couldnt even use my mini-disk to provide music. My phone was the stand in and did well. tho music doesnt restart after reciving a phone call. The voice activated dialing is great-why do so many people not bother with hands free? Its so much simpler being able to use it than worry about holding a phone, changing gear and gripping the stearing wheel (and not ilegal either!)

0 comment(s)

Employment
On 17/09/06 at 15:03 cobaltfish wrote:

I guess I best update again.

I have now got a job after my time over in Cov on a training course. I start on monday, and have discovered that one of my school mates works for the same firm. What's more amusing is that my dad used to work on the same site that I will be at, but for BT. I'm just glad I'm not going to have to be covering most of the entire length of the A14 in a day any more.
I've clocked up about 400 miles this weekend! I took a detour to bradford from coventry on friday, passing lots of broken down cars and such like on the hard shoulder. There were a lot of speed restrictions, it felt like it took for ever. But I made it to Bradford and went out and relaxed and chatted with Cat and Paul. I had to then go back to suffolk via coventry cos I'd left my laptop there!
My car is doing good. I'm pleased with its efficency-it does about 40 MPG, depending on how hard I drive it-I suspect I could even get it up to 45MPG if I decided to go a little slower and do 60 the whole time! The boot space is quite good too-as I found out before term ended, with getting about 6 bows in it, and people inside the car too. I now get to drive in rush-hour to get to work. Its only about 22 miles, but it may take a while, depending on how many car accidents there are between home and work. For the sake of my sanity I need a new stereo. The FM reception is... well more it isnt! And yesterday the tape adaptor was being crazy, so I couldnt even use my mini-disk to provide music. My phone was the stand in and did well. tho music doesnt restart after reciving a phone call. The voice activated dialing is great-why do so many people not bother with hands free? Its so much simpler being able to use it than worry about holding a phone, changing gear and gripping the stearing wheel (and not ilegal either!)

0 comment(s)

Off to camp for real
On 27/08/06 at 21:48 cobaltfish wrote:

Well this time I should stay at camp for a propper length of time. I've had 2 weeks of the training course. I think I've mostly consolidated on things I already knew, but the practice, and the actual being taught wont have hurt at all.
I've done a small amount of work in Jon and Janes new house. He's got a picture of me or 2 working. They now have a network installed (by me) and attached to wall sockets. I managed to crimp/punch the cables correctly, with no errors, which is quite pleasing, seeing as I've not got that much in the way of spares left now of RJ45's
The journey down from coventry this afternoon took for ever! Once I made it through the queues onto the A14, the heavens opened and I could only safely do about 40mph anyway! But I made it in one peice! I have an apointment in Ipswich in the morning before heading up to Norfolk to get a chip fixed on my screen. I managed to pick it up on my way up to sheffield to replace som RJ45's in Lou and Gibbons house, (and to collect a longbow as a prop for a 'hunt the leader' type game on camp) But the insurance will pay for a free chip repair, so thats all ok.
I have had agencies getting in touch with me about possable jobs-wait and see how they come on!

0 comment(s)

Start of Course
On 27/08/06 at 21:41 cobaltfish wrote:

I made it up to coventry yesterday, after lunch. It was a pretty un-eventful drive. If only A14 were always like that.
The weather for the few days I spent on camp did improve a bit. It was still plenty blowy. I flew a friends 10ft Flexifoil (Identical to mine, but using his saved me finding mine) and came uncomfortably close to knocking myself out. I got a good bit of air under my feet, and landed badly, while tacking the kite accross the sky. The result was me landing on my bum hard, and following through by cracking my head on the floor. I kept the kite under control as my sight went funny, but chose to land it for some reason! (although I was within 20ft of the cliff, the wind was coming over it, so perfectly safe!)
So far the content of the course was mostly admin type stuff, and fairly basic. But they need to have everyone at a similar level, and I have the advantage of some experiance in IT already

0 comment(s)

Bad Weather on Camp
On 27/08/06 at 21:34 cobaltfish wrote:

The weather on camp has been bad this week-it seems to have got worse since I left. Ruth and Lou were apparently fairly close to a lightning yesterday, and I went up to camp today. The corner of it was attached to a minibus, and the ground was so wet, and the wind strong, that the 3 ft long iron stakes for securing the sides of the marqueue were just pulling through the ground, as fast as they got put in. The wind dropped during the day, and the tent that blew off its pegs was replaced.
I'm now un-un-employed, in preparation for my trip up to coventry and my training course.

0 comment(s)

Off to camp for real
On 18/08/06 at 22:48 cobaltfish wrote:

Well this time I should stay at camp for a propper length of time. I've had 2 weeks of the training course. I think I've mostly consolidated on things I already knew, but the practice, and the actual being taught wont have hurt at all.
I've done a small amount of work in Jon and Janes new house. He's got a picture of me or 2 working. They now have a network installed (by me) and attached to wall sockets. I managed to crimp/punch the cables correctly, with no errors, which is quite pleasing, seeing as I've not got that much in the way of spares left now of RJ45's
The journey down from coventry this afternoon took for ever! Once I made it through the queues onto the A14, the heavens opened and I could only safely do about 40mph anyway! But I made it in one peice! I have an apointment in Ipswich in the morning before heading up to Norfolk to get a chip fixed on my screen. I managed to pick it up on my way up to sheffield to replace som RJ45's in Lou and Gibbons house, (and to collect a longbow as a prop for a 'hunt the leader' type game on camp) But the insurance will pay for a free chip repair, so thats all ok.
I have had agencies getting in touch with me about possable jobs-wait and see how they come on!

0 comment(s)

Start of Course
On 07/08/06 at 22:41 cobaltfish wrote:

I made it up to coventry yesterday, after lunch. It was a pretty un-eventful drive. If only A14 were always like that.
The weather for the few days I spent on camp did improve a bit. It was still plenty blowy. I flew a friends 10ft Flexifoil (Identical to mine, but using his saved me finding mine) and came uncomfortably close to knocking myself out. I got a good bit of air under my feet, and landed badly, while tacking the kite accross the sky. The result was me landing on my bum hard, and following through by cracking my head on the floor. I kept the kite under control as my sight went funny, but chose to land it for some reason! (although I was within 20ft of the cliff, the wind was coming over it, so perfectly safe!)
So far the content of the course was mostly admin type stuff, and fairly basic. But they need to have everyone at a similar level, and I have the advantage of some experiance in IT already

0 comment(s)

Bad Weather on Camp
On 03/08/06 at 22:34 cobaltfish wrote:

The weather on camp has been bad this week-it seems to have got worse since I left. Ruth and Lou were apparently fairly close to a lightning yesterday, and I went up to camp today. The corner of it was attached to a minibus, and the ground was so wet, and the wind strong, that the 3 ft long iron stakes for securing the sides of the marqueue were just pulling through the ground, as fast as they got put in. The wind dropped during the day, and the tent that blew off its pegs was replaced.
I'm now un-un-employed, in preparation for my trip up to coventry and my training course.

0 comment(s)

Unemployed and camp
On 27/07/06 at 22:30 cobaltfish wrote:

*decideds to update blog for first time in a while, a month after it happened*
I'm back to being un-employed now, and have breifly signed on to jobseekers allowance. I'm going to be signing off it shortly, as I'm off on a training course on 7th July in coventry, so am no longer quite as available as the government might what me to be to claim it. I dont want to get in trouble for screwing the system, so I figured it was as easy to sign off.
That leads me onto camp. I've gone up to Norfolk to help with the setup there. The caravans got sorted out and emptied today, and the store tent set up. It felt kinda interesting building a tent with a thunderstorm rumbling in the distance. But no drama happened while it was being assembled, and the rain didnt come until after it was pitched. It was embarising watching the slow going of a battery powered strimmer on some of the long grass by the tent, as they tried to clear a path to it.
Tomorrow, the rest of the work will be done, such as pitching the tents for campers etc

0 comment(s)

Graduation (part 2)
On 21/07/06 at 00:25 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, I'm back down south again after graduation. As promised, I have some pictures online. Currently they are on 2 pages, though I will prob aquire more from Hannah and Cat. Link Page 1, Page 2
I got a picture of Ely Cathederal on my way up, from the car. Not the best image you'll ever see-if I'd been on the other side of the train, and not packed my camera, I could have grabbed a snap then too:

The day was realy hot, but inspite of the heat, I spent most of the day dressed up with all my gear on. I wanted to make the most of the occasion, as I dont think its going to happen again any time soon. Anyway here I am, all dressed up:

My department layed on a great "party" before our ceremony-there was a good selection of food, and was all free! It gave a nice chance to catch up with a lot of my friends. I didnt realise how many I did actualy know in my school. My only disapointment is that I still havent had my results letter saying my classification on my degree, even though I have the certificate from the ceremony yesterday.
I'm back on the job hunt-Hopefully something will come up soon!

0 comment(s)

Graduation
On 18/07/06 at 12:06 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm now on my way to bradford for my graduation. I'm soon to be BSc (Hons) That said, the university are yet to give my my official results! I guess I'll go check it once I get to Bradford.
We're taking the scenic route, cos of a multitude of hold ups on A14. We went past Ely just a few minutrs ago (the joys of GPRS PDA phones)
I'll try and post pics once I get propper internet back

0 comment(s)

Back From Coventry
On 13/07/06 at 00:27 cobaltfish wrote:

I went up to Coventry yesterday, on the whole job hunting game. I spent the night over at Jon + Jane's. They've got quite a nice flat over there, though I think they're shortly buying a house!
Anyway, today I was at an assessment day, which actualy seemed to go really well. The advice and talk from the people running it on its own I think was very helpful.
I was pleased at how I did at the aptitude and other test they had for us to do. I think I got 83% on the aptitude, and 79% on the background computing. I struggled to remember some of my win 98 stuff in the test-seems a little pointless, seeing as how Microsoft have retired it now.
I think the upshot of this all is that I'm going to be offered a place on their training scheme. Its not actually paid, but it will give me something to keep my busy for 7 or 8 weeks, by which point I should have another feather in my cap, when it comes to greeting employers.
We've had a bit of fun tonight at home. Our mains water pipe sprung a leek. The Plumber/engineer from Anglian Water has just left, unfortunately unable to fix it, as the hole is just above ground level where the pipe enters the house, and the pipe is apparently also of an unusal gauge! Fortunately we dont think it has been leeking for long-under 24 hours-prob under 12.

0 comment(s)

How to install iTunes on Windows Vista 64
On 09/07/06 at 21:16 cobaltfish wrote:

I've been trying to get iTunes to install on my shiney install of windows vista (64bit) beta 2, but when ever I try to install iTunes, it helpfuly tells me how it wont run on the 64 bit platform-realy helpful considering I'm sure versions run on the OS X 64bit for the G5's I had a hunt around on the web for what I could see, and this is what I came up with:

1. install itunes on a *normal* version of windows. In my case, this was my 32bit windows xp installation
2. copy files from the following directory to somewhere the 64bit machine can access:
   %WINDOWS_DIRECTORY\%Downloaded Installations\{1E8CF57A-24E8-4A97-9564-A8F1956C447B} in my case, this was
   C:\WINDOWS\\Downloaded Installations\{1E8CF57A-24E8-4A97-9564-A8F1956C447B}
3. run QuickTimeInstaller.exe on the 64bit machine-this should install ok, but vista will prompt you about visual themes and stuff
4. run iTunesSetup.exe on the 64bit machine. Because the msi file for iTunes was configured on a 32bit system it then installs ok
5. reboot, and run iTunes. There is a message about visual themes with this too, but it does work.

I cant tell you if any features are missing or not-I've only just got it working. Updates on this if I do find anything major not working

4 comment(s)

more job hunting
On 29/06/06 at 12:33 cobaltfish wrote:

I think I'm loosing track of how many jobs I've applied to. atleast 13 online, and about another 5 offline.
But my major question is "Why Word document" I've tryed to make it my policy to provide my CV as PDF format when no format is requested. PDF is readable as the creator intended-not too many ambiguities brought in by old word versions, or openoffice etc. Word suggests such out-right reliance on M$

Also, I'm thinking of creating a list of things not to do while traveling at 25 mph or less.

1. Try and pour coffee from a themos into the cup (on my way up to Bradford at weekend)
2. Blow out your rear bike tire x 2 (I managed it today on my way home, as well as a couple of years ago)

(this is a work in progress-I may publish more additions to it, as I think of them)
I Just had a meeting with someone from a recruitment agency in Needham. They may have a role which I am just about suitable. I spent best part of an hour talking with them about my CV and such like.
I then cycled home-it was a nice day, so I decided to save money/petrol. About 1/4 mile on the way there, heard the fateful hissing noise of a blown rear tire. I then walked the last 1.25 miles with my bike-1/2 of it carrying bike, so I didnt damage the bike tire any more! Well, its one way to get some excercise!

0 comment(s)

a road too far
On 24/06/06 at 19:22 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, I'm now down south for the forseeable future. I've finished uni, and moved my stuff from the house its been in for the last 3 years.
I drove a car load back down on monday, and came back up yesterday to sort the other bits out, and to then head over to york to pick my sis and all her stuff up from halls.
I managed to drive about 120 miles down the wrong road on monday! I headed south on the M1 rather than the A1 so it was no major problem, and seeing as both roads intersect with the A14, it just meant a longer haul east at the tail of the journey.
I am getting far to used to not having the internal mirror, just the side ones on the car when traveling-I could see a nice brown cardboard box with it this afternoon!

I'm now job hunting in earnest. if anyone has bright ideas of who to apply to in the yorkshire area, it would be much appreciated, though I have put in about 10-15 applications to things already!

Talking with Han just now gave me a brilliant idea for a cooking experiment..... to make some archery muffins! The aim being to have the colours of the target face made up by muffins. Yellow shouldnt be too hard-just a pale-ish plain muffin. Red could be cherry, enhanced with some colouring. Blue could be a plain one, with just blue colouring, or, if I can get hold of them, blueberrys. Black would be done by making double chocolate muffins. The white, with white choc chip. This seems like a good plan for an archery cake stall or something!

0 comment(s)

building gaim plugin
On 16/06/06 at 02:31 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm begining to see the need of learning C. I've been looking at the plugins available for gaim to try and have some way of implementing my status as part of my account friendly name for the msn protocol (which I mostly use at the moment) say if I'm sleeping, my name is changed to "cobaltfish :: *random witty comment* {sleeping}"
I cant see anything out there on the web yet to do this. So I think I'm going to finaly get round to learning C, and will prob have to practice compiling in both windows and linux to create dlls to run the windows gaim client, and the .o files for linux.

Also, at the same time, I'm looking into re-developing my website, and using better software development procedures, rather than tacking bits on here and there. I've revised my knowlage of UML, and writen some of the site in UML.

I should realy go to bed-its the beach party tomorrow on amphitheater, and the last day of term-ever! I'm also going to be off at an archery competition for saturday-leaving here by about 7 am

0 comment(s)

Gravatars and things
On 09/06/06 at 18:27 cobaltfish wrote:

I now have updated the comments page on my website to allow people to use gravatars. All that is needed is to fill in your gravatar email address on the comments section and it will link in to your given gravatar. I may try and implement some kind of gravatar cache, but I think that will have to be after a big re-design. I could do with designing my site and writing the functions that I'll need-to follow some what more of a true software development cycle than just patching bits and bobs here and there, like I have done before.
Exams are now over for me, which means the job hunting is now somewhat more ernest, altho the archery still keeps me fairly busy.
I got a silver medal in the qualifying for the NEAUL Head to Head in Durham. Unfortunately the day dragged on, so I ended up having to retire from the semi-finals, in order to go to the Arts Ball, back in Bradford, which is a real shame, considering it was the first time I'd ever got past the 2nd round in any knock out type competion. I did ok on the clout, the next day (driving back from Bradford to be in Durham for 2 am). I scored a total of 23-more than 10 times what I managed the year before, but still about 1/2 of the winning score, but nothing to be ashamed of.

3 comment(s)

Maximum Security at Tesco
On 23/05/06 at 02:03 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm kinda scared by tesco's self service tills. I went with Han and Luke for a few bits and bobs to cook ourselfs tea, and we chose to use the self service checkout. It was very picky about items going into, and out of the "bagged" area after being scanned. I think 3 of us in the checkout area confused it.
What realy concerns me is the payment. Luke only needed to swipe his card to tell the system to debit his account. It didnt ask him to verify with his pin, just the physical presence of his card. Yes I know that the system has cameras and AI and neural networks, but surely a form of user identification verification should be incorperated-seing as normal checkouts use it?! If I'd nicked lukes wallet, apart from all the cctv of me on the till, I could pretty much have bought what I liked!

On other topics.... I spent a bit of the weekend fixing viruses and network problems on a laptop of a housemate of someone I know. I dont think their windows install was legit-it made me so glad that I stick to opensource or freely available stuff for all my pc software. If only ati graphics cards and nvida chipsets worked in linux beter, and then I could abandon it on my desktop, and use cedega for windows environment emulation for games, and run the few that I find time to play!

0 comment(s)

AAA! BSOD
On 19/05/06 at 07:00 cobaltfish wrote:

I've been doing some catching up on coursework for deadlines the last two days, so have been a bit absent from my bed... What however was concerning, was watching out of the corner of my eye, my desktop go into the Blue Screen Of Death, while I was writing the report on my laptop, for the code I'd compiled with my desktop. It took me a couple of secs to remember that after 120 days uptime, I'd switched to linux on it, and all I was seeing was a screen saver!

0 comment(s)

Neual Outdoors
On 15/05/06 at 00:34 cobaltfish wrote:

After a few busy days, I was shocked by my performance at the NEUAL Outdoors competion over in York.
I was up for all thursday night sorting a presentation for friday, then only had a short nap in afternoon before going to the CU ball on that evenin. I only got at tops 5 hours sleep friday night, and then went and got the minibus to go to york.

The drive down wasnt that great-it was raining and the lorrys were kicking up some serious spray. The bus I had was speed limited. I've since discovered that the limiter is a requirement of new legislation that came in on 1st Jan last year, that new minibuses have to have them, and the rest, by 2008. It mostly dryed off by the time we were ready to shoot.

Once it started, I cant say I got off to a great start-I missed with 1/2 my sighters. But from then onwards, I didnt miss again. From about the first dozen, somehow I was first, and kept that way right thru to the end. I did have a collection of poor shots. the most annoying was when I got 4 9's and then dropped one in the 1 (and one in 5) but over all, I scored 742, with no misses-a first for me out doors on an albion, and a generous 200 points on my scores last season.

To cap the day off, York uni didnt win the team-the first time ever in the regional league! Bradford did, with the help from Paul (who came 2nd) Hannah (also 2nd out of ladies) Shelley, and myself. So in one day, I didnt just get my first gold, I got my 2nd too!

Then, after results, I had to rush back to Bradford, to play in a concert!

0 comment(s)

Sycnronise P910 Calendar with Thunderbird
On 10/05/06 at 04:17 cobaltfish wrote:

W00t. I have done it! I managed to get my phone to (tentively) sync its calendar with the calendar in Thunderbird. I found on the web the Sync4jMozilla plugin. This is a version of the calendar plugin, that can read from a Sync4j server. This Sync4j server is an opensource project, which is now under the code name Funambol. I havent done anything teribly special yet, other than to install their prebuilt server setup, and create user, and set the user permissions to allow them to sync.
The Steps I roughly followed are:

1. Download and install Sync4j bundle 2.3 for Windows (not very imaginitive, using windows, but its what my phone connects to at the moment
2. Download and install in thunderbird Sync4j Mozilla Client for Windows 1.0.2 and install in thunderbird
3. Create new user cobaltfish and create new device association (called priciple in the Sync4j Java console) between cobaltfish and syncml-phone
4. in thunderbird go to tools, calendar. This opens the calendar window. In the calendar window go to edit, preferences, and in the calendar options window, go to the last item in the list (syncml server) and set the parameters of your server. I used: Device ID: syncml-phone
Server Name: http://localhost:8080
Sync URL: http://localhost:8080/sync4j/sync
Username: cobaltfish
Password: **********
5. I copied these settings into the Remote Sync program on my phone, and set the server address to be that of my laptop external IP, and enabled task Calendar. The Server database it connects to is scal.
6. Then I docked my phone, and hit sync. It then checked what the server had already, and dumped records as needed onto it.
   
7. Finaly I ran the sync on calendar in Thunderbird, and it picked up what my phone had just sent

Some time tomorrow, when I'm a bit more awake, I may try and give a better guide to this in the project section of my website

0 comment(s)

BBQ Season
On 06/05/06 at 18:47 cobaltfish wrote:

I think it is now officialy BBQ season. I've had 2 in the last 2 days.
Last night was completely impromptue-I'd ended up sitting out on amphitheater with people, and we decided to go find fire and food and had one.
Lunch today was a little bit more planned, and unlike last night, I wasnt short on bbq fuel, tho its still fun burning pine cones!
We even managed to get cold drinks. I had the bright idea of making ice cubes last night, and then I transfered them into my thermos flask, and used the thermos to keep the ice cold, so all our drinks could be kept at a nice temperature

Uni work wise, the workload is slightly diminishing now-my project is in, I just have a couple of courseworks, and exams. After that, thats it! Its definately scary

0 comment(s)

Three peaks
On 23/04/06 at 20:27 cobaltfish wrote:

I survived the three peaks yesterday. Not that I walked any of it. I was the minibus driver for the control bus, which meant I drove around with Pip, who was on communications, and Bex who was organising the hike, trying to keep in radio contact with our teams on waypoints and sweeping.
At one point we weren't sure if we had lost one of our walkers, who was left behind by the lead group, and hadn't checked in some time later, but after finding a bit of radio signal, kinda emergancy stopped at the side of a B road with the bus, and checked in on the teams up Whernside. By the time we had the information off the top of Whernside, and gone back down the road, he had made it back to the waypoint.
I had a bit of a play on the radios as we waited for the last party to make their way of Ingleborough, and checked that the people who we expected to be in the pub were all there, so that the sweep team coming down knew that all was accounted for.
All in all it was a good day-quite tiring, even tho I mostly hung arround and did what I was told. Tho tiredness can be blamed on the time we set off at-about 7am from Bradford, and only getting back 10pm ish The curry once we had unloaded the buses was much needed!

0 comment(s)

If you need a job done...
On 21/04/06 at 17:12 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm now back in Bradford-got back up here yesterday evening, having driven up. Its nice having a car, tho kinda scary knowing that its all my responsibility to look after it.
I met up with some of archery lastnight, and casual mentioned to an invoice that I'd asked Paul to submit to the union for me, so I could get the £250 back into my bank account. Sam kinda responded saying oops-cause paul had passed it to her, and she hadnt had a chance to do anything. She went and handed whatever Paul gave her in today, but from the sounds of it, a cheque requisition form hadent been done or signed.
I didnt realise that I should have told people exactly what to do down to this sort of detail:

1. pick up green piece of paper, the cheque requisition form
2. put in something about Isle of Man trip for reason
3. fill in the archery private account number
4. tick archery private account
5. fill in the amount
6. fill in "payable to" box with my name
7. tick the collect from finance office box
8. sign as a club signatory
9. put in the tray for requi's

yes, it takes some doing, but its all on the form! The only step I cant do in that is the "sign as club signatory" as the money is for me! Atleast the handover of the club to new exec is soon, so I wont have to do it any more.
In other rants.... the internet is slowed to a pitiful crawl (again) by my beloved housemates using bittorrents
< /rant >
Hopefuly tomorrow should be a good day. I'm helping the hiking club by driving the bus for their trip to the dales, where the walkers will be walking 26 miles between the three highest peaks, Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen-y-Gent. (Called for some funny reason "the three peaks"!

5 comment(s)

A walk in the country.
On 19/04/06 at 15:37 cobaltfish wrote:

Went out monday lunch time to Orford, and went on a walk along the top of the sea wall. On the walk, we came accross this curious thing:

Yep-I wasnt imagining it. Someone took their BMW 4 wheel drive off the road and into the mud. Well, I say mud, but the area was fairly dry. But none the less, its still suprising.

Tuesday afternoon presented a different kind of off-road challenge for me. The lawnmower had a flat front tire when I went to cut the grass. And being only about 20cm in diameter and tubeless, were a pain to re-inflate. Once I'd got some air in, it all went well-all the mower needed after that was a bit of petrol and oil top up

0 comment(s)

Referer/comment Spam
On 13/04/06 at 14:24 cobaltfish wrote:

I've noticed in the last few days that I've been getting a lot of spam on my website. So if you are refered to my website from a website with words such as loan and pharmacy, and use words like pharmacy, loan, viagra etc, then you will not be able to get through. I might make some sort of blacklist as well, but these basic measures should cut down on it a bit.

2 comment(s)

Return from Isle of Man
On 11/04/06 at 22:53 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, I'm now back from Isle of Man. The tour there was quite hard work with the organising, but we made it there, and everything seemed to work out realy well.
The people of the island were loveley as ever. A guide at Creagnesh Village, inspite of not officialy being open till the next day, gave us a short introduction to what was there in the house she was at, and also some soda bread. We managed to squeeze in a trip to the Okells brewery. The real ale drinkers of the club loved it-after the tour, the bar was open-people got to pull their own pints, after they had been shown how. I got to sit and watch and chat. Harry, one of the chief brewers, who gave the tour was pleasently suprised that a group of students didnt mean that we turned up already drunk and rowdy.
In the competion, Bradford as a whole did well.
Our longbow and barebow were un-challenged (well, no one to compete against, so they shot against each other in the Head to Head)
With Recurve, our Team came 2nd by only 33 points to Warwick, and were over 250 points above L'bro in 3rd. On the individuals, Hannah got herself a nice cup, coming in 1st place, and I got a medal for coming in 2nd place

Pictures of this will be up on the web. I'm in the process of building a webpage of all of Bradfords pics

I've now made it all the way from Isle of Man to Suffolk in under 24 hours, via Bradford.

0 comment(s)

mmmh, pizza
On 01/04/06 at 00:59 cobaltfish wrote:

I was on the net, looking up pizza (I got hungry again!) and I came across this site with a pizza printer on it. I'm not sure if its in mass production yet, but it looks like a realy good idea!

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Solar Eclipse
On 29/03/06 at 10:27 cobaltfish wrote:

Wow-I am so out of touch with what is happening in space at the moment! I didnt realise that there was going to be a solar eclipse today, till I happened to visit the news and read that its happening! We're only going to get about 10% of the sun covered here. I best get me to Kazakhstan so I can see it in totality in the next 30 min!

1 comment(s)

new strings
On 22/03/06 at 16:59 cobaltfish wrote:

For the first time in many many years, my cello has been treated to a new set of strings. My old set of Jargar, have been on the cello since when I first got it. I think that was about 9 or 10 years ago now. To date, on this cello, only one string has snapped, and that was my A-string, on the morning before a school concert. I got a set of Dominant strings through today from the string zone.
Unfortunately even though I tried to lubricate the notches the strings sit in with graphite, my A string seemed to not like it, and the winding looks to have broken. I contacted the string zone, and he suggested sending the string back, and he would try and sort me a new one. He was very helpfull none the less.
Oh well... atleast my A string wont be too out of tune in the orchestra rehersal tonight!

Today was posterday. This basicly meant that my entire year group had to present a poster on their final year project, to both their tutors, and some representatives from industry. I went slightly over dressed, in that I wore a suit, but first impressions are always good! My poster wasnt that amazing, but it caught the eye of a woman from IBM, who as it happens is working on a project with similar principles for a major retail chain! I realy should get my report part finished sometime for my project....

0 comment(s)

BUSA Results
On 10/03/06 at 12:00 cobaltfish wrote:

The busa results are now online on the UKSAA website. Team wise we didnt finish teribly strongly-seniors were 17th of 33, and novices 17th of 22. Individualy however, it was better-Kirsty, our Compound finished 2nd, Catherine, Novice barebow, finished 2nd out of all barebow, and 1st in novices! Hannah got 6th place (of 87 who actualy shot), and I got 26th out of 199 competitors, with my new personal best.

Saturday should be fun-its BUTC (British University Team Champs). Werner Bieter (who designed a lot of archery kit, and the hit miss targets we'll be using in the knockout) is Lord Paramount. He's a lovely man. Last year I remember him saying things like "I dont speak much English-only archery English"

0 comment(s)

US to try and controll sharks
On 06/03/06 at 00:57 cobaltfish wrote:

Oh my goodness. I know slashdot have a lot of jokes about this kinda thing, with lasers and stuff, but here, on the bbc news and new scientist (and not on april the first either) is an article about robotic sharks.
From the new scientist articleWe may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling. AAAHH The seas are no longer safe.... I need my tinfoil hat

0 comment(s)

A long day out
On 05/03/06 at 13:20 cobaltfish wrote:

Yesterday was quite a long day out. We left Bradford for Exeter at about 8:15. But before we even got going it was interesting. The night before being the AA Colours award ment I didnt realy get home and to sleep till quite late-I think 2:30. I got a Colours award for Archery, and some pictures of me all dressed up smart. Unfortunately something disagreed with me and I didnt sleep properly from about 5:30 onwards, and was up at 6:30 getting ready.
Then when we got to the bus the fun started with it (again). It had no problems in the uni carparks with moving, but some of the locks and doors were slightly frozen. When we went to close the back door after loading all the kit the latch just wouldnt engage properly! After we fiddled a bit it shut, but the other door which it latched to hadnt been closed propperly, so we had to try and get it to re-open, to then shut that, and try and get it to shut again.
We got going and set off down over Pennines and out towards M6. When we got the bus there was a chip not too far from the tax disc. It had got a slight crack when we left Bradford. Then Dave suddenly said "the crack's grown" and we saw how it was about 30cm!
The hire company didnt seem to think this was a problem, and that we should only worry if it spanned the entire screen! We did persuade them to sort us a new screen, after it continued to grow-all be it, less fast.
They didnt want to give us one on route, but in the end, when we got going after a break we were told to ring someone at juction 13 of M5, and meet them at services off juction 19-I think about 70 miles from where we were. The screen lasted, but when the guy changing it did so, it very quickly had the crack runing as a section from the bottom to the side of that part of the screen!
We made it just about with time to spare-we had planned for a decent length stop and to be able to still have an hour spare. The competion was also running realy late!
People from Bradford won 2nd on ladies compound, and the ladies Sheild (novice) Barebow. I shot realy well for myself and finaly broke my personal best I shot in Durham over 2 years ago. I got 542, and hopefuly that places me fairly high-I think I may have made it within the top 20 or 30!
The trek back was interesting too. I had a blue peugot 206 that seemed to like overtaking me as we got towards the roadworks, and then slowing down.
Dave had to deal with a silver ford focus that was being most bizzare. It was just about snowing, and this car over took us, and then proceded to sit in the outside lane, and slow down. Dave then sat behind it for a bit, to which it responded by flashing his hazards. Dave pulled back into inside and stayed there. When a bunch of other cars came along and overtook it in the outside lane, it went with them, but a few minutes later, we caught up again, and it repeated the procedure again. This happened several times-one time it pretty much forced a car into the outside and snow covered lane from the 2nd lane.
We couldnt figure out what they were doing. If it was a highway maintenece/checking how much gritting needed to be done in certain lanes, they could just have slapped an orange light on the top and then it would have made sense. If it was a police operation, to catch / provoke dangerous drivers, then I would say they were the ones at fault. They were slowing down to 40 sometimes on a clear motorway! And if it was just someone being an idiot.... well, enough said.
I got in at about 3:30 after the usual refill bus, empty it of rubish performance, and was absolutly shattered.
(wow-this was a long post!)

0 comment(s)

snow and a community spirit
On 04/03/06 at 01:46 cobaltfish wrote:

I am impressed by some of the folks on my street. I'd foolishly put the bus for tomorrow at the end of my road, so getting to uni tomorrow wasnt too bad, but had to move it cos it was likely to be in the way.
Then the snow attacked the bus. Instead of going forwards, it had a tendancy to fishtale sideways. One of my friends in archery, who also is broad and lanky started giving a helping push. Before I noticed 4 complete strangers were joining in and helping push. It took about 10 minutes, but without them, I'd have been stuck. As it was I ended up using 3rd - 4th gear to get the torque, and the bus at times thinking it was doing nearly 30mph on the spot.
Thanks guys-I doubt they read this, but still, I'll do what I can to say thanks.
Hopefully it wont be too bad a drive to Exeter tomorrow-there isnt currently snow down there *crosses fingers*
Colours Ball was good-not quite so good as last year, but still mostly fun.

0 comment(s)

Its Snowing!! :-D
On 03/03/06 at 14:15 cobaltfish wrote:

I think I belive people in archery club now that say its traditional to have snow on or arround the BUSA indoors competition. It has been freezing for the last few days, so hardly suprising that it finaly did snow. I just hope that the motorways are clear for getting down to exeter university tomorrow.

1 comment(s)

Fireworks
On 22/02/06 at 03:32 cobaltfish wrote:

What better way to end off my birthday with a few fireworks. I was about to go to bed when I was disturbed by the house shaking and a loud bang. Thinking it was either one of my housmates in trouble, or something serious going on, I grabbed my trusty maglite and took a look. From the front door, I could see the glow from the torched car.
I have a few pics, but sorry Han, you cant see the firemen in uniform, and I didnt sit in their fire engine in my pjs ;-)

I am suprised how quickly the car was lit-they normaly take a day or 2 before someone does them. But it did give me a chance while I watched the fire to chat to one of my neighbours, who's on my course.

0 comment(s)

iTunes and P910i
On 21/02/06 at 17:37 cobaltfish wrote:

Just been playing with my phone, and with the help of Tee Vui Huang's Mass storage synchronisor I managed to sync my phone with iTunes. I played a little with the script files. Unfortunately it does the storage to the card rather than phone, via a card reader, as windows doesnt mount the phone as mass storage. I've hacked the script a little for my personal ease. My card reader tends to give it a drive letter of H: so I commented the script to only look on drive h:. I also changed the path that it writes the music to. It was using the line set MSDWalkman1=... to set the path on the card. I changed the default path to be :MSSEMCP-SeriesMedia filesaudioiTunes This allows the onboard media player to find the playlist created in iTunes without having to search thru all media files. Now all I need to do is find out how to mount my phone in its sync dock as a "normal" disk!

edit: it doesnt seem to be deleting tracks... I need to check this out.

0 comment(s)

ooh-sony ericsson 3g smart phone
On 21/02/06 at 15:02 cobaltfish wrote:

just went on the sony ericsson website to check the memory capacity of p910 for add on cards-am thinking of using its media player abilites a bit more than I currently do, and spotted the P990i on the soon to be released phones (not sure if the link works-will update if it doesnt) I'm not much of a fan of 3g yet, but if and when I change, its nice to know that there is now a smartphone that I'll be fairly familure with the workings of available

0 comment(s)

mmmh, tasty
On 20/02/06 at 22:36 cobaltfish wrote:

Just reading the news on wireless (I'll get my pipe and slippers later) and spotted this story about some building works. If I was around London I think I'd try popping in to see the biscuit city being made/eaten
on the food subject, the pancakes we had were interestin... some colouring got added to the milk, so they were kinda blueish-pics to follow later....

4 comment(s)

another weekend, another network, another
On 20/02/06 at 16:51 cobaltfish wrote:

This sunday I popped over to Newcastle to see former housemate, and make her a cross-over cable so another housemate could share the broadband.
It was an interesting train ride over-I ended up standing all the way from Leeds to York-I think there were problems with a virgin train service, so loads of people had crammed on the trans-pennine express for that part.
The cable went in fine-I'd guessed the perfect length, and all the connections went on fine. I'd never made a crossover before, just straight cables. I am a bit bothered by my crimps-pin 8 doesnt seem to often connect. I think this is only an issue with making cables for gigabit connections. (steven nikkel had some useful diagrams) I might have to get a new pair of crimps.
I checked with cable tester, and my laptop, and it worked fine (after I decided to see what wireles was about, and found an unsecure belkin point!) However I ended up practicing some Polish when checking the housemates laptop worked. I think they were using an ip anonomizer, which didnt seem to like doing dns lookups. I eventualy got it to work-impressing people with my understanding of polish, based on memories of windows in english! (it made a change from doing network maintainance in Finish or Sweedish, which was what I was doing before Christmas)

My Study group from CU are over here tonight for pancakes. I think I'm going to use the nice old blue peter recipie to make the mixture

0 comment(s)

Random Queries
On 13/02/06 at 02:36 cobaltfish wrote:

Taking an idea from Neil of random queries to website from search engine, I decided to post a few
the system is busy deleting another site. please wait and try again. raq
Well, my site seems to still be up-I guess it must still be deleting another site, so hasnt got to mine yet
send 5000 mails a day
Spammers-who'd have 'em? Cos I dont think I ever got close to seeing that many mails in a day
screenshots of tree bios
yes I have some screen shots, but not of tree bios-I always thought trees got put in the ground, not had input/output systems.
sponsership done by nokia
I use sony ericsson at the moment... but if someone is offering me money/job, I'll take it-I'm a student after all

1 comment(s)

Spotlight 600
On 12/02/06 at 00:43 cobaltfish wrote:

It was fun up at Bronte for the spotlight 600 competition. Its a unique competition to the club which consists of 60 arrows in 6 arrow ends at a target placed at the 40 pace mark (today, just short of the 40 yard line), on a full 120 cm target face. Its also shot in the dark, under spotlights (hence the name!).
It was a nice friendly competion again, even if it was a bit cold and blustery out there. We were warmed with a nice "Shelley break" for coffee and such like. After the shooting finished, and the field cleared we had Pie and peas.
As a club, Shelley and Cat both won medals for the womans recurve-2nd and 3rd. Unfortunately the other mens recurve scores were way above what I got, but it was a nice but chilly way to start some of the out-door season.
What I find a little strange is that my shoulder was really aching before I went up and shot the competion-I must have pulled something in the morning session. Yet by the end of the competion, other than having 1/2 numb fingers, I felt fine. I'm realy glad I decided to shoot inspite of being concerned I would regret it the next day. I might have to take back my idea of excercise being bad for you now!

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Jaws-it is alive
On 09/02/06 at 01:08 cobaltfish wrote:

My old file server/number cruncher is back up to its normal collection of disks. I got a psu from ebay thru yesteday, and after a bit of re-configuring with a proliant smart start cd, rebooted it with a replacement network card. (its previous main one had died, and I was using the spare, which is a bit intermittent). I need to patch the boot settings a bit better, to ensure that when it boots, it also starts my various internal internet monitorings and graphs propperly. Its been running stable for the last 24 hours, which is good to see. Hopefuly the next time I shut it down is when I move out.

Anyway-I think today has been an exciting enough day, so am off to bed (early!). It was nice having a curry after orchestra-but I must say that I feel quite stuffed now! I recon with the various stolen cars I've reported being left on/by our street, I'll soon have a full on record at the local police.

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Joy Riders
On 08/02/06 at 17:55 cobaltfish wrote:

*sigh* I hate them-why do they have to tear up and down the ground at the end of my street. Just coming home to pick up my arrow tube for going to the archery shop, and I nearly got hit by some. I'm sure they looked at me, and decided to see how close they could get to me. Unfortunately, when I spoke to police, I couldnt remeber much details about the car. Fortunately they did seem to go soon after their pass at me. I dare say in a day or 2, if the car isnt spotted by the police and collected, it will end up burnt out :-(

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Bandwidth
On 02/02/06 at 03:08 cobaltfish wrote:

This post covers a few forms of bandwidth usage. I've noticed how that in the past few years how my monthly bandwidth has been increasing. Maybe cos of more pictures being uploaded, maybe more useless info, either way, August 2004, I transfered 28.84 MB to 212 unique visitors, and January 2006, I transfered 473.92 MB to 999 unique visitors!
On the subject of useless information, I have a few graphs that I captured of network data in my house


These are of some stats from jaws, my ssh/monitor/file/number crunching server, created with cacti, the monitoring package I'm using on the network.
Other useless info, is that I'm aiming to consolidate all my computery project info that should be usefull to other people into one place of all my projects

My body clock is quite out of kilter-I realy should go to sleep now, to have some hope of being alive for lectures tomorrow-I blame working late last week, and not quite getting round to getting "early" nights ever (is 1 am early?)

1 comment(s)

presentation?? when??
On 27/01/06 at 05:04 cobaltfish wrote:

I thought I had escaped exams unscathed, and had 2 days breathing time before term started.
But, oops, I was wrong. One of my friends reminded me at about 1 this morning that we have to do presentations on our final year projects (technicaly) today. 4 hours later, and I have a rough outline made out.
If your wondering what it is, I'll try to briefly say. The aim is to create a utility, probably using perl, to make post instalation configuration files for Nagios, and to compile an RPM with these with a script to put them in the correct location for the machine. So this will meen adding a new server to be monitored simply requires my config program to be run to create the RPM package, and that package installed on it.

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network problems
On 26/01/06 at 15:18 cobaltfish wrote:

I finaly figured out today why gaim wasnt working without using a proxy server to connect to msn! I ran a clean install on my desktop, without GTK installed, and it ran fine, connecting and everything. So I unistalled GTK 2.8, and gaim, and re-installed on my laptop, and after that, it ran fine!
I'm still not quite sure how the proxy helped-maybe it altered the way the commands were structured or interprated

On another issue, I the compaq network card in my server died last night-at about 12:40. I was transfering a whole load of stuff from my laptop via samba, when all of a sudden I could no longer reach it. I tried all that I could-restarting the interface, checking the media etc, but nothing was happening with it. At the moment, I'm using the "spare" card as the main one, and re-assigned ip-address to it. Unfortunately Suse linux doesnt seem that good at handling the problems when one card goes down and letting the other continue, so I actualy had to do all the work on it down in the cellar.

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telewest problems
On 19/01/06 at 12:24 cobaltfish wrote:

*sigh* Telewest have nice broadband problems. I managed to get to tech support, and managed to avoid most of the "turn modem off and on" stuff, and they checked, and found problems on the regonal router. I've been running ping to google, and this is the result for running it overnight:
Ping statistics for 64.233.183.104:
Packets: Sent = 29858, Received = 25265, Lost = 4593 (15% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 26ms, Maximum = 1011ms, Average = 492ms
The routing seems a little odd-tracing the route, and the packet seems to go to the same ip address twice. It results in frequent disconnects, timeouts and very slow connection speeds

If that wasn't enough problems, my website hosts isp (pipex) have also got problems with power, so my email/website is down!

update: The problem with the net seems to be with the router/amount of p2p trafik running-a quick trip to *shudder* pc world soon sorted the router, and am trying to see if the QOS can help improve the speed

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the end of find-a-drug
On 04/01/06 at 15:42 cobaltfish wrote:

After over 5 cpu years worth of processing and 29844856 gigaflops from me alone, Find-a-drug has stopped giving out work units. I ended up ranked at 516
I'm now putting my spare processor cycles to use in World Community Grid which at the moment is looking for cures for aids, and examining the human genome.
However I may occasionly put some processor cycles to use for graphic rendering, having had a bit of a go at setting up drqueue a graphic rendering queue manager for windows, linux and osX.

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feedback spam
On 03/01/06 at 21:14 cobaltfish wrote:

wow! I got some feedback spam back in july on my main cobaltfish.com website, that I never noticed till now! Maybe I should look into ways of implementing authentication on my site....

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(belated) Happy New Year
On 03/01/06 at 12:56 cobaltfish wrote:

I've been online enough in the last few days to say happy new year, but haven't quite got round to it!
I've decided to do a clear out on my camera memory cards, so will probibly be posting some more pictures from 2005. It could be quite interesting to try putting one or 2 pictures from each month as some sort of photo diary, but I dont think I have all my images here, so may have to get them from my computers still in Bradford
Now that its 2006 I realy am getting close to graduating-its no this calandar year as well as accademic! I've been working on my CV, and got some companys to apply too The idea of leaving education, even tho I did technicaly do it for a year is kinda scary. Its made worse by all the relatives asking "do you know what your doing next year?" etc. That said, I'm sure it will all work out.

2 comment(s)

Fun with teamspeak
On 29/12/05 at 22:11 cobaltfish wrote:

For co-ordinating our efforts in guildwars I have a teamspeak server. I've grown fond of the ability it gives for vocal commands and comments in game, like being able to say "look out" without needing to select the in game text team chat, then type "look out" and then send it.
However Cat was having problems with her sound card, in getting it to transmit the noises that the mic was making. I managed to narrow it down to it being the input source not being correct-it was seeming to be transmitting the wave output, so understandibly, when in local test mode, the feedback was instant. The soulution turned out to be to open the windows sound recording settings, and tell it that the recording input source was something other than the mic, then set it back to being the mic. 2 secs later,and the sound was fine!

On another, random note, I managed to get my guildwars character Yrre Oakleaf to slide arround on his bottom for a bit last night. A hydra knocked him to the ground, and he didnt quite get round to standing up!

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christmas pics
On 28/12/05 at 17:55 cobaltfish wrote:

I've just spent a bit of time uploading some christmas pics to my server. I also have some pics of the snow. I've edited my website admin page to make it easier to adjust where pages are, without loading every page in a group

Sunrise

the tree




Bird Table
>>More pics<<

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Happy Christmas and Snow!
On 27/12/05 at 09:31 cobaltfish wrote:

Happy Christmas! I know its a bit late, but I haven't quite got round to saying it before now. I've been kinda pretending to be sociable with the family-had 9 there for Christmas day lunch. That gave a fair bit of washing up! But it was great seeing everyone.
After Talking to Cat the other night, I spent a bit of time messing arround in trying to set up render farm queue management software, as she may be getting one. I ended up with trying DrQueue I managed to compile it for windows, altho pre-compiled binarys were already on the servers. I then found I needed Maya to get render.exe to actualy take the frames and make them pretty. Fortunately Maya (alias software) have a free personal learning copy, which even tho it has some features disabled, was enough to get me going. I now need to get more than one computer to be able to render, and unfortunately there is no linux maya available for free.
Snow.... Yup-there is snow here. I'm going to try and get a few pics of it and post them online later. I may have a bit more of a go at taking pics with my dads old SLR-there's a film in it that needs using up. Atleast taking pics sounds like a good excuse for messing arround out side! :-D

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Nearly Christmas
On 14/12/05 at 23:58 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, its nearly christmas again, and this year looks no less busy than ever.
It was the archery christmas meal on saturday, which was after having taken the novices into Leeds for the novice championships. The meal alright, but considering how I'd had to chase round in order to sort it out-according to one member of staff they couldnt give an invoice until we had paid for the meal.
This week is also quite busy-have both a courswork deadline and the CU carol service tomorrow, after my normal session of archery in the evening. I'm probably going back homewards on saturday, but am yet to get a ticket on the trains.
I'm also hoping the bug which has been pestering a little this week will clear up-1/2 a curry at rawals felt quite filling!

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skeptics annotated bible
On 02/12/05 at 11:18 cobaltfish wrote:

While browsing I came across this skeptics annotated bible. I will agree to a certian extent that some of the stuff on the creation is hard to interperate, so is good material for a skeptic-creation vs evolution can cause quite a bit of trouble in churches. But some of the stuff is just because they havent read properly. I just browsed through, and these are a few comments I can make
Point 26: "Noah is called a "just man and perfect," but he didn't seem so perfect when he was drunk and naked in front of his sons (Gen 9:20-21). Gen 6:9, Gen 7:1" when he got drunk and naked was after the flood, when this statement was made about being "just man and perfect" was before.
Point 35: "Noah kills the "clean beasts" and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all "clean" animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. "And the Lord smelled a sweet savor." After this God "said in his heart" that he'd never do it again because "man's heart is evil from his youth." So God killed all living things (6:5) because humans are evil, and then promises not to do it again (8:21) because humans are evil. The mind of God is a frightening thing. 8:20-21" Again, Read the previous verses! There were 7 of the "clean" animals!
Skiping down to point 907: "# The devil is like a lion who wanders around looking for people to eat. 5:8" there is a concept in language called a "metaphor"

On that note... I'm off with cu today for the weekend for their houseparty. I'm also heading back here on Sat to play in a uni concert, then back again! Its going to be a busy weekend!

1 comment(s)

Return of Jaws
On 30/11/05 at 13:17 cobaltfish wrote:

I finaly got round to fixing my server yesterday afternoon. The disk array power supply broke months ago, and I finaly got round to sorting out the aftermath. The system had been off, as it wouldnt boot, and because it was off the volatile memory had erased, as they system battery is flat. This meant that when I did try and boot, linux was un-happy as there seemed to be no date. After reseting stuff with the compaq admin cd, it would boot, but the installed linux was unhappy, cause 1/2 the disks werent "there" so couldnt fsck them. once I edited /etc/fstab so that these file systems were no longer added at boot, the system was fine.
I now have teamspeak running on it, as well as my normal pharmacutical research. I may set up a mailing list on it, seeing as I have root, tho I will have to check what ports my housemates are using for receiving incoming trafic. Because of the length of time that it has been off, there are near to 100mb of updates to install, including a kernal update. Some are a bit unnecisary, considering I am likely to be removing and or limiting GUI access to it-ssh tunnels are so much easier!

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fed up of dabs
On 21/11/05 at 15:00 cobaltfish wrote:

Inspite of what I was saying earlier about dabs, I have now decided to completely stop using them. I had a hard disk break, so had to send it back to them. I had to continualy chase what the status was thru web forms. Even when I mentioned the problems and doubts I had, the responses back were essentialy template based and automated. From now on, I think I will try and support the local firms. Customer service is much more likely to be better, and Dabs dont hold a monopoly decent prices.

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Guild Wars
On 17/11/05 at 15:50 cobaltfish wrote:

I have a new way to waste time... I'm playing through guild wars at the moment. I'm in a small guild on it called Arcus Alliance and am making a webpage with Cat for it. At the moment we have 5 members, but are likely to try and keep it to friends or friends of friends.
Its a fun game, tho always battling monsters in the player vs enemy can be tiresome, as every time you move out of the instance, to meet up to make partys, they all respawn. I currently have a level 15 Mesmerer/monk. The healing spells are so usefull! If you want to find me in game, my main character is called "Yrre Oakleaf" When we get the money, we will try and get a guild hall. However it costs about 30k gold to buy the Sigil required to get the hall

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stolen cars
On 16/11/05 at 15:40 cobaltfish wrote:

Its kinda worrying, these last 2 weeks, there has twice been stolen cars left at the end of my street. I called the police non emergancy both times to report my suspicions. It was funny when I got asked why I thought the car was stolen the 2nd time.
"so what makes you think its stolen?"
"it's boot is open, its missing it's wheels, and it's front number plate is smashed"
However, someone else had already reported that car in. Atleast I'm trying to do my bit for the local community.

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projects
On 22/10/05 at 01:08 cobaltfish wrote:

Its final year project time for me, and I've had to start planning my one. Thanks to my second placement, I have something to be working on for them, which is nice. I like the idea of something that will have a practical use, other than filling out a portfolio for me.

While in Jazmans coffee shop, with some of the people I know through archery, Tom Randal told me about Gantt project.
This is a java based (and therefore platform independent) design tool for Gantt diagrams. These are used for project management, for ploting the length of time tasks will have, against time, to help with planning. I only came accross them in a lecture earlier in the week, so to be told of a tool for making them, thats open source was even better.
Today I spent time finding convertors for the save files that ganttproject makes, for importing data into my projects main body. My current favored one is gan2svg This uses an xslt transform from the xml format ganttproject uses to the svg format that can be read by suitable programs. I'm yet to get openoffice to import it, but I know it can be done, and I can easily open them in gimp However, the transform document didnt seem to quite work perfectly for the files I have, as some of the text of the last to complete, and lowest on the chart got clipped. I therefore hacked the transform xml to add an extra weeks worth of days onto the end, and another task lines width at the bottom, resulting in an acceptable image.

I think I might use blogging as a fairly well organised way of keeping track of the work I've done on my project, or atleast for the biblography/references part, as I already have some usefull sources for my project recorded here. I wont have it public, as I dont think I need people reading my daily progress on the project! Any useful bits and bobs will still be likely to get put on here.

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power to the users
On 16/10/05 at 13:08 cobaltfish wrote:

While looking at the dabs website, checking on a returned hard disk, I noticed that the new design had the w3c validator valid xml code logo. This states that the code on the page is valid according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for the code. It also links thru to the validator, and checks the page.... I rand through a few of the pages and was upset to find on some, over 100 errors. I pointed this out in an email to dabs, along with a query with my return. No comment was made in the reply about the website, but today when I looked at dabs, the ticks have gone! I never really expected them to take much notice of me, a customer who out of the blue points this out!

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aaar!
On 04/10/05 at 13:21 cobaltfish wrote:

in hounour of the pirate society that has formed at uni....

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
You can also view a breakdown of results or put one of these on your own page!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

I ended up browsing these because a friend was trying to get names, and I figured name generators and came across this! http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ has a whole load of different generators

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New Term
On 04/10/05 at 12:13 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, the new term has really arrived now. I survived freshers week-ended up being quite busy with archery stuff. Had a good number of people show interest-I think we had about 70 names on our list from sports and societies fair. Quite a few didnt leave details, but were interested.
It looks like I have a final year project sorted. HCJB need some network monitoring stuff, so will be investigating and deploying it (assuming I do get full approval)
I had a great lab this morning-essentially working through an idiots guide to excel! To make myself something to do, which was learning, I wrote a macro to do part of one exercise!

The music centre seems a bit of a mix up at the moment. There is no music society, so many of the activities weren't terribly well represented at the sports and societies fair, so I'm a little worried about the number of people that might have joined if they did but know about it!

Lol-LJ dont have "blog" in their spell check dictionary

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Feed to cobaltfish.com
On 08/09/05 at 10:54 cobaltfish wrote:

I've just (finaly) spent time on the feed from my livejournal to cobaltfish.com website. I think it now works, so am putting in this test message to see.
I should get my new handset, a nice shiny P910 today. I took my old P800 apart yesterday to see how hard it would be to replace the screen, seeing as I have nothing to loose by doing so. it is relatively simple, tho it takes a bit of effort to get the plastic catches apart.

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murphys law
On 02/09/05 at 13:59 cobaltfish wrote:

I fix one thing and another breaks... I've known for a while that my laptop hard disk is dying, so it was no suprise, all be it annoying to have to play with the reiserfs repair utilities to fix bad blocks these last few days. I got the disk mountable last night, removed it and restarted the live cd ( from insert) and went and put my phone on charge.
When my alarm on it went off this morning, it seemed that the phone was having display problems. I thought No problem, and rebooted it, only to find that they continued. So Any one got ideas on how to fix a p800, which is prob outside waranty? The display kinda works, but is flickery and shows the wrong colours :-(
While browsing the sony ericsson website and expansys (where I got my p800 from) I started looking at various gadgets, and then manuals of them. I remembered that I don't have pdf viewer on this live distro, so looked for a lite install of a pdf viewer. Then I came across an online pdf viewer which may be of use to people

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100th post
On 28/08/05 at 23:33 cobaltfish wrote:

This is my 100th post-its taken some time, cos I dont always have that much to say...

Anyway, I'm back home from a final week at camp, where I was the tent leader.
The weather wasnt that great-fairly damp through-out the week. The troup tents seemed to have a slight habit of getting damp in under the door-I'm not sure if that was due to wind blowing it under, or the kids not shutting it properly. Either way, the puddle was fairly limited and no ones stuff got damp
I had a bit of fun with my 10ft kite-I think I got about a foot under my feet a couple of times! The problem was some of the children wanted to watch, and stood infront of me! I let someone fly my little delta, with my nice new lines. Unfortunately shortly after it was flown into someone elses lines, and the nice 150lb breaking strain lines were in shreads :-(
We also went down to an activity centre, where we did rafting in the afternoon, which also involved falling in the river-swimming with a supersoaker, while wearing a boyancy aid is fun
On a couple of nights I managed to point out some stars and stuff-managed to point out mars, milkyway and a galaxy! (the andromeda galaxy!) but on the whole it wasnt teribly stary or sunny.

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Apache logging
On 17/08/05 at 00:43 cobaltfish wrote:

After months of slow server performance, I finaly spotted where the problem was with my website. It wasnt the mod_rewrite which converts the apparently static urls into the relevent php pages at all. I was certain of this after comparing to the apache server my laptop is running. Then while looking through webmin I spotted it. Somehow, the logging level had got set to "emergancies-the system is unusable" and was logging everything. Changing this to a more sensable level and applying the changes soon resulted on normal speed. Appologies to anyone who has suffered from the slowness!

1 comment(s)

Trip To The Country
On 16/08/05 at 23:10 cobaltfish wrote:

Had a nice little trip with the family out to the coast. We started off at Minsmere-an RSPB bird reserve. Saw a large collection of wildlife there, including marsh harriers hunting, hobbeys, sparrowhawks, various greebs and other waterfowel. Including these, there was also a good collection of butterflys and dragonflys. Also on the path we spotted a grass snake!
We then went just up the road to Dunwich heath where we had our lunch. Ruth and I then wandered down to the beach there, to fly kites. On the way there, a lizzard ran straight into my shoe!
The wind was quite good on the beach-I discovered how fun it was to use my kite to pull me from lying on the shingle to standing (ish)... oh for more space in Bradford to fly!

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Wandering Home
On 14/08/05 at 21:58 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm now back from 2 of the 3 weeks I'm spending camping
The stars were awsome. I try to be in the habit there of buying a daily paper so I can keep up with current events. Mondays Times Had a little star chart, so I used this while looking up on the clear nights, and was able to point out to a number of people some of the more major constelations, like pegasus and cygnus, and even, with the help of binoculars, andromeda galaxy! Also, being the time of year for the persid meteors, there were loads of shooting stars, and even quite a few random ones not associated with the shower.
The weather wasnt all that great-not much sunshine, but there wasnt rain, so was pretty good. It was windy over the 2nd Sunday night, and Lou and I ended up staying up all night, keeping an eye on all the tents-one of the troup tents kept popping its braling pegs and guy lines, but it was in a direct line from the sea for the wind. The wind was quite good for kite flying-I managed to bust the string on my delta kite, so a trip into Norwich where I got lines and a nice 10ft airfoil type kite. Its got some nice pull on reasonable days-I hope for more windy days!
I now have one week where I'm a tent leader for the junior campers. I think its gonna be the most tiring out of all the weeks, cos I have a much more responsable role as the kids are younger and sometimes need more looking after.
This week on the other hand, I'll be helping my grandparents pack some stuff for when they move house, and also run a backup of Grandads computer. A nice break from some of the rushing arround I've had recently.

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Summer Holidays
On 26/07/05 at 21:35 cobaltfish wrote:

I've now finished in Bradford for most of the summer.
I've been quite busy with helping out with a whole load of renovations at the office, Working on anything from moving furnature to drilling holes to put network cables thru to new sockets. It made quite a change to programing on the website.
I'm back in suffolk for Jon and Janes wedding on Saturday. After Saturday, I'll be helping with a camp up in norfolk, so prob off the net for a couple of weeks. Then I'll be back for a week or so, before another week away. After that, I think I'll be sticking at home before heading back up to bradford for final year and all that :-s
I realy dont know where all my time at uni so far has dissapeared, but it has been great so far

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Noctilucent Clouds
On 15/06/05 at 00:56 cobaltfish wrote:

I just got disturbed by a few random fireworks, and spotted something a bit more rare, Out of my window, I could see some Noctilucent Clouds
To explain breifly, these are high altitude clouds, lit up by the suns light, and only visable because it is dark where they are being seen from, so not swaped by daylight

3 comment(s)

Balls pictures
On 04/06/05 at 01:04 cobaltfish wrote:

I've got round to uploading some of the pictures I took at the various balls I went to this summer. Some of them came out suprisingly well, but take a look on this page

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firesomething
On 03/06/05 at 02:09 cobaltfish wrote:

For those of you that have used cosmic cat creations firesomething, there is a firefox version 1 and above here: firesomething 1.6.0.1
For those who haven't come accross it, its quite a random little plugin, that changes the browser ID to something different every time you load firefox. not much practical use, but using mozilla superyak must have its uses.....

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interesting Mars images
On 23/05/05 at 00:51 cobaltfish wrote:

Just looking at the News on the bbc website and spotted this novel view of martian space craft. Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor took a picture of the Mars Odyssey probe while in their seperate orbits, and also a picture of ESA's Mars Express, from a mere 155 miles.
155 miles not much in space terms, but from an earth based perspective, thats more or less like taking a picture of my dads car from here, while we both drive around!

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OpenNA, apache, php and postgresql
On 21/05/05 at 23:08 cobaltfish wrote:

At my new workplace, one of the things I am working on a website called audiopot-A library of short christian audio clips. Anyway... while building a developmental server from scratch I used openNA's autoupdate utility. Unfortunately it produced a couple of problems:

• It upgraded the database from version 7 to 8 with no warning.
  This was reasonably easy to fix by uninstalling, and re-instaling version 7 to do a data dump for the upgraded version 8
• the version of php it upgraded to didnt seem to be supporting mail functions
  I gave up on this-the best option is likely to be to compile a custom version for the server
• Then all of a sudden, I started getting database access errors, because the "pg_pconnect()" function in php was undefined.
  I ran "ldd" on the appropriate libraries in the php directory, and eventulay found that the library file from php-postgresql-4.3.* was needed, yet didnt seem to want to be installed. I gave up on instaling it directly thru rpms, and copied it from another server, but it was quite concerning to be lacking it, no matter what I did.

I will try and update with the correct library file names so that the info is more usefull

1 comment(s)

google local search
On 02/05/05 at 22:20 cobaltfish wrote:

Wow Google local search in uk! I did a search for Spring fisheries-a local take away, and it comes up as a search result its location, and phone number. I didn't realise it was working outside of USA

2 comment(s)

round the world in 80 sshs
On 01/05/05 at 19:03 cobaltfish wrote:

After a random conversation with Han and Graham over a curry (a week ago, now), we ended up wondering if we could get arround the world in 80 ssh tunnels.
With the servers I have access to in bradford I have about 3 or 4, or more if I can persuade people to give me logins to their machines. I also have a login for a server in USA, but could do with some more locations-preferably interesting ones! I'm not sure whether anything should be tunneled down the ssh, but I think that can wait until access is a bit less sketchy.

1 comment(s)

spammer sentenced
On 10/04/05 at 19:48 cobaltfish wrote:

Granted that with my collection of spam filtering, very little gets through to me, but it was good to see in the news that a spammer got 9 years in jail

2 comment(s)

rfid mouse
On 09/04/05 at 22:03 cobaltfish wrote:

I know some of the more paranid individuals fear RFID tags but this rfid mousestrikes me as an interesting use of it.

1 comment(s)

Isle of Man Pictures
On 06/04/05 at 11:25 cobaltfish wrote:

I've now uploaded some of my Isle of Man pictures. I do have some more, but I've only uploaded the better ones.

0 comment(s)

shiney gadgets
On 05/04/05 at 16:03 cobaltfish wrote:

I dont think I can ever have enough gadgets. I was browsing the Sony Ericsson website for their bluetooth hands free kits and to see what they might say about the jog dial playing up on my p800 and came across this little blue torch Like all their accessories, it plugs into the power socket on the phone, and draws power from there. Its quite neat how that all their gear essentialy uses the same charger, so only one is needed when traveling, and I supose you could then even cut that down to a car or usb charger (I dont think I go anywhere for long without my laptop). Sony Ericsson also have a laser pointer which works in a similar way. I have no idea where these are available from-the e-shop on the website doesnt currently have stock!

0 comment(s)

its oh, so quiet
On 05/04/05 at 15:37 cobaltfish wrote:

I've been a bit busy with stuff for a while, and not posted anything for ages. Anyhow, I thought I had best say that I am alive, and have had a bit of holiday.
Last week I was with the archery club in the Isle of Man, for the Student festival of Sport. I landed the job of minibus driver. I think the TT course would have been more interesting in something that didnt slow down as soon as it reached a hill. I have collected approx 1300 pics from Bradford, Warwick, Birmingham, Loughbourough archery clubs. I might have collected some of Exeters, but the ammount of SD, XD and compact flash cards I fed my laptop via picassa, I may be wrong! I will post some pictures of mine on here. Anyone interested in a Cd / dvd of pics should contact me, and I will try and burn one for you.

0 comment(s)

Birthday and Snow
On 23/02/05 at 01:15 cobaltfish wrote:

Monday was my birthday, and also, for the first time in a while, a snowy one. It reminded me of when I was much younger, and there was snow in the winter, and often on my birthday, so I got to build snowmen and such like. It wasnt untill about 1:30am that I went out in the snow-posibly enough for a snowman, and definately enough to make snow balls :-D. I've put some pictures up on thesesnow pictures pages

1 comment(s)

gmail and links / lynx
On 11/02/05 at 22:36 cobaltfish wrote:

Sitting at home, with a rediculasly slow wireless connection, and no dns settings, I've sshed into my computer in bradford in order to check e-mail and such like. However, unlike my website, I cannot logon to gmail in lynx or links. I dont like javascript and such like at the best of times-is this another good reason not to like it? that it limits command line web browsers? Oh well, I'll just forward port 3389 over the ssh tunnel for now, and maybe search for the dns servers I need

1 comment(s)

crashed lifts
On 06/02/05 at 20:57 cobaltfish wrote:

The richmond building never ceases to scare me with its lifts:

I think its crashed :-s This is why I always take the stairs when going up to the n floor

3 comment(s)

Wow-gmail invites
On 04/02/05 at 00:52 cobaltfish wrote:

Wow-I now have 50-yes 5 0 invites to gmail. They must be going out of beta soon, if that many are available to me now-look, here's the an image of the invite

1 comment(s)

wireless access
On 20/01/05 at 10:11 cobaltfish wrote:

I decided to scan for wireless access as I walked into work today. I was quite suprised at the number of access points that where unsecured. of the 35 access points I detected, 24 were un-secured. 2 of the access points are works (secured), and one of the unsecured was the university, which is secured via university computer logon password, which leaves quite a few which could be compromised. I wonder if more investigation is needed.....

4 comment(s)

wind
On 20/01/05 at 09:43 cobaltfish wrote:

Woah-it was windy last night. I abandoned my bike for getting into work today, and still found that some of the wind was on the strong side! I really need to pay more attention to the weather, cos both this wind, and the snow on tuesday came as a complete suprise!

2 comment(s)

message from outerspace
On 15/01/05 at 23:41 cobaltfish wrote:

ESA have successfully landed the huygens pobe on Titan, after its 2.2 billion mile journey there, piggybacked on the cassini probe of Nasa. It touched down a couple of days ago, on 14th Jan, and some pictures are now being released on the ESA website. Also an mp3 of audio data taken as the probe desceded I wonder if there's any recordings from any martian probes... ;-)

2 comment(s)

copy windows xp installation
On 15/01/05 at 21:44 cobaltfish wrote:

Nothing ilegal... ! Last night I succesfully moved my windows xp from what (to the original install) the c drive to another disk on the system.
I started with local area security linux distro, and used partimageto transfer the whole disk into a bzip file on another pc. I then formated the destination disk and read from the backup files to the new disk. Unfortunately the image that was restored was a 12gb one, and the partition was 60, and windows decided to ignore the increased partition size.
after a bit of research I found ntfs resize and found inside security rescue tool kit, and used the tool to reset the disk to the "correct" size.
and there was my windows install on another hard disk, thus avoiding what I feard, of my system disk dieing (it was making funny noises for a while)

1 comment(s)

geeks guide to tv
On 15/01/05 at 18:05 cobaltfish wrote:

Rich pointed out a realy cool tv guide at bleb.org It has rss feed channels for the tv channels, and has all the extra channels like bbc4, and even bbc digital radio stations. It seems written with firefox in mind

1 comment(s)

mac mini and ipod shuffle... more on my wi
On 11/01/05 at 23:51 cobaltfish wrote:

Well, apple have brought out some interesting new products today. The mac mini looks stunning, and is from what I've seen amazingly small, and with a starting price of $399, at a pretty good price. I'm sure a similar sized sff machine would cost atleast that price. Granted you have to provide a keyboard, mouse, and screen, but it almost makes me want to have this to supliment my desktop. However I am still intrerested in the powerbooks, and with the prices for apple products, I think the day where I get one is drawing close. from what I've read on slashdot it is fanless and silent. Maybe the multimedia pc in the house needs an upgrade...

Lets not forget the other mac release today, the ipod shuffle, a flash based (and small) ipod. Its the cheepest ipod they have, and the smallest. My creative nomad muvo now feels quite dated. Dare I consider an upgrade? However, it doesnt play oggs, and most of the music I have is ogged. I dont know how much daily use it would get. Cycling to work kinda requires me to be listening and aware of any of the madness there may be on the roads.

*sigh* decisions...

3 comment(s)

google-what search is next?
On 11/01/05 at 11:14 cobaltfish wrote:

Google have some interesting searches now on their website like university and school search however this doesnt have Bradford uni yet they have Bradford collage I've added Bradfords website, but it requests that I "encourage others on campus to follow your lead by sending in more nominations on your school's behalf"
Another interesting search to watch develop is google local search which appears to be a bit like yellow pages search. It is beta, and is only in USA at the moment

1 comment(s)

rss feed
On 09/01/05 at 23:16 cobaltfish wrote:

I've just been experimenting with rss feed from this website... I think it nearly works. I will have a bit of a play with it before putting it public, but it wasnt nearly as hard as I imagined

6 comment(s)

mozilla download manager
On 09/01/05 at 10:06 cobaltfish wrote:

I had quit an amusing convosation with someone from a computer texh support the other day:
them: "so you use mozilla for your downloads?"
me: "yes, I suppose I do, and for my e-mail"
them: "but isnt it like kazaa?"
me: "what?? no!! its a web browser and e-mail program"
I must say I was shocked to be asked that kind of question by someone in the computing industry.
I had another, much more satisfying convosation on the phone with a hardware support line. I needed a file to test the configuration of a firewall, and was worried that the e-mail content filter might not like the size or content of the message, so suggested another e-mail address. I gave my gmail address, and the support person was like "cool, you have gmail"
by the way, I have invites again on gmail

1 comment(s)

happy new year
On 05/01/05 at 23:06 cobaltfish wrote:

First post of new year... ment to post earlier, but got side tracked! Website is working fine again. Database played up the other day-apologies-I must get a better *problem* page set, which is more than "database error"

3 comment(s)

turkey dinner
On 16/12/04 at 00:24 cobaltfish wrote:

Just had quite a fun afternoon/evening. I cooked a quite successfull dinner for me and the house. It felt quite a challange when I just started looking at it, but a few hours later, I'd cooked a turkey, spuds, veg, and a trifle for pudding :-) Thanks to everyone for the help they gave-maybe I'll another one soon :-)

1 comment(s)

more to do
On 13/12/04 at 23:28 cobaltfish wrote:

Just run a quick modification of my css to increase the text size, after a few people had said it seemed a bit small
Things I still wanna do is add a priview before entries are posted and also for comments

0 comment(s)

Some nice plugins
On 13/12/04 at 23:17 cobaltfish wrote:

Just a few firefox/thunderbird plugins I've started using a few nice pugins, some are prob more famous than others, but here's the list

1. Gmail notifier Gives a nice status bar indication of gmails in inbox
2. foxytunes This plugin gives control of pretty much every media player I can think of, even foobar2000 (my current one) in both firefox and thunderbird
3. super bible toolbar this searches bible gateway for the text you enter. Bit buky, but can see that it can be useful

2 comment(s)

bike repairs
On 11/12/04 at 00:39 cobaltfish wrote:

oops, that was nearly a blank post...
I've been learning about fixing my bike up better today. On the way down to uni yesterday evening, my rear gears suddenly stopped changing. After popping into the shop, I was advised to preasure wash the rear of bike, and then lubricate it all.
a quick blast did indeed make it much better! I also ended up taking the axles apart on the bike to grease the bearings. I think my rear axle is a bit too worn in places, so will check when I have time, and cycle shops arent so busy

2 comment(s)

thunderbird + sunbird + sony ericsson
On 11/12/04 at 00:37 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm investigating the usefullness of some of mozillas products with my phone (p800). There's a Syncml php and mysql server. I aim to look at the data this collects, and integrate it into the address books and calendar functions provided by Thunderbird and sunbird (which is still in early stages of development
I havent started reading data out of the address book or calendar to the database, or from the database to calendar, but have taken sample entries to test principles. More to follow

1 comment(s)

G-mail
On 07/12/04 at 17:55 cobaltfish wrote:

I know g-mail has been arround for a while, and I've had it a while, but I have 6 invites if anyone is interested.

I've been asked by one of my mates back home whats so cool about it. Straight off I answered 1Gb of free storage. I didnt add how it can be linux mounted and other things like that. Is it just a geek thing finding it cool?

7 comment(s)

one years worth of crunching
On 21/11/04 at 01:19 cobaltfish wrote:

Since June, I have been processing work units for find a drug . This is a project, not as big as SETI@home, and unlike some of the other medical research programes, include linux version. Last night, I submited my 387th work unit, which brought my total to 367 days of processing. The main boost in the amount of units done recently is because I'm running the client on my server. Although a quad PII 200 isnt much processor power, it is functioning properly as a multi processor, and has one job per processor, and only has the overhead of running a command line and samba.

4 comment(s)

Postoffice-my local bank??
On 15/11/04 at 13:15 cobaltfish wrote:

The post office near work has signs on the front sayin how its your local bank and such like, so I decide to do a good thing for the community and make use of the local facilities. Only my bank card doesnt work in their swipe for some reason, yet is fine in other places machines. So I cant withdraw cash there. I then try to pay in a cheque, and get told that even they do local bank stuff for barclays, its an hsbc cheque, so they cant touch it. So what are the post office useful for then?!

3 comment(s)

order, order....
On 14/11/04 at 21:14 cobaltfish wrote:

Just put a little bug fix in to the sql for returning the blog comment entries. For some reason, I hadnt put an "order by *entry date*" into it, so items where in no particular order-easy fix :-)
Was at a Bums concert last night, featuring Rent, a local band, and the small world band. Pics will go up soon, but with a new 512Mb compact flash card, I tried to take lots, but still got nowhere near filling it!

5 comment(s)

msnbot
On 12/11/04 at 02:40 cobaltfish wrote:

I've been quite suprised at the ammount of hits on my website... then I read the logs and saw it was the msn bot-47% so far this month! I see like the bbc news says, microsoft realy do want their finger in everything. I still think 2 comment(s)

**Pop**
On 12/11/04 at 02:25 cobaltfish wrote:

My cycling experiance got one step more interesting. I had my first full blow out. I even heard a pop. It took me a few secs to realise that it wasnt just another firework, but infact the tire bursting, leaving me a miles walk carrying it on my back. I now have replaced the narrow slicks with broad more off roady tires. On the plus side I stop quicker... on the down side, I think its reduced my top speed to about 27mph rather than the 30 I sometimes reach-prob safer, but its kinda satisfying reaching the speedlimit!

2 comment(s)

Christmas already
On 24/10/04 at 00:30 cobaltfish wrote:

I'm fed up of christmas already. Its not that I dont enjoy it, but having christmass adds on tv, starting in the middle of october-I havent had my summer holidays yet, as for winter. Anyone like to predict when the shopping catalogues will be out for christmas 2006-my guess is some time around 01/01/05

3 comment(s)

networks
On 20/10/04 at 00:01 cobaltfish wrote:

Been a bit of a long time since I did much on my site. I got my laptop back after a week, which isnt too bad. It had a new system board, which is a bit bad.

since then I've been doing random bits of computering for people-an evening in sheffield discovering the uni provided dodgy pci network cards, then did another couple of houses up here in bradford. One the entire network, and another just did the final touches + re-configed the router + a couple of pcs.
Its nice getting compliments like "genius" from time to time, and everyone when working in a house offers plenty of cups of coffee.
Plug if anyone I know up here would like some help with stuff, feel free to give me a call, and I'll see if I can help you :-)

1 comment(s)

another broken toshiba...
On 22/09/04 at 23:13 cobaltfish wrote:

Yet again, my toshiba laptop is dead. After an average day at work, I was pleased to have a short play with an orange 3G modem card, and got a nice vpn terminal server session to run via the connection.
All this changed when I got home. I went to resume from standby, and all that greeted me was a power light. I tried various ways of unplugging it, but it didnt help, so called tech support (call toshiba on 08702 202 202 I now know that number off by heart) The hold music kept thanking me for my patience every few secs-can't I just listen to it in peace?! The techician was worse-I was told to turn off laptop, unplug mains + battery & hold power for 10 secs to "remove satic" from the system. That said, I should be able to get it collected tomorrow or day after

2 comment(s)

gimmie a ride on your bike
On 18/09/04 at 23:07 cobaltfish wrote:

Tonight was a bit of a chapter of randomness. I went off with one of my housemates to see a film with some other friends, only to find they'd gone in before us. We decided that we may as well see a different film about an hour later as theirs had started about 20 min ago, and have a wander arround bradford till then
I'd got my bike, and was sitting on it talking thomas (having an in depth discussion about morrowind, when a guy with his mate on the back of his (pedal) bike asks me to let him have a ride on my bike. Having had my last 1 nicked, I wasnt too keen on letting some stranger on mine! Some other guys also showed up, and really tried provoking us to insult them or the area, with things like so where are you from (and asking why I didnt go to cambridge) and why bradford and bet you think I cant afford that bike, to name a few. They also took a look at my helmet and lock, and decided to wander off with the lock, and said you can have it back for a fiver-I wasnt that fussed-it cost that much in the first place, so letting it go resulted them being fed up of being argumentative (and throwing the lock on a bus, whose driver ignored me!) I suppose it was technicaly robbery, but it also saved a big flare up, especialy as I'm not for fights.

0 comment(s)

Webmin for Apache (on suse 9.1)
On 29/08/04 at 00:24 cobaltfish wrote:

Yep, another post-4 in 2 days... Anyway, back to the reason for this post. I was trying to get a few more modules installed on my file server at home, including apache 2. Webmin was convinced that it was not running, when the rest of the server was. An online update in YAST didnt solve anything, so I changed the global misc settings for apache to look in a different location for the apache pid file (which, if you need to set is /var/run/httpd2.pid). Now webmin can fully configure the apache server. I must now check that webmin will auto start, tho I dont plan shutting the server down-one of works is setting a crazy target to beat-about 220 days at the moment, still going strong!

0 comment(s)

security fixes
On 28/08/04 at 21:11 cobaltfish wrote:

not that I'm wanting people to destroy my website.... but I think I've resecured the security holes that where present on my site-like the potential for full html in comments. Rich has been keeping an eye on the security for me

0 comment(s)

I'm So unfit
On 28/08/04 at 15:44 cobaltfish wrote:

Just home for a spin on my bike in warfedale. I took the metro train across from Forster Square to Ilkley, and was plesntly suprised to find that its free to take bike on the trains. My only complaint is that if the trains where more crowded than at 11 am on a bank holiday saturday, it could be a pain.
Once I got there I had a short ride arround the centre before heading off in the Keighley direction, over the moor, trying to follow a cycle map for Bradford area. Lets just say 1 in 10s are steep to ride up, with little or no practice in months. I also realised it was going to be a long way back to bradford. The going down was amazing-I must have been at 30+mph. I decided it was best to just ride round Ikley, then catch a train to Shipley, and ride back from there. I'm now home, the net result, one tired Andy!!

1 comment(s)

Bike
On 27/08/04 at 22:52 cobaltfish wrote:

I splashed out on a bike yesterday, so I'm thinking of going of and trying to explore some of yorkshire tomorrow and/or monday. The only thing is I think I'll be a out of shape as I havent been on a bike on the hills of bradford for a couple of months. I'm now looking for a few nice routes in the area, that wont be to tiring

The delights of work are varied, today I was asked how much I know about photocopier repairs-good considering I'm IT support!

0 comment(s)

What shall I print next
On 25/08/04 at 23:06 cobaltfish wrote:

While running a check on network devices and locations I noticed an IR port on an hp laserjet 2200, and had my phone in my pocket. just to see if it worked, I fired up the IR on my p800 and tryed printing my business card from it. A couple of secs later, I had my details on a sheet of A4. I then went one further, and tryed printing a picture I'd taken on my phone camera, and that also printed, no drivers. My laptop however took 30 s to install a driver, and then also printed fine, no wires-I could get used to wireless printing.

I bought a wireless keyboard and mouse from aria for a tenner, but my current probem is the multimedia keys and my laptop-the keys function, just the software doesn't. With a bit of registry work, I changed some of the program details, so it put my name as software creator, and found the keys needed to be modified. filemon and regmon are my best friends!!

0 comment(s)

Back From Camp
On 22/08/04 at 11:00 cobaltfish wrote:

I just got back from a week on camp yesterday, hence the lack of posts on my website from me. I had my laptop and fone there the whole week, but not the time to write anything, being busy looking after my share of about 30 10-13 year olds. I cant put pics up cos of the whole child protection thing, tho I mite be able to put a few up from there, once I hav a chance to look thru them. The first thing I'll do is catch up on some sleep!

0 comment(s)

linux info
On 07/08/04 at 02:04 cobaltfish wrote:

Looking at my logs over the last few days, I seem to have had a few hits on the site regarding various settings on computers (as well as quite a few international visitors, which I'm pleased to welcome). In view of this I plan to put a section on my site with info regarding the various projects I have, including Firexplorer, Suse 9.1 and ofcourse the general day to day configuring of my compaq proliant 6500 server. I also aim to get Bluetooth, my Sony Ericsson P800 and my toshiba laptop to all work together in linux (not that I've started yet). RSS feeds and trackbacks on my website are also a goal. A quick little job for tomorrow will be adding a little query to count comments on a page, and alter the link text accordingly. Any other ideas-please add them

1 comment(s)

Samba + suse 9.1
On 06/08/04 at 01:16 cobaltfish wrote:

Its taken me a little while to remeber the settings correctly for running samba on my server. (for those of you that dont know, samba is the linux utility for creating fileshares for windows) The problem I kept getting was that I seemed only able to access files as nobody from a windows machine. After a bit of fiddling, I used chgrp, chown and chmod to change the group, owner, and permissions of files, so some shares only I could write to, but everyone can read, and some that anyone can do anything.
For group read write and exicute, with owner and others also doing the same, use
chown nobody *
and
chmod 777
However, this is not secure, so for the directories I wanted write access for users, but read for anyone else,
chgrp users *
chown [owner username] *
chmod 775 *
And the other important thing is to create the samba user with
smbpasswd -a [username]
to add the required username and passwords to sambas config
Now all I have to do is figure out a seamless way of adding disks to an array without loosing data, but increaseing its size.... the compaq tool doesnt seem to entirely work with suse, whether its caused by old array firmware, or incompatable rps (the software for linux is only rpm based) I'm yet to find out
1 comment(s)

My First server
On 29/07/04 at 23:50 cobaltfish wrote:

I got my first server yesterday, and got it partialy working today. Its a nice little compaq proliant 6500 server, with quad Pentium II's and 512Mb Ram.
I struggled for quite a while yesterday with the interlock LED's being lit. I ended up taking the whole thing apart, and putting all the drives and cpus back in untill it was no longer lit. Then It wouldnt do anything-the nice LCD display told me how it was a compaq display on firmware 1.9, but no more info. A short call to the trader on e-bay who I got it from soon helped. He advised that the case open swiches prevent it from running, so to check them. About 30s later, it was running!
Now all I need to do is install an O/s. I tried Suse linux 9.1 but it seemed to get so far, and then stop loading into the ramdisk-I think it may be a problem caused by the way the server addresses the ram. However, most of the important hardware seemed to function-the compaq array including the network. I then tried quick boot of knopix. It ran fine showed that linux kernels where quite happy with quad cpu's, tho the disks where not detected. I shall try the suse linux install from smartstart cd tomorrow

On a seperate note its System administrator appreciation day tomorrow. I hope everyone at work is appreciative!

1 comment(s)

comments
On 24/07/04 at 21:53 cobaltfish wrote:

I've just spent a bit of time creating comments. feel free to add some

1 comment(s)

Time for my servers
On 22/07/04 at 22:45 cobaltfish wrote:

Yesterday evening was spent ebaying. I got to interesting pieces of kit to play with-a rack mount quad cpu compaq 6500, and a storage array. These will be consigned to the "server room" once I get them, and given the menial task of being my file server. I'll have pictures of it, once I have installed it
Also new is a server for work, which is a very nice peice of kit-a dual xeon 3.2Ghz server. It is amazingly fast-I'd say the best machine by far we have
The long running of my desktop came to an abrupt end last night. After 43.5 days, zorro randomly switched off. I know I didnt hit the power button, cos the case door was closed. My aim was to exceed the 55 days a server at work has done. I guess I can try again....

0 comment(s)

Rewiring the house
On 18/07/04 at 21:31 cobaltfish wrote:

The rewiring of the house has been partialy done. I have put some of the pictures of it here. I think the server room looks pariculaly good with the 48 port switch, and cobalt raq. We even gave the shelf that the servers are on a new lease of life-it seemed to be discarded down there as junk!

3 comment(s)

firexplorer
On 17/07/04 at 09:49 cobaltfish wrote:

The project to fool people into thinking firefox is explorer is realy taking off now. Rich and me will be working on the project

On a side note, maplins is such a bad shop! Its just too easy to get distracted from what your supposed to be getting in there. Hopefully soon they should have the parts in to re-network the house, to tidy messy and damaged cables, and to create a house "server room". Although it is a student house, Rich already has a (very nice, might I add) cobalt raq, and I would like to get server to be a centre file server. Pics to follow

0 comment(s)

Firefox Explorer 6.0
On 05/07/04 at 00:03 cobaltfish wrote:

At work, having re-installed a terminal server Rich and I set about trying to improve web browser security. This meant trying to remove IE as much as posable and replace it with mozilla firefox, but keeping it looking the same, so people didnt get too confused Rich has details on setting the apperance of the browser to that of IE but this only goes for the user profile its installed on. to get it to. So I then tried to find the settings requited to apply the skins and icons for all users. Add these to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\greprefs\all.js

pref("extensions.lastSelectedSkin", "IE5");
pref("firesomething.lists.names", "");
pref("firesomething.lists.prefixes", "");
pref("firesomething.lists.vendors", "Internet explorer");

if a proxy is needed by default, set this up in the same file
pref("network.proxy.http", "192.168.0.1");
pref("network.proxy.http_port", 8080);
etc...
I'll put the skin install settings up when I have them, but it involves including skin info in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\chrome\chrome.rdf

0 comment(s)

to many connections...
On 01/07/04 at 23:00 cobaltfish wrote:

To my suprise, there is quite some lag, when using remote desktop conection over wireless, to a machine using terminal services over our broadband internet using a vpn, and then trying to connect to a vnc terminal, which is diplaying the output of a ssh shell....
next time I check the mail server at work, maybe I should use a few less connecting computers between me and it

0 comment(s)

deus ex: cassandra
On 27/06/04 at 15:59 cobaltfish wrote:

Having been suprised at the shortness and the changes to the interface of deus ex: invisable wars I was happy to find a mod for the original game called the cassandra project I havent had time to play any of it yet, but it looks impressive-new weapons, many characters to interact with, and an interesting plot.
More about it as I try it out....

0 comment(s)

stable zorro
On 27/06/04 at 00:29 cobaltfish wrote:

I know windows isn't an O/s associated closely with stability and lack of restarts (after upgrading a computer at work, and re-installing M/s office on friday, I'm now certain of this), but I'm impressed with the stability of my desktop machine (which is called zorro, after the name of it's case design). To date, it has been running for just under 19 days. This was likely to have been helped from being left running while I was in suffolk for 15 of them, and that my laptop is content to handle pretty much anything I can think of-even some directX 9 only games like Deus Ex: invisable wars.
My processor cycles arent being wasted. Using the Find-a-drug client, I have been donating spare cycles to finding drugs to treat, cancer, malaria and HIV. I've given up looking for ET-if its so important, they can find us, rather than them us. Until then, treatemnt for cancer will be more use to human kind

0 comment(s)

wheres my buddies?
On 22/06/04 at 23:40 cobaltfish wrote:

Just trying to use msn this evening and:

I know gaim isnt what everyone uses for msn, but instead is an open source, os independant, multi protocol instant messaging client. I happen to like it, as I can use essentialy the same program when using linux or windows. It works pretty well, tho sometimes has issues with file transfers. I think most of that is caused by the nature of the networks I'm on-port forwarding is required, and I cant really be bothered to set it up for dynamic IP addresses

On a side note: I've done a bit more configuring of my cms. Apache now can fully handle my virtual jpg images stored in a db, and will (hopefully) query the database using the image return page. This should help unfortunate IE users which sometimes seem to strugle when given just a url to a php page

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Busa ourdoors 2004
On 21/06/04 at 17:34 cobaltfish wrote:

I've just arived home from the busa outdoors competition at lilleshall (nr newport). Inspite of being fairl windswept for the shooting, it was a good time, and great time after the compititon, meeting up with all the other people I know from other uni clubs, and having bbqs/bonfires for 1/2 the night.
now that I'm back, I've discovered my transition to the new server isnt quite as seamless as I thought. The newer php version dosent resize pictures in quite the same way as the old server, so a bit of editing is required to get colour balence rigth... some pictures will be up shortly

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new software out
On 18/06/04 at 20:57 cobaltfish wrote:

Lots of new software is out now: . Mozilla has also released firefox 0.9 and thunderbird 0.7.
Also, in the news: Mozilla may be moving to mobile phones. They have sponsership from nokia, but I cant belive that something wont be done for sony ericsson phones. Currently my mobile browser is opera, and at version 6.30, isnt really a very upto date browser. Bring on the opensource :-)

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Bluetooth-its everywhere
On 18/06/04 at 12:05 cobaltfish wrote:

Its good to see that bluetooth is finaly begining to take off: while out on a shopping trip in ipswich, I was impressed to see a security guard with a bluetooth earpeice, instead of the standard wired one.
The spread of bluetooth hasnt gone un-noticed by virus writers: Cabir is a proof of concept virus, not yet out in the wild, that can affect nokia series 60 phones, and transmits to any bluetooth devices in range, once it infects a system

on a side note, I'm now on the new server, with a fairly seemless transition :) please e-mail me if any problems are spotted

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updates
On 17/06/04 at 00:26 cobaltfish wrote:

With this new webserver stuff, maybe its time I considered getting some more work done to my website, seeing as I haven't done much with it in the last few months.
As a DIY CMS, it still lacks a little in flexability for use. I will try to make creating pages easier, with buttons adding appropriate code-such as tags for different text styles and images. I also need to tidy up the update interface-although no-one but me (hopefully) sees it, it's still a bit untidy, and lacks links between the various editing pages I have. My picture pages are created with a script, and it would be useful if I could also edit them with a script, rather than the text box I use at the moment for editing every page.

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webserver
On 16/06/04 at 23:50 cobaltfish wrote:

my webserver is being moved... hopefully the move will be seamless. My Dad, who provides the hosting now has a new server, where all the sites he looks after will live. Most of the functions I need of my webserver seem to be ok, so fairly soon, I'll be live-I'm not sure where my database is at the moment-this entry could appear on either website-current or, soon to be curent-lets just see!

*edit*It seems to be looking at the database of my live site. I suppose, it will be looking at the database specified in the url the config files.... can soon change that
I'm investigating my server admin area-I dont seem to have access to any mysql databases, but I can schedule web stats to update every so often :-) */edit*

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New Friends
On 15/06/04 at 21:15 cobaltfish wrote:

While doing some digging in the garden at home today, I was amazed by a blackbird. It was suprisingly tame, and not concerend by me trying to dig up a tree stup. It nearly hopped over my foot. I took some pictures while it was arround:

Appologies for image quality-these are from my phone camera

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Suse 9.1
On 10/06/04 at 09:48 cobaltfish wrote:

Suse have brought out version 9.1, which includes kernel 2.6, and will run on 64 bit, and 32 bit processors. I do have broadband here at home now, so could start downloading, but I dont want to upset my family, or use any download limits. There's a nice 768K connection that will be more or less only for me up in bradford when I get back-I think I'll wait for the few gigs it is

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Bluejacking
On 25/05/04 at 15:47 cobaltfish wrote:

On saturday I had my first experiance of bluejacking (bluejackQ has info on how to bluejack). I was over in huddersfield at a summer ball and had a little scan for people. No one replied to any mesages, but I'm sure I'll get better responses in future

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interesting spam
On 17/05/04 at 16:44 cobaltfish wrote:

here's a vaugely interesting spam I revieved:

********** WebMail -  FREE Web POP3 SMTP Email Account's  	
 

None profit organization for FREE multi language Web and POP3 Email Account's

Home           About us          FAQ          Click here to Sign Up and Login          Free information by mail

    * Someone is sending big mass of spam emails with link to our site. If you get an email with link to our site or with our Main Page, it was not sent by us !!! .

    * FREE 20 MB disk space - The biggest space you can get for FREE on the Net.

    * 5,000 emails limit to send per day - The biggest ammount you can get for FREE or even for pay. "Hotmail" and "Yahoo" limit you to maximum 100 emails per day, and only few companies limit you to 500, but NO ONE let you to send 5,000 emails like us and it is a fact !

    * 5 MB attachment(s) size limits - The biggest attachment you can get for FREE on the Net.

    * POP3 / IMAP full access - You can use any email client program like "Outlook", "Netscape", "Eudora" and more, to send and receive emails without the necessity to enter to the web site for that.

    * Web based access from anywhere - You can see your emails, send and receive from any computer and anywhere in the world, like from "Internet Coffee" etc.

    * SMTP full access by any email client program - You can use any email client to check outomatically if you got an email, as well to send emails by our SMTP server, without the necessity to make the Login - Password process every time.

    * Multi Language support and interface - 21 languages that can cover the users necessities all around the world.

    * Full smart editor to write and send your emails - You can choose fonts, colors, images, background and much more.

    * Anti-Spam filters - No more Spam and "Junk Emails". Our Spam decetor will reject those emails, and you can also put by yourself more filters as you need or wish.

    * Virus protection - Our built-in Virus protection program, will stop any virus, so you can be sure your emails are totally clean.

    * No advertising from us in any way - All the other free Webmail providers force you to see advertising when you enter to your account, and also send you from time to time advertising emails. On our Webmail site, you will never see or get, any kind of advertising.

    * We are active for over 3 years and serve more than 280,000 users.

    * Sign Up in few seconds. Just choose Username and Password without any questions from us and start using your new account.


      Click here to Sign Up and Login.

      Click here to send us email.
      ©1999-2004 Friendly Files Inc.

"Someone is sending big mass of spam emails with link to our site. If you get an email with link to our site or with our Main Page, it was not sent by us !!!" what ever-why am I even advertisin this spam..... atleast I'm not being told to enlarge body parts or get diplomas

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Guildwars
On 15/05/04 at 14:33 cobaltfish wrote:

Thomas has given me a really interesting game thats under development. Its called Guild Wars. There was a demo of the alpha out for E3 at guildwars.com, but the demo were only for E3 and has now ended. its a kind of mmorpg, but will be without monthly fees, just buy updates from time to time-I'm looking forward to when its out for real

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bluetooth
On 14/05/04 at 07:53 cobaltfish wrote:

I recieved after much "customer support" a new laptop from toshiba yesterday, to replace an extremly dodgy one. Its a nice little Tecra M2, powered by intel centrino. (with fairly good battery life-it easily played a film, without turning bluetooth and wifi off for the first 1/2 hour!)
I also managed to get bluetooth and my sony ericsson p800 to work with the toshiba bluetooth card. I browsed several forums to try and find out how.
Eventualy I discovered that the bluetooth wants to do the sync on com port 7 or com2, so the sync program has to listen to that. But before it listens to that com port, a link has to form with the phone. Use the bluetooth stack program wizard to create a new connection, but select custom mode, and connect to the phones bluetooth com port. Hopefully if you tell the sync program to listen to this new port and ports 2 and 7, it should connect and sync mail me if you want more info from me about this

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new gadget
On 26/04/04 at 20:18 cobaltfish wrote:

I've finally replace my seimens c45. To replace it I got a Sony Ericsson P800. Its quite a gadget, and I'm still learning some of its functions on it!
I'm a little concerned about the battery life-its seemed quite short so far. But I expect all the uploading and configuring I've done on to it is main reason. I'm yet to start writing programs for it. I plan when I have time to write a score sheet program. I'll use java-output to text files is fairly easy to do, and a few parse ints will let it add numbers up, and I've done so much gui stuff for various courseworks I cant see me having too many problems- an alpha may soon appear here!

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Firefox + toshiba
On 22/04/04 at 01:24 cobaltfish wrote:

In anticipation of the forthcoming mozilla firefox I've decided to have a go with a version omptimised for my CPU, and see how it goes. I've got quite used to opera . but given time I should be able to get firefox how I like it.
I'm begining to loose confidence and patiance with toshiba. About 3 weeks ago I phoned their "customer support" with regards to a bust hard disk. I'm still waiting for them to get back to me-this is after a phone call this week, in which I was placed as a "high priority". I just hope that the next laptop I get (likely to be an apple powerbook G4) is more reliable than my toshiba satellite pro 6100.

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dead hard disk
On 19/04/04 at 13:49 cobaltfish wrote:

my laptop hard disk is dead-only replaced in june, so I'm a bit diapointed with my toshiba satellite pro 6100. customer service from toshiba has been even worse: I phoned up the day before I went to the Isle of Man, and was promised a call the next day. I still havent heard. When I rang up, various excuses where made: "the phone system's not working" and "we're under staffed. That still doesnt fix my laptop. I think I'm pretty certain to replace it with a nice little g4 powerbook when it is working, and I can afford one. Maybe with that nice back lit keyboard....

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Back in Bradford
On 17/04/04 at 23:25 cobaltfish wrote:

I was a bit more organised with packing last night for coming back to Bradford. I had it done by midnight, unlike when I went home, where I started at about 2 am, cos thats when I got in after getting back from Isle of Man. It was funny-everything seemed to fit in the suitcase so much easier this time.
I went over to a friends house last night, and nearly had flying lesssons on the way back home-metros really shouldn't do that kind of thing, but it was fun driving propper narrow roads :)

This may demonstrate why free wap isnt a good thing but anyway....
on the train coming back to bradford, I was a bit bored, so decided to check a couple of message boards I frequent on my mobile using google's wap seach engine, which also renders html to wml, and divides the pages into smaller cards. The trouble with message boards is even peoples footers on a mesage take all the line of my phones screen, so sometimes messages spanned to pages. I think its just more reason to upgrade my slightly outdated siemens c45

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Isle of Man Student Festival of Sport
On 15/04/04 at 16:36 cobaltfish wrote:

I've finaly got round to posting since the archery club trip to IoM. Appart from practically no sleep on the voyage there, it was great
The island is lovely, the weather was good (I chose the right times to be inside museums!) Oh, and there where lots of other students arround: over 40 doin archery, and one evenig we had prety much all of us in 1 room! I came 9th in the competitions :D (there where 4-a portsmouth, fita 18, worcester, and a bray 1, followed by a knockout)
I'll try to get my pics up soon

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Crazy Drivers
On 24/03/04 at 00:31 cobaltfish wrote:

Sometimes I really hate riding a bike around Bradford

1. The hills-you've hardly gone down one, before you're going up the next
2. The drivers-for some reason madness takes over anyone here-the highway code is interperated differently here
3. The weather-if its not raining its pouring, or just plain windy

Todays example was as I went off to do my shopping at morisons. I had a lorry pull out of a side junction, turning right, and nearly kill me! I was going down hill at a fair pace-about 25 - 30 mph, and with him across my lane kinda didn't have anywhere to go. Oh and the driver was on a mobile phone
I survived, and shook my fist at him! Fat lot of notice he took-atleast he didnt then turn round to finish the job off!

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blog user interface
On 20/03/04 at 01:09 cobaltfish wrote:

I have just created a back end user interface to my blog (while I watch my housemate try and hack my website! :S) It's an ugly interface, but hopefully if this appears on my website, the UI works

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nasty network cables....
On 19/03/04 at 03:15 cobaltfish wrote:

Sometimes I really hate computer networks. I spent most of this afternoon trying to persuade the network at home to work. Richard had put in a 48 port 10 base switch, but for 5 people and about 10 computers it seemed overkill, so replaced it with a nice 100base 5 port switch, to complement our 4 port dsl router.
Only it decided to play up, and no one could do anything. Very carefully I unpluged everything but his computer (as his radio was on air at the time) and started to sort out all the wires. Unfortunately it wasn't best pleased with the wireless box, which kept killing things from time to time-I think it was taking a disliking to the uplink slot.
Anyway, it seems to be happy now, and even the wireless is working, after I reset the security keys, so I'm going to do a bit of work on my website

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Red vs Blue
On 18/03/04 at 01:23 cobaltfish wrote:

Even though I'm no fan of microsft and its products, I still appreciate a good story. Red vs Blue is a video/story set in the halo game world, and is quite amusing. I'd say broadband is useful, as the video clips are about 20MB each. Thanks to some custom instalation of xine and alsa dmixer packages from links2linux.de, I now have both divx and quicktime files playing happily on my linux box (it was also a windows machine, until I killed the registry. I'm surviving fine without it, so havent bothered fixing windows! I do seem good at finding german websites!) I must stop wasting time....

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my instant mesenger
On 17/03/04 at 23:51 cobaltfish wrote:

I've changed my msn client again. I'm still unconventional and not using the microsoft version. I had been using Dmsn which is a java based program, as java is happy with linux. but unfortunately for links it uses the command "explorer http://a.web.page" meaning linux doesnt like the link, and windows ignores my default browser. However gaim which originates from linux is perfectly happy both in windows and linux to open urls how I like, and it feels more configurable

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w3c code validator
On 14/03/04 at 17:56 coblatfish wrote:

Just validated my webpages, and the pages and the stylesheets are valid.
I've still not made my user interface for the blog. But I have made a java user interface for a calculator as part of some coursework

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Linux and nforce2
On 08/03/04 at 07:55 cobaltfish wrote:

YAY! I finaly got my desktop to like the nforce network drivers! I had a go at compiling them from source, while disabling anything that might even consider interfering with them, and suddenly thanks to suse's Nforce driver instructions(in German!) both network cards worked! Bridging the two connections was also fairly easy :-)
However, I cant get to excited yet, as alsa doesnt seem to like multiple audio streams on the built in sound

Oh well, back to doing coursework

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I need to post something....
On 06/03/04 at 23:39 cobaltfish wrote:

I thought I better get something on my site for March, seeing as its now nearly a week into it.
I've been out at an archery competition all day, and only just got back, but I did manage to update the fridge magnet poetry on wednesday.
I'm no further on with my site development-I have too much propper work to do(doing java coursework, not hiding toucans from the birmingham archery team, like I was involved in earlier today....)

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fun in the snow
On 27/02/04 at 02:41 cobaltfish wrote:

Aaah the glorious weather of Bradford.
So Your walking home at 11:30 with a friend and its snowing, what do you do? Start a snowball fight :-)
Also we built a snowman once we got home, I think it's called Bernie, as Frosty is just a common name

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my video project
On 24/02/04 at 02:29 cobaltfish wrote:

I now have another little computer project or two, having hit some sort of brick wall with the nforce driver issue. I'm now in the progress of trying out the dual output of my graphics card in linux-windows is fine-I think its the nforce chipset again The aim being to make it output to tv. I have several outputs for doing this:

• directly from s-video connector -> composite video -> scart
• from s-video
• from dvi
• from vga

and finaly I could get something to take these and change them to rf to be tuned into by tv
Another problem is the reaching of tv from computer-my current connectors are a little short. taking a vga, and using the RGB composites seems the best solution, as composite looses a bit of video quality. For the cable, I think butchering some rj45 may do the trick! This forum has a lot of stuff on it, and sput.nl has some diagrams I'll vaugely follow

Oh, and dont mention the coursework-only a couple of java gui's etc to do....

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Kernel 2.6.3
On 18/02/04 at 14:20 cobaltfish wrote:

No sooner than I sucessfully compile kernel 2.6.2, I notice that kernel 2.6.3 is out.
Aah well, its not much harder complining a kernel a day later than compiling the previous and the thought of ruining a nice stable linux build....
Eventualy I might even manage to get my other network card working-the configuration of nforce2 chipset stuff seems few + far between

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More yeti fun
On 16/02/04 at 20:51 cobaltfish wrote:

There's now a new version of the penguin game at yeti sports. Its called orca slap, and in a way its a bit like archery-getting penguins into a target by hitting them with a snowball, after they've been flipped in the air by an orca-another good distraction from things I should be doing

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Suse Linux 9.0
On 15/02/04 at 22:57 cobaltfish wrote:

I now have both my computers running linux (after downloading a copy of the suse 9.0 and installing it. I must say I am impressed with its latest changes:

• reading/resizing ntfs partitions
• software modem detection
• pcmcia wifi card detection/configuration
• samba and apache configuration

to name a few of the current new improvements I've noticed.
The only real problem I currently have is that nvidia dont seem to have updated the nforce drivers for nforce 2 chipsets-any ideas, let me know-but the only major problem it causes is I only have one gigabit ethernet connection!

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muddy archery
On 14/02/04 at 22:40 cobaltfish wrote:

So whats your idea of a fun valentines day evening....
I spent mine walking arround in a muddy field, getting rained on and cold. Oh the joys of outdoors archery. Bronte Archers had a spotlit shoot, and in the best of British traditions, it was wet! Though unlike Paul, I kept my nice cream trousers fairly clean, inspite of his efforts.

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friendly urls...
On 12/02/04 at 12:09 cobaltfish wrote:

Thanks to Neil I've got an idea of how to configure my website to have more user friendly urls, and so that things like google bot can search it

The only problem is that I also have 5 peices of coursework on the go, not including a group project and getting a job for next years placement... so I dont realy have time to do web page development.
Once I have coursework under control, I also have sport keeping me busy, I think if I remember right, I have archery competitions for about the next 3 weeks, having had competitions on the last few weeks-atleast its keeping life interesting!

update 12/02/2004 12:26 :: lets see how hard it is to do

Getting the server to turn URLs into page numbers shouldnt be too hard. But it would help if I wanst using IIS on my local webserver, when my remote is apache, as I could check my code before putting it online-time to make the switch...

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Yeti-penguin Games
On 04/02/04 at 14:21 cobaltfish wrote:

just for anyone who hasnt come across it yet, there's a cool yeti/penguin game-a great waste of time! Yeti/penguin game
My best at the moment is about 1380-I'm sure I will attempt to do better....

I think I have my blogs working with IE. The only problem is the menu's seem to disapear on other browsers when over the blog page

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Begings of my blog
On 04/02/04 at 01:00 cobaltfish wrote:

This is my first blog entry. Its all a bit experimental at t he minute, but I will gradualy be adding more stuff to it....

things to do (that I can think of at the minute)::

• Proper input for me
• other peoples comments
• linking to other blog systems (track back etc)

update 04/02/04 02:15 :: more stuff for the list

• get IE to work propperly.... standards complience....

update 04/02/04 14:25 :: even more....

• get menus working in blog for opera, mozila, safari....

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