One too many mornings

Spent the last four or five days debugging a problem where the new dvb cards woould stop streaming after a few seconds. They were getting duff interrupts and that was causing them to lock. It is the kind of problem that could take ages to fix or get a fix for. I was also only seeing it on new motherboards.

As a last resort downloaded the latest bios for the motherboard. What do you know? It solved the problem. This was an issue that in all likelyhood could not have been fixed at the kernel level. So I’m glad I only spent a few days at it.

Now Playing: Charpentier - Te Deum

Serves 4 (3 meatballs each)
Cooking time 1 1/4.

• 300g lean mince
• 100g bread crumbs
• 1 egg and 1 egg yolk, beaten
• 2 tins chopped tomatoes
• 2 onions, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• dried oregano
• fresh basil and parsley, chopped
• grated Parmesan cheese
• 12 rashers streaky bacon
• Olive oil

Use a large pot for this recipe. Everything goes in the pot so saving washing up. Gently fry the onions and 2 cloves of garlic in 2 tbsp of olive oil. Add the tomatoes and bring to a simmer. Add salt and pepper to taste. Allow to simmer for 20 mins.

Meanwhile mix the bread crumbs, meat, herbs and the remaining garlic in a bowl. Add the egg and form into 12 equal sized balls. Wrap each ball with a rasher of streaky bacon. Place the balls on top of the sauce in the pot cover a leave to simmer for a further 45 mins.
Serve with rice or cous-cous.

Sometimes we just aren’t as cool as we think we are. While preparing the italian meatballs (See receipe pages.) last night, I sliced the end off my finger. Not a lot just a few mils. The knife was so sharp I was actually going back for another cut by the time I realised! This will put paid to any guitar practice for a day or two. And I just bought some new picks too.

I’ve updated the kernel build to take in the new and old cards. There is also a few fixes in there for firmware loading and SAP announcements. It seems we were not quite compliant to the RFC. Will test it tomorrow and hopefully release it.

This could well be the last release of the gateway as we will start development on a dedicated streaming platform next month.

I submitted my first patch to debian today. A one liner, and I got it wrong. But the point is that I found a bug, logged it, characterised it, and it was fixed within a few hours! Debian may have its critics for not releasing frequently enough, but if everyone is dogfooding then it makes little differnece. Especially when there are debian unstable distros like Ubuntu. Thanks to Eduard for responding to my bug so promptly.

Michelle left for work before me this morning, as is usual. Two minutes later there was a ring at the doorbell. It was Michelle, I assumed she forgotten something or other and let her.

As soon as I opened the door I could tell something was wrong imediately. Must’ve been something to do with the lip curl!. It was very icy this morning due to an over-night snowfall, and she’d slipped and fallen and hurt her wrist. It was the same wrist she broke in similar fashion in Andorra. Looks like it isn’t broken, however but I did find this in case a cartoon character ever breaks a bone.

Since everyone else is doing it. So am I.
Here are the first 10 random songs from my collection. I was suprised to find hear’say in there,
and at least three of the artist’s produce, in my opinion, insipid trash.

1. Edwyn Collins - Country Rock
2. The Woolies - Who Do You Love
3. Scissor Sisters - Return To Oz
4. Natalie Imbruglia - Pigeons and Crumbs
5. Hear’Say - Pure & Simple
6. Savage Garden - I Want You
7. Stereophonics - Maybe Tomorrow
8. Red Hot Chili Peppers - By The Way
9. U2 - Beautiful Day
10. Byrne - Waiting for Winter

A severe storm passed through Scotland last night and blew in our window. Got up and secured it then went back to bed.
Lying in bed listening to the wind whistling down the street and through the trees at four in the morning is totally zen!

It’s been a slow day here today. I’ve hacked a bit at adding jpeg support to microwindows. The implementation seems a bit broken though.
Maybe it is something we did. I’ll have to go back to the original and make sure we’ve not wrecked it.

There seems to be a lot of faults on the motherboards we are using to build our Tv gateways with too. So although I built two today, there
are two that fail memtests with known good RAM. Argh! I’ll be going out for a drink tonight definitely

I’ve had a splitting headache all last night and through to this morning it is like water torture. Taken a few aspirin and now a cup of coffee to see if that helps. I missed the session at the Antiquary last night. Dave went along with Angus but it isn’t really that place to trap birds.