I’m in the process of putting debian sarge onto pootle, my little sony laptop. It previously had ubuntu warty on it but I think I’d rather run debian sid on it. So as a first step I’m migrating to sarge. Seems to be going OK, nothing terminal so far.
Again an online absence of several weeks. I’ve been doing stuff in the real world! Then Edinburgh festival has been on and I’ve been to more stuff this year than in all the previous years combined. Seen a lot of comedy and music.
Bonnie Prince Billy
The Pixies
Damien Dempsey
Dave McSavage
Andrew Maxwell
Dara O’Briain
Pam Ann
The Burlesque Hour
And all that was in two weeks.
I’ve been up to Dundee to see United get shunted out of the Uefa cup. And we’ve been getting a first release of Scapa together in work. It’s been a busy couple of weeks.
For the longest time, I’ve been backing up this weblog nightly. The fact I only write to it once a week not withstanding. Since moving to wordpress this has not been enough since the posts are held in a database which is outside of the web accessible area. Luckily Scott Merrill has written a plugin to backup the database and email it to me. Scott has also written a plugin to do this nightly so I can rest easy again.
Elsewhere, Dave Jones talks about rebasing his kernel each night. Inspired by this I’ve set up my PC to do nightly builds of all the exterity software branches I’m interested in. It then posts the built software to an internal website along with the buildlog. If there is a fail in the build it emails me the buildlog so I can fix the problem the following morning. It pays to be lazy.
George Watson are getting rid of their iMacs I picked up 3 old iMacs and 2 Power Macs for £200. Four are for work but I’ll put one in the kitchen and get it wired up to the interweb, so we can have podcasts and receipe sheets at our fingertips. Sad, very very sad.
The Edinburgh festival has started, and last night Michelle and I went along to the opening concert. It was held at St.Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh. Unfortunately there are two St.Mary’s Cathedrals in Edinburgh. One at either end of Princes St. We picked the wrong one. Fortunately we arrived 15 minutes late, just as the soloist was about to start Vivaldi’s Spring concerto. He looked up and patiently waited till we took our seats then launched into his virutoso performance. I’ve never heard classical music played live, but was really blown away by the musicanship, but also the humour in such a constricting art form. Perhaps because it is so constricting you notice the nuances of the performance. There were some bum notes played but it is live and the music must be horrendous to play. I really enjoyed it and the sound in the church was fantastic. They finished with Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Looking forward to some more base entertainment in the coming weeks but that was a great way to kick off the festival
boardmon monitors the temperature and fans of the scapa board. It logs the temperature and fan fails to a log file, reports high temps and fan fails to a manager, and shuts down the board on a high temperature. Other features may be added in due course. This little program was the first bit of new programming I’ve done in over a month. I’ve basically be testing and doing system analysis work during that time. It is nice to get to do the part of the job I enjoy most. And I am in such a better mood because of it. Maybe I need to pick up a debian package and start hacking on that in my spare time.
Started playing a chess game by email with John, you can see how it is progressing here Thanks to soundkeepers for running this service.
I’ve just finished reading this sixth installment of the Harry Potter series. It engaged me much better than the last few books, it wasn’t as long and the style was punchier, much like the first and second books. The heroes are 16 now and are distracted from the fight against the Dark Arts by the usual teenage diversions with the opposite sex, and with procuring butterbeer. A wizard comes of age at 17 so they are almost at a rite of passage. The ending is intriuging and sets up several possiblities for the final book of the series where Harry and Voldemort must have their final reckoning. Had this book been as slow as the Order of Phoenix I don’t think I would have bothered with the last one feeling that JK Rowling had run out of steam. This book shows her to back to form and I’m looking forward to reading the conclusion.
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