My Journal

Well I started learning to drive back in February, passed by theory test yesterday, got one question wrong (couldn't remember which hours it's illegal to sound your horn in a built up area)

Now to book the practical...

Con⋅sul⋅ta⋅tion  (kän′səl tā′s̸hən)

Noun

A process by which you waste the time of the people who will actually be affected, asking for their opinions, when in actuality you will just impose your will on them anyway.

I seem to have ended up in Belfast for 2 weeks as a lampie.

Flew out on Monday, unfortunately Shevek's post does far too good a job of describing how the first 3 days went. Last couple of days haevn't gone too badly, although we're being given naff all information about what's actually going to happen and when, when which makes life interesting.

Ah well. The event actually kicks off tomorrow. Last night was the first decent nights sleep I've had all week.

Apparently some employers have been a little "victorian" about the recent weather and threatened to deduct pay for staff who can't get in to work safely.

I agree with my union, it's important people are informed about their rights on this one, BBC has a reasonable article explaining your rights:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7867264.stm

That's the second time in a week the heating's broken in this building at work.

So that I can get paid for the hours when I need to fix things outside of work I'm now on the on call list at work.

There's something a little silly about how they tried to contact me on Sunday though... They texted my work landline, to tell me the internet wasn't working. Couldn't have done anything about it as I don't have the passwords for the fwsms and don't really know to speak much cisco. But texting my work landline was just plane comedy for me when I got in this morning.

Went to lock the doors this morning, only to discover that the padlocks had frozen. So this morning there was the comedy scene of me stood on the back of the boat waving a tealight underneath the padlocks waiting for them to defrost.

It's 5pm on a Friday, I'm about to leave. One of our automated systems catches a phishing scam coming from another university, and can be 95% certain it's a compromised account.

I phone up one of their SysAdmins, I feel sorry for the poor guy, I've just caused him a significant fraction of an hours work, last thing on a Friday. But on the other hand, they're still going to be able to send email come Monday morning when they get back to work, not having to spend several hours getting them selves off blacklists.

I have to credit the phishers, they've spotted a lucrative target, academics may be good in their field, but half of them don't have the common sense to just ignore phishing emails, and universities tend to have a rather large bandwidth to abuse. That doesn't mean I don't have a desire to apply a significant quantity of explosives to their nether regions, but they are at least showing some intelligence.

Yay, hsdpa, I have intarwebs at a reasonable speed! Just not when Im at my usual mooring.

When you discover that the UNIX team (my team) are running several databases which are almost as critical these days as the Database team, it's time to start handing them some responsibility.

"Last time I looked the RT DB was ~ 7 to 10 Gig. Oh, I stand corrected, it's not: it's now 28 Gig"

It's apparently about as big, if not bigger, as the main university databases. And sufficiently normalised that it actually has the 10+ million row tables that they don't.

Our RT server is becoming a victim of its own success. The number of new tickets has doubled every year... We'll probably hit 1 million tickets by the end of 2010.

I really should stop answering the phone with "Good evening, Unix team" at half past 10 in the morning...

I keep finding myself wanting to be in two places at once.

The fireworks company I work with are doing a big show this weekend and it was the Rugby League final.

Since I don't see that much of my parents these days I want to the rugby. Saints lost, hopefully NL will do slightly better in the fireworks. On the plus side I didn't end up spending the day wiring up explosives in the cold.

PulseAudio for RHEL 5 (CentOS 5)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455842

How much testing does it really take to establish that "pulseaudio --help" doesn't even run!

*bangs head against desk*

Before I get comments about Pulse, for the SunRay stuff I'm doing it's bl**dy marvellous I can redirect the "default" ALSA devices into the Funky OSS device that gets created on the SunRay server. Audio JustWorks(tm) for the vast majority of programs, although I've ended up with custom ALSA builds and stealing PulseAudio from a random repository whose build actually works.

Things you don't want to find on a boat #71: Soggy floorboards...

Fortunately it's just a leaky water pump and not a hole in the boat. So I just need to replace the pump. In the mean time I can turn off the water and turn it back on when I want to use the taps.

9.5 hour planned outage on the substation.... 6 hours of diesel in the generator... Weekend of the 20th is going to be interesting.

Went fireworking again at the (extended) weekend.

( Friday )

( Saturday )

Sunday and Monday:

Not much else happened, got drenched cycling to Trowbridge and back on Monday, picking up a few boating essentials, and watched DVDs.

A note to some of my users: would you please learn that abuse is far to easy to track, just don't bother.

I'm bored of playing hunt the abuser now.

"I know exactly who these problems people are"

Went paintballing at the weekend.

't was great fun. The morning's events were rather poorly run, apparently he was a new guy in training. The afternoon's events were rather better run.

It was raining for most of the day and there were sections that were foot deep mud. The weather improved for the last game, so I had a bit of a play with some of the available pyro (smoke grenades that worked rather well)

I've now got quite a few small round bruises, mostly on the insides of my thighs for some reason, including 1 or 2 which look like they missed something more sensitive by a rather small margin...

I just got volunteered as the UNIX team lead on our new File Servers...

Which brings core systems that are my problem to ...

RT - Most of the university's admissions and general enquiries now go through this
Email - Both IMAP and SMTP servers are my problem
NetApp - I'm now the Unix team lead on this one