Friday, January 15, 2010
Back in time
(backposting) To see the girls. Oh, and my new watch arrived, hurrah! Well, Moo went and picked it up from the post office. I went with an Accurist one, which I managed to get on points from my credit card, for free. Timezones is the main thing of interest: that and the fact that it tells the time, which means that I don't have to keep asking Moo, which is a major benefit to my having a watch, in her view.Labels: geekery
Thursday, December 31, 2009
New toy and cross-dressing
(backposting) Toshiba NB200 12B arrived this morning. Very nice. Tried Ubuntu lucid on it, but it was just too alpha, so I went for karmic in the end, which is gonig fine. I was very proud of myself for not even turning it on until I'd made the (albion) chocolate elk. And then the pannecotta bread and butter pudding which I needed to create when I realised that I'd seriously under-whipped the first batch of eggs for the first pudding.Party at Si and D's in the evening, and they'd arranged for baby-sitters for all of the kids at the other end of the house, so our two wandered through from time to time until they both fell asleep. We had a good time, and all of the men who'd cross-dressed (as per instructions - I got a new outfit, of course) looked rather unconvincing. Apart from Pete. Hmm.
Friday, December 18, 2009
A busy day
Well, a fair amount of snow, but not enough to keep Jojo from school, which is a good thing. A hard day of work, but it's my last one (officially, at least) until after the New Year, so I didn't feel too bad about it. Part of my working day was to do my expenses, which came out around £3800 for the past month. This is quite a lot, however you look at it, and I'm rather looking forward to the money coming back!One of the accounts I have with a hosting company has started going over with lots of files, and all of a sudden, too. I worked with the company to clear things out a bit, but got another automated warning this evening, which is concerning.
Friday, December 04, 2009
A new machine
Well, it looked like that was what I'd need to do: build a new machine. Spent more time - in between doing rather pressing work - trying to get the old machine back and working, including recycling an old disk as a new OS disk. All to no avail, and other things seemed to be failing, so I decided that wouldn't work. Thought about getting a cheap replacement machine, but a quick trawl yielded nothing, so I decided to use my main desktop machine, and turn it into a server. It's powerful enough, and although it took some doing, it's (mostly) up and running. The main issue is email - the old machine provided mail for both me and Moo, and it all now seems to be doing the right things.On a rather more pertinent note, I managed to get a major piece of work done, and sent out, a day early. I'm also quite pleased with it, and it bodes well for the future. All good stuff.
Oh, and we're planning a video extravaganza tomorrow night. Children and their friend Sennen first, then put them to bed. After that, Victoria, Jack and Charles (Victoria's other son) for supper and more video time. And, I rather suspect, some drinky-poos. No services in the morning...
Thursday, December 03, 2009
CME time
(backposting) We had a CME evening tonight, on diversity. It's very easy to make these sort of sessions very white, middle-class, and that's always a danger. I think we avoided that - it was helpful to have at least one non-white face in the room (!) - but also the person talking to us was very aware of their position. She talked about her parish - East Ham - which has an extremely diverse nature, and also about what it means to be Christian, Anglican and CofE in such a context.It was interesting, and thought-provoking, and also great to see a few friends who I've not seen for a while.
The other major news? Server died. For real, this time, I think. Big hard disk issue, and I had real problems rebuilding it. We'll see what tomorrow looks like.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
What a day
Worked till 1030. Partly because things are very busy, partly because I had to take breaks during the day to: 1) let the electrician turn off all the power in order to finish off fitting the new radiators 2) deal with the fact that my main server died, loudly (*phzzzzzzzzzt* + ozone smell) when I turned it on, necessitating emergency DHCP procedures 3) pick up Jo from school, where she'd come down with severe stomach pains (fine by bedtime) 4) fail to have a haircut (see 3 above) 5) meet other members of the clergy and reader team for prayers, discussion and lunch (though I ended up using Sally's office for 45 minutes for a work call) 6) the realisation that I had a computer that I might be able to cannibalise for a new PSU, which just _might_ be all that had broken on my main server (and was). So, a busy day, and I'm not quite sure why I'm still awake. Time, in fact, for bed.Labels: clergy, geekery, illness, jojo, work
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Getting interesting
Started playing with LDAP today, for work. Not something I've really been involved with before, and the set-up for OpenLDAP is _not_ simple, particularly with the "new style" configuration, but I've got it working, I can now connect to it, and I'm going to start seeing if I can connect it to our product. Good stuff, and interesting to be learning new things. As I did yesterday, actually - new architectural insights on the Appian product, which I'll be spending lots of time on in the future.Saturday, August 22, 2009
Home alone
The girls are away at Kate and Mac's this weekend, so I'm home alone. We started off the day driving to Sainsbury's, planning a lovely fry-up. We got there at 0735 - the shop opening time being 0730 - but the café wasn't open yet, so we did some shopping. And _then_ we went to the caf&ecacute;. No fry-ups. And no clue about anything else either, it seems. But I bought a pair of trousers and a shirt for work. And some food for the weekend.Got home, had a sleep, did all of the ironing whilst listening to the cricket. We've set them a good target, but, well, the pitch is holding up better than expected.
I've also updated my home laptop to karmic alpha 4, had an Indian take-away, and am watching Chain Reaction. Amusing and moderately diverting, but not High Art[tm].
Labels: cricket, films, food, geekery, girls
Friday, August 21, 2009
Migration
A big day today, as we needed to migrate to a production server. Despite some set-backs, we got it sorted, which means that I should be in the office for the first time on Monday. Despite having worked for Appian for four weeks now, I've not made it into the office, and wasn't even interviewed there, so it'll be weird. There should even be some other folks from Appian EMEA in, which would also be good, as I've only met 3 of the others so far.Moo's off to Kate & Mac's tomorrow, but I can't go, as I'm taking services on Sunday. But it'll give me time to get some rest, which I really need.
Oh, and I now have Windows working under Linux. What a huge relief. Needs some tweaking, but getting there.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Hands free
(backposting) I'm having to make a number of calls in the car at the moment, but even with a bluetooth handset, I'm not so happy about it. My current phone doesn't do voice dialling, which means having to touch the screen to sort it, which is bad. So today I bought and got fitted an integrated handsfree kit for my car. Much nicer.Labels: geekery
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Windows
(backposting) I really, really don't like Windows. It's partly that I've not used it for upwards of 10 years, so I'm not used to it, so I'm really not enjoying very much the fact that I'm having to use it for work. It was installed on my laptop, but more importantly, I need to use IE (Internet Explorer) as part of work. But I hope to have a way forward. I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to run it within Linux using VirtualBox. Possibly even seamlessly. We'll see.Labels: geekery
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Canonisation
(backposting) Oh, the other thing that I really, really should have blogged about yesterday was that we went over to Mark and Jen's for a lovely barbecue last night. Andy, Zae, Si and D were all there, and we were joined by Andi Chandler, though he took some time to arrive. We tracked him with Google Latitude, though, so had a good idea of where he was. We're sad. Maybe even more sad was my exclamation "I don't have a backtick!" when I tried to put Mark's auto-generated WPA key into my phone. We had a good time, and a good deal of alcohol was consumed, though luckily not by Moo (who got a bit bored of my driving "suggestions" on the way home).More work in the garden today, and I also took the girls to the 1000 at Halstead. In the evening, I went to my training incumbent John's installation to a non-residential canonry in Chelmsford Cathedral. I wasn't very impressed with the sermon, which took the title of the book "If you meet George Herbert on the road, kill him." It's a reference to a story about the Buddha, and is supposed to deal with the unreal expectations that are put on clergy by his "The Country Parson". I take the book to be written not in the spirit of expectation, but of aspiration, particularly given his poems such as "Aaron" and "The Collar". My bishop, who I happened to mention it to, agreed...
Labels: geekery, poetry, sermon
Friday, May 22, 2009
A good day, a bad day
So, Plan C is out. If I become unemployed in the next few months, I don't have anything definite lined up. This is a bad day thing. And then I started to wonder whether or not to keep my new Samsung i8910 HD. I really need VoIP, and there's not SIP stack on the phone. There are some other things that I'm not particularly happy about, too, including lack of decent GPS apps and the difficulty of uploading photos to flickr, and I wondered about sending the thing back and getting a Nokia 5800 instead. In the end, I discovered that the Nokia doesn't have a SIP stack, either, but managed to get Fring working with AQL (my SIP provider), and all's looking rosier. Took some doing, but I've found some OK GPS apps, too which I'm trialling.And I had some possible job leads, in case things go a bit Pete Tong on the employment front, which they may, so that helped too. I finished up the day with an hour's hard walk, listening to Finzi, Duruflé and Poulenc. Now sitting in front of the TV, trying to work out how to disable the Orange Photo app on my phone.
Labels: geekery, job, phone, walk
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Ascension Day! (and a new phone... (and a new washing machine))
(backposting) So, the new phone arrived today around 1500. I'd been on tenter-hooks all day. The new washing machine arrived around 1100, and has been busy going through all the washing we've not been able to put through for the past week or so. Mel's been a star and has helped out with a load or two, which has allowed us to have some pants, etc..I've taken some time getting my head round the phone, and the camera's very good, wifi works fine, and so far, so good.
After the kids had gone to bed, I went to our sung Eucharist for Ascension Day. John, my incumbent, hadn't expected I'd make it, so it was a good surprise. We had a pint after the service and went through the draft order of service for my (and Iain and Mark's) ordination to the priesthood, which is only a little more than a month away. John preached helpfully - in that I have more ideas now about what to preach about on Pentecost.
Labels: eucharist, geekery, ordination
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
A poor show
(backposting) Not the curate's meeting - although only 4 of the 6 of us were there, the others had good reasons - but the Mobile & Wireless Show in Olympia 2. It was pretty poor, and I left after a short time. Noone interesting there, nothing interesting to see.The good news, however is that my new phone should arrive tomorrow! It's the lovely Samsung i8910 HD. It has an 8 mega-pixel camera will record HD video. This would be more useful if we even had an HD television.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
rsync
I got a decent sized external hard drive for Christmas, but never got around to setting up backup to it. I had some time today, and finally got round to setting up rsync and crontab. Two very useful apps that I should have got round to nailing a long time ago: sensible additions to my armoury.Oh, and it's official: we got acquired, subject to the court's approval. Who knows what this means jobwise: we'll just have to see.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Computer maintenance 102
Back by popular demand, and this time it's "how to get your PC to talk to your dad's old hard drive as a second drive so you can get the data off it".The easiest way to do it is this (note that if you're running Windoze, you may need to load some drivers first: most modern Linux distributions should do this all very simply):
- buy a USB<->SATA/ATA kit, make sure it comes with a power connector, too, like this one
- turn off the old computer, remove the power lead
- open up the computer from which you wish to get the data
- disconnect all the leads from the back of the old drive
- (optionally, but it's easiest if you do) unscrew the old drive from its housing and remove it from the case
- connect the ATA/SATA cable to the old drive. Only one of the connectors will fit, and it will only fit one way up, but check, because if you force it, you can cause yourself some problems
- plug the power cable into the back of the old drive (ditto, only one way up, etc.), but don't turn it on yet
- turn on the computer to which you wish to transfer the data
- put the USB connector into the new computer
- turn the power on to the disk drive, listen to it spin up
- wait for the drive to be recognised as an external drive by the OS: this will take a few seconds (probably more on Windoze)
- copy the data across
- unmount the drive via the OS
- disconnect the USB cable
- turn off the power to the drive
- you're done!
The other, other way is to ask a geeky friend to do it for you. If you trust your geeky friend, if they don't charge too much, and if you're happy that there's no confidential information on it.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Computer maintenance 101
I went to Jo's pre-school today, as the computer's apparently broken (again). Here's how to fix a CD-ROM drive:- unplug all the leads
- take the case off
- take the fascia off
- disconnect the CD-ROM drive
- remove the CD-ROM drive
- press the manual tray release
- pull the tray out
- remove the 4 CD-ROMs that the pre-school children had pushed into the tray
- push the tray back in until the tray release clicks
- replace the CD-ROM drive
- reconnect the CD-ROM drive
- replace the fascia
- put the case back on
- plug all the leads on
A meal with the clergy team today, our last meeting before James goes. He'll be missed. In a good way. He's become a very good friend.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Holiday
So, I'm up in a cottage in Dent with my lovely wife. I've been watching Ice Age on DVD, the cricket (West Indies-England test match) and random religious broadcasting on Sky, and the news. And Moo's been knitting.And that's it. We've not been looking after the girls. Because Kate and Mac (my parents-in-law) are.
It's the first time that Moo and I have spent a night away together without the girls since Jo was born, now 4 years ago. We know this isn't good, but we're so pleased to be here, and just relaxing and spending easy times with each other. Many thanks to Kate and Mac.
Oh, and I've managed to get this machine online despite not having the relevant documentation, remembering stuff I last had to do around 3 years ago, about which I'm pretty chuffed.
Labels: geekery, girls, holiday, Moo
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Kernels and zoos
(backposting) Mum took the girls to Colchester zoo today. I think she found it harder work than expected, but to be fair, the place was packed, as it's half-term. Jo's also getting steadily more (over-)excited by her forthcoming birthday, and Miri couldn't work out whether to walk or be in the pushchair. Everyone survived, though, and got back in time to make buns, most of which I ate.In other news, I'm back hand-rolling kernels. I've not had occasion to configure and craft my own kernel version for _ages_, and I am enjoying myself. There's even a work-related reason for it, so I don't feel guilty about indulging in what is, undeniably, an extremely geeky pursuit. I note that there's some corollary to a well-known "law" which I propose thus: the number of options in a standard kernel will expand to compensate for compilation time reductions delivered by Moore's Law.
Oh, but it _is_ fun.
Friday, January 09, 2009
New laptop
No - not me: Moo. She's got herself mobile broadband from Orange, for work, and it came with a little Asus EEE 901 running XP. I've just spent some time configuring it, and it's quite a nice piece of kit.Labels: geekery
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Christmas Eve
(backposting) Well, it's all very exciting, obviously. Though Jo, when asked whether she was excited this morning, replied that she was because she's going to see Turtle and Mouse on Boxing Day, and only mentioned presents and Christmas Day after that.I've had a day of computer stuff, as it turns out that Kate's desktop (5+ years old?) died during a software upgrade last night. So, we went to PC World to buy her a laptop, via Maplin to buy an IDE->USB cable, and bought her an Acer in their clearance section. It's a lovely little machine, and the Ubuntu 8.10 ("Intrepid Ibex") install is so easy - I've only done upgrades before. I've so far been unable to get anything at all off her old drive: I suspect that it was that dying which killed the machine. Anyway, all working very well, and now Kate can work around the house if she wants to.
We (Kate and I) took the girls to a crib service at East Leake, which was packed, and which the girls enjoyed immensely. Glynis, the incumbent, very kindly allowed me to take part robed in the Midnight Mass, and I not only did the intercessions, but also served, which was a real honour, particularly as they have a deacon, Claire, who very graciously let me do lots of things which are, by right, her territory. I enjoyed myself so much, and would have been so sad if I'd not had the chance to take part in a service. Thanks to both of them. In bed by 0100...
Labels: diaconate, family, geekery
Thursday, December 18, 2008
initrd
Today I've mostly been working on init ram disks, or initrd. This is how you boot up Linux machines, and usually you get it all sorted from whoever makes your distribution. Why would you want to make your own? Well, if you wanted to use capabilities of a system which aren't usually available at boot time, like some of the clever crypto stuff.It turns out to be more difficult to get it all sorted than you might think. And then you think you have, and you haven't. It has, however, been a voyage of discovery, and worth a _great_ deal of geek points, particularly given what I'm trying to do with it, so I'm pleased. It's been slow steps throughout the day, but I got to the stage around 9pm when I was beginning to delete important files by accident, so decided that I'd better stop.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Sickness - and not mine
So, the girls are fine, but Mel phoned early to say that she was still feeling a bit off. She decided to have breakfast and see how she was feeling. I took the day off to look after the girls, but Mel phoned me around 1000, very keen to come in: really bored, and not feeling too bad. So she came in, picked Jo up from pre-school with Miri, and looked after Miri while I took Jo swimming. And got a text from Mel half way through, saying that she'd been sick.I arranged to have a call at 1400, as it seemed that Mel was going to be OK, and she was OK to sit in front of the TV with the girls, so I took the call and then sat with them until Moo came back, after which Mel headed off home. Lots of work, then. Mainly trying to get what I think is an Intel WG82567LM network card to work with Centos 5.2, which turns out to be harder than you might think.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Dentist
We all went to the dentist today.- Moo: first appointment since 2003: two minutes, clear;
- Me: first appointment since 2005: two minutes, clear, two "watches";
- Miri: first ever appointment: would not open her mouth until she got so upset by the whole process that she screamed, which was quite useful;
- Jo: first ever appointment: got very suspicious when the chair started to recline, went with it when she realised she'd get a sticker and certificate.
Today's question: what's the level of support for TPMs in the BIOS of Dell's Optiplex line? Hmmm.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
TPMs
Why can't I get the TPM in any of the three laptops I own to work? Well, I know the answer to one of them: the kernel modules included with the distro I'm trying on that box don't support the (fairly old) TPM chip. For the other two, I'm somewhat stumped.Labels: geekery
Monday, October 27, 2008
I'm a sad geek
(backposting) This means that I really enjoyed a day of research into hardening. Of doing adversary characterisation (a phrase I use as often as I can, 'cos it's cool), and work on secure booting: all that sort of thing. I really enjoy my work, sometimes, and today was one of those days.Saturday, October 18, 2008
Posse
Every few years, we manage to get a group of the members of the Posse mailing list together for a meal. Tonight was one of those occasions, and we headed off for a meal in London. There were 12 of us and one partner. A good night: the only downside was that I ended up missing the girls' bedtime, which meant that Moo had to do it.Best line? A (somewhat obviously geeky) "Can someone reboot Chris, please?" (after Dan had been talking to him about "furries" - if you don't know, google it: but be careful).
Labels: geekery
Thursday, October 02, 2008
More training, more hackery
(backposting) I've been very impressed with my SANS course, which is 506: Security Unix/Linux. And it's been useful on the ICE II exercise, which I took part in again today. This time we had more defenders (there were more attackers, too!), and George (a guy on another of the courses) and I took a team of defenders each. We thought we got completely hosed, but at the de-brief afterwards, it was interesting to discover that we'd been in better shape than we thought. It's easy to panic, and we did, particularly at the beginning.Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Hacking games
(backposting) This evening, I took part in ICE II, which is a "cyber exercise". Two teams of 8-15 each. One team (the defenders) gets given a network that they need to keep the other team (the attackers) out of. Before they enter their respective rooms, neither has seen the network or what's on it. The attackers get access to a bunch of tools: the defenders have to make do with what's on the (old, and generally very exploitable) systems they're looking after. And when I say old, I'm talking Windows 2000 and more. A mix of Linux and Windows, a SCADA (power) box, a couple of VOIP phones, and IP camera and a PABX box (running Asterisk).I ended up leading the defender team. We got lots of help from a Larry Pesce from PaulDotCom, but then again, the attackers had lots of help from Paul Assadorian (also from PaulDotCom). Both sides did well: we managed better than I thought we had. Lots of credit to everyone on the defenders team, and also to the folks who set it up.
I ended up with a Wi-spy. Geek-a-rama.
All very useful indeed in understanding how threats play out: the scenario basically tries to put you in the place of an incident team parachuted (metaphorically) into a NOC (Network Operations Centre) which is under (virtual) siege from malicious attackers.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Raffle
I won a prize in the raffle: an 8GB iPod touch. Seems OK. Won't play oggs, so I'm trying to work out how to put videos on it. Under Linux.Labels: geekery
SANS Day 1
I'm taking a course on UNIX and Linux security in Las Vegas, which is very interesting. It's also hard work, and would be even if I weren't somewhat jet-lagged. 9-5, with things to do in lunchtimes and evenings, so we're keeping pretty busy. And then there's checking work emails, etc.Wednesday, August 20, 2008
New computer
(backposting) I've not been happy about the amount of non-work things I've been doing on my work laptop: it's not felt right. So, I had a grant from the diocese for a variety of things, and felt that it would be good to get a new laptop. Dell to the rescue, and the box arrived today. Lots of work to do, so didn't get to do everything (by which I mean installing Ubuntu Hardy Heron 64bit on it, over 'doze Vista *yeuch*) until the evening, though I got the basic install started earlier. Very pleased with it, though. And encrypted the hard drive right from the start, of course.Labels: geekery
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Supervision and iptables
(backposting) I meant to mention that yesterday began just fantastically: I saw a kingfisher in the little stream near our house. It's right in the middle of the village, and right on the road, but it's the second time I've seen one there. Just this beautiful flash of colour as I walked up to the 0800 service in Great Yeldham.Had a supervision at lunchtime with John, which went well. He had good things to say about my sermon and some useful feedback. We sorted out lots of bits and pieces as well, and I'm doing some good reading about death and funerals.
And I've been learning to grok iptables. They're not as complicated as I'd feared, but more powerful than I'd realised.
Monday, August 18, 2008
New glasses
Not that interesting: just new glasses. Lots and lots of work on iptables, and I've finally finished the first set of work on hardening for Linux systems, which is fascinating. I'll be doing some training in September, which I'm really looking forward to doing.Labels: geekery
Friday, August 15, 2008
Hardening - and the Blessed Virgin Mary
I've been working on lots of (often pretty low-level) hardening techniques for Linux recently, for a project I'm involved in. It's been really interesting, and I'm attending some very relevant training in a month or so. Today I've been looking at ntpd, which can be configured to keep your computer's clock up-to-date. This is an important security issue, as a number of forensic techniques require a good knowledge of what exactly happened, and when. I've also been helping someone with how to dispose of old hard drives and smart-cards, trying to work out exactly what a particular customer _really_ wants, and looking at account creation, security and locking. It's been an interesting, if busy, day.Today is also the feast day of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. It's a very important day for many Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics. I'm not a big proponent of Marian devotion (devotion to Mary), but as I've mentioned in this blog on a number of occasions, I'm moving slowly higher up the candle: that is, I'm getting slightly more catholic - with a small "c". I think that what I'm learning is that ritual can be a good way of showing respect, and respect is something that I rate highly in my worship.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
sshd
Well, the reason I couldn't get it working on a development box last week was that when I used Public Key authentication, I was copying over the public key to the remote box (correct), but then specifying the public key rather than the private key on the command line. E.g.
ssh -l random_user -i .ssh/id_rsa.pub remotemachine
Rather than
ssh -l random_user -i .ssh/id_rsa remotemachine
D'oh!
Completed the Wii Boogie story-line over lunch. I'm very sad.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Supervision
My first supervision with training incumbent: John. All went well, and we're settling down nicely, I think. We're going to do some work on funerals over the next couple of months, as it's one of the first CME (Continuing Ministerial Education) topics I'll be tackling. It's an area which is difficult for SSMs and NSMs (both part-time ministers), as most funerals take place during the week, when we're working, so it's important to see if we can find some opportunities to work on this.Now, why can't I get ssh to work properly with public keys under CentOS? Hmmm.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Gays, women and evolution
Drove into Cambridge today to buy a book about Windows 2003. Very big, very heavy book. Looks useful, though. Lots of work in the afternoon on Windows stuff and Xen, which I've decided to try out.During the day, had a discussion on a mailing list I'm part of (hi, guys) about the Church. Why does everyone believe that the Church is backward-looking, reactionary and bigoted? That seems to be the set of messages that everyone picks up. So, questions ranged from whether women should be priests, to my views on homosexuality (I'm for it ;-)), to the virgin birth, to whether I believe in evolution (well, of course I do - d'oh!). It's good to have the opportunity to talk about this stuff with people, and I firmly believe that it's an important part of my calling. When I first felt the vocation, part of it was the question "if you were you, but not part of this Church, would you want to be part of it?" The obvious answer is, "no". And the obvious second part of that is, "well, go and do something about it then." That's what I'm trying to do.
Labels: church, friends, geekery, homosexuality, women
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Today, I shall mostly be ...
- ... sleeping in (but not as long as Jo and Moo)
- ... taking the girls swimming with Moo
- ... spending more money than I meant to in Waitrose
- ... clearing the dog poo off the lawn
- ... mowing the lawn (first time this year, if you exclude the two strims it's had)
- ... stepping in several instances of dog poo that I missed
- ... barbecuing with Si
- ... drinking beer with Si
- ... eating the barbecued food with Si, D, Morgs, Boo, Moo, Jo and Miri
- ... drinking wine with Si and Moo
- ... geeking with Si
- ... whilst drinking more wine with Si
- ... going for a walk with the girls, Moo and Buster
- ... having a bath with the girls (but not Moo and Buster)
- ... putting Jo to bed (very quick!)
- ... clearing around a bit
- ... loading the dishwasher
- ... doing some washing up
- ... and ... finishing my last essay for ERMC. YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!
Labels: drink, ERMC, family, friends, geekery, swimming, walk
Monday, May 12, 2008
Email and finalisations
(backposting) I spent most of the day sorting out email. Not just processing it, but getting work email to a point where I could use it again. Work has move away from Lotus Notes to Exchange, and I've had various problems getting it to work (I'm using Linux, of course, just in case my life were too easy), from accessing the server properly (which I just about sorted last week) to importing all my old emails. I'm used to having these hosted online, but that's now not possible, so I had to jump through some hoops go get them into Evolution. Specifically, import them into Thunderbird on Windows, flatten the folder hierarchy, copy all the files onto my Linux partition and then move them back into the right hierarchy again. I'm very pleased to say that I discovered that you don't need to import each folder individually in Evolution - a (long) Internet search led me to the discovery that if you put them in Evolution's mail hierarchy, it'll work things out for itself, which it does pretty well.We (Moo and I) had a meeting with John, my training incumbent-to-be, and Hilary, the SSM coordinator, in the evening. It was much less fraught than it might have been - Moo was initially quite anti - and we got pretty much everything sorted out, including my working agreement. I'm looking forward to meeting the CME (Continuing Ministerial Education) officer for the diocese on Friday.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Joikuspot - a brilliant application
For the last 3 phones that I've had, I've spent some time working out how to connect my laptop to it over bluetooth, and then use the phone as a GPRS modem so that I can access the Internet while travelling. This hasn't always been easy, and I can only use my laptop - not multiple devices - as the connection can't be shared.Yesterday, I met the guys from Joikuspot. I don't often endorse products on this blog, but I have no hesitation in telling you that if your phone has wifi (802.11a/b/g) support, then you just must get this free software.
What it does is turn your phone into a wifi access point. Simple as that. You get to choose what connection the phone uses to get Internet access, the AP name (ESSID) - which is prefixed with "Joiku_", which I think is fair enough - and WEP (64 bit or 128 bit), shared or open. I'm really, really impressed. There are further refinements coming, and a premium (paid-for) version on its way, but this is quality software, and it's free. I really can't recommend it enough.
Labels: geekery
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Sick
Not me. Jo. She started around 2230 last night, and carried on till around 0330 this morning, according to Moo. I helped until around 2330, when I thought things had calmed down, and Miri joined me around 0350, and took an hour or so to settle. So, all-in-all, not a great day.I took Moo out for lunch in Clare, and she accompanied Jo to pre-school for the first time, which Jo was so excited about. We'd been in two minds about letting her (Jo) go, as she'd been ill last night, but she was eating by the morning, and slept for an hour, so we risked it.
Got Moo's phone (a Nokia 6500) receiving and sending emails from her work today, with some help from them. I'm hopeful that this will reduce the time she needs to be spending doing stuff in the evenings, when she should really be relaxing.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Cool demo
(backposting) FedEx tried to deliver something on Monday, but I'd gone out for lunch (and not realised how quickly it was going to arrive from Canada), so today I drove to Chelmsford to their depot, to pick it up. It's a really cool demo to show off some of our technology. It's about barcodes, and digitally signing them. Nice stuff, and I'll be taking it out to Geneva next week.This evening, I popped round to fix Charles' computer. He's the son of some friends of ours, 13 or so, bright, and a nice guy. Having fixed his PC (partially unseated RAM), installed Firefox and AVG anti-virus, his mum wanted to know how he should repay me. I'd given him a cryptography 101, and so I decided that that next time he sees me, he needs to be able to explain the differences between symmetric and asymmetric encryption. I even gave him the requisite wikipedia page. This is a bit geeky, but he'd shown an interest, so... We've also agreed that we're going to buy a cr*ppy old PC, rebuild it, and put Linux on it. Yes, geekery.
Tomorrow is Jo's 3rd birthday, and we wrote the card and wrapped the presents. Oh, the excitement.
Friday, January 11, 2008
To Heathrow in the rain
(backposting) As the heading said. Not for a flight, but for a meeting, which was very useful. Things are getting interesting work-wise, which I'm pleased about. Oh, and Certicom has appointed a new CEO. This means a new guy at the top for me: my boss' boss. Not sure what this means yet, but we'll get there.I'm trying to arrange a meeting with the rest of the team for the possible title post, but finding a time when everyone can get together may be difficult. I spent a fair time in the evening trying to install AVG free on a friend/neighbour's computer. It's riddled with malware and full of randomly installed apps that mean it was difficult even to get AVG on it, but it's running now.
Watched more of The IT Crowd. I'm more Moss than Roy, I'm afraid.
Labels: geekery
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Back to work
Not that anyone else in the UK seemed to be bothering. Got a couple of emails. Did quite a lot of reading about netfilter and iptables.Oh, and I finished the 2nd of the two essays that are due on Monday, which is a big relief.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Nerd Type
Not surprised that it's a close-run thing, but I score rather scarily in rather too many of them.
| What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Musician Doo doo de doo waaaa doo de doo! (<-- That's you playing something.) Everyone appreciates the band/orchestra geeks and the pretty voices. Whether you sing in the choir, participate in a school/local band, or sit at home writing music, you contribute a joy to society that everyone can agree on. Yay! Welcome to actually doing something for poor, pathetic human souls. (Just kidding.) | |
| Literature Nerd | |
| Gamer/Computer Nerd | |
| Science/Math Nerd | |
| Social Nerd | |
| Drama Nerd | |
| Artistic Nerd | |
| Anime Nerd | |
| What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace | |
Labels: geekery
Monday, December 03, 2007
Laptopery
Most stuff is working now. Can't get my machine to connect via 3G via my phone, but I've now got Skype working with my bluetooth headset, which is pretty nifty. /home and swap partitions encrypted, 2Gig RAM, SecondLife all there.Jo decided to read me a story, and got a book out. "Stephanie and the bad hair day," she announced (she's into Lazytown at the moment). "Or Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water," I countered. "No, Daddy: Stephanie and the bad hair day." Fair enough.
I suggested we said a prayer after the light was turned off. I suggested praying for Mummy, Daddy, Miri and Jojo, but Jo came up with a lovely little prayer thanking God and Jesus for Father Christmas (and not just giving her presents, but everybody). She also reckons he brings Christmas trees, but hey. It was a beautiful prayer, and I was very impressed.
Labels: computers, geekery, Jo, prayer
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Going home
In an hour and a half's time, or so, I'll be getting on a plane to go home. I've accrued enough air miles that I'm able to upgrade to "Executive First", so I'll get a good seat and a chance to sleep, which is good. I'm ready for home, I really am.I've bought lots of presents for the girls (including Moo): just one of those trips (and the Canadian dollar's very weak at the moment, which helps).
Did some coding today. It's been a while. Nice to have the chance: I'm working on a PoC (Proof of Concept) for an idea I had this week.
Enough. Home soon.
Labels: geekery, home, sleep, travel, work
Thursday, November 01, 2007
NFS, compiz, amarok, firefox
Some keywords: .kde, .qt, .mozilla, .configIt turns out that compiz doesn't like being run where the home directory is mounted on NFS. Specifically, you need to softlink .config to a local directory.
Similar problems with firefox: softlink .mozilla
Similar problems with amarok: softlink .qt and .kde
This took quite a lot of investigation, mounting, remounting, linking, etc., but my main box is getting close to working as I'd like it to. It also appears that amarok isn't desperately keen on building a large collection on a samba share, but we're getting there on that, too.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Compiz
Having all sorts of problems with Compiz on one of my machines. Spent too much time during the day playing with it, and had to spend extra time in the evening making up the time doing some proper work. Didn't just play with compiz - work stuff too, mainly catching up with stuff from last week while I was in Canada.Labels: geekery
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Tomorrow already
According to my laptop, it's already tomorrow. Which means, I suppose, that I'll be home today. My laptop's on UK time, my watch is on East Coast time, and, to be honest, I'm not quite sure which one I'm one - leaning towards the latter, I think. It's never much fun coming back eastwards - the jetlag hits your harder - but hopefully it won't be too bad this time.I've had a productive trip, all in all, and though one of the tasks I'd hoped to achieve was less successful than I'd hoped, the other went very well, and I've got lots of other things done as well, which is always pleasing. I've got lots of writing up and new work to do when I get home, so that'll keep me pretty busy.
I've spent some time this evening responding to a document discussing some of the legal issues around services in SecondLife, which is quite exciting. I was also very touched to be invited to the ordination of a good friend. Unluckily it's in New Zealand next month, so I don't think I'm going to get the chance to attend, which is a pity.
On a geeky note, I've just managed to install compiz on my laptop, which rocks. Lots of lovely 3D desktop effects, etc. which I'm looking forward to applying to my desktop machine at home as well. There are some performance problems which I need to address, but that's all part of the fun: tuning is definitely part of the deal.
Well, on a plane soon, then home.
Labels: geekery, secondlife, travel, work
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Presentation
Next week, I'm in Mississauga (our Canadian HQ), and I'm due to give a presentation to anyone who wants to come. I've chosen the topic "Getting Paid to be Evil: the joy of audit", because auditing can be fun, and creative. And you get a chance to be evil by trying to work out how to break other people's stuff, but you don't have to fix it. Lots of fun. So today I wrote the presentation. There will be references to Sneakers, Spooks, Cryptonomicon and Hackers in it. Just because I can, and I'm a sad geek.Labels: geekery
Friday, August 10, 2007
Funeral visit
I went on a funeral visit with Ian today: the first one that I've attended. The family had very kindly allowed me to come along, and it was very interesting. Difficult, at time, but Ian has a very light touch. This is one of those occasions when I absolutely can't discuss what we talked about, but he allowed the family to talk, led them through the service and was calm but empathetic at the same time. I was very impressed, and learned a lot.Discovered that it was a real pain not having a main machine, and after trying to use the server, I discovered that it was struggling. so, I've ordered a new one. Or pieces therefore to build one. Moo loves it when I do these sorts of things.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
God be thankit for geekery!
I hope to be able to stream and text the service tomorrow at 0800. Recompilation, after lots of failed attempts. God gives gifts (and then forces us to use them).Labels: geekery, secondlife
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Back to work - and London
(backposting) One thing I forgot to mention about yesterday was the amount of rain we had. Of course, I walked the dog through it (neither he nor I care, to be honest). But we also lost power for a while, and it seemed to kill one of my Wifi routers. The LAN interface was fine, but not so much the Wifi interface. So, binned it was (Yoda).I went London today for a work meeting, and managed to find the time to buy a new antenna as well. Good meeting - unluckily I was back after 2100, and didn't manage to walk the (somewhat stressed) dog - but the antenna didn't work well enough to sort things, so I ordered a new router, too. Rather more expensive than planned.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Tutorial, Ubuntu upgrade
Had a tutorial for the Life and Service module. Should have finished this module by now - or nearly - but I was too ill earlier. At least I've started.Also upgrade Ubuntu from 6.10 to 6.16: nice. Just a bunch of improvements, to be honest. Still playing.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Title post
I'm well over a year off ordination, but I'm having to think already about where I serve my title post - or at least what sort of title post I'd like to consider. Let me explain about this, because it's not sure how much people reading this will know how it works. I'm also aware that some of our dissenting brethren (well, sustren - that's our Methodist friends, to be clear about it) read this, and there's no reason why anyone should know how the Anglican church works. Noone in the Anglican church does, after all. I only found out fairly recently. Let me explain how I believe it works:- training (3 years in my case)
- ordination as deacon
- start title post (working as a curate in a parish)
- ordination as priest (1 year after ordination as deacon, in most cases)
- continue in title post for 3 more years
- do something else if required.
Anyway, I have to come up with some suggestions about the sort of parish that I'd like to spend the next 4 years of my life in.
Aaargh! Do I _want_ to do spend 4 years of my life working in _any_ parish? I guess I do, but I'm not sure to what extent I expect my ministry to be parish-based in the long-term. Is this taken into consideration? I'm not sure it is, but there's a lot to be said for spending time in a parish, settling into a pastoral context, a worship context and the rest. Anyway, what do I want? I'm thinking hard, but music and respect and a receptiveness to the power of online communications: I guess they're all important. And respect for women and for homosexuals. I mean: how can we not?
Oh, if you hadn't realised it, I'm back, and I'm geeky as ever. Still not entirely well, but getting there. All I can say, is
ssh -X -C -i hostkey.kpa host
Labels: geekery, ordination
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Family and geekery
So, Moo's sister and brother-out-of-law, Jenny and Jake, came over with their daughters (our nieces, Jo's cousins) Turtle (Aurora) and Mouse (Mercy). We had a lovely time, as did Jo. It's always good for Jo to spend some time with slightly older children, and Turtle's 3 and a half. They get on very well, and Jo's come on so much since the summer, when we saw them last, that they can have real conversations, let each other know what each of them wants. Unluckily, I missed the bit where everyone else went on a walk, and Jo got so tired that she fell off a bench as she fell asleep at the end of it. Got lots of baby clothes.While we were clearing out Jo's new bedroom ("when you're 2..."), we came across Moo's old machine. It's a lot more powerful than the machine that I've had running as a server until recently, and as we're sure we won't need it for Moo, I decided to replace one with the other. Got it done today - it's fun to geek away for a while - and things are much, much faster, and I've now got some spare cycles to use.
blogs4god
