Alex McLintock's personal log

Amphi here we come

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 08:19:42 GMT

Getting ready to go to the Amphi Festival. Not been online much. I might pretend I will be bloging the holiday later on but I doubt it. I might be able to remember the games I have played, but not much else...

Tech: RDF/OWL of ISFDB

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:15:50 GMT

My Google foo has failed here. Is anyone working on turning the ISFDB into an RDF/OWL ontology. Originally it was a proprietary database format, now it is available in traditional RDBMS format including MySQL.

I can obviously code it up myself but I'd like if possible to know that there is a community doing such things rather than me doing it by myself.

Tech: Indexing and Searching Apache Solr

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:23:49 GMT

Do I know anyone who is familiar with Apache Solr ?
(And to a lesser extent anyone familiar with Apache Lucene?)

I'm trying to figure out what Solr does so that I can decide whether it is the right tool to achieve what I want instead of rolling my own. I suspect that I will probably need to use it to create a prototype - but that might be a LOT of work...

Games

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:05:46 GMT

This is a test of sorts to see what posting is like on my phone. Has anyone seen the doom board game and played it? I saw it yesterday for 20 quid but decided no.

Food: Restaurant Deals

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:53:51 GMT

Note for myself... Current Money off vouchers for restaurant deals....

(hint hint)

Tech: Hardware: Steptoe and Sons

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:16:36 GMT

I sometimes think of myself as a rag and bone man of the technology world. I have a server system made available to me and I've wasted several hours trying to get it working. I am assured it *was* working. It comes with 2 Opteron CPUs, 4Gb memory, and is already in a nice big dekstop case.

1) I'm on my third power supply. The first did nothing at all (so I binned it). The problem is that it needed extra connectors as a server board rather than a consumer board - 24pin power plus an eight bin connector. Most normal ATX nowadays have 24+6, but all the ATX I had were just 20+4. Dont you love standards which change all the time. I dont want to have to worry about ATX version 2.2 being different from ATX 2.0 or whatever.

2) I managed to get a BIOS screen come up once. ONCE. ARGH. This kept me interested. If I hadnt got it at all then I would have assumed it was really dead.

3) It has an LED display which shows two characters as it goes through different phases of booting. It is currently aborting at "44". This took a lot of hunting down as it isnt a common fault. If it said "This machine is buggered" then I would have stopped. Instead I look at a document like this and it doesnt mention code 44 at all. Argh. I eventually found one which suggested it might be internal memory at fault. I'm thinking that I might need to reflash the BIOS. but then how can I do that if it wont boot to bios.

4) I could have just effin bought a new server in the time I wasted on this old one. Being green is all very well and I am trying to save kit from going in to land fill but it is hard.

Tech: Old Server

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:22:59 GMT

So I dont think I will be buying another compute server for a while. I now have 14 cores easily available to me - plus another five or six in lower spec single core machines...

a) The old Supermicro motherboard needed all its RAM to be identical. It did NOT like two pairs of 1Gb DDR sticks from different manufacturers even though they were all tested in other machines, and rated at a speed suitable for the MB.
b) I thought one of the SCSI disks had died. Instead it just disappearred for a bit - thus temporarily dropping it from the RAID. Unfortunately I seem to have killed the RAID - moving it from a DEGRADED to a FAILED state. So I am re-initialising the RAID, and am going to stick the latest Ubuntu OS on it - just like I did the other (working) box.

So in total right now...

4 cores, 1Gb memory.
4 cores, 2Gb memory.
4 cores, 4Gb memory.
plus my desktop
2 cores, 3Gb memory.

Tech: New Server

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:12:47 GMT

I am considering buying another quad core powerhouse as I am putting together some servers for a compute farm. So far I have 2 four core machines working, and one more which is playing silly buggers. I'm wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what is stopping it from POSTing and booting into the BIOS configuration screees. I dont know whether it is RAM, Disks, or SCSI RAID controller. Or whether it is the second Xeon processor, or the motherboard or CMOS is duff. The symptoms change every with almost every configuration. But of course this is a machine which was thrown out as being "too old to diagnose and fix" so I only have myself to blame for wasting time. I am getting pretty close to throwing it out entirely.

Personally I prefer buying motherboard bundles as I usually have spare cases - BUT if I am trying to fit them in 1u rack mountable cases then I need to worry about the size and shape of the heat sink and fan. Alternatively I could maybe just bolt it to some IVAR shelving...Hmmm, I wonder if No More Nails conducts electricity.

So what would you buy and who would you buy from if you were after a Four core Intel or AMD CPU / motherboard combination with 8Gb memory minimum. On board graphics and gigabit ethernet required.

If you have a feeling of deja-vu then I am not surprised. I asked something like this a few months ago. But I didnt buy anything back then.

(Personally I usually buy from http://www.novatech.co.uk or http://www.scan.co.uk, but other recommendations welcome)

In other news the Seagate barracude 1Tb is still working fine after six months.

Oh - and if you want a laugh... http://www.instructables.com/community/Another_IKEA_server_rack/

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?s=9ba43df9a2ea9744cba525f6d05838c2&t=110539

[Edited for clarity]

Tech: Home DNS

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:08:33 GMT

So who has a DNS server at home, and what kit do you use? I'd like to use my ADSL Router, but it doesnt have that technology AFAICS.

I tried setting up my home network as something like "machines.home.owal.co.uk" but this was a bit of a pain because I dont have any machines in the house which are on *all* the time. My main desktop machine is on most of the time now because it records digital tv and radio. I dont really want it to be the DNS server as well.

I suppose I've answered my own question. That machine is on almost all of the time so it should be the DNS server. Damn.

I have the O'Reilly DNS book on a CD somewhere...I wonder if I can get it to do reverse DNS lookups :-(

PS My main machine is Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 in case anyone wants to offer advice.

London Holidays

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:51:51 GMT

So I am having some time off next month, and I will mostly be in London, Cambridge, and wherever I can be persuaded to go.

What should I visit or see in the next month or so?

I will almost certainly visit

- British Museum
- National Gallery
- Tate Modern
- Tate Britain (for the first time)
- Camden Market
- Walthamstow Farmers Market (on Sundays)

plus the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge

If I can keep up the enthusiasm I will be going to

- Hyde Park for roller blading lessons

GoodReads.com

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:29:04 GMT

Do I know anyone who uses http://GoodReads.com ?

http://mashable.com/2007/01/30/goodreads/

I'm wondering how good it is, and whether it

a) works as a social network
b) has good links to other systems like LibraryThing, Facebook, and so on.

Texas Hold'em

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:20:11 GMT

The Google-Fu is weak with this one....

So can someone please point me to the rules of scoring Texas Hold'Em poker hands where two players share the same hand - eg two players get a flush, or two players get a straight. My phone has a crappy poker game on it and I think it has been scoring a lot of hands wrong.

I know that it scores All-In hands wrong (at least according to wikipedia). It assumes you can win the whole pot if you go all-in no matter how much everyone else bets above you.

Web Logging

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:12:23 GMT

Houses built on sand ...

If you're looking for someone to blame in the collapse of the global economy, one popular punching bag is the credit ratings agencies. Firms like Moody's, Fitch and Standard and Poor's are supposed to let investors know whether bonds are particularly risky or relatively safe.

that would be a bouncy castle ...

A GIANT inflatable tower could carry people to the edge of space without the need for a rocket, and could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator,

SourceForge

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:10:22 GMT

Does anyone know if SourceForge is down? It looks to me like they have a routing error....
http://sourceforge.net/

[EDIT: Hmmm. Back now. ]

Island Records - in the stream of my consciousness

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:47:55 GMT

I've been watching a program on the BBC about Island Records and I am loving it. "I bought that when I was a kid... and that", "Oh look Brian Eno had hair when he was in Roxy Music", "Gosh, I didnt realise that Island Records had been going that long when they signed the Wailers and Bob Marley". Oh my GOD Cat Stevens is English? Why did I think anything else? He always managed to sing convincingly in Greek" (Wikipedia tells me he is a British Greek Cypriot which makes his conversion to Islam more interesting to me). Grace Jones - Oh My Goddess! "Slave to the Rhythm" was one of my favourite albums when I was at school.

Jethro Tull... of course. Oh, so THAT is Fairport Convention - Trevor Horn was The Buggles? Why didnt I know that? I have to investigate ZTT and his work with Paul Morley. I think WIkipedia...Hmmm, It isnt really clear whether ZTT was a label which was part of Island, or just financed by it. Oh Brian is on the telly again. pout pout.

Apparently the head of Island records didnt want Brian Eno to produce U2. Brian had just come in with an idea for an album called something like "Bird list". It went tweet tweet Albatross tweet tweet tweet Thrush.

Anna has just asked me "WHo are these guys?" That is ROXY MUSIC. That is Brian eNO at the back. The one in the silvery top.

Self Harm on the TV

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:34:56 GMT

So last night I saw A_World_of_Pain:Meera_Syal_on_SelfHarm/. It was worth watching (and I have provided a link to iPlayer so most of you can see it for the next few days.

Meera skirts around the mental health aspects of self harm. It is largely treated as a coping strategy and the people Meera talk to largely dont see that as a mental health problem. A great many mental health problems are coping strategies. The problem comes in deciding whether the coping strategy is unhelpful/harmful to the person using it, and that really ought to be up to the individual concerned.

[EDIT: cut a bit of text which didnt say what I meant]

German GrandPrix

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:53:05 GMT

Do I know anyone going to the German Grand Prix (12th July!)? Do you know anyone going? I'm flying a few days afterwards and was thinking of extending my stay to include it.

~~I wonder if my mate Norman (winolj) still has any contacts in Heidelberg.~~ Nürburgring, not Hockenheim

Maybe I should rent a stupidly fast car to drive around the Autobahns :-) Pah. It looks closer than Glasgow!

Other uses for books

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:51:42 GMT

I've been trying to build a chair like this for ages. Now that someone else has done it I dont have to.

Happy Birthday Mr Flay

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:32:08 GMT

Big happy birthday greetings go to mr_flay who I hope to see tonight at Madame JoJo's. However no promises as bits of me seem to be not working. Today it is is my right calf. For three days now it has been almost solid - possibly in mild spasm. Yuck.

And of course much happiness to stuartl who shares with me several important likes and hobbies, such as Lego, cars, computers, and women in leather on bikes.

You Tube

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:48:17 GMT

So how do *you* find stuff on YouTube? I try searching for interesting stuff but it is quite hard because of the low singal to noise ratio. When interested in particular specific topics I can find stuff if I search for particular participants. Of course I may also look if someone directs me to something in particular...

But...

Am I missing something but is YouTube terribly hard to browse?

Technology: Self Congratulations

Sat, 30 May 2009 14:09:21 GMT

I so rule at Technology. My kettle broke recently - the plastic hinge for the lid snapped. So I decided to fix Anna's fancy kettle with a water filter built in.

I changed the fuse, opened up the base, pressed the wires back onto their connectors and magically it worked.

Japanese Comics

Fri, 29 May 2009 09:09:50 GMT

So annafdd and I finally got to the Royal Academy to see the Kuniyoshi Exhibition. Gosh - it was busy. There were only four rooms of it - but with many pieces of art packed very closely together - and far too many people for my liking. I can see the wisdom of my mate Norman (winolj) in becoming a friend of the Academy. You can pop in any time you like for a one off annual fee: if it is too busy you can come back some other time.

Somehow I suspect that the best part of the trip was the Academy Cream Tea afterwards.

Satellite 2

Tue, 26 May 2009 09:00:41 GMT

Anyone reading this going to Satellite 2 in Glasgow in July? Any recommendations for getting transport to Glasgow from London, (probably train). I seem to have two days left to book a hotel room. Hmmmm. 90 quid a night

Happy Birthday

Sat, 23 May 2009 09:28:13 GMT

To ladytg

Wipe your hard disks before giving them away

Wed, 20 May 2009 12:34:25 GMT

We've talked about this one before but yesterday saw an updated version of the BBC News article telling you how to wipe your hard disk before giving it away or selling it....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8056364.stm

In summary For the third drive we turned to a free utility called Darik's Boot and Nuke. This overwrites every sector on the disk with zeros in a way demanded by many government agencies. Darik's utility is free but there are many other commercial versions that do the job.

Setting up and running Darik's is not for the faint-hearted or technically unsophisticated. It also takes a long time. Writing zeros on the 80GB drive took almost two hours. Bigger drives will take longer.

....And....

By contrast, none of the data on the over-written drive was recoverable.

(Of course feel free to use an appropriate dd command if you are on unix :-))

I am somewhat gobsmacked by the idea that DBAN is not for the technically unsophisticated. You burn it to a CD and boot from the CD. If you cant do that then do you really deserve to run [Edit: "administer"] a computer?