Category: Uncategorized

I will never see this again

I can’t belive this, it is like reading a book except this time my friends and family are phoning me to check I am ok. I had a panic email from my mum saying that she can’t call the US, all she could get was recorded message. I replied to an email to my sister that she forwarded onto my mum.
I first heard the news when I drove into work, while stopped at traffic lights I heard someone in the car next to me shouting “FUCK”, I guess he just heard.
We didn’t do any work today just watched the news first hearing that the first tower had collapsed, then the second, then a report that there was another plane circling Dulles Airport which turned out to be false. This is just too much to belive
I don’t know of anyone who would have been working in either the Pentagon or the in the World Trade center but my heart goes out to the friends and family of people who do.

Friday night was dinner at Sunflower Vegetarian Cafe It was amazing to have a choice of more than 2 things on the menu. I would recommend it if you get a chance. After dinner we moved on to Iota to listen to some music.
Saturday breakfast was bagels in the sun. Then work for a while untill I gave up on trying to get something to work. After a trip into D.C. I met up with JW, DS and few other people for a night at the Black Cat Brit pop night. Back home by 3:30am after being stopped on Route 50 by the police. They were stopping everyone looking for drunk drivers. I had only had one beer so I was fine. I am now tired but happy…..

Geek Stuff
My 486 is back up and working, why did I ever think of upgrading it?? The last little problem was the kernel that I installed from SUSE. It was running really slowly and the machine would suspend or do something strange that would kill the machine. So I copied over the old kernel from the original install and Bang it has been up for 5 hours 🙂 Email, and dns is done. Need to do a couple more things, but it is up 🙂

Geek Stuff
I am getting closer. I gave up on the 60 gig hard drive. The only way I could get that to boot was on my p233 with the ATA100 card. I upgraded the ata33 controller’s BIOS and now it doesn’t even see the 60 gig.
I now have a 3 gig drive that is booting linux, except it can’t find init Doooh, reboot again and that should be sorted.
Well about 5, but it is up and running 🙂 now to reconfigure all the stuff I use on it

Geek Stuff
I am stumped. I can’t get the 60 gig drive to boot. It just refuses to do it. So I then thought, well I have a 540 meg hard drive (This was my first ever hard disk) that I can make the master and boot off that, then mount all the partitions on the 60 gig. Turns out the 540 meg is dying 6 years not a bad life. So I then put in a 3 gig, but the partition table is missing from it, and I can’t write a new one. This is now the third hard drive for this to happen on so I am wondering if something else is going on. I think I need to pull the ATA33 controller and try something else. I have ATA100 in a box that I have been meaning to install but never quite got round to it. Or maybe I should just try doing this with out an extra controller on another machine to see what the F**** is going on, but my 486 won’t see the 60 gig and the 233 won’t pick it up either. But I have reinstalled the boot partition on the 60 gig with out reiserfs which means I don’t have an extra headache of loading the reisrfs modules. Or I could just go out and get on of those $99 40 gig harddrives and start from scratch. Hmmmm I think I should go home.

If you have a wireless network you should read this

I think I might have resurrected my hard disk. It still complains about partition boundaries but I think I can get all the data off it. I can even make it boot into linux. I found a good reference page Recovering a lost partition table which points to a tool for working out where partitions begin and end called gpart

Now all I need to do is work out why I can’t print from my work machine.

Geek Stuff:
I have completely screwed up my linux server. I tried to upgrade from a really old version of slackware to a new version of suse. Basically I have lost my original boot drive 🙁 and the new one won’t boot on its own arrg. On the bright side I have a backup from last night of the important stuff so it is not a complete foobar, but I don’t have access to email and have lost anything that was sitting in the mail queue 🙁

All observed timing measures provided for the signature routines were performed on a Sequent Symmetry with ten 16 Mhz 80386 processors. The numbers provided are simply an informal gauge of throughput, rather than any authoritative metric.

Ahh, I think that was the same config as castle.ed.ac.uk, the mainframe machine I used in First Year A.I. They merged Castle and the other Sequent machine Festival to become Tattoo. Looks like that machine has been replaced by holyrood. Ah high powered computing those were the days.