Is good. Just because you are covered and wearing a helmet doesn’t mean the damn sun won’t sneak through the HUGE vents in your helmet and cook your skin… making you look somewhat a burk… much to the delight of those I work with.
Suncream
May 26th, 2009Weedkiller marketing?
May 26th, 2009With my new dynamic self.. time to take on that knotweed again. Little bit of interweb research (wikipedia > search ‘japanese knotweed’) 
I popped off to B&Q to nab me some toxins.
Back home with my box of fun (hopeful plant death), I set about in my alchemy lab (kitchen) to concoct the vial brew (put the disolvable plastic sachet into water, whilst trying not to eat it).
To my Joy (litterally GLEE) it turns out I have managed to purchase “Alpha-betty-weedkiller” !!
Lookit!:
Seems all the lettering off the disolvable sachet came up to the surface! what fun!
sedantry – -
May 24th, 2009I am far too un-active.. its pissing me off. So once again, chocolate banned (although there was a big slice of choc cake today.. stupid me..).
need to loose a load and build fitness again, so have plans for the Gym before work.. need to get membership sorted, but with finances tight £40 a month (or there abouts) is a bit of an issue. Still..
Thankfully Andy popped over yesterday and managed to persuade me out on my bike again today. He used the trick of turning up on his bike and pointing at the various bits.. worked a charm Glorious day so off we went. Headed West which was new for me, and to Liverpool airport. Stopping at the bottom of the runway to watch planes coming in and others take off. Helicopters are just weird, as they have to follow the runway and taxi ways.. funny to watch.
Snagged me a video of a Jet landing too, used phone so not amazing but still :
I will stick the few snaps I took up on the gallery.. it could do with something new too I think.
Overall 22 miles, which isn’t too bad for the 1st run in about 12 months. Absolutely shattered and my legs and arse are sore, but so glad I did it. Thanks for dragging me out Andy.
Now I just need to keep at it and get the old vibe back
Debian and VMware server “The path /usr/src/linux/include is a kernel header file directory, but it is not part of kernel source tree.”
March 29th, 2009Yeah a long name I know, but trying to get it stuck in Google so it will be most helpful.
I hit this snag and did a lot of trawling with little luck. Previously had no issues installing VMWare server, upgrade to Lenny, swap some hardware, decide to get it up and running and POOF! no dice!
Anyway I have solved it (huzzah!) and can finally goto bed
It seems that the error message is related to the lack of .config and or Makefile in the headers. So a .config or Makefile in /usr/src/linux/.
if you have installed your headers :
apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
have build-essential installed have set CC to be gcc-4.1 yet still you get grief, heres what I found.
If you look in the headers path, you will see .config and Makefile. Yet no joy!, look closer, the Makefile is a damn pesky SymLink!!! this goes for most if not all of the buggers. What you need along with the headers is:
linux-headers-2.6.26-1-common
which should reside in the same directory as your headers:
ls
linux-headers-2.6.26-1-686
linux-headers-2.6.26-1-common
The SymLinks point into files in there, for some reason (possibly my own stupidity) I didn’t have it, possibly deleted it in a fit of disk space recovery before starting the build.
Hopefully that will be of use for someone out there, if not, I am sure I will find it useful when I next cause myself grief
Questionable BBC
March 25th, 2009Just seen the following Interesting Article about the BBC creating a BotNet and then using it to do tests. Although this is IMHO questionable anyway I do wonder if they will be reimbursing people who incur traffic and usage costs for their connection. One of the tests was to DDoS a test site they had setup, which is obviously going to use resources on the source machines.
What gives them the right to do this, they may have had good intentions but what would have happened if that botnet was compromised itself?
They claim to be contacting the affected machines owners to let them know, quite how they are going to do this I am not sure, perhaps the hack was done after credentials were entered into a site and confirmed? Still a very worrying thing to be done.
Motorway?
March 11th, 2009I have come down to Reading to see Nightwish thanks to a very generous offer from friends (cheers guys) who are also putting me up whilst I am here.
Last night I drove down, thinking ahead I thought I would set off quite late so as to miss all the rushhour nonsence. It seemed to work, nice empty ish flowing motorways.. great, I even stayed on the M6 instead of using the Toll (credit crunch and all ).
Big gripe? (there has to be a gripe I am updating my blog! ). road works.. millions of em! (well about 3 per motorway on average).
I can understand the speed restriction stuff, its a fair point, it does bug me a little when there is no one at the site in the evening, perhaps a slight loosening of the restriction would help us night time drivers, but I can live with it 50’s not too bad for a few miles.
What does annoy me is when they take the piss because they can. The M42 has long been a personal peeve of mine, tonight was no exception. Due to its gantry based speed cams (they are on, I saw them get someone) you have to abide by the dynamic speed signs. Which should be fine. But at around 23:00 on an empty motorway 40MPH is somewhat annoying… this is further compounded by the limit being removed and then a new set of road works about 500yrds further down the road. This time, completely empty motorway, no workmen in sight (found them putting cones out a mile or so later), restriction? 20MPH!!!!!
WTF!
really annoyed me, there was much slamming on from people and a seemingly confused pause as we crawled past the camera on this massive empty stretch of tarmac. Only to speed back up to something sensible later.
Yeah protect workforce, but don’t take the piss.
Been a while
February 17th, 2009yeah I know.. I suck at updating this.. I have even thought of stuff to put in here over the last period.. just well, never got round to it
Mostly I have been getting into the work thang, we have a manager at long last and he is instilling some process and procedure. Direction is being found and stuff is happening.. not been this satisfied by work in.. longer than I can remember. Got me sitting up straight, which has lead to me trying a few things myself. This last week or so I have been un-nerving people in work with a clothing choice change.
Rather than the usual random trews + random T-shirt, I decided to try this shirt and trousers approach. See if it gives me some more focus. So far I am mostly unsettling those not used to seeing me in such garb but I must say I quite like it myself, and as I am doing it for me (and its all legal) yar boo sucks to anyone who doesn’t like it
Work is going well as I said, my guild is doing super (raiding soon! yay), working on some home hardware consolidation, though I think I am going to have to stick with VMware server for now, but it should more than do what I need it for. Just working on getting my work VM migrated over to it, should allow me to fire it up via the laptop in the front room without having to run upstairs to boot the gaming machine. RDP in and tada visio on an Apple PowerBook G4
I’ll leave it at that for now I think and try and post my usual mixture of rants reviews and techno waffle more frequently.
My parting thoughts… GO SEE “Bolt” its rather good.. and my 1st 3D film experience, rather enjoyed it, once I got the whole staring straight ahead thing sorted.. ish
Stopping bind replying to ‘.’ or root
January 19th, 2009Seems there is a new DDoS in town. Seeing requests for ‘.’ against my DNS servers from an IP. Every minute or so. This will return a list of root name servers from the hints file on the DNS server. Not a massive amount of traffic… unless you are the spoofed recipient of this and consider how many DNS servers are now sending you copies of their DNS roots hint file :/
Ideally I would like to be able to tell BIND to ignore any requests for ‘.’ alas I cannot find a way to do that (anyone who knows how to do this on BIND 9.3.x please let me know. My damage limiting hack at the moment is to zero out the hints file itself. So querying ‘.’ gets you a blank response. Doesn’t stop the problem but the amount of data sent is that bit less. My servers are not recursive and should only be responding for zones they host so it shouldn’t cause me any issues not having a valid set of DNS roots.
Hopefully some bright spark will pop up with a nicer solution to this before this starts happening en-masse.
update : An alternative to this is to put ‘additional-from-cache no’ in your bind options, you will need recursion also disabled, so only really for an authoritative server. Will stop your server replying from the cache and respond with a ‘refused’, which whilst still data, isn’t of the same magnitude as the roots hint.
The Happening
January 2nd, 2009I had heard bad things about this (tho that gives the film more credit than it deserves tbh)… Heard nothing much is probably more in line…
Anyway, its about a ‘happening’ something happening which is horrific and bad, kinda post-apocalyptic kinda thing. Only don’t worry, hope is not lost, it only happens in single part of the US, entirely within its hard straight edged borders, 100% contained… which given the hypothesis of ‘the happening’ in the film, along with the casts mental capacities of a gold fish is of no surprise.
The film is flawed, heavily. For example, they decide that X is probably the cause of the random wacky deaths, so, to minimise the chance of it happening they flee the cities (where X is in its lowest density) and head for small townships which are pretty much embedded in X. All the way through the cast seem to be getting some form of clue, or the film going somewhere and it just evaporates in the next breath they take. Literally they make some announcement of “Y is bad, lets avoid it” wait 5 seconds and they are skipping gleefully into as much ‘Y’ as they can !!
In one of the clips from the special features Mr Shyamalan states that they were going for a “Hard R” certification… perhaps only adults can tolerate this level of mundane monotony without having some sore of psychotic episode ? I think you can count the horrific events on one hand.
The whole film plods, really plods, even the dialogue plods, and Mark Wharlberg (who I do like) almost whinges and whinges his way though his plodding lines. One thing you can be sure of, you are 100% safe, completely of anything ever Happening in this film. Really… avoid it, unless you enjoy paint drying.
Fuckers ( ~:(expl0rer):~ hack)
December 31st, 2008Some twat decided to haxxor my blog.
Probably my own fault for having such an old version of WP on here. None the less not impressed.
Instead of this page you get an interactive interface for poking around and running and reading stuff on the remote system. I think I have gotten off lightly thanks to the joys of suphp.
The hack page actually lives in the database, and hides itself in some coded text making it a bit of a head scratcher to find. I read around on the web :
and discovered a load of dubious rows in my wp_options table :
| rss_0ff4b43bd116a9d8720d689c80e7dfd4 |
| rss_0ff4b43bd116a9d8720d689c80e7dfd4_ts |
| rss_17fd746cbaabc9c8492edcdc707a29c3 |
| rss_17fd746cbaabc9c8492edcdc707a29c3_ts |
| rss_503e5c96d032cbcd5e7bff1c20b85bbd |
| rss_503e5c96d032cbcd5e7bff1c20b85bbd_ts |
| rss_867bd5c64f85878d03a060509cd2f92c |
| rss_867bd5c64f85878d03a060509cd2f92c_ts |
| rss_encoded_html |
| rss_excerpt_length |
| rss_f541b3abd05e7962fcab37737f40fad8 |
| rss_language |
| rss_use_excerpt |
As I backup the SQL regularly and the site was screwed I took my usual brutal approach to it and just binned these rows. tada, site back. May have a look and see if anything else has changed… tho tbh, I think just updating to latest version is probably the best bet.
Also found a few extra plugins in the wp-content/plugins directory.. including a copy of the hello plugin and a larger /old version which was just full of nonsense. Again coded php :/
rather annoying but at least I seem to have removed it.
fuckers.
The Interwebs is awesome!
December 22nd, 2008And they has a LOOOOOONG memory, of stuff even in their wee years ! Seems someone somewhere is caching everything! I was having a mooch about the interwebs, poking hither and thither and found some really old posts of mine. By really old I mean 1998.. from my BBS!
Fido Echo Tastic! It looks like the site basically cached one of the old Fido echo’s I stuck my head into.. Some anti religious echo (no surprise there ). Only found a couple of pages with my stuff on, but still.. funny to read (for me anyway).. I’ll bung the links here, but be warned they are walls of text, basically the echo messages one after the other. Looks like there is some HTML in some of them which has upset things so its all a bit ’strike’ crazy.
Wonder if there are copies of any of the other echos out there….
Stop dreaming of white xmases
December 2nd, 2008PLEASE!
Some of us have to get to work!
Took me far too long to get to work, and whilst bored and sat in the traffic I snapped this pic of what my car had to say about the state of the roads :
Click the pics for some other snow covered Rochdale pics from my office window.
Interesting conundrum…
December 1st, 2008Its cold out.. rather chilly.. my car this AM resembled some kind of wheeled iceberg. This has sprung a question…
If you licked your car on a frosty morning and got your tongue stuck to it, what would the RAC/AA offer in means of roadside assistance to resolve your predicament ? If you did it at home would you need home start cover ?
Wonder if they have a special tone based menu system for such situations as obviously you wouldn’t be able to speak too clearly.
Discuss.
Let the fixings begin… well kinda
November 3rd, 2008As an offshoot to fixing Kerry’s laptop I thought I might try my hand at some ebay cash for xmas. Buy up some bust Mac laptops, fix them, sell them for more money. So with this in mind I set about snagging me some ‘Spares or Repairs’ type laptops off ebay. Quite surprised how much a trashed laptop sells for these days! even the old iBook G4’s.
I eventually won one, which ironically arrived at work on Halloween, so whilst people were wandering around dressed as zombies etc, I was wandering around with a very very unwell iBook, which was proclaimed the most scarey thing some had seen.
Anywho, Kerry wasn’t so impressed with it, especially as I took it apart. Seems one of its previous owners had decided the best route to get to the HDD was to snap the logic board and rip the drive out. Destroying the logic board and the carrier too. So given there is no way I was getting this thing running again the £56 it cost seemed a little high. That is until I got her to try the battery in it in her laptop (which is in need of a new battery at about £90+ from Apple). After a few hours charge one nearly spot on battery. So a bargain, plus to add to that, I have a keyboard, screen, case parts and a few other random components too, all ready to be used to fix the next unlucky lappy I get my mits on.
Now I just need to find one.
Do Androids dream of electric sheep?
October 28th, 2008Mr Andrew lent me Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (Gollancz S.F.) for a read, I recalled it was the book Blade Runner was based on, so was a little apprehensive. I have never really gotten on with the film, it made no sense to me.
Anyway, its not a massive book, and having a need for something to read I started on it. Glad I did. Was a pretty damn enjoyable story, and has made the few memories I have of Blade Runner make a LOT more sense. Think I may have to get a watching of it again now.
For those not in the know, the story is that of a Bounty Hunter, who is still on Earth whilst most of the human race has buggered off to Mars and other colony worlds. His job is to track and ‘retire’ the errant androids of these colonies who escape back to Earth and try to exist as people. The story follows him after a bunch of androids which are of a newer more advanced type, Nexus-6. The story was written quite a long time ago, so reference is made to Video Phones and tape. Reading the blurb at the back about the author (Philip K Dick), it is sad to see he had little of his work published in his lifetime and he himself died before Blade Runner was released.
Even if you don’t like the film, I would recommend giving it a read, if nothing more the film will probably make a LOT more sense to you than previously, and it is quite an interesting story and has a lot of good concepts and ideas relating to synthetic humans and how exactly you would know.
I R Mr Fixit
October 24th, 2008I got home from work today with jobs to do. 1st off Kerry had managed to take a sample of glass,storing it in her tyre for convenience. Alas the two didn’t react too well, so the air left the tyre in a huff. So 1st port of call, getting off one of those bloody awful tyres and fixing a puncture. Nabbed a better set of tyre levers from Halford and set to it. Was much easier with previous experience of fitting em. So job 1 done.
2nd job.. fixing the borken iBook. Using the parts I ordered from iFixit.com (new power board and lead) along with all the appropriate screwdrivers. (which I must add I had to go and collect from Parcel Farse after they charged me an additional £13.50 for the privilege of them picking up the parcel with duty on it.. duty only being £6.49.. grrrrrr robbing bastards.. even the guy working there behind the counter agreed.)
Anywho, printed out the instructions from the site, which are very very clear and step by step from the start to finish. The printable PDF version even comes with a screw sheet so you can keep all the right screws together and get them back in the correct holes Carefully dismantled and replaced the faulty part, easier than I thought, power lead back in and ….. SUCCESS!!! one happy Kerry, laptop restored and tyre de-punctured! I are teh win.
Other point of interest is the handy app Kerry had found which shows you in mAh how much charge your battery has, and how that compares to its original charge capacity. Anyone interested have a mooch at Coconut Battery top little app.
Now to relax with a DVD
Finally!
October 22nd, 2008Now THIS is just awesome, and something people should probably contribute to.
Nice to see they hit and surpassed their requirements so quickly. Kinda shows that people are sick to the back teeth of all the religious mumbo jumbo forced down our throats on a daily basis.
Tragic Wednesday
October 20th, 2008Yeah almost a week out of date, but I have (and still am) busy. Will try and rattle this off quick smart as I have things to do, but wanted to get this down before I forget any of it
Wednesday the 15th of October 2008, going to be a date I avoid in future I think, possibly in another country, in a padded room, asleep.
It started badly when Monkey was taken to hospital at around 01:00 with a very bad cough (he was barking more than the family dog) combined with his asthma, not good. The ambulance and paramedic that turned up from the Wirral after a few minutes (we live not more than 200yrds from the main hospital in Warrington, and only a mile or two from the ambulance station). So the 20 minute wait was a bit stressful. Thankfully the person on the phone stayed on and helped stop Kerry loosing it completely.
Monkey off with his mum to the hospital, I crashed in his bed in case Froo stirred, she didn’t bless, but I didn’t sleep much, partly due to a tiny hard bed full of action figures and partly due to trying to be aware of the phone and Froo. Around 03:30 the call came to go get Monkey and Mum, so I got my mum to come and sit with Froo, whilst I went to pickup Monkey and Kerry. The hospital has changed its layout some, so I ended up playing with one way systems bleary eyed. Eventually gets them home and mum back home and back to bed for me. That 08:00 lie in is seeming less of a lie in now.
08:00 comes round all too quickly and with a woolly head from the broken sleep, I contemplated getting a later train down to London for Storage Expo, thinking on it I decided to just snooze on the train if I needed.
I got to the station around 08:30 ish, and unable to find a free parking space in the tiny station car park, or any markings on the large town car park telling me of closing times, I decided to leave my car on a roadway near the station where plenty of other cars were parked. Train was delayed a few minutes, but I got on no problems. My seat was mostly not taken by someone taking the piss, just their bags (overhead perhaps m8?) So I finally got my seat and got comfy, glad I only had my small bag and some books with me. I did notice the rather cute young lady on the seat in front of me as I boarded, wondering why I never end up sat next to the hotties on such trips, ah well, such is life.
Next stop down and there is a bit of an argument. Seems the hottie is in the seat of some toff, there are some rather blunt and rude comments made by the toff, which were not taken lightly by the lass, who gave as good as she got. Turns out the young woman had been miss directed to that seat by one of the train staff, another came along and put things right, seems she WAS meant to be sat with me.. win! today is looking up (in a small way).
On the journey down not much was said between me and my new travel companion, other than she had no idea what platform her next train would be on at Watford Junction. I mentioned I was changing there myself and would help as best I could (damsel in distress, a cute one at that, who wouldn’t! ). So Up comes Watford, its announced we get up, move down the carriage, only to be blocked by some doddering old bloke, who faffs so much for the 60 seconds the train pauses at the station for that it pulls away as we try and get off it. Brilliant.
A brief chat with the train manager, followed by my green with worry looking traveling companion and we have an alternate travel itinerary, through subway and various bits of London (looks like the later train would have been faster :/ ). The train manager was very helpful and as we were going the same way (and she possibly also noticed how worried the young lass was) suggested she follow me, which seemed to calm her a bit. Me with all my experience of London travel.. heh.. not.. Pleasantries were exchanged her name being Terri.
So, off we go through London, From Euston to Victoria, from there to Clapham, from there to Kensington Olympia, and at West Brompton, Terri was to take her train south. As all the interconnects were slow trains it took me until about 13:30 to get to Storage Expo anyway! So the later train would have been just as fast, but without the nice company, so I didn’t mind.
Spent a fair bit of time nattering on the train, turns out Terri was down here for an interview with a couple of modeling agencies after her appearance in ‘Nuts’ magazine. She showed me a pic from her portfolio (Very nice ), amazing the people you can meet on the train these days I asked if I may take a pic myself and she said I could.. obvioulsy nothing like her portfolio :
Before going our separate ways and explaining her route back north I gave her my mobile number, so if she got stuck she could give me a call, and off I went to the expo.
The expo was as expected, a few interesting chats with vendors, some bumf acquired, and dolly birds gawked at. Whilst I was catching up with John at NCE I received a text from Terri saying she was back on her way to Watford Junction. I sent one back saying I was heading back myself and she hung around. Seems she was a little nervous about traveling alone We both thought it would be ace to get home a bit earlier than originally planned. I had a new WoW patch to play with for starters and a nice warm bed to go back too
Alas things were not so simple, we had joked on the way to London that the trip back would at least be easier. How wrong. As we had jumped on an earlier train, turns out our off peak tickets were not valid, and either pay up £83 each, or get off. We chose get off, again an alternate itinerary was provided. This time, Lichfield to Birmingham New Street, Birmingham New Street to Crewe, Crewe to home.
Yay more random interconnects. When we finally got on the homeward train, we figured it was the train we had tickets for in the 1st place anyway! Well I spose changing trains left right and centre was more interesting than simply siting on a platform for 2-3 hours.
Arriving back in Warrington at 22:00 I looked forward to getting home saying hello and testing out the new patch for an hour before bed. Relieved I saw my car was still there, complete with windows and wheels. As I went to get in the drivers door I heard a clunk, then turning to look I saw the bright yellow sticker on the door telling me I had been clamed!!!! Oh joy. £60 release, only payable in cash, and lo it begins to rain. Not overly impressed given the woman on the phone was a judgmental unhelpful cow, I had to walk in the rain at night into town to get £60 out of a cash machine or my car would be towed. The signage where I was parked was there, about 2 foot below the surface of the road, on a fence at the bottom of the banking the road was on, behind some shrubs. It was a yellow card sign with small (32pt) faded writing on.
£60 down, tired, wet, and very fed-up I got home at around 23:00
I got a quick look at wow after recounting my day to Kerry, before going to bed, up again at 06:20 for work. I think I will just avoid that date in future.
Knotweed, import some old friends ?
October 13th, 2008Still at the back of our garden and forefront of our minds at home is Japanese Knotweed. Still it grows, hurting my eyes when I look out the kitchen window. Too costly to have removed at the moment it just continues to grow. This has lead to a rather excited Kerry calling me at work with a discovery. An article on BBC News comments on an on going project to bring some of the plants natural predators to the UK to try and control its spread.
Predators which attack other plants native to the UK are being ruled out, and only those which love the JK are being considered. Exciting stuff! A plan has been submitted to the government to see if it can be permitted, however, I suspect there will be objections. Probably from some hippy movements (always seems to be one to object to everything) and I also suspect there may be some comment from the current bunch of Knotweed removal ’specialists’ of those we have contacted are charging upwards of £2000-3000 to remove what we have at the back of our house. I imagine they would not be too impressed.
I wonder how the govt. will go, will they continue to do nothing, or will they actually take some action.
Weekend of work
October 12th, 2008Joy of joys I have spent most of this weekend actually working.. for work… gah..
Thankfully it has been quite interesting stuff, and alas not all of it has lead to stuff being complete. I still have a system to rebuild, some tweaks to make and check over something else.
Both leading to potentially more work on other systems. All of which will detract from the new shiny work and project stuff I want to work on. Poo. Ah well this is the life I have chosen, get my head down, my tunes on and see if I can grind out some stuff.
Of course as always when busy, stuff jumps in the middle.. So Storage Expo needs to be visited on Wednesday, (need to book me a train for that! last minute as usual :/, and possibly a hotel, tho I haven’t yet decided if I should stay there Tuesday night.. probably be a plan TBH)
I am getting there organisation wise.. but still not quite there Here is to a fun week ahead
