Well, in the past weeks, I’ve not been without computer problems, most of them I’ve fixed. I’ll talk about these first because I might as well get the boring shite out of the way first, and then we’ll get talking about… poo, or something. Or maybe not.

Anyway, yes, the past week since the wasp attack has been spent with me doing computery stuff, as I try to get rid of the few niggling bugs I’ve had with the machines I own. I’m happy to say that these fixes have been mostly successful

Firstly, I managed to get the mysql server running on scribcam.co.uk. I was getting a message that some of the system tables were corrupt, every time I tried to change any of the parameters, or create a database. This was likely because I’d upgraded the mysql software, but copied all of the data files from a (very) old version, including the system tables. It really didn’t like it. I’d forgotten that the majority of the mysql settings are actually stored in one of those data files. Whoops.

I left it chugging for a few weeks, as a few apps on the server relied on it. It got to a point though, where it was useless to me, as I couldn’t use it as a backup server. I had the idea of dumping the tables, reinstalling mysql, recreating the users and then reimporting them. It was all bound to go horribly wrong.

It didn’t, and within about 5 minutes, I was wondering why it had all gone so very, very smoothly. There is no answer. It just did. That was a bonus. I was expecting to fight with cryptic error messages and stuff I didn’t really understand. Didn’t happen.

Last night came the greatest challenge yet. You may, or may not know, that thanks to an absolute disaster with Windows XP, and my inability to perform a clean install of it on Beastbits, I have been using ubuntu as a substitute until I get a new machine, and I’m liking it.

Now, thanks to the many hardware problems Beastbits has, I decided it was not a good idea to keep all of my data and the OS itself on one drive, and decided to separate the two. Since I installed Ubuntu, there’s been a 250Gb drive used as the system drive, and data, and a 500Gb drive doing nothing, except holding inaccessible data. Last night, I made the decision that Windows was never going back on here, so I thought it would be nice to have my 500Gb drive as the data partition, and the 250Gb as the OS drive.

Sounds complicated enough, and sure it would kill an hour or 6.

Again, this went oddly well, and I’ll explain in a very quick, shit, and probably incorrect way of doing this…

Mount drive and partition, in my case, this was /dev/sdb1 and mounted to /media/New olume
Check all data is backed up
Unmount drive (sudo umount /dev/sdb1)
Load gparted (sudo gparted)
FInd out gparted isn’t installed by default
“sudo apt-get install gparted”
load gparted again
Delete partitons
Create ext3 partition, and name it “Home”, just to complicate matters
Have beer and/or wank whilst drive builds itself
Wonder what happens, when drive doesn’t appear
Reboot
Watch with glee, as newly formatted drive is mounted to /media/Home
Cry in horror, as your normal user doesn’t have write permissions to the drive
Out comes Google.
“sudo chown -R username /dev/sdb1″
Watch with glee as drive becomes writable
“cp -a /home/* /media/Home” (I think)
Construct a small fort from CD cases. Learn to play the recorder. Sort your blood cells into alphabetical order. Basically, I had 133Gb of data to copy across. I’m trying to get across that this took an age.
With the help of spike1 from #speccy (which has now moved home, it used to be on Astrolink, it’s now on irc.coldfront.net ), run a check on the copied data by comparing file sizes
Burst into tears when you realise that there’s a 1Gb discrepancy between the original data and the copied data.
Breathe a sigh of release when you mounted /home/www during the copy procedure so you could move mirc across.
Confirm this with… er, a command I’ll enter later, as I don’t have it to hand, which creates the two directory listings, then compares them.
Edit /etc/fstab
Insert line “/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 2″
Bonus step: login as root, remove the old /home directory. This isn’t necessary, as linux will automatically mount the new mountpoint over the top of the previous one. I did it for completeness, and because I’m a rebel, and also wanted to see how much space the OS itself used.
Reboot. Hope for the best. Actually, I don’t think you have to reboot, but I did.
Scream with joy when “df” reads something like the following:-

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             227G  3.9G  212G   2% /
/dev/sdb1             459G  127G  309G  30% /home

Feel a bit guilty when you realise there’s 212Gb free which you’ll probably never be able to use.

Well, that went on a bit longer than I expected it to. I forgot there were so many steps. Let’s move on quickly. Sooo, er… I happened to be walking around the confusing, brightly lit aisles of my local Tesco the other day, and noticed something new. Yes, there is now a rival of the humble Pot Noodle, in the form of something called “The Nation’s Best”, which are manufactured under the “Golden Wonder” brand.

Now, the first thing that struck me as odd is the use of the Golden Wonder brand, was for many years, they used to manufacture the original Pot Noodles.

As a self confessed slob, and a shit cook, Pot Noodles are a staple part of my diet. Well, at least when I’m at work they are. I was interested how these new noodles fared up to the old veteran of the lazy man’s cupboard.

No “convenience food” would be worth its salt (and most of them have plenty of that!) without a curry variety, and I’m pleased to say these also have one, in the form of “Chip Shop Curry”. Awesome. Noodles in a curry sauce, with raisins and apple.

The pots are slightly smaller than your average Pot Noodle. One bonus is that the lid of the pots is plastic, which means that it’s less likely to get punctured. If there’s one annoyance I have about the original Pot Noodles is the ability to burst the foil top, and the powder going everywhere, meaning that everything sharing the same bag also stinks of Pot Noodle, for weeks afterwards.. No problems like that with these!

So, I’ve talked enough about the packaging. What about the actual stuff itself? Well, to be honest, it seems a little devoid of ingredients. There’s the noodles, but where’s the dried out veg? Nowhere to be seen! At least when you eat the veg in a pot noodle, you can actually pretend that it’s doing you some good.

There are little bits of “apple”, and even though raisins were promised, upon initital inspection, these are few and far between. This is probably a bonus, as rehydrated raising tend to be one of the nastiest things that can ever be consumed. Except for sushi. (True fact: I only mentioned sushi there because I’m listening to the extended version of the 1992 hit “SuperMarioLand” which features the line “I’ve eaten sushi in Japan, but there ain’t no place like SuperMarioLand. Oh, and the thought of eating raw fish turns my stomach)

In conclusion, bring back Pot Rice.

I really dislike them.

For the past two nights, there has been one of these little shits in the office. I happened to be the first one to spot it the other night, as it happened to land on my “umbilical cord” (the wire from my headset leading to my phone). I froze, slowly backing up, unplugging my headset, and then legging it. As I reversed it headed towards me. I think everyone thought I was mad.

It turned out that 4 of the 5 people who were in the office with me also severely disliked the little stripy buggers. The only person to not admit to disliking them was Dick Brown, webmaster of short-lived shitfest

One of the things I was discussing with Chad yesterday is my Flicke account, as there are a few scans I’ve put up on there of us as kids. It made me wonder, just how many images had I uploaded to Flickr, and how much disk space was I using on their servers?

It’s easy to tell how many images you have, both private and public (14,533 at the time of typing), but I still had to find out how much disk space was being used.

They use a third-party service called QOOP to allow you to do things such as print your photos out, back them to CD or DVD. After playing around with it, I found out exactly how much space I was taking up. Sit down for this, it’s a goody…

Final Backup Size: 39.67 gigabytes
Required Disks: 59 CDs or 10 DVDs

CD Backup media Price: $884.41
DVD Backup media Price: $199.90

This no doubt will have changed, as I’ve uploaded a few more pictures since then, about another 300Mb’s worth. Marvellous! Think I’ll run off another one of my own backups now.

Mere weeks ago I’d have been hovering over the delete key, deciding whether to send one of Chad’s “cutting” comments to the big RSS feed in the sky. Yesterday, we met up for the first time in what must have been 10 years. The startling changes are his accent (which apparently gets mistaken for either Dutch or south African) and the lack of hair. In fact, both of my readers can now put a name to the face…

He flies back to Japan today, but he may return later in the year. Needless to say, he’ll be back posting slightly offensive comments here in the very near future!

I have the sad duty of announcing the death of a good friend and work colleague. Stu, one of the security guards who look after where I work, sadly died of a heart attack yesterday.

I feel that I can’t say much more than that. I am truly, truly devastated. He really was one of the best blokes you were ever likely to meet. I have known him pretty much from when I started at my job 8 years ago.

We would often spend time joking with each other about which one finished our shifts first. I would often say, as I was leaving the building, someting along the lines of “Well, there’s 8 cold ones in the fridge for when I get in”, normally resulting in a glare, and a “Yeah, go on, fuck off!”, which was even more prominent if he just happened to be starting his night shift as I was leaving. One of the best examples of this was when he was on Messenger, at work. He was sat in his little security office, and I took a photo over the line of cold cans I was about to drink. Honestly, you’ve never heard swearing like it. It was hilarious. He always remembered that night, and would often remind me of it, usually adding the word “twat” to the end of it.

I recall the time I received a call on my mobile from him. I can’t remember the exact details of what it was he asked me, in fact, I didn’t even know it was him, as he called from a different number. When he realised I was out, enjoying several and/or many pints, alongside a game of snooker, my phone turned blue.

He will always hold the record for the “most calls taken by a security guard”, following the release of a particularly bugged piece of software. I think it was something like 400.

He was a stickler to the golden rule… if you order a takeaway to be delivered to work, you always ask the security guard if he wants anything. Otherwise, your food may be subject to a 20-minute “cooling off” period in his office. Many a new worker fell foul to that rule, only to be presented with luke-warm, stodgy chips! If you asked him if he wanted anything, your food would be hand-delivered to your desk, no questions asked, and no matter what type of “eating at your desk” ban may have been in place at the time. To put it simply, if you respect him, he respects you, and that goes for everything.

My memories of Stu are long and rambling. He was a great guy, a true asset to the company, and someone who will be sorely missed by all who knew him. I’ll miss you mate.