I can find no other way of describing the FIAs decision to use Microsoft as the sole supplier of ECUs in Formula 1 cars from 2008-2010. The very thought sends a cold shiver down my spine. I’m lucky enough to be invited by Honda to Goodwood, Festival of Speed again this year. If I get the chance to have a chat with any engineers, it’ll certainly be a subject I’ll be discussing.
Archive for the 'Life' Category
Grifferz was kind enough to respond to my blog entry on the UKUUG, thanks for your comments. I’ve had a longer think about this now. A quick scan of the previous events list shows a big bias towards events in the South and I’ve not heard anything that indicates this policy will change in the near future. As this makes attending the events pretty tricky, I’ll be dropping the membership.
Are you a member of UKUUG, the UK Unix User Group?
My membership is now overdue and I’m wondering whether to renew or not. Personally, I feel the benefits, which include a quaterly newsletter, bi-annual conferences and book discounts, simply don’t offset the 40 pounds per yer fee.
The newsletters always look dated, particularly the news section, due to its quaterly publication schedule and the fact that the internet provides up to the minute news from any one of a million sites. The reviews section also seems inferior compared to the rich results provided from a quick google on any subject imagineable.
The bi-annual conferences could be of interest, but none of the events (that I’m aware of) have been anywhere near my location.
The book discounts are also rendered useless by sites such as amazon and www.compman.co.uk that usually end up working out cheaper even without the UKUUG discount.
If you’re a member (or an ex-member!) of the UKUUG, I would be interested to hear your views. As it stands, I don’t think I’ll be renewing my membership this year.. To put the annual membership cost in to perspective, I could buy an entire years subscription to Linux Magazine for less..
This is the last thing you want to see when you’re 160 miles away from home. Read on for an explaination.
As blogged previously, I had decided to make the journey over from Yorkshire to Birmingham to attend the first PHPWM meet. The journey went really well, taking just under 2 1/2 hours and unusually for me, I didn’t get lost. (Although somehow I did manage to take the scenic route on the return journey heading down the M6 in the wrong direction.) (The penny dropped when I noticed signs for Wales!)
The day took a nasty turn though shortly after I parked up after arriving in Birmingham. Noticing that it was a bit chilly, I pressed the boot release button and went to the boot (or trunk for any american readers) to get a fleece jumper. I took the jumper out, put it on and closed the boot door at which point I noticed the familiar ‘click’ and indicator lights flashing suggesting that the car was locked. And it was. Turns out the car I was driving automatically locks itself, like a lot of modern cars these days. Unfortunately though, this car wasn’t smart enough to realise the keys were still in the car. So there I was, miles away from home with a company car and the keys locked inside.
Luckily the car has RAC cover so I called home and asked them for the breakdown number which I promptly called, around 6:30pm. The first question asked was ‘What is your policy number?’ to which I replied, ‘I’m not sure as it’s locked inside the car,’ The second question asked was, ‘Is it your car?’ At this point I realised it was going to be an interesting conversation.. I replied ‘No, it’s a company car’ thinking that the registration plate combined with the name of my work place would suffice. But as it turns out, the car is not registered to my work place, it’s registered to a leasing company. Anyway, 30 minutes later they decided to send someone on the condition that the policy number was quoted as soon as the car was unlocked. Fair enough I thought. ‘It will be 75 minutes’ seemed a bit long to be, especially as I was in the centre of a big city. TWO HOURS later the guy turns up. Through a combination of embarrasement, exhaustion and annoyance I decided not to make a fuss about having to wait two hours. The guy that turned up was very polite and didn’t seem hassled by ‘another locked car.’ Turns out they attend cars with keys locked inside them several times a day, or maybe he just said that to make me feel better. 
Fifteen minutes later the car was open again and the RAC guy was off (without checking the policy number.) I had a brisk walk up to the meet but I must of just missed everyone. Gutted. Hopefully I’ll make it to the next one!
I think I’ll just have to put this episode down to ‘life experience’…
I might not live in the West Midlands, yet I’ve still found the West Midlands PHP User Group mailing list to be a useful resource. The list has covered a diverse selection of topics ranging from MVC frameworks, PHP development environments through to discussions around source control systems. I would highly recommend any PHP developers join the list. With a growing user base it was suggested that we look at a meeting and Open Advantage have stepped forward providing a venue. I’ve been toying with the idea of attending since the meeting was annonuced but the (near) 5 hours of travelling time it will involve for the round trip kept putting me off. Well, I decided today to just bite the bullet and give it a go. Thankfully work has been very supportive, providing both a car and expenses for a hotel room if the night runs on. (In the typical, technical geeky meeting ending in a pub sort of fashion.) David Goodwin from Pale Purple will be talking about Smarty. (Smarty is a templating engine that seperates content from business logic.) I’ve never used Smarty on a mission critical site before and it will be interesting to hear Davids experiences with it, both from the developer point of view and how the people who look after the templates find it. Also talking is Elliot Smith on Eclipse and Jake Stride on Enterprise Groupware Server. Should make for a superb evening, really looking forward to it.
Since 1st December 2003 it has been illegal to use a hand-held mobile phone in the UK while driving. I say ‘hand-held’ as the legislation was a bit murky to begin with but the basic rule is that you cannot pickup the phone at any point while the engine is on, even if the car is stationary. Handsfree kits are fine so long as the phone is not held by the driver.
People that drive while talking on their mobile phones has always bugged me. It usually results in the driver going slower than normal or weaving across lanes. Last night I followed one home in the former category. In a national speed limit (60mph) the driver was hovering just over 40mph while yapping away on the mobile, causing a huge tailback of traffic that was unable to overtake safely. I was about 4 cars behind the offender and you could see the drivers in the cars behind getting worked up, weaving and tailgating each other while attempting to get past. Worse still, as everybody slowed when going through a village, it became clear the car had a baby in the passenger seat too. Words escape me.. It’s not big and it’s not clever.. don’t do it, please.
I’m sure the regulars on #lugradio will of noticed my extended leave over the past few weeks (months?!). I’ve just been snowed under with work. We’ve had some major problems with a couple of our servers. Both are over 6 years old and hugely overloaded, as a result they’re bursting at the seams. We also had our first network downtime since installing Cisco kit, 3 years without issue isn’t too bad I suppose. We’re also putting in a new Lotus Domino server, training starting next week, should be fun. 
Had an interview lack week for a Linux Sysadmin post. The interview went really well and the business seemed to be going in the right direction. It was also obvious that their infrastructure had huge potential for expansion, something I would relish. Unfortunately I didn’t get the job. But then again, neither did anyone else. After interviewing they decided that they didn’t really need someone full time and have taken on an existing contractor 1 day a week to do the work. Business wise it’s a sensible choice, it was fairly obvious that it wouldn’t be a full time job managing under 10 servers. Although it would of given lots of time for research and development of their systems.. The search continues..
PS - Anyone fancy lending a hand tidying up our server room?
Finally! We now have a venue for our May 2007 wedding. We’ll be getting married at Sledmere House, a local stately home. The grounds are pretty stunning. Al was delighted to see that our tour of the venue clashed with a local hunt meet. Thankfully my recently purchased 1Gb 133x SD card came in good use. I was pretty pleased with the pictures from the S80, it was pretty dull and overcast but the pictures still have clarity. Impressive.
Windows Vista x64 To Require Signed Drivers
Very bad news for interoperability and user rights. There’s quite a few Open Source projects around providing Windows drivers, the one that immediately springs to mind is OpenVPN. Hope this isn’t the end of the line for their Windows driver.
I haven’t got anything specific to say but I haven’t blogged for a while so I thought I would dump out all my current random happenings to my blog.
Work happenings
- New RAID6 SAN arrived and very nice it is too. The system provides redundancy on everything. I didn’t even realise it was possible to buy SATA disks with dual controller boards and dual inputs for data and power.
- New Dell 1855 blade center also arrived. Unfortunately this isn’t so good. We’re struggling to get the embedded PowerConnect switch talking to our core 6509 switch and we’re slowly running out of options. The only remaining option I can see is changing the entire VLAN config across the site, not something we’re willing to do. (The problem lies with VTP and GVRP running together, if anyone was interested..)
- Spent some time looking in to Novells Open Enterprise Server offering. For those outside the Novell club, OES (as it’s known) is the replacement for Netware. It runs all the standard Netware services on a SuSE Linux server. I would of preferred Debian, but it’s still a big leap from Netware. In theory, this should allow some really cool customisation of network services to a level not possible with Netware.
- Found that the Intel 915 motherboard using a 64Bit P4, that takes 4 x 1Gb RAM chips, doesn’t actually support 4Gb of RAM due to a chipset limitation/stupid Intel business practice. Only 3.2Gb is available. As this machine is going to be used for server testing inside VMware, it’s very annoying. And I swear, I will never be buying an Intel machine again. (Needless to say, the limitation doesn’t apply on AMD64 setups.)
At home
- Starting to realise that organising a wedding is a long affair. We haven’t even been able to find a venue yet, although we did find a superb marquee company that hasn’t quoted the earth so the plan for an outside reception still looks good.
- Upgraded to WordPress v2, a refreshing, one click, affair. Nice. Loving the new backend interface, it’s really slick and worth the upgrade.
- Started studying for my Zend Engineer exam, although the ‘official’ study guide is crap. As previously pointed out by GingerDog and ChairmanMeow, it has a ridiculous number of errors in it. The errata runs to over 10 (A4) pages..
- Applied for a couple of jobs involving Linux work, looking at a third that also involves some Solaris work. Realised that I should touch up on my Solaris skills so I’m playing (again) with Open Solaris hoping that I’ll see what the buzz is about this time. (Stability?.. Commercial backing?.. who knows)
- Spotted a couple of interesting blog entries by Sparkes and TonyTiger on a new Autistic LUG setup by Sparkes and various issues sorrounding LUGs. I’ve never gone to either of my local LUGs, although I did help with an InfoPoint stand on one occassion. The driving distance doesn’t really put me off, although it is a good 30 minute drive, the real turn off is the pub location. I just can’t tolerate smoky atmospheres. Working in the nightclub industry for too many years has seen to that. I should really voice this to some of the local members to see if anything could be done about it..
- Anybody else catch a story on Slashdot about Tesco offering VoIP phones? Check out the Guardian Unlimited article. If Tesco are to market the product well, I think it could be a huge success. I’ll certainly be picking one up to play with next time I’m in one of the bigger stores. (Although I don’t suspect for a minute it will work without Windows.)
- Some jammy sod seems to have got a free broadband upgrade to 8Mb. I wonder when Kingston Communications will be upgrading my (pathetic) (but costly) 576k connection. They don’t even offer anything above 3Mb and that costs £40 PCM.
- Added a new services page to the site, detailing support options for people interested in Moodle. A lot of people have shown interest in Moodle to us at work (after our own site received many recommendations) so I thought I would offer install and maintenance options.
And here the randomness ends. Not because I’ve run out of entropy, but because I haven’t done the ironing yet and if I don’t get on with it, they might not be a wedding.. (!)
