Laurence’s Blog

Chris Lamb has set up a website, called Planet 3YP, which is “an aggregate feed of University of Warwick Computer Science third-year project blogs”. It looks good, although it only has 2 projects on there at the moment. Hopefully some more people will signup (I’ve just sent off my project’s details to him) and we will get some interesting information reading about each other’s projects.

The shiney hardware I ordered hasn’t been delivered yet today, but due to yesterday being a bank holiday may not come until tomorrow. I hope it arrives before I return to Coventry tomorrow evening even though I probably won’t have an opportunity to actually install it all until after the exams.

This entry from Dave-Miller.com, is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while. It quite literally had me laughing out loud;

Important announcement from UK Department of Transport

There is concern over the current driving standards in England, so the Department of Transport have devised a scheme to identify poor and dangerous drivers.

This system will allow all road users to recognise the potentially hazardous and dangerous ones, or those with limited driving skills.

From the middle of May 2006 all those drivers who are found to be a potential hazard to all other road users will be issued with a white flag, bearing a red cross.

This flag clearly indicates their inability to drive properly.

These flags must be clipped to a door of the car and be visible to all other drivers and pedestrians.

Those drivers who have shown particularly poor driving skills will have to display two flags:

One on each side of the car to indicate an even greater lack of skill and limited driving intelligence.

Please circulate this to as many other motorists as you can, in order that drivers and pedestrians will be aware of the meaning of these flags.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Department of Transport.

Back to revision, the first exam we have is ‘Introduction to Software Engineering’ on Friday. A while ago I downloaded all of the ISE notes onto my laptop so I could revise without an internet connection (say at the RAF’s formation-flying pig display…). At the time one of the lecture notes was unavailable due to the familiar 404 error. I checked again today, and it’s /still/ a 404. How the hell are we ment to revise if the (examinable)lecture notes are returning 404s?!?

Having spent far too much money on hard disks which aren’t even in stock, I thought I’d write a nice rant about Komplett.co.uk and their website. We’ll their webiste is ok, but when placing an order it goes through some 3rd party website (presumably for CreditCard validation) which errored out with an error in some foreign language (probably Swedish?).

Unfortunately I cannot speak the language in question, but did notice that ‘Internet Explorer’ was mentioned. ‘Okay, so they want me to use IE’, I thought – some websites are lame like that. I changed Konqueror’s preferences so it claimed to be IE 6.0 running on Windows XP (A very nifty feature). Same error. Fine. Since I wasn’t going to install another browser simply to place this order (in retrospect I possibly should have installed and tried Opera – it would have been interesting to see if that worked if nothing else) I moved onto Firefox on my dad’s PC.

It worked fine on Firefox on Windows 2000 Pro. Clearly they do support some alternative browsers, just not the decent ones. Oh well, now I’ll just see if they manage to get the HDD I ordered in stock and delivered, with the rest of my order, in a reasonable amount of time.

I’m currently at home (supposidly) revising for my exams. I foolishly thought if I didn’t bring my desktop computer with me I might actually do some revision, as a result I’m sitting here on my laptop, which struggles with openttd, writing blog entries. Fun.

On the plus side, I’ve had my braces removed, after over 2 years of wearing them, since the Othodentisty people at Glenfield Hospital have finished pulling my teath around and decided that they want to move onto the next stage of treatment. I’ve now got removable retainers for 3 months, after which they’ll be cutting bits of my mouth open to put implants in.

I had some interesting thoughts about my third year project in the shower yesterday. Most of them are either unfeasable or just plain crack-headed, but I noted them down anyway. They’ll give me some interesting points to discuss in my report, at least.

Oh well, I’ve got to go and move some paint tins from the barn to the garage before my dad gets back. Riveting Stuff.

Last weekend was a Warwick CompSoc LAN party weekend, which for me ment the customary ‘trying the latest Linux releases’ as well as playing the odd game. (Incidentally, Fred introduced me to TO:Crossfire which is a great mod for UT2004, and looks to be better than Tactical Ops for UT)

A friend of mine (and shameless free-as-in-speach-software advocate and HURD user), Tim, asked me to try Ututo for him, so I tried to install it on my laptop first. For some reason it failed to boot past the ‘ISOLINUX’ stage. Suspecting a possibly duff CD-R I used the downloaded ISO image to install it in a virtual machine. It successfully installed in the VM, but failed to boot. Declaring Ututo an unmitigated failure, I moved on…

Next on the list was SuSE 10.1 which had been released on Thursday. SuSE 10.1 seems a lot stabler than 9.3 and 10.0 were. I only had one KDE application crash on me, where as on 9.3 and 10.0 this was a regular occurence. The knetworkmanager application is a fantastic addition to the KDE desktop, and automatically picked up the university access point which was within range at the LAN. For Linux newbies, and people who want a ‘just works’ Distro SuSE 10.1 has to be one of the best. Shame I don’t fall into one of those groiups

…so back to Debian. After re-installing it I decided to install KDE since it is a nice desktop (dispite the fact that, by default, konqueror, konsole and konversation all use different shortcuts for switching between tabs. (Alt+Left/Right, Shift+Left/Right and Ctrl+,/. iirc)). For a distro which has a reputation for being Gnome-oriented when using a full desktop environment its KDE packages are great. Everything just works as expected, and I’m very pleased with it. I wonder how long it’ll last until I decide to go back to something more minimal (e.g. evilwm).

Managing RAID and LVM with Linux

hmm, so I installed debian again on my laptop yesterday (instead of doing coursework). The compile-time got to me again. However it[gentoo] is one of the few distro’s which currently have the 2.6.16 kernel, which includes the drivers required for my desktop’s TV card (according to various websites – completely untested by me). Gentoo did well to last a week, most other distro’s aren’t so lucky.

On another note, microlog helpfully embeds smilies within other BBCode blocks, including code blocks (which SimplePHP Blog did too and is simply irritating) and url=$url – this breaks horribly when it replaces some text in $url with a smilie. Nested html tags DO NOT WORK and thus both the url and the text displayed is horribly broken. Oh well, off I go to find another piece of blog software.

My shell account on the Warwick Computing Society’s server had the login ‘laurence2′ as ‘laurence’ was taken by a former member whose account had not been removed for reasons unknown. After nearly two years of moaning and harasing various people I have finally had ‘laurence’s account removed and replaced with mine.
This makes me a very happy bunny. Now all I need to do is finish the coursework due in on Monday…

core has facility to determine which plugins it can talk to, and which not.
security module requests notification of all un-registered sockets.
core by default accepts all, and can be told to by default reject (a la USE”-*”) and have a list of accepted sockets.

security levels how?

message structure:

{message id}{source?}{destination}{replyto}{message}

I got an email this morning telling that the cousework which was due on Wednesday has had a deadline extension until Monday. There goes any motivation I had for working today .

I got bored of using Irssi through PuTTY(party because if someone else was heavily using the shared internet connection it was impossible to type on due to the lag), so I looked around for an alternative Windows IRC client. Having previously used XChat and not particularly liked it I was looking for something else.

I used Opera’s inbuilt chat client for a while, but the problem was that when a plugin crashed Opera it also killed IRC irritating me and the other people in the channels I was in. Granted it only happened twice, and on the same page but it /could/ happen again which is a good enough reason to switch for me.

After some searching I stumbled accross a simple extract and run irssi created from the cygwin version. I downloaded, unpacked and ran it and as promised I had a working Irssi install .

I did some more poking with scripts and themes from the official site and eventially settled on the hv theme for Irssi and using people.pl(for coloured nicks which work with nm), nm.pl(for right aligned nicks in a column), trackbar.pl, quitmsg.pl(for nifty quit messages. I combined it with a list of BOFH excuses I found on the web) and autorejoin.pl from the Irssi scripts page as my ideal setup. The scripts and themes reside in ‘C:\Documents and Settings\.irssi’ on my computer. Incidently, considering this is a Windows system, I have a surprisingly large number of dot-files in ‘C:\Documents and Settings’. OpenSource ports from *nix systems ftw!