I haven't had my hair cut professionally in about 5 years. I figured it might be an idea to do so before the wedding, but also needed to do so long enough in advance so that if there was an issue I had time for it to grow out. So I finally did so yesterday, and ended up with something that doesn't look a lot different to what I had. Which is good as far as I'm concerned. :) Anyway, it finally prodded me into creating a Hackergotchi:

My laptop HDD was unhappy. SMART was complaining about 2 uncorrectable sector errors and they were in the middle of swap so resuming from suspend sometimes didn't work. I formatted round the problem to begin with, as I didn't really want to lose my laptop for the week I knew it would probably take. However the fear that it was an indication of impending doom made me finally ring Toshiba last week. After lots of fun (trying to explain that smartctl was reporting a Read Failure from the drives own testing, that I was running Linux and asking if they had a diagnostic disk (it's a Toshiba drive, but people like Maxtor and Western Digital have boot iso images you can download to confirm a drive is faulty before RMAing it), being told that I'd have to reinstall Windows, pointing out that the machine had no removable drives and the Windows recovery disk was a DVD and I had no USB DVD drive, asking them to send me a USB DVD drive if they wanted me to reinstall Windows) they finally agreed to take the laptop back on the condition that if there was no fault I'd have to pay the default investigation fee of £35.25. This was better than having to spend time trying to figure out how to get Windows back on the thing, so I accepted. Next day I get a phone call asking if they can replace the drive. Well, yes, that's what I expected you to do. Seems they have to check anyway. I'm not quite sure what they did with it for the next 3 working days. Testing it perhaps. Anyway, I got it back yesterday with a new HDD (and they hadn't even bothered to install anything on it, which I wasn't complaining about). When I first got the laptop I installed it in a slightly sick manner. This time I thought I'd be more traditional and try the recently released Etch Beta 3 Debian installer. It's based on a 2.6.16 kernel which has the appropriate sky2 driver for the ethernet, so installation was hassle free (modulo apt-cacher playing up and not being happy about serving up files that I think had expired the cache). I'd wanted to try the graphical install to see what it's like, but I believe that's only available on CD images so I couldn't. On the apt-cacher thing, anyone seen a similar issue? I track unstable on my desktop which tends to mean it has the packages already when they migrate to testing. However I think it's hitting a problem when it's expired a package from the cache and then needs it again. I don't actually have any firm evidence for that yet; need to do some further investigation and file a bug report I suppose.

Kathy and I have finally started stripping the wallpaper from our hall/stairs/landing (it's only been on our todo list since we moved in over 3 years ago). This includes removing it from the ceiling. Now, the ceiling above our stairs was parallel to the stairs (ie not horizontal, diagonal). Which left us wondering what was in the gap, which we had no access to. As we started to remove the wallpaper on it some hardboard was revealed. Which I eventually decided should come down, if only because it would be easier to cleanup and repaint that way. The result? Obviously the last time someone wanted to repaint/paper they decided to cut down on the amount of work they had to do...

I get asked this a lot about people. Most recently when visiting the Fat Cat with Simon and his work mates this week, but often about the other Simon (who's my business partner as well as a long time friend). The truth is a lot of the people I know I met first online, be it Fidonet (hello Pads, Peter, Simon and several others), Usenet (hello Ox.Net), mailing lists (hello ALUG) or IRC (hello, er, lots of people). I don't think I'm in any way unique here, but it can sometimes be awkward explaining this to people who preconceive internet friendships to be something seedy involving 40 year old fat man and 15 year old naive children. Or at least that's what they seem to be thinking when you say "Oh, we met online". Let's give some examples. I met Simon on Fidonet, back when we were both 17 or so. We were in a couple of echoes together and we did netmail a bit. When I came to England for university one of the echoes we were in had a meet up and so I decided to go. I ended up staying at Simon's (making his mother worry a bit; even back in 1997 people thought meeting online was freaky!) and that was the first time I met him. We've kept in good touch ever since and even gone into business together. Is this a lot odder than a chance meeting at a pub or through friends? I don't think so, but some people do. Or take when I moved to Norwich. I had some friends who could help me load up the van in Harpenden (where I was moving from), but didn't know anyone in Norwich to help unload. I'd already joined the ALUG list, so I thought I'd ask there if anyone was prepared to help in exchange for beer and food afterwards. Adam and Edward Betts both turned up to help, not knowing anything about me. And were very helpful and we got everything unloaded. I still see Adam reasonably often, both online and in person (last night, for example). I haven't really kept in touch with Edward since he left UEA though. :( There are many more examples like this of people who I see a reasonable amount in real life and yet if you asked me I'd have to admit I first knew online, sometimes for several years before actually physically meeting. And lots of people understand it these days, but please tell me I'm not alone in getting the funny looks sometimes. Please?

After seeing the work Dave had done on Reynard City (site down at present, though I understand it's coming back at some point, honest) it got me thinking. I've been reading a handful of webcomics on an almost daily basis for several years, but never actually paid anything for them. And I probably should. So I've finally thrown some money at Userfriendly and am considering buying some Sinfest merchandise. Jerkcity don't seem to have a donation or merchandise option and to be honest I'm a bit scared about what they'd spend the money on. :)

I've done a minor update and released a newer version of my usblauncher code for the USB missile launcher. You can grab it as usblauncher-0.0.2.tar.gz - it just adds some code to tell the kernel to release the device from the usbhid driver, meaning those with USB keyboard/mice can become armed and dangerous without loss of input functionality.

I've compiled my own kernels for as long as I can remember. I do so for almost any box I use, rather than running distro supplied kernels. I think this dates back to to the days when that was just what you did, but it also ties in with the fact I often want to run the latest and greatest (eg for laptop device hardware support). One of the things I've always avoided is the initrd. I've never really seen the point; I compile my root device driver into the kernel and thus it all works. I've seen some suggestions that the in kernel RAID array detection code isn't really being maintained and that in the future it'll require userland tools to configure a RAID array, so I've been a bit worried that I'll eventually have to learn about initrds. In fact, that day came this weekend. My large IDE disk is dying and I decided I needed something to replace it so I could have a proper poke. So I bought a pair of SATA disks and found a cheap Highpoint RocketRaid 1520 (don't buy one of these; I mistakenly thought they were better than the good old SI 3112, but they're not. And if anyone knows of a cheap (sub £30) SATA-II PCI card then let me know. I don't think they exist.) The RocketRaid is basically just a HPT372A (hpt366 driver in Linux) with software RAID on top. Previously I've ignored such things and just used the normal Linux RAID support, but I thought I'd give this a try with the aid of dmraid. This can read several different ATARAID formats and uses device-mapper to map the drives appropriately to keep Linux happy. So, I install dmraid and it happily finds the RAID array and configures it all up (though I end up with the wonderfully named /dev/mapper/hpt37x_dabhghbgeg which is a bit unwiedly). All good. Except, of course, that I have to run some userland to get the RAID array up, which means I need an initrd to sort it all out if I want / on it. And I do. These days I want initramfs rather than initrd (and I needed to remember to set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y in my kernel config as it's needed for initramfs or an initrd). I found the initramfs-tools package and installed it, then had a poke around for info on getting dmraid working with it. Debian bug #367661 discusses such things and I've attached the patch I used from Ubuntu to the bug report. Then I did, as root, update-initramfs -k 2.6.17.6 -c -v and it magically created a /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17.6. Passed that as the initrd in grub and it all magically works; dmraid fires up from the initramfs, the kernel gets to mount the RAID partition as / (and the other partitions as swap and lvm) and it's all good. Except the fact one of the disks seems to have been damaged in transit and eBuyer are being slow about issuing an RMA number. Oh, and the fact the RocketRaid sucks and only seems to get 15MB/s or so. Meh. The initramfs stuff is all happy though, and a lot easier than I expected.

Everyone in or near Norwich should ensure they're at The Murderers this Wednesday (19th July) from 8pm for Dave's Reynard City launch party. Yes.

I need a new TV. I've have my current one for 6 years now and it was secondhand when I bought it. Plus it gets this little green patch now and then (which it's been doing for a couple of years). Not hugely annoying, but everything helps in justifying a new one. My current TV is a normal 25" 4:3 set. I've worked out that if I go widescreen I need a 31" set to get the same height, which seems perfectly doable. The tricky bit comes in that I'd like HD, as hopefully the new TV will last me at least as long as the old one has. HD's only recently been launched in the UK - Sky brought out their HD service just in time for the World Cup (though I understand lots of people who'd pre-ordered didn't receive their upgrades in time). Telewest also have a recent HD service. Of course NTL, who I have, don't yet (despite them having merged with Telewest) and the Freeview DVB-T trials are only in Central London. Anyway, I won't have HD signal for a while, but I want to be ready when for when I do (and I'll be hooking a media PC up to the screen anyway, so will be able to take advantage of it via that method). Sky appear to have decided on using 2 HD formats; 720i (1280x720, progressive) and 1080i (1920x1080, interlaced). So having support for those would be nice. In addition I'd like 1080p (1920x1080, progressive), for things like the media box and in case content becomes available in that format (HD-DVD/BluRay?). This doesn't seem like a huge request. Lots of TVs in the UK are marketed as HD Ready. What does that mean? Essentially it specifies that the minimum native resolution of the screen is 720 lines and that there is a digital (DVI or HDMI) input that can support 720p and 1080i input and copy protection (HDCP). There is no minimum width; the set is allowed to scale the image to fit whatever it has. I've seen HD Ready sets that have a 1024x1080i native resolution - not wide enough for a native 720p image let alone 1080i. However most HD Ready sets seem to do 1366x768 as the native res, so fine for 720p but not 1080i/p. sigh I managed to find a TV from Philips, the 37PF9830/10, which does native 1920x1080p. Amazon even sell it, though for an eye watering £2,248.28. What does this get you? Integrated Freeview decoder? No. MPEG2/4 playing of movies from flash media? No, just image viewing. A nice big monitor for your computer? No, Philips' website only lists 1024x768 as the max computer res and I've seen reports in forums that 1366x768 is possible, but no higher. There's a 42PF9830/10 (42") that adds movie playing and ethernet, which sounds good but adds who knows how much to the price (I couldn't easily find a UK price). Plus it's probably too large for me even if it was affordable. My naive hope is that with the Sky push lots of people will have got sorted for the World Cup, or will go HD for Christmas. Meaning that come the new year I might have a better available choice of proper HDTVs and the pricing might be sane. I can dream, right?

I tried Coke Zero for the first (and probably last) time this evening. While the first mouthful actually tasted not bad, the familiar and unpleasant taste of artificial sweetener soon hit. Oh well. Much better than Diet Coke, but not something I'd buy again. Not that I'm that fussed. I don't drink a lot of soft drinks - we buy pure juice for the house and although I occasionally drink Coke (or preferably Pepsi) when I'm out, it's only if I'm not drinking. I prefer ice cold water but it's usually ridiculously expensive and doesn't come in pints (tap water will sometimes do, but often isn't cold enough). Nice try Coke, but count me out.

Black Cat got another query today about offering dynamic DNS to customers. We've had people ask us about it in the past, but the DNS changes we made a while back means it's something that is possibly easier for us to offer now. So I had a think about authentication and tying it in to our current DNS interface and bits like that and decided it might not actually be too hard to get a basic service running. Then I went and had a look at current implementations. In particular I wanted to see about client support. So I grabbed ez-ipudate, which is used on at least the Netgear DG834G and Linksys WAG54G routers. It supports a load of different services. And the only one that protects the password is GnuDIP. Various services offer HTTPS updates, but ez-ipupdate doesn't support it that I could tell. I stopped looking at that point. If one of the most common clients doesn't care about protecting users then I don't want to depress myself by finding out how many others don't either. It's a real shame though, as it means if we want to implement dynamic DNS that'll work with standard clients we have to add another authentication system that is unique to that service.

I returned last night from my first UKUUG conference, which I'd been at since Friday (missing the Thursday tutorials, but arriving in time for beer on Thursday night of course ;). Good to see the usual faces, as well as meet some new ones. Ta to JD for providing me with crash space (and recommending the wonderful Thai). I don't think my talk, Hardware Hacking on a Budget; the Amstrad E3 was as good as it should have been. The audience were much more hardware savvy than I expected and I went through it too quickly. Still managed to talk up until lunchtime due to the previous talk having started late so I guess that worked out ok. And hopefully some more people will get involved in the E3 work. It was amusing to see that TFM isn't the only person who decided to replace a broken heating system with something hooked up to a linux box. And Ben's talk on DVD creation was good as I'd been fighting with that myself last week. Meeting SteveC was good as well - I've been pleased by the number of people I'd been touting OSM who have now either gone off and starting marking things up or at least started thinking about how they can make tracks. All in all a great (if hot) weekend and too much to mention all here. Definitely something I'd go to again.

Go Joey.

Good things about the weekend:

• Discovering KLM's internet check-in.
• The fact I can walk from home to the airport in about half an hour.
• Getting upgraded to a Penthouse Suite for no extra charge due to the hotel overbooking.
• Finally getting to go to the Heineken Experience (I'm a beer bottle!)
• Checking in for the flight home at the automated terminal with just my passport (I'd forgotten to print out my ticket details and was worried I was going to have to go and find some net access to get them).
• And of course, having a nice weekend with some good friends.

On the flip side I only actually saw Andy (the reason I was in Amsterdam at all) for a few hours thanks to a combination of BA delaying his flight for over 2 hours and my body deciding at 2am that it was really time to wander back to the hotel and sleep.

I got some bounces today from Nationwide (no doubt spam backscatter), but the interesting thing about them was that they were PGP signed. Some digging reveals that Nationwide seem to sign their outgoing mail, which is nice to see. Further digging fails to find any nationwide.co.uk keys on pgp.net, keyserver.net or pgp.com. Well that's useful, isn't it? They're not the only people who do this - I regularly see posts to mailing lists that are signed but the key isn't available. Why bother signing mails if your public key isn't out there? It doesn't really give the impression you understand why you're signing things.

I've just had a pigeon (I think) fly into my study window, making a rather large bang, and then fly off again. It's the first time I've notice this large a bird do it, but there have been several instances of something sparrow like doing the same. At first I thought it was some kids throwing something at it, until I managed to actually see the bird flying off again afterwards. Are their magnetic direction sensors adversely affected by all the technology in this room perhaps? :)

Google's not very helpful about this one. If your Linux kernel is spewing this message then you no doubt have IPv6 configured and have a route via a global address rather than a link-local address. I think this should only affect machines that are being used to forward IPv6 packets for other hosts. Anyway, replacing the route to a global IP with a link-local one should make the log message magically go away.

As previously mentioned I run evilwm as my window manager. The only way to spawn a new process in it is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Enter, which opens an xterm. So I have a single xterm that I use to launch whatever apps I need (I choose this. I'm aware of many options if I felt the need to point 'n drool to open apps.). I don't think application authors can do this much, judging by the amount of crap that gets output in this xterm. For example, today I installed evince (I normally use xpdf) to have a look. I launch it by typing evince, up pops the window, I go to the File menu and choose Close. What do I get output in my terminal? The following: (evince:4105): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_tree_model_foreach: assertion GTK_IS_TREE_MODEL (model)' failed (evince:4105): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_list_store_clear: assertion GTK_IS_LIST_STORE (list_store)' failed WTF? A 'critical' error for simply starting and exiting the app? It's not the only offender. liferea spews Unhandled property: 12 border-collapse messages, gajim defaults to calling aplay rather than aplay -q so you get a message every time it plays a sound. Does no one else care about this crud? Is it unreasonable if I file wishlist bugs every time I hit an app that does this? Should I just learn to live with it?

I had a rant about Firefox today on #debian-uk. Mainly the fact it seems to like to guzzle memory and bring my system to a crawl when it feels unloved. Which is every time it loads an animated image as far as I can tell. Matthew suggested Epiphany so I thought I'd give it a try. Seems ok, but looked a bit blocky, like GTK apps do for me. Not shiny and curvy like people who run a GNOME desktop (I run the excellent evilwm). So I had a poke around. And the magic is to run aptitude install gtk-theme-switch gtk2-engines and then switch2 and pick a theme and marvel as your GTK apps become sexier. Of course you probably all knew this. I'm impressed with how it's affected GNUCash, liferea and workrave as well (yes, yes, that's the whole point of theming, but I'm a simple creature who mostly runs xterms). Time will tell if Epiphany actually sucks less than Firefox. And there's still the leaking bucket that is liferea (253MB? Eh? And that's with the optimise for memory option enabled).

This is silly. We get our few days of summer and suddenly we all can't cope with the heat. Or at least I can't. Especially when my neighbours decide it means they can play loud music that I really don't like (I don't do doof doof, sorry doop), or when it is music I like it's too distorted to actually be enjoyable. And if I shut the windows it just gets hotter and hotter inside. sigh. Sometimes I wish I worked in an air conditioned office again. Spent all weekend being too hot and avoiding writing my UKUUG talk for the end of the month. It's done and submitted now; thanks to #alug, Simon and Paddy for constructive criticism. Now I just have to produce some slides. Not much else happening. I have a u-boot patch for the E3 against their current git tree, but I haven't heard anything back about my JFFS2 compile patch so I'm not sure whether they'll take it or not. I've sent it off to Mark for comments first. Kathy's disappeared to New York with her sister again, leaving me at a bit of loose end. Off to the Fat Cat on Wednesday with the other Simon which can't fail to be nice. And, er, that's it really. I suppose I should go to bed.