My E3 is currently sitting running KPhone/Pi under OPIE. Annoyingly I currently have to have a USB mouse attached due to lack of a suitable pointing device on the E3, but I'm sure that's solvable in time. More disappointing is the fact that it doesn't really work. :( I can successfully SIP register with my local Asterisk instance, and dial voicemail successfully. I only hear a fragment of the "Chameleon mail" prompt and attempting to send DTMF to choose a mailbox doesn't work either - I don't know if this is because I leave it too late or if they don't get sent at all. OpenEmbedded doesn't have any other OPIE based SIP or IAX clients, nor anything text mode that I can see. I found ZiaxPhone but it seems to be closed source so I can't rebuild it. Guess I'll have to find a text mode client and try to work out if it's KPhone, the audio driver or the E3 not being fast enough that's the problem.

So I need to get a wedding ring. Given I hope to wear it for the next 50+ years and that I've worn a ring in the past I figured something more interesting than a plain band would be nice. Many years ago Kathy bought me a silver Celtic style ring I was fond of, but unfortunately I lost it a while ago, which was upsetting, so I thought it would be nice to get a wedding ring that was similar to the lost ring. However. I don't like gold. So the logical choice seemed to be white gold. Until a jeweller told me that it was plated which would wear over time and require replating every few years. Which is a bit offputting. Anyone any experience of this? I've seen mention of getting it replated with a thicker than normal coating, which makes it less likely to require regular updating? The other options seem to be silver or platinum. Does anyone have silver wedding rings? Does it last well enough? It's a lot cheaper; is that the only reason why they're not common or is there something more fundemental? Platinum is more expensive than white gold, but that's not a huge issue for the last ring I plan to wear. Is it harder to work though, making it less likely that I'll find what I want? I found a ring at Ortak that I like, but no platinum option and I'd want to see it before buying, so online is out. Can anyone suggest a decent jeweller to talk to in Norwich? I've had a look around but not seen anything matching what I want. Alternatively I guess I can look in London.

I went back to Northern Ireland for the first week of May. Vicky and Branwell were getting married on the 5th, so I figured I'd go home the weekend before (with the bank holiday), work a 3 day week, then come back on the Monday. Plenty of time to see my folks, some friends, and relax. I did end up feeling a little stranded at points. My parents live in Newry, and I don't know anyone there any more. Public transport in NI is dire and I didn't have access to a car (even if I'd been insured for Mum's she's far too busy for me to be able to borrow it for any length of time). Kathy was in Banbridge (15 miles away) and there were people in Belfast (40 miles away) but it wasn't like I could just pop out and see them. However, what I did realise is that there's a social system in place back "at home" that I could easily slip back into. I spent the Bank Holiday afternoon pottering round Belfast with Jake, Paddy and Peter, ending up in The Kitchen. It was, as it always is, good to see them. Later I went out with Kathy, Mal and Miranda for dinner. At Vicky and Branwell's wedding I saw a bunch of people I probably haven't hung out with in 5+ years, all of who were chatty and friendly; the wedding was a good day/night. I didn't have time to see ct, though it would have been good to. I'm sure I could slot back into a similar setup in Oxford, but I found it surprising and comforting to realise I still have that in Northern Ireland.

I've been quiet for a couple of weeks now; I went home to my parents for just over a week at the start of May (more on that later), then last week was spent catching up with various bits after being away, and then the past few days I've had a cold (just in time for the weekend, yay!). Meh. Anyway, as such I haven't been fiddling a lot with the E3; still stuck at the point where I could get it to load my second stage loader from NAND, which would then load u-boot, which would then load the kernel, but not getting anything from the kernel after decompression. Whereas if I loaded the second stage loader over the serial port it all worked fine. Figuring that Amstrad's PBL must be doing something different depending on which method you use (NAND/serial) I had a look at the config registers to see if anything was different. Nothing obvious. I enable the low level kernel debug output and find it is booting ok, but that it freezes as soon as it tries mutex_lock in clk_register. Odd. So I disable CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES and all of a sudden it works. My E3 boots into Linux unattended. Woooo. I think.

Last year Black Cat decided they wanted to be more organised about offering dedicated servers. We already had a rackful but they were all in use. So we looked around for a suitable supplier. Originally Dell were the front runner; although they have a bad reputation we already had a bunch of machines from them and they'd been reasonable reliable, did serial BIOS properly and were competitively priced. Dom pointed out that having hotswap drive bays would be a really good plan; we'd already specced the machines with dual drives to enable RAID1, but if they were hotswap then we could easily move drives into a spare chassis in the event something went wrong, meaning the customer could be back up and running again quickly while we investigated the old machine. Good plan. This started to push Dell into ridiculous pricing, so we had a look around. We had some machines from Xinit, which again we hadn't had issues with. They were able to give us a price that wasn't that different to the non hotswap Dells, so we decided to go ahead with them. Bad move. On September 6th I informed them we wanted to go ahead. They'd quoted us a 10-14 working day lead time. As we didn't have a credit account already set up with them and it was likely to take a while to sort out we said we'd pay up front in the interest of getting things moving as quickly as possible. By September 22nd we still hadn't heard anything from them, like even confirmation that payment had been received and an ETA for delivery. So I contacted them, received confirmation they'd received full payment by September 13th and was told we should see systems by September 30th or October 3rd at worst. On September 26th they emailed to say there was a problem with their shipment and we'd be receiving a part shipment with the rest to follow. 4 servers were delivered on October 12th. It turned out none of them had been configured as requested (serial console, 9600 8n1, all set to auto power on after power failure), so I ended up having to plug a monitor and keyboard into each machine before connecting it up to the serial console server and power cycler. I chased Xinit again on 24th October. They'd claimed a 5th server was to be delivered before that and still hadn't told me anything about the remaining 15. I was not impressed. A new contact got back in touch and made all manner of apologies and promises about keeping in better contact and keeping me up to date with what was happening. Suffice to say this didn't happen, and calls to the main Xinit number were of no use as no one could help, and the mobile number I'd been given for this contact was unanswered more often than not. On 1st November we received another 11 machines. These were at least configured as requested, but during our testing we discovered they had been misassembled. 5 machines had CPU heatsinks put on incorrectly; visually misaligned and such that any load caused a machine crash. Very unimpressive from a company who supposedly does full burn in tests on machines before shipping them (and indeed used this as an excuse for not shipping us machines sooner on occasion). Further chasing didn't have much effect, but we eventually received the remaining servers on December 5th. Nearly 3 months after we initially placed the order. While Xinit have happily provided many platitudes they have failed to address the numerous failings in their organisation. They are appalling at responding to phone calls or email. They continuously fail to make good on any of the promises they make. They can't provide realistic delivery dates and don't have the decency to get in contact and let you know when they're going to miss them. They have proved unable to assembly machines to any level of competence; most of what they do is buy in chassis and fit parts to them - this is not complicated and yet they managed to get it wrong on several of the machines we ordered. We were promised a machine or two in compensation, but of course these never arrived. In addition, they're so badly organised that in the middle of March we received a spam from one of their sales people who was completely unaware we'd been customers of them! I cannot stress how much you should never consider using this company. I've spoken to others who've bought machines from them or had dealings with them and I know I'm not alone in this. Really. Don't do it. You'll regret it. I suspect it would have taken less of my time and energy to buy all the parts and assemble the machines myself. I wish I'd done so instead. This does leave me lacking a hardware supplier however. We're in the position of needing more machines, but given recent power pricing increases Xeon LVs (the new Sossaman cores) look like the way forward. Except no one appears to have any stock. And even if they do, how do I know I won't get my fingers burned again?

You sit next to a teacher at your brother's AS Level drama play, don't realise she's a teacher until someone tells you and then think it's highly likely she's younger than you or at least no older.

Argh. A long time ago I got LinuxBIOS up and running on a Via EPIA-M mobo - someone else had done the initial work, but it had bitrotted. As part of that I got auto power on working, such that if you removed power from the box it would come on when you reapplied it, even if it had been turned off before. However I never checked this into LinuxBIOS as it's a bit intrusive - not everyone wants boxen auto powering on. What I now find is that not only have I lost the code to do this, but the copy of the vt8235 (southbridge in use on the EPIA-M) datasheet doesn't have the details of which register I need to twiddle. I'm sure it used to, but that might have been an older copy which of course I no longer have. So, does anyone out there have a copy of the vt8235 datasheet and can tell me what magic value I need to poke to what register(s)? Please? I've tried creatively Googling, I've tried running Via's factory BIOS and seeing if the PCI config registers changes when I flip the option in that, but all to no avail. Someone save me. I don't want to have to disassemble the BIOS trying to find this one tweak. :(

Kathy and I went to Norwich Register Office yesterday to confirm the date for our wedding and show them our various documents (proof of age, address etc). All very scary, especially the way it seemed to be a test to about whether we knew each other or not (checking about middle names, age, whether we'd been married before with each of us while the other was out of the room). I mean, it's still months off, it's not like we're rushing into this. And the proof of address was our council tax bill with both our names on it. Anyway. It looks like we're actually really going to get married. Gulp.

I recently started using workrave, mainly because my cow-orkers have both suffered from RSI to some degree or other and I thought prevention might be better than cure. However I'm finding it really fucking annoying. I do not cope well with interruptions when I'm in the middle of something and it ends up really pissing me off. I'm sure it's all a good idea and everything, but I've just found myself switching it into quiet mode so I can actually get some work done without having my flow of concentration constantly broken.

How do people find the time to read a daily paper? Kathy and I often end up buying a Sunday paper, and I find it takes me the entire week to read it all. Between the main section, the Review bit, the magazine, the random bits that change weekly and so on, it's quite a considerable amount to read. I know daily papers tend to have less sections, but even when we end up with one of those it takes me a while to get through it all. And it's not like I'm a slow reader. Do other people just have more time than me? Can I have some?

I shaved my sides a week or two ago, returning my face to its normal (well, as normal as it gets) goateed self. However I remember why I stopped shaving for winter now. If you shave, you have to do it every day. Otherwise you just look like someone who can't be bothered shaving, and while that might be because it's true, why not just not bother at all? I'm not really convinced about the wisdom in applying a sharp blade to my face early in the morning either. Oh well. I'm sure I'll get used to it again soon enough.

Earlier this week my Amstrad E3 2.6 patch was accepted into the linux-omap-2.6 tree. This is pretty cool; I'm a big believer in pushing changes to upstream where possible and thus it's great when they take them. I'd thought that once this base patch was in it would be a simple matter of cleaning up my patches for the LCD, USB, keymap and NAND support, ready for submission. I have all of these working fine on my 2.6.15 tree, so it should have been easy, right? Of course not. I've spent most of the week (well, the bits I wasn't working or doing late night router upgrades) trying to solve the ohci: Unlink after no-IRQ? Controller is probably using the wrong IRQ. problem. No, I know it's not the wrong IRQ. It works fine with 2.4 and 2.6.15. Gah. What's worse is Google only showed up people having the same issue; a number apparently x86 with ACPI being suggested as the culprit, but there were a few that were also with the OMAP5910 (the E3's processor). The most recent from Ladis but he's already turned up on #emailer to ask me how I'd got it working in 2.6.15. Anyway, I think I've finally solved it (the 5910 needs the local bus clock enabled for USB according to the datasheet and this wasn't being done), though I'm waiting to see if my solution works for anyone else before deciding it's a success. Assuming it does I can actually start to look at getting the other bits ready too; I think the LCD stuff has changed a bit and I dread to think what the MTD guys are going to say about my attempts at a driver.

I was in Oxford on Thursday for the Nominet EGM. There were a variety of changes that they wanted to make and while in general the principle behind them seemed good the detail was a bit worrying, and I believe had been badly communicated. However I was still surprised to find that the vote was defeated; I'd expected a narrow victory. There are some more details on The Register, who were the only people to send someone I believe. What's scary is the percentage of members who didn't vote. Nominet has just under 3000 members. I wouldn't have said more than 60 people turned up to the EGM, and some of them were Nominet staff or multiple people from the same member organisation. Only 10% of members actually bothered to vote. That's quite a pathetic number. Even if you don't take on the view point that Nominet are a member run organisation (and I do and I think they work very well in general and try to do the right thing and promote good practises), this was a vote that would have given the board the right to modify pricing as they wished. Surely that's something you're interested in even if all you do is treat Nominet as a normal supplier? There's more to the changes than that obviously, but I would have thought price changes were something that might at least make beancounters sit up and take notice. Do you work for an organisation who's a Nominet member? Were you aware there was an EGM taking place? Did your organisation vote? Are you aware there's a PAB election starting from this Friday? Are you planning to vote? Have you ever been to an AGM? If not, why not? What about the members lunches? It's somewhat disappointing to see such a low level of member involvement. Nominet do seem to try to talk to people and get their opinions, but you have to actually turn up for that to happen...

This is mainly for Google, as I found a lot of things talking about the error with not a lot of solutions when I looked for it. I had a machine that was outputing the Neighbour table overflow message with reasonable frequency, and while it didn't actually seem to be causing problems it was disconcerting. Digging around seemed to suggest it was an ARP issue, with some pages mentioning Blaster - presumably because the scanning that this sort of worm can do is likely to fill up the ARP table? Anyway, this machine has over a /22 of IPv4 space hanging off its various interfaces, so it seemed logical that I might need a larger cache than the default. I found this SuSE post which solves the problem perfectly. So I've added the appropriate magic to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net/ipv4/neigh/default/gc_thresh1=1024
net/ipv4/neigh/default/gc_thresh2=2048
net/ipv4/neigh/default/gc_thresh3=4096

(Oh, and the message comes from net/ipv4/route.c in the kernel source tree.)

While driving to Oxford yesterday (more on that tomorrow I feel) I was listening to Radio 1. The Scott Mills show had someone ring in asking for Laura's autograph. (I'm not sure exactly who she is other than someone who's having her diary from university read out on the show and appears to work for it somehow.) Scott then proceeded to try and get people to ring in with more pointless autographs that they had. This got me thinking. I don't think I've asked anyone for an autograph since Eddie Izzard signed my jacket when I was 15. I don't think I'd be that bothered about getting anyone's these days. But there are probably a bunch of people I'd quite like to have a drink and a chat with. And that led me down the path of the people I consider famous in the Free Software world that I've met and had what I consider proper conversations with. They probably don't remember them or me, but it's a level of access that I don't think is mirrored in other industries, such as the music biz. If I were a lowly guy with a band in my garage then I'm unlikely to get to meet the movers and shakers of the record industry and even if I managed to be in the same room as them they're unlikely to have a decent conversation with me. Yet in the Free Software community even a lowly unknown like me can rub shoulders with people who really make things happen and actually have meaningful exchanges with them. How cool is that? All you have to tend to do is make the effort to turn up to events; sometimes just your local LUG if you're lucky, or maybe a free LinuxExpo, or maybe something like Debconf. I think this is a pretty low barrier to entry. And I think it's a real strength of the community. In fact, it's part of what helps us have the community. (Maybe I'm just easily impressed by people though. And to be fair the people I'm viewing as famous probably aren't widely known to the non IT world. I still think it's a remarkable thing about the way in which we operate, something to be proud of and to not forget about.)

I've been using MRTG for many years now to draw pretty graphs. It's a bit inflexible though and I'd written a kludgy script or two to graph things that wanted more than 2 lines, or that I wanted to dynamically configure. I'd been on the looking for something simple that would do this all for me and replace my MRTG + scripts setup. All of what I'd seen seemed a bit complicated to get up and running, and what I had was BALGE, so I hadn't really looked that hard. At the start of the week, however, I got pointed at someone else's stats page, generated by Munin. The graphs were presented in a nice clear format rather than a million levels down a tree, and all the graphs for a host were on one page for at at-a-glance view. Of course there's a Debian package, so I thought I'd try it out. Very quickly I was up and running with my local machine being monitored. A little extra work and I had SNMP monitoring of my switch, allowing me to ditch MRTG. Slightly more work and I had my UPS being graphed too. Finally I installed snmpd on my wgt634u running OpenWRT and had that sorted too. Excellent. A lot less work than I expected and a much nicer setup than before. I'm sure there are other good options out there, but I found this one worked for me. Oh, and while I was at it I discovered mbrowse, an SNMP MIB browser. I think I'd rather have something that showed me the values read from the device in tree form, but I still found it quite handy.

I finally replaced my aging SCSI scanner over the weekend. It was making really odd noises while scanning, and had somehow upset my SCSI chain such that the BIOS could load GRUB ok, but GRUB then couldn't load the kernel. I have better things to do with my time than sacrifice goats, so I went looking for a cheap 'n cheerful replacement. Oddly enough PC World provided an acceptable option. They have a system whereby you can reserve an item on the web for pickup from your local store, and get a reduction off the in store price. I have no idea why they don't just reduce in store prices anyway. I ended up with a Canon LiDE 60 for £44.82, slightly less than ebuyer charge before P&P and with the added advantage that I could go and pick it up on Saturday. I had, of course, done some research beforehand to ensure this was a supported scanner, however it turned out I'd misread. I thought the version of SANE in Debian was a little old; turned out the versions for sane-frontends and sane-backends differ and I'd looked at the former instead of the latter. Plus I thought I was going to need to pull a CVS or snapshot copy to get the support I needed. So I unwrapped the scanner, plugged it into a spare USB port and checked lsusb showed it up. Then, just to see what would happen, I tried scanimage -L and was rewarded with device genesys:libusb:004:009' is a Canon LiDE 60 flatbed scanner. Rock. scanimage just worked and produced a nice PNM of my Electric Six CD inlay. I don't think installation could have got any easier than that. Admittedly I already had SANE installed as I'd had a previous scanner, but if I hadn't the only addition would have been aptitude install sane-utils.

Last night I dreamt I went drinking in the Reindeer with Phil Daniels.

Rock. I've now got the LCD on my E3 working; blurry picture at http://www.earth.li/~noodles/images/e3-lcd.jpg (I couldn't convince the camera to both focus well and shoot the flash in a way that made the text visible). I've updated my Amstrad E3 page with a few of the recent 2.6 developments as well. I'm quite chuffed with myself; while Mark did the original work of getting it booting with serial and USB I've managed to write the NAND driver, the LCD driver and sort out the keypad keymap. There's still quite a lot left though:

• Get u-boot onto the actual device rather than having to load it over the serial port on each reboot.
• Add NAND support to u-boot.
• Get the modem setup.
• Sound
• Handset - both mic/speaker and off-hook detection.
• Mailboard (the pull out keyboard)
• Camera

And then I can worry about the application layer. :)

Bah. All these people back from FOSDEM posting about having had a great time. And Dominic got engaged! I'd have liked to have gone to FOSDEM this year, but it clashed with Christmas and someone had to stay in the country to mind things (Dominic and Simon both went, so I drew the short straw). Plus I decided not to go to Debconf this year; although I've enjoyed the past 2 years I couldn't really justify the cost of flights. And I'll no doubt need time off around the wedding, but I made the decision not to do Debconf before we got engaged, so that wasn't quite so big a factor. However I now find myself lacking in geek events this year. I'm sure there'll be the usual Linux Expo stuff, but I've been considering the UKUUG Linux conference, which people have said good things about in the past. Is there anything else in the UK I should be considering? I did get some hacking done this weekend however. Mark Underwood got 2.6.15 booting on the Amstrad E3 videophone to the point of USB and serial working. So I spent a while trying to figure out where Amstrad had hidden the NAND flash and managed to write a driver for it. I'm all chuffed with myself; my E3 now has a JFFS2 root filesytem. I also mapped out the keys on the keypad and tried to get the LCD working, but although I can get it to light up (the easy part) it doesn't actually seem to want to output anything. Bah. You can find all the bits you need at http://the.earth.li/pub/e3/ - both Mark's original stuff and my patch on top of that are there. Oh, and the list at http://www.earth.li/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking is a useful place too. (And yes, I know Christmas is in December, but I have a yearly Christmas meal with the people I lived with in my final year of university, but it can take so long to find a weekend we're all free that it's often nowhere near Christmas by the time it happens - February is pretty good going for us!)