David Morris – brassedoff.net

I was thinking whilst cycling in to work this morning that I’d not posted anything about cycling for a long time and something I saw on the back of a bus made me think…

I had a run-in with a Stagecoach (formerly Yorkshire Terrier) bus driver a few weeks ago between Attercliffe and Darnall. Basically, I was cut up quite badly when this driver failed to notice that the road narrowed in front. I pulled out to accomodate the chicane and he carried straight on, leaving me with much less than a metre between my offside and his large fast moving bus.

One of the worse things about cycling, especially in traffic, is when you get passed and relatively high speed by a large vehicle. It can be quite disturbing. I’ve been cycling in traffic many years and it still gets me. I suppose it’s good that I don’t get complacent.

Anyway…

I cussed, but there was nothing I could do about it at the time, until that is, I caught up with him at Darnall traffic lights. I nipped down the nearside and hammered on the bus door demanding to know what he’d been playing at. His feigning deafness did nothing to calm my temper, and eventually I’m afraid I swore at him (which incidentally he did hear). He refused all demands to give me his licence number and drove off.

No to be defeated, I got across the junction and got out my PDA. I googled for the number of the bus depot and rang and spoke to the duty supervisor.

To my surprise, I got a call back from them a couple of days later saying that they’d witnessed the whole event on the bus CCTV (they have four cameras on each bus) including the original incident when I was cut up in the first place and they’d be pulling the driver in to discuss this and some other incidents that happened on that shift. Result.
So, I’m following a Terrier liveried bus towards the end of Woodburn Road this morning, and there on the back of the bus is a large sticker proclaiming “Make Room For Cyclists”.

I wonder if it was my friendly bus driver behind the wheel?

Yesterday, we decided an outing was in order and Caroline suggested the newly opened Weston Park Museum in Sheffield. When I checked the web site, the newly opened musuem doesn’t open until October, so we were looking for Plan B.

Another ‘Caroline suggestion’ after we;d seen an advert at he pictures the other week (we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2) was Eureka at Halifax, home town of our good fried Mark Kelly.

(Read on …)

To avoid the grief from family and friends, here goes with an allotment update.

The earlier post was just after we’d taken over the plot. It was full of weeds and self-set potatoes.

Since then, Caroline (predominantly) has been busy planting and I’ve been called in for technical assistant for water-catching arrangements and to provide grunt when it came to digging.

So, three months or so on, what have we achieved so far?

(Read on …)

iv’e had a trying few days at work. Our production database server went BSOD last week we’re just getting over the outfall. One way in which databases eak out that last bit of performance is by caching writebacks which is OK until yon Windows-based server decides to throw a wobbler, which as we all know, any machine is prone to do from time to time.

On the plus side, I now get a good excuse to have a look at Unidata instead of mvBase. I don’t know whether anything will come of it long term – it’s a question of timescales and costs but we can look for nothing.

One problem I know we will face is that we’ve used non-Unidata supported constructs in some places. On the positive side, I think I can identify them all automatically and fix them with a program. All I have to do then is convince auditors that the code is essentially the same. I can only think of doing that with some form of test suite, using a suite of programs to exercise various aspects of the language and system, proving the two will perform the same because the results from the two runs on different platforms are materially the same. Unfortunately, our system vendors don’t seem to have anything to hand, despite the fact that they work with different multivalue database flavours.

After a hot and difficult spell trying to keep this server cool in our study (which is pretty full of gear – desktop, server, firewall, wireless access, print server…), I have given up on the Antec Sonata case that it had been living in.

The Sonata looks nice with that shiney piano black finish, but the arrangement of the hard drive bays was such that it was difficult to get sufficient airflow over them to do the business, and I lost one drive, presumably through overheating (it was a backup drive so I wasn’t really bothered).

I needed a new case, and despite the problems with the Sonata, I decided to go for another Antec, but this time with better cooling support. After a bit of digging around, I chose a TX1050B from eBuyer.

The HD bays are in a more traditional arrangement and there’s lots of space for fans. There’s a 120mm one on the back with clip-in space for one in the upper drive bay and another one in the bottom below the lower bay. It also comes with an Antec 500w SmartPOWER PSU with intelligent fans and that rather nice cable management which means you only plug the outlet cables into the PSU that you really need, saving routing all those redundant cables around. I’ve filled it with fans – 80mm Antec tri-cool ones which, like the rear fan, have switchable speed settings.
What’s in the box?

A 120gig Diamondmax IDE drive, a 200Gig WD SATA drive (backup), a Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPU, 2Gig of Crucial RAM, a 64Mb Nvidia AGP card of some description (it’s not used for gaming – only 2d stuff), a BENQ CD/DVD writer, an Adaptec SCSI card and a DDS3 DAT drive (backup again).

It weighs a ton as you may well imagine, but it’s quiet and touch wood, it’s cool. I’ll check it out later to make sure though.

I spend a lot of time working with multivalue databases and one of the problems we have is access to a decent revisioning system. We have something I wrote myself some years ago. It’s far from perfect, but keeps the auditors happy and provides us pretty much with what we need. It’s basic in the extreme in terms of facilities though.

Could I use Subversion alongside mv though? Read on!

(Read on …)

So where did we get to today on our trip out? A round trip of around 160 miles to visit the Cathedral of the Canals, aka the Anderton Lift.

(Read on …)

Just in case anyone does the same stupid trick as me and can’t get Eclipse to start…

You’ve downloaded Eclipse and unpacked it (we’re talking Linux here) using tax zxvf eclipse……

You go to the eclipse directory and start the program using

./eclipse

…or whatever. The spash screen appears then part way through comes up with an error and refuses to continue. You’re advised to look in the .metadata/.log file which contains loads of stuff some of which relates to IOExceptions from the JVM.

I didn’t spot what I’d done until it came to deleting Eclipse to try again. Yes. I’d unpacked it as root and was running it as my local user. The IOException was because it couldn’t get permission to up date some of the configuration files.

Stupid, eh?

I’ve just read a BBC News report that suggests around a third of people using digital cameras regularly don’t back up their image stores.

We’ve been bitten by this – ironic really considering my profession and that I preach the need for backups regularly to our (ab)users. We lost a load of Daniel’s early pictures which were only on a hard drive when the inevitable happened and the drive died. To add insult to injury, I had a CD writer in the machine as well, I just never used it.

What do I do now?

A few months ago, I started using Picasa from those awfully nice Google people to manage our digital photo archive. There were several reasons for picking Picasa, not least of which it produces nice simple web pages which I can upload as photo album pages.

Picasa also includes a one button “back up my photos” which any idiot can use. Stick in a CD or DVD and press the button.

As you might guess now, I’m not one of the third that doesn’t back up.

If you don’t back up your photos, if you can afford to lose them, fine, because sooner or later, your hard drive will die. If they’re precious to you, back them up.

The recent spell of hot weather we’ve een having may also speed the demise of your collections. Hot weather not only stresses sensitive electronic equipment like hard drives, but if your CD or DVD backup collection is in direct sunlight, you might just turn to a backup to find it’s unreadable because it’s been stored in the sunlight, so keep your backup discs in a cool dark place.

Please make sure your memories are secure.

I just came across this link to a YouTube video whilst browsing the uk.rec.waterways newsgroup.

It’s a timelapse video of a group doing the 30 locks of the Stourbridge ring set to music from the Levellers. It’s very well done and worth a watch.