@nthony

...as the cry used to go on the train to school as we rummaged around through our needlessly cavernous school bags for a variety of software on a festival of C60 and C90 media (look it up son). A world full of Night Lore, Sabre Wulf, Lords of Midnight, Ant Attack, Uridum, IK+ and so on.

Today I completed my first console game. SO PROUD. Gears of War I has been dispatched, I have "c'mpleetedit", and am onto the sequel which is the same but far more polished, too many cut seens, no lulls, but very full on OMG - very easy to get lost in what you are doing... which is a good thing. Immersion is king for me, it just feels like things are slipping by too fast for me to take them in - intentional or otherwise.

Okay so I had it on casual FPS mode - but still - go me. Not so bad for a few (albeit excessive) hours of learning how to use a console controller!

The REAL DISCOVERY is that over xbox live a friend can take the part of one of the NPC's and assist me in the campaign mode - what a complete result - no need to bimble around in mock engagements with AI opponents to no ends. Hoorah for progress.

In other news - MANY thanks to my local publican for Bioshock - what a result - such attention to detail! [ READ MORE ]

I am currently going through the mother of conversions.

I used to play a LOT of computer games, but you know, you tire of the gradual and steep upgrade path of hardware, and the farcical and repeated hit to the pocket of the run away of GPU hardware market.
A few days ago a present labelled "Love from Jess X" (my cat) was unexpectedly unwrapped to find that I have made the leap from PC to Console. I have to say - full marks.

HOWEVER - imagine my frustration at the switch of control method. Demon hoards mullering me, and there is no precise move, fire, move fire, its ever decreasing 'square circles'.... and I am toast. Again. I will learn slowly (with a lot of cursing - wrong tool and all that!) - albeit at the expense of a more organic feel. Maybe this is to go on the Anthony list with why I appreciate the sound of valves, and other backward practices?

[ READ MORE ]

I do not recall where I saw them, but I remember seeing once OLD pictures in shades of sepia of a huge white elephant painted on the roof of the Pier Pavilion in my home town. The facility had been newly built, and was, at the time, pretty much used by just the roller hockey team; which for some reason I am yet to fathom was pretty big then, and now.

However, in the run up to the go live of the phase one of the fibrespeed project in North Wales, I cannot help but think that possibly I need to cutting myself a white elephant spray stencil and start visiting comms man-hole-covers in the dead of night? [ READ MORE ]

Why? Why do that? Seriously? Sure - it made me laugh but WHY?! There I was looking for something in the repositories for Hardy and this line caught my eye:

sdate - never ending September date

...nestling between a text based IIRC client and a plug in for vim with HTML plugins. In the absence of what I was looking for in my apt-cache search - I was curious. So I installed it.

...and then ran it.

root@svr66:/data/domains/xen1# sdate
Wed Sep 5503 16:49:35 BST 1993

For crying out loud, why document formalise, and upload crud like this? Sure I smiled. But now I am burdened with thinking of why this has ANY use at all?!

Adventures in rediscovering DRBD/HA - how hard it is to re do something really quite complicated that you have done before, but still looms and seems scary. Thankfully - when I did it before the version was a lot lower, and hopefully its easier / safer / less *OMG I just primaried the wrong box!*

This entry is intended to be an aide memoir, and an edited and updated resource until I can 'hear Jimmy'. This is intended to be a learn-a-long-with-ant, with pitfalls highlighted for future avoidance.

Click the more for the rest on this. [ READ MORE ]

Today I solved an issue that had been causing me grief in the office for quite a while. Mail attachments.

Our configuration with being in a shared building is that our traffic, while secured, controlled, throttled, sanitised by our firewall before being passed on to the outside world. Where it skips a Cisco based firewall that the rest of the building goes through before joining a Cisco based VPN router before joining a govt LAN over leased hard line. [ READ MORE ]

I ended the day today with a large glass paperweight on my desk with a hologram of compressor blades (that's the insides of a jet engine) in it.

Where I work lasers and glass are 'every day', however the office is split between holograms are cool and holograms are soooo 1980's.

What is your standpoint?

Professional Student? Who sir? Me sir? No sir.

After a ten year break John and I are taking the plunge. We start our CCNA course in September. Well - its something to do on a Tuesday evenings isn't it... and we get a piece of paper and some more abbreviations to use.. its going to be great. Best of all we get student cards... grey hairs, who cares, I am a student.. its says so... here. *points excitedly*.

I had the smart idea of using Shozu to beam back pictures quickly and easily from my phone to Flickr as our adventure takes place. Genius.

Then I realised that I was abroad and TelCo's charge extortionate rates for back haul.

After spending an extended 40 mins on hold with some rather 'keen to help' UK based people who where not grasping what I was talking about, with some rather mind numbing midi based hold music, and VOIP based call centre audio; I really was none the wiser. Thank you O2 - was it such a strange request? [ READ MORE ]

It has been bugging me in the office for a while why it is that I can set up a CUPS print server to service and announce all the printers in the office, but none of the other boxen seem to look at it with intent to print, just acknowledge it's presence at best. The point, if efficiently and nicely configured, drifts by.

After a little bit more Googling than my usual 'three blanks and you are out' and on to something else I found what I was looking for.

vim /etc/cups/client.conf

ServerName 172.16.0.10

/etc/init.d/cupsys restart [ READ MORE ]