Note to self: When your Macbook is having repeated issues waking from sleep, don’t sleep it in the middle of installing a big piece of software that has a complicated installer… On forcing a reboot the damned thing hung at the ‘Starting Mac OS X’ scroll bar screen, and stayed hung. Looking at the syslog at the console showed the last boot activity was coreservicesd crashing. Uh Oh, time for some panicked googling.
Solution: Boot into single user mode using Command-S, mount the root filesystem rw, then: mv /Library/Caches /foo followed by reboot. Everything seems fine now, just need to restart that installation 
I finally managed to get all the relevant modules into an initrd this evening, and managed to upgrade from the SuSE 9.3 stock 2.6.11.4-21.13-bigsmp to the current rpm from SuSE 10.1, 2.6.16.21-0.13-bigsmp. The difference is immense. On excalibur, which is an IBM x335 with dual SCSI drives in a RAID1 mirror, I’ve gone from 2.4MB/sec to 69MB/sec.
A painless process, albeit made a little hairier by having to play ‘hunt-the-dependency’ with drivers in the initrd as LSI seem to have rejigged things since the old kernel.
If only I’d twigged it was a driver issue that was thwarting me sooner… at last I can type ‘ls’ without people whinging at me!
On the bright side, my VIA based dedicated server from BlackCat seems to be coping with the load of teamspeak plus 3 or 4 forums admirably.
Saw this on the way to the bus in Cottenham after work tonight - thought it looked rather ominous, but I suppose things are rather flammable given it’s about 35° at the moment.
So I managed to tag along to the ARM BBQ with David and Kate. There was food, drink, dodgems, drink, ice cream, drink, punting and drink. There was rather a lot of drink. It seems ARM know how to put on a do, go check the pictures.
All that and David fell in the Cam.
It was a good day
Spotted this whilst waiting 40 minutes for a once every 20 minutes bus…
Yes… So I’m posting here now, expect nothing helpful or interesting from me 
I do bring pictures though.
Saw this on the way to the shops for some barbecue supplies.
Yes, I know it has received the attention it was seeking, but still, to me, this seems like a really rather pointless waste of money. More, well, personal personalised numberplates I can sort of see the point of - after all, I’ve no objection to vanity domains, but this one… It’s a car. We know this from the four wheels and general car like shape. It’s an M6. It says so just above the number plate. No added information, what’s the point?
I thought it was about time I put something nice and dynamic in my site header, shamelessly being… umm… inspired by the Live header at Mike Davidson’s blog and the realisation that a 640×480 badly compressed network camera image doesn’t really do the view I have over Midsummer Common in Cambridge justice. I had an old Canon Powershot G2 lying around (it got replaced by something that fitted into a pocket more easily), and a slightly dodgy laptop running XP that was collecting dust. Combine the two with a USB cable and the appropriate drivers and you have a rather oversized webcam. Add in the timelapse mode in PSRemote, using an upload script as my ‘Image Editing’ software and everything is in place locally to squirt a snapshot to my web server every 5 minutes.
At the remote end things get copied from the FTP drop box into the relevant webspace. The raw file is then processed by some PHP and cached ready for use as the header. I would post the code here, but am a) lazy and b) haven’t had a chance to check for obvious screw-ups I don’t want to admit in public!
Of course, the temptation now is to try and do more stuff with the images - motion detection and storing interesting images seem obvious ideas, although I’m sure I’ll think of more that’ll also never see the light of day!
Tinkering with my blog and found Sabifoo which seems quite nice. It’s what’s generating this feed, so we’ll see how it goes!
Testing lifeblog with the N80, originally uploaded by Skaffen.
View from the office, taken through a window with my N80’s main camera.
