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Murphy’s law

Well, I go off to France on the bike for a week, and what do you know, we have a thunderstorm, a power cut, and although I upgraded the server so that it comes up clean after a power cut, I forgot to set the BIOS to power on when power returns, so the server was offline for pretty much the whole of my trip.
I got back to Aberystwyth earlier today, and have just been in to switch the machine back on, and have remembered to change that BIOS setting and save it to CMOS so that it should come back up automatically again in the future.

Now I can upload some of the photos I managed to take with the D70 before it came down with the dreaded “flashing green light of death” – a support call to Nikon customer services is in order first thing Monday morning for a return authorisation.

I almost thought that I’d have no photos, as the CF card reader that we have at home doesn’t appear to work very happily with MacOS, and it corrupted all the photos that it brought across, so I ended up having to import them on Suzy’s windows laptop and put them onto the file server, and get them across to the Mac that way.

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Upgrade of server

That was a traumatic few hours – I have just upgraded the little old server that provides all these pages to a nice new shiny Ubuntu LAMP distribution. It was previously running a very old distro of RedHat, with apache 1 and very old MySQL and PHP, and the time had come to move to a new infrastructure – not least because Claire, who is developing the museum database had said that she would not do any more work on it until I upgraded to a version of MySQL that actually supported relational integrity.

Well I’ve done that now, and she has no excuse, and neither do I in the future, as Ubuntu is very easy to keep up to date.

If you do find anything that is not quite working as it should, then please let me know and I’ll try to fix it. It should be fairly transparent to the average user though – but it does leave me in a better position to upgrade WordPress and Gallery at some time in the near(ish) future.

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Museum updates

I’ve been a bit busy on the museum over the last couple of days – I took the CBM 4032 apart, and cleaned and serviced the keyboard, and now all the keys work most of the time. I then proceeded to type in a copy of TIC TAC ARITH in Basic, and saved it to tape, so I now have at least one program that works on it. I’ve also managed to convert some .prg files to .wav files, so next time I remember to bring in my dummy cassette adapter, I’ll be able to test out space invaders on the PET, and that’ll bring back soe real memories.

I also managed to locate the speakers and 3D glasses with emitter for the SGI Octane, so I now have to find where the 3D rendering software is on the machine. (H)

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New addition to the Museum

I now have an SGI Octane dual 300MHz processor workstation, complete with original SGI monitor, keyboard and mouse – no speakers though, or 3D glasses 🙁
museum/DSC00007.jpg

I’m slowly getting to grips with administering it, and have managed to get it running some of the demo programs as can be seen from the photo. I think it would be better with a little more RAM, so ebay here we come…

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Yellow Chairs

This sounds like a more sociable alternative to warchalking – you place a Yellow chair outside your house and invite others to sit on it to share your wireless network.
This is an interesting art project, its worth reading the background story
The person who set this up appears to have found that theiir network became too slow to continue with the fully open service, but it does offer some interesting insights into social interaction.
There is another article about this on http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/

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Scrapheap take 2

Some of you will know about the Scrapheap Challenge application that a team of 3 of us put in a couple of months ago, we got through to the final hurdle before the series – the production company wanted us, but Channel 4 apparently didn’t, and chose a different team over us.

Well, we’re trying again, this time for the Scrapheap Challenge Roadshow, and in some ways it’s easier as we do the build in Aberystwyth, and don’t have to take a number of weeks out of our lives here in order to film for the show.

We started the build on Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then had half a day of filming yesterday (Thursday), and it all went very well. I’m not actually on the 3 man team this time, but am quite involved with the team, doing a fair amount of the design and build along with Ian, and we’re due to take our creation down to Beaulieu in a couple of weeks.

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Residual network problems

There may be some residual issues with connectivity to sites on this server, as it appears there are a couple of routers that were mis-configured. Hopefully most of it is sorted out by now, but if there are oddities, such as drop-outs in service for a few minutes, then please try again a few minutes later to see if it clears.

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rsphoto.co.uk detagged

I decided that I was not going to renew rsphoto.co.uk – I haven’t updated the site in months (or years actually) and I know that it’s a bit of an odd time to choose to do that, especially with the new camera, but I can always integrate it into another domain, probably just use a subdomain of theshipmans. So the site is gone for now, but will return in some form or other – maybe Suzy will do a redesign of it for me if I ask her nicely enough. 😉

Oh, and apologies for the downtime over the weekend, the local substation had to be upgraded here, so there was no power to the networking equipment for the duration.