Week of 4th December, 2006

Last Week

Next Week

Monday, 4th December

Jane's Father's Funeral

Anthony Fenelon

1917-2006

A successful, if melancholy, day.

It was interesting to see and hear how affectionately everyone remembered him, including his pupils from 40 and 50 years ago. And not a few of them were in attendance at the church.

Back to Daynotes


Tuesday, 5th December

Back to work, and the mixture as before. But the new clip management system was upgraded last week, and now it's prone to randomly losing parts of transmission schedules, and hence deciding that clips are no longer required. And when a clip is no longer required, it is deleted. The transmission controllers get worried when material disappears before their eyes, to be replaced by a sea of red "Not Available" flags. This is a problem of sufficient magnitude that it can count as a brown paper bag bug. In fact, there are two such, since the system also doesn't recognise when a previously missing clip becomes available - we have to specifically inform the tin mind that a clip has been ingested, even though you can browse for it's metadata, and find it.

But despite that, the missing lists were mostly empty at going home time - about 6 clips, none before early evening tomorrow.

Back to Daynotes


Wednesday, 6th December

Back to Daynotes


Thursday, 7th December

Today, I decided to test whether the DP-802 is the bottleneck in external traffic speeds. This required fixing IP addresses on Tux and the Linksys print server, since I don't have any other dhcp server that can reserve IP addresses, while remaining out of the data path. Then I could turn off the DP-802 and enable the Vigor's internal dhcp.

The Vigor wanted a reboot after this - big mistake. As I type this, that reboot happened over half an hour ago, and I still don't have a connection - the router status page still says "Handshake".

So I 'phoned Demon's Tech Support - and, as is the way of such things, while I was speaking to them, the router connected. All hail the Internet gremlins, not to mention Shub-Internet. And, just for completeness, the Prophet Murphy...

<long pause>

Extensive load testing sems to show that the DP-802 was indeed the cause of a fairly major choke in external throughput. I am now seeing incoming datarates peaking at 2.8Mbit/sec, and holding at 1.4Mbit for significant periods of time on sufficiently large downloads. Ths is a significant improvement on previously, when peak rates of 910kbit/sec were the maximum I could rely on.

There's no other change, and the tests have run for about 7 hours as I type this, so I think I'll be able to rely on it in future.

Getting to this was a tad entertaining - Tux lost visibility for his mrtg plots. He also couldn't get out to the Internet - there was a name resolution problem - which just went away after a reboot. Good thing, too, otherwise I might have lost cartoon downloads.

Back to Daynotes


Friday, 8th December

Jane and Sarah have left for the Christmas Market in Lincoln. They will be back on Sunday. And because their absence would entail Ben the dog being muzzled for 14 hours a day, at least, to keep him quieter and avoid displeasing our neighbours, we've sent him to friends a few miles away.

Tabitha the cat is still here though - but she's no trouble. Just feed and water her twice a day.

Back to Daynotes


Saturday, 9th December

Back to Daynotes


Sunday, 10th December

Last Week

Back to Daynotes

Next Week