Week of 25th June, 2007

Last Week

Next Week

Monday, 25th June

I've got Ally taxed for another year - all I needed was to supply the reference number printed on the renewal paperwork, and the big Government database picked up the linked test certificate, and the fact that there is valid insurance, and asked me to pay up. So I did - the tax disc should be here in a day or four.

For non-UK readers, this tax disc is the legal proof that a particular vehicle has had its tax (by the book, "Vehicle Excise Duty") paid until the expiry date printed on the disc - which is paper, about 3 inches in diameter, and must, by law, be displayed on the windscreen of the vehicle to which it relates. Failure to display is a criminal offence, punishable by fine and possible confication and destruction of the vehicle. There used to be a 14 day grace period after the disc expiry date, but tthat concession was withdrawn some years ago.

I've also started paying the maintenance fees on our timeshare weeks - something I should have done 6 months ago, but my cash flow wasn't as good then as it is now - not that it's very good now.

Following on from yesterday evening's post about Aytobe navigation systems, I need more big SD cards. So I wandered out to Morgan Computers, and picked up 3no. 2GB Peak SD cards, and a 2GB Peak USB thumbdrive, for my portable manual collection..

Also, as an experiment, I got a SwissGear backpack, with lots of pockets, so that I can carry my kit of essential gadgets - at least I deem them essential, others might disagree. I know Jane does. More on this later, but I will say now that it should be able to hold the Acer as well as my gadget collection.

Back to Daynotes


Tuesday, 26th June

Dentist today, to have my teeth cleaned, and an intermittent toothache sorted out. Then I'll put in the claim on my health insurance. And I need to make another claim - for my new glasses.

The bl**dy SD cards aren't recognised by the Acer. Maybe they need formatted... Otherwise it's me for the shop again. And I'll probably spend a bit more do$h, and get Sandisk - they work.

Later: Verrry interesting, but schtoopid... It turns out that the Acer's card reader doesn't recognise 2GB SD cards. Nor does the Palm. 1GB yes, 2GB no. The iPaq H4100 is OK with 2GB as well. One last test - does the Aytobe accept 2GB cards?

<pause>

Yes, it does. And I already know that the Perstel DR301 DAB radio has a 1GB limit.


I just checked local e-mail on Tux. This is all internal admin stuff - reports from cron jobs, and the like. And with the change to the new homepages server, my mrtg uploads have been failing, because the server couldn't find the directory in which to place the files. It has, of course, moved. Wups!

So I changed the cron job to suit the new filestructure on the server. This is internal to the webserver, externally nothing has changed. It should work now, I'll check tomorrow - the upload happens at about midnight, and it's 11:30 p.m. now.

Later: That's fixed it - mrtg plots are now updating.

Back to Daynotes


Wednesday, 27th June

Back to Daynotes


Thursday, 28th June

Back to Daynotes


Friday, 29th June

That's the nights over for a month or so - next stint is likely to be in September. And a weekend off. Jane and Sarah are away to Lancaster to collect Jenny and her traps. And there's some doubt as to whether Jenny will return to do her second year - she doesn't like the course, apparently, and is making noises about switching to another course, which would probably reset her to first year. Or maybe a gap year - but I suspect that she won't return to education if she does that. Which would be a shame - Jenny is arguably the most intelligent of all three, and it's a pity to see it wasted due to, basically, laziness.

And Katy has passed her Final examinations, and will be admitted to the class of 2nd Class Honours graduates - lower 2nd, admittedly, but lacking only 1 mark of getting an Upper 2nd. This is cause for 3 rousing cheers. It's an excellent performance, given her dyslexia. The Graduation ceremony is the Friday after next, and we will all be there. Which means I'm only working 2 days of the next fortnight, because we'll be going to Aber. a week tomorrow, and staying in a cottage for the week. We'll be back just in time for the McMichael Rally, which is the Sunday after we return.

Later: I've implemented the extra stanza in mrtg to monitor the ADSL uplink datarate in a more detailed fashion, without the much larger downlink datarate hiding it. Basically, all I did was clone the ADSL stanza in mrtg.conf, change the target name, to make it a unique instance, and add a

Options[target]: noi

line. This makes mrtg monitor the target, but suppress display of the first (by convention input) variable. You can suppress the second (conventionally output) variable by saying noo in the Options line. It makes no sense to use both options.

This option does not suppress logging, it merely stops mrtg displaying the parameter.

Back to Daynotes


Saturday, 30th June

Jane and Sarah left for Lancaster about 1 p.m. They arrived about 5:30 p.m. or so, after an easy trip, enlivened by finding a circular, rubbery object under the car at a rest stop. Mut have been picked up en route, because there's been no reason for such a thing to be attached otherwise.

It's been a quiet day here, with me all on my ownsome, but I can live with that.

Back to Daynotes


Sunday, 1st July

We're supposed to be hosting a Belgian boy for this next month. He was supposed to arrive by EuroStar this morning, on the 09:36 into Waterloo. But just after 7 came the 'phone call (from Jane, relaying info she had received) that he missed the train. Well, I suppose 6 a.m. CET (5 a.m. local) is a bit early for your average teenager. Apparently, he should now be arriving tomorrow evening. I await e-mail confirmation of times.

Of course, I'm working, so I can't collect him from Waterloo, and Jane doesn't want to do the trip either, so he'll have to use the Underground, and Jane will collect him from our local station. I'll send directions when I hear about arrival times.

Later: Well, they're all back. Hopalong must have been struggling - the back end was full, plus Jenny's bike on a bike rack on the tailgate. And the Dell Inspiron 510m that used to be Katy's has problems. As far as I can tell, either the battery is shot, or the charger, or both. But he runs from the mains adaptor, so that's OK.

Jenny can't have used him for a while, because a lot of software needed to be updated. And M$ are stiill pushing Windows Genuine Advantage: and I'm still refusing it. And in that regard, Userfriendly had a very apposite series of strips back in March, starting on the 5th, of which this is the best one. Talking of which, Illiad must be extremely p*ssed off with my attempting to script downloading his strips, becasue he seems to have blacklisted my IP address - it's the only site I can't get to from here. But I can do it from work, and e-mail the results home.

It's the end of the half-year, so it's comic archiving time - or it will be once I've got the last few UF strips. I just need to edit up the strips with extraneous copyrights on them - remember, I consider that copyright vests in the artist, not the displaying site.


I've been playing with mrtg again, trying to get the ntp offset page to display Tux's uptime, like his dataflow page does. Since getting the ntp offset requires the use of an external script, you need to insert a line like -

RouterUptime[target]: 2:public@target-ip-address:

in the appropriate stanza of mrtg.conf, according to the online documentation. But it doesn't work - mrtg falls over with error messages by e-mail.

And it turns out that you don't want the interface number (the '2') and the colon on the front of the target string (which snmp interprets as part of the community name) - get rid of that and it all works.

I also tried the WithPeak option on the Vigor page - this displays the 5 minute average peaks on the slower graphs. But the extra data makes the averages less easy to see, so I discontinued it.

And I really should read the e-mails from cron, especially just after making changes. A typo in the new upload cronjob meant no ADSL uplink traffic graphs posted. Never mind, all should be well tomorrow.

Last Week

Back to Daynotes

Next Week