Week of 13th August, 2007

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Monday, 13th August

A new shift fortight starts today, and I'm on a 10 o'clock start. This is the swap fortnight, so it's a 10 rather than an early.

Call it 60 commercials, and about the same of promos - so relatively quiet.

Last Thursday, I reported a problem with bouncing e-mail to the home account. Today comes e-mail from Demon, saying that they have raised the problem with Cloudmark, who claim to have fixed it. I'll check tomorrow.

And there was a note pushed through the letterbox from our Postie, who has a parcel for me, "that is too big to fit through your letterbox", and stating that I may collect it tomorrow - which I will do, on my way to work. I think I know what this is - the cradle for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, from the firm in Holland.

Meanwhile, I'm frantically charging PDA batteries - the iPaq ran out of battery yesterday. Luckily, I carry a spare. The Nokia was charged over the weekend, and seems to have better standby time anyway. Just for safety, I'll investigate getting an extra battery for it - that's the Nokia BP-5L Li-Polymer cell, 3.7 volt @1500mAH. The price seems to be about UKP29 for a genuine Nokia, or just under UKP13 for a pattern part. I've not had great success with equivalents, so I may bite the bullet, and spring for the genuine article.

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Tuesday, 14th August

The parcel was indeed the Nokia CR-81 cradle, sent in a box 6 inches cubed, with lots of air bags for padding, although I'd have put an air bag in the box before the cradle, and another one afterwards, rather than filling the box after putting the cradle in. It's a moot point, the thing arrived undamaged. Now to leave feedback on eBay - 7 days from order and payment to delivery from Holland is good service.

E-mailing Userfriendly strips from work to home is now successful, even for animated .gif files - Cloudmark have fixed the false positives. So that's good - it means I don't need to seek out a free wi-fi access point - which is not to say I won't.

Work is still quiet, about the same as yesterday. And I've got overtime to morrow, a 12 shift.

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Wednesday, 15th August

Still quiet at work, although the commercials load is starting to increase after the summer break.

But before that, I had a look at the traffic-summer script for mrtg. It took a while to get it to run, but eventually it did, whereat I got a blank report - just the header lines, no reports of aggregate traffic for any configured interface. traffic-summer has a default "don't report traffic of less than 500GB", but you can over-ride that with a command line option. But even setting that option to 0 doesn't give me a non-blank report.

My perl skills are next to non-existent, so this is going to be fun. Unless I punt, and post to the mrtg mailing list, asking for help.

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Thursday, 16th August

Further investigation of traffic-summer suggests that the script emits an aggregate in+out report per monitored interface, for the previous calendar month. I want a separate traffic in and out report, totals for the last 30 days, that is compatible with mrtg's syntax for external scripts. This will allow me to invoke it in an mrtg.conf stanza, and graph the result, as I do with ntp.

Of course, I could invoke the existing script fron cron daily, with the e-mail option, so that I can read it - but a graph is easier and quicker. But I still can't get any significant data from it.

Later: I joined the mrtg mailing list, and my first post elicited several replies, nearly all of which pointed me at the routers2.cgi package from Steve Shipway - which looks like very good advice. The trouble is that it's not just an extra script - it requires wholesale changes in the way I do things. And I'm not quite ready to open that can of worms just yet...

But there's a link at the mrtg home site - scroll down to Josef Wenzel, who has a script that is supposed to be run once daily from cron against your mrtg logfiles, and will do rolling average traffic summing for specified interfaces. That is more like it - a minimal change, rather than a wholesale rebuild of a large part of the system. I can't do anything about this until next week, now - work (that famous 4-letter word) will get in the way.

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Friday, 17th August

And work did indeed get in the way. Although it's still quiet - we have 3 days to get rid of the material delivered today. Which will be easy - I envisage having very little to do on Sunday.

I need to order some electronic bits - notably the new fan for Emperor, but there are other items - which I can do by 'phone from CPC. They have a minimum order of UKP30 exclusive of VAT - order less than this and you pay postage. Over UKP30 postage is free. This order wil be comfortably over the threshold.

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Saturday, 18th August

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Sunday, 19th August

And my thoughts on workload were correct - all material except the week's music videos was done yesterday. And since there were only 2 musics, they didn't take long, either.

Net result? Most of the days were spent 100% monitoring episodes of "Stargate SG-1", "Stargate Atlantis" and "Scrapheap Challenge". It makes a change to have the time to do this, and enjoy the content, even while working.

One of the "Scrapheap"s was particularly entertaining. The premise of the show is to give 2 teams of 3 people (plus a programme-appointed expert for each team) free run of a scrapheap, and 10 hours in which to build something, purely from materials on the heap, which would then be tested in a competitive situation against the other team's effort.

The episode of which I speak required the two teams to build jet-propelled dragsters, which would be tested against each other at the Santa Pod Raceway. And they did it, too. The times for the standing quarter mile wouldn't set the drag-racing world on fire - 28 seconds? - but for machines built from scrap in 10 hours I call it very creditable. And very entertaining, too - the winning machine was a pulse-jet, a la the V-1 Doodlebug.

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