The Computer Science department got it’s new website (more of a re-skin, actually) yesterday, so I decided it was about time to update my staff page. I’ve brought it in-line with the new look of the main website, although it doesn’t completely follow the standard templates. It’s also XHTML 1.1 valid, which makes the pedantic side of me feel much better. There’s …
A few days ago one of our users reported that they couldn’t change their password. The error coming out of the passwd command was confusing in itself – it said ‘bad old password’, or similar, which turns out to be a bug in our wrapper script. After some investigation we discovered that neither kadmin or kpasswd worked: tdb [~] % …
I’ve been using the Flash Car Wash to wash my car for the past year. It’s a fantastic device, and has really good results. Not only does it leave my car shining without blotchy water marks, but it removes the need to use a bucket at all. There’s only one flaw with it though – it requires a hosepipe. Here …
I’ve done a bit of driving back and forth across the country recently, and I’ve seen quite a few places go over the £1 per litre mark. Admittedly they were the more expensive places anyway such as motorway service areas. Fortunately I’m not a heavy user of petrol, but it still frustrates me that something like 70% of the cost …
So after copying everyone off the limping T3 arrays I arranged for a Sun engineer to return to site to fix it properly. Sun Dispatch had a bit of a moan because I’d had the parts for too long, but they realised it’d make most sense to keep the parts on site rather than collect them and then send them …
I’ve been using the speed camera database at Pocket GPS World with my satnav system for a while now. With the necessary tools installed on my PC it would automatically pull the latest data and install it on my PDA. Fantastic system, and no hassle at all to keep updated. When doing an update today I thought to check the …
After yesterdays saga I was looking forward to an easier day today, but I didn’t get it. At the end of my last post I was trying to disable the primary controller in the array. It took a while, but it didn’t help. However, after some more discussion with Paul at Sun we noticed a lot of errors for the …
We have a fairly long standing hatred of the Sun T3 storage arrays, and last night they once again proved why we feel that way. At around 7pm last night I noticed a lot of SCSI errors on myrtle (our staff and research Solaris server) which I quickly tracked down to a problem with one of the attached T3 arrays. I was …
Yesterday my car went in for it’s first yearly service at Invicta Motors in Canterbury. All in all not a bad experience; they gave me a discount for being a valued customer, cleaned the car for me (inside and out!), and had it waiting by the door when I got there. They even fixed the mudflap clip I managed to …
A few days ago my car insurance renewal quote came through from Ford Insure. I’d already done some online quotes to get an idea what I would be expecting to pay, so I was quite surprised to see the Ford quote come in at 50% more then the majority of the other quotes. Even when I queried this with them …