Boxing Day
It's been a while since I last made an entry, so this is likely to be rather big...
th:at cafe
We've been inhabiting th:at internet cafe in town rather a lot recently, in groups of varying sizes from two people to a third of the GA, and they're always pretty cool. Admittedly, they make a lot of money out of us - but so did Starbuck's when we used to go there, and the staff there always seemed to resent our presence.
A few days ago (the 22nd) we had a little micro-GA meet - came into town, shopped briefly, then headed to th:at cafe for a couple of coffees. I had just started drinking my coffee when I reached across it to retrieve it and sent the mug flying in Nate's direction. Luckily, he ninja-dodged out of the way (from a seated position, too!) but the coffee went everywhere. Nate wandered over to the counter to ask for a cloth to clean up the mess, but it proved totally inadequate, so the manager came over with a mop and cleaned up - then wandered over with a free coffee.
Coincidentally, just before I splattered the floor with coffee I'd been talking about the coolness of the th:at staff and wondering whether we should get them a little present or something. So, after we'd left the cafe, met up with a few of the GA who were wandering around town, and did some light shopping, we headed over to Woolies and chipped in for a box of Celebrations. This was duly presented when we got back to the cafe, and we succeeded in making the girl on the till squee, which was quite pleasant ^_^
We stayed in the cafe for a few more hours, with various GA members shuttling between th:at and Booth's arcade. Really made our day when we were preparing to leave the cafe, and one of the th:at staff came over and handed us a little bag which turned out to contain a card signed by all the staff, and several pieces of really good Rocky Road. W00t!
Christmas Eve - noodles, coffee and dead hard drives
Christmas Eve was spent mostly in town with some of the GA. Noodles at Ichiban, then coffee at th:at (again). Really cool day.
Unfortunately, when I got home I found that Altair's hard drive had died again - I'd left a 200Mb 'apt-get upgrade' to complete overnight, and it had obviously run into the bad sector again. Didn't want to reboot and run into the same problem again, so I made a quick last-minute backup (which consisted of setting up an ftp server on the laptop - all servers on Altair had died due to trying to write to a read-only filesystem), powered down and pulled the HD. It's now sitting in a box downstairs, ready for RMA.
However, I'm not going to get a replacement disk for probably about a month or two, so I needed some way of getting a replacement server up and running in the meantime. First up was Altair running floppyfw, which was relatively painless: floppyfw uses dual network cards instead of the single one I'd had installed, so I had to borrow Razor's card. However, apart from that it was relatively painless: insert floppy, boot, and things Just Work.
Unfortunately, floppyfw's DHCP server didn't appear to work too well, and I couldn't figure out how to reconfigure stuff (there's no editor included on the floppy...) so I set up Angstrom (AKA 'teh slab', my little gray P233 laptop) with ipmasq, which also worked pretty well and had the advantage of being much quieter than Altair. I'd been meaning to try using the laptop as a server for ages, and it worked really nicely.
The only problem that remained was wireless access. Normally, I've got things set up with Altair connected to the cable modem doing NAT, and the wireless router sitting on the internal network configured to route any packets addressed to it directly to Altair (I've already ranted about the fact that the wireless router seems totally unable to work in a pure access-point mode.) This would have worked, but for some reason Angstrom seemed to be ignoring packets from the router, rather than forwarding them onto the cable modem as Altair had done. I really don't know enough about ipmasq/iptables to fix this, so I left it for the time being.
Christmas Day
Christmas Day itself was pretty cool: for a change I really made an effort to get people stuff they would really like, and in return got some very cool stuff myself. ^_^ Noteworthy stuff: Nate bought me a bodhran! It's very pretty (it has a pattern screenprinted on the front), and extremely loud (apparently, bodhran is derived from the Irish word for 'deafener'...) It also drives the dog absolutely mental, so I think it'll have pride of place on my wall instead of on my lap most of the time...
Also, I bought Shaun of the Dead for Nate. I've been raving about it all year, and since he was in Dundee he didn't get a chance to see it. The thing is, my sister bought a present for both of us: Shaun of the Dead. So we now have two copies. =P
Christmas dinner was nice. It's the first time I've ever actually seen a roast turkey in my life: Mum and Dad only buy free range stuff, and they'd never managed to find a proper free range turkey before. So we'd always had chicken. However, this year a free range turkey was procured, together with lots of trimmings, and consumed with much gusto.
This year was unusual: for as long as I can remember, we've shared Christmas dinner at our house with the same family, and gone over to theirs for New Year. Unfortunately, they've had family troubles and weren't able to make it this year, so our dinner guest was Rahim, an Iraqi cardio-thorassic surgeon - one of my mum's friends from work - who turned out to be a pretty cool guy.
More consequences of the dead hard drive
Had some spare time after dinner, so I fiddled around with the wireless router some more, and eventually decided that the only easy way to fix things was simply to allow the router to actually work as a router. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to acquire an IP via DHCP from the cable modem for ages. Fiddled around, and nothing worked - until I unplugged the laptop from the network. Looked like every time I reset the cable modem and router, the laptop had ended up grabbing the IP address before the router could get around to requesting it - even though the laptop was plugged into the router's inwards-facing ports, and the cable modem to the single outwards-facing one ... d'oh. Anyway, after that, things worked, yay!
The only remaining problem now is the fact that normally I use DynDNS.org to provide dynamic DNS. I'm on a cable connection, which means I don't have a static IP, so I run a client on Altair which takes note of whenever my IP changes, and sends the new IP to DynDNS, which then catches any incoming DNS requests and gives out my current IP in reply.
Both camtarn.homelinux.net and andy.camtarn.org use DynDNS, but with the router rather than a full Linux system as the external machine, I don't have any way of updating DynDNS any more. That means that until I can get a replacement HD, I have no local web server >< Ah well, at least most of the 'important' stuff is hosted on IX nowadays - the notable exception being photos. So, no photos of anything for a while u.u
Other stuff...
There's still snow outside from yesterday: a thin layer of solidly iced snow, but snow nonetheless. It's the first white Christmas we've had since I was about ten or so. Pretty cool.
I tidied my room today, yay. Well, mostly my cupboard. I emptied out seven lever arch files, three folders, and a few plastic wallets and ended up with a pile about two feet tall of notes from fifth and sixth year. Was gonna burn them, but I guess I'll recycle them instead. Better for the environment, and less insane amounts of ash blown all over the place. I can now actually see the floor in the cupboard, since I moved a lot of junk onto the shelves where the folders were.
There appears to be a Project in the works - Nate, Mishi and I spent several of our hours in th:at on the 22nd Planning and Scheming (and drinking coffee.) I'm not sure how much I'm meant to be saying about it, but I think I'm being dragged into designing the website =P
I also need to study for the exams I've got after New Year ><; Sigh.
th:at cafe
We've been inhabiting th:at internet cafe in town rather a lot recently, in groups of varying sizes from two people to a third of the GA, and they're always pretty cool. Admittedly, they make a lot of money out of us - but so did Starbuck's when we used to go there, and the staff there always seemed to resent our presence.
A few days ago (the 22nd) we had a little micro-GA meet - came into town, shopped briefly, then headed to th:at cafe for a couple of coffees. I had just started drinking my coffee when I reached across it to retrieve it and sent the mug flying in Nate's direction. Luckily, he ninja-dodged out of the way (from a seated position, too!) but the coffee went everywhere. Nate wandered over to the counter to ask for a cloth to clean up the mess, but it proved totally inadequate, so the manager came over with a mop and cleaned up - then wandered over with a free coffee.
Coincidentally, just before I splattered the floor with coffee I'd been talking about the coolness of the th:at staff and wondering whether we should get them a little present or something. So, after we'd left the cafe, met up with a few of the GA who were wandering around town, and did some light shopping, we headed over to Woolies and chipped in for a box of Celebrations. This was duly presented when we got back to the cafe, and we succeeded in making the girl on the till squee, which was quite pleasant ^_^
We stayed in the cafe for a few more hours, with various GA members shuttling between th:at and Booth's arcade. Really made our day when we were preparing to leave the cafe, and one of the th:at staff came over and handed us a little bag which turned out to contain a card signed by all the staff, and several pieces of really good Rocky Road. W00t!
Christmas Eve - noodles, coffee and dead hard drives
Christmas Eve was spent mostly in town with some of the GA. Noodles at Ichiban, then coffee at th:at (again). Really cool day.
Unfortunately, when I got home I found that Altair's hard drive had died again - I'd left a 200Mb 'apt-get upgrade' to complete overnight, and it had obviously run into the bad sector again. Didn't want to reboot and run into the same problem again, so I made a quick last-minute backup (which consisted of setting up an ftp server on the laptop - all servers on Altair had died due to trying to write to a read-only filesystem), powered down and pulled the HD. It's now sitting in a box downstairs, ready for RMA.
However, I'm not going to get a replacement disk for probably about a month or two, so I needed some way of getting a replacement server up and running in the meantime. First up was Altair running floppyfw, which was relatively painless: floppyfw uses dual network cards instead of the single one I'd had installed, so I had to borrow Razor's card. However, apart from that it was relatively painless: insert floppy, boot, and things Just Work.
Unfortunately, floppyfw's DHCP server didn't appear to work too well, and I couldn't figure out how to reconfigure stuff (there's no editor included on the floppy...) so I set up Angstrom (AKA 'teh slab', my little gray P233 laptop) with ipmasq, which also worked pretty well and had the advantage of being much quieter than Altair. I'd been meaning to try using the laptop as a server for ages, and it worked really nicely.
The only problem that remained was wireless access. Normally, I've got things set up with Altair connected to the cable modem doing NAT, and the wireless router sitting on the internal network configured to route any packets addressed to it directly to Altair (I've already ranted about the fact that the wireless router seems totally unable to work in a pure access-point mode.) This would have worked, but for some reason Angstrom seemed to be ignoring packets from the router, rather than forwarding them onto the cable modem as Altair had done. I really don't know enough about ipmasq/iptables to fix this, so I left it for the time being.
Christmas Day
Christmas Day itself was pretty cool: for a change I really made an effort to get people stuff they would really like, and in return got some very cool stuff myself. ^_^ Noteworthy stuff: Nate bought me a bodhran! It's very pretty (it has a pattern screenprinted on the front), and extremely loud (apparently, bodhran is derived from the Irish word for 'deafener'...) It also drives the dog absolutely mental, so I think it'll have pride of place on my wall instead of on my lap most of the time...
Also, I bought Shaun of the Dead for Nate. I've been raving about it all year, and since he was in Dundee he didn't get a chance to see it. The thing is, my sister bought a present for both of us: Shaun of the Dead. So we now have two copies. =P
Christmas dinner was nice. It's the first time I've ever actually seen a roast turkey in my life: Mum and Dad only buy free range stuff, and they'd never managed to find a proper free range turkey before. So we'd always had chicken. However, this year a free range turkey was procured, together with lots of trimmings, and consumed with much gusto.
This year was unusual: for as long as I can remember, we've shared Christmas dinner at our house with the same family, and gone over to theirs for New Year. Unfortunately, they've had family troubles and weren't able to make it this year, so our dinner guest was Rahim, an Iraqi cardio-thorassic surgeon - one of my mum's friends from work - who turned out to be a pretty cool guy.
More consequences of the dead hard drive
Had some spare time after dinner, so I fiddled around with the wireless router some more, and eventually decided that the only easy way to fix things was simply to allow the router to actually work as a router. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to acquire an IP via DHCP from the cable modem for ages. Fiddled around, and nothing worked - until I unplugged the laptop from the network. Looked like every time I reset the cable modem and router, the laptop had ended up grabbing the IP address before the router could get around to requesting it - even though the laptop was plugged into the router's inwards-facing ports, and the cable modem to the single outwards-facing one ... d'oh. Anyway, after that, things worked, yay!
The only remaining problem now is the fact that normally I use DynDNS.org to provide dynamic DNS. I'm on a cable connection, which means I don't have a static IP, so I run a client on Altair which takes note of whenever my IP changes, and sends the new IP to DynDNS, which then catches any incoming DNS requests and gives out my current IP in reply.
Both camtarn.homelinux.net and andy.camtarn.org use DynDNS, but with the router rather than a full Linux system as the external machine, I don't have any way of updating DynDNS any more. That means that until I can get a replacement HD, I have no local web server >< Ah well, at least most of the 'important' stuff is hosted on IX nowadays - the notable exception being photos. So, no photos of anything for a while u.u
Other stuff...
There's still snow outside from yesterday: a thin layer of solidly iced snow, but snow nonetheless. It's the first white Christmas we've had since I was about ten or so. Pretty cool.
I tidied my room today, yay. Well, mostly my cupboard. I emptied out seven lever arch files, three folders, and a few plastic wallets and ended up with a pile about two feet tall of notes from fifth and sixth year. Was gonna burn them, but I guess I'll recycle them instead. Better for the environment, and less insane amounts of ash blown all over the place. I can now actually see the floor in the cupboard, since I moved a lot of junk onto the shelves where the folders were.
There appears to be a Project in the works - Nate, Mishi and I spent several of our hours in th:at on the 22nd Planning and Scheming (and drinking coffee.) I'm not sure how much I'm meant to be saying about it, but I think I'm being dragged into designing the website =P
I also need to study for the exams I've got after New Year ><; Sigh.