Journal: October 2006

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SAN
Tue 31/10/06 (Link to this entry)

This week I'm on a course with James learning all about SAN (Storage Area Network) technology. It's pretty interesting, being very much like Ethernet networking and yet very different (for one thing it's all over fast fibre-optic links rather than copper, and for another the switches are definitely not plug-and-play).

It's all rather head-scratching but I think I'm getting my head around it, which is nice. What's also nice is not having to be in the lab just now since one of our three PDUs (power distribution units) blew up and caused a fair amount of havoc on Monday morning!

A letter from the Sheriff Court
Mon 30/10/06 (Link to this entry)

Mum (who is kindly forwarding me my mail) sent me down a letter which arrived at home for me. It was from the Sheriff Court of Glasgow, which was midly alarming, but it turns out it's just notification that I might be up for Jury Duty in the next couple of years. Guess I'd better send a note back saying if it's any time in the next year then it might be a little bit difficult to commute...

Bloody viruses
Sun 29/10/06 (Link to this entry)

Sigh... I thought I might be free from having to deal with people's virus and spyware-infested machines down here. Craig proved me wrong this weekend when he asked me to sort out a particularly irritating little bugger on one of his work machines.

It wasn't caught by Norton, AVG or Adaware so it needed manual removal, which was a pain given that it was one of these irritating little bastards that has a resident process which re-launches it every time you kill it, meaning you need to be in Safe Mode to be able to get rid of it. It's gone now though so hopefully that'll be the last one I'll have to deal with for a while...

A big turnoff
Fri 27/10/06 (Link to this entry)

This weekend they're taking the mains power offline at work to do some electrical maintenance, which meant that today we had to go around our lab and turn off all our machines (around three or four hundred, at a guess). It's rather fun going round and flicking that many switches, although the lab was eerily quiet after we were finished. Thankfully I'm on a course next week so if the shit hits the fan when we turn everything back on I'll be safe :P

You want root on what?
Wed 25/10/06 (Link to this entry)

Scary moment coming up at work... I'm going to need to install something on one of our production servers. We're going to try setting up a Subversion server to manage the source code for the Java program I'm currently working on, and that's going to mean me installing some packages onto the live systems that we actually use (normally, I'm just working on lab machines which aren't quite so important or difficult to fix). I'm scared...

Stage proposal
Sun 22/10/06 (Link to this entry)

I went to see Jimmy Carr last night, thanks to Kim, James and Sam who were kind enough to sort out the organising, driving, and beds for the night respectively (cheers guys!). It was immensely funny, he has a wicked and gleefully cruel sense of humour which appealed greatly to my evil side >:-D

One part of the show involved Jimmy taking the part of an Agony Aunt, because he feels he could offer much better advice than the ones in the papers. "Better" is maybe the wrong adjective... but regardless, he seemed to get a fair few takers when he offered to solve the problems of anyone in the audience.

One particular guy piped up "I want to propose to my girlfriend in a really unique way, how should I do it?". Jimmy responded "Come up here and do it!". So he did. You have to admire the guy's guts, and in equal measure those of the lassie in question who, instead of running a mile like many people thought she would, got up on the stage and accepted most gracefully. I'd have clobbered him, myself :-D

Bloody engineers
Thu 19/10/06 (Link to this entry)

Why is it that whenever an engineer phones me at work, it's always at half five when I'm just about to go home? It's happened twice this week now. Gits. At least it's not been too busy this week, which is good given that I'm fairly busy on my mini coding project. That, and converting the project lead into an Eclipse fan. Now I just need to get him into CVS...

Half strength
Mon 16/10/06 (Link to this entry)

This should be a fairly interesting week at work, because we're down to half our usual complement of staff due to Paul being in Switzerland and three of my fellow interns being off on a course. Thankfully we didn't get too many tickets today but it could get pretty hectic later on.

Today I helped deal with one of the more amusing problems we've had recently. One of our lab machines was randomly flashing its 'error' LED in a bizarre indecipherable pattern, but only when the network cable was plugged in. When the cable was pulled, the LED fell silent. It took us a moment to realise that the flashing looked very similar to the output from the NIC's 'activity' LED... further investigation revealed that the 'fault' LED was wired to the 'network activity' pins on the motherboard. Oops!

Hooray for Caley
Sun 15/10/06 (Link to this entry)

It's nice to see that Inverness Caley Thistle don't just pick on one half of the Old Firm. Today they went to Ibrox and gave the Teddy Bears a cuffing, courtesy of a mistake by the controversially-reinstated Lionel Letizi. Looks like Le Guen might not be all he's cracked up to be, although that's maybe a harsh judgement at such an early stage.

The 'Tic had a fun game on Saturday against a fairly hopeless Dundee United side who allowed Naka to bag a hatrick inside of fifteen minutes. The game on Tuesday night should be good - shame I'll be missing it on account of the ^%$)&%£ TV/radio licensing deals.

Eek
Fri 13/10/06 (Link to this entry)

At work it looks like I'll be starting to work on the code for one of the tools we use in the lab. It's a medium-sized program which is used to organise and keep track of all our lab machines and is written in Java, which is handy as that's the only programming language I'm skilled in.

It's slightly alarming though. I use Eclipse for Java programming and it has the ability to analyse code and report potential bugs or problems (data hiding, unused variables, etc), or just plain bad programming (type mismatches, missing comments, etc). When I loaded the program's source code up in Eclipse, this function generated roughly 4,500 warnings.

I'm scared :-/

Badminton
Wed 11/10/06 (Link to this entry)

Today I got to play badminton for the first time in what must be the best part of two years, and it was great fun. I'd forgotten just how fun it is throwing yourself around a badminton court. We're hopefully going to make it a weekly thing so it sounds like it'll be pretty good. Jay seems to be pretty good too so it looks like we'll have some good matches.

In other news, Scotland resumed normal service today with a 2-0 loss away to the Ukraine. We're still top of the group for at least a little longer though, which is nice.

Got ID?
Tue 10/10/06 (Link to this entry)

We went out for a pub quiz tonight, which was a good laugh (even if we did get soundly trounced). I was also on pretty imperious form at pool, which was nice given my fairly poor form lately. Sadly, it's not all smiles... at the age of 21, for the first time in my life, I went to the bar and I got IDed.

I knew losing the beard would be a bad idea... :-/

Scots Wha Hae
Sun 8/10/06 (Link to this entry)

This has been a good weekend for sport. England drew at home to Macedonia (who?), Fernando Alonso moved to within a point of denying Michael Schumacher another world championship (the poor darling's engine blew up for the first time in six years, he must be gutted), and Scotland beat France at football. No, really. They did.

We still don't have a snowball's chance in hell of qualifying from that group, but at least our national side isn't so embarrassingly bad as it has been recently. Indeed, that was a classic Scottish underdogs' performance - 'gallus' is the only word that does it justice.

The perils of vanity
Fri 6/8/06 (Link to this entry)

I've been being told recently that I need to take more pride in my appearance. For once in my life, I decided to give it a go for a laugh. Unfortunately, my half-arsed attempts at shaping my beard a bit ended up with me looking like a right eejit, so in the end I had to whip the whole thing off. Not such a good plan then.

Before

After

I'm a bit worried about going out tonight in case I get IDed for the first time in my life. At 21 that would be somewhat embarrassing...

New bike
Mon 2/10/06 (Link to this entry)

It had to happen sooner or later. After five good years, my faithful cheap-ass bike has now gotten so bad that it's time to retire it. Yesterday I went and purchased a new Raleigh urban bike which, from first impressions, seems to be a very good buy. It's nice and sturdy and very smooth to ride (although a Reliant Robin with square wheels would probably feel smoother than my old bike).

At work today I had an interesting realisation. I've been working on a 'Sonoma' storage array which consists of a full server rack holding two RAID controller units and seven disk shelves. It's probably about 6 or seven years old. That's a rack measuring 6'x2'x3' and drawing about 2000W of power, and it's got less than three quarters of the storage capacity of the PC I'm writing this on.

Indeed, Seagate recently announced a single hard drive with roughly the same capacity as the rack I was working on. It's impressive how fast technology moves... in less than a decade, we've gone from that dirty great rack to something you can hold in the palm of your hand. Scary.

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