Journal: August 2008

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Caught in the act
Sun 31/8/08 (Link to this entry)

Upon my return to Camberley earlier this week, I discovered that Frankenrouter had been busy while I'd been away. James and Kim's vacuum cleaner had mysteriously broken and they'd had to throw it out. I was disappointed by this, as I'm now sure that a post-mortem would have revealed further cannibalism by my deadly nemesis. It's now a lot more mobile, so I mounted my camera in the living room for surveillance purposes. Imagine my horror when I saw the below footage.

This is clearly distressing news, as it means that the little bugger has now eaten two mobile phone batteries, giving it a backup in case one fails. In view of its increased mobility, I've removed my camera from the room as I really don't want it getting its tendrils onto improved optical sensors. I guess I'm going to have to do something about this. Either that, or just hide for the remaining three weeks I have down here...

Evolution theory confirmed
Sun 17/8/08 (Link to this entry)

James' habit of leaving partially-dismantled hardware around the house is becoming hazardous. It's now clear to me that Frankenrouter has taken to appropriating bits of other gadgets in order to enhance its own deadly capabilities.

Case in point: its range used to be limited by the length of its power cord, effectively confining it to a smallish radius around its wall socket. It's now using the graphics hardware it plundered from James' mini-ITX system to calculate the vectors required to whip its power cord across the room from socket to socket, effectively giving it free rein throughout the house. It's somewhat terrifying to hear the whip-like crack as the cable shears through the air, always landing the plug into a new socket with lethal accuracy.

Yesterday I bravely took it upon myself to exploit a weakness in this system: while the cable is flying through the air, Frankenrouter is without power and therefore defenceless! I tried baiting it from its favourite lurking area under James' printer (I think it has the hots for it) by dangling my mp3 player just out of its reach. When my nemesis accepted the bait and threw its power cord across the room, I launched myself across the room in my best badminton diving style, trying to use my racket to intercept the cord on its way to its new socket.

Sadly, this plan was doomed to failure. The supersonic speeds of that whip-like movement are just too fast for me to be able to catch, and it also means putting myself dangerously close to Frankenrouter itself. Currently it's only successfully attacked other electronic hardware, but I can see the burning hate in its eyes whenever it spots a biological lifeform (namely, me). It's only a matter of time before it comes for me.

Up until now, I've been safe since there are no plug sockets within range for the whip-trick in my room, effectively rendering my room a no-go error for Frankenrouter. Imagine, then, my consternation upon discovering the aftermath of this morning's brutal attack and dismemberment of James' old phone: it has stolen itself a battery!

Even though it's only a phone battery, the fact that it's James' old "PC-in-your-pocket" phone means it should have more than enough juice to fuel Frankenrouter over short distances. This is a disturbing development indeed - effectively, nowhere is safe, given that most long-distance trains now have plug sockets in the passenger carriages. Suddenly I'm feeling a little less safe about my impending trip to Scotland...

Frankenrouter: first victim claimed
Fri 15/8/08 (Link to this entry)

Frankenrouter appears to have eaten James' old mini-ITX system. I awoke today to find a distressing scene played out in the lounge - there were mangled pieces of circuit board everywhere, it wasn't a pretty sight. It looks like it never stood a chance - the casing has been ripped to shreds and some of the internal organs have been ripped out completely. We're still trying to find the hard drive.

I've feared this would end up happening right from the start, although at this stage I'm still unsure if it's a simple case of cannibalism or if Frankenrouter is modifying itself. The violent deformation of the case and the brutal amputation of the graphics card leads me to a third theory: perhaps it just did it for pure evil pleasure. Either way, I'm strengthening the barricades on my bedroom door - I don't want it getting its vicious teeth into my own computers, especially since if it assimilates my server it'll no doubt get all sorts of unpleasant ideas from my new Wile E Coyote and Road Runner collection...

CT900 pain, scrobbling and coming home
Sun 10/8/08 (Link to this entry)

I suppose I'd better get around to updating this thing... a bumper post follows with what I've been up to the past couple of weeks.

CT900 pain

Work's been pretty busy lately. In addition to my duties in helping train the new guys, I've been fighting with an old nemesis from last year - the Netra CT 900 blade server. This monster is a Telco system which contains multiple server 'blades' (small thin servers) and is a complete bitch to upgrade.

I've been getting a new chassis from Singapore online and rearranging the blades between it and our old chassis. That all went OK (apart from a cockup involving me trusting someone else's patching and then regetting it). The next step is to upgrade the firmware and software on the new chassis. Here's where I've gotten to so far with it:

The procedure requires you to first upgrade the blades, then the switches, then the midplane, then the shelf managers. OK, I think to myself, fair enough, it involves several steps, that's not too bad. Looking at the blades, it seems I'll have to do each blade separately (four in total). That's a pain. Then I discover that upgrading a blade has four steps: patching Solaris, upgrading the boot firmware, upgrading the IPMC firmware (I have no idea what that is), then flashing the onboard NICs...

At this point I'm getting a bit confused, so I look into what upgrading the IPMC firmware involves. It turns out that this, too, involves a couple of stages. First I have to install a transitional firmware image using one tool, then I need to load the latest version of the proper firmware image using another tool. But wait! The currently-installed firmware is too low a revision, so I have to upgrade that first before installing the transitional firmware...

HOW BLOODY HARD IS IT TO MAKE A PIECE OF HARDWARE THAT DOESN'T TAKE A MONTH TO UPGRADE?

Things aren't going to get any quieter at work any time soon, either - just today I had to head into the lab (on a Sunday!) to work on a "Priority-One-oh-my-god-this-needs-done-now-the-CEO-is-breathing-down-our-necks" ticket (that's the technical term). If that's anything to go by, next week should be fun - just as well I'll be off on training (muhahaha!).

Scrobbling

Right, rant over. Now I'll mention something I've been enjoying lately: Last.fm. This is a website that tracks your music listening habits and tries to match you up with other people and recommend new music for you to try out. It's pretty cool and I've worked out ways to make it work with my PC media player, my streaming mp3 server, and my portable mp3 player (using the Rockbox firmware).

It also has the capability to integrate with one's website:

It's a pretty cool service, and hopefully it'll be the source of some new music ideas for me. My profile page is at http://www.last.fm/user/LamseyMcBrien - feel free to add me if you're reading this and I haven't already found you.

Coming home

This is turning into a bit of an epic post, so I'll close out by mentioning that I'm going to be back in Scotland for a working holiday the week after next. I'm heading up on Wednesday the 20th then heading to Sun's Linlithgow location on Thursday with Tim Graves to work on a demo setup for an upcoming Sun product (currently very hush-hush). I'll be working from home on the Friday then I'll be free on the weekend before travelling back down south on the Monday (which is a bank holiday). I haven't worked out what I'm going to be doing at the weekend yet, I guess I'll need to see what comes up :-D

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