T O T K a t

This so has to be done for a party...

Stolen from here:- www.markwang.com. If you are the owner of the original image and object to my stealage or would prefer me to host the click-through image here to save your bandwidth, please let me know and I'll take it down/sort it out.

Didn't stay long as I'm still very tired from yesterday's 03:25 waking up to go get on a plane. But this place does lots of good beer.

...comes sooner than you might think.

So I was having problems with Nagios 2.0 stopping bothering to check on services and not re-scheduling the checks for times in the future (and looking at NagiosExchange, it seems to be a problem that a few people are having). But now I have it whipped. I think. Well, it's stabilised now after some minor tweaking on Wednesday afternoon, then again on Friday.

I've updated my Nagios notes to add in v2.0. There are enough differences for people(me) to be annoyed with the 1.3 notes not working for 2.0 that it was necessary to update them.

On a related note, Nagios appears to be cropping up all over the building now. Various other groups appear to have discovered it, installed it and one has even put the tactical overview for theirs on a 30" plasma screen.

And mine... mine is veeeery pretty still:-

So J and I got a couple of UPSes at a bargain price. J set his up and sorted out proper shut-down sequences etc. Mine got to my house a couple of days ago and have I plugged it in yet? No. Of course not. (Mostly because I need to re-think where to locate machines so that the right ones can benefit from it without too many trailing wires).

There was a power cut earlier this afternoon. And now my Ultra5 is down hard (probably sat part-booted, waiting for an fsck). Given how short the power outage was, having just plugged the damned UPS in would have saved me there.

*sigh*

Guess what I'll be doing tonight?

It turns out I'd wrongly blamed a power cut that never happened on my loss of home machine. In fact, it was my poor little 3Com wifi enabled router which had got its knickers in a twist and needed a restart. Still, it generally behaves really really nicely, as does its little brother the 3Com wifi travel router which provides TiVo with its connectivity. I think I've only had to power cycle the big one twice and the little one never. They Just Work (FSVO"justwork"that seemed to involve a lot of pain to get the little one to do the right thing initially).

Waterloo Road. Really quite good it was. Thankfully TiVo was on BBC1 when I came to it about 1/2 way through so I watched it (and the final Hotel Babylon of the series) time-slipped.

New Hustle starts tonight too.

Referring back to an old post my site still passes Cynthia's test. However, my style sheet is a mess (I have optimisations ready to roll, but need time to unpick the current mess to apply them), I couldn't guarantee that every image has alt text (but I've got to be close to 100% coverage there) and there are some deprecated elements in there. So sue me.

It's Monday.

Things haven't been too bad so far.

The tube was only completley hideous for the 5-6 minutes I had to wait to get onto the Victoria Line at Victoria this morning.

At least my phone works, though. (I don't have a Motorola Razr)

I may not agree that you should "blog" about anything you like regardless of the sensitivities of others, the confidentiality of the information or how it may affect your relationship with your friends, family or employer, but the new blogging guidelines published by the Met. Police on the matter do rather smack of censorship to me.

Apparently there are people buying Computers for Schools vouchers on eBay. For more than they are worth to the schools. Tesco are upset by this maybe because they perceive a loss of revenue somehow? Is it that people are using them to buy and sell eBay rating?

I really wish "educationalists", rampant fluffy liberals, psychobabbleists and general meddlers would stop pissing about with education.

My new phone has arrived, despite Nokia saying that it is only "coming soon" in the UK.

It's very Fashion. But I don't care. It's cute, free and has better (advertised) battery life than my current phone.

It looks like the government is starting to do something I've wished they would do for a while. A section of motorway is getting one lane designated for multiple-occupancy vehicles. This is great news.

I kinda wish that had been initiated a long time ago. A work-colleague and I used to car share when I was working at Nortel(Periphonics) which not only cut the cost of travel for us, it meant we were using less fuel and there was less wear and tear on our cars. OK so we had to get up a little earlier to pick each other up/be picked up, but the benefits were clear. The shame was that the journey time was slightly longer due to going a bit out of the way at each end to pick up and drop off. Had there been designated multiple-occupancy vehicle lanes in place the extra time might have been offset by the lower congestion.

Still, apart from not being too sure that actually building an extra lane where there exist 3 or 4 lanes already is a fantastic idea, it's generally good news and I hope more of it happens.

It's probably Vista that makes the interface quite so slinky but... the iMP ([BBC]interactive Media Player) demo that Ashley Highfield presented at Mix06 looked pretty nice (it starts about 5.5 minutes into the video). A heck of a lot better than the first iMP trial I was on. For this demo, the media was probably already on the PC as there was no wait to get hold of it.

The initial trial iMP client was pretty ugly, to be honest. And difficult to search and navigate, as well as fragile - exact versions of Media Player were required, I forgot and upgraded my Media Player installation and thus ended the iMP trial for me. Bad encoding for the daily news and weather video clips didn't help, the audio quality was often pretty ropey and clipped.

This flashy new iMP client appears to be much sleeker, ergonomic and usable. As one person in the office put it earlier today "it's tacky". I think what he meant was that the mass consumer would like the knobs, bells and whistles. Personally, I think it looks very much like a Microsoft-ised Apple-like interface but that could be to do with Vista more than anything else.

One bit of co-incidence is that a couple of days before Ashley must have flown out for Mix06 was the first time I've actually seen him in the office. Admittedly, I don't often pass by his desk (ohyes, even for him it is the open plan office) but it's always been empty before. I've seen the Marks (Thompson and Byford) umpteen times around the place.

The House of Lords overturned the Court of Appeal's verdict, that a school which had already bent over backwards to be as inclusive as possible about crazy foreign dress "requirements" had been unlawful in excluding a pupil for failing to adhere to their uniform policy.

The school had a uniform policy which allowed (the 79% of the pupils at the school who are) Muslims (and anyone else for that matter, I think) to wear shalwar kameez to cover themselves sufficiently modestly. But the girl insisted that that was insufficient for the demands of her religion. The religion of tolerance and equality.

Well, ya know what? The uniform policy was made explicit and clear before her parents sent her to that school. At any point they could have chosen to send her somewhere else. But no. They had to create a problem for a school they should have been lauding for their inclusiveness.

I just spent £60 on books.

Yum.

I don't have any space on my bookshelves.

Bah.

It's not like I can just go and buy another Billy because I'm hoping to move house at some point this year so should avoid buying big things (well, anything at all but books are a necessity, not a luxury!). So. Bah.

I appear to be having something of a girly moment. I bought a new skirt from Kew last night. It's full-length, mid-blue (teal), machine washable (yay!) cotton with a full cotton lining. And it comes right down to my ankles. And there are acres and acres of material that swish around my boots when I walk.

(normal service may be resumed when I snap out of it... or not)