Inevitably lots of things broke in the upgrade. The only two I’ve noticed so far were MySQL, which broke because it didn’t replace the config file, and PHP which broke because it did!
Actually not really fair to say PHP broke; rather parts of my website broke because of the default memory limit on PHP programs. Still, fixed now.
Was a little disheartening actually – I burnt the FC4 DVD, and upgraded, then ran a
yum update
and it had to download 1.4Gb of updates! I’d only downloaded the image a couple of weeks ago. Ah well.
Still fighting my chest infection. It had threatened to get a lot better, but yesterday came back with a vengence, and now my cough and nose are as bad as ever. That said, I’m actually feeling ok, and have started sleeping well at night, so can’t complain too much.
Today’s excitement is going to see the Bishop for lunch. Not something you get to say everyday! 🙂
Went to the doctor and got antibiotics, which have actually cleared up my chest really quickly; I’m hardly coughing at all now! Just don’t ask about my stomach…
Speaking of stomachs, I find myself at home this fine autumnal morning, as young man threw up last night! Nursery had warned off a stomach bug going around, but we can’t really work out if that’s his problem.. So, he goes to nursery Thurs afternoons, which means he would have had to catch and succumb to it in about 6 hours, which is pretty speedy. Or he might have caught in on Tuesday, in which case that’s really quite slow (48 hours).
He also doesn’t appear to be ill at all (apart from his cough).. perhaps more tired than usual, but basically full of beans. Best working hypothesis at the moment is that he hasn’t got the tummy bug (yet?), but either a particularly violent cough made him gag, or something he ate in the afternoon disagreed with him.
Pretty much sums up the week though – I’ve done all of about one days work, and spend the rest of the time pretty much in bed. I did upgrade my Linux box to FC4 this morning though, so that was satisfying.
Came down with the the lurgy over the weekend; some form of chest infection, most likely a virus. Although I don’t feel too bad in myself (even made it into work today), I’ve got a nasty cough and am completely bunged up, and generally feel spaced out. 🙁
It’s actually the nights that are the worse times, as my nose and cough keep me awake even though I’m really tired. It’s very disheartening lying awake in bed, checking your watch and finding that – yes- another 5 minutes have passed since last time you looked.
Still, I’m definitely getting better – on Sunday I was in a dreadful state, yesterday I was back on my feet (just!), and today I’ve staggered into work. Hopefully my cough will clear up in a day or two, and it’ll be back to business as usual!
I’ve just realised that I never wrote about Ben’s latest tricks! He’s into animal noises at the moment, and is really good at matching animals names and pictures to the noises they make. Ok, he doesn’t always get them right, and you do sometimes need a little bit of imagination to distinguish between them, but he does them very sweetly.
“Ben, what noise does a snake make?”
“ssss”
“What noise does…. a dog make?”
“ooof”
“What noise does…. a crocodile make?”
“nap nap” (accompanied by a hand opening and closing like a mouth)
“What noise does a cat make?”
“eee-oooo-UUUU”
“and what does does an owl make?”
“ooo-ee oo-ooo”
“what noise does…. a cow make?”
“mmmmmmmmmm” (occasionally “mmmooooo”)
“What noise does a monkey make?”
“oo oo” (accompanied by bouncing up and down)
“What noise does a lion make?”
“RRRRAAAAAA” (with big grin – his first noise and still his favourite)
“What noise does a sheep make?”
“baaaaaaa”
I think that’s all the ones he knows at the moment. We’re trying to teach him to say “please” and “thankyou”, and the former seems to come out as “more” at the moment 🙂
Anyway, I tried to get him to be able to say the word “thankyou” by assking him what noise a Thankyou Monster made, but I got told off for doing that. <g>
He’s definitly getting more words though – he obviously does “mumumumum” and “dadadad” (which I think also means A and me, rather than “generic big person” which it did before), but also “door”, “water” and one or two others. Not that I’m a proud dad or anything. 🙂
The sheep noise also reminds me of my last holiday as a bachelor, that I went on with a very good friend of mine. It was a Christian holiday in Turkey, run by Mastersun, and quite family oriented so they have a creche type arrangement for little people. One of the things they do in the creche is to sing memory verses like you do in Sunday School, and we made friends with the young lady who was running said creche. She was telling us that there was this one little boy or girl (can’t remember which now), who couldn’t really get the hang of the songs, but liked to join in where he could. There was this one song in particular, that starts “Your the Sheep (baaa) Jesus said (baaa) …. ” and so on, where everyone can join in the “baaa”s even if the other words were too hard. Course this little lad just loved this, and would build up all his energy and shout “BAAA” at the top of his voice when that bit came along. 🙂 So of course, we all started walking around going “BAAA” randomly to each other, especially as a response to teasing or wind-ups. “The only thing I can say to that is BAAA”. Maybe you had to be there. 🙂
I’m starting to feel like an old hand at this travelling game; or is that just old? 🙂 Anywhere, here we in Oxford for our annual project workshop, sort of a bit like a mini-version of the jolly in Nottingham last week.
My talk is a bit more involved here, as I’ve got a 30 minute slot to fill (plus various live demos), and we actually spent most of the train journey finishing it off, which was time really well spent – my boss had great suggestions that improved it no end! Mind you, he was talking about using it in one of his lectures this term… 🙂 The train itself was fine, except for a mixup in the seat reservations which meant we had to turf someone out of our seats – but they managed to find seats just behind so that worked out ok. The main reason for wanting to sit (beside the obvious) was in order to get the laptops out and do some work, so we didn’t feel too bad.
Supper yesterday was courtesy of Browns on Woodstock Rd. I’d never actually been to a Browns before, and it was ok. It was extremely noisy, but the food was very good. Probably a little more expensive then I’d ideally be looking to pay for a meal out, but by no means extortionate. I had spare-ribs, which I love having and haven’t had for ages. In fact the last time I had ribs was at the meeting in Edinburgh in April. Perhaps it’s an e-Science thing. Anyway, it was a good opportunity to talk a bit about work, and find out a bit more about each other.
Oh yes, I’m staying in St. Anne’s college, which seems very nice. First thing I did on arrival was to plug the laptop in hopefully to the RJ45 socket lurking on the wall, and lo and behold here I am. Well, there I was – it’s obviously morning now! But I bet the boss is doing the same thing next door… Ooh scary thought; maybe even reading this?
Closing thought; am a little disappointed that apparantly nobody has tried to sell their cuff-links on eBay yet. There were something like 650 of us who got them (several ladies amoung us!), so you’d had thought someone would have flogged ’em by now!
Found an excellent but under-advertised tool called Synergy, which lets you control multiple machines from a single keyboard and mouse…
Ah, you say – isn’t that just a KVM (keyboard video monitor) switch. Mais non, because with this handy bit of software you have a monitor per computer, and seemlessly change which one you’re controlling using the mouse.. So if I go off the right hand side of this screen, I end up on the monitor next to mine.
Even this is borderline passe, until you realise that the computers can be running any combination of Linux, Windows, and MacOs. For instance, right now my ‘master’ computer is my main Linux box at work (a FC2 jobbie), on the left is a laptop running RH9, and on the right is a Windows 2K – all of which I control from the single keyboard and mouse attached to my FC2. OK, so it means I have two monitors (and a laptop) on my desk, but I can live with that.
In fact it’s such a nice solution, I’m considering digging out my old monitor at home, and doing the same thing there (at the moment it’s a KVM scenario).
My new passport arrived this afternoon, and I have to say it looks much the same as the old one. One thing that’s quite amusing is that I spent ages agonising over whether to put “Dr” as my title. On the one hand it would be cool, but on the other hand it might attract unwarranted atention, especially if I happened to have a medical doctor as a travelling companion.
So I decided against it, and sent off the renewal form. So what’s funny? Well new style passports don’t have any space for title anyway!! (although perhaps they squidge it in somewhere?)
Here I am at the University of Nottingham, in Cavendish Hall (one of the students’ halls of residence), and I must say that the connectivity has been fantastic – good wireless coverage everywhere in the conference centre, and wired network in all the rooms.
A major part of the All Hands meeting is the ‘booths’ that house all the major players in the e-Science business, and there seems to be an unofficial competition to see who can give away the best freebies, and I must say they’re pretty good!!
PPARC (who are particle physicists) were giving away “Micro OpticalMouse” USB mice, which are tiny but fab, especially as the touchpad on this laptop is more than a little ropey. CCLRC and GOSC had T-shirts on offer, everyone has pens, and OMII was also pretty good, with stress-cubes, mints, and insulated travel mugs – although to get the latter you had to install the OMII client, which took me the better part of 2 hours. To be fair, this was mainly because (a) I was trying to download everything over the wireless, and (b) I didn’t have Java SDK installed and it was very picky about which version it needed (which it didn’t tell you in advance, so my process was 1. install Java-2 RTE. No joy at all. 2. Install Java2 SDK 1.5.y – no Joy; requires 1.4.x. 3. Install SDK 1.4.x. Success and travel mug.)
Mind you, it took me the better part of day 1 to get the wireless going on the laptop, due to driver issues in Linux. Still, download and install the new module and firmware and it’s solid as a rock. Well, as good as you could expect, in any case.
But as usual with these things, the main useful outcome is meeting up with other people, particularly the project partners in my case. It is also interesting to hear the keynote speakers give their overview talks, and in this case most of the speakers were vey senior academics (heads of funding councils, that sort of thing)
Off to Nottingham for most of this week, for all the “All Hands” conference. This is an annual get together of all the EPSRC e-Science projects, where we demonstrate our work and have various talks about e-Science and Grid Computing stuff.
I’ve not been to one before, but I’m not a huge conference fan at the best of times and by all accounts I’ve heard this one is a particular circus. Still, it’s a good opportunity to catch up with the other project partners, and even to see what other people are up to.
I’m planning to slope off to bed early every night tho, and all things being equal should get in a few nights really good sleep. 🙂
