Man, talk about titters of self-recognition.

:-)

It doesn’t get much better. A week snowboarding in the Alps. With beer. Good friends, and sunshine.

The only fly in the ointment, I suppose, is that there wasn’t any new snow all week, and the lucky buggers who are in Val Thorens now are getting a new dump of powder tonight, by all accounts.

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This came in my email again this morning, plugging Presto from Dell:

Yeesh.

Nobody smiles like that. Well, OK, maybe if you’re really trying hard to get across the idea that you’re a flat out mentalist. It would probably do the trick if you’re trying to shake off a particularly tenacious ex, I suppose – but one thing that beaming face does not say to me is “I just found out how to control my son’s internet access”.

More to the point, this woman presumably just got off the phone having spent ages talking to a bored tech support person on the phone. WHO SMILES LIKE THAT AFTER GOING THROUGH MINI-HELL? NO ONE, I TELL YOU.

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Blimey. I was wondering who CocoRosie were and what they sounded like, so I went on over to the cocorosieland site. Stone me. It’s attractive, sure, but sheesh – what a horrible example of grope navigation. Even when you get to the navigation buttons with some text on them after some random clicking, it’s in a pretty, scrawly script and the buggers move about all over the place! Plus, of course, you see none of this in the first place if you don’t have/don’t want to have Flash (and I was reading today that Flash in Firefox can be a bit of a pig) – which includes mobile browsers and search engines as well as anyone with a non-standard browser for whatever reason.

Rakim – what a poet. Who else could have come up with “Another enemy/Not even a friend of me”?

Now, why I like that, and I don’t like Richard Ashcroft, I couldn’t tell you. Especially since, even for, you know, back in the day, Eric B was a shite DJ. Sounds like he’s scratching with boxing gloves on, thinking about what to have for his tea and while his piles are playing him up.

Answers, as always, on a postcard.

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Warning: non-geeks should move along.

Odd, very odd. I’ve had real troubles with the server. My shiny Ubuntu Dapper installation failed fsck tests all over the shop, worrying me greatly. Yes, there are backups, but I’d rather not have the grief, thanks very much. There were corrupted files, not recovered by the journaling filesystem, and once I’d found those I knew the jig was up. Time for a bare metal restore – of sorts. Since the OS was limping along rather than completely dead, I saved what I could to another drive and then nuked the lot.

Now, I had to choose what to install. I could go for another Dapper installation, but I have the horrible feeling that this was software corruption. I could have been too close to the bleeding edge, given that it wasn’t just the vanilla version I had installed; there were lots of thing installed from the apt universe and multiverse. The thing is that I couldn’t see any evidence of hardware failure on the drive: smartmontools showed no current errors and none in the log, so what else is a boy to think? So, I’ve switched to an ultra-conservative setup, and much more minimal, too. Debian Sarge it is, with no frills – and by that I mean, no X at all, and as little extraneous guff as I can get away with.

It’s been a bit of a pain getting the data across from mysql 5 to 4, and PHP 5 to 4 too, but not all that much – which suggests, of course, that I wasn’t using enough of the new bells and whistles to justify the pain. So now, no more pain.

One thing’s worth explicitly noting here, in case somebody stumbles across this: fine, you can use mysqldump –compatible=mysql40, but it doesn’t seem to get the auto_increment fields right. I’m going to have to go through and check all of the table structures just to be sure.

On the plus side, I’m getting really good at installing various flavours of Linux – nipnap.toastboy.co.uk has been, variously: Corel, RedHat, Fedora Cores 2, 3 and 4, Ubuntu and now Debian. If you call that a plus. Ahem. I swear, I do make eye contact when I talk to people. Heck, I even wash regularly.

(Extra bonus prizes for guessing where the hostname “nipnap” came from…)

It’s was Friday afternoon, so there I was, catching up with my favourite newsfeeds on Google Reader. Via The Register, I ended up (oh, the humanity) at an article on the Daily Mail website about a new low-head water-powered generator. Clever, if it turns out to be viable: it’s claimed you get 70% efficiency from a very low-pressure water source. But of course, this being 2007, the site has a “comments” section. Now, Peter Beswick from Romsey has had a bit of a brainstorm. Great! I don’t have a stream near to my house, but no matter! I can just stick it on the mains water supply instead! Well, now. If that has a green motive behind it, then Peter is just a numpty. Where do you think the energy comes from to make the pressure in the water pipes? Of course, if it’s just a way of gypping the water company, then I’m all for it…

Well we went bowling just before Chrimbo, and we had a lovely time, thanks very much for asking. Only trouble was, I wore my extra-long jeans – the ones E swore made me look normal, and not a freak with short legs and a long body. Anyway, the jeans got caught under my snazzy, freshly-sanitized bowling shoe, and my delivery stride turned into a flamboyant, if unplanned, splits. Oh deary me. How I cursed as our companions laughed. A week and a half on, and I still have a lot of pain, right at the top of the hamstring. Ow.

Des the Dog has got troubles of his own, though. This morning during our walk he was being his usual eejot jumping about, when he pulled up with a yelp and refused to go any further. This is the second time this has happened, too. We went to the vets this evening and it looks like his hips are getting gimpy. Poor old sausage. Now he’s on 3 kinds of medication. Thank goodness for insurance.

It seems that the Bishop of Southwark has been dipping his toe in the water, seeing what all the fuss is about over binge drinking. There he was, toddling home after having a great time (apparently) at a function in Belgravia, when the next thing he knew he was sans wallet and mobile, with a nasty bump on the head. Naturally, for a man of the cloth, he assumed that he must have been mugged, and reported it to the Police. Now, after all, it seems he may just have had too many Bacardi Breezers…

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