xset

A New Zippo

// June 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

strictly speaking another new Zippo.

Considering these things have a lifetime guarantee on them I’m getting a bit sick of buying new ones.

My previous lighter had managed a previously unheard of life of 4 years and 2 months and I’m hoping that the new model will surpass this previous record.

Before I tell you exactly which model I have allow my to explain how it’s possible to got through 5 lighters in 10 years:

1) The brushed silver – when living in a house shared with 4 other smokers lighters grow legs and walk out the door – I’m really not surprised this one only lasted 6 months
2) The black matte – stealthy esque finish. Note to self – do not put black lighters down on tables in dingy nightclubs – you WILL forget to pick it up again
3) The camo pattern – lasted exactly a week. Bought for a camping trip to replace the black / stealth zippo, the camo lighter fell from my pocket in some woods in Devon … and blended so perfectly into the leaf mold I never saw it again … bugger
4) The silver Zippo motif – lasted really well… survived Prague, France, England and Scotland for 4 years until I left on the table in the local pub and it walked off into the night… actually I think I walked off into the night and left it on the table but it was gone when I got back.

The newest family member? A Solid brass “traditional” Zippo which, with a little luck, will survive for 5 years or more of wind proof, trouble free fire production.

KITTENS!!!

// June 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

KITTEN WATCH 2008 – Week 4

I’m sure you all follow my Flickr feed … right? and if you do you’ll know that Zumi has pre-empted my plans to kidnap her kittens.

She’d had them buried in a rather inaccessible area of the loft space / utility room which meant they were very warm and happy but also meant that she spent a lot of time covered in small particles of fibreglass insulation. This didn’t seem to bother the kittens in the slightest but brings my out in a major allergic rash so the plan was made to move the kittens into the birthing box and away from the insulation.

In typical cat form – Zumi decided not to bother waiting and moved them in the middle of last week. This means we now have access to squeaky (and very cute) little balls of fluff which are rapidly growing and have already started to escape from the confines of the box (much to the annoyance of their mum) and tank about the floor.

For those who like this kind of thing you can see photos of the kittens on Flickr.

This certainly won’t be the last kitten post over the next couple of months so I apologise in advance for becoming a Cat Blogger.

As easy as APC

// June 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal, Tech

Since our flat is prone to a the occasional utility outage (actually it’s difficult to think of a week since we moved in when the water, electricity and heating have all been working, all of the time) and since I have my backup server and this site running of a couple of boxes in the living room I thought it would be worthwhile investing in a UPS (interruptible power supply) to keep things up and running.

I’m a firm believer in the concept that, in certain markets at least,* you get what you pay for. With this in mind the market leader in the UPS stakes is a company called APC (American Power Conversion Corp.) who produce battery driven power conditioners and backup supplies ranging from the small to the down right massive.

These guys are what we use at work and what we recommend to clients so it made sense to spend a little extra and grab one.

Given that I need to run a small server, a modem, a router and a phone (with answering machine) I settled for a 620VA model in their Smart-UPS SC range. And it’s already paid for itself!!!

So far the UPS has protected the kit from 28 outages or voltage fluctuations and it’s only been in for 2 weeks! The great thing about the Smart-UPS range is that it’s not just a battery on a cable, it also performs power conditioning to keep the voltage flowing to my delicate kit at a perfectly stable 237.6V despite a range of a full 6V across the board over 2 weeks.

This little box will keep everything up and running for a little under an hour (54 minutes I think) which is more than enough to keep me happy.

The other factor that tipped in APC’s favour is the Debian package APCUPSD which allows servers to be made aware of power outages and even shut them down should the power be out for long enough to drain the battery. What’s more, you can customise the bash scripts that are run under certain circumstances to, say, backup your ramdisk before shutting down

I can safely say that anyone in the market for an end to power outage annoyances could do worse than consider an APC UPS and for around the £100 mark they don’t break the bank. The only issue? Now I need another one for the TV!

* Including but not limited to washing up liquid, monitors, and defibrillators.

14 months and counting

// June 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

An interesting snippet for those who wonder about the resilience of Linux in Enterprise.

My personal webserver (the big one, not the POS 2000 running this site) has now been up for 422 days with reboot or (internal) downtime!

That’s pretty impressive stuff – you show me a Windows box that’s been up for as long serving over 60 different websites (30 of them dynamic), running 2 virtual machines, a DNS server, Mail server, FTP and database.

Back from Paris

// June 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

5 days of traveling on trains (how is it possible for France, and the rest of Europe come to think of it, to get train travel so right when Britain gets it so so wrong?), speed tourism (belting round the Louvre in about an hour – dead cultural really), food and wine … lots of food and wine now I come to think about it.

As predicted I could use a holiday to recover from it all.

Photos are up on Flickr.

Everyone should be on Twitter

// June 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

Ahaha! Techy evangelism abounds at XSet this afternoon. Starting with one of the most accessible nerd tools on the interwebs. For those who don’t know what Twitter is I’ll provide a brief overview:

• Imagine a system whereby you could automatically update your friends as to your current activity, thoughts, new blog posts, requests for help or anything else that you might want to tell them.
• Now imagine the brevity of a standard text message or of your Facebook status bar .
• Combine the two into a website that you can update from the Web, your MSN account, your Facebook account* or even your mobile phone via SMS and that in turn updates your mates via SMS or Web or IM and you have Twitter.

I’ve often bemoaned the mass of social networks that are out there for sharing info and creating a net with your mates. The only one I’ve successfully used has been Facebook and even that is not without issue. Twitter is a different breed of social tool in that it simply does one thing and for the most part does it very well.

If you’re the kind of individual that regularly updates your Facebook status then why not consider the added advantages of Twitter? The SMS updates are, for most people, free and allow you to instantly ping your mates with your latest happenings and thoughts.

If you’re reading this and wondering why on earth you would bother with such a tool then can I recommend you sit and watch Twittervision for a few minutes. Millions of users, around the world, all updating in tiny little packets of information 24/7.

Don’t want your updates to be public? No worries, you can opt out, in fact, for such a simple service, you can configure pretty much every aspect of updating, alerting and visibility.

Still wondering if it’s for you? Why not give it a go? Sign up is free and take the 5 whole minutes needed to configure your mobile. You can “follow” me on my page and have a dig through some of the popular feeds to find interesting people and things to get tweets from. Above all else – tell your friends and happy twittering.

* Needs something Like Friend Feed to tie them together.

Bash Mnemonics

// June 3rd, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

Whilst doing my daily wander around various Linux servers I have a couple of handy memory joggers for commanly used commands:

List all directory contents with human readable file sizes:
ls -hal
HAL – the all seeing slightly homicidal computer from 2001 is a great reminder for this dir listing command

Show all processes in a tree structure with their parents:
ps faux
The lack of dash is not an error – this is the BSD syntax for ps and faux is nice and easy to recall

Show all server ports and the process listening on them:
netstat -lptu
LPT is (of course) the old name for parallel printer ports under dos and u? Well everyone remembers you

Colour top output and show more info:
(When in top) zxcbB
Not quite as simple as the ones above but this will give you coloured output and show the full process name. Also don’t forget that i will toggle inactive processes.

I’m sure there are more but these are the ones I use most often.

One out, X in

// June 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal

A tricky post to title. Friday saw two events which (to the best of my understandning) occured more or less at the same time.

The first, was the passing of the eldest of my family’s cats – Lucy – who was put to sleep at six o clock on Friday evening. She was just shy her 16th birthday and had been suffering for a while with a range of maladies including a heart murmur, an over active thyroid and, most recently, an inoperable, malignant tumor on the side of her mouth.

My parents made the decision to put her out of her considerable discomfort (she had been unable to eat solids for several weeks) and the deed was done. She has been laid to rest in the garden and something pretty will be planted over the top.

At the same time, in our flat not a mile away, Zumi had taken herself off somewhere to deliver her litter of kittens. We still haven’t seen them yet as she has hidden them rather well but we are sure that she and her babes are doing just fine.

So in a couple of weeks we should have them running about the place and generally being the cute, bouncy, bundles of fun that would have simply disgusted Lucy

Lucy Dudley – 1992 – 2008