Chris’ Blog

… since I last blogged, darn memory.

Need to get started on my revision properly I have been avoiding hitting the books really hard, just hitting me head really hard with the books :(.

Christmas was good … humbug … sorry I can’t help mysqlelf. I got a fairly good haul of presents, although I knew what I was going to be getting for most.

I some new albums in particular, Metallica - Garage Inc. and Iced Earth - Alive in Athens, (because I had never listened to either) with a grand total of 5CD’s between them. After much listening I can conclude they both rock (already knew the others did ;-).)

I wish you all a happy new year, may it bring good fortune to me all :).

Playing:

Warning: Addictive Album

As the end of the world year draws closer and people begin to feel all ‘Christmassy’, I begin to feel the opposite and look forward to the otherside. All the over commercialism and fuss about decor. and the like really makes me want to forget the event actually exists.

My main bug points with Christmas as I said before is all the money that companies try to extract from people by what ever means, Christmas themed adverts are not needed until December *sigh*. Yes giving is good, but do we all need to start thinking about it in October? No.

Decorations are another bug point, I am not talking about the tasteful positioning of tinsel or the odd holy leaves. Of course I am talking about electrical lighting displays, they are plain dangerous and get on peoples nerves. Again tastefully done they are not disruptive or annoying, a few small outdoor lights around a tree or so on. Is is suspected that an entire family died after their house caught fire possibly caused by Christmas lights. Drivers driving past these lights could be distracted or blinded which could cause accidents, I wonder who would get the blame for that accident. Most home displays are tasteless and tacky, it is insulting that the local BBC news go to film these hideous displays of electrical waste.

After all that I feel so much for relaxed

Playing:

A number of things have happened since the last time a blogged here, I will try to recall them (Note to self: Blog more freqeuently, less memory intensive.)

On the subject of memory, my two sticks of 256MB SDRAM arrived safe and sound. I got them installed and running within 15 minutes of discovering them. Turns out tho my mobo can only see half of the RAM on each module, so I only doubled the memory. Alhough my server appears to be a lot speedier with 256MiB instead of 128MiB, currently ~120MiB is being used as cache so there is still plenty of room for more services.

I have been doing lots of Minerva work over the past few days, trying to stablise the code and what not. I have made good progress, I need to commit my latest round of code so the other guys can get working on it too.

Playing:

Before assumptions are made, this is not me telling the world I am homosexual.

I work at my school doing network cable laying and repairing hardware and other tasks, much fun :D, because of this I know the network manager quite well. Any how it all started a couple of days ago when a flash executable was found in someone’s account, upon executing this file a full screen flash animation with large text reading “I am Gay”, there is also a vivid black/pink flashing background (font is pink/black), and out from connected speakers is a nice siren sound. In the office that lunchtime it was thought that this executable would come in handy, it was copied to an administration shared and had a remote execution script written.

To the present day now, another lunchtime in the room adjoining the network managers office a sixth form student was spotted (over VNC) playing music on a whiteboard machine (has big speakers). Well this was a chance to great not to miss, the network manager adjusted the machine volume to maximum remotely then poised over the enter key to launch the ‘gay’ script. I suggest I left for the VI form block (where I was supposed to be) to capture the reaction. So me and my best mate set off at lightning waddle towards the VI form block.

We arrived, waited outside the room … nothing … there must be a problem … waited more … Warp Warp … w00t it worked :D. We both burst out laughing so bad and then a chemistry teacher walked towards us and asked what was going on, “No idea” I innocently replied. We then witnissed several other teachers piling into the room as well as other inquisitive students. We knew we may become suspects, as over lunch I (via neoeno) had learned of the daily school wide VNC password and was having some fun witnissed by my HoY. Maximum waddle back to the network managers office … I told the situation in a very short sharp single sentenced blurt and promptly returned to side splitting laughter.

Damn time for maths *sigh*, headed off to the English block (don’t ask) and waited for the class. The girl(s) that had been victimised were standing waiting for another teacher next door, and they had been told we had been seen at the scene before anyone else. damnit … We explained we were innocent and just were well informed. They had been told that it was there fault and maybe had actually broken the computer xD.

That was the best 10 minutes in school ever

Note: This account is not complete padding and other stuff was left out either because I am forgetful or I couldn’t be bothered to write it

Due to a developer ‘reshuffle’ I have now become the Project Leader for Minerva . So, what’s the cause of all this?

Dave has been invited to join the phpBB development team to work on phpBB3, this in a way is good news for us. It means that our parent product will be developed faster hopefully speeding up the development process. It also means our development slows down, but he has been busy with his phpBB mini-project for a long time now and has not done much for Minerva over the last couple of months.

My overall analysis of the situation: meh; but good luck to Dave *poke bring us phpBB 3 faster*

I have exams soon so my Minerva activity is going to be baseline for a while, once the exams are over it is my birthday w00t . I am rambling on a bit too much now so, until next time bye.

Playing:

Well I just got myself 512MB of SDRAM for sandman for £15 from eBay. After much fuss trying to work out what densities of RAM modules it could take I eventually found a pair of double sided 8×16M modules.

If all goes well a quadruple RAM upgrade . If all goes bad doubled

Playing:

Oppsie; I b0rked my blog. The issue is now fixed after much confusion at what was causing it .

Playing:

Hallo again,

• Top 10 Weirdest USB Drives Ever
• IT Year (2005) in quotes

I may add more to this before the day is up…

My server which I am hosting this blog on runs Ubuntu Linux 5.10, I have been meaning to configure iptables to lock down the open ports.

I am not going to explain the configuration of iptables here, but there are many guides available.

Now you have created your iptables rules they are stored in memory and when you reboot your machine will be lost .

I found a solution to the problem on the Ubuntu Forums.

First off we need to create /etc/init.d/iptables and populate it, I have a put a copy of the iptables script on my server for you to download.

MD5 Sum: 7cf9c61f8d284f65b99781c2d3355747

/etc/init.d/iptables needs to be executable:

Next we need to get iptables loaded at boot time before networking, this can be done with the following command:

Now we have to save our current rules from memory to file so they are loaded at each boot.

A word of warning calling /etc/init.d/iptables stop twice in a row will clear your iptables configuration. I would advise you to make a backup of /etc/default/iptables-rules I use a simple copy command:

Source

Note: This is mainly for my own reference but others may find it handy

Playing:

Well here it is my first rant … basically over here in the UK to apply to universities applications must be sent through UCAS, who act as a “middle” person.

Any how the process is all online, great one would guess - no. The website requires me to have JavaScript enabled to open a popup window to use the application, I bookmarked the URL and get a nice fullscreen page .

Now my application has been sent they have sent me a letter telling me of my choices and to check there are no mistakes, do they transfer the application via human operator?

This is not the worst bit; the login details I use to manage my application are sent in the letter in plain text . *sigh*

Playing: