Chris’ Blog

I needed to lighten my mood slightly today did the trick, damn unlittle-documented features.

I have been doing some work on Minerva, still slowly building components for the new uber powerful core up, some time in the future we need to apply the glue and get it all stuck together. The other week I wrote a fully featured cron layer, which is dead optimised and almost emulates Vixie cron, I would like to add support for some of the predefined time settings. That should be a piece of cake though. Anyone nerdy enough (no insult fellow nerds) may look at the code, its all free, and stored on our Subversion server (hosted by me.)

So, I am still working on this damned physics coursework. Thankfully it has to be in tomorrow for final marking and sending to the big wigs that our the moderators, so I am rushing around trying to finish it. In between clicking the red button, it is such a great combination button is getting more attention than the physics at the moment. I am thinking this is not such a good thing, too bad the button rawks ^_^. *poke* I really should get back to this physics, but I am bored of it, the sight of it makes me fed up.

On another note today, came home from work and jumped pretty much into a shower, damn ceilings with fibreglass coated dust in them (or was it the other way around :S?) Anyway I was itching all over my arms and ears so off I went to rid myself of the itching. Back to physics *winches self in towards the dreaded coursework*

… and so do I!

Subject of the conversation is driving tests, as this blog doesn’t stretch back far enough in time I shall point out that I passed 1^st June 2005, first time around.

(18:48:00) Peter: wooo cancellation at St. George on 16th May
(18:48:14) Peter: its at 10:44 not at 1:33 though
(18:48:24) Peter: oh wait! theres a 13:33!!!
(18:48:39) Peter: *goes to check it is actually earlier…*
(18:48:41) Peter: wooo!
(18:48:59) Peter: give give give give
(18:49:18) Peter: mine mine mine
(18:49:20) Peter: want want want
(18:52:50) Me: lol lol lol
(18:53:04) Peter: no more crappy test at Southmead
(18:53:39) Peter: cause everyone who takes a test at 13:33 seems to pass :/
(18:56:47) Peter: Snen passed yesterday at 13:33
(18:56:51) Peter: Katie passed at 13:33
(18:56:56) Peter: on her 3rd go ^_^
(18:57:28) Me: match is made
(19:05:11) Me: maybe its a girl thing
(19:05:23) Peter: maybe
(19:05:27) Peter: I should pass then ^_^

Note: Irrelevant bits snipped

Quick post … Lifesize Pac Man ’nuff said. The Cat? Here. Smellyness, and Weston-Super-Mud.

So, I thought it was time to update my list of Mozilla Firefox extensions, at 3:20AM yes.

• Greasemonkey - User Scripts
• Firebug - Amazing web development debugging tool
• GMail Notifier - Because I never check me GMail

What do you look for in a bulletproof server? High redundancy and reliability for mission critical applications? No, neither do Hewlett Packard they appear to actually want their servers to be bulletproof, they took one StorageWorks XP12000 Disk Array and shot it with a .308 calibre bullet. Result… a working server with a hole in it (and void warranty.)

Read More | Video

Just a quick one … The Roof is on Fire.

Meet the real “Sir Walter Mitty” a.k.a “Captain Sir Alan Mcilwraith, KBE, DSO, MC” should be known as Alan Mcilwraith ex. Dell call centre employee. His version of the Wikipedia article is highly entertaining, is it the noticeable lack of English skills or the lies with big fat bullshit signs above? Maybe he needs a Bullshit bag.

Went to see Ice Age The Meltdown last night with a few friends, good film but the story line is not as good as the original. Still well worth the money though, even though the induced laughing was painful to me. First post for a while now, hum ho.

I have taken a couple of hours this weekend to secure my server a bit more, this entailed installing Firehol and fail2ban, this combination of goodies gives me server nice layer of protection to sit behind. A very secure firewall, which should protect against DoS attacks and other nasties, and only allow certain connections to make a connection to my server (http, https, ssh, ftp, smtp.) fail2ban is the dead cool bit start trying to guess my ssh password, or guess the phpMyAdmin password you get your ass firewalled off my server :). Ohh and I get an e-mail telling me ;).

When I have a little more time I need to configure the firewall to only allow certain outgoing connections to for added security.

Thanks to Martin for a little inspiration, encouragement, and documentation!