Chris’ Blog

It’s about time I wrote an entry about this amazing opportunity I have been given, I have joined the phpBB development team and I will be helping them with their journey towards the next major release, 3.2 or Ascraeus. Sadly I am currently quite busy with stuff that needs finishing off before I can jump in and start committing, but I am immensely looking forward to being in the thick of it so to speak.

I’m not sure what I can really say to that, other than n00b!

One of my NSLU2’s went up the swanny two weeks back. Typically it was the one 80 miles away at home, that not only is my primary mail exchanger but also the DHCP server for my home network, chances are somebody might notice. Thankfully I have the ability to fail over DHCP onto sandman with a one line configuration change and a restart of dnsmasq, which I did.

Whilst I was at home this past week I got to work trying to work out what was up. The documentation in Debian about the LED sequences told me that it was getting stuck at the initramfs stage of boot. Basically it couldn’t load the actual operating system off the discs. This meant I would have to delve deep and play with the contents of the flash memory.

I mounted the USB sticks that I use as its discs on my server and extracted a copy of the current kernels and initramfs images that were on it. I also found the Debian installation flash firmware and set about hacking the two. I found some instructions on how to modify an existing image which is what I did. I swapped out the kernel and initramfs in the firmware for the latest ones on my discs and flashed the NSLU2. Same thing happened! So I then set about using the previous kernel version which worked like a charm. For now I have removed the new kernel from it and forced it to keep the old version. I will look into updating it when I have a little more time.

A new month a new desktop wallpaper:

This is getting better (or worse):

(13:50:58) ####: im doing very important questing
(13:53:17) ####: im feeling very multi coloured, green cape, blue boots and black rather revealing (warlock) armour
(13:53:43) ####: my excuse is, im a caster with low strength, my armour can’t be too “complete”

(13:21:49) ***#### played waaay too much NWN2 last night O_O
(13:21:53) Me: lol
(13:21:58) ####: i had a dream about my Teifling hero :p
(13:22:15) Me: you sure you just weren’t still playing?
(13:22:40) ####: dude, she was naked.. that dont happen in NWN2 i doubt
(13:22:47) ####: oddly her horns dissapeared, but hey
(13:22:52) Me: erm
(13:23:02) Me: bash.org tbfh
(13:23:09) ####: LOOOL

… about this. Well more likely is I am just being too lazy. But it has been quite a while since I wrote anything of much substance up here, currently I am unable to sleep which sucks somewhat. I’ve been very busy as of late, I’ve finished my quite frankly ludicrous 5 week “Easter” “break” where I did not much but work, bum around, and drove places. So I am back at the grindstone that is university, ploughing through coursework at such a rate I guess I could describe as “relaxed” but that maybe pushing definition boundaries. I’m looking forward to next week when the last of my coursework is handed in and I am free to revise for exams, oh heck!

I’ve had a new desktop for the latter part of April inspired by a trip to Weston’s Cider of Much Marcle, Herefordshire over me holiday.

I am moving towards a landmark on last.fm, 100 000 tracks played. Not decided what will be my 100 000th track hopefully I don’t go over it by mistake with something non-worthy.

I leave you with the thought, why would a dairy company write “Allergy information: contains milk” on the side of a bottle of milk? Surely that is the whole idea? Or maybe I am missing something…

I am currently enjoying the visual refresh Wordpress has been given in version 2.5. Its quite cool.

(08:23:11) Me: dude
(08:23:43) Me: we’ve been on keyboard websites for nearly 45 mins xD
(08:23:52) Squire James: sad eh?
(08:24:01) Me: maybe xD