Matt's page where he writes things

Solaris 10 RAID bug 6901327 - better workaround

2011-06-02T12:09:00.003+01:00

Ahoy.
If you've just initialized RAID 1 on 2 disks with a recent Solaris 10, you'll hit a bug - 6901327. Label can't be written to the disks after you initialize a RAID volume.

The workaround in the bugnotes is pretty shit - you have to use an earlier version of Solaris, boot off that in Single user mode and create your label. This sucks so here's a quicker way:

After you create the volume, issue (if c1t0d0 is your new RAID volume):
format -e c1t0d0
label
1
Yes
q
format -e c1t0d0
label
0
[enter]
[enter]
[enter]

You'll create an EFI label, which isn't what you want but it will write. Then you change this to an SMI label - which is what couldn't be written in the first place.

Laters

DHCP interface on startup with Solaris 10

2011-06-02T12:00:00.003+01:00

I want interface 3 to bring up DHCP on startup. I asked the Internet and it said:
Create a file called dhcp.e1000g2 in /etc, upon reboot all will be fine. Neins! I get an error on startup, 'Failed to configure IPv4 DHCP' etc....
So instead of spending more time troubleshooting, you can get around this with a script in rc2:

/etc/rc2.d/S30g2IFConf
#!/sbin/sh
# Script to bring up g1000e2 and assign DHCP on startup for management
ifconfig e1000g2 plumb
ifconfig e1000g2 dhcp
exit 0

Putting the script in RC2 makes it run on runlevel2. Read up on Google for more info on that.

Laters

Emulating Sparc Solaris on x86 - NEIN

2011-03-14T10:44:00.002Z

Howdy. So I'm trying to install a Sparc version of Solaris on an x86 VM because:

- There's no spare Sparc machine around here powerful enough for what I need

- The one I can find is a POS and won't really do anything

- It'd be grand to be able to do it on my laptop

So installed qEmu which uses Bochs as an emulator. It doesn't boot Solaris - getting a system halted error. Apparently something to do with resource redirection.

One must now find a spare Sparc machine with enough power. NEIN!

Amusing IM #32840324

2010-03-01T15:30:00.001Z

(3:27:27 PM) Matt: mr salesman
(3:27:38 PM) Matt: weird that you're selling a load of bits and bytes init
(3:27:40 PM) Matt: not like a fat chair
(3:27:46 PM) Matt: or a massive load of jam
(3:27:52 PM) Matt: 'would you like any jam'
(3:27:54 PM) Matt: 'no'
(3:27:56 PM) Matt: 'oh'
(3:27:57 PM) Chris: im essentially just selling the rights to use it
(3:28:01 PM) Matt: see that's what your job would entail
(3:28:05 PM) Matt: if you sold jam
(3:28:13 PM) Chris: yeah hard
(3:28:28 PM) Matt: or I guess when you had been there for a while, you'd be able to bust out multiple jams

15 second exposure out the window

2010-01-12T00:58:00.001Z

15 second exposure out the window
Originally uploaded by matt512

Let it snow

2010-01-11T21:53:00.004Z

Snow everywhere at the moment. It's well fun, non-fatal ammunition wherever you go and building material for silly shaped men/women made from the snowy stuff in all of the parks and open areas.

Cars seem to have a lot of fun in it too.

Tings that have occured:

1_ Christmas and New Year
Was alright. Got a UX2 guitarport and it's mucho fun. And some Maltesers but these are over now. And some port, and a shirt with some hilarious picture of a man bending over and a petrol pump in him and 'assume the position' written on it. I can thank Gemma for that.

Went to London for a day with Max and company, pretty hilarious time ensued. Crusing around trying to find the crowbar only to find it was shut and accidentally set off it's alarm. Got a Sherlock Holmes shirt too. Ole'

Reading daytime New Years and then to the pub night time. Was a good night.

Also somewhen in between Christmas and New Year there I ended up at the Purple Turtle at 4AM with Steve and got the train at 5:30

2_ I want a projector

3_ I have a plant called Henry, he's a Yucca and has been alive now for at least 3 months I think

That is all

Pingtest.net has MOS scores!

2009-12-04T13:28:00.001Z

Booze game

2009-09-27T22:30:00.000+01:00

(11:28:11 PM) Matt: one called ring of fire which involved a cake
(11:28:23 PM) Matt: and you have 4 whisky shots lined up (doubles) and then at the end a candle and a cake
(11:28:26 PM) Matt: and you can't use your hands
(11:28:35 PM) Matt: and you do 1, 2,3,4 then eat the cake without setting yourself on fire
(11:28:48 PM) Dossett: ha well good

Testing Windows 7 SMB 2.0 BSOD Exploit!

2009-09-15T10:07:00.002+01:00

Friend and colleague Cedric told me about an exploit uncovered a week or so back (read about it here) that allows remote users on a network, to blue screen a machine running Vista, Windows 7 or Server 2008.

This is because these OS versions run SMB 2.0, and are suceptible to a malformed packet, causing a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA blue screen of death.

Apparently, this is fixed in Windows 7 7100, at least with the update I'm currently running.

First, Cedric found a working Python install on the lab unix cluster. So the script was edited to include my IP address and run on the machine.

At first it was thought that perhaps SMB was blocked from lab to the user network, but this works fine - as you can see with these packets:

Ping from unix cluster in lab:
757 2009-09-15 10:46:30.618160 UNIX(IP-Removed) Win7(IP-Removed) ICMP Echo (ping) request

Here's a couple of MS DS packets coming in from the python script on the unix cluster:
49 2009-09-15 10:45:56.127200 UNIX(IP-Removed) Win7(IP-Removed) TCP 49065 > microsoft-ds [SYN] Seq=0 Win=49640 Len=0 MSS=1460 WS=0
71 2009-09-15 10:45:59.504096 UNIX(IP-Removed) Win7(IP-Removed) TCP 49065 > microsoft-ds [SYN] Seq=0 Win=49640 Len=0 MSS=1460 WS=0

And a reset from my machine:
85 2009-09-15 10:46:04.018977 UNIX(IP-Removed) Win7(IP-Removed) TCP 49065 > microsoft-ds [RST] Seq=1 Win=49640 Len=0

So it would appear the exploit is fixed in the evaluation build, 7100, of Windows 7. No BSOD.

Interesting experiment! Would be nice to get this working on a Vista machine. There's a laptop around here running it, I should find it and try.

Diego Garcia...

2009-07-26T16:46:00.003+01:00

Haha... Wut? Diego Garcia?!

Was searching for anything tagged as Military Base near Menwith Hill in the UK - and Google Maps suggested I search instead for Diego Garcia.

After further investigation - this isn't in fact a Mexican pop singer. It's actually an island in the Indian Ocean.

From Wikipedia:
Diego Garcia is an island considered the largest atoll, in terms of land area, of the Chagos Archipelago, and is part of the British Indian Ocean Territories.

In the 1960s, the Chagos archipelago was secretly leased to the United Kingdom and detached from Mauritius with the intention of expelling its entire population and establishing a military base.

So there..!

Dour Festival

2009-07-21T11:00:00.002+01:00

Dour was hilarious.
Atmosphere there was like a friendly version of Reading and less violent - I didn't get set on fire once, the food and drink is cheaper, the bar helped me stash a box of wine and the beer token stands were always fast to get served at. Bands were easy to go from and to - a good festival design.

http://www.dourfestival.be/en/2009/byday

Chicken, tomato, onion stew with pasta

2009-06-09T20:00:00.002+01:00

4 Chicken legs on the bone
1 Red onion
2 Cloves of garlic or some ready crushed shit
Some chilli flakes (leave the amount up to you - don't overpower it, if you use a lot, put it in early)
Couple of mushrooms cut into small slices or cubes
Tablespoon of olive oil
Cup of water (loads of fluid, we will cook the shit out of it)
2 large tomatoes

For the tomato sauce, you can either:

Get a 330ml pot of ready made tomato sauce with basil, or
Make your own:
3 tablespoons tomato puree
2 more really finely chopped/crushed large tomatoes
Water - a cup?
Salt, pepper
Basil

So now you have the ingredients, fry the chicken on a medium heat for 10 minutes or so - so the skin is browned. While you do this, put everything else in a pot, chop the tomatoes quite liberally so they are thick slices - make sure the pot is big enough to allow everything to sit and stew.

You want to give it a good stir and heat this up the same time you fry the chicken. Then when everything is hot, put the chicken in and stir it a bit.

Then leave it for like 20 minutes on medium/low heat and cover it. Then give it a quick stir and put the lid back on. We want the chicken to cook through properly, and this will be much better with the lid on.

So leave for another 10 or 15, until it's bubbled away for some time and the chicken will be done. Check the chicken if you like, it will probably be falling off the bone anyway at this stage.
Then uncover, and leave again - you may need to increase the heat a couple of notches to get it bubbling with no lid -but watch the burning on the pan. Stir more often!

While this is bubbling away, leave until it's a bit more cooked down, then stick the pasta on, if you want it with pasta. Will be good with rice too.

You can crack some pepper on it just before serving.

Great with red wine, or a cold lager if you made it spicy.

Also - leaving this in the fridge for a night, then cooking up again next day with a bit of water and oil is great. The flavours really get into the chicken.

Chicken with mango and spicy pasta

2009-03-04T20:23:00.003Z

Chicken with Mango salsa with spicy tomato pasta

Mango, Pineapple, Papaya

Put the oven on at about 220*C (fan oven) and put the kettle on with 500ml water.

On a baking tray, put about 30x30cm foil, a bit of oil and some chilli flakes. I put a bit of cracked black pepper too but probably didn't make any difference.

Get a chicken piece and make some large cuts in it, probably half deep in the chicken. Put this on the baking tray.
On the chicken goes some more chilli flakes and some chopped garlic if you can be arsed. Otherwise I put a little finely chopped onion, and then the Mango, Pineapple and Papaya salsa. I guess not quite enough to totally cover the chicken piece. But it's up to you. Remember there will be sauce with the pasta too.

Get a tomato and chop it coarsely, quite thick slices, then half the slices and put them so they're on the chicken but upright at the side if that makes sense. Standing up, one could say. But leaning on the chicken. A bit like a drunk waiter. Anyway, once that's on there, fold up the foil to make a miniature tent above the chicken with a gap above, to trap the steam.

Then best to put it in the oven or it will be shit and raw and noone will eat it.

Then put the pasta on, I cooked that, drained it, added tomato and basil sauce then when that's finished warming through, hopefully (around 15-20 minutes later) you should have the chicken ready as well. Combine cooked chicken + pasta with sauce and you have yourself food hopefully.

Found it nice with red wine. But then I find everything nice with red wine.

Laters

Tomato sauce with Basil

Dog in suit court case with cat party fun time

2009-02-17T22:55:00.001Z

So I sent Nick the picture of the hilarious amazing dog in suit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matt512/3281141827/

And this happened:

(23:51:56) Nick: he's the lawyer in that cat abuse case
(23:52:00) Matt: haha yeh
(23:52:02) Nick: he's working for the defense
(23:52:13) Nick: the whole crux of his argument is , fuck it its just a cart
(23:52:17) Nick: CART
(23:52:19) Matt: ITS A CART
(23:52:23) Matt: then the other lawyer goes
(23:52:26) Matt: its actually a cat
(23:52:28) Matt: and the dog goes
(23:52:29) Matt: OAR
(23:52:32) Matt: and walks out
(23:52:38) Nick: hahaha
(23:52:42) Matt: and its silent
(23:52:45) Matt: then you hear the door go again
(23:52:48) Matt: and he comes back in
(23:52:54) Matt: and goes 'forgot my jacket'
(23:52:56) Matt: and gets it
(23:53:00) Matt: everyone watching him
(23:53:08) Nick: haha
(23:53:10) Matt: and as he gets to the door he opens it and holds it and stops and looks around
(23:53:16) Matt: and says 'well is anyone else coming?'
(23:53:23) Matt: and everoyne just gets up and joins him
(23:53:29) Matt: then it cuts to a fat party with balloons
(23:53:32) Nick: hahahahahaha
(23:53:32) Matt: and those blowy things
(23:53:34) Matt: that goes EHHH
(23:53:38) Matt: and theres fun party music
(23:53:41) Matt: BUT NOT TOO HEAVY
(23:53:46) Matt: and the dog is still in his suit
(23:53:49) Matt: and the judge is drunk
(23:54:24) Nick: hahah BLOG THIS NOW
(23:54:31) Matt: hokai

The end

Hot dog

2009-01-31T00:19:00.001Z

I made a hot dog:

Half a tortilla wrap
Herta hot dog
Some chilli flakes

In the microwave for 1 minute

Put some tomato ketchup on it

Eat it

Then go to bed

2009-01-14T21:00:00.002Z

Today the tube on the way in to Central, the driver braked so hard some people like flew around a little bit, when it stopped dead in the tunnel, another train shot past as soon as we stopped.

I think someone missed a red light in the tunnel or something...

I tell you, if everyone outsourced their train operations to Germany, life would be easier. I've not seen a better public transit system than I have there - only in major cities and intercity/international services, but still, best country yet. I guess the worst is either here or Spain, followed by the UK probably, but then I have an almighty grudge against UK public transport (price vs. quality of service doesn't add up for me and all the staff are ... yeh.).

Just found a Belgian rock band from Antwerp, called K's Choice. Listening to a nice song called My Heart on Last FM. I've got 'Alanis Morissette' similar radio on.

Maybe I should sleep.

- Listening to Last.FM more ('Alanis Morissette' keyword is brilliant for evening listening)

Netbook fun, Shure earphones, New mouse

2009-01-11T17:53:00.002Z

So after a week or so playing with Ubuntu on the Acer Aspire one, I figured, let's put XP on this.
And I am really happy that I did. Took around an hour to get up and running - drivers downloaded really slowly but other than that, plain sailing really. EAP and 802.11x out of the box, so could connect to Corporate auth in seconds and be up on the network.
Windows GUI does an alright job, but using hidden SSIDs can cause it to not find a network for ages... so put Secure Services Client on it. Now it's working like a charm.

Also, last week took the thing apart to put some more RAM in. I had a spare 512MB stick in my drawer so used that - but it does only take an additional 1GB stick. So I brought the total system RAM to 1GB - there's 512MB soldered to the mainboard.
It's fast! But a lot of effort to put more RAM in. Be warned!

Tips for moar netbook friendly XP:
* Turn off visual themes and effects apart from ClearType
* Change screen DPI to 85%
* Disable login theme (regedit themeenabled to 0 - google it)
* Install Firefox with some nice theme like Foxkeh
* Twitterfox
* Pidgin instead of MSN (way faster)
* Skype is good for video - built in webcam
* Put a big Wall-E sticker on the back of it (also makes it faster)
* Update the BIOS for more reliable sleep and WiFi
* Speedfan doesn't work

All for now on the netbook. It's a great little machine. Next week I will order the massive battery for it, apparently 10 hours or something. Result.

Shure ES110
OK so I feel ripped off by Media Markt for these, after now looking on the net and comparing the inflated price I paid for them, but they are awesome! They go really loud, are immensely clear and with the right earbud combinations (comes with like... 6 or something) they block out all other sound for a truly disorientating, weird, talk-to-yourself style immersive listening experience.

Also, I got a mouse... Logitech something or other - that rules as well. Laser reads loads of surfaces, and the receiver is so small, you can leave it in your laptop. OR, put it away in a little house provided in the base of the mouse. Complete with awesome red eject button.

The scroll wheel is cool... you can scroll normally, like click.click.click, or you can press it like a button and release, and it changes the gearing so it's a free flying wheel. And you can spin it for like 7-8 seconds in one hit, flying through massive documents and stopping by stopping the wheel. Useful.

And it has a green light on it, which is the icing on the cake... Nah really it's got a good weight, and feels nice to use.

Unknown how long it will be until my hearing is damaged from these earphones, but they're slightly too awesome to stop using for now.

Chorizo on toast

2009-01-04T20:31:00.002Z

Nice Italian inspired snack

- Roll with olive pieces in
- Chorizo with nuts in
- Feta cheese
- Shredded sun dried tomato
- Chillis
- Green pesto
- Extra virgin olive oil

So you get a nice roll with olive bits in, spread over the pesto, then some feta cheese cubes, shredded tomato pieces, put the slices of chorizo around the cheese, sprinkle on the chilli seeds from inside the chillis, and then drizzle over a little extra virgin olive oil.

Put it under a grill for 5-10 minutes - the cheese will burn if left too near the top of the grill.

Then eat it massively. Recommended with cold Orangina from a tin.

2008-12-26T18:14:00.002Z

Picked up the Acer Aspire One 120GBNetBook a couple of hours ago.

First impressions of the machine are good - but the OS it comes with is really quite limiting if you like to piss around more than the average Internet browser user. Otherwise it's simple and straightforward to use.

Not sure if it's making full use the Atom power management - fan seems to ramp up to max when idle and battery life says 2 hours, with screen on full and WiFi in close proximity to the base station.

Sound is expectedly tinny but it goes reasonably loud and you can comfortably watch YouTube on the thing without trying too hard to hear some guy shout 'GET OUT OF MY CLOSET' at a cat.

It's not silent - but can't control the fan speed with the built-in apps so I will see how loud each component is later on when I get some other OS on this thing. Thinking about Ubuntu 8 and disabling Compiz and making all the text really small to maximize use of the small screen.

One thing my laptop (IBM T60) has that this small one doesn't - a built in light for the keyboard, which I actually use quite a bit. So we will see if this is a problem, especially when getting used to the new really small keys on this thing.

Wireless range is good, antenna must be in a decent position inside the case. No bluetooth is a little bit gay but the built in camera is a nice touch. Not bad quality, but the framerate is around 5fps. We will see what new OS and software will do to this too. Also I wonder if I can put more RAM in too.

Well *I haven't dropped the bastard yet, so we will see how long she lasts.
Tschuss!

Some things I want to do

2008-12-08T00:24:00.002Z

Here are some tasks that I wish to complete by Christmas.

Obtain the following DVDs:

Grave of the Fireflies
Spirited Away 2 disc set

Watch the following:

Wall-E 1080p on a fat projector
Bleach anime that Karl gave me
Louis Theroux Philadelphia documentary

Go to media markt and finally decide on which netbook I will get

Visit the Atomium restaurant

Practise guitar for an hour a day

Go to Aachen

That is all for now

Windows XP Crash on Demand

2008-12-08T00:21:00.001Z

If you need to generate a memory/kernel dump for any reason, you can force XP into a blue screen of death:

Hold right control key, press scroll lock twice quickly

There is a registry setting that is to be enabled for this to work - however it was already enabled here. I can't tell if it's enabled on a standard XPSP2 build (this is a custom corporate build).

Obviously this will hang your session so I don't need to tell you to save your work before doing it.

Recipe: Pesto pasta with Chorizo, Chicken, Chilli

2008-11-22T14:15:00.004Z

Pesto Pasta with Chorizo, Chicken, Chilli

Quite a good one this. Quite fun to make, takes ~15 minutes.

Ingredients per person:

Pasta - Penne Rigate number 73
Bertolli Est. 1865 Extra virgin olive oil - 2.5 tablespoons
Chicken - 1 breast (hurrhurr)
Unpeppered Chorizo - 8 ~4mm Slices
Red Chillis in Vinegar - 2
Dried 'Blue Elephant' Red Thai Bangkok Chillis - 3
Pesto alla Genovese - 2 hearty teaspoons
Cracked black pepper
Little bit of salt
Tiny bit of that green mixed herb shit that I can't remember while writing the recipe and drinking scotch

Cut the chicken into thin strips, think stir fry but a little bigger maybe. Up to you really but this way, you really get the oils and stuff around the chicken pieces.

Get a good wide pan for the meats and stuff, and another for the pasta. Put boiling water in one and fill full of however much pasta you will need, it's up to you really. I put shit loads in then end up having leftover.

Now put your pan on the heat and add the olive oil. Be plentiful, we're not cooking bacon - this oil is part of the ingredients, not just to stop it from sticking. (But please don't put the whole bottle in that's silly). (If you do, take a picture). -Here is where you adjust timings if you like your pasta really soft. Leave it two minutes until you put the meat on here. Otherwise, it will be just a little al' dente.

Get two of the chillis in vinegar (shake off the vinegar) and take off the stalks - cut in two and rub them between your fingers so they break open - now put them in the oil (skin as well, it's not dried because of the vinegar). This will flavour the oil with chilli goodness.

Chop the chorizo while this is heating up - but just as the chilli seeds start to go a little nuts, put in the chicken closely followed with chorizo. The oil will be hot so stir like a bastard for a bit and maybe turn it down to 7/10, or if you're on a gas hob GTFO instead.

Pasta might be going a bit crazy now so to avoid hot water everywhere, turn it down maybe.

Stir everything around as usual, and now add two thai chillies. Then occasionally stir for a few minutes - until the pasta is ready.
watch the chicken to make sure it's cooked. The two pans should be ready at around the same time if you like your pasta a little al' dente, if not then adjust timing at the start.

Just before you're ready - grind in the black pepper. You can add a bit of salt but the chorizo probably takes care of this for you.

So turn down the meat pan to like 3 and then drain the pasta. Add however much pasta you want to eat to the meat pan, and then put in the pesto. Stir around massively and add one further thai chilli here for back-of-the-throat heat!

Serve with ice cold lager because it's great for the throat with the chilli. May I suggest Heineken, Jupiler, anything light. Strong beer might not mix with the chorizo.
Or a nice red wine - but I am no wine expert. Choose one that goes with rich, spicy, salty food.

I'm off to drink scotch and hope it starts snowing again. Ole'!
Laters

Evidence of foreigners

2008-11-18T21:37:00.001Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bTFMDKe2KI

Fatly hot accidental noodles

2008-11-13T21:52:00.002Z

Wurr, made some cheap prawn flavour noodles, in an attempt to stop the actual prawn flavour from surfacing (salt and MSG in a packet) I added some Cayenne pepper... but I opened the massive side of the lid and it all fell in, so I stirred it around, added a bit of Nando's hot sauce and some honey (?!?!), bit more water, stirred it around turned up massively until I cooked the shit out of it and it was like thick, then ate it.
It was so hot, like... towards the end it was like eating a hot vindaloo, massively flavoursome and ridiculously hot.

So there you are. Don't do that #5949393 from my litany of things not to do during your day.

Not used this in a while...

2008-11-13T20:20:00.002Z

But I like it! So will start using it now I think. Continue using the Tumblog for small things like quotes, reblogs of images and other crap... and this for... everything else... Vr...

5 Things I have done today: (Recurring post! Yay for recurring posts...)

1) Attended 5 hours of telepresence meeting
2) Got a large bottle of Coke Zero
3) Been dissapointed with a baguette
4) Listened to Less than Jake
5) Congratulated Seppe at work for passing his CCIE! Yay.

Now to go to the shop.
Wvr.

Service station

2008-07-09T23:06:00.001+01:00

I'm in Fleet service station

It's fun

Observing people on the train

2008-07-09T23:05:00.001+01:00

Out of the 25 odd people sat down in the section of train I'm in, only around 4 of them are not reading something, and just staring into space. Books are in decline but others read magazines, papers and many, their mobile device. I guess some are sending messages, not exactly reading... but there's a guy definitely reading something (and it looks quite interesting too) on his blackberry.
The 5 people standing in the doorway aren't reading at all. Most likely because it's quite difficult to stand up and also concentrate on reading. So what is everyone reading? Let's see.
One woman has a Douglas Adams novel, err I can't make out the title but it looks like around 350 pages. Guy sat next to me has the Evening Standard, and woman next to me has some Hot USA mag or some celebrity bollocks. Fair enough with it it's jus tnot my cup of tea to know that Jennifer Aniston likes carrots on a wednesday.
Actually that would be more interesting than what they print, because it's about OH MY GOD she turned the page and it's about 'hollywood's 10 best dressed little girls' and there's some small kid looking rather normal. But OMG she's in Hollywood so therefore has the attention of the world focused towards her. Next up, The Independant, read by the guy next to her.
Not a bad paper in my opinion, nice size for the train compared to the Guardian I had this morning. That was massive and got in the way quite a bit. And of course we have the Mirror, he doesn't look like a mirror reader. Well maybe. I don't know. What does a mirror reader look like?
And right on time, the girl that was on the phone is quickly disconnected because there's no signal on the last quarter of the train journey. Therefore goes back to reading the phone.
Ooo now it's the TV guide, trouble is I can't see what's on at 10PM tonight. Actually I can. Charlotte church on 4, Still game on 2, News on 1 and 3... That's tomorrow though.. how dissapointing.
Oh she's found some signal, my headphones went quiet as the song changed and she's dutifully saying 'its fine, its the middle of the country init'. Yes love it is. Ha what a weird mood I am in this evening on the train. Signal's gonna go in a bit... wait for it... go on go on, I bet it doesn't, Oh gwell, time to put my laptop away and go and eat Nandos, and see the new Narnia film. I enjoyed the last one, hope this one's alright.

Well funny band, some other shit

2008-07-07T22:29:00.002+01:00

Listen to this
http://www.myspace.com/henryshitmat

Also watch this
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yGWY6do7GUw

Then do this
go to a web page, then enter this javascript into your address bar:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

It allows you to just edit the page (locally, of course..) but could make for some amusing pranks. (Tip, to get the original address bar back to fool a friend, click it and hit escape. Works in FF2 and FF3 AFAIK.)

So now I will sort out my washing and go play GTA4.


Links courtesy of Kimber and Wired reddit feed from Blogstorm.

Metronidazole and Alcohol - how much can you have?

2008-06-28T01:14:00.005+01:00

So antibiotics eey? The long standing tradition of not drinking while on antibiotics has come a reality this week.
In my quest to resume tradition of another booze fuelled weekend, I did a little research on this, as I originally thought that alcohol would inhibit the antibiotics, rendering them useless and therefore the course of medication is irrelevant. And the infection comes back and eats not only your healthy cells, but also your cat, TV, laptop AND drinking suit.

It appears that drinking does indeed change the effectivity of antibiotics, but not to such an extent where they stop working - the main worry is nausea, extreme vomiting and other fun effects - but it really does depends on what antibiotics you are on.

The first, err what's it called - Amoxicillin, is a penicillin based antibiotic - and is not really affected by the intake of alcohol. Drinking just after taking it isn't advised, but this is only because it can adversely affect the absorption into the stomach and digestive system - as with anything. So no actual reaction between the two.

Metronidazole however is a different kettle of fish. This can cause nausea, massive vomiting and tachycardia. So I wonder why?
It's something to do with limiting the body's ability to break down and metabolise the alcohol - by blocking the breakdown of propylene glycol in the liver. This increases the amount of propylene glycol in the blood, and can harm the liver and other fun items in the body that allow life to happen.

So it makes propylene glycol stay in my body for ages, so what does this do? Well it looks like it's used in loads of household goods, from deoderant sticks to being a moisturiser in cosmetics. It's even a safe food additive in the US (not checked other countries..) - However this method of ingestion (oral) is minimally effective, and is therefore deemed quite safe - but when propylene glycol is allowed into the bloodstream, intravenously as it were, it becomes quite dangerous.

To make use of this and try to find out how much booze I can actually consume before the propylene glycol becomes fatally toxic, I need to find out the fatal dose... for which there is no data.

Absorption rates in rats after ingestion is 90-100%, usually not building up in the body. But when breakdown is inhibited this could build up quickly.

Ingestion of a sufficient quantity can definitely cause death. 1g per KG of body weight, so say 90g of this stuff can affect the central nervous system, causing numbness, visual distortions etc.... Increase this to 3g/kg, and you get massively drunk, slurred speech and stupor/agitation mental state shifts.
Over that, you get coma, loss of reflexes and probably death.

So it's quite inconclusive unless data on how much of this stuff is held back by the body.

All of the above sounds like getting pissed anyway, but I don't think I will booze on during the course of these antibiotics. I will find out tomorrow.

Missing BBC Mashed... and Dentists...

2008-06-26T23:51:00.004+01:00

The Hack Day 2008 sounded really fun this year, with freeview boxes to hack up with a DVB-T signal radiating around, unlocked BBC content archives to play with and all other kinds of stuff from robotics to presentations on various interesting subjects.
Definitely trying to go next year!

So... anyone ever try to get dental work done in this country? What a ridiculous state of affairs. After being kept up all night by my tooth, I went to the dentist... paid about 50 quid so the lady could poke around and put my head in an x-ray machine, then said... sorry, no appointments until December. DECEMBER?! What use is that?!
So next week, to another dentist... and most likely another 50 quid... but will book the followup appointment before I even enter the building, using carrier pigeon and fire. That'll learn 'em. Bastards.

So off to bed I go, to get ready for a meeting tomorrow at 5:30PM... It's a bit unfair to ask the other end to get up at 8AM just so I can leave at 5 I suppose. I do get to use fun telepresence which still hasn't lost it's novelty. Then to the pub, where I can't drink, because of antibiotics.
I could do with a weekend off the booze anyway really... may very well use the time to rebuild studio PC thing - (read as 'get furious with massive PC and it's confusing partitions and RAID, probably play rockband or GTA4 and eat capital spare ribs. And play with IOU which I finally got an image for today.)

Matt out.

Caffe Nero

2008-06-18T18:43:00.002+01:00

I'm in Caffe Nero with a Latte, waiting to meet up with someone to start a spec for a website. Nothing too heroic I hope, just a solid front end with a few pages. It's for a charity, and the woman seems nice so hopefully will be a painless job. Gotta watch that feature creep though...

These few days lately have all been coffee fuelled keep-your-eyes-open competitions because of the weekend, so I hope I don't come across as my usual tired self. As most people know, that's kinda similar to a cross between Hitler and a furious devil shaped aubergine. (Aubergines are massively furious and snappy all the time.)

Matt's trip to the Cisco assessment centre - Fun times in Antwerp

2008-05-23T10:42:00.002+01:00

Went to the Kulminator last night, hilarious bar with 200 odd beers and 'the strongest beer in the universe'. So yeh got fatly drunk, was slurring hard apparently on the way home.
Quite funny. Going to go on the piss again in a bit, so yeh, see you later.

Matt's trip to the Cisco assessment centre - Went pretty well!

2008-05-22T18:08:00.002+01:00

I think the day went pretty well, quite confident about it. Really tiring day with role plays, HR interview, tech interview, presentations... but yeh a good day. Find out in a week or two.
They have a free soup machine, orange juice in tins and chocolate milk. Awesome!

Quite a good first day in Antwerp too, got the 'free' tram, went to the aquarium, had a waffle, walked around for ages. Gonna get some beers in a minute and get to know the two Australians in the room.

Matt's trip to the Cisco assessment centre - The Hotel

2008-05-20T21:18:00.002+01:00

So I got out of Brussels airport quite quickly, baggage claim is much simpler if you actually read the screen rather than walk past it like I did. Anyway the free shuttle bus took me to the hotel, and I got a bath. Nice room, had to pay for it and claim back which was a bit of a surprise. Anyhow, it's done and I have a bed.
Got the Wifi up (thanks iPass) and logged into the VPN, called dad etc.... then paced around my room worrying about tomorrow, blindly looking at ISDN specifications. So I wasn't learning anything - so I have a coffee. Doesn't really help, so I head to the bar with my laptop (where I am now).
Now I know what you'll think when you read this, he's getting trashed before the interview. Not the case! Not the case at all. It's just a more lively place to sit, and it sure does good for the nerves. I figure, stay here for an hour.
So some guys from CA are at the bar, and get me a drink with their round. So that's made me smile. It's nice to sit and try to relax for a bit at least before the day tomorrow.
Read some more stuff, see if any of it sinks in. Practise my 'I love Cisco because...', 'I am a motivated and ....' lines... and think about why I think I'm good at what I do.
So that's about it, for now! I hope it will be good news tomorrow.

Matt's trip to the Cisco assessment centre - The RailAir coach

2008-05-20T13:51:00.001+01:00

Haha spacious and new it says on the website. It's not the worst coach I've ever been on, and coaches are generally quite funny because of all the stupid noises they make and they go around towns and stuff so you see more - but this one is just.. average.
Not spacious at all really but whatever, it cost £14 and gets me to terminal 5. And it's not yet making many amusing noises either.

Anyway the funny bit about this is when I booked it, I wanted to keep the ticket completely electronic, so no paper is wasted. I wish more companies did this, so wanted to try it. Trouble is, I didn't really think this through, and a minute before the bus arrived I connected to the station WiFi, got the email up and wrote the reference number on my hand.

I was then told to see a lady who was supposed to sign my ticket, which was.. my hand... so she said it would be ok. So I present my hand to the driver who gives me a furious lecture in 'anyone could quote that reference number and your name'.... so I just got on the bus anyway and now I'm on the way to Heathrow.
This brings me to another point. Why do people have this urge to eat on transport. I don't really care that they're doing it, I mean, sure, if you're hungry, eat - but I've noticed loads of people 'need' food as soon as they're on a train, bus, plane, etc..... Is it because they're bored? I mean, on a train a sandwich costs about the same as a family car or a small plot of land in the real world, I just don't see the sense in it. I guess it's quite efficient, use the time on the train to feed yourself. But I maintain most of it is balls. Do what we did on the way to Prague and feed yourself on a bottle of rum. That way, you provide far more amusement (annoyance) to your friends (adjacent passengers) on the plane.

Not really much else to write on the bus so I'm gonna read some stuff on ISDN call setups and try to make sense of some diagrams. That will be my downfall... That and I don't have a clue on what I'm gonna do when I get there... We will see.

Drinking tea through a Kit Kat

2008-05-15T20:45:00.004+01:00

Thought I would document the experience of drinking tea through a Kit Kat Dark.
It's not so much what it does to the tea, but what the tea does to the Kit Kat.

For the uninitiated, the simple steps involve taking one finger of a kit kat, biting the ends off and then drinking tea through it like a straw.

The amount of tea that one can ingest with this method is minimal - but that's not important. After around 10-15 seconds, the kit kat absorbs the tea and the chocolate begins to melt. This is not a linear experience - chocolate around the fingers and of course in the tea melts first. Once the melted chocolate becomes too much, eat the end that was in the tea first. You'll notice it is much more like when a biscuit is dunked in tea. Eat the rest, and the different levels of both tea absorbency and chocolate solidity will provide a most enjoyable eating and drinking experience.

I chose the four finger kit kat model, also with dark chocolate. So this experience may be repeated! Three more times! Excellent.

Matt's 'see what happens' of the week - Results

2008-04-23T08:46:00.002+01:00

OK well that was pretty weird. Woke up every hour to two hours feeling really edgy and annoyed, and had a screwed up dream where ten to twenty guys were chasing me down a really dark and gas torch lit street (think of the game Thief) with hooks instead of one of their hands.

So cheese experiment = good choice if you want an interesting night with hardly any sleep.

Matt's 'see what happens' of the week

2008-04-22T23:19:00.002+01:00

OK here's one to raise some lulz. I have in front of me a selection of four french cheeses and two pieces of bread, quite a formidable snack before bed I hope you will agree. Apparently cheese offers bad/hilarious dreams, so I will eat it all and report tomorrow.

Karrion and Mr Temper

2008-04-20T23:13:00.002+01:00

Good turn out and a good night of music from Karrion and Mr Temper.
Some pics are up here: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/matt512/KarrionGig

Can't remember how I got home but managed it somehow. Good times.

Red Light Company and Mobius Band!

2008-04-09T09:38:00.003+01:00

What a show, saw these two bands at the Barfly last night. Both had amazing energy and the sound was great, quite a crowd. Last show on Mobius Band's tour, and they put loads of effort in. Fun bands to watch.

http://www.myspace.com/mobiusband - Friends like these

Sites of the week

2008-04-07T08:58:00.002+01:00

Here are a few pretty URLs to check out this week.

http://www.motionportrait.com/e/
Move the mouse around the face on the right. There's a fullscreen version that Jim showed me but I lost the URL...

http://www.cowshedproductions.co.uk/
Nice bright fullscreen flash site from Cow Shed Productions.

http://www.screenmedia.co.uk/
Really pretty flash site for a Glasgow based company. Leave it for long enough and the train sounds it's horn and drives across the bridge.

Also check out PingMag, there's an English edition of this Japanese art site.

Now to get on with work...

Bored on the train 2

2008-04-02T20:06:00.000+01:00

Train 2 - 2/1/8
=================
Mugabe and a story I thought of

So today Mugabe's opposition released their own results detailing their win. I'll have to read more about that later tonight because I didn't have much chance today.

Had an idea about a story that I would love to read or see as a film when I was on the bus this evening. It was the idea of a large town somewhere, that was completely stripped of all sense of civilization, and converted into a manufacturing machine for the unknowing trading businesses that bought the goods elsewhere in the world, through networks of traders that slowly got closer and closer to the truth. The calendar and system of time use there is different - numbered days that recur for reasons only to refresh old man-power and labour into the town, and other such business needs. The idea of a weekend, year, month is unknown - the only reason a day exists is because it gets dark. This decreases the chance that anyone working there will attach themselves to a sense of life. People are turned into machines through torture and barbaric abuse through chemical attacks to the brain, the vision of a man so deprived of sensical being, he sits motionless and emotionless in front of a sewing machine as guards beat him with chains - his facial expression doesn't change as the weapons break his bones and slowly cause his death. His loss of emotion is a common occurence within the town. The story could develop in several ways. One could be that a reporter or dealer works his / her way up the supply chain and finds out the horrible truth, and either becomes a worker or helps to bring down the regieme. At this point, it could be revealed that there are in fact thousands of these towns - or it could end happily somehow. Another way could be a fun revolution from the inside, secret underground army, a cartel of presumed dead workers that have setup a network of tunnels and watch posts to help the resistance. The reporter could find this resistance... many ways to make this story exciting. Very American that last ending, I like that.
Quite dark perhaps, but whatever. I think the fundementals of the story can be certainly transposed to certain parts of the world at the moment.

So I hope to run at the Over the Air Wireless conference that the BBC are putting on over the weekend. Registration has run out, so busy it will be.
Also, Internet World 2008 is on at the end of April, 28th I think for 3 days. Lots of seminars and talks on mainly web2.0 markets, and some technical stuff.
Final note - spring is cool when the sun's out. It makes people happy. It makes me happy. Bring on spring.

Bored on the train 1

2008-04-02T20:04:00.001+01:00

As the title suggests, I've written this on the train, and then uploaded it now. This is from 1/1/08.

Train 1 - 1/1/8
================
April fools day today, it's a stupid, fun and amusing concept that some of my favourite web companies take advantage of each year - namely Google; but apart from the obvious ones, Nick pointed out one I didn't know about today where three web comics had shifted their content to the right - i.e. comic A was on comic B's website, comic B was on comic C and comic C was on comic A's site.
Quite creative and nice to see that the three seperate creators get on to such extent. (Unless they all make the content together, I don't know, bit ignorant of that).

Something somewhat more serious that is occuring right now is the Zimbabwe election. The chance for another leader to replace Mugabe - and during the closing stages of vote counting, results become tied - then revealed are talks of Mugabe stepping down.
The politics and gravity of the situation are complicated and multi-angled, but what are we, the modern western world, to make of it when we are told several different stories... We can make up our own minds, and from the stories I've been told, I would prefer to see that country change rather than not.

That's what's problematic with leadership, you can be loved by many, but always hated by some. Drill down into the philosophy of morality and you'll find that neither party is right or wrong, just that the views are different - I reckon the greater good should come out on top, but who's to say what that is... I don't know.

Multicast... Wireless... Why?!

2008-04-02T09:28:00.002+01:00

Set up a multicast server yesterday (on my newly acquired DL380 G2, thanks Mark :)) relaying a simple 2 channel audio stream from the Internet edge to the LAN.

The problem arises with the wireless access points - the stream is skippy and rubbish when using the wireless connection - and the access points are going absolutely nuts.

Trying to troubleshoot the connection, I've made sure the server isn't sending out a rediculous amount of data. It's not, it's sitting around 0.2mb/s with no regular spikes in traffic. MTU should be regular ethernet. Checking connection usage on the wireless client (receiving workstation), it's also sitting around 0.2mbps, so that makes sense, it's receiving what the server is giving out.
But the access point is still going absolutely nuts, and in some cases traffic through the wireless connection slows to a crawl.

First thing I can think of is that the packet rate is way high, meaning that overhead associated with each packet is saturating the link, but this would show on a capture, and also show as network utilization.

Next thing is that maybe it's not to do with the IP layer, but the wireless transport - i.e. beacons or some such thing. This would explain how we can saturate the wireless link but not have it show up on the network utilization monitor. But why?

This doesn't happen with unicast streaming, which I have successfully cast over 7mbps MPEG2 video over wireless LAN using HTTP, which would create a wide range of packet sizes and retransmissions, surely enough to test for a 128k MP3 stream. So it most likely is multicast causing the problem...
Is the MTU set too high causing fragmentation?

Is it a propagation process that I don't know is happening? There's two wireless points on the network, could it be that? The server is using LAN teaming, but the older server I tried this on did not have that so that can be ruled out?

April Fools Round - Up

2008-04-01T14:19:00.003+01:00

Here's a round-up of the April Fools I have seen and have been sent today.

BBC iPlayer - Penguins Can Fly
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7320000/newsid_7324100/7324112.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm&asb=1&news=1&bbcws=1

Google Virgle - Start a colony on Mars
http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

YouTube - All featured videos lead to RickRoll
All featured video on the front page lead to Rick, Rolling... I thought this quite gutsy of YouTube

Google Mail - Custom Time
https://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

Google Wakeup - a large bucket to wake you for meetings
http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/new_wakeup.html

Ubuntu on my desktop

2008-03-17T09:23:00.002Z

I decided to move from Vista Business to Ubuntu yesterday. The complication is as follows -
I have 4 disks, 120GB each - in Windows I had 4 pagefile partitions, one on each disk. This speeds up apps like photoshop/premiere that can use four scratch disks. Having two controllers helped too. The rest was one small backup partition, 50GB or so for the OS and the rest as a dirty span set for my stuff.
So I formatted the 50GB OS partition, installed Ubuntu, and GRUB won't boot. In fact, GRUB didn't even install, so I booted from the CD and installed that... but something fun happens during the BIOS handover on boot, the disk IDs change. So what would be disk 2, becomes disk 0 - so GRUB is installed on the correct disk, but points to the wrong disk in config.
You just need to change the boot (hd2,0) to (hd0,0) and it works fine. Next I need to rebuild the NTFS MBR on the span set, and hopefully get the partition back inclusive of files! Which will be nice.

Now back to work...

2008-02-22T09:10:00.002Z

This is a comment or response to something Phil wrote.
Phil wrote:

Failure as a pursuit

1:55am Today

Writing is an excuse for the bored, repressed, disrespected, slowly-realising-the-subco

nscious fiend, pseudo-alcoholic, premature ejaculator, mongrel, male feminist to provide an outlet. What they do with that outlet is no ones business but their own.

The English 'academic' fatuation with dictators as an 'other' reveals the ideoogy of the buggered, public school slanted education system.

There is a worth to philiosophy. But it is worthless.

My comment wouldn't fit on the facebook comment thing, so I carried it forward to here:

As with any ideology or philosophy comes more than one side - as it is reason, not fact, which decides it's fate. Reason can never truely be quantified as it is a product of human nature.
When looking at why we choose to carry out the various thoughts and ideas that we do, we are only kept in line by human society and the collective judgement that is morality - defining what is 'sensible' and 'acceptable'. Therefore - if the end result of every single action we partake is inevitably death, then shouldn't we discount the idea of morality and society?
No, I don't think so. Why not?
Because we can't attain to control something that we do not understand. We could choose to try to control it, we often do control things we don't understand - but the consequences are unknown. Maybe there is a reason we are here, allowing society to tick over and 'get by', but I don't understand it, and I don't think anyone yet can. I sometimes see the ideal of religion as an escape or outlet for this fraustrating uncertainty, allowing something tangiable and reliable into your life in replacement for something that can never be found, but must be in order to realise your purpose and being.

2008-02-15T16:08:00.002Z

Consumption Diary

================

14th February 2008

---------------------------

7:30 F Porridge with sugar

8:30 D Latte

8:30 D Can of Coke

10:30 D Double expresso w/milk and chocolate

10:30 D 2 bottles of water

12:10 F Spaghetti Bolognaise

12:10 F Garlic Bread

12:30 F Cookie

12:30 D 2x200ml Pineapple Juice

12:50 D Double expresso w/milk

12:50 D Bottle of water

15:00 D Mocha

17:10 D Orange Juice

19:30 F Onion soup with bread and cheese

21:00 F Nandos quarter chicken, chips and corn, 1 x sprite, 1 x fanta

23:00 D Orange juice

End of day...

Made me laugh

2008-01-31T10:27:00.000Z

On Jan 30, 2008 8:38 PM, Chris Kimber <*> wrote:

So a typical night then!

On 30 Jan 2008, at 20:27, Matt Barber <*> wrote:

Got in about an hour ago, gonna make tea, install solaris and play with streaming some media over 3G

Conversation Blog - 'Alien Rock wtf'

2008-01-23T09:07:00.000Z

(9:01:46 AM) Matt: in the metro this morning theres a full page with LOOK LIFE ON MARS OMGZ
(9:01:53 AM) Nick: hah
(9:01:54 AM) Matt: and its a rock that looks like a bloke
(9:01:56 AM) Nick: i was gonna mention that
(9:02:00 AM) Nick: i think its a bloke
(9:02:04 AM) Nick: its more fun if its a bloke
(9:02:05 AM) Matt: fatly a rock!
(9:02:12 AM) Matt: be so cool if it was a bloke
(9:02:18 AM) Matt: but i reckon its a rock...
(9:02:40 AM) Nick: suxh a weird shape rock tho
(9:02:46 AM) Matt: well yeh but it is mars
(9:02:48 AM) Matt: SPACE
(9:02:50 AM) Nick: lol!
(9:02:50 AM) Matt: ROCK
(9:02:56 AM) Nick: stil think its a bloke
(9:03:07 AM) Nick: probably one of the NASA camera crew, didnt realise he was in shot
(9:03:18 AM) Matt: i dont reckon aliens would look like blokes if they didn't know they were meeting us
(9:03:29 AM) Matt: probably take on the form of a homosapien to seem more nice
(9:03:35 AM) Matt: if they knew
(9:03:40 AM) Nick: lol
(9:03:42 AM) Nick: what if
(9:03:48 AM) Nick: we all came from a common ancestry
(9:04:10 AM) Matt: like... a universe hitler wide one?
(9:04:20 AM) Nick: massively
(9:04:30 AM) Nick: a giant gits sac baby in the sky
(9:05:02 AM) Matt: aye maybe... if you think of all the variants and weird stuff on our planet tho... and thats limited to our climate, temperature and atmosphere etc
(9:05:26 AM) Matt: say some weird planet a billion miles away where entities live on magnetic fields or another way of energy rather than food etc
(9:05:30 AM) Matt: could look realyl different
(9:05:35 AM) Nick: but the basic template could easily be configured to work on earth
(9:05:37 AM) Nick: well yes
(9:05:41 AM) Nick: but thats a million miles away
(9:05:51 AM) Nick: THIS IS 2 MATT
(9:05:53 AM) Nick: 2 MILES!!
(9:05:59 AM) Nick: IT ONLY TAKES 30 SECONDS TO MARS
(9:06:09 AM) Nick: (injection of popular reference = +5 points)
(9:06:18 AM) Matt: well yeh but im just sayin that even with a basic original ancestory we could be vastly different to any aliens
(9:06:20 AM) Matt: hahaha
(9:06:37 AM) Matt: be fun to blog that last bit of conversation
(9:06:41 AM) Matt: was interesting and funny at the same time
(9:06:44 AM) Nick: haha yeh
(9:06:47 AM) Nick: doit

Evil Duck

2008-01-13T20:23:00.000Z

Evil duck can do many things we can't. He is also several things that you wouldn't expect a duck to be.

For instance:

Microwave food without a microwave
Read data from a DVD without a player - he can read it using his eyes alone
Evil duck doesn't care about your firewall - he IS the firewall
at 13:37 each day he emits a sound that only other evil ducks can hear
Can change light bulbs with his mind
Frequently visits the late 20's to enjoy gangsters, swing and jazz

Evil duck likes film, music and the arts. More details on this soon.

Mango/Gig/Booze

2008-01-12T14:39:00.000Z

Had a thought a few days ago to write what I eat... and I'm about to eat a mango... exciting times. Had lasagne for dinner yesterday and when I was drunk bought a massive Chinese, left it out and warmed it up this morning.

Gig tonight, the venue used to be renowned for being massively rough but apparently it's changed so will have to see what happens. 24 Hour booze so it's bound to be quite hilarious whatever happens.

Dan's here with a bag of beer, but the trouble is we can't drink it. It's not a physical disability that stands in our way, it's just a massive hangover. I know the advice is generally to keep drinking but unfortunately we've sobered up enough now to feel the effects of not being drunk... See what happens after the mango. Hopefully Kimber will come over and encourage the drink situation.

Blog a Day!

2008-01-06T03:13:00.000Z

So Kimber seems up for Blog a Day, which is where a few of us try to write on our blogs once a day. But decided earlier was that we don't try to write once a day if we can't write anything - but set a benchmark of at least twice a week. This should strike a balance between creativity, useful interest and general post interestingness.

Wvr.

So yeh, might as well start with a nice usual post of what I achieved today. Woke up hungover at 1PM, played guitar hero 2 for a few hours, then moved my room around a bit. Drank a few tins, went to the pub, came home again.
Ate a Chinese curry too, that was pretty awesome. Tomorrow, I will meet Edd in Camden for some banter.

Just found this weird:

Add a video to your blog:
Please select a file.

We accept AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real and Windows Media, 100 MB maximum size.

100 MB Maximum size?!?! Few years ago you were lucky to get 100MB on your hard disk. God, youngsters these days have it lucky. Good times tho. And it can transcode. Love to see their render farm.

phil's idea

2007-12-03T22:31:00.000Z

Booze Dice

2007-11-24T13:19:00.000Z

I have a booze dice! And I plan on using it tonight.

On each side, it has: Gin & Tonic, Vodka & Something, Red Wine, Chilled White Wine, Beer and... Mineral water.
So I plan on etching something else in that last one to more effectively represent a booze product.

That is all.

Work - For Edd!

2007-11-11T02:46:00.000Z

Edd wanted me to write about my job, so I will.
It's a shame I can't actually outline what I'm doing, it's not top secret really but I'm not supposed to really say about it until the product is launched, which is not yet. So yeh, sorry... but I can tell you about the place, the network, the IP phones, canteen....
It's a really nice place to work, it's not too much trouble getting there either. Train, then a bus at stop SI to Green Park. It's got stars all over it and the driver sometimes makes really bad jokes about stamping your ticket.
The IP phones are so cool... they connect only using powered ethernet, and have a 10/100 switch in them, pure IP based. You log in using a username and pin, and all your speeddials and extension numbers route to that particular phone, in any location in the world. Kind of what you would expect from IP phones, but so cool to actually use. They have the 24 ring on them too which is massively awesome. The ones in the TelePresence room all have colour touchscreens on them.

More on the TelePresence - Three 1080p screens, running each at about 4mbps, with AAC-LD (Low Delay AAC) Audio (See other posts for me banging on about low delay audio) - and it works over the global network, with no perceived delay. How cool is that?!?! Three 1080p displays, over the network, just... working. That costs a lot - $500,000 each site in fact. Still, very impressive.

Getting up in the morning sucks. But it's nice that the cafe there does really good stuff in the morning, so I get there half hour earlier and have some toast or yoghurt, and it really does set a good mood for the day, didn't think it would be possible but it actually is. And the bus is good, every 6 or so minutes so no waiting really. Shame the trains all suck and are always delayed, but I guess it's inevitable.

AAC-LD and it's Vorbis Equivalent?

2007-11-06T17:30:00.000Z

For low delay streaming, AAC-Low Delay would be good as the specification says that the encoding algorithm should have no more delay than 20ms. This would be acceptable given we can't usually notice a phasing difference with anything lower than 15ms.
But is there a vorbis equivalent? I don't think there is, but is it possible to get vorbis's input sample buffer low enough to have some latency like 50ms? Quality isn't the main concern yet, and I think, the higher the bitrate becomes, the more that effect negates the short buffer length. So if we use something stupid like a megabit for 2 channel, should sound alright?

Job

2007-10-28T11:51:00.000Z

New job starts in about 20 hours. Nervous, but excited about it. Never really had a job like this before, where you get paid for doing something you like doing.
For Edd, I will definitely post how it goes!

First problem with 64 bit

2007-10-22T15:43:00.000+01:00

Don't install the RealTek Vista x64 driver for the nVidia audio chipset. It sounds terrible and DTS doesn't work.

I am now 64 bit!

2007-10-22T01:30:00.000+01:00

Installed Vista x64 today, and apart from a few strange 'stay blank and sit there' screens during install - and the lack of option to format a partition (it was greyed out), it went well and is really quick.

File system architecture and setup:
C:
53GB 4k cluster NTFS on disk 1

P:, Q:, R;, and S:
8GB 8k cluster NTFS, on all disks
Pagefile and cache/scratch partitions, each on a different disk so read/writes can happen to multiple pagefiles

F:
357GB 64k cluster NTFS, on all disks
File storage, spanned, not striped with big clusters. More than enough of a transfer rate for multiple 1080p streams.

J:
10GB 4k cluster NTFS on disk 2
Some backup space, not part of any RAID so partition has less chance of going down than the others

The interface is really pretty, and instant to respond, also sleep mode works where it didn't on XP SP2 x86 which I was running previously.

Now to get Red Alert and IPX working on it..

Streaming delay stuff and such

2007-10-14T02:43:00.001+01:00

Update on the problem of streaming latency over a fast network...

Decided to try just PCM, so no compression, just passing the PCM to the client - and it cuts the time down to about 2 - 3 seconds. Which is OK, but still not perfect - I got better results using FLAC. But it's better than WMA... I will experiment and see what happens!

I hate it when

2007-10-12T12:36:00.000+01:00

You restart a server, and then remember it needs a keyboard plugged into it to boot, or it sits there saying:
Keyboard Error. Press F1 to Continue.

Massively useful feature... hOnest... so now I must go downstairs and do it myself.

Stereo cable and Low latency streaming

2007-10-12T01:20:00.000+01:00

OK so I can't find an audio cable long enough to go from my PC to my stereo.
I've put a streaming server on the computer, and an old laptop as a wireless streaming client the other side of the room connected to the stereo. It works fine, good quality and all that.

My initial setup is a windows media encoder on the PC, serving up 480kbps 2.0channel /some silly sample rate WMA10. When player buffer is reduced to 1 second on the laptop, it works fine with around 4 seconds of delay, creeping up to around 10 in a few hours.
This is fine apart from the delay, which gets rather annoying after a while, especially when skipping through tracks. Not bad to listen to a playlist or album however.

So I guess the stream delay is made up of the following things:

Encoder buffer
Encoding delay (processing)
Network latency, propagation delay etc.
Decoder buffer
Decoding delay (processing)
Other delay like input and output of devices and stuff

We can rule out other delays, as the input and output are practially instant. Decoding delay is really quick too, so I don't really care about that, and so is network latency as it's running through two switches that propagate <1ms when both are plugged in to switches.

So decoding is an easy one to play with, but I have already turned down the buffer to 1 second. Windows media player won't allow less than 1 second, which sucks... but I decided to set up a multicast stream on a server 2003 box, with windows streaming server. This has fast start and all sorts of caching crap to play with, and media player seems to play this almost instantly... but the encoding delay is enormous putting it up to nearly 10 seconds. This I think is due to the fact i'm still using WMEncoder on my desktop, streaming that down to a WMServer and that's coming back up here.
I could have the streaming server get the content from my desktop over the network, encode it itself and send it to the client.. but control would be annoying.

So I thought about trying icecast, it has a highly configurable server, or so it seems. So I will try that.. and write MOAR

//Icecast!
So my desktop is running icecast, decided to try it encoding lossless OGG with a testing client running VLC. Disabled the 'burst' buffer option in the ice config, but largely left everything else other than port and passwords alone.
For a minute or two it works well, 2 second delay.. then I notice that it's using over 80% of my desktop, real time FLAC or not, it shouldn't nearly saturate a dual core with 2GB of RAM. After another minute it maxes it out to 100% and the stream fails.
Changing the settings to 256k OGG, the delay has now changed to 3 or 4 seconds, CPU is around 30% (!?!?!?!) and I'm unsure on the thread assignments either, CPU1 is going at about 5-10% and CPU2 is about 25-30%. I'm sure the OGG encoder is multithread..

Hmm time to look at the configuration options more closely perhaps. This is crap. Shoutcast time I think, good old shoutcast. Shoutcast will actually give me 50 times more CPU power than i've already got, and 300GB of RAM because it rules so hard. Bah

> Is it as simple as setting  to something very small like 1024
> or would I need a customer recompile of icecast server to set all the
> buffers to minimum settings?

queue-size adjusts the maximum queue size. icecast will always attempt to keep
the queues empty or as close as possible.

The only thing you could consider modifying is the two uses of '4096' in
src/source.c:source_main(). Even there, however, I'd be surprised if you see
a significant change in overall latency.

So if I get picky, I can always recompile.. TNG is on TV, this will wait until tomorrow.

Toothache

2007-09-25T19:00:00.000+01:00

Toothache must be destroyed! It sucks!!

DMCA

2007-08-20T04:41:00.000+01:00

Just reading about the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act - a US law that strives to prevent the illegal propagation of licenced works etc...) - and I found something strange that really didn't fit in with what I thought that act was designed for.
Those people that read technology news and keep up to date with that sort of thing will probably have heard of the DMCA one way or another, but I don't think many will have come across 'Title V' - which is:
DMCA Title V: Vessel Hull Design Protection Act

Not that I am against the protection of vessel hull designs, but I really don't see the correlation between a technology based law that, for instance, tries to ensure each VCR has macrovision type protection installed as default, and that intellectual rights of content producers are protected online, and a boat hull design.
Fundamentally, the protection of an entity is exactly that, one entity can be protected, be it either a videotape, DVD, or indeed a boat hull blueprint. But I just find it strange that this law was created and amended during it's creation to include something so different to what it's obvious, and rather advertised, purpose would aim to be.

Transformers movie

2007-08-02T17:48:00.000+01:00

Went to see the Transformers movie at the cinema the other day. I enjoyed it, the CG was really great and the action was good, too. I think a gap was bridged between comic book sci-fi and the mindless constant action that all usual action genre filling films must feed their viewers, albeit weighted toward the action rather than the sci-fi.
The film still it's roots, either to please die hard fans of the original series, or simply to give excuse to make an action film from the subject material. I think it's more the latter, but that might just be because of the vast amount of modern CGI and production techniques used to bring the film to 2007. There's also a cheesy entrance for the 'More than meets the eye' tagline, it's probably only slightly less cheese than when the battle win music plays on a cellphone in Advent Children.

Plus I got fatly drunk in the cinema on Bacardi. Wey!!

Spain 2007

2007-07-31T03:28:00.000+01:00

When I returned from Spain this year, I thought it was too funny not to document - and planned to write about it on here, but the last few days have felt pointless at doing things like that. But thinking about it, why not.

When arriving in Spain, we were around 350km away from the festival site - so had to get a train. Luckily we met up with Jim, who knew where the station was.

The Spanish don't really know how to run a train station. I am not being racist or weird, they seriously could not run a piss up in a brewery. The schedules aren't finalised, and most of the outlets don't take cards. I mean, who the fuck these days doesn't take cards!?! Anyway, good job I had many notes on me. Otherwise, Chris and I would be walking.

So we got our tickets for Valencia, from Barcelona. Barcelona is a nice place, the architecture is wonderful, as is the nightlife - when we arrived in Barcelona to meet James, understandably waiting up for 4 hours for us, he wanted to retire to bed. However Chris and myself wanted to enjoy a few tins and soak up the nightlife, so we went out discovering. We bought some tins from the local Pakistani man (pointed to us by the friendly Swedish man at the petrol station) - then went to the lively docks to drink them. No problems, just good times, to be honest. There was a French dude who forgot his phone, but it's an occupational hazard going to Barcelona I can guess.

Heading back to Jim's at about 6, we got a few hours sleep. A few hours later, we got some breakfast (weird cake and fruit juice I do believe) - We then all got the metro (underground) to the train station. From here, we negotiated some train tickets on the slow train, to get to Valencia.

The slow train wasn't bad. Most of the clientele were festival folk, and were not only friendly but understanding of our tired and rather strange nature. It took about three hours.

When we got to the campsite, it had shut. Unfortunately for us, half of the people we knew were in there. So I said to the woman that we didn't have any tents to put up, we'd already had that sorted. She quickly agreed, and so we were ushered into the Bonet campsite. We found some spots to set up camp next to our existing camping friends. Bloody good.

24 hour bar. This was awesome. Not that I remember many occasions when I have returned to the campsite, there was a 24 hour beer sale facility. Awesome.

Many thanks to the northern girl that helped me to the beach.. I remember waking up next to you and you were worried about me sleeping in the sun, then your boyfriend gave me a vodka, orange and ice! Nice touch with the ice. I still wonder where you got that from. But it was great. I then went to sleep in the shade for an hour or so, before retreating back to camp.

The beach party we went to was a success, and a failure in one. It failed in the way that we never really reached the party - however, we went to the massive fire on the beach. The police were OK with it, walking around... then someone had to throw a massive deck chair on the fire. Police went nuts, arrested the man and put the fire out. Wey.
The success came from the guys who asked me to down the bottle of spirits, and earn a sombrero! I mean, who doesn't want a sombrero! Please! So of course, I down the spirits. They say I have to throw up to get the hat - and I'm thinking, I could keep this booze, and get really drunk.... then there's always the fact that I was around 10 metres from the sea - and if I didn't throw up, I would end up in the sea. So I earned the sombrero.
Later on that night, the group were so impressed with the hat wearing, they offered me the bottle anyway. I then drank that, and did obstacle course challenge... if that's what you call it!

More later. :)
--Matt

Mit

2007-07-31T03:16:00.000+01:00

Interesting artwork from an interesting location

2007-06-18T00:57:00.001+01:00

I found the 'Iran Graffiti and Urban Art Report'. One of the reports really caught my eye, namely the first two images. You can find this here: [Blog Permalink (Spanish)]

For the lazy, here are the two images that I like:

Flowers

2007-06-17T23:31:00.000+01:00

One shot that I rather like that I took last week. It's a mixed lot of exotic flowers from Africa and Columbia.

Megadeth: Me, Chris and Edd

2007-06-16T21:28:00.001+01:00

Megadeth! Me, Chris and Edd. Then we got in the fountain.

Megadeth

2007-06-16T20:08:00.001+01:00

Priestess

2007-06-16T19:09:00.001+01:00

Gig, priestess are playing

Edd on the train

2007-06-16T16:49:00.001+01:00

On the way to megadeth, edd is drinking a hobgoblin!

Week in general

2007-06-16T13:36:00.000+01:00

This week has been interesting, and tiring. I can't complain about being tired though as it is generally self inflicted and avoidable! This being boozing up all the time, if I stopped drinking as much I wouldn't be so tired... but then wouldn't have met such interesting people over the course of the week.

Went to a house party Wednesday and (some guys) took a swimming pool, put it in the road and filled it full of wheelie bins. Thursday I was late for taking photos for a flower shop in Hounslow, but this in turn caused me to become invited to a gig in Leicester Square to take some pictures of a band. The band were good, beer was drunk and good times were had by all. Met some really nice people too, hopefully we will stay in touch.

I've met a few interesting people lately. On the night bus on the way home, we got talking to this guy who works as a chef in a casino. He was very passionate about cooking, well he would be with 18 years of it. Passionate in a different way however. He didn't just like to cook, but he loved to innovate and perform all kinds of crazy shit with cooking, using chemicals and freezing cold gas to create 'large round white bubbles that when you eat, your mind is saying coca-cola but your tounge is tasting something different'. He also created a monkfish dish out of the colours from my shirt, which was equally impressive. I hope to one day be as passionate about my job as he is with that.

Then there was the politics lecturer travelling with his daughter to somewhere starting with M, can't remember where. Morocco? Anyway, he had a green beer, so I naturally asked him where he got it. It's a special guest ale on at the pub we were drinking in, so after a couple of pints of that we got talking about all kinds of stuff, Palestine, extradition of faith, state ownership.. but none of it forced, and all of it very discussed and informal. Clever guy, he's from Delhi.

I must go and have a bath before I dissolve. And eat! My favourite part of the day. Wey.

Stir Fry

2007-06-12T15:55:00.001+01:00

For a nice stir fry, I thought I would try this.

Marinade some chicken in Nando's stir fry sauce. Heat a wok with a little water (handful) and a splash of oil to get it nice and hot. Get some dried red chillis, snap em in half and empty the seeds into the oil for some extra heat.
Add 2 or 3 splashes of Nando's stirfry sauce to the oil, and a small spoonful (teaspoon) of horseradish. Sounds weird but when heated up with the rest it adds a nice flavour. When the sauce is bubbling and smoking, chuck in the chicken and stir loads so it doesn't burn. The water should make the chicken nice and tender.
Put some noodles in and stir around, then add sweet chilli for a bit of substance. I also put in half teaspoon of chilli and garlic paste at the last minute.

Robust ale

2006-12-21T14:02:00.001Z

This ale is robust

Pete

2006-12-20T20:33:00.001Z

Pete is a spastic

Steve

2006-12-19T21:46:00.001Z

It's steve at the pub

Annoyed with: Perfume Adverts

2006-12-19T18:09:00.000Z

'Parfum pour femme au pour famme' I don't care. It costs £100 and all it makes the cunt on the advert do is walk along a shit road and want to jump onto a bench. If you give me £100 quid i'll jump onto a bench for you if you like

Annoyed with: Shit Chinese eBay Engineering

2006-12-18T16:17:00.000Z

I get lured into buying piece of shit chinese products from ebay because they only cost 5 quid instead of 100, but the last two things I bought are so shit they should be sent back with a big picture of their factory on fire with the words 'Do it properly' written below it.

And how dare they charge 1p for listing and 5 quid for postage. It doesn't cost fucking 5 quid for postage, especially when it takes about 2 years to get here!