radiac.net

I've finished packing up my stuff at my home, and I have now moved out.

I'll come back and finish this entry off later, but first I need to let off some steam.

Ok, after yesterday was efficient-catching-up-with-things-to-do day, today has been tidying day. With a lot of desk to tidy and a lot of piles of things to put away, I thought it would also be a good opportunity to tie my computer up doing something I've been meaning to do for a while - move my Half-Life 2 installation from my C drive to my D drive.

My C drive is reserved for operating system stuff (to make re-install easier), and my D drive is the one I fill with games and work and stuff. Only I wasn't paying attention to the HL2 installer the first time round, so it ended up on the C drive and I ended up running out of space.

Software these days has all kinds of crazy copy protection locking an installation in place, so the best option is clearly to uninstall HL2 from the C drive, and reinstall it on the D drive, right?

Wrong.

I have uninstalled HL2 and steam, only those directories are only partially empty, thanks to steam renaming a whole bunch of files. I reinstalled steam, but now HL2 won't install from the DVD because the files can't be found in the CABs. How stupid is that? The DVD isn't corrupt, I can copy all the files off, but can't install them locally because... no, I have no idea.

So it looks like my only option now is to download HL2 from steam to reinstall it. All 3GB of it. Despite the retail DVD sitting in the drive. Crazy or what? Advanced copy protection in action, folks.

So there I am, sitting at my computer, minding my own business, when suddenly the doorbell rings.

Ooh, I think to myself. That must be my empty Ipod box for me to return it - more on that later. So I open the door, and... there's a man in a fluorescent orange jacket.

"Hello. I'm working on the roadworks down the road, and I was speaking to a lady earlier who said that I could come and use a toilet up here."

Riiight, I said.

At school they teach you how to integrate a function, what the capital of Durkistan is, and how to properly conjugate the latin verb comedo into its pluperfect passive form. But they don't ever teach you anything useful, like how to deal with someone coming to the door asking to use your toilet.

So, I thought to myself "and what lady would that be? There ain't no lady here today. Why this house, it's upstairs and four buildings away from the roadworks. Be off with you, foul man, and find somewhere else to conclude your business", but being English, I couldn't bring myself to be so rude. And so the conversation went on, with me gently dissuading, and him gently persuading. But with the toilet door open right in front of us, and him being so polite and stuff and explaining how desperate his need was, I couldn't think of a good enough excuse to say no. Of course, a good reason would have been "no, it's my toilet - if you'd wanted a job with an on-site toilet, you should have paid attention in school", but I'm a nice chap, so after a while I let him in. How bad could it be?

Well, that was three and a half hours ago, and I've just finished cleaning, having first left the door shut and the window open for well over an hour. The basin was thick with globules of dirt from where he rinsed his hands, the towel is now in the washing machine, and the toilet... well, if I used someone else's toilet to do that, I'd have at least had the courtesy to wipe the seat, if not the bowl too.

So here's a helpful hint: should anyone come knocking at your door asking to use the toilet, especially if that person is a workman from the roadworks outside, and especially if that person has about them the faintest whiff of last night's extra-strong lamb vindaloo, just say no.

So I wake up this morning and turn on my computer. Blue screen. Corrupt registry.

This isn't the first problem with this machine recently either. I've been getting "Unknown hard error"s for quite a few days, the computer has been hanging randomly - I've felt that the hard drive was on the way out. But what the hell? This one only just lasted 6 months, and for most of those months I haven't even turned the machine on, on account of me being on the other side of the country.

I don't do abnormal disk activity - it's a desktop and the hard drive only stores applications and games, I keep my work on other machines. I don't do long hard drive scans, I don't process hundred meg files every day, hell, I don't even play MP3s from it. I treat it better than any hard drive I've had, it's in a shock-proof temperature-controlled drive bay, and never runs at more than 25 degrees (apart from on abnormally hot days).

So I feel a bit bitter that this is the 6th hard drive this machine has chewed out in 4 years. I don't think it's the motherboard, I replaced that after the first 4 failed.

And now having blamed the hard drive, Seagate's diagnostic tools are saying everything's fine, just fine. Well, physically fine, but it says the partitions are corrupt.

All I can think is that it's the power supply - I've heard the loudest fan occasionally slowing, and I know that my graphics card was pushing the limits of the wattage. Perhaps the voltage (or whatever it would be) dropped too low just at the moment it was saving the registry last night. Is that even possible? Who knows.

So, what should I do? Order a new hard drive? New PSU? Or just scrap the whole thing and take up competition fishing?

Well, I am now going to make a living from competition fishing. Most of my computers are now outside on the side of the road waiting for the dustman on Thursday, and this one will join them shortly. This will therefore be my last diary entry. So long, it's been fun.

Ok, ok, that last entry was clearly a bit fishy. It was tempting, but then I remembered I was violently opposed to sport in all forms, so that was that.

In the end I went over to PC World and bought a 450W PSU (an extra 100W), and after much googling found Microsoft's Windows 2000 Registry Repair Utility, ran it and now everything's back to normal. It's been running for about 15 hours now without any hangs, I haven't seen any "unknown hard error"s, and the fans have been humming away solidly. So I think the PSU might have been the problem.

Today, I have found some bugs in things that people assume will be bug free.

First I found a link on the recently-publicised google.org that linked to one of those annoying domain-squatting search sites, as opposed to the real site for the Acumen Fund.

And now I have found a bug in the babelfish. German to english 'igelburger' (hedgehog burger) returns 'more igelburger'. Sure, ok, igelburger isn't a mainstream word, so they're forgiven for not knowing that, but where did the 'more' come from? So English to German 'more igelburger' returns 'mehr igelburger'. Which, when translated back to english, means 'more more igelburger'. I'm up to 'more more more more more more igelburger', which is more than enough hedgehogs for anyone.

Has anyone else noticed the way that windows update will update itself and then decide that you want to reboot the machine, and does it for you?

That's the third time it's happened while I have work open. And the best bit is there doesn't seem to be a way to turn it off - you can tell it to prompt you to upgrade, but as soon as it's done it will say 'Do you want to reboot now?', and ask it every 5 minutes. And if you're working on another computer when that message pops up and you miss it, the machine reboots.

Well, at least my work was saved this time.

Wow, do I feel dumb. I've just spent half an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't log onto my linux server. I went through all the logs looking for error messages, and found something about ssl from the wrong IP (actually checking e-mail, but anyway). So I found it had a dhcp server running that shouldn't be, I closed it down, checked my ARP cache thinking it might have been left in there, reinstalled the ssl server, rebooted the machine, nothing worked.

Then I looked at the port I was trying to connect to...

I finished writing a new ActionScript class to control my custom slide bars and tried to compile it. I got the following error:

The name of this class, 'Slider', conflicts with the name of another class that was loaded, 'Slider'.

I have just spent another hour going over it trying to find what could possibly be wrong. I only loaded it once, and I couldn't find an in-built class called Slider, so what else could it be?

Well, apparently, it's the timestamp of my class definition file. My desktop clock is set at 09:12, my server clock is set at 10:16, and Flash complains. If I set my desktop clock a couple of hours into the future, it compiles just fine. Serves me right for not getting round to fixing my timeserver, I know, but this would cause problems with timezones too.

This product is a joke. And no, it it's not the latest version, but I'm not paying another £400 to upgrade purely to fix the buggy product I have already paid £400 for. They probably introduced a whole bunch more problems anyway.

After developing in Flash for 10 months, I am seriously wishing I had decided to do this in Java. And you all know how much I hate Java.

Aww, my house has now been sold and the new people moved in today. Sadness.

The plan for today was quite straightforward. Wake up, shower, do some work on the flash CD, and contact a few more companies about my change of address. Unfortunately, things started to go wrong after 'wake up'. I have no entropy.

I have a script that monitors web-pages and e-mails me when there is a change - useful for making sure my sites haven't gone wrong and watching out for changes to other pages on the internet that I'm interested in. Since the move, the server it was running on is now permanently offline, so I decided to move it over this morning before I started my work. Shouldn't take long.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the new server couldn't send mail. After many hours of googling, I found out that the problem is simple. I have no entropy.

The server runs exim, which uses GnuTLS to generate a secure key. That needs to read from /dev/random, which in turn generates its randomness from the entropy pool. Which, on my server, is empty.

The idea of the entropy pool is that it is fed by internal sources that cannot be controlled or predicted from the outside, making it an acceptably random random number generating source. These internal sources are things like mouse and keyboard input. That's great, but this is a headless server - the only things that happen are disk access and network traffic. Now, for some reason, disk access wasn't contributing, and in kernel 2.6, network traffic is deemed predictable, and there is no longer an option to allow network devices to contribute to the entropy. As a result, my entropy pool was empty, all the time. Now, when /dev/random cannot read from the entropy pool, it waits until it can - in other words, when I tried to send an e-mail, it would sit still waiting for entropy that would never come. There are hardware random number generators available - unfortunately my hardware doesn't support them. There is also urandom, but that can, in theory, be predicted.

Most sane people would just go for the sensible option - remove /dev/random and replace it with a symlink to /dev/urandom - it's good enough, and would have meant I'd have sorted it all out within a few minutes. But, as I'm sure Tristan will agree, when did I ever go for the sensible option? Which left me with only one choice.

It turns out that it's quite simple to modify the kernel network drivers to add to the entropy pool. But it took me all morning to find that out.

I have now recompiled the kernel, and after a little bit of network traffic, my entropy pool is now full, and the e-mail has been sent. Now for a shower.

Apparently I'm not the only person who's been having problems with their computers today.

The National Trust, the Inland Revenue and the National Insurance Office all told me that they could not help me with my problems because their computers were down, so I have to ring them back tomorrow.

Something I didn't mention was the new cordless telephones I have bought. They are quite nice - I bought a twin pack, so I can now call Leela's handset up when she's in the other room.

I also forgot to say that Leela's mini ipod has been returned - it only lasted a month before it completely died, showing the sad ipod icon and making a quiet clicking noise. When I sent it off, the UPS man at the door said "You stick that bit on there and put the ipod in that", so I asked "Do you get a lot of these?" Yes, he said. There was one guy who sent it back 5 times and it still wasn't working.

This just reinforces my opinion that Apple produce shoddy products that are inferior in every way to other cheaper products, and only achieve their market domination thanks to over-hyped comments by the media, either from fan-boys or the technically illiterate. And Slashdot seems to agree.

Still need a mac mini though :p

Here's a question for all you Apple-lovers out there.

When I initially mentioned I was thinking about getting an apple mac mini for development purposes, people suggested I wait until it goes to intel architecture. That's sensible, I can see the theory behind waiting so that I won't have to upgrade in the future - I don't particularly want one mac, let alone two. But here's a question - when I have my new intel-based mac mini, how can I be sure that what I develop will work on pre-intel macs?

I don't know anything about how to develop on macs, but I think I may well be producing executables. If I create them on new intel hardware, how backwards compatible will they be? Does anyone know any details of how Apple are going to ensure new software works on old hardware?

After TR and honeycomb closed ages ago, I've got out of touch with people. So I've started a quiet talker for us semi-retired spods to idle in peace - anyone interested should contact me for the address. Haven't decided whether it's going to be permanent or not, it depends on how popular it is; if nobody ever logs on, ever, then there's not really much point keeping it going. But it would be nice to have somewhere to keep in touch, so I probably will keep it running. If I do, it will move addresses, which is why I'm not putting a link to it here yet.

I've also been trying hard to think of a name for my cms thing, and failing hard. I want something short and catchy, and with an available domain. But all the good names are either taken by existing projects, sound like other projects, or are swear words in Swahili. Still, as I said to Peter yesterday, it's not like I'll be needing to name it for another year or so :)

Apart from that, the past week has been spent re-writing actionscript classes. I spent over a fortnight developing them originally, and was then told that they would need to do something that I hadn't anticipated (although to be fair I probably should have). Anyway, I had two choices - adapt what I had written, or start again from scratch. I figured adapting would be the better option, but each day for about a week I've tried a different approach and then decided it was bad, and started again the next day. Today though, I think I've done it! Nearly there, then I can start producing some results that I can show people. There's only so much time you can spend telling clients you're working hard on classes and libraries before they start expecting to see something.

Oh and if that was you who rang me when I was in the gym, ring me back, I'll hear the phone ringing now.

I think I need a haircut.

It works! I sorted my library stuff, and it's pretty good, even if I do say so myself.

Hello and welcome to my super-scary halloween decorations. I hope you are not too scared.