radiac.net

I've been using samba with many windows machines for many years and never had this problem before, and google has no record of it happening anywhere. So either I'm incredibly stupid or unlucky, I'm not sure which.

I'm running Debian with a backported 2.6 kernel and samba 3, and connecting to it from a windows 2000 machine, all working fine. After my hard drive failure and subsequent reinstallation of w2k, I wanted my linux share to appear as a networked drive in windows as it did before, so I went to 'map network drive', typed in the share path and set it to connect with different username and password. It connected fine, as I expected it to, so I thought nothing more of it. Until I rebooted and got "Invalid username or password".

Tracked it down to the following line in my samba log:

smbd/password.c:authorise_login(573)
authorise_login: rejected invalid user nobody

So windows was trying to connect without the username+password I had set when I mapped the network drive.

After much prodding of bits and pieces, I eventually tracked it down to something annoyingly simple; it turns out that windows seems to forget these things when you don't have a password set on your windows account. So set a password, remount the drive and it all works fine.

Nowhere does windows say that if I don't set a password on my account, my network username and password will not be remembered. Neither does it have a button to set who to automatically log the machine on as, it only pops up at the end of the control panel -> users options. So I guess I'm off the hook as far as stupid goes. Well, I'd like to think so.

So, I've been waiting in for a parcel to be delivered. I got up super-early (9am), even though they usually don't arrive until about 11. So anyway, here I am at 1.30 wondering how it's doing, so I go to parcelfarce.com and type in my consignment number. 'Delivered', it says. 'Left as arranged', it says. At 8.22, it says. I go downstairs, it's sitting on the doorstep.

Oh well.

I bought a trout today. I walked past the fish counter and it looked at me with its staring eye. So I bought it. But I do not know how to cook trout, so I gave it away.

Elections are boring. I should have stood, that would have made it better.

So I bought Paint Shop Pro 9 the other day (that's what arrived), and have been using it a bit, and it's kinda neat. It's actually better than PSP 7 and PSP 8 - to some people that may sound obvious, but most of the time when I upgrade software I regret it because all they have done is add worthless feature bloat that makes the program slower and less reliable.

I've never used photoshop, and that's because I've never needed to; psp has done everything I've wanted to do and more. I'm aware that psp is the poor man's photoshop, but it's actually 9 times the price, it can't be worth that. Many of the nifty new useful features in psp 9 are probably lifted from photoshop... but who cares. It's £50 and does the job. Very well. And in fact it will probably do any other job I want to do.

This just reinforces the feeling that I got ripped off when I bought that bug-ridden pile that is flash, even if I did find it over £100 cheaper than list price.

For most of the past week or so I've been getting in late and eating rubbish food that is quick and easy to make. Last night I decided to buy some good things, cook them and then eat them. I bought pitta bread, chicken, and a lettuce to go with the tomatoes I already had. I only noticed when I was putting it into the plastic bag that the chicken cost over £4, the rest of it was less than £2. What a joke. And to top it all, when I got back I realised I couldn't be bothered to cook the chicken after all, so microwaved a frozen pasta meal.

So, does anyone have any suggestions for something nice to do with 0.344 kg of free range chicken breast?

I was thinking either fry it with bbq sauce to make bbq chicken that I could shred and put in the pitta with the lettuce and tomato, or possibly make myself a giant meal of enchiladas, which would feed me for the rest of the weekend. But they seem a bit boring, so any suggestions for something exciting to do with it?

You will all no doubt be overjoyed to hear that I have finally started CAPMS. Yes, over 6 years of ideas have now been consolidated into a handful of sheets of paper, and the first library file has been created. Who knows, soon perhaps I will even be able to give you a URL to see it in action. As long as 'soon' means 'sometime next year'.

But it's not all fun and games. I have been doing a lot of work recently, and have actually managed to start some of the long term jobs. The weekends are good; people aren't in at work, so they can't send me new things to do...

In other news, my car has now been sold but I still have MD and CD head units for sale, my digiguide subscription is about to expire and I have absolutely no intention of renewing it, and I have got that hitman contracts level down to 4 minutes 40 seconds.

Remain sane. Sanity is important to you. You need your sanity. Being sane makes you a well-adjusted member of society. Sanity makes cakes and pie. Cake and pie are good, therefore sanity is good. Remain sane.

That is all.

I have been bidding on a lot of things on ebay recently, and winning all of them. Time to start selling things on ebay - in particular my minidisc head unit. I'm ascared - anyone have any experiences they wish to share?

In other news my car has had its wing mirror replaced, and I can now see behind the left of the car - very handy. And three cheers for the AA suggesting exactly what I've been saying for a long time - flexible speed limits, higher than 70 in good conditions, lower than 70 in bad conditions. I still don't think 80mph is enough when compared to the German, but then again perhaps I should be grateful for what we have when looking at our American friends.

My CMS notes ended up being 5 computer-printed pages worth, and thats just abstract specifications. This may take me a while.

So it has been 5 days since my last entry. I've been diary-slacking, and just when I was starting to get better about writing them frequently.

Anyway, I'm up to exciting things! So far on my work schedule I have remaining: 2 scripts for a website, 3 new websites, 21 new flash animations, finalising another 20 flash animations and re-doing a flash demonstration. That's the stuff people have requested; on top of that I've got a few other work-related projects (such as my CMS), and then there's the fun stuff (like my sites, something BIG, oh yes, and stuff real life). So, I'm keeping busy.

This weekend, however, I have so far only finished one script for a website. On Friday Leela cooked me a very tasty meal and we watched a film, and on Saturday I went to a concert that Tristan and Leela were in. It was good, and I think they played the right notes most of the time - good work! After the concert Leela cooked me another very tasty meal and then we watched another film. And today I have done some work, although am currently re-installing half life 2 so that'll probably be the end of productivity for today.

Other news since my last entry includes several thrilling things - I have ordered a CD player for my car which will work with my steering wheel controls (should arrive on Tuesday), I have temporarily re-done my brochure site (telling people I do websites and then not being able to give them a URL was always a little bit embarassing) and I have actually tidied my room! Although it is now untidy again, so never mind.

Right, well I normally don't do these things, but I feel so honoured to be top on Andy's list that I figure what harm can it do. Apart from shaming myself in public, but hey, no change there.

Total volume of music files on my computer
Um, didn't rescue my classical music after my last hard drive failure, so 2992 tracks (approximately 12gb). They are of course all legal. This thing has blatantly been initiated by the RIAA...

The last CD I bought was...
Lemon Jelly - Lost Horizons.

Song playing right now
Chemical Brothers - Believe

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

1. Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup
2. David Hasselhoff - Hooked on a Feeling
3. Don McLean - American Pie
4. Guns N Roses - Paradise City
5. Bombalurina - Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton
I'm stuck. Everyone I would pass it to, who would do it and not say it was lame, has already had it. However, if I have misjudged anyone who wants to pry the baton from my cold dead hands, or to just take it and put it on their site (apologies for my shocking markup, my diary script hasn't changed much in 5 years), leave a comment stating your intentions and I'll amend this entry accordingly :)

I'm doing some work in php at the moment and doing some speed testing. Copying a 5mb string to an array is faster (takes ~0.0002 seconds) than adding a reference to the 5mb string to the array (takes ~0.04 seconds). For test after test. Weird. I mean I know php has some hippy variable name lookup table so it's probably not actually copying when it copies it to the array, and I know a php reference isnt a pointer, just a symbol table alias, but I didn't expect that much difference. Or am I looking at this the wrong way and I have a messed up understanding of php references? But if I've got it right, does anyone know where I can find out about PHPs implementation to explain quirky things like this? Other than the PHP source code...

No cd player for my car yet. Most disappointing.

Also disappointing was my trip to Currys last night to get a DVD player. They had one that was £30 when I went in a few days ago, and it said it was region free (if you had a code). Went off to check the details, found the code, looked into it, and found out it was exactly what I wanted. So went back to Currys, but they had sold out. Sucks. Going to try a different Currys now!

I have bought a DVD player.

Just over 3 years ago I bought a Shuttle SV24 with a view to using it as a DVD/DivX player to go with my nice TV. However, it never really cut it as a DVD player, so since then I have been meaning to get a newer better small quiet computer to play my DVDs and stuff. Then there was all of the PVR stuff, so my requirements gradually got harder and harder to fulfil, leaving me with many many DVDs, and nothing to play them on (other than my incompetent desktop computers).

So on Thursday I bit the bullet and bought a real proper DVD player, for £29.98 from Currys. That's at least 20 times cheaper than the computer option, and it's multi-region, plays complicated scenes without juddering, has lots of output types and is very thin and very pretty. Now I just need to find time to watch something.

My work is going very slowly. With so much to do, I've recently adopted a 'do a little of a lot' approach, and as a result have made progress with lots, but got nothing finished. Well, not entirely true, I did just finish 3 things, but they were only small and I'm still left with about 50 things to do. Now going with the 'attack one thing relentlessly until it is complete' attitude. I shall succeed.

Yesterday I bought some fruit. I bought two bags of cherries, two bunches of grapes, a large punnet of strawberries, four peaches, an apple and some tomatoes. Tomatoes are fruit, right? Is it sad that the most exciting thing I have done in 2 days is that I bought some fruit?

Anyway, about the wheel mentioned in the subject of this diary entry; I have written a nice and simple XML parser in PHP specifically for my CMS, and shaved several seconds off the processing of a very large string so that it is now an acceptable speed. Now all I have to do is make it actually do something. And quickly, I have a feeling I'll need to start rolling out this CMS in a month...

I fell down some steps today and twisted my ankle. It is now swollen and hurts. Ow.

Apart from that, working. Another pretty uneventful day really.

I use Unison to synchronise my servers, and it's fantastic. Until you move 20mb of directories on one server and forget to echo the moves on the other server - then you have pain. Because it doesn't play well with moves, preferring the 'delete and copy again' approach. See, this is why I always write my own utilities because then it does what I want, cries of wheel reinvention be damned.

Ankle still swollen, cables still haven't arrived at Halfords, work still going slowly, and I haven't joined Team America yet.

Did you know that you can get the polyphonic ring tones by texting frog52, or the video ring tone by texting frog53!

Maybe it's a division of Tivo - this alone is a valid reason to spend hundreds of pounds on a PVR. My only hope is that by advertising 2 or 3 times an ad break on every channel in the UK, that this stupid company will run out of money and I won't have to hear that damned advert any more. Or those stupid birds or that bloody dragon. What kind of retarded people are keeping this company alive anyway?

Probably the same kind of people who dial a wrong number, get my answerphone, listen to the message that says 'This is Richard's phone. Only Richard lives here. If you do not want to talk to Richard, hang up because you have the wrong number', and then leave a message saying 'Hello Lenny, it's Eric. I know we'd arranged to meet Friday, but would you prefer to reschedule on Sunday for a foursome at 8 as usual?'

The most frightening thing is that some of these people have probably had offspring. As a wise man once said, they should take the warning labels off bottles of bleach and let the problem sort itself out.

I'll tell you something, whoever invented bodies is stupid. They should have learnt from how computers are made - bodies should be component based, so if you damage something you can simply pop it out and replace it with a newer faster model.

Take my ankle, for example. I accidentally applied a little too much pressure to one side, and now I have to wait for it to heal itself. I mean thats great, if I accidentally played Daphne and Celeste and damaged my sound card, it would be fantastic if it could heal itself. But really, can I be arsed to wait for weeks until I can hear the sound of the shotgun in hitman contracts again? No. I'd just pop over to PC World and get me a new one, or wait a day for it to arrive from dabs.

So I think it is wrong that I don't have that option with my ankle. I went to the local ankle shop, and the nurse told me I'd have to wait two weeks until it was fixed. And then she just gave me an odd look when I asked how much a replacement would be - apparently bodies don't work like that. Huh.

Rang up NHS direct today, and the nurse told me I had a lovely voice. How cool, I got chatted up by a complete stranger. And not for the first time! Wonder why it only ever happens on the phone though. Anyway, Isaid my ankle wasn't getting better, and should it really be blue and mouldy with little white bits sticking out, and the lady said that I should probably go to the hospital. So I trundled along to the local Minor Injuries Unit, which brought back many fond memories of having a splinter dug out. Joy. End result: I've probably torn a ligament, and it'll be a couple of weeks before I can go out for my morning run. Shame.

I am feeling remarkably fresh after just 2 hours sleep last night. Decided to have a last push on a project and am mostly finished now, woo, go me. Then to bed at 8am. Apparently the door bell rang at 8.15, a workman trying to get in to paint the kitchen - he had to go away again, I didn't hear anything until my alarm went off at 10.

And some more good news - my car leads have arrived! Woo! So I wandered in and picked everything up, and thought 'hmm, free fitting, might as well', so I led the Halfords man into the car park. Only problem was, my old radio didnt want to come out. He must have sat there pulling for quarter of an hour or so. Another guy came out to try to help, but no luck. So they sent me away at 5 with instructions to come back tomorrow morning - from the sounds of things they're going to have to dismantle the car to get the old one out. Joke.

Tonight is CAPMS night - about time it did something useful, methinks.

My incompetence in the garden is legendary. My skills are limited to cutting, hacking and lugging, and even then only under strict supervision. And as for indoor plants, I either water them too much or not enough, and they all turn brown and fall apart.

So yesterday I decided that enough was enough - I was going to give something back to the garden. So I went out and bought 12 small outdoor flowery plants, two larger potted flowery plants and a hanging basket, planted the plants in the various plant-holding devices, and hung the hanging basket on a hook. I figure they'll last for at least a week or so before they go brown.

Just did a curiosity google for 'yay', and yay.org.uk has moved from results page 13 to page 1, at 6th place! Yay!

Just after the Japanese 'Yay' search engine, and "Homoeroticism Yay!, the clique for anyone and everyone who likes their Buffy and Angel a little bit...gay."

Right. Still at least 2 places to climb then...

In other news, I have lots more work, but am happy about it because it's work that I want to do, and work that will need my CMS, so I can feel justified devoting time to it. Which is what I have done this afternoon, and my parser now parses a string and knows when to output and when to shut up. I feel like I'm making progress! But I'm really not. Oh well!

Leela says it is time for me to take her out for dinner, so bye bye!