Multicolour Room

A comment I got just reminded me to check... The producers of 'The Viridian Room' have now re-released the original 'The Crimson Room' for play on the Fasco-cs site - go on, they're a bit annoying but worth a play...

One Way...

...or another I'm gonna find ya
I'm gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha
One way or another I'm gonna win ya
I'm gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha
One way or another I'm gonna see ya
I'm gonna meetcha meetcha meetcha meetcha
One day, maybe next week
I'm gonna meetcha, I'm gonna meetcha, I'll meetcha

Coyote Ugly... gotta love it, shame i was gonna try and do some work tonight :-)

Moving...

Well after Ed moved out yesterday, I moved into his room today... just in time for John to move in a load of his stuff into my old room... it's all proper musical rooms at the moment - Ed's done a rather nice chart to explain it - oh well, it's a way to make me organise some of my stuff a bit better at least, just not the weather for moving large items around the house :-/

PHP 2

OK so I cheated a bit and got Ed to write a script to give me a unique visitor counter collated from the stats running on the server... it worked so well he used it on his site too ;-)

Anyway, today I've had a go at fiddling with his script to show what the most common search phrase is of the current month that visitors find my site with. Apart from having to learn a little PHP, the most annoying thing was that both Ed's script and mine would work fine seperately, but not on the same page (they were voiding the following ones variables)... grr I thought, then finally tried changing one of the function's name... seems you can't have 2 includes that both use an identical named function on the same page (dispite the functions being in 2 totally seperate PHP scripts) - with that changed all is working perfectly ;-)

PHP

Well that went ok - site now PHPified ready for some cool stuff... not sure what cool stuff yet though :-/

Plastique

It arrived this morning... looks like I'll be living in the lab next week then ;-)

Massiiive

Of course during the reinstall a lot of data had to be moved to back-up everything that was going to be lost - some partitions were rearranged and stuff was moved back from before too... this meant connecting a variety of hard drives all at once:

362.35Gb - now that's some nice storage capacity ;-)

Lightspeed

The parts arrived today - it didn't take too long to put them together, but realising that XP refused to boot due to the massive hardware changes wasn't expected... a repair got it to boot, but virtually no programs would run so the rest of the day was spent reinstalling everything. Anyway all is well and now running on pure 64bit power :-)

V12

Goddess on the mountain top
Burning like a silver flame
The summit of beauty and love
And Venus was her name...

She's got it
Yeah, baby, she's got it
I'm your Venus, I'm your fire
At your desire
Well, I'm your Venus, I'm your fire
At your desire

It's OK, I havn't gone insane... It's the new Venus 12 cooler ;-)

FIRE!

I was happily using my computer yesterday when suddenly it froze, and a very nasty smell started to pour from under the desk... with lightning speed I switched it off, pulled all the cables and got the case open... I could hear a kinda cracking noise and by this time a very strong burning plastic smell had filled the room - so much so I had to leave the room for half hour... later, after careful inspection I discovered this:

The motherboard had suffered already from the infamous batch of Luxon capacitors, and 3 of them had previously domed, but it seems after all this time it had finally given up and that 'lump' is where one of the power mosfets had started to combust! Luckily I killed it all before anything else started to burn... seems all but the motherboard survived, but I've decided to take the chance to upgrade anyway...

This stylish bit of silicon is already on it's way to me (along with a few other choice components)... update on Monday (hopefully)

Nearly...

Manged to be in the lab twice in one day today... but it's getting kinda exciting! The tensile creep coupons have been cut and are looking good, and the testing rigs were being put together as I look in the workshop... looks like it's all go for Monday! Yay!

S v JB

Q: Why invent sugar when jelly beans already exist?

A: 'Cus you can't put jelly beans in your coffee!

'Nuff said.

Broken Gallery?

I noticed this morning that the Gallery on the home Apache server wasn't working properly - and probably hasn't been for a while (why has nobody emailed me?) Anyway, I had moved the (working) gallery onto a subdomain to keep it looking nice and enabled mod_rewrite to use simple links rather than long PHP requests...

The main albums page was working, but all albums were 404'ing - after lots of forum searches I'd tried moving the albums folder, changing the virtual hosts, everything - it would only work either using no subdomain (which mod_rewrite would work with) or using the subdomain without mod_rewrite (hence long URL's)... I was getting rather confused and puzzled until I bumped into a single random post:

The trick is to run your Gallery Configuration Wizard from the sub-domain.

i.e. run http://sub.domain.com/setup/ rather than http://www.domain.com/gallery/setup/. This should fix the RewriteRules correctly (so it will now only run via the subdomain).

5 mins later it was working exactly as it should! I cannot believe after all the forum posts of people failing to get it to work that it was this simple! One post in the middle of thousands! Grrr... In the process I did manage to add mirror support and FTP'd the wedding photos to a remote server to get them working super fast too ;-)

Stupid BB

Well since they kicked out Marco today I guess my prediction is wrong, but they've done it on purpose only to make sure that Nadia wins instead... we'll see...