myrddin.org: weblog

Things have been ultra busy. I have become the “Focal Point” for our biggest account. Unfortunately I am actually doing the work of that of a Technical Leader exept the “focal point” title is just a way of giving me Tech Lead responsibilities without the title or corresponding pay rise… typical… *sighs*

Nonetheless I am leading a team of 3 at the moment to be increased to 5 next week. Projects coming out of our asses, new technologies on its way, lots of good things coming down the track. 28 IBM xSeries blade servers have arrived that I will be putting in additional to our current infrastructure, will be pretty cool.

Things have been stressfull lately as currently my only 2 other team members are only new to the linux team and i’ve been not been giving them much work to do so they can get their heads around the account. Hopefully next week I can get them right into things as I have 1 new guy to the IBM Linux team and one other who is already in the IBM Linux team shifting from being dedicated to another account to the one I am leading (which won’t be so bad as he’s aware of account specifics).

Things will also be looking up in the next few weeks as we are currently at a peak period in the account cycles. In saying that, a month or so down the track we will no doubt be back to where we are now, stressed and overworked as there is *so* much more work destined for my little team, but bring it on!

Filed under: m.o

This long weekend I went with my sister and her boyfriend to play paintball for the first time. My sis and her other half play and work at the paintball place all the time. They finally managed to organise a time when I could actually take a day to myself (damn work) and play with them. It was a really good day, I enjoyed it heaps.

I managed to get the shit shot outta me in a big way, but the problem being, I was the only non-professional player there… The day was organised to be the training day for the competition players. I even played against the leading Australian team which was pretty intense.

The day after however… I have counted about 16 bruises and I can barely move my legs. Its not the fact that I was hit at close range a few too many times, its more of the fact that I was running, crouching, jumping up from behind obstacles, darting and sprinting around that has made my legs non-functional. I’m no fatty, but I don’t do any exercise except for riding my motorbike (yeah, like thats very energetic anyway) so I feel like Neo from the Matrix when he asks why his eyes hurt. The answer to that question was “Because you have never used them before”. hehe hopefully the stiffness will go away in the next day or so cause I’d like to go out and play again soon.

Filed under: m.o

Every now and again I have a look at the statistics my page has. It appears this month so far I have had 4117 unique hits to my Debian Kernel Recompile Howto. I also have a look at the referrers, while most of the referrers are from google, a few come up from other sites which is all good and well, except for one. The site in particular complains that my howto’s are ageing and no longer relevant. This is far from the truth. While indeed some refer to older kernel packages, or older redhat distributions etc, they all for the good part work and can still be used as valid howto’s!

Admittedly, some DO need updating to reflect the newer package versions etc but the fact of the matter is that none are really there for the typical newbie linux user. All of the howto’s should be reasonably current and functional even if the package versions documented don’t quite match.

I initially started writing the howto’s for myself so when I was recompiling my kernel on my many home machines I had to go to one place to refresh my memory as I had documented the common tasks in the past. It was also there for friends who are also of a technical mind to check it out and remember what needed to be done. I ended up going into a bit more detail than necessary for some external people but again, they were never originally written for the newbie.

In saying that, I think the person who wrote the article that my howto’s were useless should pull their head out of their ass. I add all the myrddin.org content to a cvs server locally on my home network including the howto documents. If you look closely each of the howto documents, they all have a clearly visible cvs Id tag which shows the date of the last update/commit for that document.

Filed under: m.o

Just got another 3 fish for the 4 foot tank today. I got a Red Top Cobalt Zebra, an Albino Red Top Cobalt Zebra and a Lombardi. After putting them into the tank, the normally sedated Electric Blue Johanni decided he would terrorize the new dudes. He’s been chasing them around a fair bit, hopefully it won’t go on too much longer.

I also noticed that the Electric Blue Johanni has developed a case of “White Spot” which can be fatal to all fish in the tank if left unchecked. I bought some white spot medication which will hopefully clear up his infection and control the infection in the other fish, last thing I could possibly want at the moment is for all the fish to become infected. I only noticed it this morning and acted on it immediately so all should be ok
The old 90Litre tank is still running, ableit with no fish inside. I will use it as a qarantine tank if the case of White Spot on the Electric Blue Johanni becomes any worse. In a few weeks time I will convert the 90Litre tank to a Marine aquarium which should be awesome!

Filed under: m.o

Last weekend I went out and *finally* bought myself a 4foot fishtank. I ended up getting the 4 foot tank, a cabinet, hood, light fittings, biolight, cannister filter (1200L/h), air pump, air stone and some more water ager and amrite down.

I spent the good part of Saturday and Sunday staining the cabinet and hood a chololate brown colour. I tell ya what, I was SO bloody sore afterwards it wasn’t funny! Its times like these I realise how unfit I really am
Filled the tank up late on Sunday and realised I hadn’t cleaned the subtrate (gravel) and therefore the water went a muddy colour. Considering this is pretty bad for the water and the filter I drained the tank, painstakingly cleaned the substrate and filled it back up again on Monday after work. Its about here that I let you know that its about 220Litres that fit into this tank, and with only a 10Litre bucket, this took a fair amount of time. And also pretty much destroyed my arm muscles hehe

Tis now been 3 days, the water is still cloudy but this should soon be rectified as teh filter does its thing, I also bought some activated carbon to help fix the water clarity. I also bought 2 more catfish and a flameback cichlid which are happily roaming around the new tank along with the 2 old bristlenose catfish from the old tank. I think I will move the 8 remaining cichlids to the new tank tomorrow afternoon. The tank is looking pretty good at the moment. I might even make its creation and development into a site project.

Filed under: m.o