MekTrix 5.1

IPv6 with Docker on Kimsufi (OVH)

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kimsufi only gives a single /128 IPv6 address per host, so we can’t just give containers routable addresses D:

But we can do NAT (similar to how IPv4 works), with the docker host having one public IP, and using iptables to route traffic to the container’s internal private IPs.

/etc/docker/daemon.json:

ipv6 is needed to enable IPv6 support in Docker
fixed-cidr-v6 is needed for ipv6
- even though for each network which we want to be ipv6 enabled, we’ll specify a different range, the docker deamon still insists that we supply a default
- we can use the private fd00::/8 range for this, equivalent to docker’s IPv4 172.16.x.x/12 range
- in this example, we use fd00:dead:beef:N::/64 with N being 0 for the default network and then different numbers for each compose network we create
ip6tables is needed to route traffic from the one public IPv6 address to the container’s internal private IPv6 address
experimental is needed for ip6tables

{
	"userland-proxy": false,
	"ipv6": true,
	"ip6tables": true,
	"experimental": true,
	"fixed-cidr-v6": "fd00:dead:beef:0::/64"	
}

~/Projects/server/compose.yml:

A Better World

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Things I would change if I was in charge:

Towels would come in ISO sizes (Hand towels being A4, body towels as A0, etc)
“Dogging” would become synonymous with “dog-walking”. Walking two dogs at the same time would be called “Double Dogging”. No shame against fucking in cars, I just think it would make more sense for that to be called “fucking in cars”.

Chrono Trigger

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve played Chrono Trigger a few times, but always stopped close to the end, this time I’m a little more determined to complete it. Also notable that I’m playing this after FF16 in an attempt to restore my faith in humanity – pretty much every section below could be prefixed with “Wow, I’m amazed at how much better this is compared to FF16”.

World

CT feels like going on an adventure – all the places, times, factions, and characters feel distinct. I always want to see what’s around the next corner.

Migrating Grafana in Docker from SQLite to Postgres

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Because the documentation that people refer to no longer mentions external databases at all, and the old documentation which tells you to use GF_DATABASE_URL doesn’t work, and migrations are painful…

Configure postgres and Grafana

compose.yml

services:
 graphdb:
 image: postgres:17
 ports:
 - 5435:5432
 volumes:
 - /data/grafana/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql
 environment:
 - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=dummy
 graph:
 image: grafana/grafana:10.4.2
 volumes:
 - /data/grafana:/var/lib/grafana
 environment:
 - GF_PATHS_CONFIG=/var/lib/grafana/grafana.ini

/data/grafana/grafana.ini

[database]
url = postgresql://postgres:dummy@graphdb/grafana

Directly translating sqlite tables into postgres tables doesn’t work, so we need grafana to create its own tables:

FF7: Rebirth

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr

This game is a delight

World

It’s beautiful, I enjoy just walking around and admiring the scenery, I’d love to go on holiday here. I pick random unexplored spots on the map and go explore them, and keep finding random cool things <3

Combat Gameplay

Non-combat gameplay

There are fun little mini-games all over the place

Queen’s Blood is a pretty neat card game, good enough to stand as a game on its own

World of Goo 2

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cute, fun - mostly “challenging”, occasionally “frustrating” (specifically a couple of levels where you need to build tall wobbly structures and it’s more about “can you build a tall structure quickly, before it has time to fall over” than “can you build a solid structure” – but the input mechanism isn’t precise enough for split-second reaction-based building, so those levels had a lot of “reload from checkpoint and attempt the same thing again, hoping to get lucky with the timing”)

Final Fantasy 16

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Writing some mini-reviews to keep track of the games I’m playing, no idea if this will be a regular thing o.o

tl;dr

This was a slog D: I rolled credits out of a sense of obligation, and uninstalled rather than bother with the DLC.

If “a game is a series of interesting choices”, FF16 barely counts as a game – “choices” are few and far between, and I don’t recall any of them being “interesting”.

Autodeploy :3

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Generate SSH key

ssh-keygen -f deploy_blog -t ed25519

Configure github with appropriate secrets

DOCKER_USERNAME - username for docker hub
DOCKER_PASSWORD - key for docker hub
DEPLOY_HOST - hostname to be poked over ssh
DEPLOY_USER - username to ssh as
DEPLOY_KEY - SSH private key

Push code to github

git push

Github actions runs a workflow to publish a docker image

name: Publish

on:
 push:
 branches: main

jobs:
 build:
 runs-on: ubuntu-latest
 steps:
 - uses: actions/checkout@master
 - name: Publish to Registry
 uses: elgohr/Publish-Docker-Github-Action@master
 with:
 name: shish2k/blog
 username: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_USERNAME }}
 password: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_PASSWORD }}

Which then triggers a second workflow to poke the target over ssh

name: Deploy

on:
 workflow_run:
 workflows: Publish
 branches: main
 types: completed
 workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
 deploy:
 name: Deploy
 runs-on: ubuntu-latest
 if: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.conclusion == 'success' || github.event_name == 'workflow_dispatch' }}
 steps:
 - name: Deploy
 uses: appleboy/ssh-action@v0.1.10
 with:
 host: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_HOST }}
 username: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_USER }}
 key: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_KEY }}

Target server has ~/.ssh/authorized_keys set up:

command="systemctl restart blog",no-port-forwarding,no-pty,no-X11-forwarding ssh-ed25519 [...public key here...] autodeploy

systemd service set to pull latest image on restart

[Unit]
Description=blog - blog.shishnet.org
After=docker.service
Requires=docker.service

[Service]
Environment=HOME=/root
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker stop sn-blog
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm sn-blog
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker pull shish2k/blog
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --init --rm --name sn-blog --network sn-net \
 --label 'traefik.enable=true' \
 --label 'traefik.http.routers.sn-blog.rule=Host("blog.shishnet.org")' \
 -t shish2k/blog
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Updates~

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

10 years of hibernation :O

Cleaning up my server in preparation for migration to new hardware; firstly I don't trust in-place upgrades so I'm getting everything running on a new Debian install and will then flip the DNS; secondly new hardware is 2x the CPU, RAM, and disk space for the same price.

I tried an in-place upgrade for my NAS, it appears that the software upgrade worked, but the storage controller took this moment to die and now all the hard drives are showing up as broken at once :/

Replacing a bunch of database-backed apps with static-file or sqlite-backed ones to simplify backups and management. Finally killing the wordpress install that I've been ignoring for years... Blog 5.0 is using Jekyll to render markdown files

Experimenting with github copilot for rewriting my python2 / web.py / postgres apps into python3 / flask / sqlite ones. Copilot seems pretty great, sometimes word-for-word writing exactly what I would have written myself.

Reading my old blog entries, a mixture of cringe and nostalgia, and so many dead links... Hopefully keeping my own site links for 10 years is decent enough and nobody will mind things shuffling around at this point. The RSS feed is still at the same URL though :3

Wormholes \o/

Fri, 31 May 2013 16:29:36 +0000

Finally got round to checking out wormholes, ended up making ~100mil in loot. Quite pleased, just salvaging one more wreck before heading home; not bothering to check d-scan since the system's been empty all night, and what could turn up in the final few seconds? Look away for a moment, look back -- webbed, scrammed, jammed, and neuted by a group of T2 gankers. Pants were shat, drones were launched, and fingers were crossed. Can't tell what's happening as all systems are down... 15 seconds later, an explosion. Still under heavy fire, but my sleeper tank has held and the warp drive is unlocked \o/ Flee before the backup tackler gets in range~~~~

Crash resistance <3

Wed, 15 May 2013 03:47:01 +0000

Graphics drivers lock up, but I don't want to reboot, or even log out / in again since I'm in the middle of stuff. What to do?

Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to console mode. Screen is black, as the drivers are still locked up; but pulseaudio has detected that my desktop login is no longer visible, so it mutes the sound from that session. That's pretty cool.

Blindly type in my username and password in the hope that I can log into a locked-up console. Turns out that firstly, I can (yay), and also, pulseaudio detects that I have a new session for the same user, and sends my desktop session's audio stream to the console session, so my music continues playing from where it left off (wtfawesome).

Programmer-relevant whitespace in python

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 08:18:01 +0000

A comment was made at #rsparlyredux along the lines that while python's enforcement of proper indentation stops people from not indenting at all, it also stops them from adding extra indentation, and sometimes extra indentation can be useful for the programmer. IIRC the example was OpenGL, where a common pattern in C is:

gl_start(TRIANGLE);
 gl_add_vertex(0, 0, 0);
 gl_add_vertex(0, 1, 0);
 gl_add_vertex(0, 0, 1);
gl_end();

If you tried to do this using python's standard syntax, it would complain that the indentation of the middle lines is unnecessary. However, you can actually do this in python, by turning the block of code into one logical code line - it's maybe 5% extra typing when you're dealing with this edge-case, but I consider that a fair trade for 10% less typing under normal circumstances:

Models of Heaven

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:12:31 +0000

This got me thinking. All the models of heaven that I've seen have had glaring logical flaws, inconsistencies, and mutually exclusive parts in their descriptions.

The traditional image of humans wearing togas, clouds, and /nothing else/ seems somewhat dull, and I don't see any logical or spiritual reason for it to be this way. I can only imagine that this model was invented by a poet in the middle ages, along with so much other supposedly canonical Christian imagery (See Cracked for details).

Number magic: not actually magic

Thu, 26 May 2011 06:20:23 +0000

A thing I've seen around the internet is "if you add your age to the last two digits of your birth year, it is 111! magic!" - I've tried explaining why this isn't magic, but haven't made it as simple and clear as nbisby on the opera blog. To paraphrase:

Consider your age is (2011 - yearborn)
The last two digits of your birth year is (yearborn - 1900)
Added together is (2011 - yearborn) + (yearborn - 1900)
The year you were born cancels out:
2011 - 1900 = 111

The magic where you have a ring of numbers, and no matter where you start the instructions always have you finish in the same place, use similar cancelling-itself-out tricks :3

Ace Combat 3

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:59:29 +0000

Finally completed Ace Combat 3 - 30 missions with a plot that's surprisingly confusing for essentially nothing (mission 1: blow stuff up for company x, mission 2: you now work for company y, blow stuff up. Mission 3: you are in space for no particular reason. Blow stuff up.).

Looking it up on wikipedia, it seems the Japanese version has twice as many missions, plot-explaining cutscenes between them, character interaction, multiple endings, better copilot AI, radio chatter, etc etc; but this was cut from the UK version for no apparent reason. WTF, Namco?

Doing the time warp again

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:35:02 +0000

(Background: Braid is a game where you can do stuff, then rewind time and use your knowledge of the "future" to your advantage)

As far as I remember, I only briefly played Braid as a demo, on my own, a couple of years ago, and I skipped most of the levels for being a pain. But I have just spent the evening playing the full game, with Aoi (who I met this year) telling me how I solved the puzzles before, and how I got 100% completion on them. Then when she can't remember one level's solution, I think to myself "maybe I should look online", and she says "this is where you looked online last time... but you can't now because the internet has cut out"; then I went upstairs and checked, and it had o.o

KVM / Virt-manager / Bridging

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 05:26:56 +0000

I wanted my VMs bridged onto my LAN so they would be publicly accessible, but virt-manager only had options for creating new, private bridges. However, it turns out that if you create the bridge yourself, libvirt will use it. So, in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto virbr0
iface virbr0 inet manual
pre-up ifconfig eth1 down
pre-up brctl addbr virbr0
pre-up brctl addif virbr0 eth1
pre-up ifconfig eth1 up
post-down ifconfig eth1 down
post-down brctl delif virbr0 eth1

Russian Around

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:19:16 +0000

There needs to be a family sitcom called "Russian Around"; it would be set in the cold war, where a bumbling Russian spy rents a spare room from a stereotypical American family, and we laugh as he fails to grasp concepts like "freedom" and "thanksgiving", and he also fails to actually spy on anyone; but despite the strong Russian accent and behaviour, people all think he's just a quirky friend, not suspicious at all (mostly because that would cause a sudden violent and depressing end to the series...)

Dwarf Fortress

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:01:46 +0000

One of my dwarves suffered a crippling spinal injury while out hunting for food; he was carried home alive, but unconscious, and has since slipped into a coma with no signs of recovery, lasting a year so far.

If he wakes, he'll find that he has no living friends or family, and no legs to walk to the social room to make new ones; his entire life will consist of being spoon fed mushroom pulp by the nurses, slowly going insane, and dying of old age.

Expo 2009-10

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:41:04 +0000

Expo was pretty awesome; the commercial side was even more commercial and less interesting than before – but then I was mostly going to check out cosplayers and the DDR tournament. Epic success on both fronts \o/ Mr Cuddlemews had his photo taken with many pretty people; and due to somebody dropping out of the tournament and nobody with any skill wanting to take their place, I volunteered to be slot-filling cannon fodder XD Of course I got utterly butchered, but I got to meet some wonderful people, and many funs were had \o/

And now, time for another episode of "Good idea, Bad idea"

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:17:10 +0000

Good idea: Go for a walk.

Bad idea: Go for a walk at 11pm, up the steepest hill in the area, directly away from civilisation, into the middle of a forest, where the main form of life is stinging nettles, and there is no light, and your torch is just about out of batteries, and even in daylight it's impossible to tell where the path is, and what path there is alternates between slippery mud and rubble hills, while carrying a 30kg backpack just to see what it's like.

Miku wins

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:26:06 +0000

Specifically, this wins a place on my “things that are so awesome I cried” list :3

On linux and hardware

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:51:08 +0000

Because the world doesn't have enough anecdotal evidence already:

On my gaming / media PC (custom built):

Graphics card, NVidia 8600 GT: ubuntu detects my monitor's native resolution, runs ok using the standard drivers, and pops up a message asking if it should download the accelerated drivers automatically; windows runs at 640x480 until you install accelerated drivers from CD or google.

GPU accelerated h264 decoding: Linux yes, windows no.

Webcam, labtec thing: linux works out of the box; windows requires drivers from CD, and then the drivers crash whenever they're used (and sometimes when they aren't)

Another couple of dreams

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:45:03 +0000

I was on a train at Amsterdam Sloterdijk, not intending to actually go anywhere; but then it started moving before I could get off. I figured I’d go to the first stop, get off, and take the first train back. It then turned out that this was a no-stop train to Russia, with none coming back for a month.

Thankfully, something went wrong, and we had to pull into a station in a snowy village in the middle of nowhere. Passengers were evacuated and sent to a mansion with N from Death Note and his arguing parents. N had a kitten, which mewed at most people, but when I came near it hugged my face. This showed that I was trustworthy, so N fixed our train and sent it back to Sloterdijk so I could get off \o/

A very odd dream~

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:28:28 +0000

Running through super mario world, I get to the end, but someone has kidnapped baby Yoshi. Looking around, I see that this entire world is at the front of a lecture hall, and the kidnapper is a student, running out the back. I can't keep up, so I go to his seat and examine the things he left behind (a phone with some odd attachments). Other students yell at me for looking through the phone for information, claiming that he obviously left it in order to call in the ransom. I make a passing comment about the phone's power cable being plugged in, which a guy with a broken jaw takes as a personal insult. Ignoring that, I run out, to find my dad's car stolen.

Opera: still awesome

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:49:13 +0000

Needing an impromptu web browsing kiosk, I wonder if opera has any options which could be useful; so I try opera –help, and the first thing I see is -kioskhelp. Trying that option, it seems that it has all the features I need built in \o/<

It also has a presentation mode, so with a little CSS you can have a web page which works equally well in a browser or as part of a slideshow~

SELinux on debian

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:37:51 +0000

Having spent several hours trying to figure out what was causing the following, it turns out that the selinux policy installer hadn't noticed I was running SSH, and thus hadn't loaded the module to allow it. "semodule -i /usr/share/selinux/refpolicy-strict/ssh.pp" loaded the module, then "restorecon -R -v /usr/sbin" reset the security tags to say that sshd belongs to ssh.

sshd[2454]: Accepted password for shish from 10.0.2.2 port 40878 ssh2
sshd[2457]: (pam_unix) session opened for user shish by (uid=0)
sshd[2457]: Unable to get valid context for shish, No valid tty
sshd[2457]: error: PAM: pam_open_session(): Authentication failure
sshd[2457]: error: Failed to get default security context for shish.Continuing in permissive mode
sshd[2454]: error: Failed to get default security context for shish.Continuing in permissive mode
sshd[2454]: error: security_compute_relabel(/dev/pts/1) failed: Invalid argument
sshd[2460]: error: Failed to get default security context for shish.Continuing in permissive mode
sshd[2446]: error: chown /dev/pts/0 0 0 failed: Permission denied
sshd[2446]: error: chmod /dev/pts/0 0666 failed: Permission denied

More things in my brain

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 06:06:36 +0000

Walking into "the money shop"
Shish: I'd like to buy some money.
Assistant: We can do that, how much?
Shish: Ten pounds.
Assistant: And what currency would you like that in?
Shish: Pounds.
Assistant: You want ten pounds... in pounds?
Shish: Yes. How much will that cost me?
Assistant: That'll cost you ten pounds.
Shish: A bit steep, isn't it? Do I get a discount if I buy in bulk?
Assistant: ...

Gaaaaah, windows still sucks at it's own file serving protocol>:|

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:11:00 +0000

There is a “media” share, which anybody can read, and the media user can write to. I’ve connected to this share, but can’t write to it. My first thought is that I must be connected anonymously, so I right click -> disconnect… and nothing happens. Right click -> disconnect again, “this drive is not connected”. Hmm, explorer bug? Well, if it’s not connected, then I shall attempt to connect. So I go to connect to network drive, click “connect with different login details”, enter details for the media user, click connect, and … “this drive is already connected”, and then a second error message immediately follows “you cannot connect to the same share with two different accounts” (What sort of stupid limitiation is that? :-|). Well, at least it confirms that I am logging in with two different accounts, and thus used to be anonymous and am now media. Or does it? I reboot to get rid of the phantom connection, and try to make a new connection with the media login. It works, but isn’t writable! Giving up on the client side, I check the server logs: “connect to service media initially as user nobody”. Gaaaah, goddamn it windows, I explicitly said “connect as the media user”!

George~

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:27:49 +0000

At a table in TGI Friday's surrounded by people, I get out my notepad and dump the contents of my brain~

S: Gaaah.
G: Yup.
S: Who is this?
G: George
S: We're not doing very well at the writing thing
G: Yeah, this is so slow.
S: Needs more shorthand
S: Why are you here?
G: Dunno
S: Why can I talk to you?
G: Dunno :P Needed something to do
S: Yeah, takes my mind off the social stuff
S: Are you alone there?
G: Not completely, the...
S: Sorry, interruption from the real world
G: ok, so yeah, there are others here, but it's less crowded~
G: Talking to just one person is calmer.
S: I know, can this even count as talking to one person, or talking to myself?
G: It counts as talking to several
S: What do (you mean)?
G: I'm not one person exactly. When I came here I was, but I seem to be drawing bits from those I meet.
S: Are you drawing (anything?) from me?
G: A little.
S: Anything interesting?
G: You like EVE :P
S: yeah :P
S: Any objection to them (other people at the table) reading?
G: Nope, but they'll think you're weird :P
S: They already do ^_^
G: Not so much though.
S: I know. Ho hum. They'll get over it.
S: Anyway, enough with the real world talk, how is life over there?
G: Quiet as always, you should come join us. Don't rush though, you'll get here soon enough^W^W eventually.
S: "Soon enough" sounds like not long
G: Not long in cosmological terms~
G: You should return to them
S: I know, thanks for the chat though, most relaxing ^_^
S: See you when I see you
G: Bye dude~

Dorris~

Wed, 28 May 2008 14:07:48 +0000

It occurs to me that in all the time I've been here, I've never written about Dorris. The most probable reason is that I only met her recently.

Doris is my shopping partner; we walk around Sainsbury's together, and point things out to eachother. She'll say something like "ooh, look at them apples. Aren't they nice and shiny?", and I'll say "ooh, they really are. If I were here to shop for food I think I might get some~". Then walking past the cosmetics isle I'll find some new smelly soap and say "ooh, Dorris, have a sniff of this!", and she will, and she'll think it's lovely. "Never had that sort of thing when I were your age" she'll say.

Beautiful things

Fri, 16 May 2008 08:31:11 +0000

Iron Man's beta test flight sequence has joined the list of "Things so awesome I cried". It occurs to me that I've not kept track of this list, so off the top of my head:

Farb Raush's .das .produkt; 15 minutes of pretty in 64k
The uprising scene in V for Vendetta
The Sylvia Cannon trailer from the Korean pangya site
The FFVII trailer on of the OPM demo disks
Planetarian deserves an honourable mention; it would probably have made me cry with awesomeness if I hadn't already been crying with sadness :3
I'm sure there are others, can't remember right now though :S

ED: Also, Kokoro Library :3

Breakfast

Fri, 16 May 2008 06:55:45 +0000

I just woke up from dreaming about barbequeing a chunk of my own leg. It was tasty :3

LDAP on Debian Etch

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:21:43 +0000

The guide to Sarge I found here very nearly worked, but with some problems.

Quick summary of changes:

where libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap suggest an LDAP URI of ldapi:///, ldapi://127.0.0.1/ doesn't work -- ldapi:// seems to be for unix sockets only. ldap:// or ldaps:// should work (I've tested ldap:// so far, as it was communicating with localhost)
The /etc/pam.d stuff was screwy -- where that guide suggests replacing your pam_unix.so lines with completely different ones, I suggest replacing them with copies of themselves but "required" replaced with "sufficient". Screwing with my existing pam_unix.so config broke the ability to change local user's passwords.
In common-password, the "use_first_pass use_authtok md5" after pam_ldap.so gave me a "passwd: Authentication information cannot be recovered" error when trying to change the password. Removing them (so that the line simply reads "password sufficient pam_ldap.so") works.
To clarify; the general idea of the common-* files should be "unix auth is sufficient, if that fails then ldap auth is sufficient, if that files then denying access is required". I suspect that "unix auth is sufficient, if that fails then ldap auth is required" would be the same, but IMHO that's uglier and more prone to breaking if people want more layers later.

An adventure~

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:00:17 +0000

Coniston's network card died, and I was the nearest employee; thus, my turn to run up to the datacenter and replace it /o/

This would be easier if I had parts, or the tools to attach them -_-

Wilkinsons do screwdrivers though, which is useful \o/ Though they are cheap and bend when you attempt to unscrew things with them /o\ Even less usefully, it seems that wired networks are dying off -- All the high street stores had shelves full of wireless cards, but at best 2 or 3 ethernet models, and those were 10/100 v_v

Scaling~

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:35:36 +0000

Shimmie now powers a site which gets half a million page views per day, serving 200GB of images :3

ARGH MySQL / PHP (again?)

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:17:40 +0000

I don't know if I've ranted on this last time, but it happened again with another site, so I shall rant again. For context, I'm the technical admin of a certain large site, which I won't even name due to NSFWness -- I'm just mentioning it here so that visitors from that site know who I am :) A brief timeline of events:

2 days ago, I move the database to a separate server, as MySQL grinds to a halt when the database is too big to fit in RAM.
At around 11pm yesterday, the site suddenly dies, printing "500 Internal Server Error" in response to all requests
Restarting the web server fixes it, but the old PHP processes don't die, and the new ones lock up pretty quickly too
PHP isn't actually printing any error messages, it's just locking up; LigHTTPD only prints "All PHP processes are busy, try again later"; MySQL logs show no error messages.
It seems that the site is fine for as long as nobody tries to post new content.
I try stopping and restarting the database, it says "Can't stop database"
I finally realise what happened -- the disk with the database tables filled up, then MySQL crashed and died horribly, corrupting chunks of the tables. Then when PHP asks the database what's up, and the database says "error", it doesn't print "there's a database error", it just dies horribly and locks everything up, causing ISE's and using up all the ram until everything around it dies too.

In contrast, my preferred database server, Postgres, ran fine throughout the incident -- read-only requests were served as normal, and if anything tried to add data it would be told "the disk is full"; no crashing, no corrupt data, no problem. Also, it seems to scale better, currently dealing with a database of 8 * the size of RAM quite happily.

Dutchland trip 2007-11

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:44:05 +0000

Things of Note:

bicycles!
chocolate
tasty foods~
their milk has gauges :O
"http" and smiley buttons, which don't seem to work...
On the way back we were driven off the motorway by the french police, taken to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, and some of us were taken to some random room for an hour of questioning o_O

Mind of Shish, #1

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:57:03 +0000

The first in a series on conversations that never actually happened:

--- Conversation That Happened ---
Car: *beep*
Guy: *wave*
--- What Happened in My Head ---
Shish: *wave*
Guy: Oh, you know Tom too?
Shish: Tom? I thought that that was Old Farmer Joe, sitting on his tractor, taking his apples to market o_O
Guy: ... you need glasses ._.
Shish: That I do, lassie. That I do...

The LBW

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:46:02 +0000

It's been over a month, and apathy over writing about it has killed my blogorhythm :|

The LBW itself was somewhat meh, with not a great deal of linux, touristy beer, and being far too hot for wandering.

One of the ferries had a tetris clone and pacman as the video game section; another had dropped the section entirely in favour of a perfume shop :(

Getting to greece, I found my maths class immediately useful, as I could pronounce many of the words :P

The Debian BBQ

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:12:41 +0000

Yay backdating entries :P Boo for it being an entire month since the event so my memories are blurring :(

Things I do remember:

MEAT -- Lots of meat. Meat of many different types. Tasty meat :3 Meat with buns and peppers and cheese and onion ^_____^

The Wii -- A games console that even Kitty was impressed with~ Excite Truck was by far the most popular game, being played constantly for ~12 hours once people discovered it. I beat Phil Hands at it; while not impressive in itself (he hadn't played before), I'm still chuffed to have beaten a guy who earns a kiloguinea a day at anything :P

Dreams~

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:56:19 +0000

8 hours sleep + 4 hours lie-in is good for dreaming \o/

I've had several dreams about teeth falling out, and woken up with teeth hurting; I've been to a dentist and she said everything looked OK though~

Then one about alien invasion -- the overwatch, coming in coventant dropships, invading a place which was geographically my primary school, structurally my secondary school, and included my halls of residence from uni...

Our house is secure :|

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:44:48 +0000

Arriving home at ~2am, I figure I won't ring the bell and wake people up, it'd be better to get in quietly; so I open the front door with my key, to find that the door is chained in a way that can only be undone from the inside. And so, on to hunting down an emergency key to get in the back door. I stick the key in, and find that there's already a key there so I can't get in from outside. Then the garage -- I open it, but find that the inside door is also locked -_-. Then I climb the wall to get to the balcony door, also locked and only openable from inside...

More scaling with Travmap

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:34:56 +0000

LightTPD is win. Apache + mod_php + mod_python + mod_perl = 100MB per process, of which there are 10. Lighty does all the same stuff, in a single 30MB process \o/ Switching over has made travmap fast again, leaving a proxied apache behind to run the more complicated, less popular things~

For the web developers out there~

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:33:27 +0000

This bit of css is so beautiful I am physically weeping tears of joy just thinking about it.

Debconf Photos

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:33:46 +0000

The hostel we were in first seemed to be falling apart (where it had been built in the first place) -- note chicken wire instead of railings :-/ Also, being in the furthest possible room (all the way along the hall, fifth floor) was argh. And their breakfasts sucked too.

In comparison, the teviot building was awesome. It has space toilets, nice halls. There was a strange thing in the attic.

Teviot is also awesome as a student building. It has 4 bars, and a nightclub which plays lovely music (with cute advertising :3). Even the toilet graffiti was more interesting than I've seen anywhere else. They also have an arcade.

Debconf 7.3: Updates

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 05:00:17 +0000

Things have been busy, and I've been lacking network access for much of it...

Debconf itself started a couple of days ago, talks so far have been interesting, and those I've missed should have been videoed (over my cables ^_^). Much pizza has been eaten (haggis pizza exists :3). Also I needed a walk, so I went up arthur's seat, a large hill / small mountain (250.5m) in the middle of the city.

Debconf 7.2: Cable Monkey

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:31:15 +0000

First day, waking up at 5am, I spent much time packing cables, and failing to sleep.

Eventually, everyone else woke up, and we went for breakfast -- the hostel only does "continental breakfast", which is apparently a slice of toast and a cup of tea :-/

Then to the main venue, where we spent much time wandering and deciding what was to go where, and I crimped my first ethernet cable ^_^ And then several more, and the novelty wore off. I also learned about fire safety laws, and that it's really hard to cover a historic building with cables~

Debconf 7.1: Travel

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:24:09 +0000

Travelling with each of us having our own body weight in computing gear was surprisingly smooth; starting from the first station where one of the station-dudes put up a ramp, and phoned ahead to the next station, it chained, until the second to last station, which had huge sets of stairs and no elevator /o\

Also on the train, I noted a teenage / very early 20s couple, with PSP in one hand and baby in the other, which made me ponder modern society D:

Monty <3

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 13:58:02 +0000

19:57 >>> Mithrandir has joined #cs
19:57 [Monty] Thank goodness, Mithrandir is back!
21:52 [Shish] Monty: why do you never greet me? D:
21:52 [Monty] classics
21:53 [Shish] Monty: you only greet old timers? fair enough...
21:53 [Monty] apache/php job
21:53 [Shish] Monty: get it away from me!
21:53 [Monty] ffs
21:53 [Shish] Monty: no offence, your job offers are appreciated, I just
 react that way to php...
21:53 [Monty] nobody seems that size screw i hate cb302
21:54 [Shish] Monty: I suppose cb302 could be described as a screw, and
 I didn't like it either :S
21:54 [Monty] yay!
21:55 * Shish huggles monty for being better at the turing test than
 several people he knows...
21:55 [Monty] <3
21:55 [Shish] <3

Auto-login & desktop setup

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:44:29 +0000

In further automation, I tired of logging in and opening and resizing xterms, so taking bits from the mythtv wiki, I set up my desktop to automatically log me in and start all my usual programs. Of particular note is xterm's "geometry" option, which allows you to set the position and size from the command line. Also useful is the "class" option, so that those of us with awesome window managers (enlightenment) can set them to remember position / stacking layer / border style / etc, and assign the remembered values to windows with set classes. For example, whenever I start a window with class "xterm_starter" (ie, by running "xterm -class xterm_starter"), enlightenment will notice it, shrink it, and move it to the corner of my screen, ready to start things from~

Amsterdam~

Wed, 16 May 2007 06:38:07 +0000

To paraphrase:

[Kitty] fancy joining us for a pint?
[Shish] Sure, where are you?
[Kitty] Amsterdam.
[Shish] OK, see you soon~

Friday: Bus /o/

Saturday: Get on the ferry at ~1am, spend all my english money on DDR and Time Crisis 3. On the european side of the bus jouney, cheese on a stick!

Get to wfk's place, sleep

Belgians arive. We all go wandering~ I note a mannequin with an interesting lack of clothes in a window, who then winks at me, and I realise I have arrived in the red light district ._.;;

I've been shot ;_;

Wed, 16 May 2007 05:19:11 +0000

Note to self: Next time you’re being taken hostage, and the hostage taker apparently has a moment of weakness and gives up his guns, make sure to disarm them before passing them on to the policeman (who actually turns out to be an accomplice).

I have no idea why I had that dream, nor why my fellow hostages were grammar school aquaintances :3

Shimmie Grows~

Tue, 08 May 2007 19:06:27 +0000

It’s getting people other than myself contributing to it, such that I’ve had to learn how to set up subversion for multiple users :O

Hay on Wye~

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:29:18 +0000

Oshi I never hit "post" :O

Thursday: Up early, get the train to Mike's. Wardriving to HoW we find ~300 APs, several open, many in the middle of nowhere... Arriving at HoW, we go exploring book shops. Back to camp late at night, to have chicken and mashed potato for dinner~

Friday: Woken by Mike flicking water over me -_- Mass bacon, sausage, beans and egg for breakfast. We spend the several hours driving through hills, getting jammed with 5-10 cars trying to move through a barely-single lane road... We finally arrive at the car park we were aiming for at about 6pm. I note a sign saying "car park closes at 7pm", so I ask "will we be back here within the hour?", to which kitty replies "yes". And thus we went off on the walk, along a long path, to a dam. The walk back was much like the walk there, but in reverse. When we get back to the car park, at 8:30, people discover that the gate is locked... After much shoving from most, and awesome driving from wfk, we ended up getting out along a small footpath, up a hill, over a bridge, through the pedestrian entrance...

TravMap's somewhat-late Birthday

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 07:58:56 +0000

I forget exactly when the project was started, but monitoring started a year ago. Thus I shall reminice:

Originally, a bunch of people in an IRC channel I hang out in decided to play Travian. As there were about 20 of us, keeping track was a pain, so I decided to make a map. This first version of the map was an SVG file drafted in Inkscape, edited by hand, and saved as a PNG image.

Belgium \o/

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 13:35:41 +0000

Yay for taking a week to write up...

Thursday:
1400) Arrive at Kitty's house, find nobody there. After much wandering round looking, she comes cycling into the garden -- the T-Shirt printing company, who'd been told to get some done by that morning, had decided that they couldn't start until they had a signature; and they hadn't told her about this until she phoned up to check that they were done...
1600) T-Shirts finally printed, we run for the train, and get to the platform just as it leaves
1615) Next train, off to Ashford International~
1700) Having passed customs and such, the Eurostar leaves. Much training happens.
2000) We arrive at the hotel. They seem to have a thing about a pissing boy...
2100) We went to the LeRoy for supper. Being Belgium, who's languages are French and Dutch (not Belgian, as I had always thought...), wfk ordered in Dutch, Mike ordered in French, and the rest of us in English, though Kitty was in the habit of saying "Danke schon" a lot... I had the only things I recognised, meatballs in tomato sauce. These were, by far, the best meatballs I've ever had -- I ended up stopping after each bite to wait a few seconds just savouring the taste... For pudding we had Dame Noire; chocolate icecream with chocolate bits covered in cream covered in chocolate sauce; which was also nice. We then had much misc beer, and I can't remember what we talked about (Except gezpacho soup :P).

Argh no phone :(

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:40:40 +0000

Something seems to be screwy with my SIM card – with it in, the phone freezes at the boot logo; with it out, it gets to the desktop, and I can access the service menu, but trying to do anything useful gets an “insert SIM card” message :(

It’s suddenly occurred to me that I no longer have an alarm clock, a mobile calendar, a to-do list, a camera, a notebook, a mobile IRC client, or a games thing to pass the time in lectures. Not being able to communicate by phone or SMS is also a problem, but not the first thing that comes to mind…

Geek Sleepover~

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:16:42 +0000

2pm) Breakfast at the Corner Cafe. I was under the impression that breakfast came before work, whereas other people had been up since 10...

3pm) Garden work; I spent ~3 hours digging a trench. After I let go of the hoe, I stretched my fingers out, and was able to feel the layers of skin separating -- I now have some nasty looking blisters...

5pm) Barbecue; much eating of meat was done, and much setting things alight. Notably: bricks, plates, and petrol. Tea lights were also thrown into the fire -- the wax boiled pretty quickly, and then the aluminium melted into the ash... Also of note: the ash from yesterday's fire was still hot enough that Mike was able to start today's fire without matches \o/

KLUG Stuffs

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 21:43:51 +0000

3 meets, none blogged :O For background: KLUG is the kent linux user's group; a bunch of linux users who meet to talk about random things, and occasionally do something productive together.

Firstly: A brief social meet in The Old Bev, just down the road. Drinking was done, penguins were hugged, and talk was mostly about jobs in the industry~

Then: The day after was a more official meet, in Dover, in the port's immigration office. People actually brought computers to this one. Mostly talk was admin stuff, about what the LUG should be doing, how to be doing it, events we should travel to or run for ourselves, etc. There were also lightning talks; Mike did beer related analogies for various types of routing, a guy I don't know talked about working in a school, and Kitty did a very brief overview of the history of computing~

Swimming

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:40:18 +0000

Went swimming for the first time in several years, managed 512m \o\ Goggles definately help; 12 lengths without were painful even with a rest at each end, 4 lengths with were fine~

Argh Windows, Yay Apple

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:33:53 +0000

Time setting up router + xen host, mail, web, file, dhcp/dns, and media servers - 4 hours, of which the majority was just waiting for packages to download. Problems: 0.

Time spent pointing several windows accounts towards file shares, something which should take no more than a couple of seconds per account - 8 hours of continuous pain. Problems: Enough to bring me to the brink of tears.

Some hilights:

On Servers

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:26:23 +0000

Chai (router) and Aru (server) are being turned off for the first time in 4 months; chai is retiring for now, aru is becoming a router + xen server. It's pretty much the same setup as I've done in school -- one upstream network, two downstream; serving DHCP on the two downstreams using dnsmasq. VPSes are bridged to one or more networks depending on who needs access to them.

The school's moodle install has been moved to a VPS at context shift, since dreamhost were complaining that we were using too much CPU time. That seems to have gone mostly OK, except for me not knowing how to configure Apache + PHP to deal with more load than the server can handle (Lowering MaxClients seems to have solved the swappy death problem -- now if the server gets more requests than it can handle it queues them, rather than trying to do everything at once)

New Year's Balance

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 09:08:44 +0000

My new year's party balanced out my christmas -- all my friends who had said that they'd come round decided they'd rather be off doing family things, but none of them told me that they weren't coming until I double checked at the last minute. Having no time to organise anything else, I ended up alone while everyone else was partying :(

Bliss

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 16:13:43 +0000

Garden State is a very nice film; I just finished watching it with my sister -- it's the first film we've watched uninterrupted for ages. The key song was Frou Frou's "Let Go". Frou Frou was a producer of some of my favourite music, although they produced very little of it (only one album). Having my subwoofer in contact with my bed is excellent. Also on the topic of sound, my family got a webcam (which works out of the box on linux, and bluescreens windows), and some headphones -- the latter of which sound remarkably nice for things which only cost £10, so I intend to get some for myself.

Shish Kebab

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:45:13 +0000

I have had a shish kebab, for the first time ever. Not particularly exciting, I know, but I thought I’d note it anyway, for historical reasons…

Sleep cycle fail >_<

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:45:59 +0000

I’ve now gone 4 days without seeing daylight, having slept through the short amount of time the sun is up. In other things that I’ve slept through today: two assessment deadlines, and a promise to help a friend shift some stuff around town >_<

Christmas Dinner

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 23:02:05 +0000

Bob am Win at food – I just had the only christmas dinner that I’ve ever enjoyed; it was so nice that I had to keep taking breaks from eating to just appreciate the taste of it. It was even worth wearing a suit for ^___^

Argh fire alarms -_-

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:38:26 +0000

I was woken up at 10pm by the fire alarm, and spend the next 15 minutes thinking “bah, they test the fire alams every wednesday morning, they’ll turn themselves off soon…”. It took quite a while to realise that this wasn’t the weekly crying of wolf, but an actual emergency. That disturbs me terribly :-/

London part 2: London Expo

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 13:58:11 +0000

The london expo was much like previous years, but as with LWE, it's getting noticably cheaper -- whereas a couple of years ago everyone in the queue was given a carrier bag full of free stuff (card games, DVDs, posters, magazines), this year we were allowed to pick up a tiny (8 pages of A7) short story and some flyers. And the short story sucked.

After an hour and a bit, we left to go to oriental city for food and gaming. They have a lovely system for serving many people -- there's a court about 50m square with bars all round the edge; each bar being plastered with photos of food; you tell the person what you want, and are given a ticket with a number; when the number comes up on the display above the bar, you go and pick up the food~

London part 1: Linux World Expo

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 13:46:40 +0000

The business side was quite shiny, with demos of things like the accelerated desktop, and multiple terminals running on one PC. Freebies failed though; I got a load of leaflets, some pens, and not much else :( I'm told it was much better in previous years, but it seems that conventions are getting smaller and cheaper everywhere...

Meeting some people I knew, and watching them attempt to get unofficial freebies (like, entire racks of servers, or giant tuxes) was quite the hilarity~ I also saw jono bacon IRL \o/

I weep for compsci

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 07:24:03 +0000

I don't even weep softly. I weep fucking hardcore. I have to wait for these people to catch up before the interesting stuff starts :(

For reference, the full question:

You have an ArrayList called "library" which holds some Book objects. The Book object has a method called getTitle() which returns a String. Write a for-each loop (which we'd been learning about in the lesson) to print the titles of each book, one per line.

Do I look like a drug dealer?

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 09:53:28 +0000

Having been done with shopping, I went on a wander around canterbury town, mostly looking for somewhere to sit. I eventually found a bench next to the enterance of a small park-like area. Inside the park was one guy with a dog, and a couple of guys with some bags. Nothing suspicious as such, but then a guy with an earpiece appeared on the other side of the enterance. People with earpieces in public tend to be either hard of hearing, or doing something interesting; and this guy didn't seem very deaf.

Google Calendar: Full of Win and Awesome

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 09:22:22 +0000

Having tried mozilla calendar, evolution, and a couple of others, I found them all less efficient to work with than my phone calendar -- the only desktop calendar app I've seen which looks nice to work with being iCal, and that's OSX only D:

But lo; google have made something which looks (and I assume works) similarly to iCal, and it's OS independant \o/ That alone would only be enough to fill it with Awesome though. There is one last feature which I consider the most important thing ever -- it needs to be able to alert me to my appointments wherever I am, since I spend a lot of time not at my desktop. Google have this sorted though; entering a mobile phone number lets the calendar message me, and it seems free /o/

Connexions suck also

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:54:58 +0000

A message:

I'm still getting emails telling me how many points I have and how I
can spend them; but my card says it expires 02/06, and the website
won't let me log in :-/

 -- Signed: [my full name], Card No. [number]

And a reply:

Dear Cardholder

Thank you for your e-mail.

Please could you reply with your full name and Connexions card number,
keeping this e-mail attached, so that we can look into your query further
for you?

Kind Regards
Connexions Card Team

...

On Kendo

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:46:13 +0000

It kills the knees >_<

The intro lesson was two hours long, and all we did was the greeting and bowing process -- bow, walk forward, squat & draw sword, stand, yell, squat, put sword away, stand, walk back; over and over...

The atmosphere of self-discipline and respect was very apparent though; I could feel my posture improving just by hanging out there ._. They do the first couple of lessons for free, so I'll be going to those, and maybe more...

Food prices

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 02:38:15 +0000

8p noodles \o/

And 13p for a tin of peas which last several meals~

Then £5 for pizza...

The quiet ones...

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:43:26 +0000

Coming up to 2am; I note that the quietest, most polite girl in my hall has a way of making friends with the most obnoxious noisy drunkards, and she keeps inviting them to her room in the early hours of the morning.

Argh.

On the first week, with freshers

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 05:04:21 +0000

Fresher's Week has been packed, such that I've been either going out or sleeping since I got here. Food is nice when I can remember to get it in time, with breakfast being free and enough food to make me hurt for about £5.

Fresher's fair had lots of interesting societies; I've signed up to more mailing lists than I can remember. There've been lots of comp sci specific meetings too, the one I've just got back from had a guy from Sun showing off robots and LEDs, and we got free tshirts /o/

Tech support at UKC

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:43:55 +0000

Blogging of my first days at uni has been delayed by problems connecting to the network... And the resulting conversation with tech support:

From: shish
To: tech support

Your SBS signup form for linux users [1] has typos[2] that make it
impossible to submit; the resulting page is a back trace of a
nullpointerexception[3]. I guessed the URL of the windows version of the
form and filled that one in instead, and it works fine (it even sent me
the correct download, CSA.sh). The fix is to go through the form and
give the elements their proper names (eg, change "username0" to
"username")

[1] http://reg-kent.org:8080/registration/register-linux.html

[2] It looks like someone copy & pasted the form in a WYSIWYG editor --
all the relevant elements had zeroes after them, which is a standard
way of keeping unique element IDs after copy & pasting...

[3] I would guess somebody did something like form["username"].value,
without first making sure that the "username" element was POSTed :-/

A rather simple problem, and I even took the time to work out why things were broken, and explain how to fix them in easy to understand terms. The result?

Mother does Hardware

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 14:07:47 +0000

Shish gets parts out of a freshly delivered box
Mother: What’s this? (picking up hard drive)
Shish: A hard drive
Mother: And this? (pointing at motherboard)
Shish: A motherboard
Mother: What’s the difference? They both look exactly the same ._.
Shish cries

Updates

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:42:15 +0000

So long since the last post~

I'm now half way through my summer job, and have been meeting a variety of interesting programs:

Cacti, which I spent most of today with -- it's like MRTG + RRDTool, but with considerably less hand typing of huge config files.
A variety of Cisco and HP routers, which I've been setting up monitoring for.
Motion, for monitoring webcams, and recording whenever there's activity in the room.

Hurrah for non-sucky kernels

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 04:09:17 +0000

I have 20 autoconf / compiler processes running, my music plays without a jitter, and my UI is as responsive as when it has the whole CPU to itself -- I never realised how apparent the new linux scheduler was until I saw that it was giving a single interactive process more time than all the batch processes combined~

Compare windows, where a single cpu / memory hogging program can render the whole computer unusable...

School is over /o/

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 01:41:48 +0000

As of half an hour ago, I'm no longer a secondary school student \o/

I write from school, while waiting for one of the IT admins to discuss coming back over the summer holidays to do some programming work D:

Eating PEARs~

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:11:13 +0000

For anyone with the same problems I had...

PEAR from debian stable is too old and won't upgrade: download 1.3.5 manually, run "pear upgrade PEAR-1.3.5.tgz"; download the most recent version and run "pear upgrade PEAR-1.4.8.tgz" (in my case). You should then be able to let PEAR upgrade itself from then on.

MySQL extension is installed, but you still get the warning warning: pear/MDB2_Driver_mysql requires PHP extension "mysql": Make sure "module=mysql.so" is uncommented in /etc/php4/cli/php.ini.

A conversation with a cat

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 18:42:53 +0000

Cat: meow
Me: meow
Cat: meow
Me: meow
Cat: meow
Me: meow
Cat: meow
Me: (Are we having a conversation o_O?)
Me: *pause for a few seconds to see if the cat continues after I stop*
Cat: *stares at me in a "hey, stop spacing out, we're having a conversation" manner*
Me: meow
Cat: meow
Cat: *walks off*

Yay dreamhost again~

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 11:24:02 +0000

They let me use siag despite not owning is-a-geek.net <3 It’s nice to work with a company who are willing to add features on the whim of a single user ^___^

Expected Downtime

Sun, 21 May 2006 14:57:40 +0000

Aru, the main home server and shishnet development & testing site, now has a 300GB disk \o/

Uptime was 3.5 months, since some new RAM was installed~

Unexpected Downtime!

Sun, 21 May 2006 08:01:14 +0000

After 8 hours of being under full load, chai (my linux router) panicked, taking the network offline for 3 hours. There’s nothing obviosuly wrong with the hardware, so I assume it a linux problem. I would have investigated properly, but the stack trace only showed the addresses of functions, not names…

Seeing as one error per 4 years is unacceptably high (from debian stable, of all distros!), I’ve since started looking into the BSDs; particularly m0n0wall.

Tickets are free! (for a reason!)

Thu, 18 May 2006 06:44:58 +0000

I went to see QI being filmed~ Humorous enough to make my face hurt, but still disappointing compared to expectations -- we had the worst luck with guests; the 3 random people were people I didn't know, and the regular (Alan Davies) decided he'd rather be off watching the football -_-

The warm-up act was good (this entry's title was one of his jokes), and it was a fun day out generally~

An assortment of pimpage

Sat, 06 May 2006 16:08:08 +0000

Dreamhost prefers moral integrity to free customers. Also, their wordpress anti-spam mod seems to work, as I've had one spam comment since signing up, compared to 3-4 per day on my vanilla install.

Al|together 2006 is open for entrants.

Radio Wazee seems to have implemented my vision of a radio station powered by free uploads (aka. publicity) for artists and free downloads for listeners. (Or particular note; Reasonable Doubt and Krim)

Autopackage works nicely for things not included in ubuntu's main repositories~

dreamhost /o/

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:19:44 +0000

Again with the lateness, I've finally gone and bought some external hosting -- the new server is at least 10x better than my self-hosted one in all respects, over 1000x in others. It's shared with a hundred odd other people, but so long as nobody wants all the power at once, it's hardly noticable~

Not only do they not suck, which puts them above most web hosts, they're also actively good -- their web based control panel actually makes a lot of things easier than going to the shell and doing it all by hand. Things that other hosts don't have at all (Subversion, Jabber, raw log access, unlimited subdomains, multiple shell / mail / ftp users, per-site bandwidth throttling, etc), they make no more than a couple of clicks away \o/

The BIO, aftermath

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 18:08:20 +0000

A few days late on this... Anywho, the BIO was full of awesome -- I was literally surrounded by smart people, not once in the three days did I want to stab someone for being unbelievably stupid ^_^ Terms like P and NP were used in regular conversation, a soviet russia joke that made sense was made, numerous card games were played and the maths behind them discussed~ Even the evening out for pizza was full of smart, with discussion over the best way of eating a pizza, and the physics behind wine glass playing ^_^

The BIO

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:39:29 +0000

As last year, I entered the british informatics olympiad; this time I had some idea what I was doing, did it, and ended up in the top 15 in the country :o

They only allow MS Visual C++, MS Visual Basic, or Delphi for the final though, becasue apparently one of the biggest universities in the UK can't supply a linux box with GCC on it -_-

The UK final is at the end of the month /o/

Version 3.0: WordPress

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:17:08 +0000

I tired of my custom blog thing; and so, switched to wordpress~

It works nicely ._.

All the comments are gone though...

Reboot ;_;

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:38:42 +0000

After 4 months uptime, the server goes down for it’s first ever (?) voluntary reboot, with an extra stick of ram~

I am so fscking 1337 XD

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 12:58:43 +0000

1) My desktop server tunnel broke, so being in a DMZ, there was no way for me to get from my server to the desktop. Then I remembered I'd lent my crossover cable to a friend and ended up plugging all the boxes into the same switch. Seeing as I needed to keep the server's DMZ connection up to be connected to it, and connect to the LAN to get at the desktop, with one network card and one cable, one may think I was screwed; not so! Linux allows you to create virtual network interfaces, and be connected to several networks over one cable

I am also good at Halo

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 01:57:17 +0000

Team 1: Shish, who has no xbox, and has only played halo campaign mode at a friend's house (twice 1, half way though 2)

Team 2: 3 friends

End score: 15-Nil to Shish

Although that was seriously whoring the banshee (or ghost? the flying thing)... in regular 4-way deathmatch I only got scores like 22-8-8-5~

I'm a rocker, I rock out.

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 17:45:21 +0000

My friend's air band (myself included) won the charity week air guitar competition \o/ I blame the his beard, and the chanting cult it attracts~

It also reminded me how lame school competitions are; the first act scored 8/10, most scored 9, and the worst 7. I'd much rather they give the first group 5 no matter how good they are, then rate others as better or worse...

Finally reading more of the Al|together releases~

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:27:58 +0000

Several months after Al|together 2005, I'm finally getting round to reading some of them, via VNC over SSH over HTTP \o/ Without sound, which is a big part of the atmosphere /o\

Mentioned here as I know several people who read this and might be interested~ They're short stories, with pictures & sound. Narcissu being my favourite so far; it's so depressing, in the happiest way possible ;_;

Joy of Stats

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 15:11:45 +0000

Some numbers, from site access logs:

Date range: 2004/09 to 2005/11

Size: 500MB

Time to parse with awstats: 5.5 hours

Files served: 2,237,523

Pages served to non-bots: 62,759

Front page hits: 4,553

Bandwidth used by visitors: ~35GB

Bandwidth used by bots: ~40GB

ED> And having left the config set to update all files, I note that only 3 hours was log parsing, with 2.5 being HTML output o_O

Albert <3

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:53:48 +0000

Albert of Danbooru noticed Shimmie, and linked to it in his blog. Hits then went from ~4 a month to 10+ per hour :O

The auto-mirror & redirect worked, so the extra 250MB/day traffic was safely served by my alternate host ^_^

Shimmie

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 19:02:53 +0000

An imageboard, because danbooru + ruby-on-rails + postgresql were all being pains to install so I gave up after 4 hours, and had the basics of my own done from scratch in a half.

I've also set my local server to redirect missing images to the remotely hosted one, so I can have control over the dynamic parts and redirect to save bandwidth on images~

The London Expo 2005B, and London

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 18:54:16 +0000

Another expo, much like the last. Bought more azudai manga, and a redundant second V5 of GitS.

Afterwards went to Madame Tussauds for the planetarium, but it turns out you have to go through *everything* to get to it. With 20 pound each and 2 hours of queueing, then having to wade through crowds of people wanting photos with the models, it was very borderline on being worth it; certainly not something I can be bothered to do again :/

Sandwiches

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 18:37:08 +0000

According to SIMS (the school management program, which I wasn’t supposed to be looking at), I eat andwiches, and my sister comes to school by bicycle ._.

They also haven’t seen my birth certificate, but they have hers…

The Sickness

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 18:30:42 +0000

No entries for ages as I’ve had the most kickass illness ever~

First there was coughing, pretty much non-stop, for about a week. Then with the throat being dead, I got a regular cold with lots of sneezing, again trailing for a week. The latest stage was worst, in two parts: first with the chest tightening so the air escaped the lungs, then the gas escaped the stomach, then everything else tried to escape, then it would keep on tightening while no more could come out, leading to great pain and curling up on the floor. Secondly, after a while the throat started to give up entirely – after a while coughing it’d just close, and I’d find myself unable to breathe in either direction. Certainly the scariest cold I’ve had, no other has had me seriously worried about suffocating to death in a room of perfectly good air, just because my throat was tired of coughing~

A Weird Dream

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:23:48 +0000

First I was in a generic modern city, which was being attacked by non-specific monsters, possibly something to do with a Matrix remake - Neo was there. In one shot he had two binoculars and when the camera went away and came back one was a gun.

Having evacuated the city, I was back home; my primary school playgroud to be precise. I did something I can't remember which involved standing up for a black man's rights, which got me kicked out of the community, and hence the community bomb shelter. Velociraptors then came, and a competition was held to see which outcast would be let in. The first question was "Find the magnitude of the vector (x, 50)", to which people complained one couldn't get a numeric answer to a question with variables. It was amended to "Find the magnitude of the vector (45, 50)", which I managed to get to 5 * vector(9, 10), before the raptors started arriving and I ran to a thin space behind some lockers where I hoped they couldn't reach. They did manage to surround me though, which is where the dream ended - I assume we all died soon after :/

Powercuts++

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:11:21 +0000

Ho hum, at least this shows the automatic recovery systems work - I was back online and serving before I’d noticed PuTTY had disconnected~

I’m also back on the front page of hits for “Shish”, above MSDN \o/

Be Careful What You Wish For: Part II

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 11:34:01 +0000

Off on a wander~

Leg 1: Straight North:

Figuring I had no real plan of where to go, I decided to see how far I could go in one direction. Down the road and into the woods at the end, after only a couple of hundred meters I find a nice tree to sit in, and start reading. The book in question being "Look to Windward". I took it out a couple of days ago on the basis that I liked "Excession", but have been lacking time to read properly. As I read, the noise of traffic was still quite loud in the background, despite being quite far from it and having the sound muffled by greenery; I soon grew used to it though. Not so easy to get used to were the mosquitos, which annoyed me, but I don't think I got bitten. I also got to witness a squirrel fight.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Part I

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 10:36:15 +0000

A conversational summary, merely as background for part II:

o) Sister was watching internet TV

o) Mother requests computer for work

o) Sister refuses to get off despite good reason

o) Mother yells

o) Sister storms off in a hissy fit

o) I point out that maybe she's clinicly addicted; she gets very stressed when someone so much as suggests she leave the internet for a couple of minutes

o) Mother says maybe I'm addicted

A Birthday Miracle ^_^

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 09:02:41 +0000

So several months after getting into xclannad* so I can run Kanon SE, I finally get round to ordering a copy as a birthday present for myself (up to now I'd been working with the free demos). Several days later, it arrives \o/

But oh no! The box is ever-so-slightly squashed and deformed, presumably from being pushed through a letter box that was, when accouting for bubble wrap, too small for it. As fellow box-fans** may appreciate, I was a little upset at this. But oh well, life goes on. The game itself was fine, albiet tainted with the twinge of imperfection...

Arg, Back to School Tomorrow :/

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 21:19:25 +0000

Just as I was getting into the swing of learning new, interesting, and useful things, school comes along :(

I've learned more Japanese through 4 days of Slime Forest than I have from 4 years of German lessons in school. I blame slime forest being fun~

I've also learned to love glib - it makes C into an actual usable language \o/ IrcIndex has been redone in C, and now searching takes 0.5 seconds to load the index and 1 second per 5000 lines of output, on 150MB of test data. Indexing is still horribly buggy and only works properly in the perl version, so I'm not releasing anything yet :/

IE is on Crack

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 01:05:04 +0000

So I have a list of links; each has a bottom margin of 16px. When I hover over them in IE the bottom margins disappear. Setting the A:visited property makes things work, by disabling the :hover. Setting the width of the links also stops the jittering…

Modem Fails

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 20:11:41 +0000

On the day I leave, the modem dies -__- Two week downtime, new record…

Holidays~

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 14:46:39 +0000

I’ll be in the lake district for two weeks from tomorrow; The server goes from powercut to all services running automatically in about 5 minutes, so hopefully it’ll survive the time alone…

Fscking Modem

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 07:57:08 +0000

Just as I was getting a load of traffic looking for E17 transparency, my router decides to reset to factory defaults, and I have a half hour of downtime reconfigging everything – the longest downtime since the server got wiped & reinstalled -_-

And then it does it again while I’m sleeping, 3 hours this time >:(

Wavemage & Tastes

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 01:01:01 +0000

I found Wavemage, via him doing the music for blender’s “Orange” project. Look down his music page and note how many genres there are, consider that his music is only representetive of two of the spectrums I like ([orchestral / ambient / celtic / trip-hop] and [rock / grunge / heavy electronic]), and it becomes apparent how hard it is for me to answer “what music do you like?” :(

FoxHound

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:50:42 +0000

The Last Days of FoxHound manages to stick to most of the MGS canon, make fun of it, and be more scientifically accurate

Mmmm.. script kiddied...

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 17:44:51 +0000

Some russian dude brute forced a non-admin account on my server, then didn't manage to do any damage as it's fully patched and firewalled off in both directions~ Everything's been reinstalled for paranoia anyway, which took about an hour to get re-set-up, using Debian's latest stable (finally released \o/)

Trying SELinux, I gave up after 10 hours -- the packages, where existant, seem both unfinished and several years out of date, and after installing manually it didn't seem to do anything...

More powercuts

Tue, 31 May 2005 20:58:41 +0000

Another two months uptime, another powercut :|

But this time, 5. 10 seconds of power for every 20 minutes of darkness… But it finally prompted me to discover the useful combination of screen and cron’s @reboot timer, to allow various user-level services to start automatically (eg IRC logging)

Breezy~

Wed, 25 May 2005 13:09:52 +0000

Firstly, my desktop had it's first non-hardware-related reboot in years, due to SVGAlib messing with the display. They put "Warning: this will almost certainly mess up your display and require a reboot" in the docs, but not on the front of every app that uses it

Then I found that in the process of upgrading to breezy, X had gone -- the two core parts of it had been marked mutually exclusive. Also, the font paths mysteriously needed changing. For the first time in memory, linux's "warning: do not use this software, it is not ready, and is guaranteed to break something" has been less stable than windows' "finished, bug-free, ready for business use" :O

The London Expo

Sat, 14 May 2005 23:39:43 +0000

Twas quite the medium sized affair, small enough to see in a couple of hours, yet big enough to warrant the 10 pound entry.

Much free stuff was gained, along with some products, like GitS:SAC – which has an impressively non-ghey English dub (comparatively. It’s still not great, but it’s good enough to watch, and lets my eyes focus on the visauls rather than the subtitle bar). Also t-shirt, and azudai manga.

Viva La Radio! With less hate~

Tue, 03 May 2005 19:20:25 +0000

I've set up an icecast/ogg server with music database and web front end, so I (and anyone else, for that matter), can listen to my music collection from anywhere online \o/

ED for less hate> People fail at finding good software; Even when offering bittorrent / foobar / mplayer / firefox as replacements, most choose to stick with what they're using already. Even those who are willing to change keep needing me to poke them along, else they get slack and end up using bad things all over again :( Much as I could use psychology-fu to explain it, chalking it up to "people are morons" is much more efficient...

I got banned \o; Again o/

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 17:45:59 +0000

Now not only is my site banned by websense, but now I'm banned personally too, by my own school...

It seems that the reason is that I read my school's unofficial newspaper, Overmark -- not content with merely banning the physical paper and threatening to expel anyone linked to it, they're now going after the readers too >:(

I got banned \o; and dist

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 20:22:30 +0000

On the one day that I really, really needed my site up so that I could grab some of my A-Level coursework off it, some cockwhore at websense decided my site was a games site, thus putting me on their blacklist >:(

And I made a small new app; dist -- because knowing where stuff is takes effort; it's easier just to use a command to find a file anywhere on the network and grab it. It also pushes files to other dist-enabled boxen, hence distribution.

ENGRAND.

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 11:28:18 +0000

The trip to london to meet MT forumites went ok. Lots of walking and some sitting, no majorly interesting events. Pictures when people get round to uploading them~

And I got to hug everyone <3

Version Bump

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 17:20:29 +0000

Several things added / changed:

My HTML is now correct; a typo was putting me to the #1 spot on google far too often, and now it’s fixed I’m back to the ~10th page where I belong. (Although I’m now getting more hits from the image search than I ever did the main one…)
Anonymous blog comments work (although maybe too anonymous; I should probably use IP address or something…)
pp.pl added to apps
the pics section on the sidebar is now fixed; I knew the link in fragments worked, but forgot that it had it’s own section, and it remained broken
Giger CSS theme started, needs more work though~

Skateparks & Jackass

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:53:58 +0000

I’ve suddenly started getting ~50 hits a day looking for “skatepark” and “jackass” images. I have no idea why. Someone please tell me! Email is good if you can’t be arsed to sign up to comment (which reminds me anonymous comments need setting up at some point…)

Zomg Deus Ex

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 14:31:24 +0000

Despite the ass of copy protection, the game rocks, and provides a handy alternative theme for those opposed to vomit orange ^_^

The 3-second rule applies to pasta \o/

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:43:20 +0000

Walking round at midnight with a bowl of pasta, in the dark, I notice a chair pulled out in front of the door – not with my eyes, but with my toes. Five seconds of cursing and three of scooping later, and the pasta is back in the bowl, apparently clean \o/

"Mmmm... Old..." vs "Mmmm...ould vomit"

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 22:22:44 +0000

Being forced through a full english roast dinner makes me realise just how much I dislike them -- It's come to the stage where I get full up just by looking at roast potatoes; having had them so often, my quota for them is full. On the other side is the english breakfast, of which I have yet to give up and leave any...

In a related incident, my love of chemically and genetically altered food has gone up another notch -- a while ago we had cheap bulk blackcurrant juice, of which I could make a bottle full, and be sipping from it for weeks. Now we have "more organic, fewer artificial preservatives" juice, and it goes mouldy after a few days -- of course, I only realised this after drinking it.

Rav

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 19:21:11 +0000

Someone was looking for a random avatar script, someone else said I had one; no more came of that conversation, but I saw it in the logs and decided it was time to make a proper random avatar host. Hence, rav was made, by copying great chunks of siggy, then pretty much rewriting the back end from scratch. It’s open to the public, in beta.

Ithil Returns, and Distractions

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 02:01:57 +0000

Ithil, the guy who beat the n00b out of me, has come to (blog post corrupted)

On the slacker note; This thursday I was loaned one of four physics revision book by the teacher, on the condition that I use it and don’t slack off as always. Also on thursday, GitS2: Man Machine Interface arrived. And I found myself entered into a programming competition, doing algorythm programming in C, with the entry exam this week – I got 44% on the sample paper, with 50% being “you have a hope in hell”; I’ve been doing nothing but PHP websites for the past several months, so my logical C side has become rusty, and thus I’ve been up until 6am working through past papers to try and get back up to speed. Then there’s psychology coursework, which has to be in in two weeks.

... Something ... bad happened ...

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 02:14:06 +0000

Not sure what it was, but it caused the modem to be getting a signal without anybody to talk to on the other end :/

And as I type, it dies again >:(

I have a problem

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 22:11:15 +0000

Most people who've talked linux with me'll have noticed that I'm an enlightenment fanboy; recently, my acts of fanboyism have been getting so great I fear I may have a compulsive software pimping disorder - even spreading to such things as mplayer and firefox.

When taking a screenshot of irssi to explain it's lack of GUI, I ended up showing the whole screen, and spent more time pointing out cool bits of E than showing what text mode is...

A rather odd log format

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 02:39:56 +0000

It would seem that when “combined” is an undefined log format, rather than throw an “undefined log format” error, apache simply writes out the word “combined” every time a website is hit >:(

Moving to debian

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:16:45 +0000

The gentoo server became mysteriously full, which prompted me to finally move to debian... Some notes:

Gentoo's init scripts are way better, in more ways than I previously thought; eg, they exist at all (debian has no MRTG init script >:( ), they're configurable (debian has an equivalent of /etc/conf.d, but doesn't use it much) -- After lots of unsuccessful attempts at hacking "-D PHP4" into the apache init script, I ended up just rewriting my apache config. Also, whereas gentoo's init scripts say "doing something... " then "ok" or "failed", debian only has the first bit, often failing silently >:( And they still use numbered rather than named runlevels >:(

I have a lot of ... stuff

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 21:43:09 +0000

Cleaning out my room reveals:

o) A collection of dead light bulbs

o) A collection of McDonalds' straws (they're wider, and so better for shooting things)

o) Hundreds of unfinished to-do lists

o) A stamp collection

o) A list of netware & webmail logins / passwords for everyone in my school

o) School "Flash Club" rules. I never got around to adding "Rule 1) You do NOT talk about flash club" :(

Another power cut?

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 03:49:03 +0000

omgwtf. Where do I go to complain? And how much are UPSes nowadays?

MRTG... died?

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 19:59:21 +0000

No, no more downtime… but MRTG stopped working? I’ve gone from rateup to rrdtool, but surely that should lower complexity as it no longer has to render anything?

Power Cuts

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:56:10 +0000

Mid way through setting up dhcp and other networky stuff, the power cut out, and the temporarily fragile network fell apart… It’s being redone with more cool stuff, like putting the server in it’s own /24 to keep it and the desktops safely apart \o/

ED> And now for some unknown reason, the hardware router stopped moving traffic back and forth; leading to yet another day offline :/

MORE HATE: Copy protection

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 23:51:35 +0000

I spent 3 hours battling with deus ex's copy protection, trying multiple CD drives (5), updating motherboard drivers, reinstalling 20 odd times; each time I'd get a crash in what seemed to be a runtime generated dll. In the end I copied deusex.exe from the demo into the full game's folder, and all is working fine. But I note things:

1) Copy protection sucks ass. I bought my game legally, and it wouldn't let me use it.

Curse you, non-free journals

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:05:39 +0000

Trying to find the original research that I'm working with for psychology is much harder than I'd like - I'm looking for some quite old studies from 1900s to 1990s, but all I can find is the journals for the past 3 years being sold for 20 pound each...

On a related note, I've started learning LaTeX, and after only a couple of days I've already stopped using all WYSIWYG word processors

Nooo... My uptime :(

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 16:32:05 +0000

After 3 months uptime, I accidentally pulled the plug on the server while reaching for one of the other cables >_<

Goddamned magic quotes

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 00:21:44 +0000

Such an ass feature in practice, runtime magic quotes especially - automatically protecting things going into an SQL statement may have a use, but adding slashes to things that come OUT of the database? WHY!?

And they're not even magic quotes; they're magically appearing backslashes>:P

Mmmm... first gig -_-

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 13:29:18 +0000

I pretty much accidentally went to see the mad capsule markets yesterday when my sister's friend got ill; too much noise and not enough music for my tastes, but it was fun anyway. I got home at ~2am after several hours of jumping round, knackered to the point where I would for once be appreciative of an early night, but nay. Now in school, so tired -_-

McQueen were supporting; they weren't as good an act (I'd guess it was just the audience not getting into it as much) but I liked the music more ^_^

General Protection Fault

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 21:06:43 +0000

I was reading men in hats, got bored waiting for the new kernel to compile, so I looked down the list of keenspot comics, to see General Protection Fault. I figured it looked like crap, so I jumped to the middle of the archives, and fell in love. I think it's some psychological thing - the long haired unhygenic quake playing unix sysadmin got a girlfriend, and I just *had* to keep reading to see how things went XD

A farewell of no great fondness

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:15:26 +0000

So I took down the content from my angelfire site, and redirected here. Yay ._. Also of note is that while it was my angelfire site that probably got pimped most (ie, at all), it's this site that first managed to get onto google's front page of the word "Shish" \o/

Also; it's testing season again. The psychology tripwire didn't have any "match the surname to the study" madness, so I think I did quite well \o/ Who's idea was it to take perfectly well named studies and refer to them as ", ()[, page number in unspecified book]" anyway?

Huzzah, a text box.

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 20:05:43 +0000

Now I no longer have to edit raw html every time I want to update the news thing on the front page. Yay me.

A super-quick one night hack, and it all seems to be working fine \o/

Gah

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 19:29:00 +0000

I woke up early and got back to sleep at the time I should get up, wake up #2 was late. We have no drinkable liquid in the house other than water, and there was no time for food for breakfast. I was late for the people who give me a lift and they shouted a lot.

First lesson we spent an hour and a half using misaligned equipment in physics so it needs doing again, break time was rainy, core maths I had a load of my stuff thrown out of a window; I found the random scribbles, but 20 pound and important notes are gone. Then I had no mechanics books, as I've packed for the wrong day every day this week. Lunch was cold and wet, as I poked round the stinging nettle bush looking for my lost stuff. Then a study period where every computer I touched in the library in the last couple of weeks cacked up (although I'm fairly certain I'm not involved; some of them I hadn't used for a while and they'd been fine all week), then the general studies teaching rota got messed up so it was the teacher, me and two others of a class of supposedly ~20 going and discussing happiness, while rubbing nasal decongestant in my eyes, which burned.