30 Jan 2008 (Wednesday) 

I had 'Old And Wise' floating around my head. I don't like it. I was walking to work with it in my head. And I thought to myself 'Oh no! This is almost as bad as having 'Streets Of London' in my head. Damn. I wish I'd never thought that'.

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28 Jan 2008 (Monday) 

Dreams this morning were strange. I was in a submarine with Julian. We were on a week's 'see what it's like to be on a submarine' thing. The general gist of the dream was to point out that when out of my depth (no pun intended - although I'm sure my psyche did intend it like that), I tend to not know what to do and have to ask for help all the time. And so I had to ask Julian what to do all the time, including where we go to eat, when we go to do work and what we do when there. There was something in there about missing a meeting with Caroline as well, because I was under water.

Also, I dreamt that Steve Wright had retired, and had been using a pseudonym. Which was pretty random.

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27 Jan 2008 (Sunday) 

Last nights fun dreams, involved a large number of terrorists holding our building. Quite a few people, with guns, being mildly threatening and stopping us from moving around and talking and stuff. So Caroline and I were trapped in this office - quite a nice office actually - with a guy holding a gun over us in a menacing but utterly disinterested way, and we were chatting. Quietly, obviously. When people hold a gun to you and tell you not to talk it's probably not a good idea to, but this guy seems laid back and cool. He doesn't want any trouble. God only knows what he wants, but he's no more threatening than your average shop assistant. Admittedly a heavily armed shop assistant, with the aforesaid gun, a large knife strapped to his back and a comical sash with grenades hanging off it. But still with that blank look that implies complete disinterest in you and at the same time the ability to pounce.

Anyhow. I was trying to talk to her, suggesting things we could do later in a vague way. I seem to remember that rabbits were involved, and possibly a paper hat. And she was completely uninterested. Not the blank disinterest of the guy, but the outright not-interested-in-listening-to-what-you're-saying-even-though-I'm-stuck-here-with-not-a-lot-of-choice lack of interest.

So that was fun. I also remember there was something of an escape attempt involving a photocopier, but she'd prefer to stay where she was, it seemed.

I remember it as making me feel far more miserable than it sounds, though. Maybe there were other things that I forget.

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26 Jan 2008 (Saturday) 

I had assumed there was a problem with smartctl with the SATA devices because they didn't work straight off. It seems I should have read the man page for smartctl. It seems that you need to use '-d ata' in order to make the SMART operations work on the SATA devices.

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24 Jan 2008 (Thursday) 

The reason for buying the harddrives yesterday was so that I could fit them into a case and have some external storage - rather than filling up my server with drives (which already has 4 big drives in it). I'd been looking for something sensible for a while and had been intending to get a box from Addonics if I could. What I wanted was a case that could take drives and give me an external connection (just one for preference) which I can connect to my machine. I'd sort of settled on USB2, mainly because those were the most common.

In doing my research I came across Span, who I'd not seen before but seemed to do the right things, in the UK. For a long time I was very tempted by the USB2 cases, but wasn't so keen on the USB2-speed. Chatting with Chris about it one evening, he pointed out that I could use eSATA, with the only real restriction being it wasn't quite as portable - as few things seem to have eSATA these days. The speed is far better and there's still just one connection.

So... we looked at a case which has 5 bays and a single port multiplier eSATA interface. Neat. Basically this gets me what I want, almost spot on. Of course, I don't own a eSATA card. But my motherboard does have PCI-express. And Span just happen to sell a cheap card that does eSATA with 5x port multiplier.

What else is great about that ? The card explicitly uses AHCI. AHCI is the defacto standard that SATA controllers are using and... the linux support is good (according to the website). (when it arrived, I noticed that it has a JMicron controller on it from the chip - in linux it appears as "JMicron Technologies, Inc. JMicron 20360/20363 AHCI Controller" - for which there is good support). Port multiplier support is (I read) available in a patch. So that's just excellent, and having done the research to confirm that these things should work, I ordered it.

It was ordered on Sunday, and arrived yesterday. Simon and I put it together with the drives - I only cut my hand twice in doing that . Then I plugged it in and remembered the thing about port multipliers being available in a patch. Which I didn't have.

And which I had no idea how to find this patch. I did more research last night and found libata-tj which is the distribution of the patch. I had kernel 2.6.18 installed as a bog standard kernel from Debian stable. Applying patches is always fun, and I had to do that if I wanted support. After dithering about which way to do it, Jogu suggested just going to kernel 2.6.24-rc8, which has all the support integrated. Which means obtain a 2.6.23 kernel source, patch to rc8 configure, build, install. RC8 being the most bleeding edge of kernels currently in existance at the moment, this is probably the only time I'll ever be this 'up to date' on a kernel I'm not actively developing.

So, import my settings from my current version (/proc/config-* has this, which is handy to remember) as .config in the new source. Do a 'make oldconfig' to be asked about a lot of stuff that's new. Remember to say 'yes' to any SATA and AHCI problems.

'make' and 'make install' and 'make modules_install' do most of the work. Remembering to move the vmlinuz file around in the root of the disc so that we don't overwrite the last good kernel and then update lilo.conf for the new OS. That takes a while. Meanwhile I'm chatting to Ian, Drobe and Jogu about things, and Caroline turns up too, so I can talk to her as well. One of the things that was suggested was that I should make sure that I build the drivers in the kernel, not as modules. Which I thought I remembered to do.

Then reboot. No worky.

Repeat with little tweaks in between.

Short of it is that I'd left the initrd image from the 2.6.18 kernel in the lilo line. I tried, unsuccessfully, to build my own before saying 'sod it, I should be able to boot with just the root drive specified. During these failed bootups I could see that it was recognising the card still, so I hadn't broken the SATA card recognition at least. I do this and discover that... I'd forgotten to include the ATA support in the kernel - it was a module, which didn't matter if I was using initrd, but does when you boot directly. Rebuilding with the ATA support in... and I can boot again. Yay.

Many cheers.

Only the device still prints up 'SATA link down' and no amount of replugging the connection helps me. This is annoying. I tried a lot of things, including looking for more debug, but was getting nowhere. At midnight I decided that enough was enough and I was going to bed.

I read for a bit and then went to sleep.

Unsurprisingly I slept badly - that's the norm - and when I woke up at 6:30 I knew what was wrong. This time it was right. It would work. And no one would have to get nailed to anything.

I went upstairs to the server - and Simon was up watching telly. Amusingly, the purpose of the external box was that I don't have to mess with the server, so he could keep watching the telly off the server whilst I was fixing it. I took the case apart and... there it was.

What thing does electronic equipment generally require before it'll function ? Power. Yes. That's it. I'd forgotten the power lead to the bridge board. Plugged that in, reseated the cover and plugged the case into the mains and the eSATA into the server... and the console scrolls a whole load of messages about new ATA devices. It works.

So there we go... I'm now using a bleeding edge kernel, which I built myself (always error prone 'cos getting those configs right is hard), and I have drives accessible to me over the eSATA interface.

All that remains is to format the discs and mount them. This is a doddle, obviously...

• cfdisk /dev/sd[ab] to create the primary linux partition.
• mke2fs -T largefile -j /dev/sd[ab]1 to create the filesystem.
• mkdir /mnt/<drive-name> to create mount points.
• Update fstab with the new details of the drive mount points.
• mount -a to check that they work.
• Update /etc/init.d/sleepdiscs to set the sleep time on the discs so that they go to sleep when not used for a while.

Testing with hdparm -t /dev/sda tells me that I'm getting ~75M/sec out of the interface/drive. Which is comparable to the internal SATA speed I was seeing yesterday. For amusement I tried the cached timings as well, with hdparm -T /dev/sda. That says I'm getting ~550M/sec cached transfers. That's just stupidly fast. It's also as fast as my equivilent PATA drive will do.

Having written up this diary entry, it's now nearly 8am and I should have just gone to bed after fixing it. But... Yay. It works.

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22 Jan 2008 (Tuesday) 

New discs arrived today. So I tried installing one. It's a SATA disc. It doesn't appear in my list of drives. Ok. It seems that the VT8237 isn't supported by the sata_via driver by default. I install a patched version (a version for a different kernel version, quite scarily) and it does work, but it's still quite scary. This link seemed to do the trick anyhow. So I have a large disc attached now. That it's not working by default is a little concerning for me, but... well, we can cope with this.

On the plus side, formatting the device is a doddle because it's the only SATA device I've got at the moment.

Quick tests with 'hdparm -t' gives me some simple timings. The 500G disc that I've got on the ATA bus gives me around 79M/sec, which is pretty reasonable. The 500G disc on the SATA bus gives me around 76M/sec. So slightly slower, but no big deal. It's still ludicrously fast. Faster than any of the other drives in the system.

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20 Jan 2008 (Sunday) 

Sometimes I wish I didn't know perl. Then I wouldn't write things like: print map { "$_\n" } sort { $a <=> $b } keys %tests; and think I was normal. [ Normal; Justin ]

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19 Jan 2008 (Saturday) 

Not a whole lot happening today. I've not really done much today, but I did manage to chat to Caroline for a couple of hours this evening, which was pretty neat. We chatted about quite a few things - I do tend to ramble - which was quite nice.

I watched the first episodes of Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach today, too. They were... well, Moving Wallpaper was mildly amusing, if only for what Echo Beach was. There were a couple of very funny sections and some that were amusing. Whether it's enough to keep me watching, I'm not sure. Echo Beach was amusing for what Moving Wallpaper had discussed, and of itself was... well, I'm not sure that I cared all that much. On the other hand, was that Mike Baldwin I saw in the pub ? I wasn't certain but the voice and the face seemed incredibly like his.

I also saw the second episode of Reaper today as well. There were some quite funny bits in it, but it's still... it's not there yet, I don't think. Maybe I'll find it better with the 3rd episode, if I stick around that much.

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17 Jan 2008 (Thursday) 

So, I had a great sleep last night. I was feeling particularly bad before I went to sleep anyhow, and so wasn't in the best of moods.

Here's the scenario - and it's a dream so reality doesn't come in to it. This was actually a continuation of a recurrent dream from over the past couple of years, continuing from a previous place. Those are always fun. I'm living in back at my old place and I had given away my daughter. I couldn't look after her and so had given her to some people at the end of the road. I really wanted her back, but I couldn't bare to go there. Dad convinced me that if there's something I wanted I should just go and do it. So I went around there to tell them, and there was a large grouping of people there as I came up the stairs onto the patio and into the house - Family were setting out chairs at the table and cooking food. I wanted my daughter back and so they laughed at me and then we all went through into the living room and I explained how I loved her and I needed her and how I was so wrong and had been wrong to give her away. Then I woke up and felt like crap.

So that was a whole lot of fun. That was about 3am. I got myself a drink, washed and dried my eyes, and went back to bed.

I was in Reading and seeing people. And there was always someone around with Caroline. Everywhere I went I couldn't help seeing that there they were with Caroline, as if they were just trying to make my life harder. She seemed utterly oblivious to how much this was hurting and how I was feeling. Eventually I went home and stayed there.

That's all I remembered about the second part. That was really great, too. So by the time it came to go in to work I was just in the most excellent of moods.

On the other hand, today, I had a really nice time out having a meal with people from work.

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16 Jan 2008 (Wednesday) 

Crappy day.

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15 Jan 2008 (Tuesday) 

I didn't feel at all well last night, so I went to bed about 8ish. I had a reasonably nice time dreaming about a day with Caroline, interspersed by waking up every few hours. Which left today being more crap than it might have otherwise been.

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13 Jan 2008 (Sunday) 

This weekend I've felt particularly bad. And I've had a sniffly cold. Which may be related. Oh and I managed to catch my middle toe and rip off part of my toenail. Which is mildly irritating.

I got to see the first episode of the second series of Primeval, too. Which was surprisingly good. I enjoyed it anyhow. I liked the baby raptor (yes, there was going to be a raptor, and it was... well it was a raptor... don't pay attention to what you can or can't see as being 'real'). Clearly, though, they got more money for the set as their new office is a lot swankier .

I've also (I think) fixed another odd bug with the multi-value ID3v2 fields in SlimServer. I'd missed a possibility that there might be multiple empty fields which would be merged out of existance, leaving you with an empty array - and part of SlimServer wasn't able to handle an arrayref in the YEAR field. Fortunately it was a relatively easy fix once the reason for the problem was found.

And I won a tenner on the lottery this weekend. Which is nice.

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9 Jan 2008 (Wednesday) 

Yesterday. That was a pretty crap day. I got to sleep at about 0:30, which for me wasn't so bad. Unfortunately I woke up at 5am. So I went in to work at about 9 and things weren't so bad. And then I found something out that seemed rather silly so I mentioned about it to the development maillist. Ok, so I was a little sarcastic. Well, anyhow, this raised a lot of discussion, part of which was that I wasn't completely correct in what I'd said, but the differences were minor and the problem was still quite silly.

And then I got an email from a top bod telling me off for posting such things to the public groups. Which might not have been too bad, except that the way that they did it was rather brutal - for me anyhow. Try having someone throw you an email using a sentance which, whilst it's probably quite reasonable, also has a very strong meaning for you, and you'll find out how crap you can feel.

Anyhow, I decided 'screw it' and went home at 4pm instead of my more usual 7pm. Which was marginally nicer as I had a very long evening. How strange is that ? Anyhow, I realised at about 8 that I hadn't actually had a lot of sleep so that probably explained why I'm been quite so sarcastic. Not excuse, but at least explain (not that my being sarcastic wouldn't have been a particularly uncommon thing, but still).

That was yesterday.

Haven't felt a whole lot better today, but you never know... things might perk up in a week or two.

And this evening I've got a sore throat, which is usually a sign that I'm going to be ill.

Oh, and an added bonus, I've noticed myself talking to myself in broken sentences again. I had nearly stopped that - at least managed to not do it quite so often toward the end of November, but it seems to have come back. Which is quite embarassing, really.

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5 Jan 2008 (Saturday) 

Ok, so you want to do a concert. You're stuck for venues... so you pick the middle of an amusement park ?! Sorry... it's a YouTube link, but... Just such a cool idea...

It looks like the Logitech remote that I've been testing for them has been announced properly now. There's a few fites showing pictures of the 'Squeezebox Duet'. Basically it's the Squeezebox, but without the display or headphone socket, and with the Jive remote instead. So no infrared control - you have to use either the web interface or Jive itself. It's actually quite amusing to see the product that I've been using for about 6 months being announced, finally. I'm still not sure that it's 'ready'. In particular, browsing long lists is still too slow to be truely useable, and the Favourites control is still limited. Alledgedly, the remote itself is ~$299, and the receiver (effectively a cut-down squeezebox) is $149.

Interestingly, one of the notes on the fact sheet PDF says that it can get 'Radio station information', and the note says 'Only for radio stations that support Radio Data System (RDS)'. 'RDS' is for actual FM broadcast radio, so I don't see how it applies, unless they're using RDS to mean the metadata transmitted inline with audio on Internet radio streams.

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4 Jan 2008 (Friday) 

I just remembered to say... I didn't get stopped at the airport. It seems that just writing about blowing up planes isn't enough to get your name marked. For which I am quite thankful.

We got given 2 weeks extra holiday this year in recognition of the fact that we worked hard. Some might say that you get paid in recognition of the fact that we work hard, but not me - I don't think it's a good idea to say anything against extra holiday. Anyhow, the last day is today, so it's back to work on Monday.

I went in to work on Tuesday (or was it Wednesday? I dunno) to check that the machines were all working after they'd re-wired the network for half the office. It seemed fine with all the machines I tested, which is great news - it means that nobody should have to worry, when we get back, about the network not working. Not that I expect they would, but still.

I'm moving teams as well. Nothing particularly significant - still working with the same people in the same office, probably even at the same desk, so ... not that much change in reality.

It being a new year, Chris mentioned something about resolutions and stuff. I purposefully decided not to resolve to do anything because I don't think it's worth resolving to do trivial things, and the only important things I'd want to resolve to do I'm not prepared for. So all in all it's easier to not.

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1 Jan 2008 (Tuesday) 

It's a New Year. What have I done today ? Well, I spent most of the day doing work things for Jogu. Maybe not most of the day, but a couple of hours on that. And a few hours on something else worky that I came across by acccident.

I've done not a lot otherwise today. Sorted a little bit of music - and found the other version of Send Me An Angel that I heard whilst in Spain. It seems to be by a Spanish woman who was on a reality TV show. Whilst I don't in general like them, I don't doubt that they sometimes hit talent . Plus, not knowing anything about it, I can justifiably not be cynical about them. Anyhow, it's a woman called Soraya Arnelas, and there's an album of covers from the 80s, called Ochenta's (which means '80s' in English)).

Anyhow, it's an interesting thing to have covered; and it's quite an interesting version, too.

It's late now - after 1am - and I can't really think of anything to say. Quick summary of Christmas...

Went out to see Mum and Dad for a few days over Christmas. Got to see their new house, their restaurant, and Greebo, too. That's about it really.

I want to try to write more in the diary, if there's stuff happening. This isn't a new years resolution or anything; it's just a general idea. I don't expect to not be miserable, but I'd like to at least write about stuff, even though I might not care too much.

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