Feeling pretty sucky today and really need to ... I dunno... something to go nicely right for a change.

My sleep's been awful for the past couple of weeks. Mostly consisting of 1 1/2 hours sleep, then half an our or so awake and then repeat until about 6 or 7 at which point I'm then so tired I sleep until 9. Last night seemed a little better, if you can say that - I had two dreams between which I woke up. The first was about a virus being released from a lab in the middle of a town and everyone turning into Zombies and eating people. The second was about Caroline and was equally unfun.

Despite that, I've had a lazy day (as usual) sorting out some DVDs for mum and dad, copying my music to the new server drive, and trying to sort out a few little bits on the server. Oddly I can't seem to get any fan information for the new server - core temperatures from the CPUs but nothing else.

'Dirk Gently' appears to have been made for telly! Quite surprised - nobody I'd spoken to knew about it, but 16th December, 9pm, BBC 4 apparently. Not sure what it'll be like, but it'll be interesting to see anyhow .

Very sucky day today. Don't really seem to have got very far, due to needing to mess around a lot with BuildBot. Plus, I'd woken up at 3am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. Finally decided to do something at 5ish, so I worked out what's breaking my film indexing and submitted bugs to the IMDB::Film author - which they've got back and confirmed they'll be sorted by the new release at the end of the week.

I had another dream about flying again, last night. Continuing the theme of flying using a paper kite, and floating far above the ground, trying to find the right wind to keep in the air. It was nice and fun.

This evening I spent about 2 hours faffing with the Samsung TV trying to upgrade it, 'cos someone had pointed at the fact that the Samsung Internet@TV feature supports iPlayer and LoveFilm now. After all that, I find that the 'B' series of my TV doesn't support it. The 'C' series does. And I've got the 'B'. I wonder why people have to go down the home-grown route to get such things to the telly.

Hannelore gets into funny situations. Whether it's talking to her mum, having a birthday, or clearing up vomit. I think that's a pretty neat present from Pintsize, actually. (Yes, I collected a few of my favourite strips)

I've finally updated my MRTG system to use RRD now. A few teething problems with scaling factors and 'mrtg-rrd' not actually working properly on debian stable - it wouldn't return the size of the graphs properly, so was reporting 'width=0' and 'height=0' which didn't work so well. A small amount of hacking and I've got it working.

There's really only 2 reasons for upgrading - firstly, MRTG's 'rateup' only supports integers, which isn't so great if you want to record temperatures. Secondly... it doesn't support negatives, and instead converts them to absolute values. Which was fun when it was -1 degrees I wanted to record and it recorded as 1 degree.

I woke up about 5am this morning, from dreams worrying about going away. And then worried more so couldn't get back to sleep. Even my usual distraction of thinking about stuff I enjoyed recently didn't help. Eventually I did a little bit more on my CRFS (Caching Remote Filing System) thing I've been working on for a bit. It seems to work ok really - although I can see a few problems.

One problem is that it's slow. In that... it cannot exceed the upstream that it's being used on. Which is obvious. But when I was looking at the transfer speed and it was telling me 82KB/s I was disappointed. However, as my upstream is 768kbps, it seems to be a pretty good rate. There's still decode time and the like, and I'm not really serialising blocks in the most efficient way, but it's still not too bad.

The memory caching is wrong, too. When you close a file the memory cache is flushed, which makes sense but we could just as easily hold on to the cache and restore it for the file if it were reopened. So long as we still enforced the cache limits on open cached data and unopened cache data, we'd be fine.

It's very wild outside tonight - very windy.

Last night's dream was initially about an infection that people and animals and plants caught. It made you got all black and veiny at the point of infection and then everything just crumbled away after a while. Lots of things died, and whole areas were made desolate back charred by it. It'd come from a bunch of aliens who landed and then died. One solution was to use radio waves to stop it which seemed to work. The tower transmitter on the hill collapsed one day so we had to move another one into its place, to keep the area safe. We tried but the legs on the huge transmitter collapsed and it tumbled down the hill, leaving us all to be turned to dust.

The second dream had me finding two scars on my leg and their turning out to be tape worms that I had to coax out and then pull until they were completely out. It hurt, and I woke up.