If your email breaks down for an hour, don’t email me, Facebook message me, then leave two different messages on two phones

I spent the whole day basically tracing one bug. It was to do with shadow flicking and it was getting on my tits. Walked the dog. Still bug hunting. Went for a run. Came back to a FaceBook message, a message on my mobile and a message on the home phone, all from my mother. All asking for the password to log into her email. It’s all setup and doesn’t actually require one. So I tried to log into my own email and got an authorisation error. So a bit of digging. I finally managed to log into my Ubuntu box and reboot it. It took bloody ages to start up and then was slow as hell, still no email. Rebooted it. Web server came back up but that was about all. Managed to copy the syslog across to my PC. It did a kernel panic at about 6PM, ran out of memory. After the reboot I did a process list and there were an absolute shit load of apache services firing up. This looked highly suspect. I killed apache, then started digging more. I thought I was getting a denial of service attack, so added a log to the firewall and sure enough there was an access a second from some external site which was trying to randomly access my site. Every access would spawn a new apache server service and eventually it would go pop. So blocked the IP on the firewall. Restarted apache but it still needed another reboot to get it all back together. I think I need to limit the amount of services it can fire up. But that’s a job for another day. Or may be I should stick some more memory in it.

Then the plumber man turned up. He was fine, young chap, made vague notes, I’m sure he will give me an even vaguer quote. Finally traced and fixed the bug. I do need to twiddle it a bit more though, at least I know where it came from now.

Wine o’clock.

I think I’ll go for a double ender

Took Sasha to daycare at 6:30. Went back to bed. I couldn’t persuade Jamie to do anything exciting with my penis, although I gave certain hints. Got up and had coffee. I then spent probably the best part of three hours trying to get something to work, which basically was just badly implemented and almost non-existent in places. Ranted a lot. Then spent the rest of the day fixing odd bugs, wasn’t really in the mood for anything else. Yet another set of small hand tools arrived, I was determined to find the correct one for that bloody HK250. And finally cracked it, it was a Torx T5. So I can now strip it done. I think I will strip it down completely, make a list of all the parts and then attempt to rebuild it from scratch. That’ll be a fun job for my retirement as I haven’t got clue when I’m going to do it otherwise.

Went to gym and did Pump. I do like Trudie who plays the CD about 25% faster than it should be, it gets it all out the way.

Heard again from Plumber man. He recommends stuff from bath store, so we should be fine there. I don’t think the p-shape bath is going to fit, so instead I think I’ll try and go for a double ended slightly wider one. It’ll still be a whirlpool. It’s all a bit stressful. I need to do some sealing of the ceiling, then a bit of painting. Plumber man is coming tomorrow, we will chat, he will quote, I will have a coronary then spent seven hundred quid on helicopter lessons instead.

Second fermentation started

Started late as I was waiting for something to be fixed. It wasn’t fixed even then. Still, by the end of the day I had everything checked in and working. It was yet another miserable and rainy day. I spent a long time looking at bathroom suites and tiles. The p-shaped bath I wanted was too big. It came to about two and a half grand. Tonight I found another one, bath, screen, panel, sink, loo, cistern and taps, about eleven hundred quid. Just need to look at tiles. Went out for a run in the rain. Came back, fed the dogs. Then went for another run. Had a shower. Measured the gravity of the wine, both were bang on at 1010. So sterilised two more buckets and transferred them across. Now set for the secondary fermentation, which should take about two weeks. Sat down and looked at more bathrooms.

How hard can it be to route 15M of cable?

Started reasonably early I guess. Well on time anyway. I had a nasty bug left over from last Friday. It probably took me the best part of five hours to trace it. One line slightly wrong. Always the bloody way. Then I had hud rendering flickering all over the place, that needed a bit more tracing. The weather has been shit, constant rain. Walked Sasha in the drizzle. Went to the gym and did Combat. Was okay. Came back and did another hour or so, have to resolve a lot of code and data now before I can check it all in. Hopefully will be quite quick tomorrow as I want to get on to something a bit more interesting.

Keep trying to work out how I can get this hdmi cable from the bay window up to the ceiling. I reckon I can get part of it under the floor, then up the stud wall. I may have to do some exploratory drilling and sawing of flooring. It will be an interesting project anyway.

Changing seasons

So once again I was up like a shot. Okay, may be not then. As the weather has now certainly changed it’s time to knock Geocaching on the head and crack on with the DIY. So I was lying in bed researching DIY projects. I’m going to get someone in to do the bathroom, so as long as I get that sorted that’ll be fine. It’s just not worth me attempting it. I’m sure I could do it eventually, it would just take about five years. So I’m going to crack on with the living room. First things first is preparation, and that means running cables. Lots of cables. I need to get an HDMI cable up from behind where the TV is to a mid point across the ceiling. This is for the projector. I think the best way to do this is cut a hole through the floor behind the TV, then another over by the door, pull the cable across here and then another hole over by the archway. Then pull up here and drill through the bottom of the studding, then up the wall (I’ll put a speaker cable up this way as well), through the ceiling, then through the floor of the landing and across the floor of the wardrobe, then across the ceiling. I also need to run power and probably a network cable as well. I’ll probably run two HDMI cables for redundancy. I reckon theres a good couple of Sunday’s work there to start with. Also I’m thinking of some wifi controllable down lights.

Got up, boiled eggs, picked up dog poo. Drove to Tytherington. Did the puzzle cache which was the last remaining one there. That brings me up to 315 now, happy with that. Message from captain James that the fog was lifting. Drove to Staverton. We had the air field pretty much to ourselves due to the weather. We did lots and lots of autos. Pretty much got the hang of them now. Took the ‘Operational Procedures’ exam again. Got eleven out of sixteen. Had another pop at it and got fifteen out of sixteen. We had a look at a couple of questions, there was one there that neither of us thought was correct. Some of the semantics of the answers is just bizarre. Anyway, passed. So now on to radio telephony.

Came back. Went for a quick run. Imported helicopter footage of today. Have a bath. Drink wine.

So where will the dog sleep?

Okay, so I had a bit of a lazy morning, which kind of drifted into the afternoon. Read the paper, studied ‘Operational Procedures’, almost got the hang of that now. Finally got up and walked Sasha. Had some toast. Then I went to do a home check for a horse sized dog. Hmmm. “Where will the dog sleep at night?”. Lets just say an incorrect answer was supplied. There’s a few other things as well. I think I have only ever failed about one home check before. But have to think of the dog, wrong type of dog this time for the situation. Drove to Curry’s, tried to find a Hero 4 black edition, no chance. Got stuck in the car park. Got back home, then went out for a couple of hours, there was a fairly new Geocache over towards the station so walked there. Spent about ten minutes standing under a bridge up to my ankles in water. Found it eventually. That takes me up to 214, which sounds much better than 213. Did the accounts. Think I’ll have a bath now. Flying tomorrow.

Well if it could be threaded it now is

So started a bit later than I should, mainly as I didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for it. Anyway, cracked on. Got the threading stuff I was working on working, then on to another bit. That’s about it now, if it could be threaded it pretty much now is. We’ve come a long way from the first monotonic renderer eight years ago.

Went to Pump. Did a session with Laverne. Had pretty much enough of this week it must be said. I’ve got a few bugs to trace next week and then it’s actually on to doing something vaguely interesting for a change.

Got no real plans this weekend. Have to do a home check, may be flying Sunday. See how it goes.

46 litres of wine now brewing

Work was rather dull, which made a bit of a nice change this week. Working on moving some GUI stuff to render on a thread. As exciting as it sounds, oddly worked first time though which is always quite worrying as it means it will comeback and bite me in the ass in about a weeks time. Walked Sasha. Then my wine kits arrived. I got three lots of white and a red. Together with a a bottle cleaner and a load of corks. Went for a run. It’s getting really dark early now, so had to cut it a little short. Still managed about seven miles though.

Came back, did a bit more work then sterilised two buckets and a load of kit. Poured in a rather expensive Voignoir and a Californian into buckets and topped them up with water. Added the various bits and the yeast. Now they are in the spare room starting to activate. They smell delightful.

Today is a bit of a sad day, a colleague who I’ve worked with at my current company for almost eight years and at a previous company for almost ten years, is leaving today. Haven’t seen him in a long time as he’s now in Australia. I wish you all the very best for the future Al and I hope we don’t lose touch.

All day spent waiting for an event

So started at 6:30 and took Dillon to daycare. Then tried to start on time. Basically spent about three quarters of the day tracing one bug. In the end it turned out to be a problem with an event. So here is the scenario. You have a thread that adds jobs to a ring buffer. It also increments a job count using an atomic. So if its the first job then it resets an event. Then pushes the job on to a queue. When the job is processed it decrements the count, if it’s zero then it triggers the event. The bug was to do with the event, the increment/decrement is atomic, but there may be a context switch before the event stuff, so it’s possible the event may remain triggered. Which was causing no end of fun. Fixed that. Picked up Dillon.

Went to the gym and did Pump. Then came back and had to fix yet another event problem.

Looking forward to a dull day tomorrow.

So memory caching is going to kill me

Spent most of the morning working on a problem to do with video bandwidth. Then in the afternoon and most of the bloody evening one to do with duplicate or invalid data. It’s no doubt caused by some kind of caching / false sharing weirdness that is just there to piss me off. It’s succeeding. Went for a run, had a bath. Been feeling somewhat snotty all day. Ordered four wine kits, will hopefully get those up and going by the weekend. That’s around 120 bottles.

Going to bed I think.