Category Archives: Rant

It’s all about tea

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Well, makes a change from pfSense I guess. Only breifly twiddled with that today to sort out a problem with Courier SSL certificates. Spent the bulk of the day working on these damn m4a files for Apple Lossless. Got a bit of a breakthrough, in now I actually have one that plays. Even managed to add the metadata to it, so it has a track name. Don’t think there’s too many more problems to go on it, so hopefully wrap it up soon.

Went off to the gym and did BodyPump, also did 40 minutes of running. I’m now breaking my no wine rule, by, well, having some wine. But hey, I’ve managed over 1200 calories today in exercise. So now it’s wine o’clock and bath time.

Here’s a little something Jamie found on an old backup. It was recorded for one of his podcasts about five years ok. It’s me ranting about my Mothers tea making skills. (Warning, contains a terrible Bristolian accent and bad language).

TeaBags

The Agila 1.2, why?

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Today the nice man from Vauxhall turned up with my car. It now has a nose. I looked up underneath and there’s a bolt missing, a fixing missing in the middle and various plates hanging off. Also with the wheel on full lock, it banged into the wheel arch. So back to Vauxhall it went. To be fair to them it came back straight form a 3rd party body shop. The actual bumper repair has been done very well.

Apparently it’s all been fixed now so will be back tomorrow.

They left me this white Agila. It’s very ugly. Like a small high box on wheels. The boot is the size of a glove box. It does have four doors. The gear lever feels like a clunky piece of plastic connected by a broken Biro to a hair-dryer of an engine. It’s reverse gear is where my 6th gear is, which could lead to some interesting high speed gears flying up from the engine. Power wise it isn’t going to scare a speed camera in a 20mph zone. The brakes feel more like the pads are being grasped gently by a couple of dusters, so not to frighten the car into stopping.

It has no extras, no air-con and no redeeming features. If you want to carry four people in discomfort then it’s probably the car for you. The Vauxhall Agila….why?

In server news I’ve made a bit of progress by setting up two lan cards to bridge and then set that to filter through the firewall. I was able to access all windows and samba shares, so making progress at last.

Work wise, finished off iOS audio session handling and started off doing a windows version of the Apple Lossless codec.

Please, stop asking me about render….

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I don’t know the difference between Blinn and a bin liner. Spent the day looking at a Crytek paper and demo on SMAA. As usual all these things look really pretty until you move, then it all turns into a shimmery mess. It’s good to see the demo produces the same shimmery mess. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at MSAA again just to prove that isn’t any better and it’s still a shimmery mess.

Went to gym, only did a 20 minute run as I wasn’t really in the mood and my legs are killing from the last two nights jaunts. Car is in garage on Monday, will be fixed by Tuesday and I’ll be about four grand down.

In server news I connected two of my Ubuntu boxes to each other and ran iPerf again, still the same 943MBps, so the switch wasn’t adding any overhead. I’ve ordered two PCI nic’s and a PCIe one, all Intel, so I will perform further tests in various combinations. Still 943 is pretty good, if I can keep that up across all interfaces then I’ll be impressed. Also ordered a compact flash drive sata thing, to install pfSense on, just to make things interesting.

Now it’s time for wine and torture porn, until the next person asked me about render…

OpenAL – what an ass

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Today I continued to do battle with Xcode and iOS, which made me even more heated in a very hot room.

What is it with OpenAL? It’s an open spec that is badly implement on every version I come across. The problem is, it’s too open and open to interpretation. The HW vendors are free to do what they want provided they adhere to the vague spec. So what you end up with is doing multiple workarounds for each platform for something which should really be platform independent. Take for example audio buffers, you queue them to a source and play them. If you call stop then all the buffers are marked as processed and you can unqueue them, nice, no problem. But what if you don’t play them? Well if you call stop not much happens, you can’t unqueue them they just vanish into a big pit of piss. You have to load a NULL buffer to the source, this then bins all the attached buffers and you can manually delete them, no unqueing. Except that’s only on iOS. On the reference driver calling stop will mark them all as processed and you can unqueue them as normal. Then you requeue them again, and what happens, well on the ref driver it works. On iOS it marks freshly queued buffers as processed so never plays them. You have to do an additional ‘rewind’ on the source to update the internal play marker that’s been shafted.

In server news I installed an old 250Gb hard drive into the box and set it up with ext3. Managed to mount it and set up a cron job to run a shell backup script. It now does a grandfather/father/son type rolling backup which I’m quite pleased with. Last couple of things are pop3 support, which I forgot about and a few bits on virtual domains. I also installed some stat stuff in word-press which I’m sure will be interesting at some point.

Once again the evening was warm so managed a couple of hours of fairly fly free cycling. And now about to settle down with the dog for some torture porn (see my other blog). If my dns ever sorts itself out, as the www is now pointing at the router address.

Oh, last nights shag, definitely rates in the top 10. That’s two entries my husband has on that leader board now:)

Travel Republic – did they rip me off?

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I’m still debating this. Booked a holiday, paid by credit card, checked all the small print, checked the final price, didn’t change when I selected credit card. Paid, and got stung 2.5%. What I didn’t notice was in 2pt text under the total is it gives you the extra amount. Sneaky? Very. Legal…..only just. Will I use them again…..? Will I fuck.