Spent the entire day working on clouds again. I vowed never to touch these fuckers again. Still. Made some progress anyway, got rid of a load vertex data that wasn’t required. It’s now dead quick in the vertex department and still bloody heavy in the pixel one. Looked at grout, can’t seem to get a colour chart anywhere, so will have to guess. Think I’m going for some kind of grey.

Walked over to Aztec West and took the drill bit back. Did more work. Finally went for a run. It’s now officially bloody cold. Had shower. Watched deep ITV drama’s. Then finally after yet another reminder email got round to rekeying my SSL certificates. As apparently 1024 bits isn’t enough these days so had to be changed to 2048 bits. Anyway, now after lots of buggering about it’s all done and now valid until May 2016. By then I will either be dead or will have forgotten where to stick the files again.

Dillon off to daycare tomorrow and then more bloody clouds.

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.

So now been running for just over two years. Same system, well okay that was replaced a bit later, but basically it’s the exact same install as I started with. Still running Ubuntu, still with all the same settings. And how many times has it crashed? None. Not once, not even a blip. Word Press has been upgraded monthly and all the Ubuntu updates and security fixes have also been applied. Can’t really complain, it all just ‘works’.

Work today was all about colour buffer compression, and to cut a long story short, got absolutely nowhere. I couldn’t get the damn thing to work properly with MSAA.

We took the dogs out, they went for a swim. Oh, I finally took the car to the garage and got that bush thing fitted. It really did only take about ten minutes and they did it straight away.

Went to the gym, did Pump. It was just so bloody hot. Then worked on chest with Laverne. Did a bit more work. Loaded up the GPS, updated the Sat-Nav. Already for tomorrow. No new video this week so far, I’ve just imported the footage from the London trip.

Slept well. Which wasn’t great when I had to be up at 6:30AM to take Dillon to playgroup. Went back to bed. Spent the bulk of the day typing up a conference notes Took Sasha out for a walk she was actually pretty well-behaved for once came across another dog and she’s actually fine. Now this is really weird. I press function key twice on the MacBook Air, and it’s only asked me if I wanted to install dictation software. So I said yes and after a five minute download update came with a small microphone icon. And the rest of this blog entry is now actually being written using voice dictation I will keep actually all the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors into making our if any gesture amusement purposes and to Jesse accurately actually is. Went to the gym this evening and a body pump then came back and did a bit more work. I then sat down for about an hour and started adding fracture to the Las Vegas helicopter video. I am going to stop the dictation mag because it is making some very amusing errors.

That was fun. Okay I haven’t mentioned Ubuntu in a while, I’ve been getting some quite bad spam for a little while so wanted to black list some sender email domains. Now using postfix, here’s how to do it. First create a file in /etc/postfix and call it sender_checks. Then inside that file add the domain name followed by REJECT followed by any comment you want to send back to the sending server, I use ‘No spammers’. Then you need to turn that into database file, so run ‘postman hash:/etc/postfix/sender_checks’ this should produce a .db file in the postfix directory. You need to edit the /etc/postfix/main.cf file and add ‘check_sender_access hash:/etc/postfix/sender_checks’ to the ‘smptd_recipient_restrictions’ line, usually best at the beginning. The only thing you have to do then is ‘postfix reload’. This will then block all the listed domains before they get anywhere near the mail box.

Lots of things arrived. My new Sony 7506 headphones, which are fantastic. The transceiver that I only ordered yesterday arrived by midday. Took a while to get the damn thing programmed up with the local repeater but got there in the end. Logbook also arrived, so all set to go….

Except I left it on all day and just listened to people talk through the repeater. If anything could drive you to suicide then listening to these dull peoples lives would. Anyone who can bang on for almost twenty minutes about changing a photocopier toner cartridge I don’t think I could hold a conversation with. Maybe tomorrow.

I worked on fiber stuff. All successful. Then it was back to shaders.

Went to the gym and did Spin with Laverene. Came back and did some more playing around with music and then some video editing. Then sat down and tried to find old Ubuntu scripts to do with the old Belkin UPS. I need to revert all these before putting the new UPS in, as this one actually supports proper power off shutdown.

Got up. Started work. It was actually quite fun, needed to work something out and got it all going nicely. Still got a couple of bugs to fix elsewhere though. Had a little cruise around for Brother printer problems and managed to find a shell script that installs all the awkward Brother printer drivers for Linux so gave that a blast. After deleting old printer and adding new one I could magically print things from the PC. I let it sleep and managed to print a PDF, that’s the first time that’s worked in about 18 months. I did try and configure it on the iMac, it wasn’t keen. So that will need more work. I’ll try and set it up on the laptops and stuff.

Went to Pump. Worked hard. Did a session with Laverne afterwards, worked harder.

Now about to have a bath with no wine:(

So today was all about multi-threading again. Which can lead to all sorts of fun. Basically I’m building render lists in multiple threads and then executing them in order. This in theory is simple, in practice it leads to many hours of thinking and banging your head against the keyboard. By the end of the evening however I’ve almost got it all working. Still lots to do.

Jamie had his ‘Game of Thrones’ lookalike Callum round. He ended up doing Jamie’s make-up, the less said about that the better. They ate at Nando’s, I’ve still never been there.

I had some success with an ebay order, I complained that the tracking number was for someone else. They said it never got dispatched so was going by next-day courier and they were including a quad-copter as well. Bonus.

Went to Pump.

So when I eventually sat down this evening it was time for IP blocking part two. So yesterday I worked out how to get the new ip address as a text file. Tonight’s fun was to try and do something useful with it. So I decided to go for a bash shell script. First thing to do was repeat the grep line to generate the file and called it newip.txt. Then do a check to see if it was zero length, if it was then just exit as we can’t do much. If it contains something then check to see if oldip.txt exists, if not copy new to old. If they both exist then compare new to old, if they are the same then nothing to do. If they are different I then invoke ‘sendmail’ and echo a small file including the new ip address. Finally set this up in crontab. I’ve got this set up on a user level at the moment, but I have a feeling it will need to be changed to root or when I log out it won’t run. Next step is going to be rather more complicated I’m sure.

Today was working on the joys of multi-threading a renderer. Which is actually rather complicated. The good news is that after a fairly long battle all is mostly working. I reckon another day should shift it, although how much of a speed gain it’s going to be is yet to be determined.

Ordered bar stools.

Went to the gym and did spin. It’s with a guy called Paul who think’s is American in the same way that Tim Westwood thinks he’s black. He only knows two sentences, ‘Tap it up’ & ‘Sprint’. I popped into Tesco’s on the way back and picked up some corks and sterilizer. Also some paint for the coving.

Did some more work, then transferred the red to the other bucket. Started the white off, needs to come up to temperature first.

Sampled the red, it isn’t bad, pretty drinkable.

Then I started playing with a little linux pet project. I want to get the IP address from a mail log for a certain user, but I want it to be the most recent entry. And I want to do it using only command line utils…okay one step at a time. First lets just get all strings associated with this user. So start with ‘grep’ then, so ‘grep user=tim mail.log’. Sorted, now have an output of every line for that user. Okay, now only want the latest entry, so we’ll pipe that to tail. ‘grep user=tim mail.log|tail -n 1’ sorted, that gives me one line. That line looks like this though ‘Nov 8 18:58:03 mannmansion pop3d-ssl: LOGOUT, user=Tim, ip=[::ffff:192.168.0.0], port=[65568]’ etc. So now lets get rid of the front bit up to the ‘ffff:’, ‘grep user=tim mail.log|tail -n 1|sed ‘s/^.*::ffff://’ and that gives you the output ‘192.168.0.0], port=[65568]’. Now let’s get shot of the end bit, “grep user=tim mail.log|tail -n 1|sed ‘s/^.*::ffff://’|sed ‘s/].*//'” and finally you get the output ‘192.168.0.0’. I’ll work out what to do with this exciting information tomorrow.

So the pppoe dropped sometime over night. Rather than kicking it I want to see if the auto drop at about 4AM kicks it off again. If it doesn’t I want to see if I can manually restart it using the backup firewall access. So there’s been no email today, pinging the gateway works but it doesn’t get beyond the firewall. It’s actually been quite nice with no annoying spam.

On Saturday I installed DropBox on the Ubuntu server, this involved large amounts of python scripts. I’ve then set up a cron task to tar the apache directories into by home DropBox directory, this then is mirrored on DropBox. Oddly that all works.

Summer is over as it was pissing down today. Took the dog to daycare, she didn’t mind. Went for a run in the drizzle.

Did a lot more Japanese. Still can’t find enough to fill ten days with, so stocking up the phone with crap I need to watch. May take a few Kindle books as well. Two more days of work left, yey.

This morning I wasn’t woken by a courier.

Spent all day working on this data stuff again. I just knuckled down and got on with it, I don’t really like how it looks, but never mind.

Walked the dog.

Courier arrived. It was the Draytek back from repair, they’ve swapped it out. I must admit, gold star to Draytek that was bloody quick service.

Went to the doctors. He failed to join me in a suicide pact, so prescribed more Prozac instead.

Did more work. Went to BodyPump. Did more work.

Then looked on the server syslog and notice some iNode block errors. After further investigation it appears that the backup drive which it archives to every night is shagged. So it no longer has a backup. I’ve now gone into panic mode about it. I’m just doing a backup run now and I’ll copy it over to another machine. Nothing has been lost, but potentially could have been nasty.