Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

We are about to leave for the airport. We are taking a long weekend break in Ireland! Should hopefully be meeting up with Rob Holland (former dev) whilst out there and I will be sampling the local Guinness to see if it really is nicer out there. Get to spend a few days in Dublin and then down to Cork. Should be lots of fun (neither of us have been before).

Best get going - back Tuesday I think

On Saturday I did the open water section of the PADI rescue diver course. It was a long day, starting at 5am waking up, getting my dive gear in the car and setting off just before 6am. Then I had a two hour drive up to Capernwray and met with Tigerdive and my course mates at the Truckhaven services just across the road from the dive site for our briefing at just gone 8am.

Once we got to the dive site I had to register, we had a briefing on the site and then kitted up. I think we got into the water for about 11am and we did our first dive and the only one we could log for the day (the others were all too short). Mick (a trainee divemaster) led us on a whistlestop tour of the site. We did a short surface swim to the helicopter buoy and descended on it down to 12 m. I was buddied up with Alistair for the day, with Sara and Ian buddied up too. We circled the helicopter and then Mick led us past another couple of boats and we finished on the Sessner (I think it is called) before ascending to 6 m and starting the exercises - diver problems underwater.

We were just constantly watching everyone for what they were going to do to us next and just when I thought it was over Mick simulated an out of air situation and we ascended with him breathing from my octopus. After that we had diver problems on the surface, panicked divers and it went on! We were in the water for most of the day and it was the most exhausting course I have done so far. I think it was really worth it and I feel like I could really make a difference if I needed to help a diver in trouble now but it isn't a course I would have wanted to do before I was confident underwater and above it.

I am now a certified PADI rescue diver - I have a badge, a certificate and soon even another PADI card to prove it! I spent most of Sunday recovering from Saturday...

I have finally bumped BOINC to version 5.5.6 today. There was some messing that had to be done, but it seems to be working better and I have already had reports of it fixing at least one build issue. I would appreciate testing on it and any feedback. I am thinking about removing the server USE flag as there is virtually no-one who is going to use that functionality and it only seems to cause issues. Furthermore I cannot test whether it even works properly and if you are running your own project you can probably add a line to the ebuild without any trouble.

The problem I have now is in updating the SETI@Home client. It fails to build for me here on my amd64 systems. Haven't had chance to test it on one of my x86 systems yet. I have been trying the 5.17 sources from today's snapshot of the enhanced client. Their CVS seems broken as when I check it out from their files are missing. The file vector/analyzeFuncs_x86_64.cpp is throwing errors on check_suspend_flag not declared in this scope... If anyone has any ideas on this I would love to hear them. I am using GCC 4.1.1 and it could well be an issue with that but I don't want to add new stuff that doesn't work with it. I got an assembler warning too.

I am pretty busy so I am not sure if I will get the time to revisit this any time soon. I built the enhanced snapshot from today against the 5.5.6 boinc sources in the tree. So any ideas please comment on this post, comment on a boinc bug in bugzie or send me an email. Hopefully this weekend I will get chance to poke around and see what other distros are doing too.

I wrote my first webapp ebuild the other day - for serendipity 1.0. I have been using it to power my blog for quite some time now. I asked Sebastian Bergmann who is a member of upstream and a Gentoo dev if he would mind me knocking together an ebuild for it months ago and I finally got around to getting it all working over the weekend with a little help from Jakub and Chtekk.

Stuart sorted my write access out for the Webapps overlay so I could add it there initially. Check it out, let me know how it works and if you can spot any bugs Hopefully it will work well for people and be allowed into the main portage tree once the necessary checks have been done on it.

Daniel Ribas very kindly made a far better hackergotchi than I think I could have, even after hours of trying... I would like to thank him and ask the powers that be to add it to the Planet please I think it looks pretty good, even though I look like a floating head with hair wings.

Unfortunately I am in a semi-conscious state today after spending the day doing the open water section of my rescue diver course... Hopefully I will do something more useful tomorrow like finish off the boinc version bump!

After Steve Dibb's post about hackergotchis I figured I would have another crack at making one... Tried Krita but couldn't figure out how to get it to feather the selection, moved over to Gimp and I did better but the cut out isn't exactly smooth and the drop shadow went around the whole image, not just my face. I also couldn't quite figure out how hackergotchis handle long hair? May be I should try and dig out a picture where I had my hair tied back instead to make it easier!

If anyone wants to have a play I would appreciate it - or just give me some further pointers. I have put a few pictures below, there are more scattered in my online gallery too. Finish off my rescue diver course tomorrow too - all day out at Capernwray doing exercises and scenarios! Hopefully we will manage to squeeze a dive in after the course too...

Last Wednesday evening we drove up to the a place called Seahouses and checked into our bed and breakfast. We then grabbed a quick bite to eat and a few beers before getting to bed for some rest before our first taste of diving in the UK sea. We dove in several locations in and around the Farne Islands with Sovereign Diving. Thursday morning we had an early start out on the boat.

We started off with a wreck at about 20 m just off the side of one of the small islands called Knivestone, and then got a little lunch and after a good surface interval we were at our next dive. This was much shallower at about 6 m on a sandy bank just off a beach. It was called Corrington and there was quite a spread out wreck and loads of life. The highlight of which were the lobsters for me.

We all had a really nice meal together in the evening at the dive operations restaurant after washing our gear down and leaving it to dry. Shared a few tales and took in all the photos of the seals hoping we would be lucky on our second day of diving and meet some seals!

We saw a few seals from a distance on the first dive, but the currents were really strong. Louise didn't feel very good after that dive so she gave the last dive a miss. I buddied up with Mark and Grant on the last dive and that had to be the best of the lot for me. We went through quite a narrow gulley, caught sight of some seals playing around near us. Had a quick look at the wreck at about 12 m and then came up and did our longest safety stop ever whilst playing with the seals. I have put all the decent pictures I got here along with my favourites in the sub album.

All in all a great introduction to UK diving. Shame Louise missed the best dive, I suppose it means we will just have to go back some time. When we got home I had to complete the knowledge reviews for my rescue diver course and had a really long day at TigerDive doing the classroom stuff and pool work. Next Saturday is my first visit to Capernwray to do the open water part of the course.