General

We got to Malta safe and sound. It was really hot at the airport but got really cold by the time we got to the hotel. When we got here it was like the hotel time forgot - it seems to be stuck about forty years in the past which is why so many old people are here I guess It is nice enough but quite basic for a four star hotel - the Mellieha Bay Hotel.


We went on our first dive today with Aquaventure who are at the beach in our hotel complex. I have been looking forward to going on another dive for a good few months now but I was disappointed I am afraid... It was the shortest dive I have done so far at only 34 minutes, the shallowest at a max depth of 7.6 m and an average of about 4 m. It was also the coldest (15 C) and the one where I had the most air left at the end. I came up with just under 130 bar... There were very few photo opportunities in Slugs Bay too - I will put a few up with this entry though such as the sea slug I found.

It was nice to finally get to use all this new equipment though. My underwater camera enclosure seemed to work well, although the woman who sold it to me just told me I need the fibre optic kit to get rid of back scatter... If she had told me that when I asked at the dive show I would have bought one there and then. Never mind - I will get the best photos I can with what I have available. Even though the water was cold my wet suit kept me warm. Louise gobbled through her air - she only had 80 bar left but she gets a lot more nervous.

We have arranged a car for the next four days (three full days) and have two dives booked on Friday, one on Saturday and one or two on Monday I think. Hopefully I will get a few wreck dives in next week too as well as some caves. I really hope the diving does get better - I think we were spoilt in the Red Sea!


Lousie managed to beat me this morning too - she pasted me at Scrabble whilst we were sat at the side of the pool. Back to the evenings entertainment anyway...

Like Donnie I am also trying to get fit. Towards the end of January we switched from the Virgin gym to Greens in Sheffield due to its more convenient location (closer to where we both work) and the promise of a new place invigorating us (and the fact that none of the staff ever seemed that interested in helping you out at Virgin). I think the convenience has really helped out and we have made it quite regularly, apart from the times when I have been out of Sheffield (and quite often the country) which seems to happen more and more regularly recently.

We have also been trying to eat more healthily and just eat what we want (i.e. leaving the clean plate club). So far it has worked out really well for me having lost four inches off my waist and over two stones in the last three or four months. I am also so much fitter now and on Sunday morning I managed to run 5 km (3 miles) in just over 32 minutes. This is great progress for me as a few months back I struggled to run for 10 minutes without stopping. I am also doing a lot of swimming, spinning and various other bits to tone up and stuff.

I am feeling lots better and am hoping it will really pay off whilst we are on holiday with the scuba diving and snorkelling especially. I have been enjoying running quite a bit too - the mental challenge of running faster and further has been really good fun, setting targets for myself and beating them as well as watching the weight slip off. It hasn't been going quite as well for my wife - she is training to run in the race for life charity 5 km run in June so I am trying to help her train up for that.

We are going to try and do a little running out in Malta to keep fit and help Louise train. Time to try and get some sleep anyway - at best I have four hours of sleep left before we get up and get our plane

Using a slow DSL connection from some airport hotel in Manchester. We are waiting for our flight in the morning to Malta. I have been running around for the last few days trying to make sure I got everything done before we left. I nearly managed to forget my new dive watch! We decided to give Virgin Trains a go too and they sold us a ticket onto some crappy little First train with two carriages. We basically ended up travelling for over 2.5 hours for a journey I could have driven in about an hour in the car!

I don't think we will be bothering with the train to Manchester again. The hotel has been a little boring too - I just want to be off on holiday. So in future we will either drive or get a taxi straight to the airport for our flight unless it is down in a London airport as that is much further away. I have been double checking and I think I have remembered everything else we needed and now I can't sleep...

Can't wait to get to Malta - we have been told by lots of people how nice it is out there. I have taken the O-rings off of all my underwater stuff (apparently it can damage them due to the reduced cabin pressure in the plane) so I really hope they work OK once I put them back together. I think I will test them in the bath at the hotel and again snorkelling before I take them on a real dive. We aren't sure if there is any Internet access at the hotel so tonight could be my last night on the Internet for two weeks!

I am hoping to write a Qt4 based dive log analyser for my new dive computer whilst we are away in C++. I have come up with a rough prototype for it but have been too busy over the last few days. It would be good to be able to download and analyse my dives in Linux - I already have the Suunto USB interface working. If I get something decent together I will try to make a proper release and package it for Gentoo. It would be good to release a useful and unique application to the public.

Anyway I had best try and get some sleep! Need to be up at 3am to get ready and get to our terminal for 4:40am... It could be a couple of weeks cut off from the Internet potentially too

On my recent trip to Baltimore I read my second Discworld novel - Going Postal. I have to say that I enjoyed this book much more than Thud! It is a very clever book and it appealed to me on many levels. I especially enjoyed the Clacks and the parallels my mind drew with areas of modern life and some of the practices of the operators of the Clacks. Moist was a fun character if not a little predictable, all in all a great read in my opinion.

However Dan Brown's Digital Fortress was a big disappointment to me. It was predictable and terminology was used in a clumsy and in some cases incorrect fashion. He made the common mistake of calling crackers hackers and tried to dramatise the breaking down of a firewall in a way that really did not work for me. If he really did consult with ex-NSA agents I fear for the security of the NSA! I thought it might be a fun read but it really wasn't. I may yet read the Da Vinci Code but after reading this book I am in no rush to get it.

So a bit of a mixed bag. I found Dan Brown's writing pretty simplistic with silly amounts of twists at then end that were almost funny but not really. Whereas Going Postal was a really fun book that had me amused all the way though. I have bought Night Watch and Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett - both were recommended by friends.

I also bought The Art of Diving on a friends recommendation as his friend Alex Mustard did all the photography. I have to say the photos are amazing and I can only hope to take pictures approaching that quality whilst I am in Malta. I also bought An Essential Guide to Underwater Photography by Michael Aw and Matthieu Meur when I was at the London Internation Dive Show (Amazon doesn't seem to have this) and got it signed by the author (first book I have ever had signed). Hopefully that will help me to take some nice pictures - I tested out my underwater camera enclosure and strobe yesterday ready for the holiday

Well I am back from Baltimore now. Louise joined me on Thursday and as there were no relevant talks on the last day of the conference we went to the aquarium for the day on Friday. That was really fun and it is a pretty good aquarium. We saw the dolphin show twice as I really like dolphins and went around the Australia exhibit they are currently showing.

We had a really nice meal that evening at the Capitol Brewing Company and I found one of the nicest beers I have ever tasted! It was called Fuel and was made from coffee and chocolate among other things. It was quite strong but very nice, I couldn't find any to buy to bring home though... Saturday we took the train down to Washington DC for the day.

We paid for a day pass on the tour bus and started off at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I was amazed that is was free entry, but the queues were long and slow. Once in I had to put my bag through a security scanner, I asked the security guard if it was film safe and he didn't listen at all but took my bag off me and pushed it through. I will find out when I get them developed I guess.

Started off my journey on Friday morning at about 5am. Couldn't find my hair fudge but aside from that I think I managed to remember everything I needed. Got to the train station and caught the 5:20 train to London. Louise got me a seat in first class, but first class wasn't as first class as usual this morning. They did the usual barely drinkable complimentary coffee but no food was served. So went I got into London I was starving. Got the tube and the tube replacement bus to terminal 4 at Heathrow.

This was my longest ever journey travelling alone, before this I had just done a short hop to Grenoble, France! It is pretty lonely travelling alone. Security was the highest I have seen it on both sides of the Atlantic. I used the BA online checkin service, checked in my bag for the hold and then I thought I was done. Just had to go through security so I went to the red barriers and was directed to the back of the line. A few times along there I thought I had lost the line but it really was that long! I think I was waiting for about an hour to get through security, thankfully I had arrived with lots of time to spare.

Well I am going to set off in a couple of hours to catch the train down to London, Heathrow is such a hassle to get to from Sheffield. Looking forward to it but paranoid I have forgotten something I will need. BA only let you take one piece of hand luggage which is going to have to be my laptop, so unfortunately my SLR camera has to stay at home. I will be taking my small Fuji F10 but I would really like to be able to use my Nikon F80 out there. I don't trust it in checked baggage though.

If there are any Gentoo folk who fancy meeting up for a beer I should be able to check mail at the hotel. The conference looks huge - it will be a real challenge taking it all in and seeing as much as possible whilst I am out there. Best continue running round the house trying to check I haven't forgotten anything now!

Well after reading Diego's post about VMWare server I thought I would have to check that one out myself. I tried out Mike's original ebuilds in bug 56881, but haven't had chance to try out the updated ebuilds in the new bug he opened. I would like to thank Mike for all his work, the ebuilds worked fine on my dual core amd64 SMP system and I have been happily making a few test VMs with it.

This should be great for being able to play with bleeding edge environments in their own sandboxes and easily letting other people try out Gentoo without install whether they are using Linux or Windows. I just need some more disk space now!

Well I have booked my flights and hotel room, joined the American Physical Society and registered for their March meeting in Baltimore. I am feeling broke but really looking forward to seeing some of the American East coast (only ever been to California in the US). I am also looking forward to the jobs fair held in parallel to the conference. I will be polishing my CV and registering for the it pretty soon.

Managed to arrange for my wife to join me after the conference so that we can look around the area and make a bit of a holiday out of it. This is going to be a tough year writing up my thesis, searching for jobs, finishing up my current research and getting it published. I am really looking forward to looking around Washington DC too as it looks like a really amazing place. Drop me a line if you are in the area and fancy meeting up for a beer one night or have any recommendations of sights we should taken in.

Well I had an old motherboard with an Athlon64 3200+ in it (previous burnt out PSU that wasn't quite as bad as it looked). So I bought 1 GB of RAM, a new PSU, a Hauppage PVR-500, used my old nVidia GeForce FX5900XT and a DVD drive for it. I installed Gentoo amd64 on it of course and then began my first attempt at MythTV.

I have TV out working and I can play DVDs, although I am using xine instead of mplayer for the DVD menu support. The TV tuners are recognised but all I get is static. I was working with this wiki article. I also have messages like this in dmesg, ivtv1: i2c attach to card #1 ok [client=(tuner unset), addr=61] which I think is my tuner failing to get set up properly.

It looks like the infrared receiver/IR blaster doesn't work either, it is USB based and came with the package. I get ID 0609:031d SMK Manufacturing, Inc. when I plug it in but no lirc devices This means that the remote is also unusable. So far I have had limited success, but I am hopeful I will be able to improve and document the set up in future. I am currently using,

media-tv/ivtv-0.4.2
media-tv/xmltv-0.5.39 - current stable is unable to parse UK TV listings
media-tv/mythtv-0.18.1-r2
app-misc/lirc-0.8.0_pre3

Just given my talk (on my birthday no less) and I won joint first prize for it, so I am really pleased. I wrote it all in Linux using Kile, LaTeX and LaTeX beamer. You can look at a copy of the PDF here if you would like to. It is a summary of two of the main areas of my research - alkanethiol encapsulated gold nanoparticle Langmuir-Blodgett/Langmuir-Schaeffer multilayers, and the sensing/conductivity characteristics of these multilayers to various gases and vapours.

I just have to get more of my work published, write up my thesis, find a postdoctoral position (hopefully in the States or Canada) and pass my viva! Shouldn't be too hard, for now I am going to take the evening off and enjoy the rest of my 26th birthday

With all the pressures of this year I decided that I would like to make some time to read for pleasure and had been meaning to read a discworld novel by Terry Pratchett for quite some time. Louise and I were in the city centre on Monday and I saw Thud! on special offer at Waterstones and bought it. It is the first fiction book I have picked up and read in months - always seem to have my head buried in physics, nanotechnology, mathematics and programming books these days.

I really enjoyed it and found the book very entertaining. I don't know if it is one of the better books in the series or not, but I certainly think I will find the time to read a few more. I don't want to get too engrossed though as I need to write up my thesis this year

Well it is the New Year already! 2006 has come around so fast... This will (hopefully) be the final year of my PhD studies at the University of Sheffield. I spent quite a bit of time before the break polishing up my CV, and will be sending it out to some research groups shortly to see if there are any potential postdoctoral positions going for when I finish. I am also scouring the job web sites for potential positions.

On top of that I am of course working on some more papers and my thesis! I also have to prepare a presentation to summarise my work for the final year PhD talks that are taking place on the 26th (by coincidence this coincides with my 26th birthday). If there is any time left in there I will hopefully be able to do some Gentoo development and work on my Qt4 based X-ray/neutron reflectivity package.

This is certainly going to be a tough year with lots of uncertainties. Time to get started!

Louise and I got married on 29 July earlier this year and quite shockingly (to me at least) we are still waiting to get our wedding photos! After paying hundreds of pounds for photos that look nice, but I must say nothing amazing, our photographer is still messing us about! It took over a month for him to produce the book with the tiny little proofs in it, then a few more weeks to produce a CD with really low resolution images that didn't help much more.

Louise phoned him today and yet again he said they weren't ready. Yet again he promised that he would have them ready by the end of the week and yet again I don't believe it. We went with the guy who I stupidly believed was one of the best in Sheffield (Seaman Photographers or something like that) and have received what I would call poor service ever since the wedding. He said the proofs would be ready when we got back from our honeymoon, then when we got them you could hardly make out what the pictures were of.

Now we have chosen them and ordered and spent even more money on albums and more photos he keeps delaying on delivery. I wish I had just asked a friend to take some photos. Louise's sister used a guy who trained under our photographer and they had the proofs (real prints) before they got back from honeymoon and their albums within a month! When will it ever end (no I'm not talking about my rant ).

Got my new system up and running yesterday. I would like to thank Mastercard and NatWest for helping my to purchase a new PSU, motherboard, graphics card and AMD Althlon64 X2 3800+! I haven't worked out all the fine details of how I will pay them back just yet, but I do have a beautiful new system up and running!

Thanks to Gentoo it took virtually no effort at all. Flashed the BIOS to the latest version, plugged in my old hard drive. Everything booted but a few things weren't working so I just recompiled the kernel with SMP support, PCI express support and the forcedeth module for the different network interdace. Rebooted and it was all working great. I do have this really weird issue where it seems to reboot on a cold boot after entering run level 3, then on a second boot everything boots fine.

The system has clock issues too - it gains time at quite an incredible rate. I have even found ntpd having trouble keeping up when it is under load! Hopefully I will get some time to do a little work during the rest of the weekend. I am really hoping for some better luck when it comes to computer hardware too - I can't afford to replace anything else! The dual core processors seem pretty responsive so far too running on the gentoo-sources-2.6.13-r2. There is just the clock issue and the random reboot on cold start.

As the title says my main system is dead. I was working on it earlier, went to get some dinner and came back later to find it powered down. Hit the power button and it never POSTed Stripped it down sequentially until I was left with just the CPU plugged into the main board and I still don't even get any beeps! It is a Gigabyte GA-K8NS Pro motherboard and has never been quite right so I am tempted to think it is that, but there is also the possibility of graphics, RAM and CPU issues.

Until I get some cash and figure out what went I won't be doing much development as that box housed all of my work including Gentoo CVS repos, experimental ebuilds and such. I think the hard drive is intact but don't have any other SATA systems. Pretty sure I also have a DVD backup from about a month or so ago, but my first priority is to get the system working again. If anyone feels like sharing any tips with me on diagnosing my system I would welcome them. It has been a crappy week - at least I have my new laptop so I can still get some work done. Most of my data and SVN repos are on that box too though

Update: It does seem to be the time for system problems with quite a few devs having trouble with their systems in the last few months. Checking on my mainboard (pretty sure it is that - hunch though) it is three weeks out of warranty. Not a good week at all - can't get anything done until I get my system working again...

I have finished moving my old Gallery 1 site from my old server to the new one, and took the opportunity to migrate over to the newly released Gallery 2. Everything seemed to work really well and the migration went across without too many issues. I had been testing the betas and rcs anyway, but it was great to see the final product. I think my gallery looks much better now. I did see another Gallery 2 site with the year as a big heading, and the albums taken in that year in that section which I really liked.

Anyway I am really busy and am going to have to shoot. I took the opportunity to add all the photos from my trip to Japan, stag week in Tenerife, our wedding and some of the honeymoon photos. Hopefully I will get time to add more later. I am very impressed overall, but I would really like the photos in the random photo and when you are looking at individual photos to be centred. I will have to see if there is an easy way to do that soon.

I have been so busy recently. Over the weekend I was getting my new server online and configured. Some of you may remember the terrible problems I had with 1&1 a while back. Then the manic travelling during the Summer, wedding and months trying to catch up on everything I needed to do whilst I was away (still not caught up - sorry if you are waiting on something).

Well I finally got a dedicated server sorted, and it is of course running Gentoo. To be more exact it is running AMD64 Gentoo Hardened kernel and toolchain and it has been rock solid so far. I am renting the server from OH Telecom who have been very helpful and friendly so far, they even downloaded an amd64 2005.1 LiveCD for me to install from Using all the grsecurity/PaX stuff with the hardened toolchain and everything still works too! I am new to this stuff, but the hardened docs seemed to explain it all very well.

If you are seeing this blog entry it also means that DNS has updated and nothing broke! Hopefully you won't see all my blog posts again, or something like that, as I have seen happen when others have moved servers before... I am gradually moving all my email and web sites over, testing new stuff out and making sure it all works. It will also allow me to give some of the server oriented Gentoo packages much more testing too - I have spent the last few days trying to get all the Apache and PHP stuff keyworded correctly. Please poke me if I missed anything.

I think I had had the worst 24 hours in a long time! It started with the hard drive in my old PII 450 server failing, taking out my email at about 1am. After recovering what I could, setting up an alternate server to accept email for my Gentoo and general email I got some sleep at about 2:30am or so.

Driving in to work this morning some idiot taxi driver goes into the back of my car! Took his details but it doesn't look like there was any damage. Then I had to try and get in as I had someone visiting at work and had to make some samples with him today for nanolithography. That went OK apart from dropping a piece of prepared silicon on the floor and feeling really tired.

Finally got to the end of the day feeling like crap. Went to pick Louise up from work and got stuck in traffic for about 50 minutes for what is usually only a 5 minute drive in rush hour! Some idiot reversed into me very slowly at the traffic lights too - really unimpressed as he saw me there. When I got to Louise's workplace I decided that she could drive us home.

Got home and Louise made some dinner, then crashed out on the sofa at about 7pm. Went to bed and fell to sleep, but woke up again at about 10pm and don't feel like I am going to be able to sleep anymore. Took my new laptop out of its cool backpack style case and noticed I had forgotten its power supply and mouse - they are at work. I guess I will find out how long the batteries last before giving up. It has just turned midnight now so hopefully tomorrow will be better!

I got a few new toys delivered to me last week. On Thursday I got a Fuji F10 6.3 MP digital camera which is a really great camera - take a look here for more details. It was recognised as a USB mass storage device without any trouble in Gentoo and I have been doing everyone's head in taking pictures of everything. It is a replacement for my old Sony Cybershot which met its ultimate end on the last night of my stag week in Tenerife... I got a 1 GB xD memory card and a spare battery for it too!

The biggest new toy arrived on Friday though, which is my new Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi laptop, specs are here. This is a great laptop, and I read loads of reviews before purchasing it. As soon as I got it on Friday morning I repartitiioned and starting installing Gentoo on it of course The initial install went fairly well, and I got it to boot without too many problems. Unfortunately it comes with a broken ACPI DSDT so the battery readout was broken - I wish manufacturers would try getting stuff like this right. Fortunately those before me had already fixed this.

I am afraid that laptops don't seem to have gotten much easier to get working... I installed straight from 2005.1 amd64 stages, and built a multilib system. During my research I found a few useful pages scattered across the web with installation details. An Acer 5021NWLCi installation of Gentoo, as well as a user on the Gentoo wiki who installed it on the same model I have here which has been useful in providing quite a few pointers and fixes.

I installed using gentoo-sources-2.6.13 and upgraded to -r1 over the weekend. I had to apply one patch to the kernel - to load the updated DSDT file from an initrd during boot. I am using ndiswrapper to use my broadcom wireless network card, and I have finally managed to get WEP encryption working. I got the Windows XP 64 bit driver from Acer FTP. Unfortunately I have not been able to get wpa_supplicant working so far - any tips greatfully received I also got a new Linksys WRT54GC wireless router to power my new wireless network too.

The integrated memory card reader doesn't work, and it doesn't look like there is much chance of getting it working which is a shame as that functionality would be nice to have. I am getting APIC errors on the CPU which is a little worrying too, but doesn't seem to be causing issues. The touchpad is working great, but I still can't get the bluetooth mouse working reliably either - I think I am missing something here but I need to get back to some real work!

Productivity has been terrible on my PhD work, Gentoo and consultancy stuff whilst getting this laptop working! Hopefully now I will get back to being even more productive.