Simon Rumble’s blog

So over the weekend I started to work on getting my server running. This is an NEC system I bought off eBay, dual-Xeon, 2 gigs RAM and a big fat RAID array.

It doesn't seem to cope with me plugging in a PCI USB 2.0 card. Just fails to boot and gives an obscure error beep code indicating, according to the user guide, FRB failure: Contact your sales representative to replace the processor or system board.. Useful!

What's more, it seems that booting to use the DAC960 module for the RAID controller requires some obscure stuff. I've tried with Ubuntu, no joy. There also seems to have been a bug in Debian, though when I get home tonight I'll try some more options I've discovered.

So no movement on the server just now. The PCI problem is going to be a real pain, as it could also indicate I won't be able to use TV capture cards in it. That would really suck, though I guess I can use one of the IBM thin clients just to do the capturing, but I'd prefer a single-box solution.

Any ideas what "FRB failure" might be referring to? Googling for the acronym comes up with Federal Reserve Board, which fortunately I'm pretty sure hasn't failed.

When I moved out of my parents' house, my room was about 50cm longer than a double bed, and about 10cm wider. Still, I needed a bed and wasn't going to be very successful with the laydeez if I had a single bed, so I went and bought a nice, cheap futon matress and base. The company even came to my place and set it up.

I like futons, but the main criteria at that point was price. Futons with a rudimentary wooden slat base were really cheap.

Having returned from our sojourn in London for six years, our spare room has taken over my (much newer than the above) futon sofa bed base. We're trying to find a futon matress for it, but they've really jumped up in price! Cheapest we've found is $319. Ouch!

These Australians are a bit weird. Just got back from the supermarket and nearly all the sausages are beef sausages. That's just wrong! Especially when they say things like "traditional" on the packaging.

Sausages are made with pork goddammit! Would love a Porkinson about now.

Just looking through the programme for linux.conf.au and unfortunately I'm not going to make it. As a contractor it's quite expensive for me to take days off, so I was thinking a single day. Friday's programme looks great for me! Problem is, it's $300 regardless of how many days you come for. That makes it a very very expensive day.

So I think I'll come along for the Open Day which is free and I can get to by getting into work early and bunking off early.

Still, I should be able to get some info from Janet and Kim who will be staying at my place.

Apparently my blog is blocked on a federal government department's network as "Category: Pornography/Sex,Entertainment (Global)".

Besides the mis-categorization, it just goes to show the futility of filtering web sites based on the URL or domain. Kristy read my blog via some kind of aggregation, probably one of the planet aggregators on which my blog appears. Handily side-stepping the classification.

Kristy is being coy about which government department, probably for good reason, but I'd love to put "As classified Pornography/Sex,Entertainment by the Department of..." on my site.

The post yesterday asking about Ikea components has got me a couple of responses.

Steve Walsh says:

IIRC, they are;

threaded pin rod

and

rotating lock screw

Alex Hudson says:

Your Ikea part isn't; it's a standard fixing based on a
traditional dowel wood joint.

The dowel is replaced by a cam dowel, which is the upright fixing, and
it mates with the cam lock, which is the round thing.

They work best where the cam lock has sharp teeth and the hole is
tight on the lock, that's the only way the joint stays tight. A
traditional dowel joint is usually stronger, and you can replace
dowels relatively straightforwardly - a cam lock becomes looser over
time, and you can't replace them to tighten them.

Thanks for the responses folks! Most interesting

So it seems the term for this type of fastener is "cam and dowel", though this leads me to think perhaps they are also known as "knock-down fasteners".

I'm trying to work out what component 110630 and 112996 are called from Ikea furniture. I'm quite impressed with the utility of these devices: they allow you to align items at right-angles in a precision way, with only casual alignment to start with. Really cool pieces of hardware and I want to find out more about them. They're not just used in Ikea, I've seen them in Argos flat-pack furniture too.

So what are they called? Let me know.

In searching for an answer, someone pointed me at the Ikea Hacker blog. Very cool!

The Wilderness Society have released overlays for Google Earth that show the scale of the destructive logging going on in Tasmania. It's incredible that we allow this to happen in such a beautiful, untouched place. And for a few dollars a ton, we export the resulting woodchips to Japanese paper mills.

This technique will be very useful for campaign groups. Imagine a map of toxic plumes from exhaust stacks on the M5 and Lane Cove road tunnels? It's a very direct, very "look how close to my house that is" way of bringing the message to the people.

I've been listening to a couple of great albums recently. I'm really getting into Costello Music, from Glasgow band The Fratellis. Great spiky guitars and catchy, almost Beatles-esque tunes. Loads of fun.

Also I've finally picked up Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited, a compilation of covers of Gainsbourg songs by modern artists. I spotted this first in a record shop in Milan but they wanted €35 for it, so I waited until we got home to grab it.

It starts with Franz Ferdinand and Jane Birkin doing A Song for Sorry Angel with Birkin's breathless vocals, Kapranos' power and Ferdinand's trademark spiky, tight riffs.

Jarvis Cocker and Kid Loco do I Just Came to Tell You that I'm Sorry, and from this I think Cocker could spend the rest of his life covering Gainsbourg--he's just perfect for it.

Frontline, Brian Molko and Francoise Hardy do Requiem for a Jerk (Requiem Pour Un Con), which is another great match of voices with songs for the Placebo frontman.

Lola Rastaquouere becomes "Lola Rastafari" in the hands of Sly & Robbie with Marianne Faithful. Fantastic stuff.

So two very good albums. I'm really enjoying them.

Spotted last night at the end of my parents' street, a police paddy wagon parked outside the local pizza joint in a No Stopping zone while the copper was inside waiting for his pizza. There's a car park right next-door to the pizza place, and it was by no means full.

So who polices the police? These things are the way of the future, but with the rule that they cannot be switched off and a copper's testimony isn't worth shit if the camera inexplicably "isn't working". Get yourself a set today!