Steve's Blog

On Friday around 3pm, I started to upgrade various packages on the server. The distro in use at the time was Fedora Core 2 – which had been out of the whole update scene for quite a while. This is something I wanted to correct.

I started installing a few packages that would have little impact on operations, when everything stopped. As only my ssh session was responding (no web, no new ssh sessions etc) I told the box to reboot. At this point, the server did a kernel crash and refused to do anything.
Continue reading ‘Server outage details.’ »

This one comes from the weird department. I was just leaving for work the other day when I notice that some punk had spray painted crud on both mine and my next door neighbours garage doors. I won’t post any pictures of it, but it’s not the kind of look that I want for my house! Anyway, we were looking up things that remove spray paint – and the proper stuff is damn expensive – when someone suggested using fly spray. Now I was interested by this – but as it turns out, fly spray removes spray paint. Now the tools for this job are quite specific, as using the wrong type of cloth will just spread the paint around. We found that a ‘Chux’ type cloth (the ones that are thin with lots of holes) work very well – whereas the normal cloths just spread stuff around. The Chux cloths also rinse clean in warm water – so you can actually remove the paint. This just has to be filed in the ‘who-would-have-thought’ file.

I’ve had this Orinoco 802.11b PCMCIA card lying around here for a while. It died when upgrading the firmware on it in a Mac when the card was removed too soon. So, I decided to do what all good geeks do when something dies. You rip it apart.

Melrose Drive , Tullamarine , Victoria . January 16th 2006 : 14.35 hours :
Highway patrol pulls over a Workcover Inspector for doing 68 in a 60 zone. Workcover Inspector says nothing and cops the $120 fine sweet. Policeman finishes writing ticket and proceeds back to his car. Workcover Inspector in the mean time, gets digital camera out of bag, photographs the cop and proceeds to the police car where he issues the Policeman with an $800.00 fine for not wearing his hi-visibility vest when leaving his vehicle in a high traffic area.

It just doesn’t get any sweeter than that.