Info
2008-02-28 Maidenhead to Reading
The Maidenhead to Oxford service is yet again late. No possibility of doing anything productive on the train again.
On a good day the train can be an ideal place to do some quiet work, no one usually will bother you if they see that you're absorbed in something important. Today though was just not one of those days. There must have been some mistake on the signals from the early morning as people were rushing about much more than usual.
On some other notes though it appears that work are issuing more project work to me which is a good sign that they're showing some confidence in my abilities.
FreeBSD 7.0 has been released, it's worth taking a look at since it's got ZFS and is probably quite usable on the desktop now.
2008-02-27 trains
Another rubbish day with the trains. It seems to me that another member of the public is equally as unhappy with the rail service as am I since the carriage stank of urine I thought that it could only mean that someone else where was so horrified with the service that their brain could no longer hold the contents of their bladder.
The Maidenhead to Oxford service was yet again late. This means that the Maidenhead to Reading service is delayed, which would leave me to miss the connecting train from Reading to Newbury. Not wise, but of course it leads to extreme over crowding on the Maidenhead to Oxford.
2008-02-26 more on trains
Further problems. The level crossing in Thatcham had barriers down at 07:20 when I arrived at the station to use the car park. This meant waiting for the inbound trains to pass safely before the barriers could be lifted.
At around 07:25 an intercity pulled into the station. The train is clearly two carriages too large for the platform so the train was blocking the level crossing and the barriers remain closed firmly.
At 07:28 the train began to pull away, but this only proved fruitless as another inbound in the other direction began to block the level crossing carrying nothing but gravel, albeit for two dozen carriages.
By the time the intercity had cleared the level crossing yet another gravel train heading into the direction of the previous began to block.
Once both lanes were free I could approach the crossing in my car. At about two cars from the level itself the barriers began to signal their descent by indication of flashing red lights.
It was at this time 07:31, the train was due any second now. The smaller part of my brain thought less of the possible situation of being stuck in the middle of the track and continued full throttle to cross the line.
If I had not been so stupid I would have missed the train completely and the connecting train at Reading. This was obviously a hangup from yesterdays situation of trains being delayed all over the place. For whatever reasoning the 'Gravel' company must have a good deal with the rail network for being able to use their lines so heavily at such an important time for the 09:00-17:30 commuters.
2008-02-25 season ticket
After 14 reasonably on-time train journeys it seemed like a good idea to get a rail card for a week (providing the photo to prove that I am the card holder).
The journey to Maidenhead was OK (despite the connecting train in Reading leaving 5 minutes later than it was due (for some unknown reason). The return train was not so prompt.
At 17:40 I arrived at Maidenhead station with a deep feeling of despair as I noted each and every information screen showing nothing but a stock message that there was no information to display. I walked to my normal platform to find it over packed with commuters waiting for departure.
At aroun 18:20 a train from Paddington to Reading arrived to have as many commuters as possible squeeze into any remaining space.
At around 18:55 the train pulled into Reading station where every commuter on board alighted where there were information screens showing nothing by delays. At 19:05 I looked for a train that would go in the direction that I wanted, the 19:12 to Newbury should cover that, only it didn't depart until 19:28, at 20:00 it arrived at Thatcham.
It would not have been so bad if that train station provided free wireless access for their commuters in such a problematic situation. Why should the commuter have to pay for some courtesy communication to inform people of they delays? It's not like a bit of modem-speed internet is going to break their bank.
One thing that *really* bugs me is that the cost of a weekly ticket to Maidenhead is 41.70gbp, parking my car, 2.20gbp daily, a total of 52.70gbp each week, is coming out of my pocket, along with the time that all this consumes. The cost of travel by road is also escalating, but soon will come the time when I've had more than enough of rail travel. Stay tuned as I make a log of the delays on this line.
As far as things go programming wise, I'm still working on another module for Apache but it's taking much longer than expected.
2008-02-19 so what's it like then
A few people have asked me about my new job role and I'd like to let everyone know how it's going after just a week and what things I'm aware of now that I didn't consider before the change.
Firstly I'd like to thank everyone at the new company for their warm welcome. It's very nice to be working in a large department of like minded people who come from a similar trade to myself.
Upon my arrival there was a computer powered on, brand new laptop waiting in a box, user account waiting and piece of paper with some network welcome notes.
The notes were well structured and detailed things that I should purse for day-to-day business. This was great and very well thought out. I could tell things were going to be a little different!
Some things that I didn't consider too well are
- trains
It was silly of me to think that trains connect well. Trains that are late at one point of a connection do not adjust the time for the departure of other trains when the station is a hub. That's a confusing sentence but difficult to word. Another annoying feature is that intercity trains get priority in the pecking order. - free exercise
Given the proximity of the office from that station I get a free 25 minute walk to/from the station daily. - missing love
Since the morning train departs at 07.30 it's not very easy to arrange nights with a dear love
In summary
The short of it is that the new job brings possibilities of a successful IT future, despite the lost hours in commute. Looking back at my college days though this was good time as I could get lots of work done without distractions in the train carriage.
2008-02-16 nthell
Over the past few days the internet connection here has been diabolical. There is little that can be done about this and I'm thinking about moving parts of this site to a proper host, rather than run it off the home internet. The only trouble with this is that it will cost me a lot of money. The site itself now consumes 531megabytes of HTML and the daily bandwidth can be 50-60Megabytes of upload. It might not seem a huge amount from a big picture point of view but when it comes to getting a host to look after the site then it becomes costly.
One company offers something adequate for around $11/month but as this site doesn't generate me any revenue then it's unlikely that I should have to fork that out myself.
2008-02-13 ntl captivity
NTL/VirginMedia appear to place capacity limits on customers at certain times of the day, take a look at this graph to see how the bandwidth is suddenly throttled to 110kbyte/sec.
2008-02-12 limited access
There was a link posted today regarding supervised internet access, which in summary means that the domestic ISPs will be looking at what their users are doing.
This could extend to reading emails, interrogating traffic, assembling TCP streams, really, it means that any heavy user will be under the microscope.
2008-02-10 freshmeat
Not that it's a major thing - but it's worth a mention. Two small projects of mine are now on freshmeat.net.
There's already been some feedback regarding mod-cidr and I've eagerly made some minor changes. I hope to hear from other users soon, feel free to drop me a line if there's any suggestions or questions.
2008-02-09 a little time mapped out
I had a few hours spare today I did two things
- sorted out the site maps
- did a test drive to the new place of work
- made some README changes
As far as the sitemaps go it should now help the search bots to not have to send many probes for page changes since the map contains a last modified field but we'll see how that goes by a count of 304 responses (should the search bot send a If-Modified-Since header).
The drive along the M4 to Junction 8/9 isn't too bad mid afternoon on a Saturday but I'm sure it's going to be a royal PITA Mon-Fri 09:00-10:00, probably have to use the train and a bicycle, so will have to look into the price for a bike locker in Maidenhead.
2008-02-08 cidr
Ok the CIDR module is finished, I'll post it here as soon as it's packaged, have to get somewhere now. Also, car is fixed, at a mighty 279.81 GBP.
OK. Done the source tarball packaging and Makefile. Please download the CIDR module if you require it. The download also includes a perl script to build the LIR .cdb.
I hope this module can be of use to other people, for me it's very useful for inspecting the country that the inbound request originates from.
2008-02-07 fix it at-once tony
Yet again I am without my car. This is beginning to suck on incredible levels now. Yesterday I was told that they should have the part (fuse box) fitted by the end of the morning. Now the garage are telling me that the fault is still not solved with the replaced fuse box and that the switch on the steering column needs replacing.
I cannot stress just how much this sucks.
2008-02-06 firefox 3
Been using a beta version of firefox 3 for a while now (since I saw a posting ages ago pointing to the download page). It's a really nice beta, it's quick and responsive - a bit closer to iceape rather than firefox 2.
It would be nice to say that this is a release that I can stick to but most of those add-on programs that I depend on have yet to be built in a compatible format for this release.
For a long time I've advocated that firefox 2 has gotten slow and it seems that I'm not the only person who's been saying this as it seems to have been addressed in this release, so well done to those who worked on this area of the project.
ipv6
Good news for people who are into ipv6!
"4 February 2008, IANA added AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers whose operators have requested it. A technical analysis of inserting IPv6 records into the root has been done by a joint working group of ICANN's Root Server System Advisory Committee and Security and Stability Advisory Committee, a report of which can be found at http://www.icann.org/committees/security/sac018.pdf. Network operators should take whatever steps they feel appropriate to prepare for the inclusion of AAAA records in response to root queries."
Seems we are getting closer to having IPv6 available to everyone but the biggest hurdle is getting all the tier 1-3 ISPs to update. Most of the inet routing programs now support IPv6, so there is no real excuse for lack of adoption. In normal situations one should expect a land rush but it seems because some paper work might be required (for application of space) people seem to be avoiding the issue.
2008-02-05 a better solution
Given last month's short pseudo-wiki markup, I have improved on this to produce a simple class with some vague differences to the mediawiki format that we see in most wiki editors.
If you're interested you can download the code here: wiki.pm. It's going to make my life a lot easier, maybe someone else using perl can benefit from this very simple solution also.
fix it again tony!
I bought a fiat brava a while back and am now regretting it. The car had lost half the electrical system and left me pretty much dead in the water at night.
For any car buyers please buy something that is already popular as the components will be in abundance, rather than having to wait for a week for a part to be shipped from Italy.
google network blocks
For one reason or another I've found it useful to collect the network blocks that google own, here they are in CIDR notation.
- CIDR:8.6.48.0/20
- CIDR:64.68.80.0/20
- CIDR:209.85.128.0/17
- CIDR:216.239.32.0/19
- CIDR:66.102.0.0/20
- CIDR:72.14.192.0/18
- CIDR:89.207.224/21
- CIDR:64.233.160.0/19
- CIDR:66.249.64.0/19