Woke yesterday to find there was no electrical humming noise in the room. Investigated and found the server completely unresponsive, with what seemed to be a blown power supply.
Unfortunately, I had only minutes to spare before heading off to London. Revised my plans for the day and decided to head to Tottenham Court Road - source of every possible gadget, component or piece of electrical equipment you could ever require. Found a reasonable cheap case including a power supply, and since I've been thinking about a new case with better cooling for some time, decided to go for it.
The display model was the last one, so the salesman offered a better model at the same price. Jumped at the offer and proceeded to lug the box around with me for the rest of the day. Rejected the idea of using 'Left Luggage' at Paddington due to cost. Got home late last night to find that the case was indeed a much better model, but that it didn't have a power supply included. At this point, after a long and frustrating day, went to bed.
Woken early by the postman, so headed out to the local computer store. Picked up power supply, and at last I think things are all back to normal. Now chugging through megabytes of stored mail!
I've moved a few things around on the site, which will hopefully make things easier to find. Firstly, I've condensed the galleries into categories roughly based on people and places - which should make things easier for adding more in future. The railway galleries are also a little easier to get to - but are still in a different format to the rest of the site for now.
I've also added a page for the Wessex Class 158/9 Fleet, and tidied up the side bar a little.
Finally gathered all the bits of thinking, testing and research I'd done on getting XSLT to translate an ADT file meeting the DfES schema into a flat, printable list. Added a reasonably usable web front-end here.
Hopefully, this might be useful for looking inside a file without having to import it, giving some idea of what it contains and who sent it. In fairness, it doesn't do much error checking just now, but I have convinced it to correctly deal with <AddressLine> and <NLPGaddress> sections.
It's far from perfect, but hopefully its a useful utility. In the process I might just have learned enough to respond earlier to the upcoming challenges of ASL, ALT and ATF files.
Yesterday evening I finally decided it was time to move my main machine to Ubuntu. I've hung on to an old Fedora Core 1 installation on this machine for far too long, wondering if my hardware would work with a 2.6 kernel. Things were beginning to get a bit flaky, and I knew I had to do something soon. I've not been convinced by recent developments in the Fedora camp, so the recent successful experiment with Ubuntu on the other machine was a relief.
The process wasn't entirely painless for me - but the install was, of course, completely simple and refreshingly straightforward. I struggled with getting my DSL modem working - all down to hotplug trying too hard, and then set about grabbing lots of updates. Finally, this morning I started restoring services - IMAP was much easier than before, the webserver confounded me for a while. Eventually, I'm almost back to where I started, but with a clean, quick and updated system. Best of all is the work put in on the Project Utopia stuff - just plug in the camera and I get the picture, things just work. Which is great.
Hard work, but worth it.
Lost::MikeGTN
I've had a home on the web for more years than I care to remember, and a few kind souls persuade me it's worth persisting with keeping it updated. This current incarnation of the site is centred around the blog posts which began back in 1999 as 'the daylog' and continued through my travels and tribulations during the following years.
I don't get out and about nearly as much these days, but I do try to record significant events and trips for posterity. You may also have arrived here by following the trail to my former music blog Songs Heard On Fast Trains. That content is preserved here too.
