Cricalix.Net

One of the nice things about living 1 mile from the center of town is that it’s easy to meander in on a Saturday, pop into the library, grab a few books and meander home again (possibly stopping at a bakery on the way for a snack). This Saturday gone was no different, save that I was at work cleaning up code.

I happened to pick up Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness In The Sky, and I’m glad I did. The book is about 600 pages long (largeish print version, not small paperback), and tells the tale of humankind as a space trading race, and the tale of a spider-like race who happen to live on a very strange planet with an even stranger star. The book jumps back and forth between the two human factions, and the spider-like race, but at no point do the jumps seem random - the threads are deftly woven by the author.

Along the way, you learn of the founding of the Qeng Ho (one of the human factions), great betrayals, nifty technology and an interesting philosophical view on modern technology. There are several characters who appear to be protagonists, but in the end, there can only be one - the core characters are well fleshed, as are the supporting characters. Indeed, it’s only as I write this article that I realise who the protagonist really is. There are also several twists in the story - ones that make you go ‘hmmm’ - that reveal that everything is not what it seems. Indeed, one of the best twists shows up at the very end of the story, and ties together several smaller arcs from earlier on.

To know what that twist is though, you’ll have to read the book :) If you like science-fiction, and books that don’t lay everything out immediately, but reveal clues as you get further in to the story, A Deepness In The Sky is probably something you want to read.

So $dayjob moved DSL 3 days ago to a new provider.  We had been with Zen Internet, on a 2 MBit business circuit, but our hosting provider offered us an ADSL circuit as part of our hosting package.

We were expecting a like-for-like upgrade.  We got something better.  Now if only my home connection would do the same (and I’m about the same distance from the exchange as work).

I ran into an interesting glitch (and that’s not for lack of a better term) in the ADODB library for PHP today.

ADODB is a DB abstraction layer, allowing me to change the underlying DB engine without caring (much) about the code I’ve written. Change the driver name, perhaps the connection string, and everything should ‘Just Work’. It also claims to have a smart transaction handler, so that you can write (cribbed from their docs): (more…)

Years ago (heh), I worked for a .edu in the USA, same place I got my BS degree.  At the time, my boss preferred Microsoft to the campus choice of Novell’s Netware.  We had the odd stealth Linux server, and even an RS/6000 running AIX (as a web server no less), in the web/Internet department, and all of class scheduling, billing, payroll etc ran on an AS/400.

After I graduated, I worked full-time for a year under another boss - the guy who ran the farm of Netware servers.  Funnily enough, more and more Microsoft servers were showing up.  I had fun writing code that ran under Netware’s Perl, complete with NDS authentication.  I also wrote stuff in ASP and VB.

Today, I hear through the grapevine that Groupwise is out, replaced by Exchange, and NDS will be replaced by AD by next year.

Odd, they were such a bastion of Netware, and I actually liked Netware 6 (perhaps it was because the local console ran X?).

C’est la vie.

Well, the DSL saga continues.  The call has been escalated by my ISP to BT, and BT have called me for details.

This evening, I ran a fresh connection for the DSL modem from the back of the master socket.  The downstream noise margin has gone from 5 to 10, and the ATM sync rate has picked up a good megabit or so.  Unfortunately, this hasn’t translated in to an increase in IP speed - in fact, my speed tests through my ISP portal are showing 500 kbit, not 5000 kbit :( :( :(

Hopefully the system will reset itself over the next few days and my speeds will re-balance.  The fact that my DSL picked up signal strength when I put in a dedicated path from the master socket means I also have a fault somewhere in my wiring.  I might well re-wire using cat5 cabling - the only issue is getting the cable up to the computer closet.

One problem with Xinerama and Cedega - the EVE window showed up right in the middle of the two screens.

KDE’s force window positioning to the rescue!

Well, I woke up at 5 A.M. today - this tends to happen as the days get longer, I wake up when it gets light (so you can imagine what winter is like for me). Decided I was tired of the Dell server humming away in my room, and that it was time to move it into its new home - the closet at the top of the stairs. I’d already had three double sockets installed, and a run of 2 pair phone wire, so all I needed to do was wire up the phone connection (for the DSL).
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