Cricalix.Net

I’ve been hosting this site on a Xen host in the UK for the past year - it was cheaper than running the server in-house, and the uplink bandwidth is certainly more than the 1 Mbit/s that my home ADSL is capable of.  However, in the past 6 months or so, I’ve noticed a distinct degredation of service, evidenced by the fact that I’ve raised support tickets on

• June 21st
• June 29th
• September 8th
• September 9th
• September 18th
• September 19th
• October 17th
• October 27th
• October 29th

Pretty much every one of those tickets has been ‘My Xen instance is unreachable’.  At least two of them are from disk issues on the underlying server, several have been file-system write errors in the Xen instance.

On the other hand, another Xen instance I take care of lives on a US Xen hosting facility.  It’s been running since May, and I’ve not had to raise a single ticket about it.

So, goodbye CheapVPS, hello Slicehost (and here’s hoping the Rackspace buyout doesn’t affect them negatively).

There were only a few hiccups with the migration too - primarily with maildrop.  Forgot to install the courier-authlib-devel package before compiling maildrop, so it insisted on reading /etc/passwd instead of the database that everything else refers to for e-mail.

For the longest time, my understanding was that Exchange only allowed ’send on behalf of’ through the delegation interface (and thus stamped in the message headers).  Turns out that if an admin with sufficient rights accesses the Security of another account, they can add the ‘Send As’ option to a listed object (ie, account).  Learn something new every day.

When I was younger, one of the guide books for Barbados had the following in it:

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out.  Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

Describes the game perfectly, don’t you think?

Orange don’t know it yet, but I’m changing my pay-monthly phone to a PAYG phone this weekend.  I’ve finally succumbed to the lure (and allure) of the HTC Touch Pro, and acquired one on contract with Vodafone.  There are plenty of reviews on the ‘net already, so I’ll just remark this - I like it :)  As a geek, I’m really impressed with the ability of the phone to connect to Last.FM when I’m out and about (on the 3G connection).  I’m fairly sure that heavy use of this streaming would get Vodafone to notice (500 MB fair usage), but for walking in to work and so on, it’s brilliant.

I just need to get pocket PuTTY installed, and get the VPN connection to $work functioning, and I’ll have an SSH and RDP capable device that can connect from anywhere with a WiFi or 3G signal (in the UK at least, the Pro apparently isn’t quad-band).

Caused by: javax.mail.SendFailedException: Invalid Addresses;
nested exception is:
class com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPAddressFailedException: 550 5.1.1 User unknown

at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.rcptTo(SMTPTransport.java:1130)
at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.sendMessage(SMTPTransport.java:525)
at javax.mail.Transport.send0(Transport.java:151)
at javax.mail.Transport.send(Transport.java:80)
at alt.javax.mail.TransportImpl.send(TransportImpl.java:18)
at com.atlassian.mail.server.impl.SMTPMailServerImpl.send(SMTPMailServerImpl.java:168)
… 7 more
X connection to localhost:10.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

What a way to end a day that hasn’t been one of my better ones (more on that later, maybe).  Having got Tomcat back up and running, and slimmed down to just JIRA, I was hoping that the day was going to smooth out, at least for the last working hour.  Instead, I’ve been watching Tomcat just fall over at random, spitting out an error that the X connection went away.  There is nothing in the Tomcat configuration that requires X, so I can only guess that Java noticed that I had an environment variable set, and even though there was no X at the end of the DISPLAY, decided to use it anway.  My only hypothesis is that after some period of time, Java determined that the connection wasn’t there, and terminated Tomcat.

Wonderful.

unset DISPLAY && ./startup.sh

Decided to go to the Great Western Festival (in aid of the regional air ambulance) last weekend.  You’d think that having spent an entire weekend there, accumulating several hundred photos to process, I wouldn’t be going back so soon to take even more photos.  Well, I’m not always that logical, and some of the bands playing were pretty darn good the weekend before, and I like good music.

In the week running up to last weekend, I did some frantic processing of the photos from the previous weekend, and shot them off to BonusPrint for a run of 8″x12″ glossys.  This turned out to be problem number one that week - the credit card payment system screwed up, so I had to call them and get things fixed.  What I didn’t realise (because it wasn’t made clear at the time) was that they had to put a hold on the print job indicating that the prints had to go to their office first… I also ran off some business cards using Vista Print, even though I knew they wouldn’t arrive in time for the weekend (they actually arrived yesterday). (more…)

Sunday afternoon saw me returning to the Great Western pub for the Americana / blues bands they were hosting.  This time I carried my green chair with me, as the prospect of spending another 8 hours sitting on the wooden benches at the pub was not very enticing.  Acts included the Dustbowl String Band (featuring (reportedly) the best flatfoot dancer in the UK), Under the Influence, Wes Finch and the Dirty Band, Cindy Archer / The Dolly Rockets, Kel Elliott (complete with brass section), The Tree Horns, The Bellows, Clayton Denwood and the Street Shepherd Group.

The afternoon rocked past, with 300 photos or so ending up on my SD cards - time just flew.  Excellent music, decent hamburgers and plenty of water.  Also ended up chatting to a staff writer from Americana UK who was there to cover the event, and swapped details (and cameras).  Having played with a Canon 30D, I still don’t like it much - it’s an excellent camera, but I just can’t hold it properly, the grip is that fraction too shallow.  The 17 - 35mm lens was nice and fast on the auto-focus though.

Musical highlights for me were Kel Elliott and her band (or was it the Kel Elliott Band?) - the brass section really completes the lineup; Libby Fielding, the dancer in Wes Finch and the Dirty Band - whirling dervish seemed to describe her at points, and I’m sure if you look in a dictionary, you’ll find her as the definition of energetic; and Jack Blackman, a young man (not yet 16) who had blues dripping from his fingers.

The evening wrapped up with a performance by the Street Shepherd Group - flamenco guitar, cajon drum, violin and a percussion instrument I can’t identify.  The pace was slower and quieter than what had preceded for most of the day, but it was a nice way to cool off after a day of shooting, and just relax to some good music.

Picked up a ticket for the GW Fest as well, with the intent of coming back for more good music, and the chance at some more photography.