We’ve now moved in to our new place in Hudderfield, where we’ll be staying until we both finish our stints in University: me finishing up my Computing Science degree here in Hudds, and Jess doing a Masters in Politics at York. The house is really nice, with plenty of spacious rooms—we had to get a 5 bedroom house because there are 5 of us, despite there being two couples, so one room has been converted to a computer room, and the other is being coverted to a lounge / guest room.

The University went through quite a few changes last year, and we’re starting to feel the effects of this now. Our School of Computing and Mathematics has merged with the School of Engineering, to become the School of Computing and, surprise surprise, Engineering. In addition to this, many members of staff have left for a variety of reasons (not one sacked, I think), including the university’s scheduling person: that means we still don’t have any idea what time all our lectures are or anything…and we’re starting on Monday!

I’ve already managed to get into this year’s first caving trip, which is just a freshers’ trip to Longchurn (a nice easy horizontal cave) so should get me back into the swing of things. Lovely! On a sourer note, I need to buy a new battery for my lamp since it leaked last year while we were away…

Anyway, I have to get downstairs to move a few sofas from the garage into our lounge…

Well, it’s been another long gap since the last update… What a surprise eh?

We’ve just come back from 10 days in the sunny (ha ha) South of France. I say ‘ha ha’ since all but the last few days seemed to disappear in the torrential rain and thunderstorms — heck, even the motorway between Monaco and Italy has been shut for over a week! We did however have a really lovely time including nice meal for my birthday (21, for real!), various days out, etc…

Yesterday something went wrong with Baldrick, very much like it did back on the 1st of July, where PostgreSQL locked up in IO and no number of kills solved the problem. One reboot and a kernel update (while I was at it…) later everything seemed to be working fine again. Strange. This morning I woke up to find MySQL had gone crazy and was eating CPU trying to access a corrupted table, which I can’t figure out either. All fine again now. Very strange.

I’ve also been experimenting with IPMI, originally to get sensor values from my server for things like temperatures and fan speeds. That’s when I got more interested and found out all sorts of very interesting swanky features like being able to remotely retrieve this information and, probably the most useful, being able to remotely cycle power in case the box crashes (even though I can ask 49pence to do that for me, albeit with a delay).

Just while double-checking Baldrick was working OK at the airport, I noticed Gromit‘s battery was running low very quickly, and although it lasted a good while after getting down to 1%, I’ve now discovered my battery is on its way out. Apparently, a battery that only at the start of the summer was rated C+ and very good for its age is now “very poor” and has less than a quarter of its original capacity. That’s £82 that is!

Another thing on the shopping list…