Sony, not content enough alienating customers of its music business by installing rootkits under the excuse of Digital Rights Management, has done it again. This time it’s their games business, though!

A recent patent filed by Sony describes a technology which would tie a video game (or potentially any other digital media) to the first device it was played in, thus making impossible the sale of second hand games which, if you think about it the way they do, equates to lost revenue. I don’t know about you, but we’ve got a lot of second hand games we would have never bought new, ever, so surely it gives them more exposure that way?

Anyway, imagine this scenario: someone steals your brand new PS3 console. Or it breaks. You just got paid so you go out and buy a new PS3 to replace it, but all of a sudden your games refuse to play! How did that happen? Hmm.

I think Sony have lost yet another potential customer. But that probably doesn’t matter, they’ll probably find a way of bringing the law down on people who refuse to buy their stuff.

Update: I’ve just heard of yet another piece of malicious DRM Sony uses on its CDs…

Yes, I’m still alive…just! I seem to have come down with a bad cold / pretty mild flu just yesterday, but that’s no excuse for not having posted anything for 21 days. Mind you, it’s better than some people, who haven’t posted since September 19th!

Not a huge amount has been happening on my side of the story really. I went caving last week, down a hole called Giants Pot (or Cave, who knows) in Derbyshire. It’s one of those caves that you’re recommended not to go down more than once or twice a year due to the high levels of radon… I went down a couple of years ago and followed much the same route: walk about a bit, go down a 5m pitch (we laddered it this time; I hate ladders!), then walk down the Crab’s Walk (it’s so narrow you have to go sideways most of the way), then back up again. Not bad, but very tiring!

In other news, my project is doing better than I could have ever imagined, but there are still some major hurdles to overcome, not least that I still can’t read/write the flash chips (need to build the JTAG adapter), and I’ll have lots of fun shoving a Linux kernel in 2MB of FLASH, not to mention running a whole system in 2MB of RAM! Fun!

I was woken this morning by the sound of our doorbell, at exactly 8:00. It was the new washing machine, or more precisely the washing machine delivery man. The house had a washing machine in it when we arrived, but our landlord wanted £1.50 each per week for the machine. We thought we could do better than that and found a £100 reconditioned Zanussi machine or three, that we went for instead. You do the maths, but we’ll save a pretty penny this way, and we get a better machine to boot!

The first week of Uni went quite well. I’ve got some really interesting modules, like Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Neural Networks, but even the more standard ones like Language Specification & Implementation and Computational Mathematics look good and will definitely get those grey cells going! In addition to this, my current idea for my final year project is looking good: trying to get Linux on an old Sky Digibox (a PACE 2500N). So far everyone I’ve spoken to think it’s a good idea if it’s possible, but that’s the thrill of it all!

Jess is off doing a traffic survey today, getting paid £30 for two hours work! I thought the weather would be miserable and opted out of the exercise even though everyone else in the house has gone, although now it’s turned out fine, if a bit cold. Never mind, gives me plenty of time to tidy this room up a bit!

That reminds me, I need to put a load of washing on…

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…

I got in touch with the makers of the piece that I was attempting to put into Jess’s PS2 about the part I inadvertently removed, and they told me exactly which bit I should buy. So last night I proceeded to buy 5000 of the things (they sell them in reels) and got them today. Popped the tiny little part in and…

…it works!

So that’s me a happy bunny realising I haven’t broken the PlayStation, and Jess happy I haven’t broken her toy. Phew. Ah well, it looks as though in the end everything comes together: the SATA controller, the 2 new PCs, and now the final thing: the PS2.

Most of the week my luck has been wearing very thin indeed… I ordered lots of parts from DABS to build 2 new computers for Jess’s family, as well as add 1TB of disk space to a rebuilt computer of mine, and everything seemed to go wrong all at once! Oh well, at least Jess’s chickenpox is slowly going now!

First of all, I ordered a Serial ATA controller card so that I could use 2 of my 4 new hard drives (the motherboard has 2 SATA ports). I started off by ordering the cheapest thing available (they all use the same chips…), but when I received it it just kept locking up. After several days’ worth of debugging on the Linux Kernel mailing list, we came to the conclusion I actually had a faulty controller card.

Next, I set off to build the 2 computers. Everything looked fine until I came to start installing Windows (I know) on the first one. I quickly realised the floppy drives didn’t work for some reason, and the power supply covered up the heat-sink fan causing overeating. I knew the drives weren’t at fault since I used them on my other computer without any trouble.

Third, I started off fixing Jess’s PS2 after my previous failed attempt involving a blown fuse. I got the replacement fuse, replaced the failed part, and proceeded to install a “subzero fix” which is meant to prevent the laser burning out. In doing this, I managed to take off a tiny resistor (only about 1mm × 2mm × 0.5mm) and after trying to replace it, lost it. So now I need to order a replacement resistor for Jess’s PS2 once I find out exactly what it is.

I organised a return of the faulty controller card and the two badly-designed cases, and ordered a new controller (brand-name this time) and 2 new cases very much like Jess’s old one (now mine). The new controller works a treat. As for the two new cases, everything fits great and the floppy drives work: must have been faulty power supplies in the old cases. Two new computers working like a charm.

Pages updated: About » Arcadia and About » Bigwig.

Charles will be happy: the first post I have written for over a month! As you might expect I’ve in fact been up to a lot, and hardly ever bored enough to write a post on my blog — sorry readers! So what’s been going on? Well, I’m still in Devon and have been taking advantage of not having to do anything. Jess and I have stayed at her parents’ caravan for a good while, and various chunks of her family have been visiting—all with children—so we are keeping busy! Add to the mix the fact that I’m building 2 new computers (for Jess’s family), rebuilding 2 of my own, and I’ve been chipping Jess’s PlayStation 2 for various purposes, and we get: hardly any time left for blogging!

The caravan seems to provide an almost endless stream of faults that need repairing including 2 broken pumps, a mistreated porta-potti, and various other smaller jobs. It’s great fun staying at the site since it’s right on the coast and mostly quite peaceful. When the occasional sunny day does rear its head it makes for lovely beach going!

I’ve been asked to build 2 new computers for Jess’s family and, as you might expect, am rather looking forward to putting them both together. I’m also taking opportunity of the situation and I’m going to rebuild mine and Jess’s computers, adding 4 × 250GB hard drives making for 500GB of RAIDed storage: nice!

And yes, you’ve read correctly, I’ve been chipping Jess’s PlayStation 2. I must admit the real reason behind this is to be able to play dodgy games, but I might also play around with writing software for the device since it’s really quite neat. I’ve fitted a DMS 4 Lite and was fitting another little gadget when I blew a fuse with my soldering iron, and am waiting for a replacement to arrive.

Today marks the last day of my Industrial Placement at Oracle. I’ve had a really great year and everyone really made me feel very welcome, I’ll miss just about everyone there. It’s been a real pleasure working for Oracle, and I highly recommend going for a placement over there if you’re looking around. Maybe one of these I’ll end up back over there, we’ll see.

I thought at the start of the week I’d get through all this without feeling too emotional and all that, but just as I was leaving work yesterday I have to admit my eyes started to water a bit… I got through today fine though, despite the tears from the others around. It hardly feels like 12 months have gone by to be quite honest.

On another note, the server had a bit of trouble that started at around 21:50 BST, and was noticed about 5 minutes later. It was rebooted and everything came back up at about 22:10 BST. I managed to login and check a few things just before it seemed to lockup solid, and several (mostly PostgreSQL) process were in the D state (uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)). Unfortunately the log files didn’t have any information at all. Ah well, all seems well again now.