This sunday (the 6th of May) I will be walking from Rhosilli to Swansea (a total distance of
22 miles) in order to raise money for Tong-Len's Michael Blakey Memorial Fund.
This is a really good cause, as you may know Mike was a good friend to all who knew him; he was very passionate about his work. The aim is to raise £20,000 to build the "Michael Blakey Centre" in Dharamsala. The Centre will address the needs of the homeless, the poor and the deprived communities of India.
If anyone would like to sponsor me then you can find me on campus or if it is easier you can donate online at http://www.justgiving.com/michaelblakey
Thank You!
*Update* Opps, got the date rather wrong!
My dad decided to treat him self, so he's putting together a audio server to sit next to the Hi-Fi and feed it the CD colection without any of this changing the disk rubbish.
Basically its a fan-less Mini-ITX board and a big IDE disk in a rather nice case (mini-itx.com sell them in the UK) its also got the dinkiest internal PSU I've ever seen! (if you ignore the power block you hide outside the case of course...)
So.. what we did...
- Put the thing together
- Install Debian... what else? ;)
- Marvel at how quiet the thing is
- Figure out how to drive the display and buttons...
- Grab the picoLCD SDK (includes a C library and example app)
- Play with it a bit
- Decide doing everything in C is a bit too much like hard work
- Figure out how to write a Python module
- Write a Python module (which you can find at http://projects.sucs.org/svn/LiFiPod/pyusblcd/)
- Write a really simple test program to make sure everything works.
- Figure out how to make it play music...
- Look at a few options
- Succumb to MPD propaganda from various people
- Bodge together a simple interface to play music.
- Play with it
- Make a Video - not too bad for a days work!
... - Make it do all the home server stuff the old, noisy, bogged together Pentium Pro box was doing
I've now left the implementation of a rather more elegant solution, with browsing for media and stuff to my Dad... or me when I'm next home ;)
Future Developments?...
- Actually plug it into the Hi-Fi! ;)
- Media browsing... It really needs some kinda of way to select an artist or album to play for example.
- Remote Control... its got a IR receiver, but the C library doesn't yet decode what is received, so its all a bit of a garbled mess.
After yesterday afternoons problems with silver, I've finaly gotten around to getting cacti to plot the tempratures reported by the system sensors.
Now I just need to get around to ploting the disk tempratures and another graph for the UPS status...
From BBC News...
"Surnames including Cock, Smellie, Daft and Shufflebottom have been dumped by people since 1881, compared with figures in 1998."
I wonder why?
The UK has some brilliant place names...
Today I came across the small village of Login, out west of St Clears.
Anyone know of any other geeky place names?
To quote Microsoft...
"In general, case-sensitive data should not need to be stored in a database."
I've been working on data migration (for my ITWales Summer Placement) for a little over 2 weeks, and a few things have been puzzling me...
1) Why on earth is the old system so slow? Is its server on a 486 or something?
2) Why don’t they just let me talk strait to the database to get the data out rather than prating about waiting for IT to get around to it?
After talking to the IT guy today, it turns out the answer to both is that their is no database, just 270MB of flat text files, and server is a bit of a overstatement, its just a box with a SMB share which all the clients connect to.
Ewww!
So just...
3) Why don’t they just let me talk to the database on the new system? To answer now. *
Anyway time to get back to figuring which of the 382 files has the information I want in... I can hardly wait!
* If you ignore the question "Why on earth is fairly recent software using flat files to store so much important data?" that is.
Swansea has a couple of very good spring gardens. I spent a happy hour or so in the Botanical Gardens in Singleton Park on Sunday Afternoon. If you have a moment I recomend you go take a look, its only a 5min walk from campus!
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Trip by the Hiking Club
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 |  Trip by the Hiking Club |
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