I was just doing a bit of random browsing as usual on a Monday morning and I came across an article on Slashdot about a guy who got pissed off with his Xbox 360 crashing all the time and so managed to fix it.
 
I think it has something to do with the power supplies over heating because all he did was raise it off the floor with a bit of string. There you go folks, another public service announcement

I went up to Edinburgh this weekend and since it’s a 4 hour train journey I thought I’d take my laptop and get some work done. Unfortunately I spent pretty much the entire trip in both directions standing up.

On the way there it was because of the Scotland - Australia match and on the way back there was flooding on the line which meant three trains worth of people were stuck on one.

Better luck next time maybe?

Cluster Update: I´ve gone ahead and started building my Linux cluster to act as my way-over-the-top web server. I grabbed 6 identicle Athlon based systems that I wasn´t using and ripped out the hard disks (I only need the drive in the master node). These were then all networked and I then went searching for tutorials on how to set it all up.

After a bit of searching I found this tutorial which is quite good. I used Fedora Core 3 since I already had the disks on my desk but it works the same. The only bit that I found confusing was adding the libraries lines which after more searching is added to the file /etc/ld.so.conf. I´ve booted it all up with the master and one slave node and I´m about to do a boot with all 5 slaves. After that I might do some testing to see what kind of performance I´m getting out of it.

I was reading an article in a PC mag entitled "Build your own supercomputer" but as it turns out it was mainly supercomputer history and then talking about basic multiple core PCs which are more powerful than a $10 million Cray from the early 90s. The end of the article though was a lot more interesting. It was about using bog standard PCs to create a linux cluster to do some serious number crunching.
 
All you really need is a bunch of old PCs, a switch or two and the software to run it all. The PCs can be pretty much anything as long as they have a COU, RAM and a network card. The next step is to make sure they are linked up to the switch or switches to optimise the communication speeds between the different boxes. After that it´s just a case of installing the software (all of which is free to download since it´s open source) and configuring the entire system.

 
I also want mine to be able to run with one machine on a UPS and set up so that if one or all of the others go down (either due to power failure or hardware failure) it will keep running as a system and when the other systems come back on line they will just boot and join the cluster again. I´ve got a lot more Googling to do to find out how to do all this and if all of it is possible but I´ll post more here when it gets done

Ok, Tip Of The Day time people. If you´ve got a wireless network and you´ve got signal strength problems, or you´re trying to bridge two networks between buildings using wireless and want to boost the strength in a certain direction, there is an answer!

 
Pringles tubes. Bear with me here… If you cut the bottom off a pringles tube and place it around the antenna of your access point (assuming it´s not built in), the metal coating on the inside of the tube acts as a way of directing the signal in a particular direction.
 
Of course, I´ve never tried this since my access point has a built in antenna and is only in the next room, but I might try it one day with another access point to see if I can get broadband access in the local pub (geek alert!!!).
 
Give it a try and let me know if it works!

I need a new phone since mine is, what’s the technical definition - shit! It hasn’t been working right for ages and apparently they never got them working ok anyway (it’s a LG 8120).

I’ve been looking around and came across the Nokia 8800. I want one soooo bad. I’ve just got to find somewhere that’s selling it for less than £250 plus the £30 tarrif.

Yup, that´s right, something else for me to do! This time its…. cartoonist!

We´ve been very successful of late with targeted emails bringing in a large amount of sales. The problem is that christmas is usually a slow period for us so we came up with the idea of doing more humurous emails to try and get a few more sales in while everyone is winding down for the holidays.

For this we decided to do a bunch of cartoons and send those out and my boss decided we´d get a freelance cartoonist to help us out. Luckily I did A-level art and am quite good at cartoons so I said that I´d do them in my spare time.

It´ll make a change from complex coding at least.

I currently look after several thousand websites but there´s about half a dozen (like this blog) that I´m really intersted in. One of these is a site that I´ve had for years which I don´t really use for much but is always around since it´s my home page (fast to load and has links to stuff I use regularly). Cos it´s my home I tend to do a redesign on it every now and again when I get bored of the current one. I was doing a bit of random browsing and looking at the Wayback Machine, it´s been almost a year since the last time I changed it. No wonder I was bored of it.

 
While I was there I decided to check out the Premier Computers domain. The reason being  I occasionally get emails which are intended for someone else but all on the premier computers domain. I decided to try and track down who used to have the domain by having a gander at past versions before we had it. Turns out it was owned by a company in Peterborough in 1999 and 2000. Time to update your address books people!

We´ve got a new morning ritual at work and I love it. I normally get in about 7:45, check the emails, make sure all systems are go, do a few bits and bobs and so on.
 
Then the best bit. About 9:30 me and the MD head around the corner for a MacDonalds breakfast and talk about what needs to get done that day. It´s brilliant! Give it a try.

When I first started I did an online delegate management system for our course sites. It took me the best part of 6 months to get everything done. With some new stuff we´ve added to Pharma Foundation on some US courses it wouldn´t work with the new system.

 
Because of this I had to effectively turn the system into an email based system that we can manage oursleves. This involved re-coding the entire registration system. Managed to do it in 4 hours. That´s fast coding!