Pither.com

One of my customers today launches their latest competition. This contest is looking for unsigned bands to upload their best track and after a few rounds and filtering and a public vote the winner will get to perform live in Spain in front of thousands of people!

Certainly not my idea of fun, but I'm sure many will disagree with me there! As for my fun, I shall be making another post about the development of their site. For now though, feel free to spread the word about the contest and good luck to anyone entering.

After many, many months of pulling himself up on furniture and crabbing his way around it, plus a short lived (twice I think) attempt at standing on his own around new year, Edward has finally decided to consistently balance himself on his own two feet.

He continued to practice that for a day and the following morning decided it was time to try out a few steps! I think his current record is three, or possibly four (do you count the stumble down to the floor?).

He still prefers a rapid crawl to actually get somewhere but seems quite happy to practise a few steps when encouraged. So we'll keep encouraging and hopefully he'll be properly toddling before too long!

What's worse than a cold?

Now I don't just mean a slight sniffle and a bit of a sore throat. I mean a cold that saps all of your energy, makes you generally ache and regularly wakes you up at night because you can't breath through your nose and breathing through your mouth is just too painful!

So, what's worse?

Obviously... having a small child who presumably feels about the same as you but doesn't understand what's going on or why.

This seems to lead to them generally screaming most of the time, quite often including during those few minutes when you actually feel just about well enough (or simply too exhausted for anything but) to sleep.

So when you're feeling really pretty rubbish and mainly just want to hide under the duvet, you actually have to get up, look after, change and attempt to play with a generally unhappy and screaming baby. 24 hours a day!

Could it get worse?

Of course it could - add one partner, who would normally care for you and help you through such tough and unpleasant illnesses. The only problem is, this cold lasts for quite a lot of days and they now have it too!

All in all, three people with no sleep and an unpleasant cold doesn't make for a very fun household!

Thank goodness colds don't last that long.

Recently I invested in some new hard disks for my file server. The idea being to increase capacity (1.1TB to 1.9TB) and to decrease the power usage (10 disks to 3).

I finally got around to fitting them at the end of last week and set the computer copying all my existing data from old to new over the weekend.

However this simple operation failed, running out of disk space. So how can copying the contents of a (not full) 1.1TB file systems onto a totally empty 1.9TB file system run out of disk space!?

/dev/mapper/vg1-lvol1   1.1T  1.1T   46G  96% /u3
/dev/mapper/vg2-lvol0   1.9T  1.9T     0 100% /u4

Firstly I located where all the space on the target drive had gone:

-rwx------ 1 root  root  795G Nov 17 20:54 dsc02170.jpg

Then I just had to see where all that data had come from on the source disk...

-rwxr--r-- 1 simon 43857374 142P Oct 23  2004 dsc02170.jpg

Which looks like the reiser file system having gone a bit crazy.

Needless to say, this image is no longer readable in any meaningful way. On further checking it seems that most of the image files in the same directory are also damaged. Generally their sizes aren't crazy, but the content is wrong. :-(

Maybe one day Linux will get ZFS in a finished state.

Thankfully I don't have to play with the details of web user interfaces all that often. But occasionally, they are forced upon me. Thankfully I know enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous!

Even with such knowledge I am still frequently amazed at the obscure browser (in this case IE6) bugs that have to be worked around.

Today's IE6 bug is that you have to force/trick it into repainting the actual a tag on :hover if you want it to considering repainting any of the children of the a tag!

Aaarrrggghhh!

See this article for all the details.

I've had a very busy couple of weeks with work and didn't help myself by turning last weekend into a physical (but fun) workout at Camber!

Hence my delay in finding time to write an update here. Anyway...

My Mum was able to come home from hospital towards the end of the week after her crash. While still rather achy and a little lacking in memory, she does seem to have got much better.

Hopefully in a few more weeks she will have made a full recovery.

Last Sunday (28th) my mum was in a car accident.

Thankfully her physical injuries, while initially worrying for doctors with potential internal bleeding, now seem to be relatively minor.

However there does seem to have been a toll on her memory. It has been getting gradually better over the last few days and she can now remember most major things, if not the details. Although her short term memory is currently minimal, if at all.

Two other cars were involved in the accident, with three other people also going to hospital all with relatively minor injuries.

I believe that all three cars were written off.

I wish my mum well and hope that she makes a full recovery soon.