Fleas (by sarah)

'Alaric when did the cats last have their flea treatment?'

'Erm, can't remember why?'

'Becuase I am covered in flea bits! Havent found any on Jean. Didnt you mark it in the calender?'

'Oh dear, no why should I have?'

'Yes its supposed to be done every three months isnt it?'

'Oh no we only ever did it when they got fleas...' I will not type what I said yet as it would be lots of stars! Approximatly it was along the lines of...

'Nonononon... we have a baby we dont let the cats get fleas in the first place! Same with the worming tablets.'

....

'You haven't given them their worming treatment either have you?'

'But they dont have worms...'

Ok so I had three flea bits but still - I'm afriad poor Al got moaned at quiet alot as he'd said he would do the cats meds as he's brought cats up before.

Good job I'm already in the middle of spring cleaning!

Wiggly Pets and Shrooms (by sarah)

I ment to post this ages ago but forgot about it!

Here are some wiggly pets investigating Mushrooms and Fungi of various sorts!

I'm afraid that maggots came out of this and due to Sarahs maggot phobia Al disappeared it rather than any culnary goodness coming of it.

System V IPC on Mac OS X is a bit funny (by alaric)

Well, at long last, I'm finally getting paid to mess around with the kinds of things I find REALLY interesting - a task which, at the moment, involves setting up shared memory and semaphores between processes for some high-speed shared cache action. Sort of like PostgreSQL does.

Anyway, I've found a few quirks of Mac OS X's System V IPC setup that I thought I'd best share.

1. ipcs should be setuid or setgid or something. It grovels in kernel memory to find out what IPC objects exist and their state, but when run as a normal user, it doesn't have permissions to do so and fails silently; ipcs always returns that nothing's allocated, while ipcs -T reports garbage values.

2. Talking of ipcs -T, the IPC system limits are (as usual) set via sysctls. But if you try and change them, they refuse to alter. It turns out that you can set them, but only once - the first time this set of sysctls is written to the kernel, it sets up its internal data structures and considers the sysctls read-only thereafter until the next boot.

You have been warned.

I'm reporting the former at least to Apple as a bug...

A Home Wiki (by alaric)

Since I've been getting our home network a bit better organised lately, the home server is now actually accessible from both the wired and wireless networks (and could be accessible from the outside, too, once I've sorted out suitable security measures), so it's high time I started making use of it.

The first thing I've done has been to set up a home Wiki. There's various bits of information that Sarah and I share, but that one or the other of us is 'in charge of' depending on whose computer it lives, so rather than putting a bunch of text files on the shared file server area, it seems logical to do it with a Wiki.

I'd been wanting to research the current state of the art in Wiki software anywhere; the only other Wiki I run, the ARMuC Wiki, runs on UseMod, which I've never grown to love properly.

Anyway, my researches led me to PmWiki, and I'm quite sold on it - it's written in PHP so doesn't require CGIs, and it has a software design philosophy that I agree with; a simple core with modular extensibility.

So we now have a Sutton's Mill Intranet for our domestic odds and ends. And with a little bit of simple plugin writing, the home page lists the status of important household sensors - currently just the incoming mains voltage and frequency (we get a lot of mains power problems out here!) and the battery backup system status, but hopefully soon to include external temperatures too.

We're using the Wiki to store our monthly budget, our goals for each month (chosen at the New Year), our template shopping list of things we need to check we have sufficient stocks of, and our list of favourite recipies (since we have a habit of forgetting them, then one day going "Blimey! I've not cooked that lovely Thai turmeric rice in months!"), and we'll shove more stuff in as we come up with it - basically, from now on, whenever one of us has to go and look something up for the other, we'll Wiki it for posterity.

Mum is in the clear (by sarah)

Mum had her mammogram and other tests on Friday and is in the clear - the lump is normal breast tissue - it appears to be a muscle that has cramped up and is just not coming out of the spasm for what ever reason.