Returning to College (by sarah)

I wasn't looking forward to tonight I hadn't managed to contact anyone at the college about the money situation due to the internet issue so I had to go and find someone.

I tried the admin office first but unfortunatly it has a tendency to close slightly early and lo it was closed so I headed for the corse coordinator and almost cried whislt telling her and was to my horror shaking - she said we can try the hardship fund but it obviously depends how they actually assess weather you need it.

Plus I feel stupid - this is a compound error - first off I miss judged how much JEans nursery was going to cost becuase I listerned to the government hype about what they were doing with 3+ children and education and didn't read the fine print.

Then I lost my gaurnteed work etc....

Then I wasn't expecting to have to pay for this years tuition fees as I had payed up front before but unfortunatly due to the way that has all be hashed up I am now being asked to pay a resit fee of HALF the origonal - this makes me angry as I was sick and didn't just drop out.

I now can't register until I pay this resit fee and until I do that I still have no libary access or access to the online facilities.

And then the guy I wanted to talk to about my minni project wasn't there when I had finished talking to the corse coordinator but was when I walked passed to go to my lecture but wasn't when we went for a break nor when we had finished the lecture so I haven't got that sorted yet either.

On the plus side there was only two of us on the computers and I learnt how to try and make word do useful stuff and discovered I know more about how to make a page look on a website than I do in word :/

So far I am the only person who has attended every lecture - but I'm very worried about how I'm going to pull this one off. I have alot of work to do this term:

7000 words 5000 words 3000 words plus actual lab and meeting time plus background reading

I also need to finish off the business course stuff for the Prince's Trust whilst trying to build the business which is now more urgent than it was supposed to be :/

Ugarit (by alaric)

The core of Ugarit is ready. Now I just need to wrap some UI around it...

However, the code I have will now archive and restore directory trees!

Take a look. Here's the input:

    -bash-3.2$ ls -l test-data
    total 4
    prw-r--r--  1 alaric  users     0 Jan 15 20:52 FIFO
    lrwxr-xr-x  1 alaric  users    18 Jan 15 03:02 LICENCE.txt -> subdir/LICENCE.txt
    -rw-r--r--  1 alaric  users     0 Jan 15 02:44 README.txt
    brw-r--r--  1 alaric  users  0, 0 Jan 15 20:52 blockdev
    crw-r--r--  1 alaric  users  0, 0 Jan 15 20:53 chardev
    drwxr-xr-x  3 alaric  users   512 Jan 15 10:01 subdir
    -bash-3.2$ ls -l test-data/subdir/
    total 4
    -rw-r--r--  1 alaric  users  1527 Jan 15 02:44 LICENCE.txt

...and here's the output. Note the file modification times are preserved, the FIFO and the device special files and the symlink and the zero-length file and the subdirectory make it, too. The modtime of the symlink isn't preserved, but that's because there doesn't seem to be a POSIX function to do it - I use utime to set the times, although NetBSD seems to have a utimes/lutimes pair that can do symlinks properly, I don't know how widespread it is.

It does the mode, uid and gid, too; note that the files come out owned as alaric, even though I ran the extract as root.

    -bash-3.2$ ls -l tmp3
    total 4
    prw-r--r--  1 alaric  users     0 Jan 15 20:52 FIFO
    lrwxr-xr-x  1 alaric  users    18 Jan 17 01:03 LICENCE.txt -> subdir/LICENCE.txt
    -rw-r--r--  1 alaric  users     0 Jan 15 02:44 README.txt
    brw-r--r--  1 alaric  users  0, 0 Jan 15 20:52 blockdev
    crw-r--r--  1 alaric  users  0, 0 Jan 15 20:53 chardev
    drwxr-xr-x  3 alaric  users   512 Jan 15 10:01 subdir
    -bash-3.2$ ls -l tmp3/subdir/
    total 4
    -rw-r--r--  1 alaric  users  1527 Jan 15 02:44 LICENCE.txt

Now, give me a moment while I wrap a command-line shell around it and some higher-level management stuff, then run a more serious test, and it'll be ready for initial release...

Deaf, dumb and blind (by alaric)

The scene: I'm happily working away in London. Sarah is at home, and finds that the Internet connection is down. So she resets the wifi AP and the router and so on, but it doesn't get better. So she rings me.

I can't ping the router from afar, and a traceroute ends at an address that I don't think looks like the last hop before the ADSL link from memory, so I file a ticket with the ISP and get on with work.

But there's no reply to the ticket, so I ring, and sit in a queue, which eventually hangs me up.

So I google and find:

186k, Elite Internet, Mailbox Internet Services Go Bust?

Ah. Apparently my broadband ISP has become one with the Force. So Sarah can't get any work done at home, and I'll have to figure something out so that I can get some work done when I go home, and we'll need to join the queue for a MAC code to migrate to a new broadband provider, which we'll have to choose. And I doubt we'll get back any of the money - we paid a year in advance...

Bleargh...

Jean and her guitar (by sarah)

I dug Jean's guitar out of storage - Barbara thought it was new but I pointed out she had it before the flood - Barbara thought this was odd and that I was 'assuming' genius as Jean wouldn't have been old enough to hold it properlly etc... but thats not the case.

Jean at the time would not leave my guitar along - I could not practice for little chubby hands trying to join in so I found a small cheap guitar and got it for her - at the moment it is annoyingly holding tune better than mine :/

Jean was excited to get her guitar back and we 'played' a few tunes - she now knows what the different bits are called anyway!

We also have a music corner in the bedroom which has Seths drum and other sundries like my recorder etc...

Information Request I (by sarah)

Ok so I realised that I hadn't actually remembered to put this public so yes request one is now after request II - sigh!

As some of you know I have a cooking blog which I have been neglectful over telling people about!

I am looking for recipes for it, I would especially like all those ones that people don't really think about you know - grans chicken soup that sort of thing. Becca, @ndy and Ella have already contributed. Which is cool.

I am veiwing the cooking blog as a sort of research tool and store of recipes. Any interesting food facts are welcome too 🙂

When I say cooking I mean everything form how to make a sandwitch to making preserves to making wine, butter etc... The blog still need some work as it was sort of abandoned with all the flood stuff and the posts that are live aren't even edited yet but its getting there 🙂

Also any cool food websites you know about - let me know - if you have a food bit on your blog let me know etc...

I still have like a hundred recipes to type up from when we lived at Barbaras for it as well.