Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

Coniston’s network card died, and I was the nearest employee; thus, my turn to run up to the datacenter and replace it /o/

This would be easier if I had parts, or the tools to attach them -_-

Wilkinsons do screwdrivers though, which is useful \o/ Though they are cheap and bend when you attempt to unscrew things with them /o\ Even less usefully, it seems that wired networks are dying off — All the high street stores had shelves full of wireless cards, but at best 2 or 3 ethernet models, and those were 10/100 v_v

After trying a few shops and being pointed back and forth, I ended up at yoyotech, which seems to be a place of at least some clue; the sales dude (Brian, apparently) asked if I was using linux, and googled to see if the model of card was sufficiently supported~

Having bought it (and a second of another brand, just in case), I was off to the datacenter /o/ The trip was relatively short and uneventful, aside from a youth in a shopping center throwing a big enough tantrum for the police to take note :-/

The DC itself was relatively normal, with coolers and cables and such; the part exchange went well once I’d figured out how to get the side panels off, and what to do with the switch bolted to the side o_O

On the way home, the train was declared unfit for human transport, so we all had to get off and wait for the next, which was much more crowded :( But then I was home \o/

Shimmie now powers a site which gets half a million page views per day, serving 200GB of images :3

Re: Lack of updates, see Dan Kim’s blog for a far better illustrated parallel to my thoughts…

LightTPD is win. Apache + mod_php + mod_python + mod_perl = 100MB per process, of which there are 10. Lighty does all the same stuff, in a single 30MB process \o/ Switching over has made travmap fast again, leaving a proxied apache behind to run the more complicated, less popular things~

This bit of css is so beautiful I am physically weeping tears of joy just thinking about it.

The hostel we were in first seemed to be falling apart (where it had been built in the first place) — note chicken wire instead of railings :-/ Also, being in the furthest possible room (all the way along the hall, fifth floor) was argh. And their breakfasts sucked too.

In comparison, the teviot building was awesome. It has space toilets, nice halls. There was a strange thing in the attic.

Teviot is also awesome as a student building. It has 4 bars, and a nightclub which plays lovely music (with cute advertising :3). Even the toilet graffiti was more interesting than I’ve seen anywhere else. They also have an arcade.

Also, I went up a mountain.

The edinburgh bike shop is notable for posters and banana holders.

Yes, this exists.

The night venue was quite nice, and had an organ.

The sever room was predictably messy.

It rained quite a lot.

Google-sponsored pizza :3

People on a floor

Ummmm… argh.

First day, waking up at 5am, I spent much time packing cables, and failing to sleep.

Eventually, everyone else woke up, and we went for breakfast — the hostel only does “continental breakfast”, which is apparently a slice of toast and a cup of tea :-/

Then to the main venue, where we spent much time wandering and deciding what was to go where, and I crimped my first ethernet cable ^_^ And then several more, and the novelty wore off. I also learned about fire safety laws, and that it’s really hard to cover a historic building with cables~

Travelling with each of us having our own body weight in computing gear was surprisingly smooth; starting from the first station where one of the station-dudes put up a ramp, and phoned ahead to the next station, it chained, until the second to last station, which had huge sets of stairs and no elevator /o\

Also on the train, I noted a teenage / very early 20s couple, with PSP in one hand and baby in the other, which made me ponder modern society D:

Much of the train time was spent attempting to sleep (having gone ~48 hours with only two 3-hour naps), and otherwise resting. Some of that was spent listening to the limited amount of music on my phone, which wouldn’t be noteworthy, except for the irony* of listening to “The Sound of Silence” right before “Halo”…

(* sentance may not contain actual irony)

19:57 >>> Mithrandir has joined #cs
19:57 [Monty] Thank goodness, Mithrandir is back!
21:52 [Shish] Monty: why do you never greet me? D:
21:52 [Monty] classics
21:53 [Shish] Monty: you only greet old timers? fair enough...
21:53 [Monty] apache/php job
21:53 [Shish] Monty: get it away from me!
21:53 [Monty] ffs
21:53 [Shish] Monty: no offence, your job offers are appreciated, I just
              react that way to php...
21:53 [Monty] nobody seems that size screw i hate cb302
21:54 [Shish] Monty: I suppose cb302 could be described as a screw, and
              I didn't like it either :S
21:54 [Monty] yay!
21:55 * Shish huggles monty for being better at the turing test than
              several people he knows...
21:55 [Monty] <3
21:55 [Shish] <3

In further automation, I tired of logging in and opening and resizing xterms, so taking bits from the mythtv wiki, I set up my desktop to automatically log me in and start all my usual programs. Of particular note is xterm’s “geometry” option, which allows you to set the position and size from the command line. Also useful is the “class” option, so that those of us with awesome window managers (enlightenment) can set them to remember position / stacking layer / border style / etc, and assign the remembered values to windows with set classes. For example, whenever I start a window with class “xterm_starter” (ie, by running “xterm -class xterm_starter”), enlightenment will notice it, shrink it, and move it to the corner of my screen, ready to start things from~

Part one of some notes on automation:

Having tired of keeping ~20 shell accounts up to date with my preferred settings, I made a script to do it. Snippets which other people may find useful are:

Only doing things if an app is installed:

is_installed() {
    if type -p $1 > /dev/null ; then
        return 0
    else
        return 1
    fi
}

if is_installed mplayer ; then
    ... do mplayer specific things ...
fi

Outputting large amounts of text from the script into the config file:

cat > ~/.vimrc <<EOD
syntax enable
set autoindent
set autowrite
set nocompatible    " Use Vim defaults instead of 100% vi compatibility
set backspace=indent,eol,start  " more powerful backspacing
set ruler
set foldmethod=marker
if v:version >= 700
    set spelllang=en_gb
    set spellfile=~/.vimspell.en_gb.add
    set spellfile=~/.vimspell.add
endif
EOD

cat > ~/.inputrc <<EOD
"e[A": history-search-backward
"e[B": history-search-forward

set completion-ignore-case On
#set editing-mode vi
set mark-symlinked-directories On
EOD

cat > ~/.bash_logout <<EOD
#!/bin/bash

if [ "$SHLVL" = 1 ]; then
    [ -x /usr/bin/clear_console ] && /usr/bin/clear_console -q
fi
EOD
chmod +x ~/.bash_logout

Now using those, I have all my important settings stored in one shell script. In order to push settings to another host, I can run “cat slek2.sh | ssh user@host.com”, which doesn’t even create any temporary files on the other side of the connection \o/

(Note: the post title, and the script, are called “slek”, which was originally a typo on “skel”, but then got made into “shish’s linux enhancement kit”. Though it’s also tested and working fine on solaris…)