New Years Plans

So, according to Kev, sounds like a warm up at home, with some food in the agricultural shed and older friends, followed by a youth party in Schonborn with loads of fireworks and alcohol.

Me not being much of a alcoholic, I shall be looking forward to the German tradition of fireworks galore in the streets just after midnight.

Anyway, before any of that, I'm off to Limburg Cathedral to sing with the choir there at the end of year service. You know me, can't turn down a good sing....

Stay safe everyone and enjoy

Merry whatchamacallit

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL !!!!!!!

Now that I have unwrapped my new ASUS 3D monitor (I'll talk about it later), its time to go to the Christmas morning service at church and have yet another good ol' sing. Just shattered after the last sing and only 6 hours sleep...

More Carols? Yes Sir!

Another day, another carol service, this time in my own church back home, the little church of St. James' Bushey. Lovely little place, and I'll try to talk about it some more later on.

Anyway, beautiful evening, another great sing - and this was a big plus:

The "Swinger" wasn't there, therefore meaning that I didnt have to wear a gas mask to sing and breathe.

Oh, and one week to Christmas Day XD

The journey back

So today I drove back from Aberystwyth for Christmas - the joys of packing the car with almost everything - and as it just has to happen, you've guessed it, SNOW in the Welsh mountains.

So the journey was fun, saw a few cars on their roofs, and another the wrong way around in a ditch. But since I have the SmartMobile in winter mode (winter tyres, 0W40 super-cold oil and snow chains at the ready) the weather was no match for me.

Just home was the problem, minor issue of keys and me having to break into the house........

Anyway, I'm still in time for choir rehearsal at St. James', so off I go

St. Albans Singing (again)

Well its this time of year, and last night was the infamous Aldenham School Carol Service in the Cathedral and Abbey Church of Saint Alban. interesting catch, the choir was so big, they ran out of candles. So there were 10 tenors and basses at the back who were in darkness. Suppose it was for the best, as the older ones should never be trusted with fire.

Anyway, a very good sing, got to catch up with a few people (students and staff) and well worth the train journey back from Aber just for it.

Now that I'm on the way back to Aber (with mum beside me), I just have to put up with a few more lectures, then a drive back home.

Dissertation?

Hmmm, soo may assignments from other departments and modules seem to somehow of caused my dissertation to be forgotten for the past week. Thats negative :(

However, I guess there can be a plus side to this: A fresh mind and view after the little break will hopefully improve the project. Lets see that this is the case.

Airport Security

So, I've just had my first on time train - that’s right, lucky number 16 - guess British rail can actually run a decent service.

WAIT - did I just say that?!?!?!?!?!?

Anyway, this is supposed to be about airport security here at Birmingham International. It’s rather fancy, or at least that’s what I thought.

The first thing to say, and I'm sorry all you Linux fans, its running Windows XP - why, don’t ask me. For airport security to be running windows, and at that XP, is quite risky, so many security flaws that people will find, and I bet (but can’t confirm this) that they have some sort of internet connection, or maybe still have solitaire or minesweeper installed or that "I can’t be bothered" day.

So, I thought I'd explain the process, but since I'm on my Touchbook with limited programs, I can’t create a flow chart. But I may add one in the future, It'ld be quite cool **Is It'ld actually used?**

So, it starts with the bog standard 'show your boarding card to a person because the machine is broken' starting gate. This is followed by the expected snake queue system guided by a biological person saying numbers (I also hate the person who said "Lane 7 Ma'am" to me, she definitely won’t be in my will).

So, when in the queue, there are those normal announcements, "remove belts and high heel shoes." or the "laptops and liquids must be removed from bags". So still no different to a normal airport security. But the next bit is where it gets fancy.


The trays have barcodes on them, which are scanned when they enter the X-Ray machine. Above the entry is a camera, with a live feed to the scanning assistant, so he can see what’s going in the scanner. The exit point has a push bar, which allows the "interesting" or potentially dangerous bags to be pushed into a different shoot, so that the owner can’t get to it and run off and end the world or similar. Otherwise the tray goes down the good shoot, and you get all of your irradiated possessions back (including my belt so that’s the world doesn’t have to see my patterned Topman boxers).

Now onto the computer side of security. As I said, they are running Windows XP (some would argue for, others against - please argue on this in the comments sections). They operator has a touch screen with all the controls for the system - stop and start the belt, good shoot or bad shoot, change scan layers etc. - and plays God with your possessions.

If your tray goes down the bad shoot, the scan data is saved and assigned to the barcode. This allows the bag rummagers to scan the barcode at their "desk" and bring up all the scan data on their touch screen, where they again can go through all the layers.

Now, hopefully they delete that data - but then being an airport, for "security" reasons, they may store this data indefinitely. They don’t state the data storage terms anywhere and I think asking might be suspicious.

Now I have to admit, that is a cleaver system, however I am worried a bit about the data storage of the scan data and photos taken by the camera. Maybe a sign would be useful. On the other hand, maybe freedom of information would make them give me a copy of my tray scan?

Right, that’s the end of my Black Forest hot chocolate from Costa (it was very nice). Just time to spell check and post, and I still have one and a half hours to wait for boarding, the down side of Aberystwyth and its 1tp2hrs (one trains per two hours) service.

Tie to enjoy some more free Wi-Fi - iPlayer downloading maybe???

Lets recap (M)November so far

hmmm, lets see

• I finally got the server up and running, fully RAIDed (simple disk mirroring), so in theory no more losses due to disk crashes.
• The server now automatically backs its self up to my desktop every day
• Team Foundation Server and Sharepoint are finally up and running and working (with a few minor glitches, but I can live with those)
• I bought 2 1TB Hard Drives from IS @ Aber (I hear they are all gone now for the lovely price of £55)
• And I have some sort of a basic GUI working on my phone

The bad part of the last 2 weeks:

 

TRAINS TRAINS TRAINS

 

14 15 Trains in 10 days, not one been on time, and a review of these is below:

(after writing the list I realised its 15)

1. Aber to Brum - canceled
2. Aber to Wolverhampton - Replacement for train 1, and Delayed
3. Wolverhampton to Watford, - Replacement and Delayed
4. Bushey to Euston (fast) - Canceled
5. Bushey to Euston (slow) - delayed
6. Euston to Bushey (slow) - delayed
7. Watford to MK Central - delayed
8. MK Central to Crewe - delayed
9. Crewe to aber - Delayed departure, yet somehow arrived at aber 5 mins early!!!!!!
10. Aber to Brum - delayed and terminated in wolverhampton, redirected to crewe
11. shrewsbury to crewe - delayed (and packed like sardines)
12. crewe to watford - only train leaving crewe on time (however last second platform change)delayed arrival at watford
13. bushey to euston - delayed
14. esuton to crewe - delayed arrival
15. crewe to aber - delayed

Thats enough train ranting for one day - now to finish the FinNesse worksheet 1 for CS313, then to do a replacement prac......

...and so it goes on...

Just as I thought I had all fixed, a bug in server 2008 (yupp I had to downgrade to fix so many problems) prevents me from authenticating on the uni network, unless I logged on locally to the server, disabled and then re-enabled the network card. This was painful, so now I'm trying another windows server version to see if I can finally get my project back on the road.

Meanwhile throughout all this server issues, I've been doing some local testing and work on programming for WP7.5 to improve it all, so hopefully in the next week or two, and can start to build a base GUI????

Otherwise some doucmentation and planning is still in order.

But still, this blummin server needs sorting out before it drives me mad.

At least I now know how MS Team Foundation Server works for version control for my project, and thats useful. Just need that stable server environment to host it all on then I can start - yay....

Its that time of the month again

Oh dear, now that I am nearing the end of dying (this illness is finally starting to clear up), my server has decided to have its period today :(
Apparently my Windows Server 2008 R2 installation on partition G:  has a problem and cant boot. Strange, since it was installed on C: ...... hmmmmmmmm

So its back to the community ( http://superuser.com/questions/350685/windows-server-2008-r2-only-boots-to-recovery-console ) to see if anyone can help. Tried all the standard things, but none of them want to work, grrrr. Well better now than closer to the hand ins for my dissertation.

I was even planning to buy another 4TB for the server to back up everything, but that idea went down the drain when I discovered that because of flooding somewhere in one of these countries where they make HDDs, the prices of them have doubled in the past week - grrrrr

Oh well, now just to wait and see how long its going to take to get my server back online so I can finish installing and configuring all the components I need to do my programming.

Back to reality now.........

Illness

So, its 2.30 am and I am awake, all because of this silly head cold, including sore throat, coughing and blocked nose. How is my day going to be productive if in awake every 2 hours??? I guess so much for a productive Sunday.....

The beginnings of a dissertation

So, it looks like I'm supposed to start writing a dissertation and making some sort of program to go with it. Its supposed to be fancy, show off my strong points, and most importantly - WORK (or so they say)...

So lets see, this blog already had the name "Techie with a Tractor", which clearly is supposed to mean I like technology and tractors, so I think I shall base my project on something to include the both.

/Lightbulb

"GOT IT" - I shouted out one day (this must have been a few months back now). "I'll make a mobile app for farm management."

...And today children I still seem to stand by this crazy and perplexing idea. An people say I'm crazy because of the platform I'm going to program it for (also please note that people called me crazy beforehand anyway).

WINDOWS PHONE 7.5 (aka Mango)

"So its for a Micro$oft product", I hear you say in agony. Well the simple answer is YES! Whether this is a mistake, we shall find out in due course.

Meanwhile, over the past few weeks, I've been plying around with basic things from tutorials, getting my self-hosted SVN (VisualSVN with Tortoise) up and running, and still trying to sort out my blessed network issue: see: http://superuser.com/q/348247/95379

So that's enough babbling for one day. According to some of the useful emails I get, I have to write some kind of doku before Wednesday............

Oh well, lecture time now anyway, saved by the bell....................