People complain that I’m too fixated on being right. Sure I am, but I am right, dammit! :-)

In my CSC3002F lecture yesterday, our Networks lecturer asked the class to name an application protocol that uses UDP. Silence. Eventually, I piped up “DNS”, as I get very bored in slow lectures, and just want them to get a move on…

No, he doesn’t like that.

OK - maybe DNS isn’t an application protocol, I mean, it’s a function of the IP network… So I suggest VoIP.

“Am I sure?”

“Pretty damn sure!”

“Well, I think you’re wrong, it would be TCP, because you don’t want voice packets arriving out of order. The answer is SNMP, as I showed you in my foil on tuesday.”

GRrrr! Some lecturers need to get out into the real world, and see what people are doing. VoIP is considered the textbook example for UDP, packets can be lost without too much trouble (humans have built-in error detection and correction), out of order packets can be dropped (for the same reason), and any attempt at flow control would be a problem (you’d need to change codec).

Somehow, I’ve managed to pick up flu during the heat-wave, and been out of action for the last week. While everyone else has been dying of heatstroke, I’ve been wrapped up in arctic gear, complaining of droughts, and generally sleeping 24hrs a day. :-) I’m slowly getting back on my feet now, thank god.

Now that I’m back online, I’m seeing lots of e-mails from sensords on servers, complaining of being too hot. I’m not the only one with a temperature :-)

Now that I got my laptop back, I’ve been trying to get it to work with Ubuntu Edgy. I tried a lot. I spent hours pouring over kernel command line options, to stop the random hangs I was experiencing due to bad interrupt configuring.

Eventually I gave up and decided a new kernel is the only solution.

Ubuntu has a great custom kernel guide, and a git guide. The build took 2 hrs. and Git downloaded well over 100MB. Then I tried to build a restricted modules, and after fighting for a few days, gave up in disgust. My new kernel suffered from the dreaded ati-ixp double speed clock. I tried every option, and in the end, no_timer_check seems to be the one to use.

So I put this in my menu.lst:

And after using that a bit, I upgraded to fiesty anyway, and bricked my system, thanks to a lovely initramfs-tools bug. I now carry around a monolithic kernel (like all my debian boxen use). You just can’t trust initrds…. :-)

I have my laptop back. And I didn’t have to pay a cent to get it fixed (excluding my time, phone calls, faxes, and 2 months without it)

I got back from my Christmas Holiday at Arniston today, to find my laptop in a bag, waiting for me on the kitchen counter. The maid must have signed for it this morning.

It took me a while to get it to work nicely again (the first seating of my Atheros MiniPCI wifi card didn’t work), but I’m very happy to have it back again. I’ve really missed it (I know, it’s sad…) :-)

Thank you Acer.

Went out the house to the car, and came across this in the driveway:

God only knows where it came from :-)