It’s that time of year again, hay fever has once again risen it’s ugly head and I’m suffering. So what you may think, it’s only a bit of irritation.
I beg to differ. Let me run you through a typical day at present:
7:30am I wake up at the sound of my alarm, or more accurately I try to open my eyes. You see during the night my eyes have been running which then dried sticking my eye lashes together. Five minutes later I can open my eyes and so blow my nose. A while nights build up of snot is thus removed – eugh. Next step is to take my hay fever tablet.
Some time later I’m ready for work, only I don’t feel like work. The constant itching in my nose and mouth all night means deep sleep doesn’t quite happen. It’s currently warm at night as well, but I could open the windows right? Wrong, that lets more pollen into my bedroom and just makes it worse.
9am and I’m sat at my desk at work. But I have a problem, I can’t see anything and my nose is streaming. The morning commute brings me into more contact with pollen. I alternate between washing my face and blowing my nose for the next hour, and then by 10:30 I feel about normal and have some how managed to read my emails and catch up on the nights alerts.
The hay fever has abated by lunch time so I join the others from the office grabbing a sandwitch from the local shop. 20 minutes later heading back I can feel my nose staring to run and vision is starting to blur. The offer to sit in the sun on the grass is delined and I head back to my desk. Another few tissues appear in the bin.
Home time and half way home my eyes take it in turns to stream down my face. I make it back and amid sneezes find the time to blow my nose and wash my face. It’s a glorious warm evening but I spend it indoors with the windows closed. Only when it’s late do I open the windows to allow the air to circulate and my bedroom to cool, if I open it earlier the pollen is still in the air.
The constant sneezing and blowing my nose has tired me more than usual, while my eyes are sore with the near constant irriation. So I head to bed in hope it getting a good nights rest. Except I wont.
But you know what, for me it could be a whole lot worse. Sure my eyes are irritated enough that I can’t wear contact lenses and they stream most of the day, my nose does need blowing every five minutes and roof of my mouth itches like crazy. But I can at least still go about my day, I’m not stuck at home. The tablets get rid of about 60% of the symptions. And I know it will be over in a month.
So the next time you hear of someone with hay fever, please don’t think of it as being a minor problem to be ignored. For those of us that suffer from it it has a very real effect on our daily life. If we are grumpy and look a mess, give us a bit more space.
For the others with the Summer Flu, hang on in there.
The environment at work is a mix of Windows and Unix. The standard build for the laptops is Windows XP, with a few Macs. Oh and the the odd Linux install 
 Of course with a network of a certain size then DHCP becomes the only option for allocating addresses to devices other than servers, printers and the like (which must be on a static address).
But that doesn’t mean that it’s all well and jolly, especially when you have windows admin who run the central services including DHCP.
In my case I couldn’t work out why only certain hostnames could be resolved after I picked up an address via DHCP on my linux machine. Some addresses were getting a SERVFAIL repsponse from the internal DNS servers. Did I have a proper IP address – check, dns servers – check, dns search domain – check. All in order. Time to compare with a windows machine which could resolve all hostnames.
What’s that I spy? Three more dns search domains! Eh? Where did they come from? I added these ‘extra’ search domains into /etc/resolve.conf and all those hostnames that didn’t resolve before suddenly popped into life. Next step to check with the admins and see if DHCP server was behaving correctly.
No reported problem there. Next question – how is the dhcp server configured for dns search domains. “Only the one is given through the DHCP request, the rest are given through group policy.” That explains a lot. Linux machines don’t pick up dns search domains given out via a windows group policy.
Just as I left this evening I had a quick chat with one of the more senior and knowledgeable staff who is a Mac user, and no surprise there but he has the same problem but didn’t realise it. As a result of this this quick conversation it sounds like there may be a change to the DHCP server in the near future. 
My self signed certificate ran out yesterday so I needed to generate a new certificate. I still have the key from my original certificate (obviously), but for some reason I couldn’t find the certificate request file from last time. On top of that I couldn’t remember the exact commands to generate the new key.
With some help from Xeno Cafe web site these are the steps I took:
- openssl req -new -key tuxx.tuxx.org.uk.key -out tuxx.tuxx.org.uk.csr
- openssl x509 -req -days 730 -in tuxx.tuxx.org.uk.csr -signkey tuxx.tuxx.org.uk.key -set_serial 08 -out tuxx.tuxx.org.uk.crt
In step 1 I enter the details and the certificate request file is generated (this is the one you send off when you want a signed certificate). In step 2 the actual certificate is created. I opted to make it valid for 2 years hence the 730. Once that’s done it’s just a case of putting the key file and certificate file on top of the old files and restarting apache.
The first time I generated the cetificate Firefox gave serial key error on the certificate. After a quick google I came up with suggestion to set the serial on the certificate. I didn’t even know you could do that!
The second time I created the certificate also setting the serial and the restarted apache. This time it worked.
The blog, gallery, and webmail have all been updated this weekend to the latest version
I run Roundcube for my webmail system and this finally reached a stable release in early March. Gallery runs my gallery and has also had a fairly big point release in the past few months, version 2 is really starting to come into it’s own and settle down. And finally my blog runs on WordPress which had a point release in the past 24 hours
Wednesday night get on my bike to cycle home and find that I have a flat tire. I walk home and fix the puncture later on that evening. Thursday morning I’m on my merry way.
Thursday night I cycle home as usual. Then just as I’m serving tea I hear a very loud hissing noise from the other room. I race in there wondering what on earth is making that noise only to see the same tire going from full pressure to flat in less that 30 seconds.
Later on when I have a look no air is escaping from around the edge of the patch – the usual culprit. But the patch itself has a very conspicuous bulge running down the middle. I’ve never seen that before!
That’s more or less the error message I got some time in February. I was sat at my computer doing some work with a remote database while at the same time catching up on Life in Cold Blood on the BBC’s iPlayer when bang, it all came to a halt and timed out. No internet connection.
I couldn’t get Sully to reconnect that evening so I called the support line at Zen, my ISP. No problems at their end. In the end I decided that some part of the hardware on Sully had died, and so grabbed a spare Netgear router from Dad that he wasn’t using. I had been running a low quality cable from the master phone socket to Sully, and while on the phone to Zen they did mention my connection speed was fluctuating. So I took the opportunity to do some recabling and place the Netgear next to the master socket and run a proper network cable back to the server (and from there to the rest of the house).
It worked first time, and at the time lead me to conclude that Sully had indeed had a hardware failure.
Fast forward a few weeks and I decide to tidy up the old cable – only to find this. Doh! My landlord will get getting a call.
Not much is happening right now, certainly nothing that’s interesting to the public at large.
So instead I’ll just let you know that I’ve updated the gallery with pictures from the past few months.
Looking out across the back garden at 8am this morning:
And the side window:
(Unfortunately it’s not due to last for more than 24 hours)
Roll back to November and my brother calls me from Germany:
Brother: I can’t play any of my DVD’s, only the one I got in Canada. And it wont let me change the region back.
Me: How many times have you changed the region on your laptop’s DVD drive?
Brother: It asked me to change it when I put the Canadian DVD in but I haven’t change it before and now I need to change it back.
Me: Hmm, ok…
Followed by about 5 minutes of me talking him through various different things to try, and to also confirm to me that he couldn’t change the DVD region away from Region 1 (North America). In the end I’m not able to solve it, and we hang up with a promise from me to have a look at his laptop when he is back for Christmas in a few weeks.
Fast forward to just before Christmas and I’m having a look at my brothers laptop. Sure enough he has run out of changes to his region code and the various software hacks and downloads don’t work. I even flash his DVD drive with the latest firmware as suggested on various web sites. Still no luck, looks like he is going to have to buy a new DVD drive. A search on eBay gives some promising results.
Just as I’m about to admit defeat and hand the laptop back, I download VLC on a whim – and it works! I have no idea how it works, I guess it just ignores the region and plays the DVD regardless.
Another satisfied customer
