Archive for December 2007
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 
Gone are the days when I used to be able to keep my Linux server up and running for upwards of 150+ days. These days updates are so frequent that I just about manage a month before the next set are released.
It’s not just my server either, the same is true of the servers I used to look after in previous jobs. These weren’t just exclusively Windows or Linux servers either, it was a mix of both.
Some people take the view that don’t need to apply an update if you don’t use that particular bit of the system, but I’m in the opposite camp. What happens if one day you install a piece of software that uses that bit of the system that you’ve never updated…
On Windows it’s rare to apply and an update doesn’t require you to reboot after applying it, while on Linux it’s often easier as you can just restart the service that you’ve just updated. This can lead to bigger uptime for Linux, but these days Linux systems are so complex and the kernel updates are that frequent that I tend to reboot after most major updates (unless I’m 99% sure that I don’t need to).
Getting that 100% uptime is becoming harder and harder.
I think the title just about says it all! See you in 2008.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted and I’ve no real excuse other then laziness. But that’s not to say I haven’t been doing anything with my time. Far from it, this is the first weekend that I actually have nothing specific to do.
So what have I been doing, I’ve been to two weddings, two weekends away for meetings, a weekend in Cumbria for a fiends birthday, trip to Sheffield to go climbing, many parties in and around York, across to Leeds for the fireworks, family birthdays combined with a geeky weekend. And oh yea, I quit my job and got a new one (more on that later).
As my Mum so delicately put it “You get around”.
Unfortunately it’s raining today, otherwise I would be in town to pick up a few bits and bobs.
