s5h.net

2007-02-28 nodnol commuting

The journey began at Thatcham with the 0818 to Reading connecting train to Reading. This all began ok and I was ready waiting for the train at 0810, only to find said train delayed by 6 minutes, just long enough to prevent myself from boarding the connecting train to London Paddington.

0818 came and went, arrived at Reading after the connecting train had left. We passed Aldermaston station where I think I saw the boss boarding the same train as I.

As I arrived in Reading I heard an announcement informing travellers that the train to Paddington was at platform 5, where I rushed, jumped on the waiting train to find it was heading to Oxford. So I depart this train at Tilehurst, wait another five minutes to catch the next train in the Reading direction, fortunately this was going the full distance to London Paddington albeit a little slower than desired.

Before arriving in London the train stop for passengers to depart and board at various stations including Slough. As the train pulled up at Slough I saw a bunch of shifty looking teens who looked as though they were about to remove the wheels from the train, though we seemed to depart Slough without trouble. From Paddington the normal route for myself is to get the tube to Baker Street and then to Oxford Circus where I take the Central Line to my final destination of Stratford (East London).

Differing from my plan was a fire at Bethnal Green on the central line. This caused the tube that I was using to terminate at Holborn. Little I could do about this but get the Piccadilly line to Green Park, change for the Jubilee Line and head towards Stratford again.

Everything was looking good again. The tube would terminate at Stratford and I could walk along the High Street to the data centre. differing from my plan (again) this tube changed its mind and would no longer go the full distance. We all heard a message informing us that the tube would now terminate at North Greenwich - and I came so close!

So, the easiest thing to do was get the tube as far as it could take me and change at Canary Wharf to get the Docklands Light Railway to Stratford, just having to wait around 20 minutes to get the right tube heading in the right direction.

So in total, I had spent over four hours to get from Thatcham to Stratford. This is not good. Normally it would take around sixty minutes to go from Thatcham to London Paddington and then another sixty minutes from Paddington station to Stratford via the tubes.

2007-02-27 frustrations

If you were to ask me what I would be posting about 12 months ago, I would probably have said OpenAFS, perl, python, ruby and other normal things.

What a change, I've not made one computer related post in ages. The last two months have been just trivial junk that's not worth reading.

The reasons for this I think are that my job has become ever more perl/c# related and thus some of other energy that I one had is being used in that direction. Not that this is a bad thing, those posts I made were full of overflow energy and it's good that this is being put to better use.

Believe me though, I shall continue to look for things to post that might be of interest to others.

2007-02-26 the running man

Had a much better run this week than the last. I'm still doing only 5-6 miles, I have to build this up to at least 12 in order to complete the half marathon.

I did better this week than last. Sadly for me I did not get the same adrenalin hit as last week. I don't know what happened, the effort was greater, the output was greater but there was no buzz!

Quite shattered, the trains suck and had to make a few extra stops to get home. The UK needs a better rail service!

Oh and my replacement trainers are much better than my previous pair, so if anyone wants a pair of size 8.5 (uk) running shoes, let me know, I have a pair as surplus.

2007-02-23 test for dementia

A friend sent me a great email of taxing questions, see how you get on with this test :-).

2007-02-22 woo yay hoopla!

Yesterday I went to work with my old mobile phone, the hands free kit and the transformer so that I do not run out of anything that could prevent me from being on hold for another 40 minutes with the bank.

Surprisingly I got straight through to the correct person at the bank who could tell me what had happened with money that I had incorrectly transferred to the wrong account.

Sam told me that it would be possible now to debit the account by the correct sum to move to my account. I was very surprised and satisfied to finally hear this. So, this weekend the boat is getting pushed out!

Totally awesome :)

Sadly though I think that the running shoes I bought last weekend will have to be replaced with a slightly larger pair for my toe nail is wearing on the inside a little too much. This caused me to have a sudden sharp pain when pressed. For the cost of a new pair of trainers and being able to complete the half marathon without any problems I think it's worth it. There is nothing technically wrong with the pair that I have other than that they are a just a bit too small.

2007-02-19 feeling good

Did the training session in Reading. Took the scenic route around the town, did some climbs and back to the starting point near the Reading station. For those who read my writing here and know the Reading area, or even went to college with me might remember Forbury Garden. This is a nice part near to Reading station that provides a handy short cut to the station if coming from Kings Road.

On the way back I was running between two groups about 20 seconds apart. As the first group headed in, I lost sight of them and took the wrong route. This proved to add about 2 mins to my final time as there was no way out of the garden. What I failed to see was that the group had gone around the garden! I've never in my life found that far gate to be locked until today :(.

Aside from the above I had a good run. I was not sure how it would go, I kept pace with some of the others and I may have made a new friend.

The new sneakers I bought seem to be good for the job. I hope they can hold together ok until the 25th of March.

2007-02-18 more on being a consumer

I've decided to take part in the Reading Half Marathon this year. This means each week I intend to do a 5mile training run. Although a half marathon, it's still quite the herculean task. I have in the past done a charity fun run of 5km and I regularly do a 1-2mile run 3 times a week. So, all this onboard, I should get a descent pair of road running shoes. I chose the m846 trainers with some gel inserts that should cushion the impact from the road surface. Yet, what should I see when today I completed the application form? A pair of running shoes on sale from one of the event organisers. How frustrating. This pair on sale must be the most suited for the event, it would only make sense for the organiser to sell what is most ideal.

Oh and Earth might be on a collision course with an asteroid.

All in all, I've spent more money than intended recently, but given my recent losses I think this is reasonable, it's all but given me a conservative outlook.

Generally speaking, I'm spending too much time clinging to a beer glass than I should be. Six months ago I was far too interested in learning to spend time drinking. Things are different now, I feel so much more at ease to waste time.

2007-02-13 this cracks me up

2007-02-10 consumer drone

The day I never thought I'd see has happened. I've become a consumer. Having taken a trip to the near by town and spent a bunch of money on stupid things, the thought has gone across my head that spending money on a starbucks coffee is just one in the wrong direction step too far.

So how has this happened, I've done perfectly well up until this point without buying such junk. The only answer that I can see is that a catastrophic banking error has recently left me flippant with my money. Having lost such a lot through this error I have decided that my money in the bank is just not safe, even from me, so I spend it while I can.

2007-02-06 messing around at work just isnt right

Today I was just checking some logs on a firewall that I setup a long time ago, to notice that this was setup some time early last year or the year previous when I was doing some experiments with squid.

So traffic inbound to a destination port of 80 gets redirected to a local service on port 3128 (squid). Squid then talks to the destination and returns the data to original source.

This was configured so that frequent requests to the local servers could be cached and should improve performance. The logs would go to the largest partition (/var) so that I could check that things are all ok, and see what the more frequent pages being accessed were all for tuning etc.

So, today, I'm thinking to myself, "oh, I wonder if changing a route here can make things easier for some other admins?", so I make the change, and notice that things do not behave exactly as I thought they should (mainly because squid was not working as it had previously). So it took me a moment to review the configuration and notice that there was a redirect.

"So!" I think to myself, "I wonder if the logs have filled the hard disk!" and off I go to watch the logs:

tail -f /var/squid/logs/access.log

and then within a few seconds I see some obvious porn/adult material URLs scroll by. This then lead me to see that this was not just some embedded content on a page like a script source. This was someone intentionally browsing an adult site.

So, the log file, all 2.1gig of it, was copied to my local machine. I make a short perl script to grep and extrapolate the date. Grouping the data by IP source, time and date in a hash proved quite easy. This, with a small

foreach my $v (sort keys(%hash)

gave a nice report, showing that the culprit had been doing this since probably before this log of activity was enabled, for the best part of the working day at least.

Three things seriously wind me up the wrong way with this activity:

1. its offensive
   many people would not like to know that other network users are getting porn, daily through our 'above board' company internet connection
2. it's going on whilst others are working hard
   why should the majority of employees have to work hard, just so that a few of the users can surf porn all day, in reality the majority are paying for the minority to slack off
3. I don't want this on the network that I am partly responsible for
   The culprit could look at porn until his extremities fall off during his own time for all I care, just don't do it on the company network!