Journal Entries
We've got a new car
Posted Feb 12, 2003
The old Astra was declared dead at the end of last week - we took it in for its MOT and they said it would cost more to fix it than it was worth. In the past, I would probably have paid the money to get a bit more time out of the old thing, but we've been wanting to get a new car for a long time now - the Astra is too small for us now - with two car seats in the back, and Bernadette and I in the front, we can never carry more passengers, which has often been frustrating for us.
So we went looking round some of the local car dealers, looking for 7-seaters. We saw a Vauxhall Zafira, which looked quite nice, but we weren't sure if the middle seats could take three car seats (which we'll need eventually) and all in all, it looked not much bigger than the Astra.
Then, while walking to another dealer we passed a tiny dealership which I had forgotten was there, and they had a Renault Espace. We went to look at it. It's older than I was intending to buy, but therefore cheaper, but we were really only looking to get an idea of how large it was. We ummed and ahhhed about it, since I'd psyched myself up to getting a car that was only a couple of years old, but this one didn't have outrageous mileage, and the lower price meant that we wouldn't have to take out a huge loan.
So this morning I withdrew a huge wodge of cash, and this afternoon I drove the new car away. It was only slightly sad to say goodbye to the Astra - it had lasted well, and not had too much trouble with it, but it really had come to the end of its life, so I wasn't too upset.
And the new car (more like a bus, really) is great. The seats can be rearranged in loads of ways, it's got power steering and all the usual extras, and has a CD changer, which is nice, because I thought it only had a radio.
It'll take a while to get used to the higher driving position, and the power steering seems very odd after a heavier car, but I'm sure I'll get used to them. OK, so it doesn't have a built-in PlayStation 2 like the Chrysler Voyager I saw on sale on eBay, but apart from that, We're very happy with it.
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Latest reply: Feb 12, 2003
Sad Geek goes shopping
Posted Jan 21, 2003
Dropped into Sainsbury's this evening to pick up a couple of things, to find that they've upgraded their 'Fast Track' self scanning system, replacing the hideously designed blue bricks with a far more ergonomic design.
The handle now fits the human hand, and has a trigger replacing the button that was on the top of the old ones. The screen is much larger, allowing them to list all the things you've bought (and scroll through the list, albeit incredibly slowly).
I noticed on Saturday that they'd fitted new brackets to their trolleys, so I should have twigged that they'd be upgrading the system. It also involved upgrading their entire POS system, it would appear. One interesting change from all previous POS systems I've seen is that it doesn't print out the receipt as it's going, which threw me. All previous POS systems I've seen (certainly in supermarkets) always print the receipt as they go. This new system (I'm guessing, because I was rude enough to snoop at the cashier's display) will probably keep a running list of items scanned, meaning they shouldn't need to scroll up the paper copy to check what goods have been scanned because they can see them on their screen. It's taken a long time to break this part of the 'cash register' metaphor, and it's probably only possible now because the printers they use are fast anough to pump out a long receipt in a few seconds - no more fuzzy purple dot-matrix receipts here.
I know it's sad to get even remotely excited about this kind of thing, but I think it's part of the reason I work in IT. I can't look at an automated system without imagining how it's working and what algorithms it's using to work. Which makes me really boring at traffic lights...
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Latest reply: Jan 21, 2003
Merry Christmas
Posted Dec 25, 2002
Well, it's almost 3am and we're still wrapping. Midnight mass finished a couple of hours ago, we picked up the kids from my parents, and we've spent the rest of the night wrapping presents. We're enormously disorganised this year, possibly because I've been suffering from a horrible cold.
Still, I hope everyone reading thios has a wonderful Christmas.
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Latest reply: Dec 25, 2002
I've got a theory...
Posted Dec 12, 2002
...it could be bunnies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spiders.
I've just got the latest log files from the servers, and have started looking for the reason our servers are under such unexpected load, when our weekly stats don't show anything out of the ordinary. As often happens, around the time the server fails, there are plenty of requests from search engine spiders (Google being particularly busy). This would explain why our figures aren't increasing but our load is, but it wouldn't explain why it's worse since the upgrade (which it most definitely is).
Then, at about 2am this morning, I was talking to Bernadette about it, and she gave me the clue I needed to explain why the load has increased so much.
It's the legacy posts. All 700,000 of them. They all reappeared in one go when we upgraded, and so all the search engines suddenly have a ton of new links to follow in order to grab the whole site. Hence, much more spider activity, leading to servers getting overloaded.
Is there a solution? Probably. In the short-term, I can block access to the site to all offending robots. This would mean that during this time, Google would no longer be spidering the site, so we might drop off the radar.
A better solution is to do a special skin for spiders - if we detect a spider's user-agent, we can deliver a 'pared down' skin which only displays the content, and doesn't link to (for example) forums, or the autogenerated pages like Who's online. So personal spaces and articles (and the frontpage) would appear in the search engine results, but the tens of thousands of forum pages would never be linked to, so the spiders would never fetch them.
This way, our principal content pages would still appear in the search engines, but we wouldn't need to be spidered half as much.
We'll see how the short term fix helps over Christmas, anyway.
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Latest reply: Dec 12, 2002
Pirate? Moi?
Posted Nov 29, 2002
My DVD-burner arrived today - I'm starting to like eBay.
I'm hoping this device will accelerate my video archiving (see A768440 for current progress) by allowing me to simply dump a whole tape onto a DVD-RAM disc, then split it up and add a menu on the PC before burning to DVD-R. In one way it complicates the process, but in another way I've realised that I don't particularly want to have a huge collection of DVDs with one long 4-hour programme on it. So although I could, in theory, really quickly archive just by copying a whole tape in one, I'm not actually doing that, so I might as well try and do something better.
It's also possible that I could save a bit more time by archiving to DVD-R, but finalising on the PC. That way, even though the disc would have one big MPEG file, I might be able to break it up using DVD authoring software. However, given my previous experience of these things, I'm not holding out much hope. I'd probably need to write my own menu system.
We'll see. Knowing my luck, the drive won't even fit in my PC.
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Latest reply: Nov 29, 2002
Jim Lynn
Researcher U6
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