Dave

I guess it’s because the death toll hasn’t been that high and the press reckon we’ve got enough news of our own but I never realised how big an impact Hurricane Ike had had. Check out some of the pictures here.

Hadron Collider

There are 15 days to go until Kathryn and I get married and we’re really looking forward to it even if we have a seemingly never ending number of things still to do.

However, this is all of course depend on whether the new Hadron Collider in will destroy us all on Wednesday.

Fingers crossed it doesn’t as I’m not sure our wedding insurance covers “cancellation by apocalypse”.

It comes around twice a year but always has the ability to cause a stir. It can make people dare to dream and hope but more often than not ultimately ends in disappointment.

At the tail end of every August and January internet using football supporters sit glued in front of the BBC home page and various message boards frantically hitting F5 (or apple-r for the more discerning among us) with the hope that our team will sign *the* player who make the rest of the season a success. Many stories will come and go, players spotted at the airport, my friends dad’s taxi driver overheard it, and we’ll sit and devour everyone in the hope that some of them are actually true.

Of course for every team buying there is one selling so the smaller clubs inevitably lose as many players as they sign. Will your Championship star striker be flogged off to bolster some lower half Premiership club’s substitutes bench? Will your 17 year old wonderkid head for Spurs’ reserves? Will your overweight and overpaid reserve team stalwart get picked up by some mug with more money than sense?

It’s 7 o’clock and there’s still 5 hours to go – I live in hope that something magical will happen but it probably won’t. And knowing Palace if they do sign anyone the fax will get jammed and it’ll all fall down anyway.

You may have noticed that as part of the new design there is a random image that gets displayed.  To go with these I’ve created a new page where you can look at each of these without having to continually refresh the page.

This page can be seen just to the right or found here.

Which is your favourite?  Any comments on these and anything else about the new design are both invited and welcome.

As you can see we have a new theme, mainly because the old one was incompatible with the latest version of wordpress.

We’ve also moved all our photo content over to www.flickr.com but you can still access it all through our site.  I really should make more use of the site so I’m going to try to come up with a few ideas for new content.

You may have noticed that the site is currently a bit broken.  Long story short is that we had problems with our old host and the site has been moved.

Plan is to get it back up and running properly ASAP.

As part of Kathryn’s work towards her MCSE she has a server PC that runs VMWare Server allowing her to build as many test servers as she needs quickly and easily. Small problem is the server previously sat in the cupboard under my iMac and ran loudly and also got very warm. Not having a server room in our house I decided to investigate potential places to host it. Under the stairs, the attic and the outside shed were the potential sites – with only the shed guaranteeing silence.

However all these locations suffered from the problem of the lack of comms links anywhere near by – laying some Cat 6 was doable but very tricky if it need to go outside.. It looked like I was going to have to plug a wireless card in and rely on that. Then I recalled an article I read on a forum not long back about how Homeplugs have improved so much – if you don’t know what they are it’s essentially a device that plugs into a standard electrical wall socket and has an ethernet port. What it does is transmit the signal across your home wiring and allows network connectivity anywhere there is a plug socket. I’ve got mine plugged into my switch under my desk and hanging off a ten gang extension lead. The other end is on a 4 gang plugged into an extension that runs under the path from the kitchen into the shed. But wouldn’t you know it within seconds of plugging the shed server had picked up a DHCP address and was on both the LAN and the internet!

It seems stable and even seems fine when the tumble dryer on the same shed 4 gang is on. I’m impressed to say the least and in the future I’ll certainly be looking at homeplugs where I may previously have been looking at a wireless solution or laying some network cables. For those worried about their homeplug signal escaping accross the mains and into next door you can set a password much like a WPA or WEP key on a wireless network.