So my gym is closed for 10 days for a refurbishment. They are going to replace all the cardio equipment with new kit. I’ll be able to check my progress online and I’ll be able to plug in a video iPod and watch on the screen. The problem is, while it’s closed I have no gym to go to! So I decided to try some classes instead. Tonight I tried a yoga class and it was great - both relaxing and tiring at the same time. I really enjoyed it and think I’ll be going more often in the future; hopefully it will help improve my skiing.
I went to Tony and Grainne’s wedding on Friday. It was a lovely day and I wish them all the best in the future.
I got back on Monday night after cutting it worryingly close to get to the airport; two hours in advance, try 40 min! Only for Ryanair to delay the flight by an hour and tell no one. Then there’s the Post Holiday Blues, aka PTD. It hit bad on Tuesday night but I think I’m used to the grindstone again now.
No Internet for 2 weeks, just as I catch up on my feeds too!
I just found out that Cineworld have a public XML data source. It’s over in the syndication subdir of their main site. There are more technical details over on my CineworldScrape page. I feel a bit sad in a way, my scraper has been working for more or less 3 years now in some form or another. The annoying thing is that they don’t actually export all the data I use. Being quite visual I have grown used to using the thumbnails that each movie has to help me pick which films to see. Apart from this it’s a great step forward. However, the problem is there’s no knowing if Cineworld will pull this service or even if they want it public. For now I’ll continue to use my scraper.
I passed my foundation exam on Sunday. Big thanks to all the helpful folk at SADARS. I am now M6TDS.
My google is now very light Green!
Today I found out where Linux exposes the extra routing information gathered from ICMP redirects. ip route show cache will show the entire cached routing table. It’s a bit hard to read so ip route show cache 1.2.3.4 is better. For example 192.168.1.0/24 is a network that is connected via a host on my 192.168.0/24 network. My default gateway (192.168.0.1) has a static routing entry to the host that gateways for the 192.168.1.0/24 network (192.168.0.57). So when a random host on the 192.168.0.0/24 network pings a host on the 192.168.1.0/24 network it first sends to 192.168.0.1 but it sends an ICMP redirect saying that in the future it would be better to just send direct to 192.168.0.57.
I learned over the years to read the old ide subsystem errors for Linux and generally am able to get a feel for the sort of hardware error that’s coming. However I have yet to really get a feel for the libata errors, I’m not really used to reading the errors. A friend linked me to a page on the libata wiki.
I played with Fedora more today. There are loads of packages in the default repos these days. However I still find myself missing things from Debian. For example, I can’t do a “yum search” while doing a “yum upgrade”. Why? I also miss the small helper scripts that save on legwork. For example update-grub: in Debian when a new kernel gets installed the initrd and grub get updated and it just works. With Fedora I have to manually update the grub config and if I forget to create the initrd, it means a trip to the 13 PCs I just upgraded!
I have finally documented CineworldScrape and made it available to the general public. So with any luck Google will index it!
The Fine Art of Playlists # I make my playlists with mkplaylist. You will have to edit the script to make it work, change $base to the base dir for all your mp3s. Then make new makeplaylist entries, each one is for each playlist, the makeplaylist function takes directories as parameters and it recurses into them and writes a playlist to the right file. It also writes the extended information.
/proc/mdstat information # Linux has a software RAID subsystem and it is called md. It is generally quite well documented. However the md status file in the proc pseudo filesystem is not documented at all. So this is one of those cases where you have to read the source to understand what’s going on. I’ll jump right in, this is what my mdstat looks like:
Debian everything else is inferior (mostly).
Vim is a good text editor; my .vimrc is available for all to see!
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you edit the DOM (ie the page) on the fly after the page is downloaded and parsed, but before it is rendered. Thus making it very easy to tweak pages slightly. For example it could search text for text that starts with http:// but is not a link, and replace the text with a link to the location. This provides a very powerful way to edit web pages on the fly.
Firefox is an amazing browser, sometimes I think I would not browse as much as I do if it were not around. Here is my user.js which has taken many years to perfect.
