[ from the Reading->Birmingham->Nottingham->Birmingham->Reading->Oxford dept. ]
Midlands Trip
Written on the train from Nottingham to Leicester at 14:20.
Today I am on route to Birmingham via Leicester (thanks to weekend engineering works which augment the journey time) to see Hannah and Joe for a very late lunch or early supper and to see their new house. This is the second visit in the last day since I met up with Hannah, Joe, Biggles and Susie last night to see her brother Mike performing Folk songs at the Arts Festival. Mike is very good and I was quite happy to buy an album for easy listening.
I caught a train yesterday to Birmingham and spent a few hours wondering around before meeting up. During this time I went to a Starbucks with a T-Mobile hotspot (Name: tmobile, SSID: tmobile, BSSID: 00:40:96:5A:F1:B5, Manufacturer: Cisco, Model: AP-350, Channel: 1) which I tried out. The service is pretty reasonable actually since it does not unfairly impose system requirements upon paying customers. It does some kind of rate limiting on uploads and has a few interesting monitors in place as well as some kind of MAC blocking prior to authentication which allows DNS queries and HTTP redirects all requests to the login service.
Last night I went to Nottingham to meet up with jok and have a late supper. I called our friend sid who dropped in too. Stayed up playing go and chatting. This morning I went in to Nottingham to grab a coffee and this train but also went in to W H Smiths and HMV. Bought another Pet Shop Boys album called DISCO 2 which turns out to be mostly remixes – I should have guessed from the title probably. We are planning on going to the Linux Expo in a few weeks although I will likely be in Nottingham at some point before. Freshers turning up soon.
Apple Rant
Apple want 279 pounds to extend my warrenty to the three year Apple Care cover plan. This runs from the original date of purchase so I would lose the first year thrown in anyway and since John Lewis already gave me another extra year of warrenty I would pay that for just one extra year. I have insurance and figure Apple are charging too much tax for extending the warrenty especially given that they will not repair the paint issue which is a known flaw in 2002 Powerbooks or the couple of annoying dead pixels. Somewhat minor things that I would want fixed in return for paying a ransom.
Birmingham visit part II
This afternoon I returned to Birmingham and caught a train to Selly Oak. Hannah and Joe and myself went to a Pizza restaurant which did not have Aubergene and Goats cheese toppings available however was still pretty good. I visited their new house for some tea before heading back on the train.
Currently I am on the return portion from Birmingham to Reading and am reading through some kernel documentation while cdparanoia processes the CD aquisitions from this weekend. I met another Powerbook user on the train which is always amusing. I believe that sysctl does now require the procfs interface in order to do any useful work in which case on a technicality my point to one of these bankers about sysctl is correct.
I am thinking about writing a modification for procfs /proc/sys to support sysrq sytle operations through the file interface for those situations in which there is no access to sysrq such as over an ssh session without a serial console as was the case in a recent post to Linux Managers. I am also perfecting the process by which I would overwrite kernel code at runtime via /dev/mem based upon disassembly of /proc/kcore.
Jon.