Given how this weekend just passed was a bank holiday weekend I decided to go back home to Sunny Wales. Usually it’s a bit of a joke - ‘Sunny Wales’ - but this weekend it was beautiful weather and so we visited Lake Vyrnwy - about a 15 minute drive from home…
I’ve got to admit that being down south in Farnborough for the last year really makes you appriciate the views back home that you normally just take for granted.
After my French explorations I booked Friday off and went home for the weekend. I had a nice time back in sunny Wales except for the fact that my family had literally managed to break every single computer in the house - and when I say break, I don’t just mean a few viruses or malfunctions, I literally mean motherboards broken, screens damaged, graphics cards frizzled and who knows whatever else. By the end of the weekend I’d managed to pull the few working parts remaining into two systems - the server (which for the most part was working to begin with except that it wouldn’t boot because it couldn’t find the floppy disk drive) and a computer upstairs for everything else. To be fair I think they’ve had some kind of power surge as one computers PSU fuse had blown along with the fuse in the plug… I think they now plan on buying a few surge protectors :p
When I returned today Paul (my boss) asked for a quick chat in the office. He had some not so great news and some excellent news for me. The first bit of news was that the presentation he and I were going to do at Sheffield university had been taken over by some other guys in the office. This turned out not to be so bad after all as I realised that it was the 29th February anyway - at which point I’m back off home anyway for my sisters 5th birthday. However, the good news (which is very good indeed) is that he has managed to get one of the guys in the Solaris Kernel Engineering department (who works with DTrace) to mentor me (after showing him some of the stuff I’d been doing with MouthOS) for my last two years at university. During this time I will be doing things like fixing DTrace bugs via the Open Solaris community - opening some real possibilities for when I finish to come back and work for Sun in their Solaris engineering department! I’ve got a meeting at 11am tomorrow morning with Jonathan, my mentor to be, which I’m really looking forward to as I’m raring to go and I really can’t wait now until the 10th March when I will be going on the Solaris Internals course - thanks Paul 
So, what else has happened over the last few days? On Thursday I got another phone call from ‘Private’ offering me a new phone. I keep telling these people that “I’m not interested and that I’ll deal with Orange directly thank you very much.” However, this prompted me to actually ring Orange and see if I really was entitled to a new phone. The answer was no, not really, but we’ll give you one anyway. Apparently these companies will ring you up, offer you a contract and then (only then) contact Orange to see if it’s going to be alright! The cheek!
Whilst I was on the phone I did say I wanted the Nokia N95. However, they wanted £89 for it. Instead I said I’d have the LG Shine (http://www.lgbloggers.com/)… this was fine except it was out of stock. In the end I decided on the Nokia 6500 Slide (in black which is apparently a Orange exclusive). So far I have been most impressed with the phone. However, as with all new gadgets it’s a requirement to test out every feature it has to offer, one of these features being the camera. I decided that it would be a good idea to take a couple of pictures of the MouthOS development centre (i.e. my desk)…
I have to admit that whilst I would love to be able to say that all of those books are mine, only the top C book and the bottom three Intel books are truly mine - the others are on loan from my house mate and friend Robin. However, I highly suspect that I will be buying my own copies before I have to give them back to him as they have been really useful for ideas and all that malarkey during the development of MouthOS so far - I think another thank you is in order - thanks Robin.
I’ve just got back today after a week in France working in the Paris office of Sun. I decided that it would be a very good idea to get up nice and early last Wednesday (5am to be precise) so that there would be no chance of missing my incredibly cheap, no refund, no modifications, return Eurostar journey at 10.30am. This proved to be more than sufficient as I arrived at St. Pancres at 8.30 with 2 hours to spare!
When I arrived in France (about 1.45pm) it then took me a further 2 hours to find my hotel. This was most unfortunate given that my hotel was quite literally 15 minutes walk away from the Eiffel Tower! Ah well. Once I’d finally found my hotel I went for a brief walk around the Eiffel Tower and towards the office - which I found with much more ease.
At the weekend a couple of Friends from University came over to visit. One of them (Ash) had a newspaper cutting which described “how to do the top 5 sights in Paris in one day”. I suspect that we were meant to do this via the Metro, however he insisted that it was a walking exercises. This meant about a 10 - 15 mile walk starting (and then finishing at) Gare du Nord. First we walked to the Pompidou Centre (which is one of the most bizzar places I have ever seen). Then from there we walked to Cathedral Notre dame. From there we walked to the Louvre, then onto the Arc de Triomphe and finally the Eiffel Tower. From there we walked back to Gare du Nord via the major shopping street in Paris. My friends thought this was all very exciting, unfortunately my feet were not too excited by this point having developed numerous blisters!
On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I was in the office again working on getting the lab back up and running after the power work was completed. There were a few minor problems with the work completed such as the fact that the electrical engineers had used armored cable and not steel wire armored cable (tut tut tut) and the fact that they decided to use some of the 16AMP commandos off some 32AMP to 16AMP splitters we had in the lab because they ran out (go figure, they’ve had the numbers they’ve needed for over 3 months now!). However, on the whole the work went reasonably well and the three power phases are now much more balanced in terms of load.
The last couple of nights in France I went out with Paul (my boss) and JD (one of the old students who is looking after the French lab this year). This was nice, except that on the way back to his Hotel, Paul managed to walk into a glass door and now has quite a bad cut on his nose 
He said that the manager of the hotel was more interested in cleaning up the blood off the floor than helping him with a plaster.
So, here I am back in the UK and what awaits me in the office? The usual? Well, in reality I suppose the answer is yes, in so far as there is nothing ‘usual’ about our office… and so the usual is the ‘unusual’ most of the time….. Tim Uglow decided to bring his two Samoyeds’ into the office… Thanks to Matt for letting me use his photo….
Happy New Year everyone!
To all those people who still haven’t received a text from me - I’ve been trying since 12… unfortunately, as I suspected, the mobile phone network is congested… now had they used products from Sun they would have been able to deal with the load
Thus far I have received one Happy New Year text from David Cole. It arrived pretty much spot on 12 - I can only assume that he, being the clever person he is, sent the text a couple of minutes before the rush - cunning! A trick to remember for next year indeed.
I wish everyone a Happy New Year
As many of you will know, in June 2007 I was unfortunate enough to have a quite bad car crash. We were on our way to Go Karting as a end of exams trip and a guy in a red Fiesta drifted across the road and hit my car head on at a combined speed of about 100MPH. Fortunately everyone was (is now) okay from the accident. This accident in turn caused a smaller shunt further down the road. I promised in my old blog that I’d put up some photos of my car after the incident, however I never did - so I’ve included them now.
Ever since then there have been legal battles between a whole host of people who all claimed that it wasn’t their fault. At the same time, the police investigation (which had six months allowance to be concluded) was crawling along. At the end of November (26th to be precise) I was informed at last that the guy in the red Fiesta was to be taken to court on the charge of ‘driving without due care and attention’.
This court hearing took place on the 19th December at 9.30am at Aberystwyth Magistrates Court and I’ve finally heard from the Police that he pleaded guilty! This is excellent news as it now means two things:
Overall a pretty good day.
I had planned to write a entry yesterday - however in the excitement of Christmas I’m afraid I hardly touched my computer. As such I want to wish you all a slightly late Merry Christmas
I hope everyone had a great day and that Santa brought everything you wanted - and some more! Enjoy the last few days of 2007 and I wish you all a happy and prosperous 2008.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Welcome to my new blog. Previously I was running a very small, and rather unsuccessful blog at http://users.aber.ac.uk/mfc5. However, in light of my adventures at Sun Microsystems, and the fact that I am currently applying for the position of Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador at Aberystwyth University (which requires me to write a blog) I thought now would be a good time to start up again - properly.
I’ve tried to move a lot of my projects and stuff from my old website to this new one. Over time I hope to move my trac installation from my home server to this server so you can all enjoy the entertaining source code of MouthOS. I hear many of you ponder the name. The origion of the name is due to two reasons:
For most of my posts I expect there to be quite a bit of technical information on whole host of topics, from the Solars and Linux Kernels, and indeed the MouthOS Kernel, to Sun’s newest and latests products and technologies.
In general I hope this blog will be useful to many people technically and will help to make people more aware of Sun Microsystems and their technologies and products.