james holden

Well, it’s official - I’m leaving Plusnet for a new job in Leeds. I’ll be very sad to go because PlusNet is a most excellent place to work. It’s been a privilege to work with such a talented bunch of people in just about the only broadband ISP in the market that actually has a clue about what they’re doing and where they’re going.

There’s going to be a really rough ride for DSL providers in the next 18 months and I’m confident that Plusnet will not only be one of the survivors, but will take their place alongside the Tier 1s in terms of the range of services they will offer.

The new job is much closer to home, so I’ll be able to spend more time doing things other than sitting in the car on the motorway. Whilst I’ll be sad to leave Plusnet, I’m looking forward to starting the new job - it’ll certainly be a challenge.

I’ve rigged up a quick hack to put what song I currently have playing on XMMS at the bottom of every page on this site, using the XMMS songchange plugin and a bit of ssh trickery.

The hard disk in my laptop failed again yesterday :-( Fortunately it’s still under warranty, so I’ll have to dig out the receipt and go and swap it.

The good news is that I was mostly able to recover my data. Here’s how:

• Boot Knoppix in failsafe mode. Flip back to a text console using Ctrl+Alt+F1.
• Get the networking running. You’ll need to run /etc/init.d/pcmcia
• Set up an NFS server on another box. You’ll need to add a line containing /somewhere/with/lots/of/space *(rw,sync) to /etc/exports and then run exportfs -a
• Mount the NFS share from the poorly computer using mkdir /tmp/mnt ; mount -t nfs server.ip:/somewhere/with/lots/of/space
• Examine the partition table using fdisk -l /dev/hda to find your home partition.
• Image it with this command: dd if=/dev/hdaX of=/tmp/mnt/home.img conv=noerror,sync. This might take some time to run, depending on how broken the disk is. You’ll end up with a large file on the NFS server which you can mount as a loopback device.

After taking the day off yesterday and looking at lots and lots and lots and lots of potential ones, we found a new house!

The slides from my DVD authoring talk are up. You can download them in Openoffice.org through this link.

I’m doing a talk tomorrow night at WYLUG, the West Yorkshire Linux User Group, on DVD authoring under Linux. It’s at 7:00pm at the University of Leeds school of computing. I’ll be covering how DVD menus are structured and what tools exist on Linux to produce them. There will be some notes posted up here later in the week.

I didn’t end up getting round to the PVR box this weekend, because we wend to Harewood House instead, which is only a 15 minute drive away from here. I took a few snaps with my camera phone which are on the site now.

At last I’ve finally got round to doing somehting with the video I shot at some friends of ours wedding in France last year. I’ve been using Kino on Linux to capture the video and I’m just recompressing the unedited footage to DVD format so I can play it back later downstairs. The ultimate aim is to produce a nicely edited version, running to around 20 minutes, as a belated extra wedding gift for the happy couple. This will involve doing some nice DVD titles and scene selection menus.

Having tracked down a copy of Chuckie Egg for by old BBC B to relive some of the old memories, I’m now after a joystick for it. It seems that PC joysticks are a little too different to just make a passive adapter. Time to hit eBay.

I’ve moved over to Wordpress as a blogging tool. This has a lot more features than the old version of b2 that I was using. The old b2 blog is still available here. I’ll come up with a more individual theme soon.