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well it’s all gone wrong

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

My Webserver died, not too bad I thought, just put a new disc in the server and restore it from my WindowsHomeServer (WHS) backup.

Not a chance, the backup was apparently “good” but when I tried to restore it just didn’t work, it kept dropping the network connection (which is a known issue with no real solution).

At this stage I thought “well – might as well build the server again from scratch, it has been running for a good few years now”

So I rebuild it then load php mysql, apache. I set the correct directives and paths, then open the backup on my WHS Server to pull out the data I need.

Oh Sod it! not a chance it was going to work as “bits” of data that were marked as being on the disc actually were not, and as that included a SQL db, i gave up then and there.

Luckily a SQL backup that I had left on the desktop was intact and after reinstalling WordPress I restored the database. At the moment virtually none of the photographs are there as they were stored in gallery and that is not running yet as the backup for that was completely fooba’d.

I think the disk on the webserver was on the way out, (I had to run a chkdsk the week before) so that might be the reason for the dodgy backups as WHS has restored a PC quite happily before now.

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Long time no post

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Well it has been ages since I posted anything, so I thought I should write something, however be warned it may well all just be a ploy to post what I think it a cute picture of my daughter…

I finally managed to get some diving in, we went to Mull for a week, staying in a small village Lochaline in Morvern and diving with Lochalinedivecentre.co.uk. I think for a while I lost my diving Mojo, but had a great week, the highlight was diving the Hispania again (been waiting for that for 8 years!) and the Rondo, a great wreck. Unfortunately as I no longer have an underwater camera – no pictures from under the surface.

I did use Microsoft ICE to stitch together a few montages of landscape photos, brilliant – much better and faster than anything else I have used (including the rather clunky photoshop panorama tool. it is handy to bash Microsoft , but occasionally they come out with gems – and it is FREE!

An example Panorama is linked below…Not bad considering it was from a moving boat.
Mull from the boat

We then went to a VWT4 Forum meeting at Beaulieu, and had a great time, althought the weather on the friday (while we were getting ready) was appalling and I was grumping around, but the Sun came out for the weeekend although ironically we didnt get into the museum we were so busy! I got lots of ideas for the van – most of which I cannot afford. The next project is an elevating roof for when we go camping.

Emma had a great time running around, so here is the gratuitous picture of our cute daughter.
Emma at Beaulieu

Here’s a photo of both of the women in my life!

Trish & Emma

Some more photos of my Scottish Road trip to Lochaline HERE

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Posted in Geeky stuff, Holidays and Travel, Scuba & Rebreather stuff, VW T4 stuff | 1 Comment »

Sat Nav gone rogue

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Yesterday we went on a little road trip (well we went to Frensham Garden Centre then to Odiham)

I didnt know where these places were so my O2 XDa2 ran it’s Sat-Nav (Co-Pilot).

It nearly got us to our first destination, then decided we were in Portland Harbour (actually in the harbour) we were then in Falmouth, Padstow, Cherbourg and a couple of places in Devon. Oddly enough later we were in Rosslare Harbour Ireland (A ferry goes to Cherbourg from Rosslare) then half a dozen places in Ireland I cannot pronounce. It then gave up the ghost and decided it would not guess at our position at all. Thiis is the situation that remains.

I think the GPS chip may have gone fritz.

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a new toy!

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

I got an o2 XDA Orbit 2 yesterday. I had the original Orbit but this is a lot nicer (and quicker) The GPS locks on more quickly and everything just seems to run more smoothly. It also has Touchflo which makes using certain tasks a lot easier (the fact it looks cool is just a bonus)

Then I loaded Google Maps on and got very excited, (how sad is that!) it was just so cool to zoom in on a satellite image of where you actually were.

Oh dear I have turned into a full geek.
Must….go….watch….deep….space….nine….

Oh yes – no baby yet, a few weeks to go. We MIGHT be ready for his/her arrival although I dont think anyone could say we were prepared!

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Back up and running

Friday, February 15th, 2008

Well this page is working again and o2 broadband is definately quicker than eclipse. (i get 1.2mb uplink and about 12mb down)
Ourpix is still down, as the company we registered it through is now defunct, so we haver to get in touch with nominet and 123-reg to sort it out. The photos will be back up asap.

This is why the link doesnt works and there is an error message in the sidebar

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Back up and running

Friday, October 26th, 2007

I havent posted anything for a while, partly because I have been too busy and partly because the server this runs on was creaking at the seams, and virtually everything on it was falling apart (the website still worked but that was about it).

It hadnt actually been looked at for over 4 years, so I rather rashly decided on a bit of a spring clean, however some parts of the system would not “play ball” so in the end I decided to reformat and reinstall everything with the result it was offline for 2 weeks, although no-one probably noticed as I never update it anyway.

When I came back to reinstall movable type, I had a few problems so decided to switch to wordpress and it is very nice to use (once you sort out whay Apache was not serving the pages correctly!).

The photo galleries have to be rebuilt and I havent decided whaether I am going to use exhibition engine (as I was) or switch to another app. I might try “gallery2″

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Long time no see…

Monday, January 29th, 2007

Well things got a bit busy since we got back from Egypt. we got a new TV, then Xmas came and went and so much has been happening (although none of it interesting) there hasn’t been much time for anything.

However the other day I sat down and plugged a PC into the new TV. It is going to become a “Media Center” but I ran into a problem.

I was using the VGA connectors and I got a picture, but it wasn’t great, the TV would not support the resolutions that the Graphics card could supply and that Media centre wanted. I got very confused. Even the guys in the shop that sold us the TV was perplexed at my question on the best way of connecting a PC to the TV.

I like to think I am reasonably competent with computers, but getting the right resolution was proving a real pain, until I read an article that pointed out DVI connections use exactly the same protocols as HDMI, I know that the TV supports a resolution that it was not letting me select, so I bought a DVI-HDMI cable, plugged it into the TV and hey presto! The TV was recognised correctly by the Video card, and the resolution was changed to reflect the best resolution the TV can handle.

So the TV only handles certain resolutions through the VGA connector and others through HDMI. The manual doesn’t really mention that.

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Ok now I am annoyed…

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I have been building a Media Centre PC, as the XBOX360s media capabilities were great but lacked a few features I wanted (Mainly proper Divx playback)

I needed a multi-channel sound card, so I bought one from maplins, it is based on a C-Media chip (8738), and was advertised as 5.1 channel output and included SPDIF in and out (so I could use an optical connection to my Amplifier)

Trouble is, if you want to actually USE the SPDIF output, you dont get multi-channel sound from it, only 2 channel, how ridiculous is that? Just to run salt in the wound, you actually have to tick a box setting it to 2 channel output before you can enable the optical output, thats just taking the piss.

Now I have to find myself another soundcard, but that means spending money on something else, something I have been trying to avoid…

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Posted in Geeky stuff, Victor Meldrew rants | Comments Off

All quiet on the Bracknell front

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

I haven’t exactly had a lot to write about. I keep all the juicy stuff for when I TALK to my friends! If you know me and Trish you know the news :-)

As I had nothing to write about here, I rejigged my other website johnralston.com as it was basically just a load of text, I used apples new Iweb to build it, it can be done really quick, and they layout tools are not bad. The only real problem is that it doesnt really optimise the picture size, they are all a little “bandwidth-heavy” at the moment.

I added a section about my semi-closed rebreather, as I had taken a load of pictures when I made some basic modifications to it, and I thought I might as well make use of them. I know a couple of people from rebreatherworld have already found them useful, so job done…

PS Charlie hasn’t been home for a week now, although I have seen him out and about.

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Xmas and Xbox

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006

Well it has been a busy few weeks what with Xmas and all that.

Surprise of Xmas was unwrapping an Xbox360 on Christmas Day. After telling Trish off for buying me such an extravagant present I decide to unwrap it and place it lovingly by the TV.

Now I am not a great game player (I have a problem that i get sick after playing most games for about 30mins) so after dying a number of times in Call of Duty2 and crashing profusely in Project Gotham3, I decided to try out the “Media Center” functionality.

The 360 will hook into a Media Center PC, and acts as a “media Center extender” so in theory any media file you have on your media center PC can be played through the 360, this is kind of cool as you can keep the PC out of the living room and access it all via the 360. (as long as you have a network)

After cannibalising a relatively old “server” and installing Media Center I was ready to try out this functionality. In the end I think it looks and works really well, but I came across a number of really annoying gotchas while I was doing it…

(more…)

Posted in Geeky stuff | 2 Comments »

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