Suffice to say I will not be showing the actual image, but you may read the wikapedia reference here. It is not one of the best pics in the world, and I urge people to view at there own discretion, and definitely not in the office. (I accept no responsibility if you are stupid enough to do that)

Here is a clip of the beeb showing the parody picture and here is the BBCs official stance on the matter.

Life begins to stir behind reception as an unhelpful, snappy troll like figure starts barking her orders to prove she is the lord over the reception desk domain. Ok, so some of the muppets who have turned up late demanding to be seen without a green ticket are asking for trouble, and the troll freely and happily dispenses with ways in which they can fornicate off. They do deserve it.

As I type, one of the muppets who thinks she’s above the rest tries for another shot at demanding to be seen in a vain attempt to catch the troll off guard. The troll looks like she had her weetabix this morning and immediately cuts her down where she stands. This women should be in politics.

So I’m approaching 90 mins now and the troll is happy with her coffee and 5.95 an hour. A few have tried to slip in under the net but the troll’s just too damn quick for them.

The health service is a joke in this country. I’m about to get tarred with a brush for not having my own dentist, but like an average of 4m people I cannot get into an NHS practice and cannot afford a private one. The last filling cost me 40 quid on the NHS, private treatment would cost at least double that. I pay my stamp and tax and then have to pay for a supposedly free health service.

Anyway, I’m rambling. I’m going to be seen soon, but don’t get excited just yet, they only want my name and to ask me the obligatory ‘do you have a dentist’ question. Can you imagine if I owned a gun? Calamity would ensue, peace would rain down from the heavens. I’m bored now, more later

So… 2 hours go by, and I am holding up pretty well considering the pain I am in and the dull drudgery that surrounds me. The only magazines I can find and oversized dental mags, or bloody “womens own”. Games on my mobile can only sustain for so long.

At last I get to go see a pre-dental dentist. She sits me in the chair, asks me 40 or 50 questions about my health and my familys health. Then after about 15 minutes in the chair, she finally asks me to open wide so she can have a look. I have no idea what this achieved, as she ummed and arrrred then handed me a form. Said form was for an X-Ray and had to be dropped off in the little X-Ray tray on another desk, 50 yards down another corridor. God damn it.

45 minutes more and I am in for the X-Ray. It’s over quick enough, the dood taking the X-Ray manages to hurt my tooth quite nicely, I refrained from stabbing him with my phone.

With the X-Ray done I am sent back to the waiting room. So far we have clocked up 4 hours waiting and messing around. I know what’s going to happen, they know it too, but the formalities have to be followed.

Not long this time, about 30 minutes give or take a lifetime and I am in to have the X-Ray assessed. “we are going to have to take the 2 out I’m afraid” she coos at me, trying to curry my favour, make me feel all relaxed and special. Tart. Surprise surprise, my response was thus “I could have told you that 4 hours ago” She smiled a faint disgusted smile and sent me back to the waiting room while a real dentist becomes available to do the dirty work. I would pity her if I did not admire her lack of care. A real unfeeling bitch, I like it.

Another hour later and we are rocking, I have been called and told to follow, to which I dutifully do as I am told. I follow the girl through the corridors, the screams get louder so I know I am headed in the right direction. Round the last corner and straight into another bloody waiting room. I am told to sit down and that the wait could be some time as they are busy. Damn

The pain killers I took this morning are starting to wear off by this point. So I am getting agitated and restless and my thoughts digress into how to solve the NHS problems we have. I almost had the solution too when I get called in to see the dentist. The guy takes a look at my X-Rays and then asks me which teeth are being pulled. Sigh.

First things first, lets get my mouth numb. He manages to hurt the hell out of me, missing my gum twice and stabbing me in the bad tooth, then the inside of my cheek becomes the needles playground. It’s all fun and games today.

While we wait for the novacaine to take effect he tells me he is from overseas and that when he came here he could not get a job as a dentist. So while he waited for a position on the bottom rung of the ladder he delivered pizzas and Chinese meals all over the area. I regret to inform my readers that at this point I wanted to a) punch him, b) run, and c) place an order for food.

Onto the extraction… Needless to say, the novacaine failed to work, my protestations of “give me 2 needles full please” seem to go unheard. He gripped my tooth and my gum with those wonderful pliers they use and yanked. .OH. .MY. .GOOD. GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The pain was unbearable, and I have to admit that I went white as a sheet and that was what stopped him. But alas, he was kidding, gripped the tooth again and yanked it out. I nearly launched him off the floor when his hands were out of my mouth. The thought of any puckered cavity and the dental drill did flash through my mind, but I admit I was in no fit state to be torturing anyone today.

So I am out of the door, minus 2 teeth, 6 hours and a wad of gauze in one hand and a clenched fist for the other. Now I have to look forward to the bleeding and the wearing off of the novacaine. Awesome.

Needless to say I will not bore you with the details of my home life but you can all rest assured that I am back. I am now settled in Cardiff City with a nice new job.

Work is good, home life is good. I finally found some peace and quiet, even in a student area.

I am almost unpacked (even though it has been 3 weeks now) and I am finally starting to find my way around. I have been working during the day and most evenings as well. So now I am ready to start posting to this blog type thing again.

Expect some changes around here, I have learnt some new design tricks and tips, and have written a new menu script for the blog that will actually tell you what section you are in by highlighting it. A new design has obviously been written. (I do them often I hear you cry) but a blog is basically a showcase of work so it has to be done.

I will finally be adding the gallery soon so I can showcase my work in my portfolio and of course I have written a few new scripts in the interim time I spent at my mums (chilling if anyone asks) and will make them available for download soon enough.

I have started to learn TCP/IP Networking and Infrastructure, so there will be some stuff on that soon too.

I expect the new theme and scripts to go live over the next two weeks once I am satisfied with the look of it. I am almost there. But not quite.

The computer I got hold of was an ex-office computer. Its a Dell desktop PC which came with 128mb ram (shocked I know) 2mb graphics card and 20gig hard drive and I think a 500mhz processor, but I could be wrong, and havn’t bothered checking. Good thing though, it’s all black.

So, what to use, windows XP which for all its crapness, the server stuff although bloated is simple to set up and run. COnsidering the files are all .exe I could have had it up and running in no time.

I wanted to use Linux, but what flavour? There are many Linux distros out there that are specifically designed for setting up a server, but i’m not that skilled with linux and besides, I wanted something that looked good aswell as did its job.

I settled for Ubunut in the end. The install was simple, took around 20 minutes for everything I needed, and that includes the format time. Once I was in, all I had to do was download Xampp for Linux and follow the instructions.

This was the most simple server I have set up. Be warned, Xampp is not really intended for use as a public server, I simply use it for local development of PHP and webdesigns.

Having said that, I highly recommend you trying it if you want to learn PHP but cannot afford a webhost to use it on.

Setting up the FTP server was the hardest task. By default Ubunut puts the htdocs folder under the root users account. The root users acocunt is also disabled by default on Ubuntu to prevent you from breaking your system. This lead to me being unable to delete or add files to the server via FTP. In the end, I got fed up of trying and shared the directory using Samba with rights for my main user account to add/edit and delete files. It’s now much quicker and easier to use.

I will try and sort the FTP in future and put some info up about it aswell as setting up the server and installing all you need.

For now, i’m content to have a simple webserver to test with, and a media server to stream my movies and music around my home.

For some reason I am unable to fathom, my motherboard, 2 hard drives, 1 out of 4 PCI cards, all RAM sticks, and the floppy drive all died. How can only 1 of 4 PCI cards die? anmd more importantly, how can 2 of 6 hard drives fail and the others are untouched?

It was time to order new parts. So, my boss in his infinate kindness, orders me the parts I need to get me back up and running.

After a couple of weeks of screwed up deliveries and missing items on the order, I finally got the parts and set about putting them together.

After switching back on and repairing windows (which took some hours to do) I figured out which hard drives I had lost. My design drive, and my personal drive. Stupidly, I backed up neither of them.

Now I have the task of trying to ressurect these drives. I have a few options. I could take them to a data retrieval company, but I refuse to pay those prices. So I am left with the DIY options.

• Put the drive head into another (working) hard drive
• Buy the EXACT same model drive and swap the logic board over, incase the circuit board is damaged

I will post the results here later next week when I should have hoefully retrieved my data from these drives.

So far they have refused all attempts to recover the phone.

The people who found the phone have come up with a few different stories as to how they got the phone and have refused to return the phone, even when the authour of the website offered to buy it from them.

This is a perfect example of the immoral world we live in. I do hope that these people get what they deserve, and the military guy in this little scenario should be court marshelled and dismissed immediately.

I wont go into any more detail as I really recommend that you read the whole story.

My full support goes out to the authour of this website, Evan, and I wish him all the best in getting this resolved. Good Luck to you.

How NOT to steal a SideKick II

All users can now add there very own Gravatar. Basically it is an avatar, an image that is displayed next to your name, making it easier to identify you.

Once you have added a Gravatar this image will then be added to all the users comments by default. Only those with sufficient posting levels may add them to the main posts. This is done to identify the admin and the mods of this site.

The Gravatar in this post is me. Whenever you see that on a comment or post you know I wrote that comment, and so on with the others.

Please visit the Gravatar website for more information on how this works.

BOFH – Dumping Old Crap
Swan tests confirm deadly virus
Windows on Macs provokes a stir

The forum has now been added.

I saved the forum for user questions about any of the topics listed within. If you cannot find what your looking for just post a message and I will tye and help you out.

The aim is to create a small community of people who can help each other with the knowledge that they have.

Please feel free to take a look, register and post some questions or information.

The forum was causing some issues that I did not find in the initial testing when I was coding in the templates. I have removed it for now until I can fix the conflicting issue.

The layout has been completed and the colour scheme is 99% done. I still have a few minor issues to sort out. For example:- the search function will search the blog entries only for some reason. None of the content off this page is searched and indexed. I am working on a solution.

The content is being added slowly now. Hopefully I will like and keep this layout for a while.

“if your thinking yea it blends well but i didn’t want a tan site, then take a screenshot, take that into photoshop, then open the hue and saturation window and change the colour till you like it, then sample the colours and replace them in css, voila”

You Are 86% Evil

You’re the most evil person you know. The devil is even a little scared of you!

How Evil are you?

Fatty’s torrents still ended up taking my bandwidth and stopping me even checking my mail.

I was nearly at breaking point when I recieved an email from Linksysinfo.org with a reply to one of my posts.

I checked out the link provided, which led me to HyperWRT Thibor.

After installing and changing the settings to my liking I think I have managed to solve the problem.

The new firmware actually has the ability to prioritise computer ports, hardware ports (the physical ports on the router) and applications themseleves. I have been running the firmware for around 7 hours and all seems to be fine at the moment.

Hopefully, this is my last post on the matter. I have a sytem log in place to monitor the health of the network while I sleep and my housemate restarts his torrents.

Fingers crossed everything will be fine when I try to check my mail after breakfast.

After leaving my computer idle for just 20 minutes, my housemates computers took over. I am getting annoyed with this little problem. Right now I have disabled both his ports on my router so I have time to find out what the hell is going on and hopefully find a solution to the problem.

I updated the firmware again to Sveasofts Alchemy. This one had the same results as the first one. So now I am trying Sveasofts Satori release. It, like the last one, promises bandwidth control and prioritisation.

I cannot upload it at the moment though, as my housemate is in, and guaranteed that if i started the update process he would try accessing the internet or something along those lines and interrupt the process killing my router.

I will post an update later once I have peace and quiet to get the firmware onto my router and to try and solve this little conundrum.

The Issue: The programs he is using to download his stuff is hogging all of our 10mb cable connection and leaves me high and dry without a connection.

The Task: I needed to control the bandwidth through my router (Linksys WRT54G) so it can be shared equally among the 3 computers and the Xbox system.

The Fix. Part 1: The router has an admin side, with all the features you need, or so I thought. First off I tried the QoS packet management utility to set priorities for applications and the ports on the router itself. This failed miserably for reasons i am yet to figure out. so, onto…

The Fix. Part 2: After a quick round of E-Mails with Visp_bofh, the tech guru, he reminded me that the router in question can be flashed with open source firmware. He provided a link that details all the available firmware for my router.

After some research, I settled with HyperWRT. This firmware basically expands the original firmware and gives you more control over bandwidth management and application control.

I set low priority to the port numbers that his download app uses, gave my computer, FTP port, pop and smtp ports high priority and saved the settings in stone so to speak.

After fiddling with some more of the settings and rebooting the router I was up and running and ready for the test.

The Test: All seems good so far, “supersize me’s” downloads are back on, on both computers and i’m still happily surfing the net, and most importantly I can still FTP.

The real test will come after my computer has been left idle for more than an hour or so. I will update when that happens later on this evening.

There are plenty of options for updating the firmware on my specific router and at some point I will upgrade to something else with more advanced features. tinyPEAP seems like a good idea, I can run a radius server and provide wireless access for people in my street at a nice little cost to them lol. All kidding aside, there is one in particular I am looking at that has loads of functionality plus it acts as a very small HTTP server for serving up web pages. That could come in handy for remote controlling the PC’s on the network.

I will write a little tutorial on all of this and add it to the appropriate section. I will announce when it is complete.

While I was surfing up the interweb looking for info on the router I came across some cool stuff. USB add-on for a mouse