CMBuckley.co.uk :: Blog

We are all friends
No matter when
No matter where
No matter how dangerous the way
No matter how far the way that we are yearning towards.
But we all know
No matter where we are
We have our own companion now.
And we can get everywhere no matter how far it is.
Because we have our own bright future
As long as we still have dreams.

Vista’s lock-down strikes again…

In short, we have Samba v2.2.7a running here, and a new machine was just added running Vista, for some reason. It wouldn’t connect to our Samba shares, where my XP box had managed absolutely fine. The culprit? Vista’s security policies. Finally we found the fix:

1. Open the Run command and type “secpol.msc”. Finding the Run command in Vista is fun in itself; we just used + R.
2. In the security policies dialogue, navigate to “Local Policies/Security Options”.
3. Open the policy “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level”.
4. Change the option to “LM and NTLM — use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”. Pre-3.0 Samba doesn’t support NTLMv2, hence the change from the default refusal.

Then, cry because you’ve “updated” to your shiny new operating system and you now have to search Google for “getting x to work in Vista” every time you want to install an application…

At our last day at work before Christmas — oh yeah, I got a job by the way — we decided to have a go at some comics after seeing some crazy comics
at Pandyland.

The rules? A maximum of 4 panels, and use some base imaging software. That’s it! Here are the efforts:





Yes, I’m aware mine bears more than a little similarity to Cyanide and Happiness, but that’s because I have very little imagination and graphics skills…

The ASD Services web site is now live. ASD Services are one of the largest selections of built-in and free-standing appliances to trade & retail in Yorkshire. Over 5,000 products are available for delivery or collection from their showroom in Morley, Leeds.

Like what you see? Contact sales [at] starsquare [dot] co [dot] uk for a quote.

After some trouble with our Belkin router recently, we managed to get it replaced under the lifetime warranty — a very satisfying result! The router arrived today, and the packaging that brought it can only be described as overkill:



I’m all for my package arriving in good condition, and this extra padding certainly facilitates that, but was all that necessary? Oh well, it works!

What can I say!

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We stayed in the same place as the last few years, getting there early and still struggling to find space, since so many had gone in on early tickets (plan for next year?). Olly was coming after work, so the brie and crackers would have to wait!

This is who I managed to see during the weekend. Most I saw all the way through, but for some we only caught a couple of songs.

Friday	Saturday	Sunday
The Smashing Pumpkins Lostprophets Fall Out Boy Funeral For A Friend Wes Packer (comedy tent) The Used Billy Talent hellogoodbye Pull Tiger Tail Late Of The Pier	Ash The Living End Kings Of Leon Mad Caddies Enter Shikari Capdown Maxïmo Park Jimmy Eat World The Enemy Plain White T’s Gossip	Red Hot Chili Peppers Arcade Fire Bloc Party Dinosaur Jr The Pigeon Detectives Angels & Airwaves Nine Black Alps Good Shoes Eagles Of Death Metal

I missed a few that I wanted to see, including a secret appearance from the Kaiser Chiefs on Saturday, but I saw enough to make up for the misses!

And as for next year? I might as well get the ticket now!

View pictures of the Festival

The other day Paul told me that square wheels (and, indeed, any regular polygon except a triangle) can ride on a road constructed of inverted catenaries. A catenary is the curve made by a telegraph wire when stretched between two poles — a cable hanging under its own weight.

A little bit of thinking about the road makes you realise that the length of the catenary s must be the same as the length of the side of the square, and the height h must be

.

This is because the centre of the square, the axle, must remain at a constant height from the ground for a smooth ride.

Anyway, armed with this information, I spent this afternoon making a real-life version of this. I used some string to mark out a catenary of the right size, and used it as a template on two bits of plywood. A fair bit of jigsawing and filing later, I had this:



I was really surprised how well it worked! Check the video to see how smoothly the “wheel” runs along the “road”!

I went on holiday this weekend to Pickering with my parents and Geoff and Gwen. Okay, it’s not that far away — one might argue that it’s not a holiday if the Coastliner goes past the camp site — but we had a really great time, despite the rain on Friday!

While we were there, we went to the Dalby Forest to check out Bridestones, a small set of bouldering problems about 5 minutes’ walk from the forest drive. We didn’t even try to get Geoff on Go Ape, having failed at getting him to go on the jet boat out of Whitby harbour!

View pictures of the holiday

We got back yesterday, and in the evening I went over to the Angel. A large number failed to turn up for a number of reasons; shame on you! Congratulations to Caitlin for turning up for once! We had a rather feeble go at the quiz, and after the Angel shut we went over to the Queen — the first time I’d been. Imagine a Wetherspoon’s about as large as a living room and you’d be pretty close…

Well, that’s it. I’m back for good. It feels very strange to think I won’t be going back to Durham again! That’s not entirely true; I’ll be back for the start of next term to sort out the changeover of the HBMC, and then there’ll be Claire and my graduation in January, but it won’t be the same!

So much has been going on since I last posted — in fact, that’s why I haven’t had chance to post. Since then, we’ve had the Summer Ball, which was a bit of a washout, but still managed to be a great laugh if only for the people there; there was a rather drunken Going Down Formal that ended up in Walkabout; also paintballing and, of course, the respective graduations.

It took me three car trips to get all my stuff back home. For those of you who couldn’t believe I have that much stuff, remember that I took up a trailer in second year, and have since taken more and more stuff each time I’ve gone back. Take a look at the photo if you don’t believe me!

Now that I’m back, it’s time for the usual — Angel? Check! Jinnah? Tonight!

Lolcat has taken over my life. I spend far too long looking through pictures of amusing cats superimposed with intentionally grammatically incorrect captions.

But I love it.

Some of my favourites:



For more pictures, check http://icanhascheezburger.com, http://lolcats.com or http://lolcats2.com, or perhaps you might want to check out http://lolcode.com, a programming language based on those exact macros. It’s arguably as good as some of the esoteric programming languages!

So good, even xkcd has picked up on it.