I have had an absolute nightmare of a day trying to get various bits of hardware to operate together. After further investigation we quickly came to the conclusion that www.scan.co.uk ‘s RAM had shagged the PC. I knew that as the current law stands that I have not got a leg to stand on, or at least I would have if I had the money to chase them for the next several months proving that there hardware was to blame.
Before anyone says that I am not really qualified to make such a general statement about their hardware I should probably state that I was “PACE” qualified for 3 years in a row and spent 5 years as a satellite engineer so I know my way around a circuit board better than most.
For reference I have also tried to get the Highpoint Card running better. It was giving me some really slow speeds when using hdparm. So I downloaded the driver from the website, installed it, and for a few minutes it tripled my hdparm speeds then it froze the PC. I tried it twice before giving up.
BOLLOCKS BOLLOCKS BOLLOCKS BOLLOCKS BOLLOCKS BOLLOCKS
End of OU coursework
Well the course work is finished, thank god. Waiting for the arrival of the hardware. I managed to a get a little spidering done today.
32.8M links_found
30 Sep 03
Its now 03:19 and the robots have been off and on all day today. I managed to fill up another partition so I was forced into moving more files around to free up some much needed space.
Performance is starting to slip as can be seen from the daily stats. I bought a 160Gb SATA drive with controller. I am hoping this will last me a few months before I need another one unless I get some volunteers to help with the project.
I also invested in 1Gb of RAM, unfortunatley I am loosing the 512Mb from this machine so I am only doubling my capacity, 1.5Gb would have been lovely. I am not looking forward to installing it. I am pretty sure that the current kernel 2.4.9-e.5 will not support the HPT374. I am expecting the gear in a couple of days so after the install we should have some fun.
My maths was the main priority today. I have finished the guts of my final peice of course work. That goes in the post tomorrow and then its exam cram time for my exams. I have another 4 years of Maths to look forward to on top of the three years I have already done so I am nearly half way there.
I am going to start adding some more technical content to this site so that anyone who is interested can see what I am doing to postgres to keep it running. I am not sure exactly what I am going to add yet but I thought I would start with the scripts that I used to build the database and the psql functions I call from Perl to populate the database. I will also start adding the Perl code as well and some instructions on how to set up your own link harvester……… eventually.
32.8M links_found
5M home_page
Links Again
This was actually the date where this website came on line.
1.3M links_found
1.2M home_page
Teaching Jenny Vim
No spidering today I had a much harder task to do. I attempted to teach my better half the art of vimming and much to my dismay she picked it up quicker than I did.
I am jealous.
Some numbers on harvested links
Some numbers on harvested links
links=# select count(*) from links_found;
count
———
4159023
links=# select count(*) from home_page;
count
Arrive in Tunisia
01-05 February 1997
We arrived in Tunis to join HMS Birmingham, thankfully the whole thing was relatively uneventful except we where chased along the jetty by people trying to check our visas. They managed to catch up with us and we were meant to have had our visas stamped at the airport. We had no idea what was going on but it all got sorted out eventually.
Tunis is a bit crazy. On our first night into town get we got accosted by a man who promised to show us all the sights of Tunis in a night, having been continually hassled by all and sundry up until this point we decided it would not be a bad idea to get ourselves a minder of sorts and it worked. What we didn’t know at the time was….. “next stop….. the casbah zone”.
We were dragged through endless alleys deeper into the heart of Tunis and I am not scared to admit that coupled with it being near midnight and not another person in the vicinity looking remotely friendly I was getting goose bumps. Listening to our guides endless chatter about a king, a big bed and lots of women in it we persevered for what seemed like an eternity. We finally reached the big bed which was very big but there was no naked women which was a bit of a let down. We were told that the king who had owned the bed had had a lot of women in it which is a different thing entirely.
Our untiring guide motivated us into going to the roof where we could see most of Tunis or at least in near pitch blackness most of the lights in Tunis were visible from where we stood. It was actually worth the entire journey just to see it.
It was at this point we then started our decent back into the casbah and the old saying “no such thing as a free ride” started to resonate around inside my head. We first payed a visit to a rug merchant who proceeded to unroll enough rugs to line a bridge to Sicily, the rugs were all very nice but for two young sailors with no money they were a bit too expensive. After much haggling, mostly with himself our illustrious rug dealer must have realized that his time would be better spent cultivating money trees, we where on our way again.
On and on into the casbah night we trod, at no point did we ever consider going our separate way from the guide, it would have been like eating your compass in the Sahara. I did notice that we spent an awful lot of time visiting cousins of our guide who all happened to own perfume or tobacco shops. By the time we had got half way back we were convinced the guy was related to everyone in Tunis.
Just before we left the casbah to breathe real open air again we where offered some hubbly bubbly which considering neither of us smoked was another non-starter. We walked for a few yards and we seemed to magically stumble out onto the street where we began our journey. This meant it was time to bid our guide a fond farewell and I was uncomfortably aware that we had not bought anything at all which is probably how he makes his living. We tipped him and he seemed rather pleased with this, we were just glad to be alive and back in the general vicinity of where we left off.