David and Katherine Goodwin

This slashdot article and it's subsequent comments, reminded me of my stint at a boarding school (Christ College Brecon).

One comment said :

Actually, private schools consistently get better grade averages because:

1. They select their intake
2. The parents take part in the kids education
3. They can permanently expel disruptive children
4. They can afford to employ the best teachers
5. They can afford to buy better facilities

Pale Purple is moving office tomorrow; as part of this I obviously had to sort out a new telephone and broadband etc. BT were for once quite quick in doing "stuff", and likewise BeThere seemed fairly quick...

However, on Tuesday our broadband at work died. This was not good. After half an hour on the phone, BeThere finally told me that they'd changed me from a static IP address to a dynamic IP address. Without telling me this beforehand! This means :

Right - a quick summary of the phpnw08 conference.

Last night John Pinner gave a talk at SBLug covering Search Engine Optimisation.

Here is an exceedingly random collection of points, as a collective, we came up with.

CentOS 5.2 ships with a bug that stops it booting as a guest KVM image, but only for X86_64 on AMD chips - you'll see a kernel panic, and wonder WTF is wrong.

Solution - use an older version from the vault (e.g. 5.1) or presumably wait for a newer version to come along

(This problem won't affect VMWare guest images)

At work, we have one customer who is always late paying us.

Right, here's how you could setup/install KVM on a Linux server where you don't want to (for whatever reason) use bridging - as I understand it, Bytemark don't like the idea of one machine using more than one MAC address for security purposes.

The script below creates a tun/tap device (tap0) configures it as a private (internal network) and creates iptables rules to forward traffic for the additional IP address to the server on the other end of the "private network".

My nose appears to have started it's annual blood letting. This is probably related to the cold weather making me blow my nose more often.

Anyway, while cycling home from work it decided to bleed again, and while waiting to go around the roundabout into Bromsgrove, some kind child in the car in-front gestured at his nose - "Yes, thanks. I had noticed the constant flow of blood - dripping onto my handlebars, frame, light, forks and hands".

Today I ran to work (Bromsgrove to Redditch and back). Coming back it took me about an hour, while going there took about 1hr 15. Curse those hills!

In other news, there are a few new videos and pictures of Rowan on YouTube and our Gallery (look for directory names like 2008-10-xx) - perhaps I'll tag them one day, or bite the bullet and use something like Gallery which fSpot can upload to....