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winterwolf.co.uk

Changelog

Full list of changes to winterwolf.co.uk: Click here for the latest entries.

20180513Update the Eurovision Song Contest results page for 2018: Lisboa, Portugal.
20130901Restored from a 2010 backup. Sorry for the missing stuff. Any problems, please do let me know.
20090922Stop a problem where certain characters extracted from referrer can cause pages that are not well-formed XML to be generated in the access summary.
20090921Fixed a problem with the flag of Armenia for the Eurovision page - this is the problem with linking to publically changable images.
20090519Added the Eurovision song contest page to the site to finally put people right on how things should have gone, and to compare this to what actually happened. Flags are in SVG format, and should be displayed if your user agents supports this.
20081104Changes to the access summary to recognise some newer eBay referrers. Also modified the picture creating templates in the RRD statistics to line up data correctly with the current version of rrdtool, which seems to be more sensible than the older versions were. Also set the character encoding correctly in the new web server.
20070930Major internal changes: The web server has been moved from Jesmos to Crush in preparation for the future decommissioning of Jesmos. I think most things have been tested now, and the only thing seriously missing is the RRD statistics that look like thay'll need rebuilding from scratch due to the differences in data structure formats between Jesmos' and Crush's architectures.
20070824Made a few changes to the VAIO power management page, even though my VAIO has long since been dismantled. Firstly, a minor typo was corrected, but a much bigger change is a description mailed to me on how to flash a BIOS with no working Microsoft software installed. Hopefully this is of use to some of you.
20070819There have been some major changes in the hardware here just recently. Now, crush and jesmos are running on different hardware, which is generally fine bus is affecting the RRD statistics logging and therefore display. I'm going to be doing some shuffling around to correct this in a few weeks' time, but for now I'm afraid some of these statistics will be out of action.
20070110Fixed another bug in the furcode interface where M--- didn't get decoded correctly, and M-- got the wrong value. This was due to a duplicate entry for two minuses. Sorry to anyone affected by that.
20061219Fixed a couple of bugs in the furcode interface kindly reported by GreenReaper from WikiFur: The links to Captain Packrat's web site were out of date and have been updated, and there was an issue where named HTML entities were not correctly processed (the specific example being ">" being used to seperate sections for future wishes).
20061214Made a few changes to the furcode interface after a bug report was submitted. It should now accept gender changes across ">" separators for the "s" section (apologies to transsexuals for not spotting this problem myself beforehand), and should now accept the "m" modifier to the "D" section on any side of a ">" separator.
20061107Added the Qantus gripe sheet page listing some amusing responses to maintenance requests added by their ground crew.
20060829Added links to the original page and an explanation of why the checkerboard illusion works. Thanks to Xevian for the pointers.
20060211Updated the IPv6 page to make it clearer that my subnet has changed, and to point out that my HTTP server no longer listens on the IPv6 address space. The rest of the content is being left in place in case it's useful reference material for anyone.
20051119Well, it looks like the problem with the RRD statistics for the two troublesome network interfaces has been sorted out. I've moved processing of these two databases on to crush - so it does seem there might be an SMP problem (or possibly an NFS problem) with rrdtool. Hopefully, I'll get around to investigating this further and possibly filing a bug report at some point. However, on checking later, it looks like things stopped again. I think there may be a different problem going on with cron runs. For now, these graphs have been removed again as they're completely useless as they stand.
20051118More on the RRD statistics issue: It looks like this might be an SMP problem. I'll try this on one of the UP machines later to see how that works if I get the chance. More information soon, I hope.
20051117I've removed Crush's RRD graphs for the btexact and darac interfaces due to problems collecting the data correctly with a new Perl package. I hope to have this fixed soon, but I've already been going at it two days in my spare time...
20050627Added quite a few sensors-based statistics from Crush to the RRD statistics page. Temperatures and on-board voltages are now being logged to complement the UPS statistics on the same page.
20050604I've been having problems with my news script and news feeds recently, and at the moment I really don't ahve the time to maintain things. Hopefully, the picture archive service will resume in the future when I have a little more time to work on it.
20050602Added a graph to the RRD statistics page to graph mains and battery conditions as seen by my new UPS, an APC SmartUPS 1000 in the office. Hopefully, the mains conditions will echo the UPS in the living room, but usage will probably fluctuate more, as Scrat is connected to the same UPS, giving one computer and a switch on permanentnly, and one computer and two monitors on occasionally.
20050424Updated the main Linux information page with current details of computers running on the LAN.
20050122Once again the fur.art.* summary page has been updated, this time to get it back to its original state. Everything is up-to-date now, and articles are coming back in at a sensible rate.
20050118Updated the fur.art.* summary to point out that I am in fact doing something to fix things, it'd just taking a little longer than expected. Normal service will be resumed ASAP.
20050110Corrected some typos in the Conexant AccessRunner page, thanks to Foyce.
20050106Noted that there are problems with my upstream news server which affect the fur.art.* summary. I'm going to get an alternative sorted ASAP.
20041019The source to the PHP robotfindskitten is now available as a tarball from the software page. This happened after finding a broken link when I achieved a major milestone — getting mentioned on the RFK website.
20041014Removed the note on the furry newsgroup picture summary page as my upstream seems to have come back to life. I'll still investigate arranging a backup should anything nasty happen in the mean time.
20041013Added a note to the furry newsgroup picture summary explaining that there are currently problems with my upstream news provider.
20040930The ports on the bridge in Crush have been added to the RRD statistics page to provide a better view of the traffic flowing through there. In shows traffic terminating at Crush, Out shows traffic originating from Crush, the P0 to P2 shows data flowing into and out of the various ports on the bridge.
20040922Corrected the typo in my CV, and removed the whole jobhunting section, as I've been in work for the past two and a half months but just haven't got around to removing it before now.
20040814Just for fun, the cats and work page is now available in a Cockney Rhyming Slang version. The Furries page has been updated after far too long displaying the wrong information about which decoder my furcode was linked to.
20040812Finally got around to removing the note about moving to Surrey from the front page. Also corrected the last three dates in this log which were, for some reason, entered as 2003.
20040801Physically, quite a bit has changed here, but logically things should be quite similar. About 24 hours of downtime ended at around 9:00 this morning, after a move from Nottinghamshire to Surrey. winterwolf.co.uk is now on a 1024/256 kB ADSL line, and all being well there should be no noticable changes to anyone using this site. If you do notice any problems, though, do give me a shout and I'll do my best to sort things out.
20040727Put a note on the front page about the impending move to Surrey at the beginning of August 2004.
20040714Added London Heathrow airport to the list of places for which METAR reports are being tracked on the RRD statistics page.
20040713Updated IPv6 information based on my new delegation that came about due to a recent cock-up on my part.
20040702Removed the note on the front page to say that we're moving to Retford, as the move has now taken place. Hopefully all services are now running as normal once again. The IPv4 address has changed, and the DNS has been updated accordingly. The IPv6 block has not changed, but IPv6 access was down for slightly longer than the IPv4 access.
20040624Updated my CV on the desired emplyment page, and also on the standalone version.
20040622Added a missing closing bracket on the main Linux page.
20040615Added a note to say that we will be moving to Retford on 29–30 June 2004. Service will be resumed as soon as possible after the move. Links have been made to the RRD statistics and access summary pages from the front page. The main Linux page has been updated to reflect the demise of Wildfire and the acquisition of Timon. A note has been added to the VAIO RAM problems page about the end of Wildfire. A typo in the VAIO power management page has been corrected. A new page has been created detailing power management on Dell laptops, specifically the Dell Latitude C840.
20040521Minor change made to the introduction paragraph of the standalone CV page.
20040520Downtime: Some services may have been unavailable/unreliable between about 4:00 and 10:00 this morning. This was due to a connection tracking overflow in crush. The number of available slots has been increased as a temporary fix, but eventally I will have to buy more RAM dedicated to connection tracking. Apologies for the inconvenience this may have caused.
20040512Some problems have recently been observed with the temperature readings on the RRD statistics page. This turns out to be a bug in Geo::METAR, whereby it mistakenly reports runway information as temperature if present. Very strange. I'm now decoding temperatures and dew points myself.
20040416All historical RRD statistics have been lost due to operator stupidity. Whoops. I've re-created the configuration file, and all data is now being collected once again. Oh well, at least it wasn't something important. Now if only tape streamers were cheaper... On the plus side, I've corrected what would ahve been a bug that would cause temperature data to be lost below freezing point, and all frost points to be lost.
20040413Changes have been made to the way METAR wind information is decoded on the RRD statistics page. Wind direction is not undefined rather than zero if the wind speed is zero, rather than setting it to zero. This reduces the number of things that can affect the average wind direction calculation.
20040411Some major changes were made to the way the RRD statistics are gathered. MRTG is no longer being used, instead statistics are gathered from procfs or sysfs on target machines directly. METAR decoding is now done using the Geo::METAR Perl module, slightly modified to not complain about the international METAR format. Ray has disappeared from the statistics as it only really support SNMP data collection, but hopefully I'll be able to sort that out soon. LM Sensors information from Jesmos has been removed as the sysfs interface has changed somewhat. I hope to have that back in the future. The RRD statistics page itself has been modified to update the header information.
20040405Gusting winds in the RRD statistics weather charts changed to areas to avoid misleading sloping lines.
20040404Added weather charts for Birmingham Airport and East Midlands airportsto the RRD statistics page. This makes a nice triangle to see which way the features are moving.
20040402Added a weather chart based on information from the METAR reports from Manchester Airport to the RRD statistics page. Not particularly useful, but could be interesting to see how the weather changes over certain time periods here in Manchester.
20040331Quite a few changes to the desired employment page: a new standalone page has been created, my telephone number has been removed for securtity reasons (although I'm happy to provide it if requested by email), and a link has been created to the Gunn diode oscillator web site. Changes were made to the main Linux page to reflect hardware changes on the LAN.
20040331Downtime: We have been affected by the recent BT fibre trunk fire in Manchester, our data services has been down for 44 hours. I'd quite like to know how they managed to get into a situation where a fire was started 150m from the nearest entrance to a fireproofed tunnel. Many people on the BBC's talk page say BT are doing their best in difficult circumstances (and I'll have to say I'm amazed our service has been restored this quickly after visiting the scene yesterday), but I do really wonder how the hell you can start a fire in the middle of a tunnel lined with asbestos (presumably to keep fires out) with just fibre running down it. Can plastic-coated glass really cause a fire? Hmm...
20040329Added the desired employment page detailing by current situation and containing my current CV with links to the CV in several formats.
20040326Corrected a typo on the GrUB hanging problem page.
20040321Jesmos has had a major kernel change to try to solve some recent lock-ups. Hopefully there should be no problem, but if anyone does experience any problems, please do let me know. The RRDtool statistics page has been updated to remove cipdb0, as this interface no longer exists.
20040224Added shopping.net to the list of known search engines on the access summary pages. Also corrected a typo on the carrot cake cheesecake recipe.
20040219Fixed a minor grammatical error in the GrUB hanging page.
20040219Downtime: Problems with Jesmos. This morning, Jesmos has automatically rebooted after a kernel panic stating "CPU context corrupt". Not a nice message to get. And only a couple of days after it locked up solid. I'm putting this down to a change to kernel 2.4.24 a few days before this started, and so have moved back to the old kernel. Apologies for any interruptions.
20040215Once again tweaked the RRD statistics page to include the 6in4 tunnel to Darac's /64 off my delegation. Also updated the IPv6 page with qualitative information about the new subnet.
20040214Updated the RRD statistics page as sabrina is now semi-permanently offline after being made redundent.
20040213Corrected a typo with the date for yesterday's entry. Split off the Conexant AccessRunner section from the IPv6 page into its own page. Updated the IPv6 page with my new delegation: 2001:618:4d6::/48.
20040212Added the 6in4 gateway on Crush to the list of monitored interfaces on the RRD statistics page. I don't know why I'd not done this before. It's a little boring for now, as I'm having a few IPv6-related problems, but hopefully when resolved it'll be quite an interesting thing to watch.
20040208Updated the EEE department timetable page with year four semester 2. Both the general timetable and my personal timetable are available.
20040123Fixed a problem I was having with the load balancing graph on the RRD statistics page. The contrast-enhancing line around the total is now displayed correctly - for some reason it wouldn't draw if it was black, so it's not ever so slightly blue and it seems to be happy to draw it. Sorry this took so long, I've been in the middle of exams. In fact, due to recent last-minute changes, I still am. The last one is now on 20040127.
20031221Corrected a typo on the carrot cake cheesecake page.
20031218Changed the format of the graph for ray on the RRDtool statistics page for clarity. Incoming data (which should always be greater than outgoing data) is now an area, which allows finer granularity to be displayed.
20031217Okay, so it's not quite as over as it might have been. An amusingly-timed letter and leaflet have been added to the Student Support Direct page.
20031120It's finally all over! The last entry (hopefully) has been added to the ill-fated Student Support Direct (or now Student Finanace Direct) saga!
20031112Once again updated the Student Support Direct farce log.
20031111Corrected some typos on the UMIST EEE department timetables for year 4 semester 1, both the general one and my personal one.
20031105Provided a long-past-due update to the Student Support Direct saga: added the last four weeks of excuses from Student Support Direct and the information provided to me from Nottinghamshire County Council.
20031028Fixed a bug in the furry news binaries list which could cause some images to be linked to invalid URLs.
20031014Updated the IPv6 information page with details of the current IPv6 setup here and our current IPv6 address.
20031013Quite a lot has happened here since Saturday and the installation of the AccessRunner ADSL modem and ATM card in Jesmos. It seems there was a problem with the driver running in Jesmos, whereby the kernel would hang at a random point whilst the ATM card was in use. This is probably an issue with the SMP code and the AccessRunner driver. I wasn't too happy about going back to Soto permanently, as there were too many advantages to having the Internet terminate on a device where you have complete control of the packets. After much messing around, we have a new addition to the network, Crush, a diskless UP AMD Duron 650 running it's NFS root from Jesmos, being the router for the network. So far so good - things have been stable for 8 hours, and will hopefully stay that way for far longer. General and my personal timetables updated to remove typos. Stopped reporting entried for gblackman.co.uk as interesting referres in the Site access summary, as that site is a virtual host on a seperate copy of apache.
20031011Our Internet access method has been changed, causing an outage of approximately two hours starting at 09:40 this morning. We now have an ADSL modem and ATM card in Jesmos, and are running the PPPoA ADSL traffic through this card. The result is that now all traffic is presented directly to Jesmos' networking layer. Hopefully, I'll soon be able to get IPv6 connectivity back here, and others in the house can run strange VPNs through the Internet.
20031007Updated the year 4 semester one EMSE timetable with yet another room change for Advanced Electronic Design. Added my personal timetable for this semester. Made that the default timetable.
20031006Updated the notes on Student Support Direct with my latest conversations with them.
20031005Updated the year 4 semester one EMSE timetable with the room change for Advanced Electronic Design, which is now the in MEN theatre in Weston. Removed redundant (and sometimes) incorrect text from all timetables.
20031001Updated the general EMSE year four semester one timetable with two corrections and one room change. Created http://gunn.winterwolf.co.uk to hold records and notes from my fourth year project on high powered gunn diode oscillators.
20030928Corrected a typo on the RRDtool statistics page. Also corrected the Proxy graph to give the correct period average, rather than one that is 100 times too small.
20030927Downtime: Well done once again, BT. They managed to destroy Manchester ADSL RAS. That meant that most exchanges North-West of Chesterfield experienced serious problems for about 12 hours. Sorry if anyone was trying to use services here during that period.
20030926Added the latest section to the Student Support Direct saga.
20030924Added the UMIST EEE deartment timetable to the timetables section. Made several changes to the appearances of the graphs on the RRDtool stats page, mainly adding summary information as background colouring.
20030923Corrected a problem with the furcode interface where expressions of aspired occupations broke the whole section while decoding. Also updated the Student Support Direct pages with details of my provisional registration and the registrar's opinions on problems with the trial.
20030922Updated the Student Support Direct pages with information on their first letter to me in three months! MRTG statistics have been replaced by the more flexible RRDtool statistics.
20030921Finally got around to updating the CSS so that the current page is highlighted on the menu by a yellow dot in graphical browsers once again. The XHTML has been there for ages, there has just been no corresponding CSS.
20030916Created a page describing my experience of the appalling service from Student Support Direct. It's not like I can do anything about it, or like there is a choice as they at the very least have a monopoly on tuition fee means testing, and nearly a monopoly on student loans, but I can at least warn people of the battle they may face getting anything from them.
20030915Corrected a bug in the access summary list of hosts visiting from any given network that could cause hosts to be erroneously listed.
20030914Corrected several typos and grammatical errors on the baklava recipe page.
20030912Added a page containing a wonderful baklava recipe. Corrected a typo in the HP ScanJet 5P easter egg page that caused the email address for the credit to Foyce to be incorrect. Corrected a typo in this changelog entry.
20030911Changed the format of the pages slightly. The copyright message that used to be below the bottom bar on the page has been moved to a copyright page. A small message is present in the top bar: without CSS this is present below the site logo, with CSS1 support buy no or flaky CSS2 support (eg. IE) a single copyright symbol is present linked to the copyright page. CSS2 compliant browsers will show the copyright symbol linking to the copyright page, but will also display the small message whilst hovering over the link, or causing the link to gain the focus.
20030907Corrected the spelling of the menu entry that used to say Change Summmary. That'd been like that since the start, and nobody (including myself) noticed until Darac pointed it out yesterday. Changed the CSS to have a menu requiring less scrolling, and generated pictures for the UL in the menu, saving bandwidth on all pages and making things look better for IE users.
20030903Added a section describing a rather interesting Easter Egg in the HP ScanJet 5P". Changed the format of the MRTG stats to a single-column layout, which looks much better on screens with smaller pixel formats whilst still looking acceptable with a larger pixel format. Changed the ordering of the CPU usage graphs to be next to each other on the new layout. The HPSJ5P page has been updated with a comment on why the button might be useful. It seems that I now have an official name: Executive Parallel Landscape Hyper-Rectangle Succulent Dohickey Darkhorse (the Forty-Second), or possibly, if you want my full name, Great Equidistant Pumpkin Quasi-Lampshade Oblong Dohickey Darkhorse Serenity WinterWolf (the Thirty-Ninth). Not bad, huh?
20030827Changed the second valid CSS link on the page footer to validate the print medium CSS, rather than duplicating the main one.
20030826I've seen Internet Explorer do some strange things, but this really does take the proverbial chocolate digestive. I have done some quick checking of my site with the only version of IE to hand, and found that it doesn't handle CSS too well, but at least renders the page acceptably for the most part. I have recently had reason to try it with IE6. Apologies to the people using IE6 to view my site in the past, it must have looked fairly bad. It seems that IE6 will not use external stylesheets that do not end in ".css". Well, it will, but only if you visit the page, move elsewhere and then use the back/forward buttons to go back. How stupid is that?!? Anyway, to summarise this entry: CSS content negotiation disables and ".css" postfix added to the stylesheet references to pacify really broken Microsoft clients. This affects the header of every page. Also added pre tags to the fortune generator for Microsoft clients that don't understand "whitespace: pre". Completely redesigned the page wrapper and CSS to make things degrade better. Browsers not understanding CSS should now see the page content first, then the menu, which should be good for handheld clients such as mobile phones, and also for those using browsers such as Lynx. Added a stylesheet for the print medium which removes the page headers and footers and the menus and alters the base font size to 10pt, which should aid people wanting to print as they will get the content and no associated rubbish.
20030823Corrected a typo on the furry newsgroup binary summary page.
20030822Found out that Internet Explorer's incredibly broken CSS support does not understand "whitespace: pre" means. As such, robotfindskitten was pretty unplayable in IE. I've now added pre tags there for those poor people stuck using broken browsers.
20030821Finally, I've finished converting the site to XHTML 1.0. That was a large task, taking up pretty much all of my free time since I started on 20030817. This only applies to the pages I create - links to stuff made by other programs (other than the MRTG main page which my script tweaks to be compliant) could have anything in it!
20030820Tweaked mod_gzip on Jesmos to compress CSS files where appropriate, which should hopefully go some way towards speeding up download times, especially on slower connections. Corrected typos in changelog entries 20030815 and 20030817. Set the default number of NKIs to 20 for robotfindskitten.
20030819Corrected a typo in the VAIO power management section.
20030818Updated the furcode interface to suggest XHTML 1.0 compliant code to paste into a target web page after creating a web page. It'd be stupid to have changed the script to XHTML and not the suggested code! Corrected a typo in the carrot cheesecake recipe.
20030817Begun the process of converting winterwolf.co.uk to XHTML 1.0 Strict. This is quite a new thing to me, and is really to force me to learn how to use CSS. It's quite rewarding, though, seeing the XHTML 1.0 valid code from the W3C HTML validator and "Standards Compliant Mode" in Mozilla Firebird's page info window. Currently only the front page is done, but other pages will follow, and will continue to by HTML 4.01 Transitional compliant until they get converted. Also added probles for the broken script "formmail" to the list of attacks recognised by the access summary.
20030815Changed the NKI placing algorithm in robotfindskitten to make placing the NKIs more efficient. Also in robotfindskitten, changed the minimum world height to 25 to allow for all 406 NKIs to be successfully placed should this be desired. I know at least someone is going to want that.
20030813Added a link to the current worl in progress: Robotfindskitten. There are still a few bugs present, but on the whole, if you don't do anythign too challenging, it'll work. For the moment, don't ask for too many NKIs or it'll take a while generating the world, and may even time out. Also corrected a typo for changelog entry 20030521.
20030802Added some information provided to me be email to the NetMos 222N-2 Linux support information page. Started a Mini-FAQ thanks to the email help received.
20030730Downtime: Power failure. The first one in Manchester in at least three years. Just my luck. Sunlight, one of my SPARCstation 10s was at 237 days, 12 hours, 29 minutes and five seconds of uptime before the power outage. It's going to take a long time to get back there. About 237 days, 12 hours, 29 minutes and five seconds, to be precise!
20030726Corrected a bad link in the changelog entry for 20030202. Also corrected a typo in that entry. That's the third change to that entry - I really should be more careful.
20030725Fixed a typo in the changelog entry for 20030529. The phone line here in Retford has now been ADSL enabled, allowing be to make changes to this site as often as required, assuming no problems.
20030713Corrected a missing title element in the GrUB hanging page. Changes may be slow for a while whilst I'm back in Retford waiting for the phone line to be ADSL enabled.
20030625Added LM sensors information about the temperature and voltage lines to the MRTG statistics page.
20030624Added an interesting collection of notes on hotel soap to the humour section.
20030623Corrected a minor error on the main page that could cause dead links in the future. It's always good to correct problems before they occur! Also added an interface to my phone SMS store, but I'm afraid that's not available to the public.
20030611Corrected the access summary server attacks section to correctly identify probes for vulnerability from the Code Red and similar worms. Tweaked the Furry newsgroup artwork summary script to give a polite message rather than a load of errors if no new images are found. Started dechunking PHP responses if required in order to be able to compress the output with mod_gzip.
20030529Fixed a problem with the MRTG stats whereby the proxy data was not updated between about 21:45 last night and 13:35 this afternoon. libsnmp-base was upgraded on Jesmos last night, and somehow broke MRTG's handling of at least one MIB file, but not the one related to squid. Remove the non-squid related MIB files causes squid stats to work again, but doesn't appear to break the other stuff. I've never really understood SNMP (the S is a lie, for a start), but I'm monitoring the situation closely for now.
20030526Updated the main linux page to reflect manny being retired and Jesmos' acquisition of a second CPU. Added Excite Japan to the list of known search engines on the access summary.
20030523Added eBay listings to the list of recognised referrers on the access summary page. The base of the referrer is linked to (ie eBay in a particular country), as well as the item itself. Colourisation has also been added to the recognised referrers on the access summary.
20030521Downtime: Big problems. It turns out that since Soto replaced Diego, DNS queries have been going to the wrong place, leading to them being answered as soft errors. This became evident today, as from thia morning the five day expiry period for winterwolf.co.uk's SOA came into effect. I noticed at about 10:00, and tried to correct the problem. After that, Soto lost sync with the local DSLAM, which then wouldn't let us back on (I really do hate BT). The problems were eventually sorted at 2:10 on Thursday morning. Between these times, access to the web site and many other services could well have been lost, and email will have been queued. No email should have been lost if servers are configured correctly, as only soft errors were returned.
20030519IPv6 services will be down until I can get around to getting 6to4 gateways working on Jesmos, and set her up appropriately as a router. Sorry for this inconvenience. IPv4 services will continue as normal until this gets done. The MRTG stats have been rearranged and updated to reflect recent hardware and network changes here at winterwolf.co.uk: upgrading Jesmos to 2xDeschutes SMP, the move to Soto (watch eth1 on Jesmos now), eclipse being retired.
20030516Downtime: Jesmos was taken down twice today for some major hardware alterations, between about 15:00 and 18:00. Everything went very smoothly, and she is now running with two Pentium II processors, stats for which are available on the MRTG page. Also, Diego has been replaced by Soto, a Nokia IP55 (rebadged and tweaked Webramp 600i) ADSL router. You shouldn't notice any significant change because of this, but it will allow a faster IPv6 service in the future, all being well.
20030514Added a scan of the finished circuit on stripboard and a provisional link to PonyProg to the UIR page. Added a PIC programmer and UIR HEX files to the software section.
20030513Information on building a UIR with integral PIC programmer has been added to the UIR page.
20030510Added a page detailling how I stopped GrUB hanging on boot from my Adaptec 2940UW. This was a real problem to track down, as the cause was not immedaitely obvious at first glance. With hindsight, of course, it seems obvious, though. Also, my project report has been stuck up here in PDF format. You're welcome to read it if you're so inclined, but be warned that it's 1.2MB in size.
20030506Just a small change, as it's dissertation, coursework and exam revision season at the moment. Fixed a typo trying to spell "Retail" in the furcode interface.
20030504A Cheesecake-style carrot cake recipe has been added to the site. I think it's absolutely wonderful, but if any rabbit Furs out there want to give me their opinion, I'll post it here. That should be the ultimate test!
20030424I've finally got around to fixing some bugs in the Furcode interface. It now correctly handles exact species handling in square brackets after specifying a sub-type, as well as instead of. Spaces inside square brackets are now protected. The will to change from a number of * codes to anything else is now handled as expected, rather than producing some very nasty looking text that contains the results, but certainly not in grammatically correct English. Corrected a typo in changelog entry 20030125 (yes, I know that was a long time ago, but I do at least get around to things in the end!)
20030421Updated the VAIO memory problems page to reflect my recent success at trying to get the dodgy top SODIMM socket to work correctly. Changed the access summary for individual hosts to display the visited pages as hyperlinks.
20030420It might be a bit late, but I've finally got around to adding a page on the National Hug Week 2002, and my involvement in the successful world record attempt for the largest group hug.
20030420Downtime: Jesmos was taken down at around 11:30 last night to have a new SCSI card fitted. All went well as far as that was concerned, but the network card decided to develop a fault during the downtime. After fixing that problem, the local DSLAM went berserk for a bit. Everything was up and running again by 12:40 AM.
20030419Added DogPile to the list of search engines recognised on the Access Summary page. Sorry for lack of other updates recently, I've been at home for Easter without any decent Internet access.
20030330Updated the access summary to notice Alta Vista's slightly changed referrer format.
20030327Sorted a problem whereby searches from Google France somtimes showed up on the access summary as empty searches.
20030326Sorry for the lack of changes, it's been a bit busy around here. Updated the third year project page with the current project status. A lot of my hits seem to be for people looking for fish pie recipes - anyone want to see any other recipes? Please do provide suggestions and requests. Calamaris reports for jesmos have been added to the site.
20030314Added iWon to the list of search engines recognised by the access summary script.
20030313Added Google Canada to the list of recognised search engines on the access summary, as it seems to use a different URL format to most other Google sites.
20030312Corrected a grammatical error in the furcode interface information page. Fixed a bug in the furcode interface whereby if you were creating a code where you wanted a section to change to the neutral value, it would not let you proceed to the next stage. Corrected two typos on the VAIO power management page. Added IP->address cacheing for up to 24 hours to the access summary, which has had serious affect on the time required to display the summary. That was deemed required after the increasing popularity of winterwolf.co.uk meant that it was taking over five minutes to display the access summary.
20030311Added the facility to create Fur Codes on the furcode interface. Added the search engines at Virgilio Italy and Comet Systems to the list of known search engines on the access summary page. Corrected a bug in the furcode interface that caused cheetahs not to be decoded, and to erroneously appear as reptiles in the encoder.
20030310Added HotBot to the list of known search engines on the access summary page.
20030309Added a web-based interface to Fur Codes. So far, it only tries to decode, but I hope to add a creation facility soon. Changed my furcode to point to the local furcode decoder.
20030306Clarified the list of interesting referres on the access summary.
20030304Added the revision R0243U0 BOIS for the Sony VAIO FX-105K to the Software page as a reference model, as this is what is used on Wildfire. I'm not providing any guarantees that it'll work for you, but you might want to try it if trying to cure a problem.
20030228Finally got around to removing VLSI on Thursday mornings from my timetable, which now looks up-to-date. As far as I'm aware, no changes are necessary to the general UMIST EEE timetable. Good news for people with decent browsers: gzip transfer encoding will now be used on text heavy pages if your browser supports this facility. This should significantly reduce loading times.
20030227Added a page displaying binaries posted to the fur.artwork.* newsgroups within the last 24 hours. Thumbnails are displayed, providing a means for people to decide if they want to fetch the articles themselves.
20030226Added Overture to the list of search engines recognised on the Access Summary.
20030224Changed the link on the front page" to point to the change summary instead of the full changelog, as there are quite a few entries in the log now. Added PCB information to the third year project information page.
20030218IPv6 routing from and to the outside world to machines other than Eclipse and Jesmos is now working again. Sorry it took so long, if you were trying to make use of the connections. It was down to an error in my route advertising daemon's configuration.
20030217Removed the cartoon archive link from the menu. There didn't seem to be much point in keeping it there, it's been down for quite some time now.
20030216The UIR page has been updated to include information on running a LIRC server for a network. Added NetMos 9835 patches to the Linux Software page. Added a page about NetMos 9835 based PCI serial and parallel I/O cards.
20030213Downtime: Jesmos, the computer serving these pages, was taken down today to add a new I/O card because I've been short of serial ports for some time now, and I finally got around to ordering one. Unfortunately, something went wrong recompiling the kernel resulting in about 2 hours of downtime from about 5:00PM GMT. Everything is up again now and seems to be running well, apart from IPv6 routing to machines other than Eclipse and Jesmos. I'm working on that now.
20030210Added a random fortune and ASCII art generator as a bit of fun. Corrected a bad link from changelog entry 20030202 to the EMSE timetable. I'm now serving the Valid HTML 4.01 graphic at the bottom of these pages from my web server, as the W3C have ebeen a bit slow recently.
20030207EMSE Timetables have been updated with the latest changes. Mainly, Dr. van Silfhout has been good enough to reschedule the Sensor Technology lecture to 10AM on Wednesdays to give us Friday mornings off. What a nice guy! Timetables are available for myself personally and also for general EMSE students. Printable versions are also available. Modified the search engine term recognition pattern to recognise searches from MiraGo UK.
20030205Fixed a bug in the access summary whereby if a referrer contained parentheses, part of it could be misinterpreted as part of the user agent. Fixed a bug where the wrong information could be returned as a search string in the access summary. Added another term to the regex matching search engine queries to show searches from AOL's engine correctly.
20030204Added a link to winterwolf.co.uk information on Netcraft to the menu.
20030203I accidentally deleted the access summary script, so took the opportunity to replace it with a slightly more efficient version during the re-write. Fixed a bug in the per-host access summary that made quesies of the summary show up as from that host. Referrer summary added to the access summary to make it easer to view and reduce load on the server by only iterating once over the logfile. Added a summary of potential attacks to the access summary, as my server seems to be regularly targeted for IIS and overflow vulnerability tests. Rather amusing, as it's quite obvious from its headers that it's not running IIS! Note that if none of the latter two events has happened since mindnight, the relevant section will not be displated on the access summary page.
20030202Added the EMSE Year 3 Semester 2 timetable. The access summary seems to have broken after installing an IPv6 enabled copy of apache. This has now been fixed. IPv4 hosts without valid reverse DNS records will show up in compatibility form now. An IPv6 information page has been added and linked to from the access summary. Referrer summary page added to keep track of who is linking to me, and how well I'm doing on the search engines for the searches that people are actually carrying out.
20030129Made some pretty major changes to the access summary. It now lists groups of hosts visiting the site, then allowing you to select an individual host to view their site access patterns. Data is reset at midnight British time as before. Added a reciprocal link between the full changelog and the summary.
20030125Corrected an error in the amount of milk required for the parsley sauce in the fish pie recipe.
20030121Corrected typo for changelog entry 20021217 because it was annoying me. Updated 20021220 entry link to the correct URL for the third year project. Did okay on yesterday's exam, did badly on todays, must get back to revision.
20030115MRTG stats updated to include jesmos:ppp1, a link to Eclipse, who will eventually by IPv6 router. Don't expect too many updates this month, it's exam season and all energy is being expended trying to learn far too much material. More after that, all being well.
20030108Site access summary updated to use content negotiation. No file type changes planned, but it never hurts to take preventative maintenance. Well... almost never!
20030106Copyright footer updated to reflect changes this year.
20030104Changed site to use Apache Content Negotiation, which should reduce broken links if I change file types in the future. All current links will continue to work, of course! Added alternative formats for graphics. Content Negotiation should return the most appropriate file format your browser can handle. Provides better support for less compatible browsers at the expense of lower quality or large files being downloaded. Added fish pie recipe. Change summary added, showing the last 10 changes to the site.
20030103Typo on the York furmeet picture page corrected.
20021225MRTG description modified to be a bit more accurate. Merry Christmas, all!
20021220Added a section for my third year project, the scanning head for a blood vessel mapping system.
20021217Downtime: Due to moderately urgent disk space problems, Jesmos had to be taken down a few times for data reorganisation between about 16:00 and 19:00. The main outage was between 18:00 and 19:00 as data was copied from backup onto a new disk. This site is due a large update in the near future.
20021109Added current page indicator to the navigation bar.
20021105Updated the Optical Illusion page with the lack of response (!). Corrected grammar error in the changelog for 20021013. Added remote control request to the UIR section.
20021104Apologies for the lack of new data recently, I've been paid to redesign the website for Harworth Heating, and also I've got a lot fo work to do over UMIST's reading week, mainly for my third year project.
20021103Added a page on the UIR Receiver. Extended the space available for the menu bar to reduce wrapping.
20021101Downtime: We have been down between about 06:00 and 18:00 today. This is due to a large-scale hardware failure at Telehouse London. Many apologies for the disruption, but our ISP has taken the oppurtunity to perform a few upgrades at the same time, so you should experience slightly lower latency connections from now on.
20021023Optical Illusions page added and should be modified when I get a response from Dr. Truscott as to why this effect happens.
20021020Pages have been modified slightly to comply with the HTML 4.01 Transitional specification, and validation links have been added to the bottom of each page.
20021018The Cartoon Archive has been taken offline for what could potentially turn into a problem. I'm sorry to have to do this, but the world nowadays is driven by profit, and it seems that getting the explicit permission of cartoon artists is no longer enough. Click here for more information
20021016Sabrina Online added to the Cartoons Archive by kind permission from Eric Schwartz. Links to Kevin and Kell added to the Cartoons Archive. Changed the comics customisation link to use your current preferences as defaults.
20021014Bug with the access summary covering more than the current day fixed, but I've left yesterdays in because we were down for most of it. Bug with access summary returning large errors fixed. Added the VAIO power management section. Access summary changed to improve spacing in the table and add a link to a page explaining HTTP result codes.
20021013Downtime: We've had some downtime recently as BT's ATM network broke around here, causing a lot of DSL connection in this area to go (in technical terms) tits-up. The outage lasted from about 18:45 yesterday evening until about 15:45 this afternoon, and many thanks to PlusNet for managing to get BT off their arse on a Sunday to sort things out.
20021012Added site access summary for root access and failures. Copyright bar at the foot of the page updated to make more grammatical sense. VAIO RAM problem updated with latest developments. Furries section updated with my furcode, typo corrections and missing hyperlinks. Updated the Linux Software section with new power management software.
20021011Created the MRTG parser and added a link to MRTG stats.
20021010Linux Software page added, and software from the old web site migrated into it. Added a link to QCE driver version 0.40c. Started the humour section with Council Letters. Added Cats and Work to the Humour section. Linux main section updated for donations. Furries section added, furmeet picture gallery set up and all currently available photos indexed.
20021009Cartoons archive linked to, and description added. VAIO RAM problems and amusing solution added. Main Linux page added along with description of my computers.
20021009Current site design implemented. Comments are welcome, some may even say encouraged! Does everything work right for you? If not, drop me a line and I'll try to do something about it. Is there anything you think or wrong or just plain missing, once again let me know and I'll see what I can do. This is the initial entry, describing main changes. Another entry is available above for individual changes.

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