Monthly Archives: December 2013

Running Foundation Training #1

Endomondo, ZR

Completed the main story of ZR Season 2 finally. A couple of side missions left, then I can start working on the Race Missions, Airdrop Mode and Supply Missions. Supply Missions will be last because you don’t get any materials, and the only reason for running them is to get the hoarding achievements.

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Dangerous Driving [Videos Added]

Two days this week I’ve driven to work in the early hours (~6am) and both days I’ve encountered some really dangerous behaviour.

On Monday, outside Wembley Central station (http://goo.gl/maps/AFHp0), a cyclist cycled along the pavement, then dives into the road without looking back or signalling. I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again. Road users on two wheels complain about not getting respect on the road. If you behave like this, how can you expect respect from other road users? I have more gripes with motorcyclists than pedal cyclists, but the majority of my complains about the two-wheeled road users are the same: lack of signalling, darting in and out of traffic, jumping red lights, riding too close to car users then complaining when they are hit by wing mirrors.

On Tuesday, I’m at the junction between the A504 Finchley Lane and the A1 Great North Way (http://goo.gl/maps/2HFBT). The A504 is a black spot for queue jumping, and I had a VW queue jump me at the junction – violating road markings in the lane which indicate it is right-turn only. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, further along, at the junction with the A504 Church Road/B552 Parson Street/A502 Brent Street (http://goo.gl/maps/MYemg), this same car then jumps the red lights.

Oh, and both were caught on my dashcam. Will be passing these onto the police. Whereas there’s little they can do about the cyclist, they can at least take the VW off the road, or at least put some points on his/her license (I hope)

LPIC-1

Linux Professional Institute

I’ve finished studying for the first of two exams for the LPIC-1 certification, and I have found some exam questions (about 600 of them), and have started to go through them.

The first thing that struck me about these questions is either I’ve not been studying all the topics, or some topics have been removed out of the exam. For example, some of the questions reference LILO, but according to the LPI page on the 101 exam, there’s no mention of LILO (but there is mention of Grub 2 and Grub Legacy). Then again LILO and Grub Legacy are quite limited by today’s standards, so it could be that they really are removed out of the exam. Guess I’ll have to take that chance.

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Mugger apologises to victim 30 years on after finding him on Facebook

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?

http://nypost.com/2013/11/30/mugger-apologizes-to-victim-35-years-later-after-chance-facebook-meeting/

Memory

Had a very eventful weekend, and my entire Sunday was taking up trying to figure out a weird symptom on my linux installation.

In the weeks leading up to today, I used to get strange behaviour from my Fedora box. The behaviour resulting in an error being detected by the ABRT tool, regarding a null reference. Sunday, my laptop conked out and refused to startup. I tried reinstalling Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, and even OpenMandriva — none of them could complete the installation. They either failed with error part way through, or hung completely.

I decided to try installing Windows XP over everything. That failed with an IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO blue screen. Then I tried Windows 7. That installation succeeded, and I started running updates. Then it blue screened me again. This time MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the message. Hmmm. So, could it be that one of my memory chips was dodgy? That would account for why it was intermittent. I have 2x 2GB chips in my laptop, so I took both out and rebooted. No splash screen. Good. That’s expected.

Put in one of the chips. Booted, BIOS showed 2GB. Good, that’s OK.

Took it out and put in the other 2GB. No splash screen. Looks like that’s the dodgy one. I dug out my 1GB from when I got my laptop originally, and put that back into the other slot, so I get a 3GB installation. Checked boot. Splash screen displayed. Good. So I then ran a BIOS memory check, and all 3GB passed.

So then I decided, maybe I should try doing a restore, in case the dodgy memory was the cause of my failure to restore previously. It worked fine, so now I’m back up with my previous setup. :D

Cause: Faulty 2GB memory