Aah Bollocks.

That was my first thought on Friday 6th April, when I walked into work to discover our major business system being out of action with a dodgy error, a quick phone call later to the “support people” and…
it was still fubar’ed 🙁

Its now the 14th April, its 9:33am and I’m in work doing overtime… the system has essentially been offline for over 7 days now (well there’s a slight discrepancy to this but i’ll get back to it in a second.) and we are trying a different course of action.

So, our great business system is a case management system, with an Oracle8.1.7 Back-end (oracle have released a version 11 recently) and the problem has occurred within Oracle, or so we are told… as nobody here in the Company has a clue about Oracle we have to trust what we are told by people who work on it.

When I say its been offline for 7 days, its a bit of a white lie… The support team and the contractors we dragged in to assist us (they have oracle specialists 😀 ) managed to get us a working system from a backup of the 30th March, with some patching and bug fixing it was operational… until Senior Management (Brain cells optional I believe) decided that since we do “backups” that we can get all the information until Thursday 5th back.  This then got complicated very quickly.

 So today, we have the contractors back (I hope, Im currently the only person in the bloody building beside Security 🙁 ) to try some funky stuff with Archive Logs, Monday Nights flat file Backup, and jiggery-pokeryâ„¢ Lets hope something works!

On a side note, Jaymes(my boss) and his wife now has something else on their hands apart from renovating his house, a bouncing baby boy 😀 congrats to them both on a job well done!

Now, lets see whos for turning up next…

I was right about it being a movie being shot, the Belfast Telegraph carried a story on Friday about Heather Graham shooting a movie called Buy, Borrow and Steal in the Clements coffee shop (News post here)

Also its Mothering Sunday tomorrow (and St Patricks day today) so the shops in full swing.. last estimate was 250+ orders for delivery alone.  Only problem is with it being so busy, they have had to turn people away from the counter after midday because they cant handle the orders for them 🙁

Guess I might be getting roped into deliveries tomorrow then!

Okay, so today is definately a strange day.  I decided to go grab myself a bottle of lemonade from the nearest shop (no vending machines in my workplace 🙁 ) and I spotted a couple of grey vans with G&H on them.

Now if you live in Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast you immediately associate G&H with the likes of movie film crews, or independant TV production companies.  This means a little bit of interest in the surrounding area particularly with the main thought of “I could end up on TV or in a Movie!”

So after getting what I needed out of the shop, I went a walk to be nosey and see what the fuss is about only to discover that they have set up within the local Clements Coffee shop.
Grabbed my Phone and took a quick snap of whats happening outside, then looked to my right and noticed 4 photographers with huge telescopic lenses on their cameras 😮

Im just glad I didnt decide to go grab a coffee instead now!

I would say upgrading WordPress is easy…

Except this time something broke 🙁 god knows where the problem was buried, or if the problem was due to all the previous upgrades and tweaks that was ran (Oh, that and the fact that it was dragged across from my previous hosting provider) I started getting MySQL errors and Blogroll got a bit fubar’ed

so theres a new easier way of upgrading WordPress, its called “Export then nuke the fucker” 🙂
One fresh install of WordPress 2.1.2 (courtesy of Fantastico) then a quick import and some minor tweaks like installing the plugins and theme again and we are back in business, well I’m guessing we are as I havnt really checked anything except core blog settings. 

I really hate those phone-in gameshows now, the producers should be lined up and shot.  I vote for choice television shows, not random crap of two complete tits reading out the phone number (which is on the screen at all freaking times)
Seriously, the tit has read the number out 5 times on ITV Play while I’ve typed this out. 😡

whoo, im back \o/

been playing Xbox360 for a bit, bought Crackdown and been playing that for a while (also finally picked up Burnout Revenge as well, since I have the previous 3 Burnouts on the PS2… which looks crap on the Dell Widescreen) and tried out the GRAW2 Multiplayer Demo, might pick up the full game later once i’ve played Crackdown and B:R to death.

I also decided recently to give the latest version of OpenSUSE which as of putting this post, was 10.2. The first plan was to stick the original 40gig drive into my works-provided Toshiba Satellite Pro A60 (its got an 80gig drive for the imaging system we use) but I quickly changed my mind when I got home and slapped it onto my main rig “Toaster” instead, which is an Athlon Xp2600+ on an Nforce2 board (DFI Lanparty)
Last time I tried to install Linux onto Toaster, it was Ubuntu 6.06 and it didnt like even getting anywhere installing as it seemed to die detecting IDE drives, so I didnt expect OpenSUSE to go along smoothly.

Surprisingly after 2 hours, I had an almost working version of OpenSUSE on Toaster, running Gnome and it detected everything.. hell it even picked up the Dell 2407wfp Widescreen monitor (but there was minor dificulties with its resolutions) but I did have a few minor problems:

• 1920×1200 didnt display properly, felt more like 1900×1200 stretched as fonts were distorted
• Xvid/DIVX didnt work “out of the box” even with Libxine1 and W32codec-all added, ended up having to grab VLC client to get them to work properly
• SMB is knackered, I store all my videos and music on Brain which is a Synology Diskstation. OpenSUSE (and Ubuntu) cannot seem to access the files from SMB shares properly so all videos need copied down to local drives to view
• ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Arch) does not like SPDIF and cannot output through it, yet OpenSUSE picks it up and can through sound testing. can you guess what every piece of software uses? (clue: not spdif)

But those are still quite minor problems and can be worked round either by running one lower res (1600×1200) or copying files down. Im sure using it more I might discover more faults if i used it a lot more.

On a side note, Crusader from Inside3d seems to be making a collection of the regulars blogs but I havnt told him about mine, lets see if his WordPress picks up this incoming link!

which reminds me, better upgrade to the latest version!