Germany
Stranded
I’ve been at home in England for the last couple of weeks. I was supposed to be flying back tonight but given the volcanic ash cloud that has covered Europe; my flight has been cancelled. I suppose I’ll have to take a couple of extra days of work next week but with no signs of the volcano stopping it could be far longer.
I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. There isn’t a lot you can do about a volcano erupting.
Home server problems
In the last couple of weeks my Windows Home Server has been having a few problems. Nothing major, more annoying really. I think that I have it sorted now although it seems like it has a tantrum every so often and messes up again.
I don’t think that it is a problem with the OS, more a problem with the hardware. It is all quite old now and I built it out of salvaged parts from various different computers. I can’t remember the exact specification but I think that it is a 1.8Ghz Sempron processor, socket 754 I think. 2 Gb RAM and whatever cheap graphics card I had lying around. I think it might be a Radeon 7500. I don’t remember the make of the motherboard but I think that it is a cheap one.
Firstly the USB ports are temperamental, they will just stop working for a few days and then come back. They will refuse to work with some devices then work perfectly with another. I bought a PCI USB card to try to bypass this but that is just as bad now. It likes to kill hard drives as well. Even before I installed Windows Home Server and had XP on it, the hard drives would just die on me. I am on the fourth now I think. It has had just enough life in it to clone it to a new one but with read speeds less than 10 Mb/sec.
The latest set of problems seems to be with the connector software for Home Server. It would be connected fine, then the connection would disappear and not come back. I reboot the laptop and it was fine again. Everything else for connecting to the server would work, shared files, remote desktop etc. I could even login through the connector. The indicator icon was the only thing showing a disconnection and it wouldn’t run backups. I reinstalled the connector software several times to no avail and eventually had to delete the computer from the Home Server along with all the backups and then add it again. That seems to have worked. I have no idea what caused it though.
On Sunday I lost the network connection. Since there is normally no monitor connected to it, without the network I can’t see what is wrong. I tried rebooting it and it made all the right beeps while starting up. I could hear the hard drive churning away and the light was flashing. All seemed to be going well, then it made all the startup beeps again. I decided that I should get a monitor connected to it and by the time I had unplugged it, moved it over there and plugged it in, the server had rebooted itself again. This time, I watched it boot. No problems at all, went straight to desktop (I have it login to desktop on startup since it starts some backup programs etc. that run automatically). The only thing that was wrong was a message saying that some services had failed to start. I have no idea which ones or why. There was nothing obvious in the Event Viewer and I don’t know where else to look.
The final problem is that other people have trouble connecting to it on the network. I have set guest permissions on the shares but they still get an access denied. I think that is probably more of a configuration problem on my part but then the network in the flat is quite unreliable anyway it seems. I am loath to buy new hardware since we are leaving the country in the summer anyway. The ADSL modem/routers won’t work in the UK and they will all have European sockets anyway.
It’s not really a fault but I am running out of hard drive space. I would ideally like enough to be able to have folder duplication as well but I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon. I have it enabled on a couple of folders of irreplaceable data such as my photo collection but that is it. I haven’t tested them recently but hopefully they have some life left in them. I know that one of them at least is getting quite old. It must be nearly 3 years by now, at least 1/2 of that it has been in constant use.
I think that it might be time to get a new server. It will have to wait until the summer though when I am back in England. Hopefully it will last that long anyway.
Back in Germany
On Saturday we got back to our flat in sunny Munich. The weather reports I have seen were vastly overrated. At best, it is the same as we are getting in Britain. There is some snow, it’s cold but nothing overly extreme about it. Seems that it has been a lot worse further north though.
I would add a photograph of the snow here but I don’t have one so I’ll add one of it from before we left a month ago. It doesn’t look a lot different now.
I’m back at work today. There wasn’t really much happened while I was gone but then most other people were off as well. I made a release just before I left, was about the last thing I did on the last day. Although I rushed it out to fix a lot of bugs that people were struggling with I was dreading that it might have made loads more and I would be inundated with emails when I got back but no, there a couple of minor things but that is it. On the whole, it seems that everything works.
Snow
So we’ve had a little bit of snow here in Britain over the last week. It seems that it has caused the entire country to grind to a halt. We aren’t fortunate enough to live on a road that the council deems important enough to grit. I can’t blame them for it though since there are probably less than 200 people living past the point in the village that they do grit too.
Living at the bottom of a hill doesn’t help, it can sometimes be a challenge to get up it and since the bottom is dead-end then it doesn’t help matters for getting out. Still, we seem to have managed it. I’m going back to Munich on Saturday to start work again on Monday and I don’t see there being any problems over there with the snow even though they have undoubtedly had more, but they are used to it.
Below are a few photos from around the house. The snow is about 2” deep. We keep having snow showers occasionally but nothing major. We seem to be in a bit of a black spot here for weather and miss out on all of it, whatever it is. It is never as cold, warm, wet or windy as the surrounding area. Go 10 miles in any direction and there is a foot or more of snow.
I hope that the airport is open on Saturday, I don’t really fancy being stuck in the airport for a few hours waiting for my flight because the runway has been closed. It is quite late in the afternoon so it may be the following morning before we go if it is delayed.
Despite all this, the weather in Munich looks to be much worse. It is colder and has more snow than here.
Home tomorrow
It’s been quite a while since I last posted on here, but then I haven’t really had anything to write about. Following up from my last post on Windows 7 I am still using it and haven’t had any problems with it so far. I have installed Power Pack 3 on my Windows Home Server now and this had improved Windows 7 support, I can now add shared folders to my libraries without having to make them available offline. It has also fixed a few issues with running backups.
Today is my last day of work before Christmas. Tomorrow I will be flying back to England and leaving the cold and snow behind me until after the new year. It has been snowing this afternoon and is forecast to continue long all weekend. I have been quite busy for a while now at work, we recently made a beta release of my program and so I have been fixing bugs and getting it ready for the final release. There are so many different configurations and environments that it runs in there was no way that I could test them all prior to a release. Just this week I have fixed over a dozen bugs and added a couple of new features.
While at home I may start to look at my FYP properly and start to do some research. I have considering getting myself an e-reader for Christmas as this will help with all the reading I plan to do. I am currently torn between writing it in C# or C++. I have already done a lot of the simple reusable code in C++ for previous assignments so I would be tempted to use that and build on it rather than rewriting it all in C#. It would make it easier to use OpenGL as well rather than having to rely on a third party library. I have plenty of time to decide anyway.
I have downloaded Windows Live Writer, I heard about it yesterday and thought that I would try it out. I’m writing this with it now. It seems to be quite good. It recognises that this is a WordPress blog and downloaded my theme so that I can edit it in a window that looks like it will when it is on the site. It isn’t perfect but close enough.
Oktoberfest
We went to Oktoberfest last night. We didn’t end up staying long though, we took a few photos, there are also a couple of around Munich since we went walking after leaving the festival.
Pay day
Tomorrow is the end of our sixth week at Eurocopter and our first pay day. This will be good because we have been living on a tight budget for the last few weeks, we were given an advance last month but that barely covered the rent so this month we will have some money left over. We might actually be able to go out for a drink.
As a result of this, I haven’t really done anything since my last post. I have spent the weekends in, watching TV. Boring I know, but free. I did have the media server and my Xbox shipped over last week. I installed Windows Home Server on it, upgrading from XP. I have to say that it is a really good operating system. It was Tom who recommended I get it as he has been using one for some time. The storage pool is a great idea and works really well. It is very easy to add new hard drives as space runs out or old ones die and then to remove the older ones from the pool. It is all managed for you, you just make new shared folders, set the permissions and WHS handles the rest. A useful feature is also folder duplication. This can be enabled on each share individually and ensures that everything in it is always on at least 2 separate drives in case of failure.
I was thinking about my FYP yesterday, while it might be a bit early to start anything properly, I am thinking of a few ideas for what I want to do. My problem is that I am not sure what is expected. I don’t want to do something massively over the top that takes a long time and then doesn’t work properly because it was too ambitious. On the other I don’t want to go too small and lose marks because it wasn’t ambitious enough. I was thinking about using some kind of version control though, to protect me from myself more that anything. I have lost count of the number of times I have done something, then changed my mind and deleted it all, then changed my mind again but it is too late. I also have several copies of some programs where I have changed my mind about what I was going to do, made a backup of it and worked on. The comes the problem of maintaining 2 copies of the same program. A few months down the line, I come back to it and have no clue what I was doing or why there is 2 copies of the same program, what the differences are etc. I am really my own worst enemy. As to which version control system to use, I am learning towards Subversion, I have looked at several different ones and it seems like it will do everything while be easy to use. TortoiseSVN should help there. Coupled with my new WHS server, I can store the repositories on there and enable folder duplication.
All this however, will have to wait, because if my wages do clear tomorrow I should think this weekend will be spent in a Bier Garten.
1 month
We will have been here in Munich for one month tomorrow and are in the middle of our fourth week of work. Still haven’t had much opportunity to go out and enjoy Munich as funds are a little short. We are still waiting on being paid. It should have been the day after my last post but it seems they didn’t get our details in time and so we got nothing. We managed to get an advance on our salary but that barely covered this month’s rent so now we have to get by until the end of the month.
Two Saturdays ago we went to Feldmoching See to the north-west of Munich, we took a barbecue and enjoyed the weather. This map shows where it is in relation to the city, the centre starts just south of Olympiapark. We had a great day although I didn’t think to take my camera so no pictures of it.
Feldmoching See
This Saturday was Michael’s birthday, he and some other’s from work went back to the lake but I didn’t as the weather didn’t look as good and I was feeling lazy. I didn’t really do anything all weekend other than watch TV. I will go out more once I get paid and hopefully I’ll remember to take my camera with me so I can get some pictures of it.
I haven’t really been doing much else except for working. I am going to get my Xbox 360 shipped over in the next couple of weeks so I will be able to get back to playing some games. There are a lot of new games coming out in the next few months. I will have to get them shipped over here if I want and English box but that shouldn’t be too much hassle if I buy them online. Halo 3: ODST is probably the next one to come out, according to that page on Wikipedia it is September 22nd so I will definitely have my Xbox over here before then. Modern Warfare 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 are out in November. There is probably some more that I have forgotten about as well.
I keep thinking that I should start doing something about my FYP soon but then I also think that it is nearly 2 years away before it has to be finished. I think that I will get settled into the job a bit more yet before I start, although not having any money to go out, now would be a good time to do something. I am considering using C# for development rather than C++ because it should save be a lot of time and trouble on C++ issues by having a managed environment. I thought this for my physics and AI assignment back in March but ended up having problems, I can’t remember what now but I ended up using C++ anyway. At work I am using Java, I didn’t really like Java when we did it at Uni in the first year but now that I am using it again I am finding that it is not as bad as I remember. The GUIs are still annoying, messing around with layout managers and needing to use dozens of panels everywhere to get it to look right isn’t very fun, I’m sure there must be a better way of doing it but it can’t beat the drag ‘n’ drop controls in Visual Studio for C#.
Munich
We’ve been here for just over 2 weeks now and things are going well. We have had no Internet up until today but besides that it hasn’t been too bad. The language barrier can be awkward at times but a lot of people speak English and I am starting to pick up odd bits of German.
Getting an Internet connection has been a nightmare though. We went into the store to sign up 2 weeks ago yesterday and were told that it would take about a week. Not a problem we thought, anyway the paper work starts to arrive (all in German) and it seemed that we wouldn’t be activated until the 28th, 2 weeks after we first went in. We discovered that Burger King has free wi-fi for customers so we went there a few times and then found out there was an Internet cafe across the street so have also been there. So then the router arrives, we set it up hoping maybe we were activated early but no joy. So the 28th came and went, still no connection. Seems there is a fault that won’t be fixed until next Tuesday so in the meantime we have bought a mobile data stick from Vodafone. €30 for the stick and €10 for 7 days connection. €40 for a week of Internet might seem like a lot but we may decide the scrap Telekom and keep it because it is twice the speed of the DSL line we should have by now.
The weather here only really has 3 states. We have seen 2 of them so far, will be a few months for the third. There is endless blue skies, 30C+. And torrential rain. There isn’t really any middle ground on them for long, we have gone from 1 to the other and back again in about an hour. The third is 3 feet of snow but that is 5-6 months away yet. Fortunately a lot more places have air conditioning here so inside it isn’t too bad. Even when it is raining it is still warm.
Mid way through my second week of work at Eurocopter, I’m finding the work to be good, I would like to move onto some different areas throughout the year so I hope that will be possible. Flexi time is a great invention, we can go in and leave whenever we want as long as we get the hours in at some point. I am trying to build up some now so I can get a few extra days off. Or have a lie in once in a while. German laws prevent us from doing more than 10 hours a day though and we have to do 8, but if we keep it up we get an extra day off every 4 days so it only takes a month to get a week off. This does mean getting up early though every day. We are usually trying to get in on the first bus which means leaving the flat at 5:40am to get to work for 6:25am the buses don’t run as often at that time of day so we have a 15 minute wait at the station. We can get the second bus and leave here at 6:10 to get there for 6:40 like we did this morning. This also means if you don’t feel like working you can go home at 3.
We haven’t really had much time to go and explore Munich, although now we have travel passes they wouldn’t give us circle 1 so we still have to pay to go to the centre which is annoying. I hope that we will also get some time this year to get out of Munich and go to the surrounding areas. Maybe go to the Alps one day or something. If we do, I’ll be sure to get some photos. Before that though, here’s the view from my window.
Packed and ready to go
All packed