money, money, money...

Well, I can't live in Switzerland and not make some comment on financial matters. Anyway, emptying out my pockets this evening I looked at the pile of francs which included ones from 1965 to 2008. As much as I like the new british designs we just don't have this sense of continuum in the UK - decimalisation (hey, I've never faffed with these old systems), then the shrinking of the 10p etc. I just about remember pound notes (non scottish) but thats it. Is change always a good thing?

TZ=Europe/Zurich

OK - So I've now been here (.ch) for a week. What's it like so far? well, cold. Snow on the ground all week at the house (900M ASL ~ somewhere between The Cobbler and Ben Lomond). Commute to work takes ~50 mins (after scraping any ice / snow off car) and is presently timed with the sun rising over the alps.

Work -- hectic. YAIM can only do so much. There's a big gap between a barebones install, getting the middleware installed and configured and being able to reliably run a test suite on machines.

Power Power Power

'Dear Santa'

Please can you get someone to injection mould a bog standard 4-way british multiplug trailing socket wotsit with a built-in IEC power inlet?

Thus by downrating to say 10A (hey, this is for geek things not space heating) we can have a simple 'travel adaptor' for all those clunky power brick things that you can simply pick up a single cable for $foreign_locality to fit. (or. more usefully, stick inside a rack to handle any transformers)

I'd do some photoshoppage (sorry, Gimpage) but my photo-fu is weak

Sniff...

Alas poor lex, I knew him well

My trusty Lex Light 500MHz fanless C3 has just died. Turned off power and its not coming back on. Sniff. Bulging capacitors on PSU part of motherboard - not looking good.

Ho Hum. Anyone got a 2.5" adapter cable for the disk?

gotta cut back...

Still hacking at the currentcost - I've at least got a small python script that plugs the data straight into sqlite these days. I also did a quick distribution curve of the wattage - still can't get it under a really cr*p 240W

I've got the power

... it's gettin' kinda heavy.


I've jumped on the latest Currentcost bandwagon with a serial cable connecting my meter to the mini-ITX box in the loft. For now I'm not doing 'proper' logging to sqlite / rrdtool as I intend to abtract this through monami - but for the first days run with some quick n dirty gnuplot work it looks OK.

Firefox3 / google / UK

When I'm roaming I'm fed up with the default google search plugin redirecting me to google.ch at cern and thus providing me with german pages.

Simple enough fix on osx - vi /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml and change

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
into
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.co.uk/search">

Tada!

Fizzicists

Y'know what worries me? I'm out in Geneva just now at CERN - sharing a flat used by the Glasgow ATLAS scientists. Supposedly a rather smart lot.

...except the batteries in the TV remote control were the wrong way round.