It’s the end of my third week doing “It’s a Diet Thing”, photos here. Slightly higher alcohol consumption this week but I defend that on the basis that I attended a beer festival on Saturday! Check out the shit I eat at work, though. BMI is stable at around 23.5.

Continuing to photograph all (or virtually all) my calorific intake. Week 2 has been much better with both alcohol and sugar consumption reduced. Wii Fit says my BMI is ideal at 23.5.


It’s a pain trying to buy the most popular game in the world. It took an age to find but we finally have it – Wii Fit.

We bought it to help out with the “diet thing”. Having spent a few hours with it now, I can say that it’s very interesting and definitely more a workout tool than it is a game. Computer-aided exercise – what will they think of next?

Nintendo at their best. Highly recommended, if you can get one, that is :)

What a simple idea – photograph one’s calorific intake. Here’s my first week. Slightly embarrassing. I’ve already taken steps to reduce my alcohol consumption.

I completed Super Mario Galaxy this weekend, not in the purist sense of doing absolutely everything, but in the normal sense of having helped Mario to beat Bowser and rescue Princess Peach.

Awesome game. 9½ out of 10.

I have a simple task; migrate a bog-standard LAMP from a co-located physical server (bricks and mortar) to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) architecture (virtual). The physical server provides core business services so the success criteria for the migration are minimising functional distortion and minimising down-time. In other words, a virtually seamless transition.

Continue reading ‘Migrating to Amazon EC2’ »


Wow! It just can’t get any better than this. I’ve been banging on for months about how the Wii would be perfect for a scuba diving game. Well, Endless Ocean isn’t a game but I imagine it’ll be 90% of what I had in mind. Released on 9th November 2007, the same day I return to the UK, it’ll be a must buy for me!

Here are some YouTube videos and be sure to check out the Wikipedia entry.

When I got home the Wii’s disc tray was glowing blue indicating that I had mail, which is good. It turned out to be another gift mail from Nintendo. Free USB keyboard support! I immediately downloaded the system update, plugged in a USB keyboard and typed a message to my brother. Fucking joy! Worked like a charm.

Continue reading ‘Wii Update! USB Keyboard and more…’ »

Now my Ubuntu workstation, part-way upgraded to the 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” release, works almost as elegantly as my Windows machines have worked forever. My network music store now auto-mounts into my home directory when I login. Finally. I’ve been beating away at this, on and off, for bloody years. I’m just not a great sysadmin, I guess!

Method follows.

Continue reading ‘libpam-mount automounts SMB shares at login, just like Windows’ »

What could I do with this?


CREATE TABLE child (
  id BIGINT NOT NULL AUTO_NUMBER PRIMARY KEY
, parent_table VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL
, parent_id BIGINT NOT NULL
, FOREIGN KEY parent_table REFERENCES INFORMATION_SCHEMA.tables(name)
, FOREIGN KEY parent_id DEREFERENCES parent_table(id)
) ENGINE=fantasy COMMENT='Don\'t run this at home, folks!';

AND
Continue reading ‘(My)SQL Infection’ »