Ying Tong Iddle I Po

God bless iproute. Just been installing some QoS stuff on the gateway machine here in the house. It would appear that a couple of housemates are bittorrent-ing which, in itself, isn’t a problem but it does tend to kill the latency and, for established connections, the throughput (we were previously prioritising SYN/ACK stuff). Now after logging into various machines on the network and by pretending to do various things on all of them I think I’ve tweaked it properly, ssh, DNS and a selection of SYN/ACK stuff gets priority in terms of minimum delay and web (80/443) gets priority in terms of throughput. Overall this seems to work and, coupled with the transparent compression I’ve got setup between here and the other end of our ADSL line, the ADSLguide.org.uk speed test now reports us as having a 1200kbps connection (we nominally have a 1Mbit one and this was with people torrenting). Yum.

OK, finally got through to Apple after listening to every song Oasis ever recorded. It appears that ’shipped’ doesn’t necessarily mean shipped to me. Silly Richard. Instead it means its left Shanghai (!) on its way to Ireland. Once dispatched from Ireland the tracking number I have should work (aledgedly). I wonder what the order details page will say once it has been shipped to me. On the upside it should take a week and a couple of days (being the average time) so it may even arrive by Tuesday [ever the optimist, eh]. Of course the order tracking page doesn’t say anything like that, it only has a big blank nothing.

I’m now almost a week into the dreaded Apple delivery blackhole. My iPod was aledgedly shipped on Saturday but the tracking number they have, of course, doesn’t work. I’m now attempting to phone Apple for a correct number (this has worked before). Unfortunately there appears to be one person manning the phones and so I’m forced to listen to easy-on-the-ear Irish pop until someone answers. I’m not holding out much hope of getting it in time for the weekend.

And now adding a post to my journal fires off a magic email and mirrors it to LJ. How I love technology. I’ll stop spamming your friends page now (honest).

I’ve decided to attempt to unify my journal and LiveJournal into one glorious whole. The first stage of this is to get post-by-email working with LJ which, if you are seeing this, is now working. This isn’t by way of having a paid account though. I’m far too stingy for that. Instead its via the wonders of Perl + Exim + niceness of LJ people to provide a web-services API.

OK, well I am now officially 24. I’m old (by some standards) and just ceasing to be young (by others). If anyone feels like celebrating my birthday with me I shall be in the Carlton for dinner from about 7:30 tonight (Tuesday). Probably with as many people as I can rope in via IRC channels tomorrow (which is technically today).

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Hi, I’m Rich, I’m a geek and my girlfriend () calls me a big gay bastard :).

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