Someone asked me at the weekend what I thought about being a Dad. I answered at the time that I did enjoy it.

But I was thinking about it today. It's a big milestone, and it is something that I *really* do enjoy. I hope that the person I was speaking to didn't think that I was apathetic about it. I enjoy playing with my son, tipping him upside down, imitating his silly sentences and words, taking him out to look at the diggers working on the road, and buying him books. And I'm looking forward to him getting older, not least of all so that we can go out watching trains and other big machines together ;-)

Gallery2 module is hosed for some reason, probably because I ran an update on the gallery code and also drupal.

Update 25/01, I managed to fix it partially, to the point where it mostly works. There are some issues with links in the bar on the right hand side block too but I'll get to them soon.

After a couple of attempts, I managed to upgrade both this site and Liams' site to drupal-4.7cvs. The first couple of times I was having weird issues such as everything looking ok but no content. However this time it seems that the database upgrade script did it's thing mostly the right way and we've now got a site with more functionality.

Some reorganisation of the files in /files/kernel, slightly better documentation of what exactly is in there and various small updates.

Still got this dreaded problem with some train pictures being screwed up in Internet Explorer though. They look fine in Firefox, which is standards compliant in this regard, but in IE have all these ugly scroll bars which should not appear. Now if only IE handled 'object' tags as it should......

Also some minor glitches with the gallery photos, but nothing too major.

I'll continue to work on it over time to fix things up :)

Not a lot else going on in my life right now, Liams birthday today so going to Hamilton later on. Only 2 1/2 weeks till we fly out to Sydney!

Having found out on about some mails to Optus which were bouncing, I discovered that my system had been added to the SORBS Dynamic User and Host List (SORBS DUHL) along with 126 other hosts on my ISP. Attempts to get off this f**king database list were slow and painful. I submitted a support request on Saturday 19th November to the SORBS website, heard nothing back by Tuesday 22nd, then got in touch with my ISP and got them to increase the zone file TTL, and then requested delisting via the automated web form (which previously would not delist me only because my ISP had a TTL of 1440s on the reverse DNS zonefile - yes it's low but clearly not used for dynamic DNS). Fortunately my automatic delisting attempt worked and I was soon listed as an exception in the address range.

Finally after a protracted struggle going on since about August 2005, Stephen Hemminger the sky2 linux card driver author has finally figured out what it is that causes my sky2 card to work so sporadically. It seems that the linux kernel option CONFIG_PROFILING completely hoses the sky2 driver:

diff -u 2.6.15-rc1-mm1.config 2.6.15-rc2-mm1.config
# Instrumentation Support
#
-CONFIG_PROFILING=y
-CONFIG_OPROFILE=y
+# CONFIG_PROFILING is not set
# CONFIG_KPROBES is not set

The 2.6.15-rc1-mm1 release did not work, 2.6.15-rc2-mm1 works just fine.

After many months - in fact years, really, of being dormant and having nothing of real substance up online, here is my new revamped website. This has been one of those things I keep saying I will get around to, and finally have done so.

There is still a lot to do, but this is a good start. I'll be tweaking the site for a while till I get it working right and it displays properly in Internet Explorer and Firefox. As I primarily use Firefox 1.5+ I regard that as my first priority to get working properly. My HTML skills are rusty and now somewhat outdated so this is as much a learning experience as an art in itself. Perhaps something I can add to my CV when I've had more practice.