Ians Ramblings

Facebook has made moving to their new timeline view compulsary starting on the 2nd of Feb. I really dislike the linear flattening of my life into an accountable browseable format so I left the site this morning. It is a bit of a shame because Facebook has really become a a norm, certainly with regard to organising events and keeping in touch with old friends.

Though once I left, I started to realise that any site that makes you feel any guilt for leaving and also takes up a lot of your time is more of an addiction and they want it that way. The data collected will eventually become a finger print or analysis of your life, extremely valuable and marketable information which will be no doubt be available to marketing companies for many many years to come.

I don’t think I want to allow that kind of analysis of my life, or to try and condense it into a tedious linear timeline that attempts to sum me up. I especially dislike how it makes it easier for future employers, friends, partners to sift back through your history and believe they understand you.

Some of the negative sides to FB Timeline
5 things to watch out for with facebook timeline

Ah well the problems with my new Honda are starting to show, it is not happy putting down power at over 5k RPM. There is a slight oil leak, the rear light comes on when it’s steering is locked, the centre stand is damaged, the rubber boot from the airbox to one carb is split, the air filter needs changing and the carbs need cleaning.

Unfortunately all that needs to be addressed before I can start with the small modifications I had in mind to give it that cafe racer look. I hope I will be able to get it all sorted before spring comes around as I was really looking forward to being able to get out and use it daily.

Luckily I have been getting a lot of help trying to understand the issues from the sohc 4 forum and also watching some videos on this youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/mrmaxstorey?feature=watch. Also luckily David Silver’s is there for the parts as a lot of garages are too bone idle to do any kind of work these days they just want the simple new bikes that just need an oil, filter and plugs change in once a decade.

Tomorrow, this little site will shutdown in support of the protest against http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act The list of site shutting down is quite a illustrious one: http://sopastrike.com/

I believe installing Chrome on Centos 5 was a bit of a nightmare, there are a few posts around that seem to assume the same will be true for CentOS 6, but luckily it’s not!

I am running 64 bit CentOS 6.2 with Kernel 2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64 I went to the following URL and clicked the Don’t see a window? ”click here”.

http://www.google.de/chrome/

Once the rpm was downloaded, I su’d to root and ran rpm -i google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm and that was it, it appeared in the internet section of the menu system and works as expected.

Had a great day today, picked up my cheeky lil Honda 550F Supersport. It was a good drive back though brakes have certainly come on a long way in the last 33 years I can tell you, though in fairness they weren’t that much worse than my ’99 Sachs roadster that I had about 7 years ago. It was fun and smooth though, rather relaxing though plebs in Audis still race up behind .. ah well the new chav badge, used to be Subaru.

I have been looking at Cafe racers, in particular those built from classic Hondas for about a year now but also looking through sites trying to find one that could be reliable for almost daily usage or also for doing trips abroad or camping trips / biking events even.

I kept looking at the CB750s initially because so many cafe projects seem to use the CB750 as a base, then I started to see a few CB550 super sports, there were less of them but they were lighter, air cooled and less complex mechanically.

The urge to get a 550 certainly grew when I saw results like this: -

Apart from the seat it’s exactly the look I hope to be going for, quite minor rather cosmetic tweaks only for the time being. I want a slightly more practical seat, that can still accommodate a pillion but still with a cafe racer rounded look, probably all covered rather than with a fibreglass tail.

So it basically begins tomorrow really, I need to remove the main centre stand as it has some damage to it which prevents it working, hopefully that will go well and I will start taking pictures of it as I go along.

If anyone else is looking to do the same kind of thing I found a few great websites on which is everything anyone would want to know about Honda SOHC bikes and cafe racers.

http://forums.sohc4.net/ (Defacto standard in sohc 4 forums)

http://caferacer.forumotion.co (Cafe racer specific forum)

http://jonrwilson.com/CB550/ (one example build from a very rough base)

http://www.bikeexif.com/?s=cafe&sortby=newest (Ideas and inspiration)

I also found this useful link to whole range of manuals: -

http://forums.sohc4.net/index.php?topic=17788.0

Well, seems like it’s been donkeys ages since I put anything personal on here, always some kind of geek post about Linux or thermostats if you please!

I had a great Christmas back home in the countryside visiting my Mum and Dad and then later my Grandparents. Was lovely to be back home especially with my sister visiting and her chap and the cheeky dogs.

Now just starting to work my way through Skyrim on the PS3 one of my plethora of presents hehe, still spoiled even though I am 30! I like the game, though I can be less evil in this than I could be in Oblivion, maybe thats a good thing

Since being back have been nice and chilled, playing games, watching great films like ‘Closer to the edge’ and getting out on the mountain bike in the freezing weather, as a friend of mine says ‘I won’t hear bleak!’.

Well back to the joys of work tomorrow, I wonder how many emails I will have, I am guessing literally hundreds because every server this side of Watford will be sending me mails to say the their temperature has been going up and down!

I had a little flashing battery icon appear on my wireless thermostat the other day and I tried to find the manual online for it, because I was a bit lazy and didn’t want to find the pdf I knew I had from when I first moved in. It turns out getting hold of the manual is a right pain so I thought I would put it on here for others.

Thermostat Manual

I had a brilliant time over in Thailand earlier this month. It certainly was a lot warmer than chilly rainy old England that’s for sure. I started off near Bangkok where my friend Gai lives, and also her friends Andrew and Yu and their cute kids. I stayed there a  day acclimatising to the weather which was roasting, then we headed on up to Chiang Mai by plane.

Was a nice flight up there, luckily we booked seats at the front where there was enough leg room for lanky old me! The space was quite Thai friendly for the rest of them. When we arrived we took a taxi quite far out into the hills to our very relaxed pretty little hotel. I took a lot of photos there because it was gorgeous.

Had an amazing time in Chiang Mai, visiting the elephants riding them through the river, and going on rafts and seeing some lovely butterflies. Not to mention visiting the Karen people in their village which was great they are really sweet people.

We then headed on using the bus, to Pai which was lovely. At first it seemed a bit daunting because it was so hectic with back packers and lots of pushing and very hot. Once we got to our nice stilted riverside house it was great and could take in the lovely scenery around the area. We also hired a motorbike which I have a pic of in here to explore the area further, finding temples and waterfalls it was great.

After the rather scary bus journey to get there we decided to get back to Chiang Mai by taxi, and had a brilliant time exploring the older temples around the city, before flying back to Bangkok.

From Bangkok we travelled by Ferry to Ko Sichang which is a gorgeous little island not far from where Gai lives, really picturesque especially at sunset so I have included quite a few photos from there too. We had a little scooter to get around on we nicknamed ‘Alfred’. There were some very pretty old buildings from the time of King Rama V and so many huge tropical butterflies.

[Show as slideshow]

123►

I didn’t find a great deal of information about how to run memcached across multiple servers and have them treated as one pool. Most of the examples just seem to show the installation and running of a single server instance or multiple instances on the same server running on different ports.

Far more useful in my opinion is running memcached on a number of servers in a web cluster. Now the install is as simple as “yum install memcached”. The following will start the server as a daemon on each of the machines in the cluster: -

memcached -d -p 11211 -u nobody -c 1024 -m 1024

This starts the service on port 11211 and is set to use 1gb of RAM.

Now in your code, when you instantiate your memcached object, you can pass an array of servers, this is the pool. The following is an example in Perl.

use Cache::Memcached;

  $memd = new Cache::Memcached {
    'servers' => [ "10.0.0.15:11211", "10.0.0.15:11212", "/var/sock/memcached",
                   "10.0.0.17:11211", [ "10.0.0.17:11211", 3 ] ],
    'debug' => 0,
    'compress_threshold' => 10_000,
  };
  $memd->set_servers($array_ref);
  $memd->set_compress_threshold(10_000);
  $memd->enable_compress(0);

If you want to install skype on 64 bit CentOS 6 follow these instructions: -

yum install glibc.i686 alsa-lib.i686 libXv.i686 \
  libXScrnSaver.i686 libSM.i686 libXi.i686 libXrender.i686 \
  libXrandr.i686 freetype.i686 fontconfig.i686 zlib.i686 \
  glib2.i686 libstdc++.i686

Install to /opt (change location as required)

cd /tmp
wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-static
cd /opt
tar xjvf /tmp/skype_static-2.2.0.35.tar.bz2
ln -s skype_static-2.2.0.35 skype

Change the version to match the one that was downloaded. Then create the following symbolic links.

ln -s /opt/skype /usr/share/skype
ln -s /opt/skype/skype /usr/bin/skype

For more information please read the CentOS help page.

To install on CentOS 5 follow the above but use the following tarball and substitute it’s name into the instructions: -

http://download.skype.com/linux/skype_static-2.1.0.47.tar.bz2