William Anthony Richard Godbolt
It has been rather a busy few weeks for us! As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my wife Ness and I were expecting our first child in mid July.
However, on the 12th of June, 2008, William Anthony Richard Godbolt was born. He was a few weeks early and weighed only 1.88kg (4lb 2oz), but he breathed unassisted straight away and has been feeding brilliantly. He’s already nearly 2kg, and shows no sign of stopping!
We’d like to thank all our family and friends for their help, well wishes and lent and donated baby things. William’s early arrival was such a surprise for us we were caught somewhat off-guard — so especial thanks to our parents and siblings for buying up half of Mothercare on our behalf!
William gets some early coding in.
Ness and I are absolutely over the moon, and are enjoying every moment we are spending getting to know our new son! More pictures here.
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 18:30:00 BST on 23rd June 2008.
The beginning of the end for Windows XP
On Friday last week I finally had the last straw with Windows. Under duress I had installed Service Pack 3 on my main PC to try and fix an issue I was having. It not only didn’t help the issue, but it meant my Remote Desktop stopped working. I spent quite some time trying to fathom what had gone wrong, but to no avail.
Later that day I awoke my laptop from standby and was informed that I had to reboot to install some critical updates. The dialog box gave me two options: “Reboot Now” or “Reboot Later”. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t quite understand, the “Reboot Later” option was greyed out.
Now I don’t know about you, but at the point where a computer decides it knows best about whether to suddenly shut down all your open applications and reboot, it’s time to find a new operating system. I don’t think I’m alone in this, it seems pretty fashionable to bash Microsoft at the moment, what with the cockup of the Vista launch.
For some time I’ve been humming and harring about installing Ubuntu GNU/Linux. It’s been around for ages, I know, and has been pretty well received by everyone. My existing Linux boxes (relegated to the loft) have always run Debian — and I’ve been very happy with their distribution — but I thought I’d see what all the buzz was about and install a more contemporary system. Although I had ensured my BackupPC backups of all my data were up to date, just to be paranoid I also took a VMWare snapshot of my XP machine before I hosed it completely. That took a few hours, as I was storing the data on my relatively slow file server. It was a surreal experience to power it down, and then as a test bring up a virtual equivalent on my laptop. I wouldn’t recommend running a virtual OS’s disks over Samba on a wireless network though — it took about 15 minutes to boot, and about the same to shut down, all I/O bound.
Safely backed up, I burnt the Ubuntu installer to CD and rebooted. First problem: my RAID setup.
When I built my home computer I was sure that the majority of the time spent compiling was actually waiting for I/O. To try and speed up my builds I splashed out on a couple of 10,000 RPM Raptor disks, and set them up in RAID 0 using the NVidia RAID BIOS. I’m not entirely convinced it was worth it, although I did get some pretty benchmark graphs.
The RAID turned out to be a right sticking point — it’s not supported by the
Ubuntu installer. A bit of trawling around turned up this article,
which was a great help, though a little out of date. I wish I had written
down what I actually ended up doing to get everything working as I’m sure
it would make this post a lot more useful, but it was about 3:30am that
everything fell together and I wasn’t at my most lucid. The one thing I
remember is that the installer let me mistakenly mark my /boot partition as
being swap, which didn’t stop it formatting it as ext3 and installing
everything fine, but did stop grub from installing with the very
unhelpful error message Grub Error 15 - Partition Table Invalid. So, if
you see that during grub installation, check your partitions are marked
as the correct type.
Anyway, cutting a long story short, I now have a very shiny Ubuntu installation. I’m very pleased with it so far, all the whizz-bang windowing effects aren’t annoying me (yet), and the programs installed by default seem very good. Bear in mind that although I’ve been using and hacking about with Linux for over ten years, this is the first time I’ve actually used it in a windowed environment. My idea of a Linux box is still something you see at the end of a PuTTY terminal, so I’ve got a lot to learn.
For now, I’m keeping the laptop on Windows, but the long-term plan is to move that over to Linux too, once I’ve checked Ness can still VPN into her work with it.
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 23:00:00 BST on 1st June 2008.
Two weeks of relaxing
Agia Napa beach view
I’m writing this on my mobile from a beach in Agia Napa. It’s blisteringly hot and there are only faint wisps of cotton wool clouds in the sky.
Sadly, this is our last day here. We’ve had two weeks of relaxation — our last before Baby Godbolt comes along and changes our lives forever. We’ve visited the hotel where we got married over two years ago and spent a lovely evening in its Cliffside bar. We’ve eaten out more than we ought to have, spent lazy day after lazy day on the beach and slept endlessly. It’s been fantastic!
Ness chills out in the Cliffside bar at the
Grecian Park Hotel
I’ve even had time to do a spot of hobby coding; mainly playing about with Google’s AppEngine and doing a bit of Python coding on an Amazon S3-based backup solution I’ve been thinking about. I also took some time going over some old algorithms that I perhaps should use more often. I lectured Ness on the wonders of different sorting techniques, trees and even assembly versus compiled versus interpreted code. As ever, she was patient and humoured me while I blathered on. It really does help though — the very act of explaining something to someone else is great for showing up weaknesses in one’s own understanding.
Now we’re soaking up our last few rays of sun before going back to the flat to pack. Next time we go on holiday we’ll have a baby with us!
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 14:30:00 BST on 10th May 2008.
Spooky coincidences...
I’ve just spotted a very spooky coincidence. Not only is there another Matt Godbolt about in the world, he married a Vanessa too!
Anyway, I’m off for a couple of weeks to Cyprus for the last (sane) holiday before Baby G makes his or her grand entrance. We’re really looking forward to a bit of sunshine and relaxation, and I’m looking forward to tinkering a bit on my code projects. I might even get a chance to look at the Weebox again! I’m feeling more inspired to finish after hearing about a friend’s rather interesting hardware 6502 emulator in the pub this week.
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 18:00:00 BST on 25th April 2008.
