Visited the Saatchi gallery today to see the new Middle East art exhibition. The quality was high as usual although there was not the ridiculous shock factor of multiple waxwork dead bodies like at the last collection.

My favourite piece was this large concrete building block. Looked pretty boring from a distance, but up close there were all sorts of interesting details such as cracks and window frames and wirey bits sticking out.

Other works included some excellent scribbly messes that appeared to be quite violent in nature but very satisfying. Also a huge room full of praying lumps covered in foil.

The wheelchair-bound wax work OAPs still remained downstairs. I think they must have a residency there now.

Bought an amplifier today after much research and investigation and decided to write about the general difficulty of the whole thing.

Where can you go to see hi-fi equipment?

Not long ago John Lewis sold a decent load of hi-fi equipment. Now those little listening rooms, stuffed with good equipment has been replaced with TVs and over-priced supposedly scientifically engineered home cinema systems. This is a shame since John Lewis has the right level of service to help make the rather annoying decision of whether to go with a Cyrus or an Arcam or a Marantz or some other random make that they may stock. You could always arrange to have a listening session and they usually let you listen to many different arrangements without any kind of “i am better than you” attitude that you can’t seem to escape at the little shops.

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IMGP1224, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Last year, Clarkson and I embarked on a cake making competition. Needless to say, she won, but here are our two entries: a cake version of my cardboard car made by Clarkson and the Millennium Dome/Canary Wharf at night made by me.

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A collage of file transfer hell

Today I had the pleasure of getting an 15GB image of RedHat with Oracle UCM installed up and running on one of the development boxes we have in a data centre, deep in the guts of the building. It should be a relatively easy task, only I do not have access to the data centre and so have to send files and operate it remotely. It is quite ridiculous the steps that have to be taken to get even close to getting this up and running.

To get at the image, I needed to install VMWare 1.08. I tried with the latest version 2, but it failed due to various windows server 2003 bugs. It kept saying “The System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation”. Very annoying. Despite having over 1Gb of free space, I couldn’t seem to get the installer going.

But to even get to the point of actually installing stuff I had to get files there. This is probably the single most irritating thing to sort out. Accessing machines you cannot see is laced with trouble. I even installed Apache on my local machine due to lack of ping traffic to the remote server and tried to download from mine own PC having logged in remotely. To no avail.

I installed DownThemAll download manager extension in Firefox to get an earlier version of VMWare, since their website would never let me download more than about 1MB, then spent the next 3-4 hours transferring the image over the network. Needless to say, this did not work. Multiple GB image files are unhelpful to say the least.

Once I got the images over to the server, getting VMWare to load them was pretty simple really. I just pointed it at the .vmx/.vmdk files and it started booting up. One hiccup was logging in to the system once it booted up. I tried various different things, but luckily found that both the username and password was “oracle”.

Once in there wasn’t much to look at. I will look at the installation of UCM itself another day.

Its Valentines day, and time for a strange construction for Clarkson. This time I tried to think of the things that are important to her. Tea came top, but then I already built the teacup last year, next was her Aga Little Wenlock woodburner. This seemed like an excellent thing to build, although I needed some kind of Gimmick. For example, the teacup was about 100 times the normal size and contained 100 teabags. For this project I got electricals involved.

 

IMGP2961, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

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I might be doing a course all about Qlikview later this month, so I thought I best do some research into what it is first and share my findings here.

This is an image from their website, showing just how important iliteration can be when communicating a message.

So what is Qlikview?

Looks like a way to present data, gathered from multiple sources in a series of interesting ways from which insight and analysis can then be drawn. Kind of like a super-executive dashboard generator I guess. These sort of products always frustrate me, things like Cognos, SAP etc. It is very difficult to define in a few sentences what exactly they do. No amount of searching seems to uncover that magic sentence that reveals why I should care. Read more…