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Well, it’s a new year, and after much hard work, late nights feeding CD’s and DVD’s into Tomcat and downloading copious service packs and security patches from Microsoft.com – I have a new and much more stable PC to work on.

After many attempts to fix the small but irksome problems with my previous installation (Windows 2K professional) – Java applets not working properly, and disk administrator crashing the whole machine, I decided to do a fresh installation. I first installed Windows Whistler (beta of what will become Windows 2002), but that, being a beta, has problems of it’s own. Then I renamed the existing “Windows 2000 Professional” as “Windows 2000 Professional (problems)”, and proceeded with a fresh install. So I now have a triple boot system, and an apparently stable and bug free platform again. There is still a fair bit to reinstall, mostly games, but these I will fix as and when the time comes that I want to use them.

SQUECH also got a reinstall of Windows 2000 Server after a very confusing period when it seemingly just rebooted itself for no apparent reason. I initially suspected overheating, but sitting downstairs late one evening with jumper on, sipping warm coffee, it seemed that overheating was a bit far fetched. So I did a controlled reboot and trawled the event log to try and find an explanation. Nothing, everything looked perfect. So back to work mucking about with SQL Server 2000 (SQUELCH is our database server). Oops – reboot. Eventually I spotted the problem – a message box appeared after an hour or so informing the viewer that the trial period of Windows 2000 Server had expired and the system would reboot in 1 hour. I had obviously been missing these messages over the last couple of months and the poor machine had been spending its life rebooting, staying alive of two hours and then rebooting again. The fix was fairly simple – install the non trial version of Windows 2K Server. Pity they didn’t put something into the Event Log, then I could have picked it up earlier. SQUELCH, Hooligan, Python and Walrus all share a keyboard, mouse and screen via an OmniPort switch box, and normally the screen is either off, or is showing Python. SQUELCH normally just sits in the background serving the databases and not much else, apart from also holding the MP3’s on some of his 400Gb or so of disk space.

Christmas and New Year was a quietish time at the Chalmers household. Lots of over eating, over drinking, and general relaxing, watching DVD’s, listening to new CD’s and mucking about on the PC’s and with the sewing machine and overlocker. The only present still not played with is the outdoor chess set with Maggie and the girls gave me for Christmas. It kind of needs the optional extra large conservatory to be built before it really makes sense to use. I bought the girls and Maggie a Scalextric kit (Beetle Cup Challenge) for Christmas, and they we kind enough to let me have a go too. We put up a large screen (2.5mx2.5m) in the lounge just before Christmas and I have plumbed together the Datak Lan and the Chalmers Movie Entertainment System, so we can now project DVD’s on the large screen – very nice and impressive and wonderful for movies. We can now also play the 40Gb of MP3’s through the Amp and Dolby 5.1 speakers in the lounge – when we are allowed to that is. Nicky and I have reorganised the MP3’s so that stuff is now easier to find – well for us two anyway.

We had the first of the winter snows on the 28th, but sadly after a storm and heavy rain on New Years evening, the nice white snow is all gone now. The central heating has just caught up with the cold snap, and has returned the house to a more acceptable 22, after dropping below 18 as it fought against the cold seeping through windows, doors and badly insulated floors over the garage.

I have done a fair bit or work on TheChalmers.com website. Give it a look sometime, all the news is now served up from a database and spat to your browser via .asp pages. The contents page list boxes are still HTML.

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