I've finally uploaded a few pictures to our website.

See :

• Rowan on his tummy
• Our new office
• Rachel's birthday cake (cake-pod anyone?)
• Emily's photos of us camping near Bromyard

Today, we moved to a nicer/bigger/better office within The Business Centre. This was prompted by a "Which would you prefer - a better office or a pay rise?" question to the minions, who all responded with "Better office". It's probably an understatement to say we were cramped in our previous one, but it was relatively cheap.

So - the good news (?) is that the employees now have a window to look out of - although the view is not really something to write home about - it is far better than no view.

As all the stuff I seem to want to write about these days really doesn't fit with the style of this site, so I've got a new blog for all my mummy thoughts.

If you're interested in those things, read Muddling Through Motherhood. It's still a work in progress, needs some static pages and a proper design, but I'm working on it.

Hopefully nothing else is going to die on me this week, but yesterday my bicycle suffered a fatal injury. I knew the frame was cracked in one place, and was about to take it to A&E (bike shop) but it beat me to it.

See : here for the gory pictures

When I did take it to the bike shop this morning, I discovered it had another crack in the seat stem... so in total - 3 defects on one frame. Nice.

Yesterday (17th of May 2008), Cassie (the dog) died. She signed off peacefully on a campsite near Bromyard (Herefordshire) after a sudden unknown illness that started in the morning. She was subsequently buried under a blooming damsen tree on my mother's farm.

She'll be best remembered for her ability to :

• bite unsuspecting individuals (Alex) and family members (Emily),
• producing some horrible smells,
• obediance,
• loyalty
• and a night time trouble making streak (bin emptying and weeing on the fridge/freezer!)

Today, I was giving a one-on-one PHP training course covering databases (we were trying to get mssql to work with PHP on Windows, but various factors seemed to conspire against us - possibly permissions related, as it seemed to refuse to allow us to select from a table that fricking well did exist.). Anyway, the amusing story was.....

This year, again I entered the Bromsgrove LRF charity fun run, and despite the horrible temperature, managed to finish 26th with a time of 44 minutes and a few seconds.

Last year, I did it in nearly the same time - although it was somewhat cooler and I hadn't been off-colour for the preceeding week.

On Sunday, I did my 5th Dyfi Enduro (at least, I think it's my 5th). As always, I had a great time, and pretty much knackered myself - which is to be expected. Oddly I reached the half way point and felt quite perky, so decided I'd better push myself harder in the second half. Thankfully I completed it, and now have one more mug to add to my collection :-)

Not wanting to complain, but I don't understand customers. Back in December, they seemed quite scarce - almost endangered. Now, they're everywhere. Perhaps January was "breeding season" or something.

I keep expecting everything to go really quiet, what with this "credit crunch" lark, but seemingly not. I'm not complaining.

Introduction

Reinstalling many machines with essentially the same content, is a time consuming process... here's how you can clone Linux machines...

This page details how to take an image of/clone a Linux system to use for restorating or wide scale rapid deployment, simplar to how utilities like Ghost work.

This document outlines how to use 'dd' or 'tar' to take a sytem image.