Just had a great weekend in London.

We stayed in Greenwich on Saturday night, just opposite the Royal Naval College which has to be one of the most impressive buildings in Britain.

Decided to go to the Natural History Museum because I'd read about a Giant Squid exhibition, but unfortunetly it's totally over subscribed and is only viewable as part of a guided tour. The rest of the museum was great though.

It looks like Derek, (not this Derek - another one) is putting together a really nice football blog:

http://jambosforever.net/blog.html

Every week a brain dump of what's going on at Hearts FC.

For some reason I elected to do a 4 or 5 mile leg of the Edinburgh Marathon Relay event as part of the office team.

This fits in nicely with my new years resolution of shedding a few pounds of body fat.

I ordered an Accu-Measure (tm) skinfold measurement gadget from ebay. You just follow the instructions and take a measurement of the suprallic skinfold just above the right hip.

Today I am:
Skinfold: 20mm

Which for my age equates to:
Bodyfat: 21.0% - which according to the chart is 'Average'

I intend to stick to areobic excercise only for now.

I'm playing 1hr of 5-a-side football every week and this morning I did my first run for a few years 1.5km

Since our local pool has just reopened I might try and get in for a swim tomorrow morning.

I don't really want to change my diet, which I think is pretty good, I may just reduce the portion size.

I discovered OpenWRT when I was hunting for a distro of linux that would install on my Linksys WRT54GS wireless router.

Initial install was really easy, you just browse to the Linksys admin page and upload the openwrt.bin file.

Even better all of the configuration you had on the Linksys is retained on NVRAM (Non Volatile RAM), so when the router reboots for the first time, it is configured exactly as you had it before!

So a few tweaks here and there and I was quite happy with the results, I even started looking at some customisations such as running a webcam off the USB port - USB is normally only for a PC to be networked to the router. I was also thinking about the possibilties of using it as a USB print server. This has to be the coolest customisation though:
http://yasha.okshtein.net/wrt54g/pics2.html


... a buggy controlled by the router - a mobile wireless range expander :-)

Unfortunatly I could not get the router to forward external requests to my web/mail/ssh server. I followed the DMZ Howto and raised a question, however no solution was found. I tried for a week (web and email down which I hate) but no joy.

In the end I had to put the Linksys software back on, but the changes I had made (trying to get the DMZ working in OpenWRT) had broken the DMZ functionality totally. This does warrant further investigation, however I don't have the time right now. Not with my site and email down anyway.

Smoothwall is back...
So with the DMZ broken on the router, I dug out and old Pentium 120MHz stuck 3 network cards and a 240Meg HDD and then installed SmoothWall Express 3.0 Alpha "Grizzly"
There is a known problem and I had already downloaded the fix.
40 mins later and traffic was being directed through the smoothwall to the webserver machine.

As for the Linksys...
I don't need DMZ functionality now, the smoothie will handle this. I'm going to stick OpenWRT back on it and configure it as a wireless range expander. Perhaps I'll plug some speakers into it and use it for streaming audio.

It's really nice to see some activity on the smoothwall project which has remained dormant for ages. I prefer smoothwalls idea of a DMZ, the machines in the DMZ cannot see the green network, whereas the LinksysOS kind of makes one machine visible to the internet. I don't like this because should my webserver become compromised - my whole network is visible to the hacker.

I spent the last few Thursdays doing a St. Andrews Ambulence service first aid course. It was a great course and a brush up for me since I haven't done any first aid for a little while.

On the last day Dave and I were discussing how first aiders seem to attract more than thier fair share of medical problems, i.e if you're a first aider people tend to collapse near/on you more than a non first aid person. At then end of the course we were discussing requalifying in three years having (hopefully) only had to put the odd plaster on n that period.

Not so...

This morning (less than 24 hours since qualifying) Dave stuck his head round our office door and said "I need you right now" - to which I replied "Yeah right". But sure enough Dave got his first "more than a plaster" incident this morning :-)

I will be avoiding him for a while - he's obviously unlucky ;-)