Mr N

At the boot: prompt, enter:

boot: linux ide2=0x180,0x386

Otherwise the cdrom will not be recognized by the rescue kernel.

Well this year FrightFest, it looks like the scheduling fairies have been listening. There are several nice long gaps on both days. There's an hour early Friday dinner time and on Saturday there's a choice of 2 dinner time slots.

It's a lot better than last year but there is still room for improvement. The Saturday's gaps could have been shifted around to give an hour after the first film. Most people have had breakfast so by the time 12:40 rolls around everyone is starving. You could then do 20 minute gaps between the afternoon films, most people just stretch their legs, go for a pee and have a fag. That would condense the afternoon and allow for a slightly bigger gap in the evening for a proper dinner somewhere non-fast-foodie.

21:00 - 22:58 (98m / 1h 38m) Ghost Stories

22m

23:20 - 00:52 (92m / 1h 32m) UK Première - The Lodgers

13:30 - 15:16 (106m / 1h 46m) UK Première - The Wanderers: Quest Of The Demon Hunter

34m

15:50 - 17:19 (89m / 1h 29m) World Première - Attack Of The Bat Monsters

1 h 11m

18:30 - 20:10 (100m / 1h 40m) UK Première - The Ravenous / Les Affamés

35m

20:45 - 22:33 (108m / 1h 48m) UK Première - Cold Skin

42m

23:15 - 01:01 (106m / 1h 46m) European Première - Primal Rage

11:00 - 12:38 (98m / 1h 38m) UK Première - The Blacksmith And The Devil / Errementari

37m

13:15 - 14:42 (87m / 1h 27m) European Première - Pyewacket

33m

15:15 - 16:53 (98m / 1h 38m) UK Première - Friendly Beast / O Animal Cordial

1h 37m

18:30 - 19:59 (99m / 1h 29m) UK Première - Secret Santa

1h 6m

21:05 - 22:28 (83m / 1h 23m) UK Première - Tigers Are Not Afraid / Vuelven

32m

23:00 - 00:23 (83m / 1h 23m) European Première - Sixty Minutes To Midnight

Over the last year I've noticed a general decline in my Windows 10 experience. It just seems to get worse and worse. I noticed it first when it constantly ignored its settings and installed all manner of crap in the background and rebooted when ever it felt like; usually when I had just spend 2 hours setting up 3 virtual servers blar blar.

I've also noticed that my hardware suddenly seems to work or not work. Currently my external USB devices seem to randomly work depending on which socket they are plugged into!

I was thinking, only yesterday that I was tired of all the "that's because's" you have to know in order to keep a windows installation going. Maybe I've become spoiled by the MacBook Pro I bought a few years ago that I've become jaded but I've always had a horses for courses attitude to these things so I don't think it's that.

Earlier in the week, Virgin Media decided to switch off my internet connection for 30 minutes without warning which took out the router, which in turn took out the house network which in turn took out the network cards in my PC which threw Windows 10 into a total tail spin. It then refused to reconnect to the house network, I just could not get the wireless network card to work. It took about 4 reboots and about 3 hours to get it to work again. So all the time I had set aside to work on other things was totally wasted by trying to persuade Windows 10 to do that thing it was perfectly happy doing last week.

I'm an experienced man in these matters and so it can't be a coincidence. So a quick search on Google and top of this list was this very interesting article that rang a lot of bells: Why Windows 10 Sucks.

If you have the time, it is well worth a read. Some sections are technical but if you are not technically minded you can skip over those sections as there is plenty of meat around their attitude toward civil liberties and stance on privacy.

The idea that the operating system was a moving target went a long way to account for the general instabilities. I particularly like the fact that Windows 10 turns your PC into a torrent server to share windows 10 dates to other people while you are not looking! Or that it can read and send your files, most of all for me it dictates which hardware it supports removing drivers whenever it feels like, not to mention all the adverts that I now have to pay to remove.

Well I have had enough, life is too short. I used Ubuntu on the desktop while I worked with Nominet and that was pretty good, nice and quick too! It's downloading at the moment, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Ironically, I can't get my external USB drive working in order to do the backup before reinstalling :(

I wanted to deny the use of MDM to everyone who wasn't admin. I was expecting to be able to set up a deny rule then allow access to it for some users but it doesn't seem to work like this.

The basic principle is deny everything then allow you to create permissions (or roles) specifying the routes you want to allow.

After installing mdm add the following to your main.php:

return [
	'components' => [
		'authManager' => [
			'class' => 'yii\rbac\DbManager',
			'defaultRoles' => [
				'guest'
			]
		],
	],
	'modules' => [
		'mdm' => [
			'class' => 'mdm\admin\Module'
		],
	],
	'as access' => [
		'class' => 'mdm\admin\components\AccessControl',
		'allowActions' => [
            '*'
		]
	],
];

This will allow access to every page as though the MDM module was not installed.

Next we have to create a route rule for every controller or module. On the management page go to the "Routes" section. Look down the list and add all the top level routes i.e. from the list /a/b/c, /a/b/*, /a/* choose /a/*. One of the will be /mdm/* (if that is what you have called the MDM module when you installed it).

From the management page go to the "Roles" section and click "Create". Enter "guest" as the name and for the description you can add "Default role assigned to all users". Finish by clicking create. You are presented with the ability to then add allow routes to your role. Highlight all the routes that your guest is allowed to use and click the ">>" button to move them over into the allowed section.

If you are being all proper like, then you would create a permission called guest_routes, assign all the routes to the permission, then assign the permission to the newly created "guest" role.

Back to the management page and click "Permissions" and then "Create". For name enter "admin_routes" and for the description "Routes allowed to administrators". After clicking "Create" you are taken to the screen allowing you to add all the routes that this permission allows the user to use.

Now go back to the management page and add the permission to what ever makes sense for you. I have a role called "Super User" which is assigned to me, so all I have to do is add "admin_routes" permission to the "Super User" role.

The final step is to tighten up the front access rules to deny all. Make the following change to your main.php.

return [
	'as access' => [
		'class' => 'mdm\admin\components\AccessControl',
		'allowActions' => [
		]
	],
];

As far as I could work out, there's no deny rule. It works by denying everything and only allowing the things you specify. It would be nice to have a denyActions that allowed you to specify a route to automatically deny then set up a permission to allow access. It would certain be a lot less work in this case particularly as I will have to keep updating it as I add controllers and modules.

Recently had a problem with Yii2's migrate when trying to connect to a local database.

[root@example.com yii-application]# ./yii migrate
Yii Migration Tool (based on Yii v2.0.11.2)

Error: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known

Searched a lot on the web and everything pointed to a recent system update. I'd just done one and was worried that it'd broken something. As it turned out it was completely unrelated. I had configured the database connection settings in the common folder but I had forgotten that the console section of Yii2 uses its own configuration outside if the common/frontend/backend part.

The reason for the error was simply that Yii2 could not resolve the hostname in the default configuration.

return [
	'components' => [
		'db' => [
			'class' => 'yii\db\Connection',
			'dsn' => 'mysql:host=host_address;dbname=database_name',
			'username' => 'username',
			'password' => 'password',
			'charset' => 'utf8'
		],

I added the settings from common and Hey Presto! everything works.