Mark J Cox

mark :: blog :: cat5

25 Dec 2001: house

Moving in on Friday, finally. Not everything is 100% finished, but I spent a couple of hours wiring in the patch panel and a couple of hours working out which socket was which. Note: if you ask your builders to install CAT5 for you remember to also ask them to label the ends. I kind of assumed they'd do that. I also made the incorred assumption that when the spec said "aerial points in every room" it meant I got an aerial. No, I get a whole load of cables in the loft ready for an aerial and distribution amplifier to be installed. I'm finding it really hard to find everything I want for the new house; I want some X10 light switches (fairly easy to find except I need one to control 500W and they look cheap and tacky in white plastic), a couple of sets of motorised curtains (harder to find, impossible if you want to do >2.5m lengths), automated heating control (found a couple, nothing perfect)

31 Aug 2001: Sheets of Style

Spent half a day debugging XSL stylesheets that worked fine with libxml/libxslt but didn't work at all in Microsoft IE. Turns out we had some errors in the XSL that libxslt didn't care about. The outcome is if you're using IE6 try this link:

http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/01-08-31.xml

It really will load the XML for the issue, load the stylesheets and the navigation bar, then parse them to create the HTML output. Do "view source" if you don't believe me!

Now that my builder has run CAT-5 through my new house (yeah, I have wireless but I want to run secure links and s- video over CAT-5) I wish I'd got them to run all the lighting cables separately too so I could X10 them without having to have the horrible UK X10 replacement lightswitches.

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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