I’ve been looking into chipping my coupé for a while now and was at first considering a superchip. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting more involved in the UK Fiat Coupé Forums and came across this post about the squadra chip which really does say how good the Squadra chip is. I’m having the coupé serviced by iceberg next Friday and really want to have him help me fit it while it’s there. I really need to get it ordered to get it in time!
Server Troubles
February 17, 2005 — osbluesI spent today in London visiting our hosting facility in Harbour Exchange to fix a machine that unexpectedly died last week. The machine in question was quite happy last week until we decided to put an extra hard disk in it (a nice big one) at which point it complained about an IDE channel error and refused to then boot from the main hard disk. Basically the new disk was installed, it complained with an IDE error, the disk was removed and then still refused to boot even though it was back to it’s previous state. The machine just says ‘Operating system not found’ after the usual BIOS stuff. I tried every combination of master/slave, primary/secondary IDE nonsense I could think of found that if either of the original disks were connected to any of the IDE connectors the BIOS would refuse to see them, however if I connected the new disk it would be seen! This is very odd, how can 2 disks suddenly stop working just because you try and install a third? It gets better too, since I thought ‘it’s OK, I’ll just rebuild the machine on the new disk and all will be OK’ and proceeded with that plan, however the machine is quite old (HP Vectra VLi8) and would only detect the 250GB disk as 65GB, strangely though Win2KPro setup would see it as 131GB!? Not wanting to ruin a new disk by formatting it at half it’s capacity (would this have hurt it?) I decided that we needed to get a replacement for the machine working and leave this one for another day. I therefore installed the relevant software on another machine to take up it’s role and will have to go down again very soon to have another look. On a slightly unrelated point, I noticed today how ridiculously overcrowded the London Underground can get. I don’t go down there much and although I know it’s busy, even the locals seemed to be complaining it was busy!
New Office
February 17, 2005 — osbluesYesterday was spent viewing and discussing new premises for the business. We have now been trading for nearly 18 months and up to now have had no ‘real’ premises. The offices we’re really nice and I’m pretty excited at the thought of having somewhere like that to call ‘ours’. We looked at a serviced office a short distance from my house in a really nice business centre which is hopefully within our budget. I was very surprised how many things were not included in the price considering it’s supposed to be serviced, I always assumed (probably wrongly) that serviced meant you got everything for one price so you knew where you were financially. Costs not included were things like electricity, water, phone line rental and silly things like use of the photocopier and such. All in all though we were impressed with the facilities and think it will give the company a more professional look and help to win new business. The office is also going to help team communication, allow us to solve problems quicker by being all together and aid knowledge sharing. Morale will also be stronger and we’ll have more of a sense of being part of a team rather than individuals working from home. All of this can only be good for our clients.
OSBlues 