I won’t lie, I like Microsoft.  I think Windows is the best all-round family of operating systems available.  And I use Internet Explorer as my default browser, even though I have Firefox and Chrome installed.

But I also run a Linux server.  It is a modest beast.  It has a Sempron processor, three hard disks around 200-500GB each, and about 1GB of RAM.  It doesn’t need much, even though it acts as a mail server, a web server, and a DNS and network file server for my home LAN.  It runs Fedora 11, which is actually quite nice.

I started using Linux with no experience, and with the help of some patience, a few good Internet resources, and good old intuition, I pretty much know what I’m doing.

About a week ago, my Internet connection started to die sporadically, at unpredictable intervals, for no apparent reason.  I traced the lack of connectivity down to the DNS server not responding to requests, and this led me to realise that the Linux box would not respond to any kind of request at all: SSH, HTTP, or even ping.

So imagine my surprise, when after a lot of investigation (and I really do mean a LOT of investigation) it turned out to be Samba, the service which handles network file shares.

I had recently updated Samba from v3.3 to v3.4 using yum, assuming it to be a bug-free release which wouldn’t break anything.  How wrong I was.  From v3.4, Samba has been changed to use a different authentication mechanism by default.  It used to use smbpasswd up to v3.3, but now uses tdbsam.

Ok, no problem really – until the upgrade from v3.3 to v3.4 changes your smb.conf without leaving an smb.conf.backup or something similar sitting next to it.  So without knowing it, your Samba installation now uses tdbsam.  Now, the problem with this is that there is a known bug whereby Windows clients become unable to authenticate and connect.

It was disappointing to have to find this out the hard way – by which I mean trawling around the web.  But still, it should be easy enough to edit smb.conf and change the authentication back to smbpasswd, right?  Wrong, because it seems the upgrade deleted the file containing the smbpasswd credentials (/var/lib/samba/private/smbpasswd).

Redhat’s Bugzilla entry explains how to convert smbpasswd account credentials to tdbsam format, so presumably you can do the reverse.  Well, technically you can – but only if the tdbsam credentials file (/var/lib/samba/private/passdb.tdb) isn’t empty!  That’s right, the upgrade failed (or didn’t even try) to convert the smbpasswd account credentials to the tdb format.

The solution is to run smbpasswd -a username for every Samba account you lost.  I’m glad I only had two.

This is why I think Linux is a long long way from being ready to take over the world.  I don’t think the Linux community appreciates how much help the average desktop user needs when they encounter problems.  This is demonstrated by the fact that Linux gives you no help at all; even the noddy ‘How do I…’ help topics in Windows destroy the assistance Linux offers.

From the very start, Linux makes it very clear you’re on your own.

While I admit that the change to Samba was publicised in the Samba release notes, I simply do not have the time to read through the release notes of, and perform impact analysis upon, every update I install.  I want to be confident that each update is the best thing for my system – much like Windows Update.

For now, I will stick with the majority of users, and keep current with Windows updates for the advantage of not having to enter the root user’s password whenever I want to do something.

There are several RAID configurations.  RAID 0 (striping) utilises two or more identical hard drives, and splits each file equally across them, yielding much faster disk performance (limited by the throughput of the disk I/O controller) as the disks read and write at the same time.  The total available storage is the sum of the individual drives’ capacity.  RAID 1 (mirrored) could be considered the opposite of striping, in that each file is written to all disks.  This effectively provides realtime backup since the content of all drives in the array is identical, with no performance cost.

I’ve only ever used RAID 0.  For a home PC, RAID 1 doesn’t offer any real benefits that cannot be achieved with a half-decent backup policy, but effectively doubles the cost of disk space if you use two disks.

The only down-side to RAID that I had found was that drivers need to be provided during the installation of Windows.  Linux is slightly better in this respect because it has native drivers for the most popular RAID controllers, usually providing basic functionality.  Windows, however, asks that you provide the drivers on installation, presumably so that you benefit from all the features that the RAID controller offers.  With Windows XP you were required to hit F6 during the installation, and provide the drivers on a floppy disk (which was a real pain, since floppy drive usage died out shortly after the discovery of fire, and RAID drivers often came on a CD anyway).  With Vista and Windows 7 the installer is slightly more intelligent.  It will recognise the presence of a RAID array, but it will still require drivers to be provided.

This is all fine; once you’re familiar with the quirks of the Windows installer it’s plain sailing.

But RAID 0 has its own special drawback, especially when you’re not expecting it.  If you take a disk from an old RAID 0 array, install it as the main disk in a PC and try to install Windows 7, you’ll have a nasty surprise.  Usually the Windows installer will acknowledge the presence of a drive, even if it can’t do anything with it.  But not with an ex-mirrorred array disk.  The Windows installer doesn’t even recognise the disk as being present.

Presumably this is related to the fact that the RAID controller had written its own form of partition information to the disk; while the Windows installer can partition and format a raw disk, or one that is already partitioned, it cannot do anything with a disk whose partition information is present but apparently corrupt.

And the icing on the cake?  You can’t repartition the disk without it being partitioned..!

The implication is that, should you wish to, you can edit a Wikipedia article such that it corroborates your argument, no matter how ridiculous.  A typical conversation which might seem to justify this belief is as follows.

Fred:  What’s that you’re pouring into that saucepan?
Dave:  Glue.
Fred:  Glue?  What are you making?
Dave:  Spaghetti Bolognese.
Fred:  That’s not made using glue!
Dave:  Yes it is, it says so on Wikipedia.

There you go.  Dave is the butt of the joke because he apparently doesn’t understand how Wikipedia works, and has foolishly taken its word as gospel.  From now until forever, each time Dave makes a factual statement in Fred’s presence, Fred will ask “does it say that on Wikipedia?” in a sarcastic and derisory tone.

However, it’s highly ironic that it’s actually Fred who doesn’t understand Wikipedia.

The basis for this is in some kind of social equilibrium; there are as many people who want to maintain and improve the accuracy of Wikipedia as there are people who would deface it.  But the former is much more rewarding than the latter; once you’ve defaced an article there’s nothing much more to do with it, but improving that article is a boundless task and thus inherently more rewarding.  This is why the vast majority of Wikipedia vandals get bored and move on, while the majority of Wikipedia editors do not get bored.

If you were to edit the Wikipedia entry for Spaghetti Bolognese and add ‘glue’ to the ingredients, it would soon be reverted to its state prior to your vandalism.  ‘Soon’ might not be within a minute, but it will be long before you are able to look back and laugh at what you did.  In addition to all the automated bots and processes which examine edits for vandalism, there is a huge number of editors who watch various articles for various reasons.  And, of course, there are normal people who read the article to learn how to cook Spaghetti Bolognese, or to find out its history, or just out of general interest – and common sense will tell them you can’t eat glue.  Between them all, they will thwart your attempt to cause people to unquestioningly cook with glue for the rest of time.

It all comes down to the simple, fundamental rule: whatever you can do, there is someone else who can do it better.  There’s a community built around Wikipedia, the members of which actively maintain various articles, recording and sharing their knowledge, expertise, common sense, and article-writing skills.  Active Wikipedia editors assume guardianship of the articles they watch, and make it their personal responsibility to maintain their accuracy and usefulness.

I know this, because it says so on Wikipedia.

Oliver in a dress

There is no point in having a dog if you can’t occassionally dress him or her up.

Ever since Oliver was a puppy, we’ve taken almost every opportunity to stick him in a t-shirt or dress him up as Santa.  Seeing as he ‘enjoys’ it so much, we have taken to dressing him up for Halloween every year.

Last year he was Frankenstein’s monster, although no photos exist–probably because I was laughing too hard–and this year he was some kind of witch (or maybe a princess) in a very pretty purple dress and matching hat.

It took a minimal amount of modification with a pair of scissors, and he did keep getting his claws caught in it at first, but at £8 from Tesco you can’t go wrong.

The problem is caused by the way the router handles traffic coming from an internal IP address and destined for the WAN (i.e. external) IP address.  In this situation it requires that the router first transfers the traffic from the internal network to the external network, and then immediately passes it back whilst applying any firewall or routing rules that are relevant to incoming external traffic.

This behaviour is called ‘NAT loopback’, and it seems the vast majority of routers built for the home market have this ability turned off, or do not have the ability at all.  It can be a big problem if you host a website and wish to access that same website using its domain name.  The domain name will resolve to the WAN IP address of your router, and any traffic headed there (such as an HTTP GET request on port 80) from the internal network will be ignored by the router.

There are a few ways to solve this, but none of them are ideal.

1. Use the server name instead of the domain name to access your website
2. Modify the list of known network hosts on each client to point your domain name straight to the server in question.
3. Run your own DNS server, using a view to return the server’s local IP address to requests for your domain name originating from your network.

Of course, the situation gets more complex if you’re also using your router to send TCP traffic on port 80 to your webserver and UDP traffic on port 8668 to a game server.

The solution is to get NAT loopback working on your router.  With some routers, such as the Touchspeed 535 as provided by Be Broadband, this feature can be enabled using a simple CLI command.  For other routers, such as the Netgear DG834G, it’s not quite so easy.

For the purposes of this post I’ll assume the internal network is on the 192.168.0.x range, the router is 192.168.0.254, and the web server is 192.168.0.1.  You will need to modify these IP addresses according to your own network setup.

The first thing to do is to enable debug mode on the router.  Simply go to http://192.168.0.254/setup.cgi?todo=debug and you’ll be rewarded with an appropriate message, “Debug Enable!”.  Nice.

Now connect to the router with ‘telnet 192.168.0.254′ to gain access to the router’s cut-down installation of Linux.  All that is required is to add one additional entry to the router’s iptables (which is a standard Linux feature; Google it or more info).  Type the following, amending any IP addresses according to the network setup:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -d 192.168.0.1 -s 192.168.0.0/24 -p tcp –dport 80 -j SNAT –to 192.168.0.254

This adds a rule to the POSTROUTING chain on the nat table which applies to all TCP traffic on port 80 (HTTP) coming from the private network and headed to the router.  The rule redirects the traffic to the server, and then processing jumps to the SNAT chain.

If your the is more than just a simple web server, such as an NTP server or mail server as well, the above step needs to be performed (changing the -p and –dport parameters accordingly) for each port and protocol combination you require.  Alternatively, those parameters could be omitted altogether, which will allow all traffic types on all ports through:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -d 192.168.0.1 -s 192.168.0.0/24 -j SNAT –to 192.168.0.254

If you do this, I recommend you run a firewall on your server, with the appropriate ports open.

There is more information in section 10 of Rusty Russell’s Linux 2.4 NAT Howto.

Unfortunately, the iptables change isn’t retained when the router restarts, so it is necessary to go through the process every time – which is a pain in the backside.  Fortunately, however, the Netgear support website has a download link for previous firmware versions, so I downgraded my router back to firmware v5.01.09 and everything worked fine again–including NAT loopback–with no iptables hack required.

Yesterday I replaced the ageing heating thermostat (a rotary-style Honeywell) with a nice shiny digital one – a Horstmann Centaurstat 7, in fact.  It has quite a sophisticated built-in programmer (more so than our existing programmer, at least) and will hopefully prevent the over-heating problem we’ve had here since we moved in.  I found that the old thermostat was calling for heat at a higher temperature than selected (3-4 degrees higher), causing someone (me) to turn the thermostat up in the morning, causing someone else (Charlie) to complain in the evening when it became too hot.

Anyway, that’s mostly irrelevant – it’s kind of worrying when the purchase of a new thermostat gets you excited!

The cable connected to the old thermostat was surface-mounted in a length of trunking, which looked pretty ugly.  It’s now buried in the wall, and if it wasn’t for the slight difference in paint, you probably wouldn’t know (although I probably would tell you).

What made me laugh was that when I removed the old thermostat, I found it had been attached to the wall with… NAILS!  In fact, two nails, each a different type.  Just in case one was the wrong type, the other would have a chance of being the right type, I guess.  I may be alone in this, but I don’t feel an electrical device should be nailed to anything!

I’ve seen it all now.  Holes drilled in the bathroom all the way through the wall into the bedroom (and then plugged with garden cane), doorsteps ‘damp-proofed’ with black bin bags (and attached with nails), electrical cables cut and left loose under floorboards, sudden 90-degree bends in buried cabling…

We still have the loft to tackle and a spare room, a dining room, a bathroom, a kitchen, a hallway, and a landing that are as-yet relatively unexplored.  I’m sure there will be more ’surprises’ for us to find.

There were no serious problems, but these failures started becoming regular.  I realised it was because I was running Fedora 9, and many packages seemed to be getting updated for the latest version of Fedora, without retaining 100% compatibility with Fedora 9.  And while Fedora 9 is not particularly old in OS terms, it’s no longer a recent version – Fedora 11 is the current release, and an alpha of Fedora 12 is currently available for download.

So I decided now was a good time to upgrade to Fedora 11.  I considered Fedora 12 Alpha, but thought I’d best stick to an RTM release since I didn’t want to spend 4 hours a day every day for a month fixing it.

And so, what I learned was: back up your personal data.

After religiously backing up all the config files for everything I was running on the server, backing up all database, all websites, and making a list of everything installed, I went ahead and performed a clean install of Fedora 11.

And then I realised I had also been using Samba to provide file storage to our Windows machines.  Not only that, but I had previously decided to move (not copy, but move) all my photos from my desktop hard drive to the Linux server.  I have no idea why I didn’t notice them when I went through my list of things to back up, but miss them I did.  And now they are no more – apart from those in the gallery, every single photo I have ever taken was exploded into ones and zeroes for ever.

Because when the Viewty first came out, people seemed to be falling over each other trying to be the first to review the phone. They hadn’t used it in anger. And boy, this phone makes me angry. When people ask me “is it a good phone?”, I struggle not to begin ranting. It is still widely available, so if I cause just one person to stop and reconsider the purchase of a Viewty, I will consider this post to be worthwhile.

The technical details, pictures, and many reviews of people singing the Viewty’s praises are everywhere. Just google it. I’m going to skip all of that rubbish, and tell you why you should have stuck with Sony Ericsson.

The interface

It’s a touch screen phone, and so has a larger-than-usual display on a phone of its size, because of the lack of hard keys on the front. There are three, in fact – Call, Delete, and Hang Up. The touch screen is slow to respond, however, and often unresponsive; this may be due to the membrane being of a more rugged design to withstand contact with keys, coins, and other pocket content, but it results in a lot of frustration.

The Viewty gives positive feedback in the form of a brief vibration when pressing any of the soft keys, which is so completely necessary to save the phone from being unusable I don’t understand why there is an option to disable the feedback altogether.

A stylus is included, and it has an interesting design. It’s a liptick-like thing, with the narrow stylus point retracting into the stubby grip given enough pressure. It doesn’t attach to the phone any any way other than looping the stylus cord through an attachment on the corner of the phone – a traditional long narrow stylus, with a corresponding slot in the body of the phone, would have been much more user friendly. Not wanting to have to carry the lipstick-stylus around with me, I’ve always used my finger to use the phone – maybe contributing to my finding it difficult to use.

My HP iPaq, of much older design than the Viewty, has a touch screen which far outclasses that of the Viewty, and doesn’t even give any kind of positive feedback. And its stylus is shorter than the Viewty is long — it would easily fit inside the Viewty case, if there was a slot for it — so I really fail to see why the lipstick stylus was ever considered a good idea.

Writing a text message is average. Unlike phones with hard keys there’s no physical boundary between the different soft keys, so you can’t feel the ‘home keys’ and even with the positive feedback you can’t tell if you’ve accidentally pressed the wrong key or not. Oh, and the backspace key is the Delete hard key, which requires much more force to press than the soft keys, and often means you need to readjust your grip slightly. And trying to position your cursor without the stylus is just pot luck.

Camera

It’s average, even though I bought the phone on the strength of the advert which concentrated on the camera as a selling point. It has an image stabiliser (which is activated with the lock button – yes, wtf?) but I don’t use it. The video camera is ok, and although it can shoot movies at 120fps, any such movies will only play back on the phone at

There is a sliding three-position selector to change the camera mode between still shots, movies, and camera album mode. This just adds to the delay in getting the phone ready to take a snap – the software takes a few seconds to load, and if you activate the wrong mode, e.g. movie instead of stills, you’ll miss your shot.

The camera album mode displays thumbnails of your movies and pictures at 8 or so per page. Changing pages takes forever, and finding a particular picture to show someone invariable leads that someone to get bored and ask you not to bother.

Scrolling and zooming

Ah yes, I nearly forgot. Scrolling through menus, and zooming in on the subject of a photo, is simply infuriating. There’s a spring-loaded zoom ring around the camera lense, which is used for both the camera zoom and menu scrolling. When scrolling, you operate the ring with your off-hand index finger – but the spring is so stiff that it’s impossible to quickly select the option you are looking for. And when zooming, you are supposed to use the edge of your left 2nd finger to operate it – careful, don’t get your zoom-finger in shot – but it feels like you would be better off using your thumb, and holding the phone in a cack-handed way.

You can also opt to scroll through menus by touching and dragging – but without using the stylus it’s very hit and miss as to whether you successfully scroll, or accidentally select a random option without realising until you’re dialling someone you’ve never spoken to before.

Locking the phone

On the edge of the Viewty is a lock button, which locks the touch screen. It’s a push-button, rather than a sliding button, and so it gets accidentally pressed in pockets and when picking it up. When locked, the screen goes black showing just the time and date , and then after a few seconds a power-saving feature causes the display to go completely blank. When the phone is locked, the first press of the lock button reactivates the display to show the time and date, and the second press unlocks the phone. That’s 1 too many presses in my opinion.

There’s an autolock function, which admittedly can be disabled, but when you’re in a call and the phone autolocks, it doesn’t exhibit the usual behaviour of showing the time and date on a blank screen. Instead, it shows a tiiiiiiiny little padlock icon at the side of the screen, and actually it’s really frustrating when you’re working through an automated phone system’s options, for example, and your phone keeps locking.

Phonebook

Mobile phones have had address books, contact lists, or phonebooks (whatever you want to call them) since the beginning of time. Well, at least since my very first mobile, anyway. So you would have thought UI designers would know how people want to use them by now. Not so at LG. Sometimes, throwing away the rulebook and starting from scratch can be beneficial. Not in this case.

By default, when you press the phonebook button to access your phonebook, you’re presented with a screen which shows you the first two (by alphabet) entries in your phonebook. The rest of the screen is taken up by the keypad, allowing you to search by name. But unless you have no more than 2 people with the very same first name in your address book, you’re going to need to scroll at some point.

You can switch to a grouped view, where the names are grouped into six groups, A-D, E-H, etc, and six entries are viewable at once. But that still involves a fair amount of scrolling, and that’s very dangerous if you’re using your finger instead of the stylus.

And there’s no Sony Ericsson-style most recently used contacts to be found ANYWHERE.

Because of all this, it’s easier to reply to an existing text message than it is to start a new text message to that person, and starting a phonecall is just heart-sinkingly depressing. However, the result is that I never go over my inclusive allowance.

Voicemail

All modern phones allow you to pre-program the number for your voicemail service, and dial that number by holding down the 1 key. Ok, for a start there’s no 1 key until you press unlock twice, to unlock your phone, and then press the keypad soft key to display the keypad. It also makes your provider’s voicemail system frustrating, because when you press 2/3/4 to delete/save/whatever the message you just heard, you realise the phone was locked and your keypress wasn’t recognised. By the time you figure out why your voicemail was ignoring you and unlock your phone, you’re halfway through the next message.

And then, when you’re done listening to voicemail messages, the Viewty kindly asks you whether you want to save your voicemail number in your phonebook. Every time.

Then you throw your Viewty against a wall.

Power

My phone always seems to be fully charged but will suddenly show the 25% battery charge icon, then a few minutes later a flashing empty battery icon. A few minutes after that, the phone will turn off. No other indication. No warning sound. I can’t count the number of times I have realised my phone battery was flat, simply because I don’t have eyes in my pocket.

Alarm

You can set a handful of alarms to repeat daily, or on a set pattern, or just once. Alarms will even go off if your phone has shut down because of low power – useful if your phone dies overnight, and you have an alarm set for the morning. However, if I wanted a fully-featured alarm clock, I would have bought a fully-featured alarm clock, in the same way that I take a digital camera with me when I think I will want to take photos, instead of just using my phone.

Conclusion

It’s a rubbish phone. If you must buy one, I recommend the following mitigating actions:

1. Buy a handbag if you don’t already have one – for the stylus – otherwise your options are to tie the stylus/lipstick to the phone (like a phone-sized phone charm) or use the phone with your finger (bloody frustrating).
2. Never travel more than 10 metres away from a phone charger.
3. Buy a second (better) phone and use that instead. (Feel free to keep your Viewty in your pocket if you feel the need to put something on the table down the pub.)
4. Abstain from mobile phone usage for a few years before buying your Viewty, so that you misinformedly think it’s the best thing since interchangeable phone covers.

Since then, and on a seemingly unrelated note, the BBC News website has reported on a body being dumped in a wheelie bin in Cobham, Surrey. It caught my eye because it’s not a million miles away from where I live (though not too close for comfort, I admit). The BBC News article carries a photo of the front of the house in question, guarded by police; and while the article itself attempts to protect the nearby residents’ privacy by mentioning only the name of the road, this is already too much information.

And this is where the two cross paths. With just a little effort – the road isn’t very long, and Google is quite a powerful engine – the property can be seen on Google Street View, complete with the unobscured number plate of the car on the drive. Google approximates the address at 16 Hamilton Avenue. Whether this is correct matters very little – the perception is that it might be correct. And that the car on the drive might be involved. It’s irrelevant that the Google Street View car may have driven down that road in the distant past, because information, like statistics, can be misused.

The latest ‘quick job’ that turned out to be anything but quick, was replacing our side gate. We haven’t used it since we moved into the house back in mid-2007, mainly because we didn’t have–or couldn’t find (or, probably more accurately, didn’t look for)–the key. We assumed that since we couldn’t open it, neither could anyone else (without breaking it down), and it was therefore as secure as a side gate could be expected to be.

Well that theory fell through when we noticed that the wet weather had finally penetrated the wood of the door, and it had started to rot and bow, leaving a large gap between the door and the frame. Since it was visible from the street, replacement was necessary.

I went ahead and ordered a new wooden door from B&Q, and all the hinges, locks, handles and screws necessary to fit it from Wickes. Oh, and some paint. I’ve never painted anything external before, so I got some primer, some undercoat, and a gloss topcoat. It is no longer funny to see how many cans of paint we have in our utility room.

On a sidenote, it turned out that the door was actually a hollow internal door, and the top and bottom edges weren’t painted. The door was so soft and damp that I can’t dispose of it yet. It will either dry out in the sun, at which point I can get it to the tip, or the rain will wash most of it away.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the rot had spread to the door frame as well, and wouldn’t have supported the forces of a door being opened and closed. And replacing the door frame is not something I wanted to do, since the two courses of brickwork above the door are not supported by a lintel. They sit directly on the door frame. Nice.

So, back out to Wickes I go, to buy some external plywood to board the door up. A packet of woodscrews and a few coats of paint later, it looks just like a door, but without a handle. Or hinges. Or the functionality.

And we now have a spare half-painted door that we need to store…

The images were captured using a camera mounted on top of a car fitted with a GPS recording system. The images are stored with their GPS location, so finding the images surrounding a covered area is straightforward. Most of London is covered.

As with any photograph taken by anyone in a populated area, anonymous passers-by get themselves in frame. And most of these anonymous passers-by don’t know their souls have been stolen they have been photographed. Obviously, many people will appear on Street View without knowing it.

But they can find out. They can find out by looking at the Street View (perhaps looking until they find themselves) of locations they regularly visit. It seems a lot of people don’t like the idea of having photos of them appearing on the Internet without their consent, and want Street View to be shut down.

At first, this seems like a reasonable reaction, and one that, without thinking too much about it, most of the public will get behind. But why might you complain about being photographed on Street View? There are two reasons:

1. You did not give your permission for the photo to be taken.
2. The image shows you in a certain location.

Again, they seem perfectly valid reasons. At first.

Although seemingly few people (including a lot of Police officers) know, UK law permits photography in any public place, and in any private place with permission. You can even take a photograph of a private place so long as the photo is taken in a public place; so, oddly enough, you are able to take a photo looking into someone’s house from the street outside. If that’s your thing, of course. If you don’t want to be seen sitting in your front room naked, close the bloody curtains – you can’t stand naked in front of someone, then complain they’re not respecting your right to privacy.

Once you have taken the photo, the copyright is yours, and you are able to do (almost) whatever you want with it. Just look at the tabloid press, for example.

So that dismisses reason #1 above. If you’re in public, you cannot stop people from seeing you. You might get into someone’s photo, especially if you’re out and about around Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, or St. Paul’s Cathedral. You’re probably going to get into someone’s photo album, or appear on Flickr. Oh no! Let’s sue Flickr!

As for #2, I can nearly understand not wanting to be shown in a certain location. But with or without Street View, there’s no way to prevent people from accidentally seeing you in that location if you go to that location. And the aim of Street View is not to intentionally find you and blow your cover. Apparently, one man complained to Google because he was shown leaving a Soho sex shop. So what?

If you don’t want to be seen leaving a Soho sex shop:

1. Wear a good disguise.
2. Make sure there is nobody about when you leave a Soho sex shop.
3. Don’t go to a Soho sex shop.

Google has automatically blurred out faces and car registration numbers as a gesture to the Information Commissioner, who probably had concerns – not because of law, but because of the way the public would react (which, strangely, isn’t fuelled by The Sun’s faux-outrage for a change).

Ultimately, it’s no different to someone walking down the street and passing your house/office/favourite park bench. If you’re sitting naked in your lounge, and you haven’t closed the curtains… well, what do you expect?

If privacy is really your main concern, start off by opting out of the edited electoral register, shredding your credit card statements, and stop Twittering every 18 seconds. There are bigger things to worry about than being seen in public.

I don’t know who They are, but why did They have to say it? Why not twos? Or “bad luck comes accompanied by no other instances of bad luck whatsoever”?

Anyway, following the tragic and catastrophic failure of my UPS, and the terminal affliction suffered by my wing mirror (oh yes, terrible times indeed), my computer has now decided things were still going too well for its liking, and a further helping of drama was required in order to provide some kind of counterpoint to the general wellness from which I was suffering.

So it died.

Not the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), the Black Screen of Refusal To Even Power Up (BSORTEP). I’m hoping that acronym will catch on. I’m going to submit it to urbandictionary.com later.

I love working in IT. I really do. It’s something I understand, and mostly enjoy. You can’t ask for much more from a job. But sometimes it feels like I spend all my time fixing things that shouldn’t have gone wrong in the first place, instead of making new things to go wrong.

What upsets me most is that I had ripped all my CDs onto that computer as WMAs, and then ‘archived’ (read chucked) my now-redundant CDs in a load of boxes ready for ‘long term archiving’ (read chucking) into the loft.

If I have to rip all my CDs again, I will be well miffed. Yes, well miffed.

And at lunchtime today it decided it was finally going to give up the ghost. It folds in, but doesn’t fold out. Repairing it shouldn’t be too difficult, or so I thought. It seems as if the linkage between the motor and the wing mirror joint has decided to become dislodged, or broken at worst.

So, armed with my trusty Torx screwdrivers, and a few other choice items from my toolbox, I went out to change its mind.

Or so I thought.

Imagine a wing mirror. Not a complex piece of equipment, really. Just a bit of glass with some tin foil glued to the back, right? But add to that a heated mirror element. And the remote adjustment motor. And the powerfold motor. Suddenly it’s actually quite complex. And so Land Rover, presumably to make things easier and quicker (and not to raise revenue through repairs), decided the whole thing should be one atomic unserviceable assembly. Yes, the external door trim, the motors, the heating element, the wiring connectors and the mounting pillar. They’re all part of one untouchable lump.

One untouchable lump that costs £169 + VAT from your nearest Land Rover parts centre. Hmm, I think not.

I’m not paying that much money for a wing mirror, only for it to make my other wing mirror look old and dirty. It would bother me. Really, it would. I think I’ll try finding one from a breaker’s yard, or something. Presumably there have been car accidents where the passenger wing mirror hasn’t been broken..?

Needless to say, I hadn’t heard the beeps because there hadn’t been any. And there hadn’t been any beeps because there had been no power cut. The UPS was faulty, and about to die.

The first symptom was the UPS constantly trying to charge it’s batteries, and clearly failing. The second symptom was its inability to maintain power to the protected circuit when it was disconnected from the mains. The third symptom was the rather nasty smell that woke me up the other morning – a sulphury smell not unlike that of someone having their hair highlighted at the hair stylist.

The three symptoms are expressed in the past tense, because they no longer exist. They have been deprecated by a fourth; the UPS’s refusal to do anything at all, even to switch on.

So, it’s getting replaced. Annoyingly I’ve only had it for a year. Even more annoyingly, we’ve not had a power cut in that time…

Whoever invented advertising was a genius.

A particular Citroen advert is my latest pet hate. After some snow about a month ago (complete with the obligatory country-grinding-to-a-halt phenomenon), Citroen have decided that so snow-covered is the UK that they need to make their cars appear more drivable in the snow than the average car. Introducing Snow Motion, an automatic system that allows you to drive through snow like it’s not there. Wow, that’s amazing.

So, not only have they renamed traction control, they have also limited its apparent usefulness to during snowy weather.

But wait…

When driving off (up to 3mph) in difficult conditions…

Sadly, that’s not a typo. Snow Motion only helps when you’re driving at 3mph or slower. That’s slow. Considering Citroen seem to think it’s a huge selling point, you’re only going to use it for a fraction of your journey. And not every journey – only when it has snowed, or is a little bit icy. Maybe in the wet. Ok, I’m pretty sure “in the wet” doesn’t qualify as a “difficult condition”. So when was it last snowy and icy? Yes, a month or so ago. And the time before that? Hmm, about a whole year before. And before that? Another whole year before.

And there’s more.

Snow Motion creates a real improvement of drive, safety and an automatic handling that eliminates the apprehension of non informed drivers.

“Non informed drivers”? I can’t think of any other interpretation than “idiots”. So, if you’re an idiot who is apprehensive about pulling away in the snow, you could just be very careful, and learn how to drive according to the driving conditions by experience.

Or, and this option is recommended by Citroen, you could go out and buy a new car with Snow Motion, and pretend it’s not snowing and that there’s definitely no ice anywhere. Just don’t drive faster than 3mph.

Much like being able to tell (but not necessarily care) when I’m boring someone with a particular conversation, I use website analytics to see where website visitors come from, what they look at, and how frequently they return. Yes, some people come back. In fact, most people do. And the most popular pages are actually the NSLU2 pages which describe how to configure a very small, low-power Linux server based on a Linksys NAS device.

I have no delusions about the overall importance of nikrivers.com; nobody knows about it, it doesn’t appear very high up in any Google results unless you search for my name, and even my mum keeps forgetting how to find it (though she also has to keep asking me how to find the Internet, because “it’s gone from my desktop”).

That said, 101 different people have visited my NSLU2 guides in the last 20 days alone, about a third of which are visitors who have never been to my website before. Even after Linksys has discontinued the NSLU2, it still remains popular as a web and mail server.

The fruit of over a year of preparation took place in late December: our wedding. It was the perfect day, and it went with no hiccups, no problems, and no disappointments. It feels like it happened only a few days ago, but it was 13 weeks ago tomorrow. We don’t have the photos back from the photographer yet, but as soon as we do I’ll create an album in the gallery for them; and I’ll also try to collect together any photos that other people took – there are already some on Facebook and other places.

January was mostly quiet. Charlie and I had some time off work after the wedding to relax, enjoy being newly married, and let it all sink in (I still don’t think it has for me yet).

However, it became interesting in February. We had a little bit of snow. Ok, a fair amount of snow; the news told us we hadn’t seen so much snow for 18 years, but personally I don’t think there’s much value in measuring how much we had – it was more than none, and it was less than enough to stop people from getting out of their houses and buying as much milk and bread as they could find. You know, more bread than anyone could possibly eat before its use-by date.

But of course, although we get snow pretty much every year, even the slightest snowfall brings the country, particularly the transport infrastructure, to a grinding halt. And then people start using the snow as an excuse not to go to work. People drive like idiots, down the middle of the road, as if the kerb is now bristling with tyre-popping spikes. Fortunately it only lasted for a week or so, the MET Office’s predictions becoming more hilariously inaccurate with each passing hour. But that’s it for snow, until next year.

Then the snow thawed. And then it refroze. And then, like a 94-year-old man, I took a tumble on the ice and landed on my poor hand, while holding my car keys. But after a call to NHS Direct, a few trips to hospital (including A&E), 2 sets of x-rays, more GP visits and phonecalls than I can remember, and about three weeks off work, it seems I didn’t fracture my scaphoid. Or maybe I did, I don’t know – I never got to see the x-rays. And I’m not sure anyone else did, either.

The statement on their website implies the decision to unblock the web page was theirs alone, and makes no mention of the global outcry caused by their initial action.

Surely, the backtracking thought process that went on at the IWF is one that should have happened before blocking the web page in the first place..?

A page on Wikipedia regarding the issue states:

The IWF blocked access to a page on one of the world’s most-visited websites without informing its owners. We understand that their policy is not to contact any of the hosts they block, but commonsense should have told them that blocking such a website might have unforeseen consequences. In particular, they failed to understand that whereas a block of the article itself may well amount to restraint on the guaranteed freedom to receive and impart information, the image itself is uploaded from a different URL which could have been separately blocked by the ISPs with whom they are in partnership; in this way, they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of how websites work, which is chilling in the extreme for a supposed Internet Watchdog.

Chilling indeed; it implies those staff at IWF who make the decision on censorship are also the same staff that implement the URL block – that’s like allowing your grandma to configure your firewall.

So, the good news is that we can all go and read about our favourite German rock band’s controversial Virgin Killer album on Wikipedia without having to look at the version in Google’s cache.

The bad news is that the IWF still have the power to decide what you can and cannot see on the Internet. A bit like AOL in the ’90s.

However, it still remains for the Wikimedia Foundation to decide whether the image in question is in fact illegal, and whether it should be removed from the Wikipedia website.

In what seems like a genuine move to prevent UK web-surfers from accidentally stumbling across an ‘offensive’ image, and to prevent those with questionable interests getting a little fix, they have classified as offensive a Wikipedia page about German band Scorpions’ 1976 album Virgin Killer, which features an image of a naked girl on the cover.

I’ll make it clear now; in my opinion the image isn’t one I think should be available to innocent surfers. If I owned the album, I probably wouldn’t keep it anywhere it might be found without specifically looking for it.

“Ok”, you might think, “what’s bad about censoring a picture of a naked child?”, you might think. Nothing. But that’s not the bigger picture.

For a start, I can’t possibly count the number of albums I’ve seen with more than just ‘questionable’ artwork. These images have been designed, agreed, printed to vinyl covers and CD inlays, and sent to HMV, before being bought by music fans. If there’s a time to censor an image, it’s when it is created – not once it has been accepted into a culture for 32 – yes, count them – 32 years, and suddenly looks like its censorship will garner you a few publicity points. Oops, I lost my neutrality for a moment there.

Of course, there will be exceptions – extremely offensive material will always be slipping through the net somehow, and remaining unnoticed for a while before being noticed by the authorities.

Oh, wait a minute, the authorities? But the IWF doesn’t have any official authority! It’s a charity that maintains a list of potentially offensive websites or web pages. The censoring is actually implemented by ISPs who use that list to check the pages viewed by innocent surfers, and block them if they appear in the IWF list.

Again, in my opinion there’s nothing much wrong with blocking pages of an offensive nature; but when your ISP monitors every page you view, where is your privacy? Who decides what is to be censored, and what is not? What is to prevent the power of universal censorship falling into the hands of the government, leaving the innocent web-surfer unaware?

I can’t answer that.

What I can say, however, is that the way in which the IWF has ‘blocked’ the Wikipedia page in question is by intercepting the traffic to that page, and returning a 404 Not Found message (although their implementation is laughable, see bottom). This interception is performed using transparent proxies, which results in every affected user (an estimated 95% of the UK) appearing to have one of a small range of IP addresses. For the non-technically minded, this basically means that everyone in the UK viewing Wikipedia appears to be doing so from one of only a few computers.

The implication is that anyone in the UK could take advantage of this effective anonymity, and deface, destroy and vandalise Wikipedia without the risk of being traced. Obviously, Wikipedia have therefore had to block anyone from these IP addresses from editing Wikipedia pages.

That’s nice. So: the IWF has decided one particular image is potentially offensive, and so Internet censorship is arbitrarily enforced, the UK can no longer contribute to Wikipedia, and every time a UK surfer views a webpage, it is monitored.

Where will it end? Will politically-biased writing become subject to censorship? Images of war and destruction? And who decides what is to be censored? On first glance, the IWF seems to simply ’suggest’ websites which ‘may’ be offensive, and allows ISPs to make use of this list. But which ISP wants to fall into the trap of shunning censorship, only to find their name in the tabloids for “ALLOWING ACCESS TO CHILD PORN”. You know what the Sun and Daily Mail are like. And most of their readers, who probably wouldn’t (want to) understand the deeper issues.

So, until the ISPs decide this was a bad move, or the IWF backs down and accepts it has done the Internet community a disservice, Big Brother will be watching what we want to watch, and deciding whether or not we should be allowed.

Meanwhile, the IWF continues bagging those publicity points under the banner of ‘keeping the Internet safe’.

It was only a few years back when China was the one at which we would laugh and shake our heads in dismay and disbelief. Now we must look ever so big and clever to the rest of the world.

Internet Watch Foundation… FAIL.

And by the way, if you really want to see what all the fuss is about, but think you can’t because the Wikipedia page is blocked, you are wrong. Just do a Google Image search for the album title.

Decide for yourself. Is censorship appropriate? You’ll probably say yes. I did. But the IWF hasn’t solved anything – the image is still readily available to those who know how to use Google. And previous lessons learned from Internet censorship show that audiences are driven underground, and people start actively trying to beat the system, thus rendering this type of censorship obsolete.

The image has been around since the ’70s, so I bet it’s on more websites than just Wikipedia, on more hard drives than just those who visited the Wikipedia article, and on more CD and LP shelves than you can shake a stick at.

As for the effectiveness of the actual IWF webpage block, I can say with all honesty that it is just this side of the ‘Not Effective At All’ classification. The IWF has blocked the URL of the page on which the image appears, but not the URL of the image itself. The image can still be viewed directly; but ironically the webpage which puts the image into context cannot – except it can, because the IWF seems to be inept:

Here is the IWF-blocked Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
But you can go here if you really want to see it: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgin_Killer

Further reading

It seems several people have a similar opinion to mine, including Tom Jowitt, whose Blog entry on the matter is well worth a read.

The IWF has made a grammatically poor statement here. Sorry if the link is broken; the URL changes each time a revision is made, and the old version becomes unavailable. Great system, guys.

My ISP, BeThere, has made this statement, which could be interpreted as suitably on-the-fence, or genuinely concerned for it’s customers’ best interests, depending on how sceptical you choose to be.

Our latest addition to our collection of Wii games is Boom Blox, a puzzle game which boasts being designed by Steven Spielberg (although, sadly, there’s nothing particularly Spielbergy about it).

It has a great multi-player co-operative mode, which has kept us playing into the small hours this weekend. And the single-player games involves lots of explosions, kittens being eaten by skeletons, and armies of sheep fighting monkeys.

Or maybe it’s just because today received very little publicity. It seems BAD relied heavily on word-of-mouth promotion, and thus I expect failed to reach a significant number of people who aren’t involved in networks of blogs and related websites.

I found out about BAD late yesterday, and have only seen it mentioned on the website which brought it to my attention. I wonder how many people, like myself, failed to publish something noteworthy and interesting because of their lack of awareness.

Surely the success of such a venture relies on reaching out to and ensnaring those who would not normally notice or care. Apparently, a total of over 14,000 BAD posts (including many ‘non-posts’, like this one) were published to various blogs; but amongst the millions of websites that cover current affairs, gaming, sport, fashion, music… is 14,000 enough to be visible?

I don’t think there are many people who would deny it’s a big issue, and one that should be tackled – do we really need an Internet-wide awareness day? Maybe we do; community-driven content seems to hold more sway than the content on corporate or commercial websites.

Regardless, presumably any Google searches for the next few days will return completely irrelevant results. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Specifically, “The Bluetooth Radio failed to turn ON due to insufficient driver memory available”. Hmm. Fortunately we were only 1/2 a mile from home when we realised it wasn’t going play ball, so we went home. “It will only take 2 minutes to fix”, I claimed.

I was wrong.

A Google search only resulted in pages that seemed to think that the problem was the order in which software gets loaded into memory in Windows Mobile 5.0; the Bluetooth drivers always get loaded into a specific memory address, and if this address is already in use, the drivers don’t load and the Bluetooth stack doesn’t work.

But uninstalling everything from the iPaq and performing a million hard resets didn’t work. I decided that the Bluetooth hardware had broken, and Windows was giving the above error message by default.

So I resigned myself to buying a new PDA, because I lost my iPaq restore CD in a previous incident, and had no way to reinstall the OS from scratch.

Fortunately, I stumbled across a page for the 2790 on hardreset.eu, which describes the way in which the 2790 can be restored to factory settings; just hold the Calendar, Messaging, and power buttons, and then press the reset button until the iPaq reboots. It will then reformat its internal storage, and (presumably) copy the factory configuration from a neatly tucked away back-up ROM.

And now it works. Bluetooth, I mean. It works. It wasn’t broken, it just had an unidentified problem (which may or may not have been accurately described by the error message it caused).

I can now safely venture past the end of our road without the risk of getting lost.

But after changing blog themes the other day, I realised the NSLU2 pages were actually quite dependent on the underlying CSS – and for some themes, this means that they looked rubbish.

So I went about reformatting the pages. There are only half a dozen of them, and only one or two are of any considerable size – but this was enough to find exactly how annoying the Wordpress WYSIWYG editor can be. I ended up with inconsistent newlines (although the HTML was consistent), weird closing tags that didn’t match anything else in the document, and random behaviour whereby the editor would say something along the lines of “hey, I can’t figure out exactly what you’re trying to do, so why don’t I double-space half of this here single-spaced text, indent the whole document from this point onwards, and completely unformat all your headings?”

There’s a little feature on the Wordpress.org website called Kvetch!, which allows users to anonymously vent their annoyance at Wordpress’s quirks and bugs. I had seen that several people don’t like the built-in HTML editor that Wordpress has, but I myself had only ever needed to write a few paragraphs and make a couple of words bold, nothing more – and for this it is fine adequate.

But for decent formatting capabilities, the built-in editor just doesn’t cut it. It is what I have decided to call a WYSINWYWBYWJHTGWI editor. Yes, a What-You-See-Is-Not-What-You-Want-But-You-Will-Just-Have-To-Go-With-It editor. I’m going to register that as a trademark so that the Wordpress people can’t thieve it from me when they release their next iteration.

So, there was else nothing for it. I cracked open Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, and used that as my editor to reformat everything. I didn’t use the WYSIWYG designer, I just wanted something that would give me syntax colouring.

I was fully prepared to go so far as to use notepad – but I think that would have been a little too hardcore for my liking.

With this theme, my NSLU2 articles currently look like they were formatted by a 4-year-old, so I might get round to fixing them, eventually. They’re by far the most popular pages on this site!

Yesterday was my dad’s 60th birthday, and a surprise party was arranged for him – little did he know that Charlie and I would be turning up too!

It was also the first time I had met my 4-year-old nephew (step-nephew, really, if such a thing exists), and I just couldn’t stop laughing about everyone referring to my dad as Grandad.

One of my dad’s birthday presents was an aerial analyser – he’s a ham radio enthusiast, and has been for years. He got the Goon Show Compendium Volume 1 from me. If it hadn’t have been wrapped in cellophane I would have struggled to resist taking a “back-up” copy of all 7 CDs before he received them.

I’ll just stick with the regular Monday 8am Goon Show broadcast on BBC Radio 7. You can even catch up on the previous episode if you managed to miss it the first time round.

And if you are interested in upgrading your faithful Trio R-1000 receiver, G0TUD has the answer.

But at the weekend it refused to upload anything successfully, complaining about PHP and web server upload limits – things over which I have no control. So I went back to using the clunky web interface to upload my photos, only to be greeted by the useless “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” page on each attempt.

Things didn’t look good. So I decided to download a cleaner-looking and simpler gallery application (Plogger) to give it a go. Still no luck.

Having ruled out the problem being Gallery2, I decided my website host had changed some things on their side. A quick Google later, and I realised that I couldn’t upload anything more than small text files to any server. So it’s not my website host.

Good job I didn’t send them that email.

But wait, I can upload files to the gallery using a machine on the other side of the corporate VPN… which uses the corporate Internet connection. So it must be my ISP. It must be. Surely? After another quick Google, I read that a number of ISPs have been caught sending fake TCP reset packets to their users so that ‘undesirable’ connections (ie. file sharing applications) are disconnected.

Knowing how to troubleshoot this kind of problem, I proceed to download Wireshark, a network protocol analyzer (formerly Ethereal). Sure enough, each time I try to upload a .jpeg or .bmp or… in fact almost any type of file, I receive a TCP RST message – surely the fake reset message sent to me by my interfering ISP!

Good job I didn’t send them that email.

It turns out the latest firmware for my Draytek 2800 router adds an innocent-looking option called “Drop non-http connection on TCP port 80″ which is enabled by default. I feel it should be more accurately called “break everything”. Disabling it fixed the problem, but it took an entire lunch break.

And so it seems we’ve neglected our blog. Our blogging has faltered. It has slowed to a stop and been forgotten like a penny that rolls under a chest of drawers. You know it’s there, but you have better things to do than fishing around under furniture with a cunningly-shaped wire coat hanger.

But we’re still around. And truth be known, we’ve actually been quite busy these past weeks and months.

And by the miracle of Science, I will somehow manage to edit the publish dates of our ‘catch-up’ posts such that it seems we have been posting regularly… with the side-effect of this post not making sense any more!

Hurrah for Science. And Technology. But not Geography. I hated that.

That’s right folks – this time next year we will be husband and wife, after what will no doubt be a brilliant day on the 20th December. Christmas trees, mulled wine and plenty of festive spirit. I can’t think of anything more perfect for my big day.

I cooked the turkey for Nik, and was monumentally proud of how it turned out. This, coupled with the 2 tonnes of vegetables, meant that the Christmas dinner itself was a success, and one from which we recovered by languishing around on the sofa for the rest of the day. This was nothing however, compared to Boxing Day…

8 people in our tiny living room should have meant disaster, but I’m happy to report that the whole day was a resounding success despite the fact that both hosts were suffering on with afore mentioned flu. It was lovely to have both sides of the family together over a buffet meal and endless hours of “UNO Extreme”. Much fun was had by all.

I’m still glad however, that with wedding on the 20th December next year, we won’t be doing it then! Makes you appreciate your Mummy doesn’t it?

Today I found a tooth under his bed. Judging by the dried blood on it, it had been there quite a while, so he won’t miss out on any money from the tooth fairy. I’m not even sure the tooth fairy does business with dogs.

Anyway, it surprised me because it’s a tooth from the back of his mouth–a wide tooth with a flat, triangular surface–but it’s the only tooth I’ve seen lying around. Surely, a tooth in the back of his mouth is more likely to be swallowed than any of his front teeth? But apparently not. He now has adult teeth right at the front of his mouth, but he seems to have swallowed them. Or deliberately eaten them.

Just waiting for him to get his grown-up canines now, to replace the one that I broke for him…

We’re looking at setting a date after summer next year, late September or very early October, and we’re starting to experience the ‘joys’ of arranging a wedding. It really shouldn’t be as complicated as it feels.

Two weeks’ work, and almost £8k. And that’s just for upstairs.

Drat. We can’t take that on right now. Double-drat.

But now we know that the small, independant trades we asked to quote on various things seem to be put off by big jobs. Moving a soil pipe, laying a concrete floor, knocking a wall down, and removing a chimney breast; just a few of the ‘little’ things we wanted done.

Maybe it’s time to rethink our plans.

When I built it, I decided it should have a 64-bit processor. Of course, that’s 32 bits more than anyone actually needs at the moment, but it’s the way forward. Allegedly.

I also decided I should try out Windows Vista. It looks great, it performs brilliantly, and, again, it’s the way forward.

Those two decisions obviously weren’t risky enough, because I threw in a third; to run the 64-bit version of Vista.

As if Vista’s lack of maturity alone wasn’t enough–with prolific reports of hardware manufacturers failing to release stable Vista drivers in time–I had added that extra 64-bit dimension to the situation. Maybe I was hoping manufacturers hadn’t released Vista drivers because they were concentrating on the 64-bit versions of the Vista drivers…

Anyway, Vista 64-bit is a bitch. It’s soooo beautiful, but… such a bitch.

Vista 64-bit will sporadically crash/fail to boot with 4GB of memory installed. The biggest hardware advantage of a 64-bit system is that it can use more than 4GB or memory. How could Microsoft possibly overlook this bug? It can’t possibly be down to lack of testing, surely? Fortunately Microsoft knowledgebase article 929777 fixes it. Ironically the problem occurs with 32- and 64-bit versions of Vista.

Then, of course, MSI decided not to develop 64-bit drivers for my motherboard; specifically, for the on-board audio. The motherboard supports a 64-bit processor. I know this, because it’s doing so right now. Clearly, it being a 64-bit motherboard, and this being the age of the 64-bit processor, there is no reason why MSI should even contemplate the laughable notion of developing 64-bit drivers.

And then the icing on the cake: Office 2007. Considering it costs more than an office suite should, I was disappointed to learn that several Office 2007 features aren’t available on a 64-bit operating system. Really obscure things are missing, like the Send to OneNote print driver, the Office Clean-up wizard, and Internet Fax. Not a catastrophe, but bloody annoying.

I’m winding down at work in time for holiday next week. Having been uber productive and finished all I was supposed to, I now find myself getting involved in discussions such as “Where IS that image for our exotic chutney on site” along with other gems “Why does the new office smell like manure” (a question that prompted a less-than-healthy debate on the finer points of paint, carpet glue and mould) and my personal favourite “If someone came into work with a bogey on their lip, would you tell them?”.

The prospect of a brand spanking new leather bed is also not very conducive to working.

Ho hum…the clock ticks…11:11….

Last night I discovered Windows XP will happily install onto a USB hard drive.

Without warning.

Well, I claim “without warning”, but I think I really mean “the warning was there, but I knew what I was doing so I ignored it”. Yes, that’s what I mean.

After having finally transferred all my stuff to my new PC, it was time to rebuild my old one and give it to Charlie, as promised. But a series of events conspired against me–including my failure to disconnect the external drive–and the Windows XP installer didn’t recognise the RAID array; so it decided to install on said USB device instead.

The drive was nearly full, and I lost it all.

I suppose it buys me some time before I have to decide what to do when the drive runs out of space.

It took a little while to unpack all the parts, throw the packaging into the corner of the room, and put it all together. And then I was ready for that nervous moment, the first power-up of a freshly-built computer! I pressed the power button, and… nothing. Bugger.

All was not lost, however – a little diagnostic accessory on the motherboard promised insight through its four little LEDs. Each LED can glow green or red, and the combination of lights indicates the stage at which the start-up process failed.

It’s basically a shining diagnostic thing. A shining, LYING, diagnostic thing. Except I didn’t know it was lying at the time. It was pointing at the RAM, saying “Ummm, I’m telliiiiiiiiing”. All the while, the CPU chuckled at getting the RAM into trouble.

After the purchase of a small (and thankfully cheap) stick of different RAM, I cottoned on to the shining diagnostic thing’s game, and stumbled across the CPU’s troublemaking. The bastards. In frustrated anger I did something–I really don’t know what–and it started playing properly.

A few more niggles later–Windows Vista 64-bit blue-screening with 4GB of RAM, the on-board audio causing lock-ups, and having to RMA one of the hard drives–my computer is up and running. I daren’t think how many times I reinstalled Windows!

And it only took two weeks(!)

Had a visit today from my 2 best friends (Butch & Greengrass) from the old days down the road who cheered me up no end, but who made me miss lunch, leaving me sitting here with nothing but a soggy pasty.

Am bored. Deathy bored, and annoyed at having to work through. Never fear however, as I will be leaving the building at 16:00 on the dot.

In short – working lunches….don’t.

I’m having a mare of a time working with mismanaged data and bungled images in order that in October, I can flick a switch and start selling turkeys.

It’s totally ruining my “real-life” Christmas too, as by 25th December, I won’t be able to look at a Christmas pudidng without feeling the urge to ram it down some poor unsuspecting throat. It’s not very festive of me, I know, but I’m starting to dream about turkeys and chestnuts, (neither of which I have any intention of buying myself) when I should be dreaming about puppies and kittens and crisp-eating teddy bears.

Don’t even get me started on the 4 Bird Roasts…

Plus, of course, there’s the fact that you can almost never take the very next working day in lieu. The reason for my working on Saturday was to make sure we were ready for a delivery on Monday. So there was no chance of taking Monday off. As it happens, the delivery has been rescheduled for today, so along with there having been no need to work on Saturday (but that’s another story), it’s four days later and I still haven’t got my day back.

And due to the nature of deliveries to clients, there’s always something small to fix or tweak – and our delivery being at the end of play results in those fixes or tweaks being made the day after: tomorrow.

So it will be Friday at the earliest before I get my day back. Assuming the delivery isn’t rescheduled again.

And then I have to haggle with project managers, whose Microsoft Project plans (or, more accurately, Microsoft Excel plans) are meticulously calculated and set out, but don’t make any allowance for resources having an unexpected day off, or being ill, or being hit by a bus.

So in all likelihood, this Saturday I will be a week behind everyone else…

It’s been a while since my last post; everything’s been a bit hectic here – not least of all due to the new addition to our family, an 8-week-old Black Labrador puppy called Oliver!

He came home on Friday the 31st of August, and made quick work of exploring his new surroundings. We’re now in the process of adjusting to being up and about by 7am, and making trips to the garden every hour and a half or so. But it’s lots of fun, and he’s a very loving little boy.

There are some pics in the gallery.

Although not only has the outside of the website changed, but its inside has too. So it’s more phoenix-like, I guess.

Without the flames.