Markie's Blog

Android 2.3.6 on Samsung GT-I9100

2011-12-11T13:48:00.001Z

Since the "bricking" and subsequent recovery incident with my Samsung Galaxy SII handset I've been on the bleeding edge of Android versions, mainly because Kies is no longer able to upgrade my phone and OTA updates don't work in my region.

I've been running 2.3.5 for some weeks and it's been rather good. Battery life isn't too bad and I can usually go two days between charges if I'm not making too many calls. The only niggling fault that's been there for several Android releases is the following:

Issue 16862: GSM signal strength not returned in 2.3.3

Basically it's not possible to request the current GSM radio received signal strength indicator over the API properly. It returns a frozen value that only updates when going manually to the About -> Status menu, but then gets stuck again at the new value. This means I can't run the RF Signal Tracker app which I'd like to evaluate for performing GSM drive testing.

Android 2.3.6 is now available so I tried an upgrade in the (optimistic) hope the above fault may finally be fixed.

The upgrade itself was pretty arduous as I run Odin through an XP Virtual Machine on top of Fedora. After solving a BSOD issue in the Samsung USB driver when connecting the phone (answer was to emulate USB3), I managed to upgrade the phone successfully.

However, the following evening I got the "low battery" alert from the phone during the early evening, which was odd because I fully charged the phone during the previous night and had barely used it during the day.

The following day I happened to spot the battery indicator half way through the day and it was down to the last 10% or so! Checking settings Applications -> Battery Usage the graph was a steep downwards curve with Android OS up at 93%. The blue bars at the bottom of this screen indicated the phone was hardly ever sleeping.

I tried rebooting into recovery mode and deleting the cache but this didn't seem to help much. I then discovered that disabling the option under settings Location and Security -> Use Wireless Networks solved the problem. The curve on the battery monitor levelled out and actually started going back up - even when not on charge!!! The phone then stayed up fine all evening on the remaining 10% charge.

Sadly, Issue 16862 isn't fixed either.

-- Update

I've also discovered another problem with MMS.

The handset won't send/receive an MMS message unless the WiFi is enabled. The MMS data transfer is still sent over GPRS using the APN marked for MMS in the mobile settings. It just needs WiFi to be enabled before it will use the GPRS connection.

... Just discovered this was happening because I used a hostname for the MMS Proxy instead of its IP address. This seems ok on some Android handsets but doesn't work on the I9100 unless you have a working WiFi connection to perform the DNS resolution.

Fedora 16

2011-11-13T03:29:00.001Z

6 months already? Fedora 16 is released.

I promise I'll write something here just as soon as I can get the damn thing installed. This new Grub2 with EFI-thingamajig is doing my brain in. I just can't seem to find a way of installing without losing my existing /home on a MBR extended partition.

....Update 1...

OK I've finally managed to get it installed. In the end I resorted to doing an online yum update from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16, which although many times slower than a local CD install, actually worked great.

First thoughts...

I see Fedora have stuck with the stupid network interface naming scheme. Fortunately I've discovered a swift removal of the biosdevname package and a quick edit of /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules solves the problem nicely and I can have eth0 back instead of the ridiculous p44p1 persistent name my laptop is allocated by default.

KPackageKit in KDE is now called Apper and it actually seems to work properly. It now pops up an icon when updates are available, even after the computer has been running for a few days (the old version used to just give up after a day or so). Also, it seems able to install updates properly without running slow, getting confused and popping up loads of dialogs and asking for input. Took me a while to find the settings option though!

There's something odd with icons in the tray on the KDE panel at the bottom. The Cisco VPN icon won't show up and sometimes there's other invisible icons there.

I've already had the classic instance of installing updates, restarting my laptop and finding it's lost it's WiFi interface (I need the Broadcom wl driver for WiFi). As in previous cases, I usually find there's several older kernels installed and the wrong kmod-wl package. Removing the older kernels and reinstalleding kmod-wl usually solves it, along with using akmods if there's no wl package available. Fortunately I've not had an instance of the old reboot machine, lose X problem yet.

Other than that, nothing to report.

...Update 2...

Normal service is resumed. Apper seems to have stopped bothering to alert me to available updates and is again popping up stupid extra dialog boxes that need clicking every time I apply an update.

Xbox360 Red Ring of Death (RRoD) - Part 2

2011-10-29T02:58:00.002+01:00

The parts to repair my Xbox360 arrived this week. See my last post for the full story of my poor departed Xbox.

I ordered a tube of decent heat sink compound (Arctic Silver 5) and a pre-packaged kit of screws and washers to replace the factory supplied heat sink mountings.

Using the guide that came with the fixings, I first dismantled the console. It's pretty well built and it takes quite some time to dismantle carefully without damaging anything. Eventually I was left with just the main PCB with the existing CPU and GPU heat sinks removed.

Removing the old heat sink compound took some time. I didn't get a perfectly clean surface but was good enough.

Now it was time to rebuild.

After applying a tiny amount of Arctic Silver 5 and spreading thinly across the die, I re-affixed the heat sinks. Using the replacement fixing screws from the repair kit it's possible to fix the heat sinks down quite tightly. I tightened up the screws evenly until they just went tight so I didn't crack the die or warp the PCB.

The next step is to partially rebuild the unit, including DVD drive, but leave off the fans and air duct. I placed the fans above the larger heatsink only and powered on.

3 red lights again.... I left the unit powered on for exactly 20 mins and powered off. I was waiting for the 2 lights to come on indicating an overheat condition, but that never happened on my unit. The GPU heatsink was VERY hot to the touch.

I switched off and left it to cool down for about 30 mins whilst I was busy with something else. I then powered the unit back on and green lights!!! All working fine. Since then I've had several hour+ gaming sessions and it hasn't missed a beat.

Xbox360 Red Ring of Death (RRoD) - Part 1

2011-10-03T02:50:00.000+01:00

It has finally happened, my poor Xbox360 is flashing those infamous 3 red LEDs and won't power up any more :(

As a first generation unit I knew it carried the design flaw that has caused all other early hardware versions to fail but my luck has held out so far - probably because I don't use it all that often and only game for an hour or two in a single session.

It must be an early console because I remember buying it just after the first Christmas it was released (in the UK) and they were in rather short supply. By chance I happened to see my local Argos store had one in stock so I reserved it quickly and raced down to pick it up.

It's had an interesting life. Apart from sitting underneath my TV in the UK, I've also taken it abroad with me several times when I've been away for long periods. It's survived several international airports, baggage handlers, aircraft holds and being generally thrown around in suitcases. On one memorable occasion I left the hard disk in the hotel safe after checking out and had to rush back by taxi to collect it on the day of my flight - I couldn't possibly leave behind my game saves!

Last week, after a firmware upgrade, it started freezing / locking up solid and the only way to recover was to press the power button. After messing around with removing the hard disk and clearing the cache it seemed to improve, but I can't help wondering if this was a warning sign. After a fairly long gaming session (about 2 hours), I powered it down as normal but then it wouldn't start up again the next evening.

Really gutted. Was working my way through the excellent Portal 2 from Valve.

What now? I've ordered a tube of Arctic Silver 5 heatsink compound and a RRoD repair kit (aka an overpriced bunch of screws and washers) and I'll have a bash at a temporary repair. To be honest, I wouldn't mind a new one - at least the DVD drive will be an order of magnitude quieter and I'll get a HDMI connector.

Samsung Galaxy SII (I9100)

2011-09-14T23:55:00.001+01:00

I've finally joined the world of touch screen smart phones with the Samsung Galaxy SII. My last few phones have been Sony Ericsson and Nokia models provided by my employer. The iPhone just didn't tempt me enough to part with my hard earned cash.

Don't get me wrong, I've had a number of personal organisers, one of my favourites being the Psion 5, plus a Campaq PDA with GSM - although I mostly used the latter for playing Sodoku until the stylus got lost.

So I got my I9100 and for a few weeks it was fantastic. I then decided to install the RF Signal Tracker app to determine whether I could use it as an alternate way of running GSM field tests. However, Android 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 on the I9100 has a bug with the callback for GSM signal level changes, thus the app gets stuck on the same receive signal level indefinitely. I know this worked in 2.2 so I tried to roll back.

Unfortunately whilst flashing the phone back to 2.2 the process stalled and didn't complete such that I had to disconnect the phone and reboot. I tried to get back into the bootloader download mode using the Vulcan death grip (Vol Down + Home + Power) but nothing... black screen. Then it dawned on me I'd bricked the phone and no combination of keys would make it power on! It was pretty clear I'd lost the bootloader and it was never going to power on again.

A bit of googling suggested a USB adapter with a 300kR resistor between pins 3 & 4 on the USB may work, but I didn't have a spare micro USB plug or lead, so I couldn't try it anyway - although I suspect it wouldn't have helped. The final trick is to disconnect the battery, connect the USB cable, then reinsert the battery, which also did nothing.

I'm currently in a part of the world where the only hope of repair is to send the phone off to the UK or the US for repair. I therefore decided to purchase a JTAG debugger so I could rewrite the bootloader myself, which would work out about the same cost as sending away, if not cheaper.

I opted for the RIFF JTAG box. It arrived in a couple of weeks and today I had a go at repairing the phone.

First up I installed the JTAG Manager software and downloaded the resurrector DLL files for the Samsung I9100, including downloading the latest JTAG Manager and unit firmware.

Next I made up the breakout cable by soldering the ribbon cable with the IDC connector on one end to the breakout PCB supplied. A bit fiddly, but not too difficult.

Then I was ready to solder jumper wires from the JTAG breakout PCB to the phone itself...

The I9100 comes apart fairly easily by removing the rear cover, battery, the 7 visible screws, then gently prying apart the plastic starting from the sides and top, then hinging out the bottom.

Then I saw the size of the jtag solder pads and their proximity to each other!!! I could barely see the pads, never mind trying to solder to them! There's no way the average person would be able to solder wires to these pads, the non-solder press-on jig is the only realistic option.

An even bigger problem was that I only had available a large 25W Antex soldering iron, some fairly large diameter solid core wire and the Mk.1 eyeball.

Unperturbed I had a bash at soldering the wires on anyway. Very very fiddly! However, with a bit of luck I managed to tack on all the wires and gingerly slipped in the battery. Hit start on the programmer and it wrote about 60% and failed - damn! Tried again and the update completed successfully! Result!

Re-assembled the phone, slipped in the battery and up she came.

I am now a legend amongst my work colleagues for my ninja soldering skills. That was certainly the most difficult soldering job I've ever attempted.

Fedora 15 64bit

2011-08-14T01:15:00.002+01:00

Bit late on this one, sorry.

Nothing much to report with Fedora 15. I've installed it fine on several machines, from desktops, laptops, servers and Xen virtual machines.

Some major annoyances that have plagued me though:

* I absolutely HATE the new network device naming scheme. It was great knowing that the ethernet devices on almost everything I logged onto was going to be eth0, eth1, eth2, etc. Now I have to check every single time. If I switch between RHEL or other distro and F15 I often end up using eth0 without remembering and the command fails. As a network admin using a lot of network based tools, it's a nightmare. Some tools like arping expect to use eth0 as a default and fail. My laptops built in wired NIC is called p10p1 !!!

* plasma-desktop often gobbles up 100% CPU and cripples my machine until I kill the process and restart it. This happened quite a lot early on in F15, got fixed and stopped happening, now is happening again with the latest updates. KDE is to blame though I guess.

* kpackagekit is still as broken as ever. Utterly useless broken software - just use yum from the command line. Often fails to notify me of any available updates. Often can't handle installing updates and gets confused. Seems 10 times slower than command line yum.

* Broadcom wl driver problems. Getting sick of applying updates, rebooting then finding I've got no wireless device any more.

* Nvidia drivers. Got sick and tired of keeping the drivers working after updates, now using Nouveau which is generally ok but often get corrupted graphics and have to restart. Given up on accelerated gfx and composting effects.

Birmingham City 2011/2012

2011-08-14T00:33:00.003+01:00

Being many thousands of miles away from Birmingham makes it difficult to keep up with my beloved Birmingham City but fortunately with access to Radio 5 Live and the Internet I'm able to keep up with what's happening on the pitch. I feel for all Bluenoses abroad who are in a similar situation as myself.

To be honest though, I'd still much rather be sitting in the Tilton Road stand clutching my season ticket, or getting ready for an epic drive to the extremities of the country one Wednesday evening.

Financially the club is in a mess. We have the owner, at best a front man for a shady business back in Hong Kong, who is facing charges for money laundering. My precious club has gone from being financially stable under the Sullivan/Gold/Brady era to a joke in just 12 months.

Jasper Carrot, when asked whether the rumours of a consortium take over were true, replied with the wonderful statement:

“I was a director from 1979-1982. I wouldn’t get involved in football again. You don’t enjoy it – it becomes too important.

“You are forever answerable to the fans. They only have two answers to everything: sack the manager or put more money in.”

Well done Jasp, you're spot on there. The naivety and downright stupidity of most of our younger fans beggars belief when it comes to the business of football (which it is).

I can't help but think this is all typical of Birmingham City. We always do things the hard way. We've had some great times lately with several spells in the Premier League and even winning the League Cup (which I felt we deserved after the first attempt at Cardiff against Liverpool), however, that's now come at the cost of new owners, relegation and selling our best players.

Anyway, get those blue tinted spectacles on, promotion here we come!

I'm off to find some Jasper Carrot video clips, the man's a legend.

Keep Right On.

Range Rover P38 - Fuse 8 Failure

2011-03-26T16:32:00.002Z

I jumped in the car after work, reversed out of the parking space, then just as I was about to drive off I got the dreaded beep-beep-beep and Fuse 8 Failure flashed up on the dashboard. The radio went off and the heater display went blank. Bugger.

Fuse 8 lives in the fusebox fixed to the side of the BECM under the drivers seat, which you can access from the panel on the side of the seat. It's a 30A fuse switched by relay when the ignition is turned to the first position.

Fuse 8 on a standard vehicle powers the radio, HEVAC panel, cigarette lighter and navigation system.

Tried changing the fuse but it simply popped as soon as I switched the ignition on. I spent a week systematically taking the vehicle to bits trying to find the short.

Eventually I traced the problem to a power wire installed in the boot of the vehicle that ran from the passenger side rear light cluster to the the retro fitted AV equipment installed on the drivers side. This power feed was trapped between the metal bodywork and the boot trim and over time had worn through and shorted to the body. It must have been like this for the last 10 years+ but the unsurfaced roads where I now live has probably accelerated the wear.

I'm pretty chuffed I was able to track down the fault, even if it did mean stripping the vehicle down. There's a lesson here in logical systematic fault finding.

Fedora 14 64bit

2011-01-23T15:11:00.002Z

Fedora 14 is out.

This time I decided to give the 64 bit version a try. This is the first time I've ever installed a 64bit version of Linux, although perversely I've been using 64bit operating systems on HP-UX PA-RISC & Itanium for over a decade!

In the past I've never seen the benefit of going 64bit. I've only ever had 4 GB of RAM installed (32bit Linux with PAE handles this fine) and I've seen all the issues with driver compatibility, especially with Nvidia and the Adobe Flash plugin.

Installed fine on an off-the-shelf Acer desktop machine and on my Samsung R590 laptop. The Samsung needed the Broadcom binary drivers installed for WiFi, plus the Nvidia drivers, but is fairly straight forward.

The biggest headache was with Skype. In the end I installed the 32bit version of Skype and had to install all the 32bit compatibility libraries, so in effect I've got a load of 32bit libraries installed alongside the 64bit versions. Somewhat annoying.

The only things I'm missing are two plugins I use for Thunderbird: Lightning and Enigmail. The first is a real pain as I use Thunderbird to handle my work mail so I'm missing meeting invites sent from Outlook. Enigmail isn't a big loss.

Did I need the 64bit version? No, not really. I don't do any serious number crunching with these machines and neither exceed 4GB of RAM either. On the plus side, I'm seeing 64bit Fedora is robust and I'll probably go 64bit with any future installs, especially on my home server which does some serious number crunching work.

Avro Vulcan XH558

2010-09-27T15:38:00.004+01:00

Avro Vulcan XH558
Originally uploaded by marksmanuk

On Sunday I went to Coventry airport's fly-in day. The main attractions were the only airworthy Avro Vulcan XH558, plus a Tornado GR4.

The Vulcan and Tornado were in the air at the same time, the Vulcan made a terrific low approach and go-around, during which time the Tornado landed, followed shortly by the Vulcan. Both aircraft parked up in the same area near where I was standing. Simply awesome!

A few more pics on my flickr. In reality I took hundreds of pictures. The guy stood next to me with a similar camera probably took about 5 pictures total, I had the Canon on continuous shooting mode firing off shots like a machine gun!

In some places, the crowd was several rows deep at the safety fence. It's amazing that an aircraft like this has such clear public interest. It will be a huge disappointment to many if the trust cannot find the required funds to keep it operating.

I also bought some XH558 merchandise in the Vulcan to the Sky tent. According to the tannoy bloke, the Vulcan pilot is the same guy that flew in the Black Buck mission in 1982 over the Falklands.

DVLA Uselessness

2010-09-25T14:17:00.004+01:00

The DVLA is the driver and vehicle licensing authority in the UK.

I wanted to report a vehicle as exported, retain the vehicle registration number and refund the road tax. I even went to the local DVLA office in Birmingham to do this.

According to DVLA local office you can't retain the registration number and report the vehicle as exported at the same time. So I have to have a whole new registration number allocated, certificates sent out and a new V5c issued, then as soon as the new V5c arrives, I have to send it straight back to DVLA and report the vehicle as exported. So this VRN will only exist for the time taken to issue and return a V5c - what a waste of time and effort!

Even though I went to the local DVLA office in person, 10 days on all I've received in the post is the temporary new reg certificate and a new tax disc! Grrrrr! I won't be getting new plates made up as the vehicle is being exported. I don't want a new tax disc because I refunded the VED at the same time with the old disc! So this stage is useless.

Still waiting for confirmation my VRN is retained. Still waiting for my refunded VED. Still waiting, pointlessly, for the new V5c so I can send it back as exported.

I've now got this suspicion DVLA are going to make a further mess of this somehow. I'm thinking the VED refund will now be rejected because either the VRN doesn't exist or because they've issued a new tax disc for the new VRN and they want that back!

Update: Oooh! A couple of days later and my new V5 arrives... which I promptly sent straight back to them with the Export section filled in.
I sort of see why they want to issue a new V5, as you keep the first page of the V5 which doubles as an export certificate - although only the VRN will change, and the VRN is irrelevant once outside the UK anyway.

Another Update: A couple of days later again, this time the Retention document arrived. At least my plate has been saved, which is really all I wanted out of this.
I wonder when my tax refund will arrive? And why is everything being sent out peace meal?

Buying Spectacles Online

2010-09-17T22:40:00.006+01:00

It's time for me to buy some new glasses. Now normally I'd pop into my local branch of Specsavers but after a quick Google I've learned it's possible to buy prescription glasses online. (Is it me or does this post sound like an advert already?).

I don't mind my local optician, they usually do a reasonable job, but choosing frames is really tedious. There's generally only a small selection and the plain & simple ones I like are strangely the most expensive. I usually just want to get out of the store and get away, especially when there's always a load of old dears in there faffing about.

As I happened to stumble across my old prescription this week, I'm taking the plunge and buying some new specs online.

After choosing some nice frames and selecting decent lenses, the price is still quite high. Certainly no more expensive then the high street, but not the cheap prices I was expecting.

The only measurement I didn't have on the prescription from Specsavers was my Interpupilliary Distance (IPD) measurement. That was pretty easy to get with my trusty digital camera, the self timer and a tape measure (61mm if you want to know).

I will post a short review of how it went once they arrive. Wish me luck!

Update: Two days later and my specs are "at the lab" for the lenses.

Update 2: Another two working days later and my order is "on it's way". Interestingly I had a separate mail, sent at the same time, for each pair, but both pairs appear to be in the post. Fingers crossed they arrive ok.

Update 3: A day later and the postman delivered a package containing my two new pairs of glasses. Each was supplied in a nice plastic case with a cleaning cloth.

I spent about an hour adjusting the arms so they fit comfortably and don't fall of. I did this by measuring the arms on my old pair which fit nicely and marking the centre of the bend point on the new arms. After adjustment, both pairs are really nice.

The only small concern is that my pair with Transitions lenses don't appear to have the anti-reflective coating applied. The other pair (which has) reflects everything with a green hue, but the transitions pair reflect in the usual colours. Maybe this is normal for this type of lens?

I felt a bit wonky for the first day, with a slight headache and nausea, but was fine the next day. The prescription was the same so I don't know why I felt funny for the first day. Possibly as they are sitting differently on my face?

I won't name the company but they claim to be the largest seller of online specs in the UK.

Fedora 13 and VMWare Worksation

2010-09-11T15:22:00.004+01:00

Is anyone else have severe performance problems with VMWare Workstation on Fedora 13?

I frequently run Windows Visa 32bit inside a virtual machine. Any disk I/O inside the VM seems to hang both the VM and Fedora completely, often for several minutes. It's incredibly annoying.

The worse case is when Symantic antivirus does it's twice daily virus scan for about 10 to 15 mins. The whole system is basically unusable for the entire time.

The virtual disk is on an XFS filesystem but ext3 seems just as bad, if not worse.

All my usual vmx hacks don't seem to help at all.

--
Update: Seems somewhat better with the following hacks:

1. Appended "nohz=off" to the kernel arguments in /boot/grub/grub.conf.
2. Added (or checked present) the following options in the VM's .vmx file:

MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
MemTrimRate = "0"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"
mainMem.partialLazySave = "FALSE"
mainMem.partialLazyRestore = "FALSE"

3. Changed the host OS filesystem (XFS) mount options as follows:
UUID=677somebollocks6676767 /home xfs noatime,nodiratime,logbufs=8,logbsize=256k,nobarrier,defaults 1 2

Disk I/O is still dog slow, but doesn't seem to be hanging both the guest and host OS quite so badly now.

Fedora 13

2010-09-05T12:26:00.004+01:00

Fedora 13 is out.

Nothing much to report about this release. Seems to work pretty much out the box on both my laptop (HP 8510w) and Desktop (Intel i7 950). Network interface card, WiFi card and all the relevant bits were recognised out of the box.

My typical install is to choose KDE then install the Nvidia proprietary drivers after first boot, then download all the updates.

KDE seems to be using the new KNetworkManager tool but seems to work ok. I'll need to get used to ii I suppose. The old Gnome Network Manager was quite good as I tended to have multiple NICs and various dynamic DHCP and Static configurations.

It just works.

Fedora 12

2009-12-22T12:50:00.004Z

Fedora 12 is now out, yay! My love of Linux continues unabated.

As usual, did a clean install. I have separate drives and partitions for my data and home directory, so it's fairly easy to format and overwrite only the partitions holding the OS. I also do cross-disk backups. I simply don't have enough external storage or optical media to make off-machine backups these days.

The only OS files I save are as follows:
crontabs (root and normal users)
dhcpd.conf
fstab
hosts
httpd.conf & custom conf.d/ files
ifcfg-eth0
ntp.conf
resolv.conf
smb.conf
squid.conf
sshd_config
vsftpd.conf

I also backup my webalizer usage stats and apache logs.

Was a bit disappointed to find a shed load of yum updates awaiting. Would be nice to have a Fedora 12.1 or 12.2 etc. to include patches. Seems madness downloading a 4GB DVD then downloading a massive load of updates.

Getting the Nvidia driver installed and nouveau disabled was a nightmare, but got there eventually:

/boot/grub/grub.conf:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.31.6-166.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=234a6b84-be5a-47bc-bdac-6cf28a8dfa67 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=uk rhgb quiet rdblacklist=nouveau vmalloc=256m

However, there's a bug in Xorg right now and the whole display freezes for 10s every time I open the K menu. Grrrrr.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=234227

Haven't really noticed too much different between F11 and F12. New colour scheme, smaller taskbar by default, that's about it.

-- update --
After updating my laptop doesn't boot properly and hangs on the Plymouth bootloader screen and never shows the kdm login screen. If I hit Escape during the graphical boot then all is well, but it's annoying.

So spent all xmas with my laptop not booting cleanly and my desktop freezing every time I use the K menu or hit Alt-F2. At least the classic KDE 3 K menu works ok as a temp workaround (at it as a new Applet to the taskbar).

-- update 2 --
Is VMware Workstation getting slower with F12 or is it just me?

I've applied a load of tweaks and it's better, but disk I/O is dragging my machine down to a crawl.

At least my VMs now startup and shutdown without hanging on a black screen for 10 mins. For the past few months the VMware GUI would close before the VM had finished shutting down !!!

DSA Theory Test

2009-12-22T12:17:00.002Z

I took my motorcycle theory test today. This is a computer based test that involves answering multiple choice theory questions and an interactive hazard perception test.

I passed my driving test when I was 17, long before this separate theory test came into existence. As best I can recall, the theory test was the examiner asking a handful of questions at the end of the test just before announcing whether you'd passed or failed. Thankfully I had no problems with that one.

So I turned up first thing this morning to take the test at a Pearson Vue testing centre. I took my Cisco CCNA a few months back, albeit at a different centre, and it felt exactly the same. It's just a small room with a load of computer terminals.

Most of the people in there were taking some type of IT testing. What a joke that was. I overheard the administrator explaining they had to use a text editor, a spreadsheet and a web browser. Unbelievable. I wonder if these same people had training to eat and breathe by themselves. There was one nervous lad in after me, looked about 15, I guess to take his car theory test.

If it helps anyone else, I'll describe the two parts.

Question Part.
No problems really. I'd seen pretty much all the questions before from self studying using the official DSA Biker Pack questions CDROM.
I did stupidly get one question wrong and I have a good suspicion which one it was.
The touch screen CRT works well, but the seating position just feels wrong and my arm ached after a few questions... gave up and used the mouse instead.

Hazard Perception Part.
What a stupid idea this it.
I know everyone classes themselves as a good driver (rider), but after many years of driving and having pre-empted many hazards, I'm certainly reasonable at spotting them, i.e. I'm not a newbie by any means. Having never taken advanced training (IAM), I'm also not arrogant enough to say I'm an expert though.

However, even now I'm still not sure when I was supposed to click, how many times to click for the same hazard, whether to ignore other hazards, whether road signs or other road clues were potential hazards, etc.

I got a reasonable score overall, but on a couple I scored pretty badly. In every clip I spotted the hazards early and certainly didn't miss any. The parked van driver opening the door on a passing cyclist was a good one - although I'd already clicked when the cyclist pulled into my path to overtake the van.

Here's the secret to my (partial) success anyway...
Click when you first see the hazard. Most are obvious, the horse on the bend, the car starting to back out, ambulance appearing.
Click again when the hazard occurs, the horse steps into the road, the car backs into your path, the ambulance pulls out in front of year.
Click yet again for good measure when you've taken avoiding action, i.e. slowed down, moved over, stopped, whatever.

So typically there would usually be at least 1 to 3 seconds between clicks.

I'd guess the system is only looking for 1 or 2 of the above clicks, but the above seemed to satisfy the system without triggering the "too many clicks" screen.

Anyway, I've done it now. That gives me a couple of years to pass my bike test!

Windows 7

2009-10-31T17:13:00.001Z

It's just Vista with a new taskbar surely?

I'm Sorry Crucial

2009-10-17T19:18:00.005+01:00

I've blogged previously about problems with Memory DIMMs in my computer from Crucial. Well it looks like they weren't the actual cause of the problem at all, so please disregard everything I said before!

After replacing all the DIMMs fitted (with a different manufacturer) I discovered memory problems AGAIN after just a couple of months. This pretty much confirmed my suspicion of either a faulty motherboard (Intel 955XBK) or Power Supply (Hiper HPU-4S525).

So I ordered a new motherboard, processor, PSU and yet more RAM. I've stepped up to a nice new Intel i7 950 this time (from a Pentium D Extreme Edition) with a Gigabyte motherboard (instead of Intel).

I planned to re-use the case, drives, etc. so I carefully dismantled my old PC which I'd built from scratch 4 years previously. When I removed the power connector to the motherboard I noticed 4 badly charred and burned pins. I'm somewhat amazed it was still running, if not dangerously close to burning my house down!

I examined the motherboard closely and it looked fine. Even the capacitors all looked ok visually - just the charring around the power connector.

Next I dismantled the Hiper power supply. After cleaning out 4 years of dust I found some suspect capacitors. No sign of leakage or venting but the tops were clearly bulging out on some of them. I don't own an ESR meter for testing caps but I'd guess this is the smoking gun. Probably high ripple was causing the memory to fail prematurely.

The offending capacitors were all manufactured by Fuhjyyu and a quick Google search suggests they've failed prematurely in other cases.

All the existing drives, PCI cards and GPU work fine in the new motherboard, so they seem to have been more resilient than the memory.

The computer has been running continually for over 4 years, so that's not too bad. I'd estimate at least 37,000 hours. I'd always suspected the high CPU temp of the Pentium D EE would have killed it first, it was forever clocking back due to over-temp! I never could keep that processor cool under load no matter what I tried.

So far the new i7 system runs incredibly cool (40 degrees C with 2 cores at 100%) and with a stock heatsink and fan - which is much quieter than the cooling system I had before.

The new PSU is a 750 Watt from Corsair. It claims to have rated capacitors for 50,000 hours. The fact they even mention the capacitors at all suggests there have been problems with PSUs using defective capacitors. I'll come back in another 37,000 hours and let you know how it gets on.

Demon Internet

2009-09-30T19:17:00.003+01:00

Seems Demon Internet are having some problems right now... in the form of a routing loop!

traceroute to 62.49.17.3 (62.49.17.3), 50 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 89.201.163.9 (89.201.163.9) 24.127 ms 24.112 ms 25.509 ms
2 10.10.3.33 (10.10.3.33) 26.196 ms 27.898 ms 28.128 ms
3 85.114.32.42 (85.114.32.42) 29.597 ms 29.590 ms 31.513 ms
4 85.114.32.41 (85.114.32.41) 31.503 ms 33.439 ms 33.429 ms
5 212.73.203.9 (212.73.203.9) 43.273 ms 43.713 ms 45.175 ms
6 ae-7-7.ebr2.Berlin1.Level3.net (4.69.135.38) 69.796 ms 58.532 ms 58.538 ms
7 ae-3-3.ebr2.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net (4.69.133.146) 68.534 ms 68.518 ms 70.401 ms
8 ae-2-2.ebr1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net (4.69.133.89) 73.349 ms 83.400 ms 83.392 ms
9 ae-1-100.ebr2.Amsterdam1.Level3.net (4.69.141.170) 83.604 ms 84.028 ms 83.990 ms
10 ae-2-2.ebr2.London1.Level3.net (4.69.132.133) 86.905 ms 88.832 ms 88.308 ms
11 ae-100-100.ebr1.London1.Level3.net (4.69.141.165) 89.015 ms 89.968 ms 90.120 ms
12 ae-43-43.ebr2.London2.Level3.net (4.69.141.198) 102.442 ms ae-41-41.ebr2.London2.Level3.net (4.69.141.190) 78.437 ms 93.200 ms
13 ae-25-56.car1.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.175) 79.757 ms ae-25-52.car1.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.47) 80.884 ms *
14 THUS-GROUP.car1.London2.Level3.net (212.187.160.126) 81.577 ms 84.044 ms 83.037 ms
15 anchor-inside-4-g1-0-5.router.demon.net (193.195.25.65) 86.444 ms 86.440 ms 88.391 ms
16 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 88.359 ms 90.058 ms 91.466 ms
17 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 90.759 ms 90.756 ms 80.505 ms
18 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 82.206 ms 81.732 ms 82.636 ms
19 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 81.704 ms 82.289 ms 83.155 ms
20 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 84.325 ms 84.321 ms 86.272 ms
21 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 85.497 ms 87.261 ms 87.676 ms
22 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 90.595 ms 89.589 ms 91.501 ms
23 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 92.214 ms 79.716 ms 81.412 ms
24 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 81.177 ms 82.816 ms 82.196 ms
25 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 82.000 ms 83.421 ms 81.745 ms
26 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 82.232 ms 82.960 ms 82.630 ms
27 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 80.863 ms 80.846 ms 81.994 ms
28 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 82.940 ms 80.964 ms 82.534 ms
29 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 80.703 ms 80.257 ms 80.945 ms
30 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 82.198 ms 80.759 ms 81.705 ms
31 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 80.278 ms 80.036 ms 79.739 ms
32 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 79.956 ms 81.126 ms 80.000 ms
33 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 81.014 ms 80.764 ms 80.009 ms
34 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 81.304 ms 81.305 ms 80.322 ms
35 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 81.267 ms 82.260 ms 82.971 ms
36 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 83.705 ms 85.387 ms 85.673 ms
37 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 81.071 ms 80.763 ms 82.189 ms
38 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 80.889 ms 80.221 ms 81.782 ms
39 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 80.963 ms 80.626 ms 79.676 ms
40 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 81.762 ms 81.017 ms 81.523 ms
41 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 80.767 ms 81.500 ms 80.215 ms
42 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 82.540 ms 83.166 ms 83.438 ms
43 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 83.106 ms 81.018 ms 80.487 ms
44 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 81.014 ms 82.939 ms 83.929 ms
45 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 80.290 ms 81.278 ms 81.484 ms
46 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 81.449 ms 81.264 ms 82.230 ms
47 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 79.698 ms 80.375 ms 81.044 ms
48 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 83.977 ms 81.110 ms 80.992 ms
49 anchor-inside-3-g5-0-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.66) 81.242 ms 79.761 ms 80.257 ms
50 anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65) 80.762 ms 81.700 ms 80.260 ms

That's a pretty serious fault. I'd guess a link went down somewhere, the route associated with it disappeared out of the routing table and now it's matching a default route instead and sending the packet back to the previous hop.

Demon certainly aren't the ISP they used to be. Sad really.

VMware hang on shutdown Fedora 11

2009-08-30T21:27:00.003+01:00

VMware is up to its old tricks again.

1. Hangs with a black screen when shutting down a guest VM. Eventually VMware closes the GUI but the process needs to be manually killed to unlock.

Simple fix this one, wish I'd discovered it sooner:

# yum remove pcsc-lite pcsc-lite-devel pcsc-lite-libs

2. Sticky control keys when coming out of full screen VM or alt tabbing. Had this ages ago, it got fixed in a combination of F10/Workstation but is back again. No idea how to fix this one, I've resorted to having a shortcut icon on the desktop that runs this command:

$ setxkbmap gb

Of course, remove the "gb" part if you've not got a UK layout keyboard.

Apart from that, I've been using VMware workstation for running Vista on F10 and F11 for some time successfully.

Last week I was running Linux (host), Vista (guest), then a Juniper VPN client, with an SSH tunnelled Citrix session on top of that!

Fedora 11

2009-08-18T12:01:00.002+01:00

Just realised I haven't posted about Fedora 11. This months Linux Format magazine has described the release as "meh", i.e. nothing to write home about. I feel the same, which may explain why I've not blogged about it sooner.

It's not much different from a fully patched Fedora 10, so jumping to Fedora 11 wasn't a great leap. Of course the difference between a fresh install of Fedora 10, with an early KDE4 build and Fedora 11 is massive!

What may surprise people is that I've been running Fedora on my work laptop for everyday business use since Fedora 9 so I've seen KDE4 improve over time. If you were frightened off by the "raw" state of KDE4 in the early days it's now time to come back to the fold and give it another try, it's looking really good these days.

Most people who see my work laptop mistake KDE's black toolbar for Windows Vista, especially those still using XP. If they're looking over my shoulder they often see the composting effects, like Wobbly Windows which triggers a Linux discussion.

The next question asked by those considering a Linux switch is which Linux distro am I using and what do I recommend? That's a tough question. Everyone and his dog seems to know about or has tried Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora because it's "bleeding edge", which is great for me but could be trouble for *nix newbies. I also prefer KDE over Gnome. I usually recommend RedHat (or CentOs) for
servers and something like SUSE, (K)Ubuntu, Fedora for desktops.

Having said all that, my last desktop was a home-made Linux build based on FC4, before that SUSE, before that I was a devout Slackware man. Only recently I've gone down the out-the-box Fedora route and trying to use the provided RPMs and not revert to compiling from source. Fedora suits me well in this respect as it's aligned closely with the latest (pre)releases of most software.

There's a few things that still aren't great:
The graphical NetworkManager tool is great but it still insists on having an "extra" gnome keyring password to store WiFi keys. Although I find NetworkManager and it's profiles an incredibly useful tool. I have two Ethernet NICs, plus wireless and I'm often switching between networks with static and dynamic addresses.

Just recently Nvidia (I assume) went unstable. X would crash randomly after 1 or 2 days restarting KDE. I've had the same X crash suspending/resuming from RAM. Odd because before that in F10 and F9 my laptop would suspend/resume fine and X was pretty solid.

PackageKit and automatic updates are completely screwed in F11. I still very rarely get automatically notified of available updates, I have to manually check every few days. This used to work fine in F10 and F9. I've turned off the option to download security updates automatically several times and mysteriously it keeps turning itself back on. Even when PackageKit does notify me, I seem to get recursive notifications in the KDE notification area to restart the computer. At least the dialog boxes and icon in the toolbar now agree on whether I should Reboot or just Logout/Login again.

PulseAudio is slightly better but still dire. I'm sure it's hardware dependent as some people have no problems (these are the vocal "works for me" selfish people you come across on Linux forums) and the rest of us are having problems. I find audio playback now stutters for several seconds then corrects itself and plays fine to the end. For the limited audio playback I use, say playing a DVD whilst travelling, it's fine. I've messed around switching between combinations of Pulse and Alsa to get Skype, KDE4 and Amarok all playing nicely together so maybe it's me that screwed something up?

The new Firefox (3.5.2 right now) is dog slow. Is it just me or is it incredibly slow compared to earlier releases? I'm also getting cheesed off with entering text and Firefox losing the first few characters because it's "busy".

Chip's Challenge

2009-08-18T11:47:00.002+01:00

Chip's Challenge
Originally uploaded by marksmanuk

This week I've been playing Chip's Challenge, well actually the "Tile World" emulation under Linux. It's great!

I own the original game on the Atari Lynx and spent one Christmas visiting relatives playing it endlessly to pass time. I don't think I've ever completed all the levels though.

Chip's Challenge and Lemmings are my most-played and most-loved games for the Lynx.

Many thanks Chuck!

Bass +5 Treble +5

2009-08-12T17:15:00.003+01:00

Every time I have a hire car the radio settings are changed to maximum bass and maximum treble. Who keeps doing this? Stop it!

I'm no audiophile but even to me it sounds bloody awful. A "touch" of extra bass and/or treble is ok but maximum settings sounds dreadful.

Now where did I leave the Brasso? I've got pins to shine on my mains plugs ;)

We are premier league!

2009-05-04T16:39:00.001+01:00

say we are premier league!

Yes! Promotion through the automatic places! Well done lads.

Looking forward to another season of Premier League footy. Been wearing my Blues shirt all weekend with pride.

Bimingham City - Promotion?

2009-05-02T12:16:00.003+01:00

Not posted much recently, but not had much to post about publicly.

Anyway, tomorrow (Sunday) is the last Championship game of the 2008/9 season and we'll know whether my beloved Birmingham City will be playing Premiership footy next season.

We could have sealed the deal last week at home to Preston, but typical Blues do it the hard way as usual.

I've got the champers on ice just in case. Will be nice to celebrate in the UK for once. Last time we were promoted I was working abroad celebrating from my hotel room with a few work colleagues. The time before that I was leaping around like a loon at Cardiff's Millennium stadium - what a day that was.

Keep Right On.

Even more bad memories

2009-03-01T12:38:00.002Z

Oh no! I don't believe it (in a Victor Meldrew style).

I've had another memory DIMM fail in my computer. As usual it started out of the blue with a spate of daily Linux kernel hangs. I ran memtest86+ and it lit up like a Christmas tree with multiple errors in the low memory range.

I pulled the first pair of matched DIMMs from the machine which resulted in zero memtest errors, plus the computer has been rock steady ever since.

So that's the 3rd pair of 1GB DIMMs I've had fail. You can see from my earlier blog posts I only bought them a few months ago. I suspect the remaining pair will fail too in time. They work flawlessly for months then suddenly degrade and fail.

So that's it! My patience has run out with Crucial and I'm going to try Corsair next. Seems these DIMMs (6 I've killed now!) aren't fit for 24/7 running - and I paid extra for Ballistix DIMMs with the (crappy, el-cheapo stuck on) heatsink.

KDE 4.2.0

2009-02-15T11:48:00.003Z

My Fedora 10 installation automatically updated itself to KDE 4.2.0 yesterday.

I've been running KDE4 since Fedora 9 was first released and 4.2.0 is a significant leap from 4.1 and 4.0. I suspect this will be the point where the people holding back on KDE 3 decide to migrate over, I think its reached the point of having enough functionality from KDE 3, stability and new eye candy to sway the decision.

Minor problem I had was excessive CPU usage by X.org after upgrade using a good 30% CPU on my system. Tried a few reboots but no improvement. I have all the graphical effects turned off but I have a Nvidia 7800 GTX gfx card which has been somewhat flaky on Fedora 10.

I logged out, did a rm -rf ~/.kde, logged back in again and all was well. Of course this recreates all your KDE settings from scratch but it was probably a good time to reset to defaults as everything looked a lot prettier after doing this. I suggest doing a "mv ~/.kde ~/.kde.old" just in case ;)

Now even the graphic effects are working so I can have wobbly windows on my desktop.

A few new things I like:
* RSS plasmoid
* CPU, Network, Temperature plasmoids
* Comic plasmoid now actually shows something
* Taskbar now groups windows of the same type together like KDE3 used to
* Icons in panel don't corrupt as much - still a bit glitchy though
* Time and date isn't truncated if you show date + time

SBS-1 Part 2

2009-01-31T20:16:00.007Z

Right, finally made some progress decoding the SBS-1 protocol. From extensive searching I've found only two third party tools that are capable of achieving this and both are closed source. I managed to contact one of the authors and he refused to give me the details. Thanks a bunch. Why all the secrecy?

I've knocked up a proof of concept in my beloved perl and it's decoding nicely

0000: 00 67 72 7C 20 00 0F 98 40 0A 77 .gr| ...@.w
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 84 E6 7E 2E A5 64 55 6D C6 50 ...~..dUm.P
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 FD 95 81 5D 40 0A 26 00 00 00 ....]@.&...
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 2F BF 84 5D 40 0A 5B 00 00 00 ./..]@.[...
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 44 03 88 5D 4C A2 4E 00 00 00 .D..]L.N...
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 E0 90 C9 5D 40 0A 77 00 00 00 ....]@.w...
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 CC D1 C9 5D 40 0A 5B 00 00 00 ....]@.[...
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 86 AF DF 27 0D 61 09 EE 4E D5 ....'.a..N.
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 96 1A FB 20 00 0B B7 40 0A 26 .... ...@.&
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 19 04 FE 5F 4C A5 C8 00 00 00 ...._L.....
Received Event: 0x07
0000: 00 71 60 08 20 00 0F 98 40 0A 77 .q`. ...@.w

My time is pretty limited right now so I'm making available the Perl script proof of concept. You can download it from here. Enjoy!

You might want to use this tool to understand the decoding algorithm in order to create your own applications. I'd like to see something in Linux with Internet sharing capabilities.

Kinetic SBS-1e

2009-01-27T20:36:00.008Z

In a moment of madness I forked out an awful lot of money for a Kinetic SBS-1e.

The Basestation software that comes with it is adequate but as a Linux user I'm having to run it using wine. Basestation actually runs pretty well under wine and looks reasonable if you have the Windows fonts installed. It also relies on IE6 being installed as the aircraft details dialog is a browser control.

Also as the Basestation back end database is using sqlite, it's fairly trivial to query it directly from Linux with Perl's DBI module, or whatever your favourite scripting language is.

As the unit itself essentially talks serial comms either carried over USB or a TCP over Ethernet connection, it would be nice to knock up a native interface under KDE. I'm not too bothered about the map display, just the aircraft lists would be enough whilst I'm doing other tasks on the computer.

So I had a Google around to see if anyone has done this already. No joy. Seems like nobody has been able to decode the protocol used between the SBS-1 and the host PC and it's deliberately obfuscated.

I feel a bit miffed because it costs a lot of money for what it actually contains and it would be nice to have full use of it. I realise there's a competing product in this sector (Radarbox) but a common API would be great.

I've had a look at the protocol they're using and this is what I know so far. Please leave a comment or mail me if you have more details.

1. Login 1 Message

Basestation Sent(16):
0000: 10 02 17 E9 6A DF 56 68 78 FF E4 BB 10 03 05 C2

SBS-1 Sent(21):
0000: 10 02 27 21 0B AA C2 5D AC 9C 0D F1 F6 27 16 39
0010: 60 AA 8B 91 10 03 09 E2

No idea what data is returned here.

2. Login 2 Message

Basestation Sent(16):
0000: 10 02 18 42 30 5F C4 F3 F1 3B E8 76 10 03 48 30

SBS-1 Sent(73):
0000: 10 02 28 xx xx xx xx xx xx xx 77 43 59 8D 7A 13
0010: 29 37 E7 9D 4C F0 DC F2 D0 23 3D 53 C9 D6 A1 CC
0020: C7 A3 BE 09 10 03 35 2D

Returns the unit inventory information, i.e. serial number, firmware version etc. and starts the unit sending unsolicited MODE-S messages. The XX's are the serial number field.

That seems to be the only messages from Basestation to the SBS-1 and after this sequence the unit sends unsolicited event messages.

3. Typical Mode S message

SBS-1 Sent(18):
0000: 10 02 07 EF 77 5A 2F 5A 01 15 73 A3 1E 5B 10 03
0010: B5 FC

I'm pretty sure the format is something like:

Prefix: 0x10 0x02 (LF) (STX)

Msg Type: 1 byte

01 = ADS-B DF=17 <- SBS
02 = Kinetic control message <- SBS
07 = Mode-S Short 56bit <- SBS
05 = Mode-S Long 112bit <- SBS
17 = Unit startup control msg -> SBS
27 = Unit startup control reply <- SBS
18 = Unit startup control msg -> SBS
28 = Unit startup controld reply <- SBS

Counter: 4 bytes Unknown use counter
Not used with 02 type messages

Message: ??????????? Message body (Scrambled)
Mode-S message 56 (14 bytes) or 112 bit (7 bytes)

Suffix: 0x10 0x03 (LF) (ETX)

CRC16: Not a standard CRC16 algorithm but is using the polynomials 0x1021 and 0x8005. CRC is applied to the plaintext message before encryption of the payload (totally stupid in a real stack because you want to discard corrupt messages before decoding them).

Only the Message Type is cleartext, all remaining payload bytes are scrambled. The scrambling algorithm makes use of the CRC16 function with some special initialisation strings followed by some bit shifting and XORing.

I'll soon have figured out enough information to get a native client working, but I'd love to have full details of the protocol if anyone has it.

Flight Simulator X

2009-01-12T22:36:00.003Z

The last time I bought a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator it was for Windows 95 on my Pentium P100 and damn cool it was at the time too.

I got the urge to try it out again and picked up Flight Simulator X which I'm running on XP with Direct X 9. I don't have the highest spec PC in the world but it's good enough.

So far I haven't progressed past the basic Cessna. First I installed the scenery files for my local airport Birmingham International EGBB http://www.egbbscenery.co.uk/. Then spent an hour taxiing around the familiar taxi ways and checking out both ends of runway 15/33 complete with localiser aerials and the rusting red equipment hut. Cool. Had a quick flight over the city and found the Blues ground, the Rotunda and post office tower.

For my first real flight I flew IFR from Birmingham EGBB to London Heathrow EGLL. Pretty cool getting ATC directions and hand-offs as you progress. Managed to track the Honiley and London VORs but then couldn't figure out how to set the localiser frequency at Heathrow. Radar just vectored me to within 17 odd miles of Heathrow at 2500ft and dumped me! As such I flew straight past the runway and promptly got lost! Tried a go-around and ended up landing at the wrong airport. Pretty bad.

The American accents on the ATC controllers is a bit annoying too, must google to see of I can select a British voice. Don't like ATC using the word "altimeter" all the time instead of QNH. Is this a US terminology thing or is it just dumbed down?

Edit: Success on my 2nd attempt. I flew the same EGBB-EGLL route and managed to pick up the localiser and made a reasonable landing following the glide slope. Great fun.

Tomb Raider Underworld - Completed

2008-12-16T11:10:00.002Z

That's Tomb Raider Underworld completed. It's not the longest game in the world but it's taken me at least 4 weeks of occasional evening play.

Is it just my memory or were the early TR1 to TR3 games really epic? I seem to remember playing these for months on end. UW seems a bit short for me. DLC?

I managed to complete the whole game without using Lara's journal for hints or referring to the walkthrough. I normally struggle with at least one puzze so I'm either getting better at TR or this was a much easier game.

I'm really disappointed with the secrets. Hiding them in those stupid pots out in the open is dumb. They're usually in the same style of pot as well. OK, a few of them are old-school which I've yet to find. Haven't found any relics at all yet, so they're well hidden!

Levels are ok. Didn't get the same "wow" feeling as I did with Anniversary (I'm thinking of the Egypt levels particularly).

Missed not having Croft Mannor to play in. There's usually some secret rooms and puzzles in the manor I miss - not just the contrtols and move training.

Character animation is crap but that may get patched. The most annoying is whenever Lara meets a non-square block wall or edge. She seems to get stuck forever in an animation loop until you release the controls for a while. Lots of clipping, had many dead guys suspended in mid-air or stuck half in walls. Even had a boss stuck in a rock that I had to head-shot to kill.

Talking of head-shots it was a pretty usless feature because you had to wait for the adrenaline bar to fill up first. In a close fight you can't be watching the meter all the time so I keep hitting Blue/X several times which both triggers then cancels the head-shot, grrrr! I want to try headshots all the time. Was slightly better in Anniversary but still a supid feature IMHO.

As for the adrenaline, slow-mo thing, I think that only happened a few times on the very last level when being shot with flames by whats-her-name.

Not bad. 8/10. Can't wait for the next one!

Test Card F

2008-12-10T22:41:00.004Z

Test Card X
Originally uploaded by marksmanuk

Test card F is back on our screens on the BBC HD Preview loop. It's actually a widescreen and HD (1440x1080) variant called Test Card X. There's also a Dolby 5.1 speaker test in the audio stream.

See this site for everything you ever wanted to know about Test Card F: http://www.barney-wol.net/video/testcardf/testcardf.html

I have a copy of the full 90 second HD test card and Dolby test in it's original mp2ts if anyone wants it (184MB). The screen capture above was taken by me and de-dog'd.

Fedora 10

2008-12-10T20:13:00.003Z

My main desktop PC died this week. For some reason I was getting Segmentation Violations trying to open Firefox. I tried to logout of KDE and log back in but X wouldn't restart.

So I restarted the machine and fsck started checking my root (/) disk and reported loads of errors. After fixing all the errors and rebooting I still couldn't get X to start and trying to compile anything with gmake failed in a segfault.

Since I was still using an OS based on Fedora Core 4 I cut my losses and decided to re-install after backing up all my data to other disks in the system.

Actually, although it was based on FC4 it was pretty much bleeding-edge up to date as I usually compile and install everything from source, i.e. the kernel, glibc, gcc, X.org, Qt, KDE. In fact it was the day after I upgraded gcc to version 4.3.2 that everything went bad.

So I slapped on Fedora 10, restored my /home, configured my FTP, Web Server, DHCP, etc. and I'm back. Didn't take that long either so I might be tempted to fresh install the next OS when it's released.

The only major problem so far has been with X. I have a NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX gfx card. The nvidia drivers went on fine and I have accelerated gfx but can't get my Microsoft trackball mouse working properly. I like the scroll wheel to actually work and the extra buttons to do Forward/Back in Firefox. For some reason I don't have an InputDevice section in my xorg.conf and adding it has no effect on the mouse. In fact, if I do init 3/init 5 several times the keyboard screws up and produces only garbage characters or the screen goes permanently blank. It's weird because X.org (latest version) was fine before I upgraded to F10.

Right now I have to type the following after starting X to get the correct mouse behaviour. If I don't find a fix I'll just script this command to run on X startup ;)

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7"

I've already been using Fedora 9 and later Fedora 10 on my laptop so I'm quite happy with it. Shame I installed on the day when yum was screwed up:

# yum update
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Update Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
--> Processing Dependency: libpackagekit-glib.so.10 for package: gnome-packagekit
---> Package PackageKit-yum.i386 0:0.3.11-4.fc10 set to be updated
---> Package PackageKit-udev-helper.i386 0:0.3.11-4.fc10 set to be updated
---> Package PackageKit-yum-plugin.i386 0:0.3.11-4.fc10 set to be updated
---> Package PackageKit.i386 0:0.3.11-4.fc10 set to be updated
---> Package PackageKit-qt.i386 0:0.3.11-4.fc10 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: libpackagekit-qt.so.10 for package: kpackagekit
---> Package PackageKit-glib.i386 0:0.3.11-4.fc10 set to be updated
---> Package PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin.i386 0:0.3.11-4.fc10 set to be updated
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
gnome-packagekit-0.3.9-8.fc10.i386 from installed has depsolving problems
--> Missing Dependency: libpackagekit-glib.so.10 is needed by package gnome-packagekit-0.3.9-8.fc10.i386 (installed)
kpackagekit-0.3.1-4.fc10.i386 from installed has depsolving problems
--> Missing Dependency: libpackagekit-qt.so.10 is needed by package kpackagekit-0.3.1-4.fc10.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libpackagekit-glib.so.10 is needed by package gnome-packagekit-0.3.9-8.fc10.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libpackagekit-qt.so.10 is needed by package kpackagekit-0.3.1-4.fc10.i386 (installed)

I needed the latest kernel in order to take the matching nvidia drivers, so ended up doing this:

# yum --skip-broken update

Hope that doesn't cause me problems later on when the repos fixed.

Now I'm on my best behaviour to use yum and rpm to manage pre-built packages. I normally last just a few days before I get frustrated and start installing stuff from scratch. Unfortunately you can't mix and match. Once you've broken a dependency, e.g. by installing something rpm doesn't know about, you're on your own. Luckily these days you can get most stuff form the repos pre-built, e.g. mplayer, vlc, xawtv, boinc.

I found my own way configuring F10 but the following guide is similar to the steps I performed: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f10.html

I'm really happy with F10 so far.

Tomb Raider Underworld

2008-11-25T21:32:00.003Z

The new Tomb Raider is out and I have my copy for the Xbox 360. I'm a big TR fan and have played just about every iteration released for the consoles.

Only played to the part where you board the ship. A few comments so far:

1. What happened to the controls and camera? TR Anniversary had wonderful controls and the camera was reasonable. In UW The character animation is dreadful, Lara gets stuck in the scenery, the whole environment is made of big invisible square blocks that Lara keeps hitting and going "ugh". Camera is almost useless when Lara is backed on a ledge. What was wrong with just taking the Anniversary engine?

2. Fighting. I've been playing a lot of GTA IV and now combat is almost impossible. Lara seems too exposed, cover is impossible - am I missing a cover option? If I tap crouch she only crouches for a split second and stands up again.

3. Secrets. Are way too easy to find. In TR I, II and III they were almost impossible to find on a normal run through the game. Now they're hidden in those stupid pots Lara kicks to pieces all the time! At least one of the pots could be toxicm i.e. Gauntlet style ;)

Apart from that it's a pretty good game. Enjoyed the early puzzles, which aren't quite up to the difficulty level I'm used to. Graphics are ok so far (Anniversary was better though).

Sound is stunning. This is the first TR game I've played on a large HD screen with 5.1 sound. when that octopus thing appeared near the start I nearly jumped out my seat!

Looking forward to the rest of the game.

GTA IV 100% Completion

2008-10-25T21:30:00.002+01:00

Yay! I've finally found time to complete Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360.
The in-game playing time reads 59 hours. The story missions I completed whilst in Sweden, the car delivery missions were completed in Argentina and the rest whilst in the UK.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas took me 100 hours to finish 100% over a period of 12 months! At least I've only been playing this game since release.

In case it helps anyone else, here is the checklist I used:

100% Completion Checklist by Mike Double U
*Spoilers Lie Below*

Please Read: In order to get 100% completion in GTA IV you need to complete everything on this list. You should print out this checklist and check off the objectives as you complete them. Please rate and tell your friends about this guide!

Important Note: Nothing you do in game will prevent you from getting 100%. You can use any cheats and you can kill whoever you want in the story. As long as you complete the following objectives, you'll achieve 100% completion.

Main Story Missions - 60%

Complete the main story, which will consist of all missions below.

[ ] The Cousins Bellic
[ ] It's Your Call
[ ] Three's A Crowd
[ ] First Date
[ ] Bleed Out
[ ] Easy Fare
[ ] Jamaican Heat
[ ] Bull In A China Shop
[ ] Hung Out To Dry
[ ] Clean Getaway
[ ] Ivan The Not So Terrible
[ ] Concrete Jungle
[ ] Uncle Vlad
[ ] Crime & Punishment
[ ] Do You Have Protection?
[ ] Final Destination
[ ] Logging On
[ ] Shadow
[ ] No Love Lost
[ ] Rigged To Blow
[ ] The Master And The Molotov
[ ] Search And Delete
[ ] Russian Revolution
[ ] Romans Sorrow
[ ] Easy As Can Be
[ ] Out Of The Closet
[ ] No. 1
[ ] Escuela Of The Streets
[ ] Street Sweeper
[ ] Luck Of The Irish
[ ] Blow Your Cover
[ ] The Puerto Rican Connection
[ ] Destruction For Beginners
[ ] Ruff Rider
[ ] Undress To Kill
[ ] The Snow Storm
[ ] Have A Heart
[ ] Photo Shoot
[ ] The Holland Play
[ ] Wrong Is Right
[ ] Hostile Negotiation
[ ] Portrait Of A Killer
[ ] Dust Off
[ ] Paper Trail
[ ] Call And Collect
[ ] Final Interview
[ ] Holland Nights
[ ] Lure
[ ] Harboring A Grudge
[ ] Waste Not Want Knots
[ ] Three Leaf Clover
[ ] A Long Way To Fall
[ ] Taking In the Trash
[ ] Meltdown
[ ] Museum Piece
[ ] No Way On The Subway
[ ] Weekend At Florian's
[ ] Late Checkout
[ ] Actions Speak Louder Than Words
[ ] I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots, And Your Motorcycle
[ ] Smackdown
[ ] Babysitting
[ ] Tunnel Of Death
[ ] Truck Hustle
[ ] Hating The Haters
[ ] Union Drive
[ ] Buoys Ahoy
[ ] Blood Brothers
[ ] Undertaker
[ ] Pegorino's Pride
[ ] Payback
[ ] Catch The Wave
[ ] Trespass
[ ] To Live And Die In Alderney
[ ] Flatline
[ ] Pest Control
[ ] I'll Take Her
[ ] Entourage
[ ] Dining Out
[ ] Liquidize The Assets
[ ] That Special Someone
[ ] She's A Keeper
[ ] Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend
[ ] One Last Thing
[ ] A Dish Served Cold OR If The Price Is Right
[ ] Mr. & Mrs. Bellic
[ ] Out Of Commission OR A Revenger's Tragedy

Assassination Missions - 2%

Complete all 9 assassination missions. You will be able to accept them from a payphone in Alderney towards the end of the main story.

[ ] Bailing Out for Good
[ ] Dead End
[ ] Derelict Target
[ ] Hook, Line, and Sinker
[ ] Industrial Action
[ ] Migration Control
[ ] R.U.B. Down
[ ] Taken Out
[ ] Water Hazard

Little Jacob's Jobs - 2% [ 64.5% > 66.5% ]

Call Little Jacob and use the "Job" option to start these missions.

[ ] Complete 10 Drug Delivery Missions

[ ] Cerveza Heights Ambush
[ ] Outlook Park Ambush
[ ] Willis Alley Sting
[ ] Schottler Timer
[ ] Meadows Park Ambush
[ ] Meadow Hills Ambush
[ ] Meadow Park Festival Towers Sting
[ ] East Island City Tunnel Timer
[ ] Steinway Apartment Tower Timer
[ ] Beechwood City Timer

Brucie's Exotic Export - 2%

View your emails from Brucie. Those with attachments are car delivery missions. Complete them all.

[ ] Deliver All 10 Exotic Export Cars

[ ] Sabre GT
[ ] Intruder
[ ] PCJ600
[ ] PMP600
[ ] Cavalcade
[ ] NRG900
[ ] Patriot
[ ] Feltzer
[ ] Banshee
[ ] Sanchez

Brucie's Street Races - 2%

Call Brucie and use the "Race" option to start these races. You must win all 9 street races.

[ ] South Broker
[ ] Airport Run
[ ] Dukes Boulevard
[ ] South Algonquin
[ ] Star Junction
[ ] Road to Bohan
[ ] North Alderney
[ ] Elevated
[ ] South Alderney

Stevie's Text Message Cars - 2%

Deliver all 30 text message cars below when requested from Stevie by text message.

[ ] Banshee
[ ] Bobcat
[ ] Buccaneer
[ ] Cavalcade
[ ] Cognoscenti
[ ] Comet
[ ] Contender
[ ] Coquette
[ ] DF8-90
[ ] Dilettante
[ ] Dukes
[ ] Faggio
[ ] Freeway
[ ] Huntley Sport
[ ] Infernus
[ ] Intruder
[ ] Manana
[ ] Moonbeam
[ ] NRG 900
[ ] PMP 600
[ ] Patriot
[ ] Rancher
[ ] Rebla
[ ] Sabre GT
[ ] Sentinel
[ ] Sultan
[ ] Super GT
[ ] Turismo
[ ] Voodoo
[ ] Washington

Most Wanted - 2.5%

Use the in-car police computer to kill all 10 of the most wanted men on each island. You will need to kill all 30 of them in total.

Broker/Dukes
[ ] Maxwell Caughlin
[ ] Scott Guzowski
[ ] Antonio Rivette
[ ] Rodrigo Stavnes
[ ] Fernando Tisdel
[ ] Tyler Pickrel
[ ] Preston Pecinovsky
[ ] Alonso Goralski
[ ] Bert Reker
[ ] Freddy Paparo

Algonquin
[ ] Shon Kikuchi
[ ] Jimmy Kand
[ ] Simon Nashly
[ ] Tommy Francovic
[ ] Barry Lamora
[ ] Lino Friddell
[ ] Juan Haimo
[ ] Darren Covey
[ ] Leo Brodell
[ ] Christov Mahonvic

Alderney
[ ] Marty Boldenow
[ ] Noel Katsuda
[ ] Rodney Mceniry
[ ] Glenn Lushbaugh
[ ] Phil Baccera
[ ] Sergi Szerbin
[ ] Danny Hatmaker
[ ] Mervin Eskutchen
[ ] Grederick Harrison
[ ] Keenan Burdett

Vigilante - 2.5%

Use the in-car police computer to start and complete 20 'current crimes'. They do not need to be done consecutively.

[ ] Complete 20 Vigilante Missions

[ ] 1
[ ] 2
[ ] 3
[ ] 4
[ ] 5
[ ] 6
[ ] 7
[ ] 8
[ ] 9
[ ] 10
[ ] 11
[ ] 12
[ ] 13
[ ] 14
[ ] 15
[ ] 16
[ ] 17
[ ] 18
[ ] 19
[ ] 20

Friend Special Abilities & Activities - 10%

Get each of the friends "Like" percentage up to the following to unlock their special ability:

[ ] Unlock Little Jacob's Gun Delivery Ability (at 60%)
[ ] Unlock Brucie's Helicopter Ability (at 70%)
[ ] Unlock Packie McReary's Car Bomb Ability (at 75%)

You must take your friends below to ALL of the following activities. All other friends do not count towards 100%.

Little Jacob After 2
[ ] Darts
[ ] Drinking
[ ] Eating
[ ] Pool
[ ] Show
[ ] Strip Club

Brucie
[ ] Boating
[ ] Bowling
[ ] Drinking
[ ] Eating
[ ] Heli Ride
[ ] Show
[ ] Strip Club

Packie McReary After 4
[ ] Bowling
[ ] Darts
[ ] Drinking
[ ] Pool
[ ] Show
[ ] Strip Club

Random Pedestrians - 5%

Meet all of these 10 Random Pedestrians and complete all of their 'missions'. The 4 other pedestrians who are not mentioned are not required for 100% due to their ability to be killed throughout the story missions.

[ ] Brian (3 Meets) [ ] I [ ] II [ ] III
[ ] Badman
[ ] Mel
[ ] Ileyna Faustin
[ ] Hossan
[ ] Sara (2 Meets) [ ] I [ ] II
[ ] Pathos (2 Meets) [ ] I [ ] II
[ ] Marnie (2 Meets) [ ] I [ ] II
[ ] Eddie Low (2 Meets) [ ] I [ ] II
[ ] Gracie

Activities - 5%

Complete all of the following objectives.

[ ] Beat a friend or random computer opponent at a game of Pool
[ ] Beat a friend or random computer opponent at a game of Darts
[ ] Beat a friend or random computer opponent at a FULL game of Bowling
[ ] Beat the high score (get at least 11,000 points) on the QUB3D arcade game

Flying Rats (Pigeons) - 2.5%

Search for the pigeons hidden around the city and kill them.

[ ] Find and exterminate all 200 Flying Rats

Stunt Jumps - 2.5%

Grab a fast vehicle and clear each of the jumps scattered across the city.

[ ] Successfully complete all 50 Stunt Jumps

Island 1:

[ ] Jump 1
[ ] Jump 2
[ ] Jump 3
[ ] Jump 4
[ ] Jump 5
[ ] Jump 6
[ ] Jump 7
[ ] Jump 8
[ ] Jump 9
[ ] Jump 10
[ ] Jump 11
[ ] Jump 12
[ ] Jump 13
[ ] Jump 14
[ ] Jump 15
[ ] Jump 16
[ ] Jump 17

Island 2:

[ ] Jump 18
[ ] Jump 19
[ ] Jump 20
[ ] Jump 21
[ ] Jump 22
[ ] Jump 23
[ ] Jump 24
[ ] Jump 25
[ ] Jump 26
[ ] Jump 27
[ ] Jump 28
[ ] Jump 29
[ ] Jump 30
[ ] Jump 31
[ ] Jump 32

Island 3:

[ ] Jump 33
[ ] Jump 34
[ ] Jump 35
[ ] Jump 36
[ ] Jump 37
[ ] Jump 38
[ ] Jump 39
[ ] Jump 40
[ ] Jump 41
[ ] Jump 42
[ ] Jump 43
[ ] Jump 44
[ ] Jump 45
[ ] Jump 46
[ ] Jump 47
[ ] Jump 48
[ ] Jump 49
[ ] Jump 50

Bad Memories

2008-09-30T19:50:00.002+01:00

Bad Memories
Originally uploaded by marksmanuk

Looks like another bad Crucial Ballistix 1GB memory module.

I replaced 2 x 1GB modules about 2 months ago and ran memtest86+ when the new modules arrived which reported no errors. Only 2 months later and one of the remaining modules has failed.

I managed a whole 1 month of stable uptime!

Ordered a replacement 1GB pair. So that's the last stick from that batch purged from my system.

Strange, of all the computers I've owned I've never had a RAM failure before until now. Well except for a ZX Spectrum 48k I once owned, but those chips really were unstable... oh and that Commodore 64 I bought from radio rally had a bad RAM chip (but a working PLA, so bonus!)

>> Update 11/12/08
The replacement DIMMs have been working fine for 3 months now without further problems so looks like it was just a batch of faulty modules. So the old ones are for the rubbish bin - thanks Crucial :(

Stargate in HD (Blue-ray)

2008-09-27T22:21:00.002+01:00

Watched the film Stargate last night in HD.

Film itself is great, picture quality was ok, but the sound was awesome. I'm no hi-fi expert and chose DTS-HD from the menu instead of Dolby 5.1. The sound was amazing, some of the low level bass during the space ship parts near the end of the film shook my sofa. Hope my neighbours didn't mind too much.

More bad RAM?

2008-09-27T14:06:00.002+01:00

A couple of months back I posted about finding a duff RAM module in my PC. After replacement and resolving a kernel problem with HPET my Linux machine was rock steady. I managed an uptime of at least 30 days for the fist time in ages. memtest86+ reported no memory errors after running it for several hours.

However, today whilst compiling KDE 4.1.1 I was getting more Internal Compiler Errors reported from GCC. On my machine this is a good indication of bad memory. Seems KDE puts more stress on the system than compiling a kernel does. Compiling KDE is the new stability test for me.

Aside: I don't seem to get ICEs with temperature. This dual core Pentium D EE seems to run incredibly hot 99% time anyway and just throttles back automatically.

I rebooted the PC and rand memtest86+. Immediately a load of red errors showed up with all the failures in the low memory region < 64MB.

I run 4 x 1GB DIMMs from Crucial on an Intel 955 XBK motherboard. I've just replaced 2 x 1GB modules in the last month after the previous RAM failure. So I suspected the 2 unreplaced modules and pulled just one of them. This time memtest reported no errors.

As a sanity check I re-inserted the suspect DIMM and ran memtest again. This time no errors reported after 30 minutes. Strange. Ran up Linux for a few hours, then rebooted and ran memtest86 again, but still no errors reported.

So right now I don't know whether this DIMM is faulty or not. The suspicous low memory region failing could imply a motherboard or BIOS bug. Will keep an eye on it.

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 4148760 1033668 3115092 0 67060 538884
-/+ buffers/cache: 427724 3721036
Swap: 1012044 0 1012044

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.20GHz
stepping : 4
cpu MHz : 3200.241
cache size : 1024 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips : 6404.65
clflush size : 64
power management:

Fedora 9, VMware and Windows

2008-09-22T00:39:00.003+01:00

I run Linux natively and often need to run both Windows XP and RHEL guest operating systems. The host is a HP laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.2 GHz.

I've had major problems with clock sync (the usual VMware problem!). Now I'm normally an expert at getting good clock sync with VMware on server hardware but this time none of the usual tricks worked (you know, like setting noapic nolapic clock=pit).

Turns out there's two things to getting good clock sync on this laptop:

1. Fedora 9 is using the NO_HZ kernel option by default. The effects is that both Windows & Linux guests generally run at varying clock speed, usually very slow, sometimes stopped!
I ran a test by tying up the host CPU to 100%, this seems to give more interrupts to the guests and they run at almost normal speed. Also running two VMs at the same time had better performance than just running a single VM.

The fix is to append the "nohz=off" option to the kernel arguments. Set this permanently in your /boot/grub/grub.conf if needed.

This is probably good enough for most people. Time of day clock runs generally in sync and VMware tools can step any small differences. I can run my IPSEC client in Windows XP and it's rock steady now.

2. Disable cpuspeed daemon and select High Performance power profile.
/etc/init.d/cpuspeed stop. In KDE4 choose Performance profile form the power management tool. The power management tool with then show continuous max CPU speed. Just disabling cpuspeed alone doesn't seem to stop the CPU from scaling down.

In a RHEL guest OS I now get 0.01 second clock resolution, which is good enough for me. I check clock sync by syncing once to a known NTP source with "ntpdate " then run "ntpdate -q " every 1s (man watch) to query the current offset.

So for 99% time I can leave cpuspeed on and select the normal power profile so my laptop runs cool and the fan stays off. For specific applications where I need stable guest clock ticks I can temporarily turn off scaling.

Hope this helps someone.

New VLC 0.9.2 Linux

2008-09-22T00:33:00.002+01:00

I've just compiled and installed the latest VLC 0.9.2 for Linux. It picked up by QT4 installation and built a QT4 user interface.

The new look is amazing. Hope this appears in Livna soon so I can yum update my Fedora 9 machine as well.

Also with the new ffpmeg it can playback H.264 content. I've noticed for a few weeks that ffmpeg has been able to encode H.264 really well. In the past H.264 was a complete disaster under Linux.

No idea what it's like under Windows.

My thanks to the developers :)

HSBC Cash Machine Charges - why?

2008-08-31T13:37:00.000+01:00

To:	MR xxxxxxxx
Subject:	Charges for ATM usage abroad
Date:	08 Jul 2008
Message:	We're writing to let you know that from 9 August 2008, our ATM transaction fee for overseas cash machine withdrawals using a debit card will increase from 1.5% (minimum £1.75) to 2.0% (minimum £1.75). Also on 9 August 2008 we'll be introducing a cap of £5.00 on these charges. This means no matter how large the amount you withdraw, you won't pay more than £5.00 for one transaction. Did you know that ATM transaction fees do not apply to overseas cash withdrawals by Bank Account Plus customers? Click on 'Current Accounts' and then 'Bank Account Plus' to find out more. Thank you for banking with HSBC.

Kernel Panic 2.6.26.3

2008-08-25T22:17:00.001+01:00

Kernel Panic
Originally uploaded by marksmanuk

I've been getting regular kernel panics in 2.6.26.1, 2.6.26.2 and 2.6.26.3 and I think (touch wood) I've finally resolved the problem.

It started when I created a new .config when my old .config wouldn't upgrade any more. After that my PC would generally crash each night and wouldn't stay up more than 24 hours.

In 2.6.26.2 it would just crash and lock up. No flashing keyboard LEDs, no screen output, no log entries, nothing. From my earlier blog entries you know my RAM is confirmed ok... now.

In 2.6.26.3 I got the flashing SysRq and Scroll lock keys but still nothing in the log and no video output.

I was was so annoyed with the damn thing I was contemplating connecting a serial console to capture the stack trace.

Finally after one panic I hit the front panel power button and the monitor came out of power save and showed the oops on the console. Finally!

So it turned out to be some incompatibility with my hardware (Intel 955 XBK motherboard running Pentium D) and enabling HPET in the kernel.

I've disabled HPET, rebuilt the kernel and so far so good.

I've not seen anything on LKML. I'm not going to post anything either as the kernel is tainted with Nvidia drivers and VMware, plus it's not the friendliest of places.

XFS Filesystem Maintenance

2008-08-23T15:19:00.006+01:00

I'm rather fond of SGI's XFS Filesystem. Although I typically use another journalled filesystem like ext3 for my main / disk and /home I use XFS for holding large files like virtual machines, media, etc.

Here's how to check fragmentation (requires xfsprogs installed):

# xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/sdc1
actual 29513, ideal 331, fragmentation factor 98.88%

*Yes, these were actual values from my system!

Print the block mapping of a large file to show number of extents before defragmentation (you don't need to do this, it's just to highlight the degree of fragmentation before-and-after style).

# xfs_bmap -v some_big_file_on_the_disk
some_big_file_on_the_disk:
EXT: FILE-OFFSET BLOCK-RANGE AG AG-OFFSET TOTAL
0: [0..77519]: 488286568..488364087 7 (60950568..61028087) 77520
1: [77520..105119]: 468155096..468182695 7 (40819096..40846695) 27600
2: [105120..120359]: 468139856..468155095 7 (40803856..40819095) 15240
3: [120360..135839]: 468124376..468139855 7 (40788376..40803855) 15480
4: [135840..151319]: 468108896..468124375 7 (40772896..40788375) 15480
5: [151320..166679]: 468093536..468108895 7 (40757536..40772895) 15360
6: [166680..182159]: 468078056..468093535 7 (40742056..40757535) 15480
7: [182160..197639]: 468062576..468078055 7 (40726576..40742055) 15480
8: [197640..213119]: 468047096..468062575 7 (40711096..40726575) 15480
9: [213120..228479]: 468031736..468047095 7 (40695736..40711095) 15360
10: [228480..243959]: 468016248..468031727 7 (40680248..40695727) 15480
11: [243960..259319]: 468000888..468016247 7 (40664888..40680247) 15360
12: [259320..274679]: 467985528..468000887 7 (40649528..40664887) 15360
13: [274680..274799]: 467985408..467985527 7 (40649408..40649527) 120
14: [274800..290159]: 467970048..467985407 7 (40634048..40649407) 15360
15: [290160..305519]: 467954688..467970047 7 (40618688..40634047) 15360
16: [305520..321119]: 467939088..467954687 7 (40603088..40618687) 15600
17: [321120..336599]: 467923608..467939087 7 (40587608..40603087) 15480
18: [336600..351959]: 467908248..467923607 7 (40572248..40587607) 15360
19: [351960..367439]: 467892768..467908247 7 (40556768..40572247) 15480
20: [367440..382799]: 467877408..467892767 7 (40541408..40556767) 15360
21: [382800..398159]: 467862048..467877407 7 (40526048..40541407) 15360
22: [398160..413519]: 467846688..467862047 7 (40510688..40526047) 15360
23: [413520..413639]: 467846568..467846687 7 (40510568..40510687) 120
24: [413640..429359]: 467830848..467846567 7 (40494848..40510567) 15720
25: [429360..444719]: 467815488..467830847 7 (40479488..40494847) 15360
26: [444720..460199]: 467800008..467815487 7 (40464008..40479487) 15480
27: [460200..475559]: 467784648..467800007 7 (40448648..40464007) 15360
28: [475560..491159]: 467769048..467784647 7 (40433048..40448647) 15600
29: [491160..506399]: 467753808..467769047 7 (40417808..40433047) 15240
30: [506400..521879]: 467738328..467753807 7 (40402328..40417807) 15480
31: [521880..537119]: 467723088..467738327 7 (40387088..40402327) 15240
32: [537120..552599]: 467707608..467723087 7 (40371608..40387087) 15480
33: [552600..568079]: 467692128..467707607 7 (40356128..40371607) 15480
34: [568080..583439]: 467676768..467692127 7 (40340768..40356127) 15360
35: [583440..598919]: 467661288..467676767 7 (40325288..40340767) 15480
36: [598920..614399]: 467645808..467661287 7 (40309808..40325287) 15480
37: [614400..629879]: 467630328..467645807 7 (40294328..40309807) 15480
38: [629880..645239]: 467614968..467630327 7 (40278968..40294327) 15360
39: [645240..660719]: 467599488..467614967 7 (40263488..40278967) 15480
40: [660720..675959]: 467584248..467599487 7 (40248248..40263487) 15240
41: [675960..691439]: 467568768..467584247 7 (40232768..40248247) 15480
42: [691440..706919]: 467553288..467568767 7 (40217288..40232767) 15480
43: [706920..722399]: 467537808..467553287 7 (40201808..40217287) 15480
44: [722400..737639]: 467522568..467537807 7 (40186568..40201807) 15240
45: [737640..753119]: 467507088..467522567 7 (40171088..40186567) 15480
46: [753120..768599]: 467491608..467507087 7 (40155608..40171087) 15480
47: [768600..783839]: 467476368..467491607 7 (40140368..40155607) 15240
48: [783840..799319]: 467460888..467476367 7 (40124888..40140367) 15480
49: [799320..814799]: 467445408..467460887 7 (40109408..40124887) 15480
50: [814800..830159]: 467430048..467445407 7 (40094048..40109407) 15360
51: [830160..845639]: 467414568..467430047 7 (40078568..40094047) 15480
52: [845640..861119]: 467399088..467414567 7 (40063088..40078567) 15480
53: [861120..876599]: 467383608..467399087 7 (40047608..40063087) 15480
54: [876600..892319]: 467367888..467383607 7 (40031888..40047607) 15720
55: [892320..907679]: 467352528..467367887 7 (40016528..40031887) 15360
56: [907680..907799]: 467352408..467352527 7 (40016408..40016527) 120
57: [907800..923279]: 467336928..467352407 7 (40000928..40016407) 15480
58: [923280..938759]: 467321448..467336927 7 (39985448..40000927) 15480
59: [938760..954239]: 467305968..467321447 7 (39969968..39985447) 15480
60: [954240..969599]: 467290608..467305967 7 (39954608..39969967) 15360
61: [969600..985079]: 467275128..467290607 7 (39939128..39954607) 15480
62: [985080..1000559]: 467259648..467275127 7 (39923648..39939127) 15480
63: [1000560..1016159]: 467244048..467259647 7 (39908048..39923647) 15600
64: [1016160..1031519]: 467228688..467244047 7 (39892688..39908047) 15360
65: [1031520..1046999]: 467213208..467228687 7 (39877208..39892687) 15480
66: [1047000..1047119]: 467213088..467213207 7 (39877088..39877207) 120
67: [1047120..1062479]: 467197728..467213087 7 (39861728..39877087) 15360
68: [1062480..1077959]: 467182248..467197727 7 (39846248..39861727) 15480
69: [1077960..1093559]: 467166648..467182247 7 (39830648..39846247) 15600
70: [1093560..1108919]: 467151288..467166647 7 (39815288..39830647) 15360
71: [1108920..1124399]: 467135808..467151287 7 (39799808..39815287) 15480
72: [1124400..1139999]: 467120208..467135807 7 (39784208..39799807) 15600
73: [1140000..1155359]: 467104848..467120207 7 (39768848..39784207) 15360
74: [1155360..1170719]: 467089488..467104847 7 (39753488..39768847) 15360
75: [1170720..1186423]: 467073784..467089487 7 (39737784..39753487) 15704
76: [1186424..1186439]: 467073768..467073783 7 (39737768..39737783) 16
77: [1186440..1201919]: 467058288..467073767 7 (39722288..39737767) 15480
78: [1201920..1217399]: 467042808..467058287 7 (39706808..39722287) 15480
79: [1217400..1232879]: 467027328..467042807 7 (39691328..39706807) 15480
80: [1232880..1248479]: 467011728..467027327 7 (39675728..39691327) 15600
81: [1248480..1263959]: 466996248..467011727 7 (39660248..39675727) 15480
82: [1263960..1279319]: 466980888..466996247 7 (39644888..39660247) 15360
83: [1279320..1294799]: 466965408..466980887 7 (39629408..39644887) 15480
84: [1294800..1310159]: 466950048..466965407 7 (39614048..39629407) 15360
85: [1310160..1325519]: 466934688..466950047 7 (39598688..39614047) 15360
86: [1325520..1340879]: 466919328..466934687 7 (39583328..39598687) 15360
87: [1340880..1356479]: 466903728..466919327 7 (39567728..39583327) 15600
88: [1356480..1371959]: 466888248..466903727 7 (39552248..39567727) 15480
89: [1371960..1387559]: 466872648..466888247 7 (39536648..39552247) 15600
90: [1387560..1402799]: 466857408..466872647 7 (39521408..39536647) 15240
91: [1402800..1418279]: 466841928..466857407 7 (39505928..39521407) 15480
92: [1418280..1433759]: 466826448..466841927 7 (39490448..39505927) 15480
93: [1433760..1449119]: 466811088..466826447 7 (39475088..39490447) 15360
94: [1449120..1464479]: 466795728..466811087 7 (39459728..39475087) 15360
95: [1464480..1480079]: 466780128..466795727 7 (39444128..39459727) 15600
96: [1480080..1495439]: 466764768..466780127 7 (39428768..39444127) 15360
97: [1495440..1495559]: 466764648..466764767 7 (39428648..39428767) 120
98: [1495560..1510919]: 466749288..466764647 7 (39413288..39428647) 15360
99: [1510920..1526279]: 466733928..466749287 7 (39397928..39413287) 15360
100: [1526280..1541759]: 466718448..466733927 7 (39382448..39397927) 15480
101: [1541760..1557119]: 466703088..466718447 7 (39367088..39382447) 15360
102: [1557120..1572599]: 466687608..466703087 7 (39351608..39367087) 15480
103: [1572600..1588079]: 466672128..466687607 7 (39336128..39351607) 15480
104: [1588080..1588199]: 466672008..466672127 7 (39336008..39336127) 120
105: [1588200..1603679]: 466656528..466672007 7 (39320528..39336007) 15480
106: [1603680..1619039]: 466641168..466656527 7 (39305168..39320527) 15360
107: [1619040..1619159]: 466641048..466641167 7 (39305048..39305167) 120
108: [1619160..1634399]: 466625808..466641047 7 (39289808..39305047) 15240
109: [1634400..1634519]: 466625688..466625807 7 (39289688..39289807) 120
110: [1634520..1649999]: 466610208..466625687 7 (39274208..39289687) 15480
111: [1650000..1665479]: 466594728..466610207 7 (39258728..39274207) 15480
112: [1665480..1680839]: 466579368..466594727 7 (39243368..39258727) 15360
113: [1680840..1680887]: 466579320..466579367 7 (39243320..39243367) 48
114: [1680888..1680903]: 466579304..466579319 7 (39243304..39243319) 16
115: [1680904..1680927]: 466579280..466579303 7 (39243280..39243303) 24
116: [1680928..1680959]: 466579248..466579279 7 (39243248..39243279) 32
117: [1680960..1696439]: 466563768..466579247 7 (39227768..39243247) 15480
118: [1696440..1711919]: 466548288..466563767 7 (39212288..39227767) 15480
119: [1711920..1727159]: 466533048..466548287 7 (39197048..39212287) 15240
120: [1727160..1742519]: 466517688..466533047 7 (39181688..39197047) 15360
121: [1742520..1757999]: 466502208..466517687 7 (39166208..39181687) 15480
122: [1758000..1773239]: 466486968..466502207 7 (39150968..39166207) 15240
123: [1773240..1788719]: 466471488..466486967 7 (39135488..39150967) 15480
124: [1788720..1804079]: 466456128..466471487 7 (39120128..39135487) 15360
125: [1804080..1819559]: 466440648..466456127 7 (39104648..39120127) 15480
126: [1819560..1834679]: 466425528..466440647 7 (39089528..39104647) 15120
127: [1834680..1850159]: 466410048..466425527 7 (39074048..39089527) 15480
128: [1850160..1865639]: 466394568..466410047 7 (39058568..39074047) 15480
129: [1865640..1880879]: 466379328..466394567 7 (39043328..39058567) 15240
130: [1880880..1896359]: 466363848..466379327 7 (39027848..39043327) 15480
131: [1896360..1911719]: 466348488..466363847 7 (39012488..39027847) 15360
132: [1911720..1927079]: 466333128..466348487 7 (38997128..39012487) 15360
133: [1927080..1942439]: 466317768..466333127 7 (38981768..38997127) 15360
134: [1942440..1957679]: 466302528..466317767 7 (38966528..38981767) 15240
135: [1957680..1957799]: 466302408..466302527 7 (38966408..38966527) 120
136: [1957800..1973279]: 466286928..466302407 7 (38950928..38966407) 15480
137: [1973280..1988759]: 466271448..466286927 7 (38935448..38950927) 15480
138: [1988760..2004239]: 466255968..466271447 7 (38919968..38935447) 15480
139: [2004240..2019719]: 466240488..466255967 7 (38904488..38919967) 15480
140: [2019720..2035079]: 466225128..466240487 7 (38889128..38904487) 15360
141: [2035080..2050559]: 466209648..466225127 7 (38873648..38889127) 15480
142: [2050560..2066159]: 466194048..466209647 7 (38858048..38873647) 15600
143: [2066160..2081639]: 466178568..466194047 7 (38842568..38858047) 15480
144: [2081640..2096999]: 466163208..466178567 7 (38827208..38842567) 15360
145: [2097000..2112479]: 466147728..466163207 7 (38811728..38827207) 15480
146: [2112480..2112599]: 466147608..466147727 7 (38811608..38811727) 120
147: [2112600..2128079]: 466132128..466147607 7 (38796128..38811607) 15480
148: [2128080..2143679]: 466116528..466132127 7 (38780528..38796127) 15600
149: [2143680..2159039]: 466101168..466116527 7 (38765168..38780527) 15360
150: [2159040..2174279]: 466085928..466101167 7 (38749928..38765167) 15240
151: [2174280..2189759]: 466070448..466085927 7 (38734448..38749927) 15480
152: [2189760..2205119]: 466055088..466070447 7 (38719088..38734447) 15360
153: [2205120..2209023]: 466051184..466055087 7 (38715184..38719087) 3904

And to defragment (requires xfsdump installed):
Tthis will pick the top 10 files with the largest extents and run for up to 2h before saving state.

# xfs_fsr -v /dev/sdc1

And afterwards....

# xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/sdc1
actual 331, ideal 326, fragmentation factor 1.51%

# xfs_bmap -v some_big_file_on_the_disk
some_big_file_on_the_disk:
EXT: FILE-OFFSET BLOCK-RANGE AG AG-OFFSET TOTAL
0: [0..2209023]: 438410336..440619359 7 (11074336..13283359) 2209024

Useless stupid waste of time company

2008-08-22T23:07:00.003+01:00

Good Morning Mr xxxxxxxx,

Thank you for your e-mail, with regards to your HSBC item.

We received your request for delivery to be made on the 30th August, unfortunately we are unable to carry out this request as we do not deliver this item on a saturday.

We can however deliver to your home, work or any branch address of HSBC for collection, between Monday-Friday.

Please contact us on 0870 389 1000 to arrange delivery.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Kind Regards

Customer Service Team

Secure Mail Services

DX 500000

Northampton 30

W: www.securemail.co.uk

>>
So why waste my bloody time arranging a Saturday delivery and confirming it only to cancel later. It's a stupid debit card anyway not the crown jewels FFS!

How hard can it be to post a new card. Just send it deactivated as usual. Either I have it delivered to work - which is a pain in the neck to manage or I have to collect in person from my bank. Are Royal Mail employees that corrupt that none of them can be trusted these days?

When my card mysteriously stopped working all by itself (yeah sure it did HSBC) I was abroad - basically stuck without access to my money. The best HSBC could do was send out a new card to my home (UK!) address - which doesn't help me in another country. Now I'm back in the UK and I still can't get my hands on it.

Useless HSBC. And they charge for ATM withdrawals abroad. And they have the cheek to charge me 30 quid a year for using a credit card. The final straw was trying to sell me a Bank Account+ and charge ME a monthly fee for THEM to hold onto my money.

Oh yeah they sent me a letter this week advising of an audit on overdrafts and how mine had been reviewed. Well that's odd, I've had the account for 14+ years with an 800 quid overdraft and only now they've decided to review it?

I hate banks.

KDE 4.1

2008-08-19T23:45:00.002+01:00

I'm still struggling on with KDE 4.0 as my everyday work machine.

With several more Fedora updates it is getting more stable but KDE 4.0 is still really lacking in functionality. I am still getting:

Random X lock ups. Have to either wait 10 seconds else do a Ctrl-Alt-F1 and then back to X.

X.org still hammers the CPU even when you're not doing anything, desktop effects are disabled and I don't use Compiz. This needs fixing ASAP, it's a backwards step.

KDE problems. Icon corruption in System Tray icons, Dolphin crashes often when doing sftp:// transfers, can't reliably copy from a sftp:// to a sftp:// window.

Other weird stuff: network dropouts on VMware virtual machine guests.

On my home PC I've installed KDE 4.10 which looks much, much better. Hope this arrives as a Fedora 9 update soon.

Thomson Sky HD - RIP

2008-08-19T23:38:00.004+01:00

It's busted again :(

I got a phone call to say the Sky HD box wouldn't switch on. Sure enough it is stuck with just the red LED lit and won't switch on.

This is the 2nd time it's failed on me. When I first acquired it the PSU was failing with bad electrolytic capacitors. Life no. 2 comes to an end (7 to go?).

On previous Sky+ boxes this permanent red LED was usually an indication of a Hard Disk failure so I ordered a nice new 500GB SATA disk replacement. When I opened the box up to fit the new HDD I noticed the PSU was extremely hot and there was scorching on the PCB.

Sure enough the new HDD had no effect and with the case removed I could hear the PSU whistling. Looks like a switch mode power supply failure... again.

Looks like the large 100uF 400V capacitor has failed - the vent is bulging out slightly and I suspect the large MOSFET on the heatsink is duff. New parts ordered, we shall see if it fixes it. The remaining caps were replaced a few months back with high temperature parts.

Worst STB ever. Can't wait until Pace release their version.

>> Update 27/9/08
Replaced the failed caps and the MOSFET but still no joy. In fact the whole thing went pop and doesn't output any voltage rails, oops!

Don't have the time to fix it so bought another 2nd hand box off ebay. When it arrived the new box looked relatively unused and the standard PSU was still in good order. As a preventative measure I replaced all the capacitors with the high-spec ones and replaced the HDD with the 500GB drive I bought to fix the old box. Runs really great, more Sky+ space and I know the PSU won't die in 12 months.

Put the old faulty box back on ebay which fetched a good 70GBP. Not bad. I guess if you get an exchange PSU for 30GBP you can make a small profit re-selling as a working box. I'm just happy as it covered most of the cost of the replacement box.

Memories - of the random access kind

2008-08-08T00:31:00.002+01:00

My replacement RAM arrived today from Crucial. A quick run of memtest86 showed no errors and I'm back to 4GB of RAM again.

I've compiled quite a lot of stuff with the new RAM and no more Internal Compiler Errors to be seen, great. Hope this RAM lasts longer than than the last lot.

Faulty RAM

2008-08-04T14:47:00.003+01:00

Today I had another instance of random Segmentation Violations whilst trying to compile KDE4 with GCC. Strange because I was running SETI all night without any problems.

Having eliminated all other possibilities I ran a memory test with memtest86. The screen lit up like a Christmas tree with red failures everywhere. Damn it, looks like I have faulty RAM - which is weird because this machine has been running 24/7 for the last 12 months with this RAM with no problems and it runs SETI during every idle moment.

With a trial and error method of pulling out matched pairs from each bank I found the offending stick of RAM. I have a total of 4GB RAM made of 4 x 1GB modules. They are all Crucial Ballistix BL12864AA804 with the nice orange coloured heat sink. The other 3 are still working ok so I've ordered another matched pair from Crucial.

I should have checked for a guarantee, I'm sure I've only had them 11 months or so. Still no time for that as I'm traveling again next week. Should just have enough time for them to ship a new DIMM and for me to insert it.

So folks, always check your RAM - even if it has been running fine for 12 months and his stated as high-performance.

KDE 4.1

2008-08-03T23:40:00.002+01:00

This weekend I've been trying to upgrade my PC to test out KDE 4.1

On my main PC I build everything from source so I downloaded QT 4.4.1 and KDE 4.1. Lets just say I'm still in the process of building kdelibs and the weekend is almost over.

I mean I built a pre-release KDE 4.0 Beta only a few months ago (see my old blog posts for a review). It shouldn't be that hard?

The first hurdle was compiling QT. I just ended up with continuous GCC Internal Compiler Errors. Sometimes repeating make solved the problem, other times I got a ICE every time.

Decided to upgraded GCC from 4.3.0 to 4.3.1. Maybe there was a bug fix?
That was equally a nightmare as I kept getting ICEs trying to compile 4.3.1. Eventually restarting the PC helped and 4.3.1 finally built ok. (memory corruption?)

Tried again with QT and still got frequent ICEs. Thought maybe it was a Linux kernel memory management bug and upgraded from kernel 2.6.24 to 2.6.26.1. For some reason using my old .config and make oldconfig wouldn't work and I had to set all the .config options again manually - which took ages to get right and I'm still missing /dev/dsp and /dev/rtc !!!

So after all that I tried to compile QT again. Still got a few ICEs but restarting make worked this time. I'm a bit worried I've got some duff hardware somewhere, but this machine has been fine for the last 2 years and I run SETI continuously so I'd know if the RAM or something was faulty.

Found KDE 4.1 now wants a newer strigi and I had to install Soprano which wasn't there before. Oh yes, there was no mention anywhere of needing kdesupport either! Does anyone build KDE from source?

So finally I'm building kdelibs. It bombed out needing a newer libpcre (I so love regexes) but that was fixed with an install of the latest pcre. Now it's at 90% and looking good.

May get KDE 4.1 built this week and try it out. I'm running KDE 4.0 on my work laptop (Fedora 9) and it's been really unstable compared to KDE 3.5. At this rate there will be a Fedora KDE 4.1 update in yum before I get the source version compiled on my desktop!

My review of 4.1 coming soon...

New Laptop Bag

2008-08-03T23:20:00.002+01:00

This post probably makes sense only to you frequent travelers out there.

Today I finally bought myself a new laptop bag. I got a new HP laptop a few months back but didn't get a bag with it so I continued using my old faithful IBM bag. To be fair that old IBM bag has been great, I've been using it pretty much every day for the last 4 years with many overseas trips, i.e. it's suffered flights, airports, taxis, buses, etc.

Sadly the zip is becoming hard to open (new laptop is bigger and stretched the seams) and the leather handle split during my last away trip. I'll miss it. These days you don't see many Thinkpad bags, so it was always easy to find it post-security x-ray machine or in an overhead locker. In fact whenever I spotted another IBM bag on a plane it usually meant a colleague from the same company was on board!

The IBM bag fitted nicely under the seat in front on planes. Typically by the time I board the lockers are full to bursting with stupid over-sized carry on luggage and my 'ickle bag doesn't fit anywhere else. As I'm quite small I could still get my feet around it (without shoes) and be comfortable.

On a couple of short trips I've even been able to squeeze a change of clothes and a toothbrush into it without creasing them.

While I was in my local PC world (yes I know - what was I thinking? I needed some heatsink compound ASAP and it was the only place open) I looked at the laptop bag display. Wow! what a huge selection. Thinks have certainly changed.

This time instead of going for the conventional leather bag with shoulder strap I went for the soft backpack style. In fact it was the most expensive in the shop, but I wanted the one with the laptop shielded in the centre of the bag with padding all around.

I'm thinking I should have gone for a backpack years ago. All that time I've spent lugging my stuff around with a shoulder strap has been murder on my back. I mean when traveling it's not just the laptop, it's all my paperwork, leads, network cables, adapters, CDs, test equipment, etc.

So to summarise this post in a few words:
IBM laptop bags are the biz.
New backpack bag is cool.

Fedora 9

2008-07-20T18:25:00.003+01:00

I'm running Fedora 9 natively on my new laptop - a HP Compaq 8510w. This is my main work laptop and I travel quite a lot so I took a big risk jumping from Windows XP to F9.

Well I've had F9 running for about 2 months now and have been using the system heavily for work purposes and wanted to document my thoughts.

Short summary: Fedora 9 is way too bleeding edge and unstable for production use.

Long version: As more updates are released the system is starting to get more stable but there's a massive list of problems with my hardware:

1. Xorg runs very high CPU most of the time. I have Nvidia graphics card (Quadro) using latest nvidia drivers. Is this an X issue or nvidia driver issue? My desktop running FC4 with nvidia barely registers Xorg in top.

2. X locks up, especially when using Konsole or switching konsole tabs. Usually doing a Ctrl-Alt-F1 and Ctrl-Alt-F7 to switch to console and back to X solves it. Damn annoying.

3. Sound screws up periodically. Usually after X freezes all the sound is buffered and then catches up all in one second. Then the sounds is locked up with a continous tone in the background which means I need to mute the audio. Pulse Audio problems?

4. Kernel locks up transferring large files from USB memory stick, especially to a Sandisk 8GB stick. Seems fine if I do this manually from the console without using X.

5. KDE 4 is way too early/unstable. If you select a smaller taskbar (a must because default is way too big) the clock text doesn't fit. The border around the taskbar isn't always redrawn properly. No grouping of taskbar icons. Icons in panel appear corrupted sometimes. KDE dialogs popup with no text then freeze the system for several mins before being drawn.

bluetooth:// mrl isn't recognised but bluetooth manager works. No bookmarks in Dolphin. KDE doesn't lock and prompt for password after restoring from suspending to RAM (security!). LCD backlight never turns off. Plugging in the mains power doesn't raise LCD screen brightness, I have to suspend/resume to fix it.

New Plasma desktop seems useless so far. I'd rather have the old Desktop folder back than have pointless comics or other useless applets.

Handling Proxy servers is screwed up. I go between the office, where I need a proxy and home where I don't need a proxy. Pain in the butt having to edit the proxy in yum.conf. Also need to manually set proxy in Skype and KDE - can we just have a single env variable?

Some stuff has got better. At one stage doing a promiscuous mode sniff on the wireless card crashed the kernel, seems ok now. Konsole doesn't seem to lock up for 30s intervals quite as often as it used to.

I think as a "heavy" user I'd have been better off with a KDE 3.5 based system as KDE 4 is just way to unstable for real use. I'm hoping things will get better when KDE 4.1 is released.

More GTA IV: Flying Rats

2008-06-04T21:10:00.004+01:00

I've now killed all 200 flying rats / pigeons in Liberty City.

It seemed to take forever but I'm still under 30 hours playing time, even after completing all the story missions and completing all the assassin missions. Not bad.

It's best just to be methodical. I used the official strategy guide as a reference and ticked them off one by one. I traveled to each one by helicopter which speeds things up and makes it slightly less tedious. Many kills will trigger a 1 star wanted level and it's easy to escape this with a chopper.

I suspect you could get at least 50% pigeons just by hunting them down without any guide. The rest are pretty tough and I suspect you'd never find them without help. The most difficult, even with the guide, is the one at the South East middle island on the coast. This is the one where you need to take a boat with a wheelhouse, climb onto the wheelhouse roof and only then can you just make out the pigeon. I found all 199 using the guide but needed You Tube to find this last one.

So I'm at 62.5% now. I'm slightly more impressed with the map now I've seen practically every square inch of it chasing down pigeons.

Still unimpressed with the driver AI and predictability. The cabs always crash into the same stuff when you go to the same location and the cop AI is so crap.

GTA IV

2008-05-29T20:26:00.006+01:00

I've had GTA IV on the Xbox 360 since the day of release. Today I finally completed all the story missions and reached 60% completion.

I wanted the Liberty City minute achievement which means completing the story missions in under 30 hours. The first time through I spent too much time doing side missions and free roaming and just exceeded the 30 hours with a few missions to go. So I restarted and completed all the story missions in under 15 hours. So I've pretty much played the game twice.

So what do I think of the game?

To be honest I'd rate it 9/10. I'm surprised Edge gave it a full 10, it's clearly not /that/ good.

It seems to be missing something from the previous GTA games. It just doesn't feel fun any more. For example in San Andreas I enjoyed the driving and flight schools, and the Zero missions were really clever.

Good:

The driving model is different but it's ok when you get used to it.
The humour is still there, especially some of Nico's subtle dialogue.
Same cheap gags (or is this bad?), TW@ Internet cafe, etc. Having all the runway numbers as 69 in SA always bugged me because having the correct runway numbers would have been totally amazing compared to yet another cheap sexual innuendo.
Enjoyed the Florian missions. Nicely done.

Bad:

Getting stuck in walls, railings, scenery when you're in a gunfight.
Pressing the cover button and sticking to the wrong wall or object and getting exposed and shot at.
Trying to use grenades or the rocket launcher is almost impossible - you just end up killing yourself in most cases.
No planes.
No jetpack.
No rockets on helicopters.
The emergent behaviour seems to be missing. Everything in GTA IV seems much more scripted and programmed. Those random moments that make you go "wow" are missing.
It's much smaller. Yes I know it's a city, but that huge map in SA was amazing, albeit largely empty and it felt more of an achievement driving between islands.
Graphics are average at best. You can still see textures loading as you move around and still bump into things before they're drawn on screen.
The character modelling and physics is pretty but never really used in the game. If it meant more system resources for other stuff I could have lived without it. Think the latest Tomb Raider for example.
Friends. Playing darts/pool/whatever is fun once but having to do it over and over again is tedious at best. So boring!
Music. With SA being similar, I'm so sick of this style of music. Hell nothing will beat Vice City in my book. If I stream my own music it doesn't integrate properly into the game, why couldn't it appear as a new radio station and mix properly with the in game audio (like Test Drive Unlimited).
Mobile phone. Was great when I played the game in 16:9 on my 46" High def TV, but the phone text is unreadable when played on a small 4:3 CRT screen. Did nobody test this?
Changing clothes. What is the point? (yes I know the kids love this ability for some odd reason)

The level design is extremely detailed. It's only the elite few that have time to complete the story and side missions that will see everything. Shooting all those pigeons and finding those stunt jumps is tedious but you get to see every inch of the map.

I thought I'd close by mentioning the missions I found the most difficult in the game:

The Snow Storm - Once I realised the best strategy is to make a run for it without killing the NOOSE agents it was simple. Took me a good 10 goes to get past this one.

Three Leaf Clover - Again, this isn't too bad once you figure a strategy. The key is to hang back and let the other guys shoot the cops. They won't get killed if you stay close. Probably had 8 goes at this one.

Out of Commission - The hardest part was the dirt bike and making the ramp to the helicopter. Must have tried this a good 10 times and mostly failed at the dirt bike stage. The secret here is to time the mission so it's daylight and practice your bike route to the ramp carefully.

Birmingham City FC

2008-05-10T00:21:00.003+01:00

The last game of the season is fast approaching. There's still a slim chance we can stay up and avoid relegation.

This club has broken my heart on more than one occasion. I'm optimistic we'll avoid the drop but I can't help feeling it's too late and we blew it last week at Fulham when the team basically didn't turn up.

I'm out of the country so can't cheer on the lads but I'll be sat by the radio with as many sport websites and forums open as I can read. Come on lads FFS!

Keep Right On.

Champions League Semi-Final

2008-05-02T22:43:00.002+01:00

I watched the 2nd leg semi-finals of the Champions league this week. The first game Manchester United vs Barcelona was on ITV (free to air) and Chelsea vs Liverpool was on Sky (subscription only).

The picture quality of ITV (Central Region) was terrible. The bitrate was way too low watching on a large screen LCD panel. In the end I watched the game as a window on my PC using a DVB-S card. At native resolution the quality was just about ok. I thought later maybe I should have tried the other ITV regions, maybe London has a higher bitrate?

The Chelsea v Liverpool game was available on Sky HD with 5.1 surround sound. Wow! the quality was fantastic. This is the way football should be broadcast, it was a great viewing experience. With my new home cinema system it even sounded great too.

I subscribed to Sky HD as a bit of test. Firstly I'm working in the world of IPTV and wanted to see what the competition are offering and secondly owning a large LCD panel makes all SD channels look awful. I despise armchair football supporters but the Chelsea game on TV was better than being there with some of the replays and camera angles Sky Sports had (the pitch level camera behind the goal is genius!).

Birmingham City FC

2008-04-19T19:12:00.004+01:00

It's season ticket renewal time. For the first time in many years I won't be renewing my season ticket for next season. I have mixed feelings about this, especially after loyally supporting the team and handing over my hard earned cash to the club over the years. For the large part I'm gutted!

It's a time when attendances at St. Andrews are pretty poor and nobody really understands why. I'd like to document my reasons.

* I'm mostly working abroad. Even though I renewed my season ticket for this season I was out of the country for 90% home games.

* Price. I got a large discount this season for renewing during the relegation season. I won't get that next season and the ticket prices are high, especially when I know I'll miss games being abroad.

* It takes up most of my Saturday which I can't spend with the Significant Other. Due to traffic, parking, queues, I have to leave home just after lunch on Saturday and I'm often not back until past 7PM. Parking around St. Andrews is difficult (without paying!) and I can't take my own car because of the risk of theft or damage in Small Heath. Getting away from the ground is a nightmare and, with respect (trying not be racist here) the locals take a dim view of the increased match-day traffic and can be extremely intimidating and I've had a few run-ins with them.

* The atmosphere in the ground has been dreadful since the relegation season. Back in the Division 1 days St. Andrews was always loud, noisy and often electric. The League Cup games when we got to the final and the play off finals (despite the losses!) still stick in my mind vividly. Today the crowd are too quick to complain, with pointless booing and abuse of our own players! I just don't enjoy being in the stadium any more. After getting relegated a lot of season ticket holders didn't renew and all the familiar faces disappeared from the stands, which ruined a lot of the banter and atmosphere for me personally.

* Cost. Not just ticket prices but the overall cost of attending games. I stopped buying programmes regularly once the price hit 3.50 for what's essentially a very glossy magazine full of advertisements. I never used the catering, partly because of the prices (hell I can wait 90 minutes and go to the local shop) and partly because of the long queues and waiting.

Overall I'm still gutted I'm not renewing. If I knew I'd be in the UK for more home games I'd probably still have renewed. Maybe I'll subscribe to Blues World and follow Tom Ross' commentary via the Internet instead (you can't get local radio abroad, grrr!!!). I still love the club despite everything, even if we should get relegated again.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Linksys WAP54G (Almost) RIP

2008-04-06T10:34:00.003+01:00

I've had a Linksys WAP54G, an 802.11g wireless access point for a couple of years now.

Over the last 6 months or so I've noticed it has been rebooting itself without being touched and occasionally the stupid thing locks up and needs a power cycle. I tried reflashing with the latest firmware but that didn't really help.

Last week I unplugged the unit, forgot it, then left it powered off overnight (I was trying to get my Xbox 360 wireless headset working and suspected interference from the Linksys AP).

The next morning I plugged the Linksys back in and nothing happened, no LEDs came on... completely dead.

I stuck my AVO on the power supply and there was about 1V output (should be 5V DC). It's a completely sealed unit which is not meant to be disassembled. I got my junior hacksaw out and managed to get into the unit eventually.

Inside is a small switched mode power supply. Usual problem, some of the electrolytic capacitors were completely shot. A couple were bulging through the vent in the top, another had leaked it's electrolyte all over the switching transistor and left this nasty dark coloured goo everywhere. Basically it was knackered.

I happened to have a universal DC power adapter so plugged that in and the Linksys fired up perfectly and still works great. I really like Linksys products, so far they've been good quality, but the cheap Chinese power supply bricks are awful. Be careful folks, looks like the company manufacturing the power supplies has been using defective capacitors.

Cutting your own leg off

2008-03-22T19:56:00.002Z

I spend a lot of time around computers. I call one of my classic mistakes "cutting your own leg off", here are a few example:

You're logged onto a remote machine and restart the network... then wonder why your terminal just locked up.

You are logged onto a remote switch or router, enter the wrong command and cut yourself off without being able to get back on.

Making remote network changes that can't be recovered without going to the physical machine and using the console.

You get the idea, I'm sure we've all done it. Usually there's that moment of realisation a split second after you press the Enter key to submit the fateful command.

I came close to really screwing up today. Basically I was logged into a computer system in another country where there is nobody available locally to recover the system if it screws up.

I tried to install a new program but it requires GLIBC 2.4 and the system only has GLIBC 2.3. As a hack I decided to throw on a newer glibc library and do some clever shared library linking so the rest of the system remains untouched. To cut a long story short, I ended up changing glibc to 2.4 globally for the whole system... but the new glibc was incompatible and every program linking glibc broke, i.e. just about every Linux command on the box! So couldn't ls, ps, mv, ln, anything!

How do you resolve this when all you have is a single terminal access and if you log out you can never log back in again (SSH needs glibc!)?

In the end I used echo (a shell implemented command) and ldconfig (static linked) to fix as follows:

# echo > /lib/tls/libc-2.4.so
# echo > /lib/libc-2.4.so
# /sbin/ldconfig

ldconfig seems to be clever enough to not symbolic link zero byte shared libraries so I managed to recover the system! Lucky me!

+448701666667

2008-03-20T22:52:00.004Z

I received a call from the above number just after midnight but they rang off really fast before I could answer. I am working abroad so was slightly surprised to see a UK number come up that wasn't in my phone book and at a late hour. It looked like a scam so I ignored it.

The same number called again the following day. In a strong Indian accent they said something unintelligible... something about an auction channel I think... then asked "Are you the buyer?". Then no matter what I asked I just got back "Are you the buyer?" in response. Stupid Indian call centres where they don't understand any English. After a few minutes of me trying to explain I've no idea who they are, that I'm *NOT* the damn buyer I hang up in disgust. I can hear one last "Are you the buyer?" as I press End Call.

So I assumed that was the end of it... but oh no, it's not over yet!

Some time in the afternoon the same number calls again. This time I'm prepared and decide to quiz them a bit. Why not waste their time as they've already wasted mine on two occasions already? Again, all they can say over and over is "Are you the buyer?". Must be a standard script they have to read. I try responding with "Buyer of what?" and "Who are you?" but, boringly, they just keep asking if I'm the buyer. I was in no rush so it became a battle of wills to see who would crack first, I kept trying to quiz them and they kept asking the same dumb question. In the end I won and they made some broken English apology and hung up.

So who knows whether I'm still in their system and another Indian call centre muppet will call me back again or whether they realised I have no idea who they are. I suspect the former somehow. Will update this blog if they call again.

I hate Indian call centres so much. What is the point if you can't understand English? Yeah they're ok if you ask something from their script, but usually when I need to call a business it's because they've screwed up and I need to resolve a complicated problem - which is near impossible for some Indian in another timezone to understand. I had a nightmare with my bank (HSBC) and their Indian call centre were my Credit Card got cancelled whilst I was still abroad and was totally dependent on it. Thank goodness a supervisior in the UK intercepted the call for 'quality control' purposes and fixed everything.

OK rant over, back to the plot. I'm guessing this is an auction style TV channel and somebody bought something and gave my mobile number, or maybe a mistake, wrong number or somebody doesn't like me very much. So there's now zero chance of me ever buying anything from one of those TV shopping channels - not that I'd be stupid enough to buy from them in the first place. The sooner these companies go bust and stop using up valuable bandwidth the better.

Update 1: Well a day later and I had 5 more calls from this company during the day. I was busy so I dropped every call. They don't give up.

Update 2: More calls from this company. I was free to answer this time and managed to get an Indian guy with a small grasp of English. Explained there was a mistake and I didn't order anything. He asked for my name, which I refused to give. He claimed the order was placed from my number. I explained that was impossible becuase it's a business number and always in my possession, plus I've not been in the UK for a month (I'm still abroad!) and there was no way I could even watch their stupid auction channel. Is this the last of it?

I can't see this being a scam as they're calling me, not the other way round - although there is a charge as I'm receiving the calls abroad through international roaming. I'm a bit disappointed if somebody in the UK set me up for this.

On the road again

2008-03-09T19:35:00.002Z

What a week!

Started the week in the UK, then over to Sweden, a couple of nights in Zagreb then ended the week in Bulgaria. When I return next week that will be 8 separate legs, making at least 18 flights this year.

My company books some pretty stupid flights as well. I guess they don't care, they're not the poor sods trying to catch them. I had a connection time of just 40 minutes during one trip, so I had no choice but to travel light and not check in any baggage. I mean 40 minutes! Nearly every flight I make is delayed, plus there's unforseen delays trying to get permission to pushback and start or having to hold at the destination airport to land. Once you finally arrive the plane is probably not at a gate and you have to wait for a bus to the terminal, then you're faced with a massive queue through security.

On a recent trip I missed a connection at Munich airport. If I had no checked baggage I might have talked my way onto the flight but they'd already taken my stuff off. The hold up was in security with two x-ray machines but people having to queue through a single metal detector, one person at a time with only 1 person on duty frisking people. Worse, the detector was turned up so high I think my fillings set it off. The guy in front set off the detector so I had to stand and wait to be waved through for my turn for what seemed like forever. Madness.

I generally wear the same type of stuff for flying, e.g. T-shirt, trakkies or jeans and my trainers. I also travel a lot so I know I won't set of the metal detector wearing these clothes. So it's damn annoying when you go through some security check the machine goes off. Is it just programmed to go off every x people anyway? Or is it just turned up way too high?

Oh and then there was the time where I was "randomly" selected to have my bloody laptop swabbed down for explosives or drugs or something. So the guy disappears with the swab for a good 5 mins while I'm stood there missing my flight.

I love the actual "flying" part and everything associated with aviation, but I can't stand airports, other passengers, waiting, queues, security, delays.

Sky HD - Follow Up

2008-03-03T00:19:00.003Z

Well after changing the capacitors in the PSU of my Thomson HD box it now works great and I can receive every channel without macroblocking.

After a short call to Sky customer services (nice Scottish people answered) my viewing card was paired with the new STB and I had my Sports channels working again, yay! I also subscribed to 12 months of Sky HD so we'll see how that goes as an experiment. Everything was activated in one phone-call too, that's good service!

Having only had Sky's HD service for 24 hours, here's my initial thoughts.

* Sky+ trick play features are very jerky and not smooth (i.e. FF/RW is slow to start and not smooth like my old Pace V2 Sky+ box).
* Had a weird bug on the Sky EPG where the background blue colour became transparent (used as chroma key?) with a frozen image in the background from a previous Tuner 2 stopped recording - actually Roy Hodgson interviewed on Match of the Day!!! That image persisted all night until I restarted the box.
* Sky Anytime looks interesting. It downloaded 5 programs automatically overnight. Unfortunately 2 of them were movies and I don't subscribe to movies and one was the HD preview show about movies I can't watch. I did watch the Prince Harry interview on Sky News, which I wouldn't have normally downloaded, but enjoyed all the same. Interesting feature this actually.
* User interface seems slightly faster than my old Pace PVR box, although the text often appears before the blue background on newly popped up screens.

Enjoyed Sky Sports in HD, it's amazing to see green blades of grass rather than a solid green blob representing the pitch. Again my only complaint is some pictures have a "grainy" effect to them. Is this a problem with my TV set or just the actual original source material? Lost on Sky One looked great. Shame about The Simpsons, the 4:3 aspect ratio was OK (black bars) but the picture looked cropped like the top/bottom was missing and the quality was very poor, almost like a vertical (not horizontal) interlacing problem where every other pixel was missing between frames. I guess The Simpsons is actually SD content in 4:3 at source and "formatted" for broadcast on an HD channel?

That was all I could watch in HD. There's actually not much broadcast in HD format on Sky despite all the extra HD channels, especially as I'm not a Movies subscriber, only sports. Most of the extra HD channels carry different content to their sister channels, so for example I love most of Discovery's output (Mythbusters, etc.) but there is totally different content shown on Discovery HD - which I don't like unfortunately!

To quantify my opinion in numbers, If my old Pace V2 PVR was 9/10 in terms of overall functionality/quality of experience, I'd give Sky HD 7/10. It's acceptable and usable right now but needs a little bit of fine tuning. Maybe the new Pace HD boxes will be better, I've _always_ had Pace STBs since the old analogue Sky days, this Thomson box is the first time I've tried another manufacturer.

The thing Sky don't tell you with HD is that they're forcing you to invest in DVB-S2 technology and STBs chipsets that can decode H.264 which is clearly expensive right now. This allows the broadcaster to reduce the bitrate down for HD services and saves them money on satellite bandwidth. For example, there's no reason why we couldn't have MPEG-2 HD but at a much higher bitrate and with higher DVB-S (1) overheads.

Sky HD

2008-03-01T16:26:00.003Z

I've been wanting to upgrade to Sky HD but so far there have been no decent upgrade deals unless I take Sky's phone service, broadband or multiroom service. It's somewhat frustrating as I was a subscriber for several years in the Analogue days and was an early adopter of Sky Digital with a continuous subscription all the way through.

I think it's around 250 GBP to upgrade through Sky and even then there's an installation fee on top. I don't want to pay an installation fee when I already have Sky+ (hence 2 LNB feeds) and all the engineer has to do is swap the boxes over! What a rip off.

So I thought I'd upgrade myself by purchasing a Sky HD box from eBay then contacting Sky to subscribe to HD and pair my viewing card to the new STB so I can decrypt premium channels (same trick I used with Sky+ incidentally).

So going rate for Sky HD boxes on eBay is ~200 GBP. The one we bought was supposed to be just 1 month old having been used for an HD free trial where the sub declined to take up the offer at the end of the trial period.

Alarm bells were already ringing when the box took 2 weeks to be delivered despite being promised 3-5 days delivery by the seller. Also required lots of chasing and she claimed to be a Sky installation engineer. Wonder what Sky think of her selling boxes on eBay?

So HD box eventually arrives and I install it. First problem: box reports "no signal" being received on either input (dual tuner) despite both inputs working great on my old Sky+ box moments earlier. I get the meter out and find nothing wrong on either input and the LNB polarity switching voltage is present ok. Then all of a sudden the box reports it has a valid signal on both inputs !?!??!

So try flicking round the channels. BBC 1 (101) reports no signal being received... BBC2 (102) works fine, nothing on 103 and various other channels. Some channels that do decode are breaking up badly. Signal strength is about 25-30% and quality is 50-60% - and I can't improve that (I'm in a flat with an indoor dish pointing out the window!). Worked fine on my original Pace and Pace V2 Sky+, so should be OK for Thomson HD box. Took the box round to the in-laws (80% signal quality) and had exactly the same problem. Looks like a duff box.

So with nothing but the prospect of hassling the eBay seller, I opened up the box to have a look inside. The problem was immediately obvious: faulty PSU caused by failing electrolytic capacitors. Several of the caps were bulging out the top, a clear sign of failure even without testing with an ESR meter.

For reference, these were the capacitors fitted in my box:

C33 100uF 16V
C80 470uF 16V
C60 470uF 35V
C41 1200uF 16V
C42 470uF 25V
C51 1200uF 16V
C70 100uF 25V
C52 470uF 16V
C43 470uF 25V
C61 470uF 16V
C81 47uF 50V
C71 47uF 50V

C14 100uF 400V
C20 47uF 50V
C21 10uF 50V

So the next step is to replace the capacitors and see if the box will work. However, it's clear the box is at least 12 months old so the eBay seller was telling lies. I also see it's fitted with a Maxtor 300GB hard disk. I've had a lot of bad experiences with Maxtor over time (in PC/Server world) so could be changing that soon if it's been running for 12 months already.

Amarok

2008-02-27T18:58:00.002Z

I've just started using Amarok under KDE on Linux - It's basically an audio player for Linux that handles your MP3 collection in a cool way.

http://amarok.kde.org/

For the past few years I've been quite happy using Juk, the built-in audio player that comes bundled with KDE. However, recently Juk has been crashing during startup. If I delete my juk configuration (rm -rf ~/.kde/share/apps/juk) and re-create the cache everything works ok again for a while. Guess I've ripped a song or downloaded a cover image Juk doesn't like and it's crashing out. So I thought I'd use this as a chance to try Amarok and I'm so impressed I'm sticking with it.

The only weird think with both Amarok and Juk is that it stores downloaded covers under your ~/.kde directory and not in the subdirectory where the media is st0red. So if I copy my MP3s I don't have the cover and I risk losing covers if I have to wipe out the config.

Earthquake

2008-02-27T18:50:00.003Z

An earthquake hit the UK last night at about 1AM of 5.2 magnitude on the Richter scale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Lincolnshire_earthquake

We've had several earthquakes in the UK over the years but I've either slept through them or just not noticed! This time I was in bed asleep and I awoke to feel the room vibrating. It took me a few seconds to realise it was an earthquake and I just lay there waiting for it to stop which eventually it did after ~15 seconds and I fell back to sleep, albeit with my heart pounding for a while.

I've no idea what I'd have done if the earthquake persisted or we had to evacuate the building. I'm in no fit state once I wake in the middle of the night. In one of my old houses a housemate woke me in the middle of the night to say he'd just seen an intruder. I just asked if he'd gone away and fell straight back to sleep! I later found out he was standing face to face with the intruder with just the kitchen door between them and the poor guy was petrified! Sorry mate.

Panorama

2008-02-23T18:06:00.001Z

Greenville
Originally uploaded by marksmanuk

Whilst I was last away on business and stuck in a boring hotel room over the weekend, I took a sequence of photographs of my hotel room with the intention of stitching them together into a 360 degree panorama.

On the flight over I was reading Linux Format and there was a review of a commercial software package for automatically creating panoramas from several individual images, that's what gave me the idea a few weeks later.

Instead of the software recommended by LXF I went for the open source Hugin. It was a nightmare to compile and install from source but managed eventually after hacking the code to not pass the unknown --compression option to enblend. Never did get autopano to work properly, seemed unable to parse the XML generated from the source jpegs? Doing manual control points worked pretty well through and I managed to get some blended TIFFs that looked reasonable.

So here's the result. It looks better if you get the largest image size directly from my flickr.

For a first attempt it's not bad. The source images weren't great - I had automatic flash enabled so was on for some pictures and not others, I didn't have a tripod so had to use a table which you can see in the shot unfortunately. At least I know this technique works so I can take multiple images in the future and stitch them back together.

Might tinker with autopano and get that working if I get time.

Burnout(tm) Paradise

2008-02-10T23:57:00.002Z

I bought Burnout Paradise for the Xbox 360 this weekend. Managed to find time for just one decent gaming session on Saturday night. Ended up playing online until 2AM Sunday morning.

Fantastic game, great fun. I can see why Edge gave it 9/10. From reading the official forum it seems to have divided long term Burnout fans, but I'm sure it's just a minority of vocal 13 year olds.

Was a bit disappointed to be so rubbish at the game online. The worst part was being helped by a middle aged woman who seemed to be beating the hard core gamers hands down! The other highlight was listening into a graphic conversation between some chav and his friend in the same room about a girl he knew who'd got herself pregnant, again... although "he still would" given half a chance!

Since buying the Xbox there have only been 3 or 4 titles I've really enjoyed and replayed several times and this one goes on the list. Shame I'll be away for another couple of weeks before I can play it again.

BBC Interactive

2008-02-10T23:48:00.000Z

I was interested to see how the BBC use their additional satellite channels for interactive services. I tuned into the feeds around 12 PM and saw the graphics guy customising the template ready for the afternoons sport.

I guess he wasn't expecting anybody to be watching or didn't realise the output was going live to air. "Normal" users of course couldn't access this screen until much later. Pretty interesting to watch all the same.

Playstation 3

2008-02-08T22:59:00.000Z

My "significant other" bought me a PS3 as a birthday present this year. I already have an Xbox 360 so I'm fortunate to own both consoles. The Wii isn't really my thing.

So after a week of ownership what do I think?

Good:
* I like the support for other codecs like Xvid. I was able to watch Lost Season 4 episodes streamed to the PS3 without having to waste time converting to some stupid Microsoft format.
* Lemmings
* Gran Turismo
* Bluetooth remote, shame it doesn't light up like the Xbox remote.
* Blu-ray (but see below)
* I can install Linux on it. Tried Fedora 8, which worked reasonably well. No accelerated graphics though and it doesn't shutdown or reboot properly. Recommend YDL for now.

Bad:
* Controller L2/R2 buttons (triggers?) suck. Maybe my hands are the wrong size or something? Nice and light though.
* The user interface isn't as nicely integrated. I love that on the Xbox 360 I can stream music from my media centre PC into a game seamlessly, like the car radio in Test Drive Unlimited, exit the game and still have the same song playing in the dashboard. The PS3 user interface seems clunky, lots of black screens/changing output resolution and I managed to lock the interface up trying to stream some MP3s.
* The "Are you sure?" screen when powering off the console from the controller drives me nuts, is there a "disable nanny options" setting?
* Tried to stream some MP3s but the PS3 reported network problems and locked up. Couldn't scroll past D in my music collection. Doesn't scroll fast enough when you have many songs.
* Tried to stream some photos, all the dates were correct but times were all set to 00:00 even though the exif was fine. Same content worked perfectly on the Xbox.
* Games are utter crap, except for GT of course. OK I'm not overly keen on FPSs and driving games, I'm more of a strategy game man. Sure the games look pretty but the gameplay is awful. I've found Lemmings and Sudoku the best games so far!
* Blu-ray. Watched Casino Royale last night. Picture resolution is superb but the picture looks grainy or noisy in places. Not sure if this is film grain or digital noise. Is this the future of hi-def?

Overall I have to admit I prefer the Xbox 360, it's just a much better integrated experience - and it pains me to give credit to Microsoft. I've just bought Burnout Paradise and I admit I bought it for the Xbox platform. The next big title I'll purchase will probably be GTA IV, again I'll no doubt get it for the Xbox. Other than GT I can't see me purchasing anything else for PS3 and it'll just be a nice Blu-ray player, media extender and Linux blu-ray ripper.

ZX Spectrum

2008-01-13T08:34:00.001Z

As a child of the 80s I was growing up in the era of the 8-bit home computer. I personally was lucky enough to have a Commodore 64 whilst most of my fiends had ZX Spectrums, an odd Atara 800 XL and even one had a BBC Micro Model B.

About 10 years ago I started writing a ZX Spectrum emulator for Linux. That project got stalled and I picked the project up again a couple of years later, then dropped it again. This cycle of looking at it for a few days then putting it down again has been repeating over and over.

That's not to say I haven't achieved anything useful. In preparation for project I obtained a (rare at the time) copy of the ZX Spectrum ROM disassembly and scanned it into an electronic format so I could annotate and correct the errata. This spawned a whole new exercise where a group of speccy chums converted the scans to a text document, hence World of Spectrum now has a Word and PDF copy of this masterpiece for everyone to use.

Right now I'm in Bulgaria on a business trip. I'm on my own in an out-of-town hotel for the weekend and bored senseless. So I dug out my ZX Spectrum emulator code and started hacking in some new opcodes. Right now I'm still working on my Z80 emulation and haven't even got close to graphics generation, user interfaces, IO, etc.

I suspect it won't get finished during this trip and probably not this year. In fact I wonder if after 10 years it will ever be finished.

VMWare disk IO performance

2008-01-01T17:40:00.000Z

From previous postings you probably know I'm a keen fan of virtualisation. I currently use VMWare running on a Linux host OS.

Recently I've noticed some performance problems with VMWare Workstation:
i. After shutting down a VM (Windows or Linux guest) the whole of VMWare seems to hang with a black console for about 30s to 1 minute. It's really annoying when I run several VMs at the same time.
ii. Recently, probably since I upgrade the host kernel to 2.6.23.12 I noticed running VMs would hang VMWare every couple of minutes for about 10s with the hard disk LED flashing on the host.

After some Googling and experimentation I found adding the following entries (or editing existing values if already present) in the .vmx files of my VMs solved the problem:

# Fix for VMWare disk I/O performance:
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
MemTrimRate = "0"

Now shutdown performance is unbelievably fast and I've not seen the VMWare console hang at all. Even guest Windows performance is improved and I can even run Windows games with reasonable performance without periodic freezing (I'm playing C&C Red Alert so nothing intensive like HL!).

Pentium D CPU Temperature

2007-12-30T18:37:00.000Z

My main desktop PC has a dual core Pentium D Extreme Edition running at 3.2GHz. This CPU is a real monster with two cores plus hyperthreading and appears as 4 logical processors. However it runs very, very hot and is almost impossible to keep cool.

I pretty much gave up on the stock Intel heatsink and fan and fitted a Thermaltake quivalent which seemed better. However it always runs extremely hot and starts automatically clock throttling in the summer to save itself from cooking itself:

These are the throttling events reported by Linux kernel:
CPU2: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 11719)

It's amusing because if you read the forums about maximum CPU temperature there are people that think the machine will explode if you exceed 40 C. In practice this Pentium D runs about 50 C at idle, but sits constantly at 70 C when running flat out. The problem is that 24/7 my machine is always running 100% CPU so is always running at maximum temperature. Fortunately it has survived for at least 2 years running like this, so these know-it-alls on the forums actually know nothing.

This week I found the system was clock throttling pretty much all the time, much more than usual and it's only December. I had to take the fan and heatsink off, apply new thermal compound (grease) and refix the heatsink and fan. I clean out the dust every month anyway which is about the maximum running duration for my system otherwise it chokes with dust and overheats. The new thermal compund certainly helped but the system still runs very hot - as usual. The old compound had gone quite hard and degraded.

So the conclusion is that I want a Core 2 Duo (or quad!), the old Pentium D EE runs incredibly hot and change your heatsink compound after a couple of years.

Röda Sten

2007-12-12T15:07:00.003Z

Röda Sten
Originally uploaded by marksmanuk

Testing the "blog this" option from my Flickr account.

This is a cool sunset picture I took in Gothenburg, Sweden out on the Göta älv at a place called Röda Sten.

I'm rather keen on photographing the Stena ships too :)

Flickr

2007-12-12T14:31:00.000Z

Finally this year I bought myself a small digital camera that I could carry with me when traveling. I've had a big expensive digital camera for some time but it's too much hassle to carry through airports and carry around day to day.

So I went into my local electronics store and picked the smallest, cheapest camera in the store with the highest resolution. It turned out to be a Casio Exilim 10.2 Megapixel EX-Z1050 for 140GBP (It was only 130GBP on Dabs but I needed it that day).

Being a pretty cheap camera I wasn't expecting great things from it but I was completely amazed. It's amazingly good. I joke to my friends that you can't take a bad picture with it! Some of the night shots are unbelievable although you have no manual control over the shutter time and have to use the Best Shot feature - but that's ok once you get used to it.

Some of the pictures are so good I've uploaded the best to my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/

Great little camera and it's so small I can keep it on my at all times. It fits nicely in my pocket for grabbing aircraft window shots or I can keep it in my laptop bag when traveling about.

Amusingly it's been useful when working on site to grab installation pictures, so progress, misconfigured stuff etc. In fact on the last customer site I worked at the customer used my camera more than I did. I see theres a 12 Megapixel version now, I guess I'll need a bigger memory card than 2GB for that beast at highest resolution.

TR Anniversary

2007-12-07T00:46:00.000Z

Wow! This game is fantastic.

Yep, I'm still playing through Tomb Raider Anniversary on the Xbox 360. It's one of the best games I've played all year.

Jumping backwards from a "wall run" using the grapple is seriously screwed up on the 360 version. Following the TR Chronicles method of holding down and jump doesn't work (PC version only?). The trick seems to be waiting for Lara to turn then jumping in the opposite direction. So in the infamous St. Francis' Folly that's run left, wait for Lara to turn, then hold left and jump and voila she finally jumps backwards to the column. Only took about 30 tries to get it right! Grrr!

Edit: I've finished the entire game now but I still can't get the hang of this wall run. When I want to jump forward she jumps backwards and vice versa... the cow! It's definitely related to which way the camera is pointing and which way you jump, i.e. jumping the same direction onlt works if the camera is pointing a certain way.

Tomb Raider Anniversary

2007-11-18T21:07:00.000Z

This weekend I finally found time to unwrap and play Tomb Raider Anniversary on the Xbox 360. I bought it a few weeks ago but have been out of the country and unable to play it - in fact I also bought The Orange Box (HL2) but haven't even unwrapped it!

Wow! What a great game. I've always been a big fan of the Tomb Raider games and have owned every edition for the PS1 and PS2 before switching to the Xbox 360 for Legend. I was really into Tomb Raider I, II & III on the original PS1 but lost interest in the game after that. However, Anniversary is really great and captures the same feelings I had when playing the original games. I'm not sure how close Anniversary is to the original games, I've indulged on far too many heavy nights out since then!

The graphics and audio are stunning also. I'm playing in 1080i (don't have an Elite) on a big LCD screen and it looks superb. I only wish I had a decent home cinema system to go with it.

I've experienced one crash so far where I killed Lara, the screen faded to black and the console locked solid, but this doesn't seem repeatable fortunately. Remember to save your checkpoints every so often just in case. I guess they may online patch.

Anyway, it's great fun and really captures the feel of the original games but the overall game quality on the 360 is amazing. If you enjoyed TR you have to go and buy this one.

To close, I wanted to revise my opinion that the TR games had come to a natural end and outlived their shelf life. This new game has totally changed my opinion. If a new series of games could be produced with the same quality of experience as Anniversary there's still plenty of life left in the game. Although for me I'd rather see more depth in level design, more puzzles and less end of level bosses.

Zoom ADSL x6

2007-11-18T20:47:00.001Z

A few posts ago I talked about the early demise of my ADSL modem and that I'd replaced it with a cheap Zoom ADSL x6. Not only was it the cheapest in the store it also included a built in 4 port Ethernet switch and wireless access point.

However, it's not perfect. I have had several weird problems with it that seem to occur over a period of time:

i. The Ethernet port connected to my Linksys wireless AP seems to die over time. If I link down/up the port (replace Ethernet cable or reboot AP) the problem is solved. It's really annoying since I have an existing wireless AP in another room and it means I get a wireless connection to the AP but no DHCP or network response.
>>
>> Update 27/9/08 - this problem no longer occurs (f/w 5.0.4-70)
>>

ii. After a period of time incoming SSH connections from the WAN side terminate randomly. I guess there is some issue with port forwarding which is causing some internal NAT tables to overflow or memory leak.
>>
>> Update 27/9/08 - this problem DOES still occur (f/w 5.0.4-70)
>>
>> Every so often I find the port forwarding table is empty, which is a BIG problem because I often don't discover this until I try and remotely SSH to my machine from the Internet and the port is blocked. I'm wondering whether this is a UPnP problem? I have both an Xbox 360 and PS3 on the local side of the network.

iv. After time I cannot telnet to the box and I cannot open the web admin interface. This is a pain because I can't telnet to the modem in order to restart it in order to solve problem ii remotely. I spend a lot of time abroad so it's a big deal if I can't NAT into my home system, i.e. I can't just restart the modem manually if I'm out of the country for several weeks.
>>
>> Update 27/9/08 - this problem no longer occurs (f/w 5.0.4-70)
>>

My really old Asus ADSL modem was pretty reliable. I was an early adopter of ADSL in my area and this was one of the first Ethernet ADSL G992.1 modems.

This weekend I checked on the Zoom support site and noticed a firmware upgrade to v5.0.2-70. Sadly the release note is next to useless and doesn't detail what has been changed in this version (please take note guys and correct this!). Thinking things can't get any worse I flashed the modem and gave it a go.

Aside: Flash upgrading the modem is pretty easy. I'm on a Linux system and just downloaded the zip file, unzipped it, then loaded the tar file from the web admin interface. I actually left everything connected to the system and it still worked fine. I ignored the factory reset part also and just saved to flash the upgraded config and changed anything that looked wrong after upgrade.

So it's now 48 hours later and so far it seems pretty good. I can still access the modem via telnet and http and none of the Ethernet ports have gone to sleep yet. The big test will be in the next couple of weeks whilst I'm outside the country and doing lots of NAT. To be honest it would be better for me if the box simply restarted rather than partially failing, at least I can get back into the system again afterwards.

Global System Configuration:

Vendor: Conexant
URL: http://www.conexant.com/

MAC address: 00:01:38:A4:56:F6

Hardware ver: Solos 4610 RD / Solos 461x CSP v1.0
Software ver: Zoom X6 Ver 5.0.2-70
Build type: RELEASE
Compiler: gcc 2.95.3 20010315 (release)

>> Update 27/9/08
I e-mailed Zoom technical support about the above problems and got a reply back stating they haven't had similar reports from other users and don't plan to do anything.

VMWare Converter

2007-10-14T19:15:00.000+01:00

Today I used VMWare Converter to convert my laptop to a vitual machine image which I can load into VMWare Workstation running on Linux.

Until now the only way I could access my work e-mail account was through Outlook webmail (which sucks) or using my laptop with native Outlook. Using my laptop was previously the only option because of the nasty IPSec client my company uses (think Cisco VPN client but replace with some nasty proprietary thing nobody has ever heard of). As I don't have the install for the IPSec client for Windows never mind Linux I thought of cloning my laptop into a virtual machine which I can run on my Linux desktop.

In short it worked really well and I can now connect to my companies corporate network and run native outlook - all from inside Linux :)

However, this wasn't without pain. My laptop has hard disk encryption so that ruled out the boot disk method of virtual machine conversion. The next problem was the VMWare converter would fail with an unknown error at 29% completion every time with Fault number 23. From the logs it looked like a disk I/O error but chkdisk reported no errors even after several runs !?!?! Confused I tried selecting a resized (smaller) virtual disk from the VMWare Converter wizard which caused the converter to run in file-copy mode rather than block-copy. The conversion ran perfectly to 100% after that. Odd, maybe something to do with the hard disk encryption?

The new virtual machine ran up perfectly on Linux VMWare Workstation and just needed VMWare Tools installing to get a decent graphics resolution.

I love virtualisation :)

Airport gripes again

2007-09-02T13:24:00.000+01:00

Last week I was working in Cairo, Egypt. Getting there from Birmingham involved a transfer at Frankfurt airport.

Just to clear things up, I'm pretty used to transfers. In the last month I've been on flights to Sweden that involved transfers at both Schipol and Copenhagen airports for KLM and SAS respectively. So I fly fairly frequently.

Flying out wasn't too bad. There was the usual security check at Birmingham but nothing after that. At Frankfurt they only checked my boarding card and didn't even check my passport! Great stuff. It wasn't until I got to the hotel in Cairo that I need to get my stuff x-rayed and go through the metal detector at the hotel entrance.

For the record, I didn't find Frankfurt airport too bad. It's a massive airport but there's reasonable signs around the place. I've read reports on the web about FRA being the worst airport and impossible to find your way around. I agree that it would be hard unless you're used to airports and travel frequently.

However, coming back home was the usual security nonsense. First you have to have your bags x-rayed and go through the metal detector just to get to the check-in desks at Cairo airport. I also needed to show my passport and itinerary to prove I was allowed through to check-in! I generally don't bother printing the e-ticket receipts because your passport is enough so it was fortunate I did this time.

For the record, this airport is a dump. The place was heaving with people, the visa/passport control setup is utter nonsense and it's also dark and filthy. They really need to sort the system out if they expect to attract more tourists.

At the gate there was another massive queue to get x-rayed again and go through the metal detector. So that's the second time before I've even got on the damn plane. Fortunately in Cairo they don't want you to take your laptop out. There's also a final stupid check where they want to check your exit visa stamp. I'm sure the whole process could be resolve with a single security check and a single passport control check! Crazy country.

When we arrive at Frankfurt there are two security people standing at the end of the air bridge. For some bizarre reason they "randomly" select me for a search. Why me? The plane is full of non-EU people carrying bongs and Christ knows what in their luggage so they pick out the only white guy carrying just a laptop FFS.

So I have to get patted down, empty my pockets, etc. whilst the second person rummages through my laptop bag. I had a load of test equipment and cables in there for work, but they didn't seem interested or find it unusual, guess they were looking for something specific.

I had 2 hours to kill and after getting completely bored head off to the gate to sit and read. The gate (C04) is miles away on the other side of the airport in some half-built trashy part of the terminal. On the way I have to go through another security checkpoint! Arrgh! As we're back in Europe it's laptop out time, etc. At least they didn't want me to open it like some airports (causes my laptop to resume if it's only been suspended!).

There was more stupidity by Lufthansa at the gate. It's one of those gates where you have a desk, then pass through to a "holding pen" prior to boarding the plane after they've scanned your boarding card. On the outside of the gate there was just a handful of seats, which were full. As there was nobody at the desk and the door was open I just walked through and sat down to wait. Over the next 45 mins lots of people turned up and did the same thing (it was a full 737 flight). Finally the staff arrived and made everyone leave the room then queue to go back inside so they could check boarding cards. How fscking stupid.

After all this nonsense I eventually get back to good old Birmingham. Being in business class (lucky me) I was one of the first off the plane too, although it seems to take Brum ages to unload a 737 so there's never any point rushing off the plane if you have checked bags to collect.

Another gripe... I always find passport control the most strict, stuffy, formal affair of any airport I've ever been in. Nowhere else in Europe do they employ a (well dressed!) person to simply control the queue and direct you to the next free officer. You get yelled at if you dare use your mobile phone in this area too! Finally when you get to the desk to have your passport checked you have to stand in _exactly_ the right spot, square on to the desk (why?) and they speak to you like some sort of lower life-form. It really p*sses me off getting treated like this when I'm a British citizen and actually live in Birmingham. The staff are generally all miserable sods too. At least it is generally fast.

ADSL Router RIP

2007-08-26T21:29:00.000+01:00

I jumped on my computer this morning to find I had no internet access. I looked across at the ADSL modem and all the front panel LEDs were out. Oh dear! It was working fine the night before so must have died sometime during the night.

It was extremely hot here in the UK last night, so could be temperature related. The poor modem has been cooking away in my computer room (aka the spare bedroom) for some time.

I was an early adopter of ADSL in my area so I've been using an original Asus ADSL modem for several years. It's essentially a first generation ADSL modem with a single Ethernet connection on the back. I connect this to a separate 8 port Ethernet switch. I also have a wireless access point which connects to the Ethernet switch.

A quick check of the power supply shows zero output where I'm expecting the (frankly unusual) 15V AC. Looks like a PSU failure. From the size of the power brick it's a real transformer (not switch mode) and probably fixable but I don't have the time.

Popped into PC World and it seems you cant just buy an ADSL modem anymore, they all come with DSL modem, Ethernet switch and wireless AP built in. So I buy the cheapest ADSL2+ modem with 4 port Ethernet switch + wireless G, all for 40UKP. I think my original Asus was in excess of 100UKP when I bought it new.

So I have a new Zoom ADSL x6 modem. Took a while to get it configured how I wanted, I had a problem with the NAT rules falling out after a power cycle. Solved that in the end though. Also some weirdness with the modem thinking I had a PPPoE connection rather than PPPoA - although that could be the DSLAM doing some clever PPPoA to PPPoE conversion. Eventually it seemed stable setup as PPPoA.

There's still a weird problem where my external (Linksys WAP54G) Wireless Access Point loses Ethernet connectivity. (Yes, I know the Zoom has an internal AP, I want to use the external Linksys which is located in a better place). A couple of times today I'd lose wireless connectivity (but AP still visible) fixed by resetting the Zoom. The second time it happened I found I couldn't ping the Linksys and linking down/up the Ethernet connection in the back of the Zoom fixed the problem. Need to keep an eye on this.

KDE 4.0 Beta 1

2007-08-19T21:22:00.000+01:00

Last weekend I noticed KDE 4 had reach Beta 1 status so I thought I'd install it and try it out.

My system is loosely based on a Fedora Core 4 installation that's been heavily updated. I generally install my software from source, including KDE. I've been building every KDE 3.5 release from source successfully for some time now and I'm really happy with it.

So I read the release note and located the source packages quite easily and download them. The build instructions provide a link to a customised QT4 source package, odd, but I download and install it without any problems.

I try and compile kdelibs and hit several compiler errors. I manage to hack the code to compile and build the libs ok. I tried to build kdebase but got loads of compiler errors that basically looked like header differences between the version of Qt installed and this version of kdebase. So I ended up downloading the latest source for QT4 from Trolltech and compiling/installing that. Of course, after that kdebase compiles ok (few minor hacks to fix a problem with virtual functions). Great, so the build instructions seem out of date!

Eventually I get everything built and installed, switch to the new kdm and prepare to start KDE4 for the first time.

kdm starts first time, yay! Lets try and login.

Splash screen appears with, presumably, a picture of the development team from some KDE conference. Good. then up pops an error about dbus. Bad. Odd because dbus is installed and running fine.

The desktop eventually loads and there's missing icons on the task bar (question mark icons) and my existing KDE3 settings are missing. Try and drag an icon to the desktop and get a horrible error message printed on the desktop instead!

Decide to logout and delete my settings (rm -rf ~/.kde) and create a new profile. A bit better, but it's still not right.

Seems to be loads of applications missing from the K menu. Can't find the control centre, cant find any menus for configuring the desktop, no way to configure kicker and Kicker keeps crashing. Also seems to be loads of old KDE3 applications missing from the K menu.

OK, lets try something simple like opening a Konsole terminal as I spend 99% time in a terminal. A horrible window appears that's about the right width but way too tall and has a nasty default colour scheme. Try and set a standard terminal size and sensible colour scheme but I can't figure out how to save a default profile and the damn thing opens up ugly every time.

I've seen enough so logout to switch back to KDE3. Oh dear, get lots of error dialogs about stuff crashing during logout.

So I'm back using my old faithful KDE 3.5. I don't know whether I just built KDE4 wrongly or this is really the (poor) state of KDE4. At the moment there's no way I could use KDE4 for normal desktop use it's utter crap. If I could at least login/logout without errors and get a sensible terminal window open I'd be happy!

Premier League 07/08

2007-08-04T12:39:00.000+01:00

The new Premiership season starts next weekend yay!

Birmingham City are back in the top flight and I'm looking forward to the new season. We all know what went wrong 2 seasons ago when we got relegated so lets not make the same mistakes again Blues!

I'm still working abroad but fortunately I'll be home that weekend. Our first game is against Chelsea away. I don't have tickets and can't go anyway, but it is a featured game live on Sky Sports, so I can watch from home.

Our first home game is then mid-week but it looks likely I'll be out of the country again. I've renewed my season ticket so my seat will have to sit empty for that game :( gutted.

We can't even get access to the commentary outside the UK. The local radio stations block foreign IP addresses for the duration of the game. They expect me to sign up to the useless Blues World service that is supposed to provide live commentary and video highlights after the game. In reality it's just the same local radio commentary they've blocked direct access to! The service has also been pretty poor in previous seasons, probably scalability issues.

I'll have to setup a proxy service ready for next week so I can at least cheer the lads on from the office or my appartment room.

I've blogged before about watching football in bars when you're abroad. I hate it when the locals are cheering every stupid half-assed shot on goal just because it's a high-profile team or player. Really annoys me. As a Birmingam fan it's worse because it's guaranteed they won't be cheering for us. Is it only me that's experienced this?

Hopefully I'll be back in the UK soon so I don't miss too many games this season. Maybe I shouldn't have renewed my season ticket this year and spent the money on Sky HD or something. If only it was that easy to walk away!

OK, new season prediction time...

We will be in the top half of the table at Christmas.
We'll finish comfortably outside the relegation zone at the end of the season, but probably bottom half of the table.

I'm quite happy this season to just get the minimum number of points to stay up and finish in safety as early as possible. No relegation battles this time please. Next season we can build on this and get bigger and better players. Anything more than this is a bonus. Maybe a good cup run that transfers to a good performance in the league, we're due another decent run since Cardiff several seasons back.

Time sync in VMWare

2007-07-29T17:43:00.000+01:00

I am a huge fan of virtualisation and use it pretty heavily on my home PC.

For example, my main operating system is Linux which runs continuously 24/7. However, I also have a need to run Windows. So I use VMWare Workstation and have a "guest" Windows operating system running on my Linux box. I'm not especially pro-VMWare, I have also used QEmu pretty successfully too.

A cool trick is running a virtual Windows XP machine to stream media to my Xbox 360 in the other room. All the media is served from a Samba share on the Linux host operating system!

Virtualisation is also useful when you want to quickly sandbox test something. For example, I wanted to test some software that runs only on Windows Server 2003. As I don't have a spare PC and nowhere to install 2003, I can just deploy a new virtual machine with 2003 installed and load on the new software. When I'm finished I can just delete the virtual machine. Fantastic stuff.

However, I've recently been using VMWare to run some video streaming software that runs on Redhat Enterprise Linux 4. I was having problems with streamed video freezing due to discarded frames caused by time shifts in the PTS. My guess is that I've fallen into the world of pain that's VMWare clock synchronisation between host and guest.

There's an infamous VMWare white paper all about this here:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf

To cut a long story short, I was able to keep the Time of Day clock reasonably accurate by disabling the power management features in the host operating system by adding the following to the kernel arguments:

clock=pit noapic nolapic

Then I turned off NTP on the guest O/S and installed the VMWare Tools RPM which performs clock sync on a regular basis. As a belt and braces approach, I also add a line to the crontab to force sync the time on a regular basis:

*/5 * * * * /usr/sbin/ntpdate -b 10.110.250.100

The Time of Day realtime clock seems to keep in sync reasonably well. I checked this by running an ntpdate in query only mode over a period of time and checked the offset field.

$ watch -n 10 'ntpdate -q 10.110.250.100'

If the offset is < 1 second then everything is working. Before the changes the offset was 10s of seconds and growing with each update!

However, I don't think this solves the underlying problem of gaining/losing clock ticks in the guest OS. Although video streaming was much improved, occasionally the same loss of sync occurs. I guess trying to run time sensitive applications inside VMWare is not a good idea.

I feel lucky however, some people can't even keep the time of day clock in sync.

I would love to receive feedback if anyone else has seem this problem and resolved it.

Stuff you can't get abroad

2007-07-12T21:55:00.000+01:00

Having spent quite a long time out of the country I've noticed a few things you can't get easily outside the UK and, conversely, a few things we can't get within the UK.

Stuff I can't get in Sweden:

Marmite - Not that I'm a huge fan of Marmite, but I just really missed it over there and really had a craving for it. I now pack a small jar in my luggage and bring it with me.
Lucozade (they have Red Bull though, but costs 20 SEK).

Notable stuff we don't have in the UK:

Lakerol - I rather like these and often bring a box or two home with me.
Snus - Not that I "do" snuff, but it is odd how popular it is within Sweden and almost unheard of in the UK. I confess I have tried it though.

I'm sure there's loads of other stuff but these are the ones that spring to mind right now.

Travelling Hell

2007-07-02T23:40:00.000+01:00

Travelling hell.

I went into the office early this morning and worked up until about 3PM. I then had to drive home, pack a bag, then get a lift to the airport.

Due to the Scottish airport security "incident" at the weekend, Birmingham airport has closed the access roads right outside the terminal. To get dropped off my partner had to drive into the short stay car park and leave me there. Foruntuately it is free parking if you leave within 10 mins, i.e. just pickup/dropoff only. Lots of armed police around, armoured Land Rover 90s and stuff. Cool!

For some reason I thought it would be better to fly out to Sweden in the evening rather than the following morning so I wouldn't lose most of the day travelling. See how good I am to my employeer travelling in my own time and unpaid! If only they appreciated it.

Flight is delayed by 15mins. We were told this is because the plane arrived late (probably due to bad weather over europe?) Even on time, they usually turn these planes around in less than 1 hour, which is pretty amazing in itself. I usually sit in the terminal and watch them arrive!

Flight goes ok but we're obviously a little late. No big deal, was in no rush to go anywhere. Arrive at Gothenburg Landvetter airport in heavy cloud, so no decent views of the city. Couldn't even make out the Eriksberg crane :(

Take the airport bus to the main terminal in Gothenburg. Again, see how I think of my employeer and take the bus instead of a taxi. Takes about 30 mins and is 140 SEK return (price increased this month).

OK, now I have to stroll across to the tram stop to get a tram out to where I'm renting an apartment room in Nya Varvet. This journey alone takes another 30 mins.

So I arrive at the apartment just before midnight. I insert my card key into the external door card reader and.... nothing. Try the 2nd card (we get two for some reason) and also nothing. Then the prenny drops and I realise what's happended. When I first checked in I booked for 4 weeks and I guess the card key was programmed to expire after the final day. I extended my stay by another 2 weeks but didn't get my cards reprogrammed! So I'm locked out, at midnight... oh and did I mention it was raining and I was already soaked walking from the tram stop?

Fortunately I have some friends also staying in the same apartment complex, so after some ringing around I got their number and got access to the building and a place to dry off whilst security came out to let me into my room. Funny moment when me and the security guy are knocking on my rooom door to see if anyone is inside - who knows, maybe they chucked out my stuff over the weekend and moved somebody else in!

There's a callout fee of 1000 SEK for out of hours. I don't think I should pay it because it wasn't my fault the card key wasn't extended. We'll see. Bet I end up footing the bill.

Next time I'll travel during the day during working hours!

City Airline

2007-06-04T22:21:00.001+01:00

Recently I've been travelling between Brimingham and Sweden on City Airline's fleet of Embraer ERJ 135/145 aircraft. I'm aiming to travel on the entire City Airline fleet. So far I've been on SE-RAA, SE-RAB, SE-RAC and SE-DZB.

They also have another aircraft with an odd registration PH-RXB? I think this one is used between Gothenburg and Manchester but I've never managed to get on it.

This is on the tarmac at Birmingham. By chance my luggage is actually visible on the top of the pile. Shame they broke that beer glass I acquired though :(

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis

2007-05-21T22:26:00.000+01:00

Today I recalled a rather surreal experience that occurred when I was traveling overseas on business last year.

In the office late one evening I was asked whether I could travel to Moldova to rescue a failed customer demonstration that another department was unable to resource. Oh and I was told I'd probably need to travel the following day, so pack a bag!

Sounded wonderful, not! Flying to a country I'd barely heard of (apart from their national football team), zero notice and when I get there I'm stepping into the unknown, picking up the pieces of a mess somebody else has created. Sounded like a no-win situation from the start.

As it happened, I had the following day to make arrangements, but still had to fly the morning after that.

So, after a whole day of flying, 3 flights, 2 transfers, I arrive at Moldova airport around midnight feeling completely shattered. By the time I've applied and paid for a visa I'm the last person through passport control. The guy behind the counter half-tried to be awkward with me, but quickly relented as I was the last person through on probably the last flight that day, plus they'd already taken my bag off the carousel and brought it out to the counter for me :)

Outside I'm met by the driver, the poor sod from the company I'm visiting who had to drive out at midnight to collect me.

I made an effort to communicate with the poor guy but quickly gave up when I found he only spoke Russian - of which I knew none then. So for the next hour I'm driven from the airport to the hotel through these pitch black roads, swerving around huge pot-holes, with barely another sole on the road. As there wasn't much talking going on the guy turns on the radio and we actually got along pretty well as we tapped along to the songs we each liked on the radio. Who needs words?

And then UB40 comes on the radio with Red Red Wine. I guess my new-found friend also likes UB40 and turns the radio up. It was such a surreal moment. Not just because UB40 are a British band, but because they are from my home town of Birmingham... and here I am miles away from home, in the dead of night, being driven to God knows where by a guy that doesn't speak a word of English with UB40 blasting out. If anything happened I'm convinced nobody in my office would've had a clue where I was.

In fact things got more interesting when I later found out the customer site was not in Moldova as such but located east of the Dniester river in a country called Transnistria. As there is still friction between Moldova and Transnistria it is necessary to pass between the border patrols on each side and have the necessary papers. Scary stuff when nobody has warned you in advance.

That's probably as much as I can say online. There were so many other incidents I could write pages of stuff here.

The only positive outcome was that I was able to "fix" the problems I was originally called in for, as well as setting up and demonstrating a whole host of other things I was never warned about - although this is pretty typical at customer sites in my experience!

To sum up. Apart from the work pressure, I quite enjoyed spending time out there. I found the people really down to earth, open and friendly. Also, it was also a real eye-opener to the political situation out there in eastern Europe.

By the way, in case you didn't get it, the Tennis reference is to a book by Tony Hawks called Playing the Moldovans at Tennis. I get the impression he also went through a similar eye-opening experience out there.

Promotion

2007-05-13T20:13:00.000+01:00

Yes! We were promoted back to the Premiership with a game still to play. Fantastic.

I had a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge whilst the Palace v Derby game was playing which was duly opened at the end of the game. I still can't believe Palace did us a favour considering the past history between our club and Simon Jordan. What's more, our former player Clinton Morrison scored the first goal. Thanks Clinton mate, us Blues fans always liked you (it's true).

So as things stood, if we won our last game of the season not only would we be promoted but we'd also finish 1st and be champions. Icing on the cake, but as we've won naff-all for all eternity it would really mean something to us long-suffering supporters.

Now the problem was that I was working overseas in Sweden whilst the final game was playing. It was an away game at Preston so I wouldn't have been there, but I could have listened to the commentary on local radio and felt close to the action.

Not only was I abroad but I was staying in this far-out hotel in Uddevalla, a town at least 1 hours drive from Gothenburg. However, I managed to sneak into the Systembolaget and buy a bottle of champers just in case we on.

This hotel in the sticks was useless. No fridge, no ice bucket, not even glasses! First I raided the breakfast room for glasses. Next myself and a couple of colleagues raided the ice machine a few floors up and filled my bathroom sink with as much ice as we could find and shoved the bottles in there. Then we went out.

At full time I was texting my friends and trying to get the footy scores by Wireless LAN on my PDA only to be disappointed when I finally received the result. We'd lost, Sunderland won, so we finished 2nd. Boooooo! Typical Blues I suppose.

However, at least we're promoted that's the main thing. It would have just been nice to actually win something for once.

So I invited my work collegaues up to my hotel room and we had a small cellebration. I would have loved to be cellebrating back home in Birmingham, but that's the best I could do under the circumstances.

Well done Blues!

We are top of the league - again!

2007-04-29T12:18:00.000+01:00

I want to post this entry before Crystal Palace play Derby. As things stand right now, Birmingham City are top of the league and 1 point ahead of Sunderland. If Crystal Palace beat Derby this afternoon we are definitely promoted and just need the final game of the season to decide who finishes in 1st or 2nd place.

Birmingham fans will know we've had a roller coaster of a season. We've had spells where we played really poorly but picked up wins. We've had periods where we've lost several games in a row and fans turned against the manager Steve Bruce. The attendance and atmosphere took a hit this season when many long standing season ticket holders declined to renew this season, partly inflicted by the ridiculously high renewal prices for Championship football.

The game on Saturday against Sheffield Wednesday, the last home game of the season, was amazing. It was a beautiful day, everyone wearing their colours and a a complete sell out.

We were somewhat edgy in the first half. The game only really came alive when Fabrice Muamba was sent off for a second booking and we went down to 10 men. A few inspired substitutions and we were 1-0 up through Cameron Jerome. Then a maze-up from Seb Larsson put us 2-0 up. After the 2nd goal went in the crowd went wild! I have vague recollections of leaping onto the guy next to me in celebration whilst the guy the other side grabbed onto me also and all 3 of us nearly fell backwards into the row behind! Brilliant!

There was a short delay when a Borat Streaker ran onto the pitch. I know I shouldn't encourage this behaviour and it could have shelved plans for the players doing a lap of honor after the game, but it was very funny! The streaker was on the Tilton Road side of the pitch while the game carried on obliviously at the Railway end! For some reason it was down to a couple of female stewards to wrestle him to the ground. Great entertainment.

Borat streaker YouTube.
(I was sat just a few rows behind this person)

Sadly there was a bit of trouble after the game between Birmingham and Sheffield Wednesday fans. Although a small subset of idiot fans are ultimately to blame, it wasn't helped by the police and stewards.

At a normal home game fans tend to stream out pretty early and the away fans are kept back for a few minutes whilst the ground clears and the people leave the area around the ground. The away fans can then leave from their secure compound by coach.

Being the last game of the season the home fans stayed inside the stadium for a good 15mins after the final whistle to cheer the players on a lap of honour. For some reason the away fans were still held back instead of clearing them away during this period. So when the ground finally emptied, both the home and away fans were trying to leave at the same time.

The away fans were pretty much locked inside the away compound behind gates and a police cordon, but there were idiots goading them with chants and abuse. Before long there were rocks, stones and coins being thrown over the fence into the Blues fans.

It was funny because at one point I was stuck in the middle of a big crowd of people, then within seconds the road instantly clears as the crowd scatters covering their heads. I'm stood in the middle oblivious why everyone just ran! Sadly it seems that a few fans, some of them children, were slightly hurt by rocks hitting them. Some younger children with their parents were quite upset and frightened by the whole thing. I hope it doesn't put them off coming again - hopefully when the morons involved have been caught and banned from future games.

Anyway, I've got a couple of drinks chilling in the fridge which I may be opening later this afternoon if we're promoted. If not the drinks are on ice until next weekend away at Preston. I'm in Sweden next week so promotion today would end a perfect weekend for me.

Keep right on... see you in the Premiership!

Speed Cameras

2007-04-24T22:16:00.000+01:00

I have just updated my TomTom GPS software with the latest speed camera database.

There's a well-known web site that collates the GPS locations of speed camera sites in the UK and sends out regular database updates.

Last week I noticed a Gatso site on the A45 between Birmingham and Coventry (here) had suddenly disappeared, although the painted white calibration lines are still there and stupid drivers still brake hard just before it. The camera has been there for a good 12 years to my knowledge, so I was surprised it had gone. Either it was moved or somebody ripped it out vigilante style.

I'm quite impressed that the location has already been removed from the speed camera database. If I'd updated my TomTom earlier my GPS would have realised it was removed before I actually noticed myself.

For fun I created a Google Earth .kml file showing the sites of all the speed cameras. You don't realise how many cameras there are in the UK until you see the map plastered with icons!

This was only a quick hack for fun and the data will age quickly. If you want up-to-date camera locations I advise you to subscribe to one of the commercial services, e.g. provided by TomTom or support a community led one.

Here is the kml file:
http://www.faime.demon.co.uk/download/speed.kml.zip

Unzip somewhere, start Google Earth, then import using: File -> Open.

The file was too large to open in Google Maps when I tried it, but worked great in Google Earth.

XBox 360 Streaming Video

2007-04-23T23:19:00.000+01:00

Sadly I've had to miss the first 3 or 4 episodes of the new Doctor Who season 3.

I have a Sky+ PVR box but the planner was completely full when the new season started so I couldn't record it. I was out of the country at the time and I had a load of other programs filling up the disk I hadn't had time to watch.

Over the weekend I downloaded the episodes I missed. Not sure how legal this is, but seeing as I would have Sky+'d them anyway I don't think it does any harm. I have a paid-up TV license and they're broadcast on BBC1 :)

The next problem was how to watch them. I don't really like watching TV programs on the computer because it just doesn't feel right. In the old days I would have burned them to a DVD, but it's a lot of hassle for something I'll never watch again.

As my XBox 360 is connected to the TV and networked I thought I'd stream the episodes from my PC in the back room to my XBox by the TV.

To cut a long story short I successfully transcoded the DivX files into WMV files using ffmpeg (on Linux) then streamed them to the XBox using Windows Media Player 11. The best bit is that WMP11 was running on XP inside VMWare on my Linux PC and reading from a Samba share. Cool eh?

For future reference here's how I converted the files to WMV format (2Mbit/s):

$ ffmpeg -i input_file.avi -f asf -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav1 -b 2048k -ab 128 output_file.wmv

It is also necessary to make a registry change to allow Windows Media Player 11 to stream from a mounted Samba shared drive. Here are the instructions:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

2. In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.

3. Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
(add the new registry key inside the HME branch)

4. Type EnableRemoteContentSharing and then press ENTER.

5. Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.

6. In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and change the value to 0

Reboot PC and restart WMP11.

dell.com

2007-04-21T14:09:00.000+01:00

I've not had much luck with buying stuff online from Dell. On two separate occasions I've tried to buy stuff online from Dell without success.

First Try:

A couple of years ago I wanted to buy a new PC. At the time I was specifically looking for one of those new fangled dual-core Pentiums. Dell offered a very expensive high-end PC on their website so I ordered it online.

Some time later I get a phone call from an Indian call centre saying they can't supply this particular model. Great. As I specifically wanted this high-end PC I told them to scrap the order and I bought the components myself and built my own custom PC. Their loss. I ended up spending about the same amount of money, but got better spec components. So they lost out there on a pretty big order. In fact I'm still using that PC today and it's still top-end.

Second Try:

This week I thought I'd risk ordering of Dell again. I saw a really nice monitor, albeit pretty expensive. I've been making do with a 21" HP P1100 monitor (actually a re-badged Sony Trinitron GDM 500PS) which I bought second hand about 6 years ago. Amazing quality, so I've not really been tempted by an LCD monitor until now, where the dimensions and response time are now reasonably good.

In fact I've also got a Mitsubishi Diamondtron in the other room unused gathering dust. It is a fantastic monitor with unbelievable picture quality, it's just that it's too large to use in the living room compared to a slim LCD panel. I can't bring myself to scrap it though, it cost so much initially and it's hardly been used.

Anyway I placed the Dell order online. A few hours later Dell left a message on my phone saying my credit card was declined. Strange seeing as my card is nowhere near it's limit, hasn't expired and I used it successfully that morning to buy petrol.

However, by the time I got the message it was after 5 PM on a Friday and nobody seems to answer the phone after 5PM and there was no response on Saturday (despite their website saying they answer the phones until 9PM and work Saturdays!). Guess I'll have to sort this out next week during office hours. Somehow I suspect there will be more problems and I'll end up cancelling this order too. Their loss again! This was an expensive order.

I guess there could really be a problem with my credit card. I checked my account online and there was no unusual transactions. The correct "verified by Visa" screen appeared so I know I entered the correct number and password.

I'll update this post if I get a positive outcome from them. I'm sure they have lots of satisfied customers... unfortunately I never seem to be one of them.

One final niggly problem. I have to have everything delivered to the same address as registered with my credit card, i.e. my home address. This is stupid because there is never anyone here during the day (I'm at work or out of the country) so I always get stuff delivered elsewhere where I know there is somebody always in to sign for it. Pretty much every other company allows this, e.g. Amazon, play.com, dabs.

-- Updated 23/04/07 --

As promised, here's an update. I called the Dell sales line first thing Monday morning and got put through to the Indian call centre. Pretty good service to be honest. The guy found my order in limbo and took my credit card details, which went through straight away even though it was exactly the same credit card that failed on Friday!

There's no reason why my card should have been declined on Friday as confirmed by it working this time.

The only slight niggle was that a few hours later I got a call from Dell about the web order I placed on Friday. Basically they said they'd tried to charge my credit card again, which had failed again and that's why they were ringing me. After I explained I'd already called sales earlier in the day, they cancelled the web order. Afterwards I had this horrible feeling I'll either be charged twice, or they'll cancel the successful order too!

Seems odd that one department has tried my credit card twice and it has been declined while another department accepted it fine. I know the number I entered on the web was correct because I recognised the password reminder when the verified by Visa dialog came up. Maybe they have to manually copy from the web form into another system, hence the error! If not, something is really screwed up in their system somewhere.

Anyway, a few hours after that I get another call from Dell asking when I'd like my item delivered. I opted for the next day and an AM delivery. Pretty fast!

Overall I'm pretty satisfied so far. I just find it interesting how a simple problem with my credit card cascaded into a whole series of follow on problems.

Looking forward to trying my new purchase!

-- Updated 28/04/07 --

Here's my final update on this. The nice delivery man dropped off my new monitor the following morning as promised.

I switched to using the DVI-D input instead of the 15 way D type I used to use from my NVidia 7800 GTX graphics card. I found that initially the monitor detected no input on the DVI-D connection and kept going into power save mode. After I stopped and restarted X (X.org 6.9.0) the display switched automatically to the new input. Cool.

I guess most people will connect a new monitor with their computer shutdown so they'll most likely not see this problem. Alternatively just reboot. I like to preserve my uptime :)

The only change was to up the resolution in xorg.conf to the new 1920x1200 resolution from my old 1600x1200 resolution with the Sony CRT monitor:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1920x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1200" "1400x1050" "1280x960" "1280x800" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1152x768" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Keyboard Layouts

2007-04-15T12:05:00.000+01:00

I've just been reading an article on Slashdot about QWERTY vs Dvorak keyboard layouts. What many people don't realise is that there are many different QWERTY keyboard layouts, usually the location of special characters on regionalised keyboards.

For example, I was recently working away in Iceland. Including my colleagues laptops we had keyboards with regionalised layouts for Iceland, UK, USA, Sweden and Denmark.

For normal letter writing this is probably not an issue, but we were doing Linux installation and configuration and needed the special characters, e.g. pipe, ampersand, slashes, hyphens, etc.

Everything was fine when using my own laptop with a UK layout, but over the course of a couple of weeks I had to use Icelandic keyboards and used several of my colleagues keyboards when showing them how to do things and troubleshooting from their machine.

Being most familiar with a UK layout I can switch to a US layout pretty easily. It's usually just the different location of the double quotes (") and hash (#) key to remember. We have quite a few US keyboards at work so you tend to switch to the alternate layout without even looking at the keys when you see the wrong character appear without breaking the flow.

I find the Swedish layout really difficult. All the special characters, e.g. slashes, pipes, etc. require shift to be held down, or worse, the right Alt key! How awkward is this! From a command prompt, e.g. DOS or a *nix shell, this means you need to use shifts/alts all the time to enter most commands. The UK layout is so much better for *nix system admin as only the pipe needs the shift key and even then it's adjacent to the left shift key.

But it gets worse! You can't always rely on the keycaps to find the key you want. For example, when logging onto a remote server configured with an Icelandic keymap from a PC with a UK keyboard layout.

Some of the guys just couldn't cope with this and resorted to using the console. The trick here, where you've learned the typical keymaps is to ignore what's printed on the key caps and press the correct keys from memory. It's hard to do, but works quite well. I've heard of touch typists physically pulling off and reseating QWERTY keyboard keycaps, e.g. to spell words, because they don't actually read the keys - they've learned the layout. The side effect is that other people are unable to use the keyboard because the mismatched keycaps confuse them.

KEY CODE LOCKOUT

2007-04-08T14:50:00.002+01:00

I got back to the UK last week after being out of the country for nearly 2.5 weeks on business. The last couple of times I've been away for 2 weeks I've been able to successfully start my car, but you can tell the battery was really low.

This time my luck ran out and the battery was so dead the remote keyfob wouldn't work and there were no lights or messages when I switched on the ignition. Using jump leads it started straight away without any problem and I took it out for an hour to recharge the battery. However, a day later and the same problem occurred, i.e. was completely dead.

Lead acid batteries don't like deep cycles of drain/charge, so I'm not surprised it has finally died. It was fine when I used the car every day, in fact I've never changed this battery since I had the car about 5 years ago! Pretty good for me as I usually get through about 1 every 2 or 3 years.

Being Easter bank holiday there was pretty much only one, expensive, place to buy such a large battery and that was Halfords. Actually they had 3 in stock, so I took the most recently charged one. At least it comes with a 3 year guarantee, which is good seeing as I'm spending so much time out of the country.

So, I change the battery over which is a pretty simple job. Then I go to unlock the car using the keyfob and... nothing. OK, so the car loses the keyfob synchronisation after disconnecting the battery. I unlock using the key and open the drivers door, which triggers the alarm for 30s!

Now the car is completely immobilised, the message "KEY CODE LOCKOUT" appears on the dash and no combination of inserting the key in the ignition, drivers door or pressing the keyfob buttons has any effect.

To any fellow Range Rover P38A owners out there, if you get the Key Code Lockout message after a battery change (or low/flat battery), the only way out of this seems to be doing an EKA (Emergency Key Access).

The EKA process is as follows. You'll need the EKA number, which is on the little card inside your owners manual wallet - mine seemed to match the key number also.

If you have just replaced the battery or attached jump leads you need to wait 30 minutes until the message "Key Code Lockout" disappears from the dashboard display.
Fully close all the doors and shut tailgate and bonnet.
Turn key to lock position 4 times. You should hear no bleeps from the alarm, if you do read get a bleep, stop and check the message shown on the display.
To enter the first digit, turn the key the required number of times to the unlock position.
To enter the second digit, turn the key the required number of times to the lock position.
To enter the third digit, turn the key the required number of times to the unlock position.
To enter the fourth digit, turn the key the required number of times to the lock position.
Finally, turn to the unlock position to unlock the car.

Apparently the default EKA code, e.g. where BeCM module is replaced, is set to 1515.

I've deliberately used the terms Lock and Unlock position so remember to turn the key in the correct direction depending on whether it's a left-hand or right-hand drive model. For a RHD UK model a Left rotation is Lock, Right is Unlock.

I had to try the procedure several times before I got it to work. If you get the Key Code Lockout message appear again you need to go away and wait 30 mins for the timeout to expire before retrying. The first few times I tried it I got alarm chirps with every key turn. When the EKA worked successfully there was NO alarm chirps when entering any of the code.

On the final unlock turn the central locking kicked in and unlocked all the doors. At this point I could start the engine again. Yay!

The big problem is if you have a really flat battery and are using jump leads. You can't use the EKA procedure without closing the bonnet but you can't close the bonnet if you have jump leads attached. I found the solution was to attach jump leads, wait 30 mins for the Keycode Lockout to timeout during which you get 30mins of charge, disconnect the jump leads for a short time so you can close the bonnet to do the EKA, then reattach the jump leads to start the engine.

As if that wasn't complicated enough, I then had to do the following...

1. Re-sync all your remote control keyfobs. I do this by inserting the key into the drivers door, holding in lock position & press lock keyfob button, then hold in unlock position & press unlock keyfob button.

2. Set window and sunroof limits. This clears the Window Not Set messages. Just fully open, then fully close every window. For the sunroof fully slide open, slide closed, tilt up, tilt down. You may need to hold the window in the fully open or closed positions for a couple of seconds before releasing the button if it keeps prompting you to set the same window repeatedly.

3. Turn off Automatic mirror dip function, because they never seem to reset back to the correct position after reversing. (Hold Store button only on drivers seat when in reverse).

4. Re-save my seat, mirror, instrument intensity settings (hold Store and 1 on drivers seat with lights switched on).

Finally after all this there should be no more messages appearing on the dash. I wonder how many people have got "stuck" after changing the battery and have needed the car recovered to the dealer because it is completely immobilised, or keeps complaining about stuff not being set via the message console?

Gothenburg

2007-03-18T16:14:00.000Z

I'd love to write something interesting here but I've spent all last week out of the country. This time I was in Gothenburg, Sweden.

What a difference a few weeks make. When I was last there in January it was freezing, there was ice and snow and it was dark, gloomy and horrible. This time it was a much more pleasant experience. It was warmer, no snow and it was even daylight going to work.

I stayed at the Gothia Towers hotel again. This time I got a better room. It was still in the West tower, but on the 10th floor this time overlooking the front of the hotel rather than the back of the hotel. You get a great view of Korsvägen where all the buses and trams stop.

The room was a little larger too, with a better layout. It's a shame I didn't get this room last time when I stayed over the weekend. I'd certainly recommend the hotel if you're visiting the city and I've always found the staff exceptionally nice.

You can see in the picture the bus stop where the airport coach leaves from and where I catch the tram into the city centre in order to catch the bus into work. The hotel is a bit far out for work really, but I quite like walking either to or from town to get a little exercise.

The guys in yellow jackets are handing out the free papers. I usually get one even though I don't read/speak Swedish. I usually get it for the TV schedules and sport in the back, but it's funny how you can follow the gist of most articles by recognising certain words.

Actually the hotel was fully booked for several days because Dolly Parton was appearing at the Scandinavium, which is situated just behind the hotel. One of my colleagues was having trouble finding a hotel room anywhere central to Gothenburg as every hotel was full!

I've got one day at work in the UK and I'm being sent to Iceland for 2 weeks. I am in so much trouble at home from the significant other!

Oh yes, for you aviation buffs I flew out on SE-RAA and returned on SE-DZB, both Embraer EMB-145s

We are top of the league (again)

2007-03-11T12:56:00.000Z

Got to see Birmingham City v Derby County at St. Andrews on Friday evening. I was quite pleased to be in the country considering the amount of games I've been forced to miss lately.

We won 1-0 putting is back at the top of the league table just ahead of Derby in second spot. I only hope we finish 1st or 2nd in the automatic promotion spots. I'd love another day out at Cardiff (or Wembley now its finished?) but I'd rather not risk the playoffs again considering our poor success rate in the Trevor Francis era.

In a nutshell: pretty decent performance, better work-rate from Nicklas Bendtner, Colin Doyle gaining in confidence every game, good crowd attendance, better atmosphere, new pitch is improving all the time.

The atmosphere was much improved tonight. We've had problems recently with the crowd booing our own players during the game, people getting on the young players backs, etc. I think we've overcome that point now and things are getting better. The manager and board have made it clear that we need to support our team during the 90 minutes and booing your own players is downright stupid no matter how poorly they're playing. As pointed out by the manager, the team is very young and will make mistakes now and then.

Now the Birmingham supporters are generally quite vocal, especially at away games. However on Friday I did noticed that most of the songs we sang were generally fully of swear words and downright obscene - usually concerning the Villa (LOL!). I have to confess that I don't mind singing the "clean" songs and our club anthem "Keep Right On", but I no longer sing these mindless songs full of expletives. We even seem to have created a new song based on Status Quo's "Rocking All Over the World!" with the words changed to shi**ing all over the villa - or words to that effect.

I'm worried I've outgrown being a die hard football supporter. Yes, I still love the game immensely and I love my team without question, I just feel that there's still a lot of brainless idiots supporting the game and I've perhaps grown out of it. Am I any less of a supporter if I don't want to lower myself to chanting swear words about our local rivals?

Don't misunderstand me, I think football should be accessible to everyone. The last thing I want is to have our club "supported" by the prawn sandwich brigade - who will drop their expensive corporate sponsorship and private boxes the minute we're out of the Premership. The future of the club is the people paying at the turnstiles each week, the kids and faithful season ticket holders. These will be the people still coming to the ground long after the players have demanded transfers, the manager has been sacked, the board have sold-out, etc.

Maybe I'll move my Season Ticket seat next season and sit with the 'older generation' where I'm not surrounded by so many idiots. I think I'm getting old before my time!

London

2007-03-08T22:56:00.000Z

I've been working down in London for most of this week, staying overnight in a hotel.

If I'm honest, I really don't like London at all and try to avoid going there at all costs. I think it's mainly the traveling I don't like, made worse by severely over crowded trains and people rushing about pointlessly.

I've been to London several times on business and driven through it a few times. I spent several weeks on a job at Heathrow airport when several new office blocks were built some years back when Concorde was still flying, plus I've been on several 1 day trips to visit specific customer sites. However, this is probably the first time I've stayed overnight in a hotel and had time to go sightseeing.

The weather was very poor and I stayed in one night to watch the Champions League on TV, but I managed to get out on a couple of nights and walk on the Millennium Bridge and visit Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, The Mall and Buckingham Palace.

Visiting Buckingham Palace was quite interesting. Although I've never been there before, the whole area seemed very familiar and I recognised the road layout. I realised that I've learned the layout from playing computer games like Project Gotham!

I think it's sad that at my age I've never really visited the tourist attractions in London, despite only living 1.5 hours away by train... and then recognising the landmarks from computer games.

This is a rubbish picture I took on my mobile phone of St. Paul's and the Millennium Bridge from the South side of the Thames. It was chucking it down with rain at the time!

The hotel was also interesting: Thistle Bloomsbury Park Hotel. You can read some amusing online reviews at Trip Advisor.

As you can see, its received a LOT of bad reviews. However, I personally quite enjoyed it! It was like staying at the Fawlty Towers hotel. The whole stay was completely surreal from start to end for various reasons. I was half expecting John Cleese to barge in doing a silly walk at any moment.

The minute I walked through the doors and waited at reception I thought I'd stepped into a parallel universe. The foreign guy checking in left his wallet open on the counter and walked off (it was put safely to one side), whilst another weird guy kept wandering around behind me examining every leaflet placed on the front desk - even down to the "feedback" cards, etc. which involved barging me out of the way to reach them!

To be fair, although none of the staff seemed to speak English as a first language, I found them all really nice and friendly. I suspect they get so many complains about the state of the hotel they're just glad to meet people who are freindly and polite towards them.

The building itself was in a pretty bad state of repair. The decorating was awful, bathroom fittings in a very poor state (probably great when fitted in 1982), burn holes in the carpet, etc. I've personally stayed in some better B&Bs - and I've stayed in some VERY suspect B&Bs, so I don't make that statement lightly! But bear in mind this hotel is in a prime spot in central London and is pretty cheap - for London prices anyway.

This was the burn mark in the carpet in my room. It's hard to judge the scale, but this was about the size of my shoe! I've no idea what caused this because luxuries like irons were not provided here and there was only a single 13A socket on the other side of the room.

Linux 2.6.19.2 NVIDIA kernel oops

2007-03-04T17:34:00.000Z

I've posted before about stability problems I've been having with my Linux PC. While I've been out of the country my machine has been working perfectly, so I thought I'd solved the stability problem.

However, this past weekend the thing has locked up at least twice. The kernel just hangs and the video and keyboard just freeze. No Magic sys-req works and you have to hit the reset button to recover.

Finally I've got a stack trace in /var/log/messages:

Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000
Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel:  printing eip:
Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel: f94ee516
Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel: *pde = 00000000
Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel: Oops: 0000 [#1]
Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel: SMP
Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel: Modules linked in: usblp nls_utf8 iptable_filter ip_tables x_tables budget l64781 l2cap bluetooth parport_pc lp parport autofs4 eeprom lm85 hwmon_vid hwmon sunrpc vfat fat ntfs dm_mod video fan button battery ac ipv6 ohci1394 ieee1394 usb_storage uhci_hcd ehci_hcd stv0299 budget_ci budget_core dvb_core saa7146 ttpci_eeprom tuner tvaudio msp3400 bttv video_buf ir_common compat_ioctl32 i2c_algo_bit btcx_risc tveeprom videodev v4l1_compat v4l2_common snd_bt87x nvidia(P) iTCO_wdt i2c_i801 i2c_core snd_hda_intel snd_hda_codec snd_emu10k1_synth snd_emux_synth snd_seq_virmidi snd_seq_midi_emul snd_emu10k1 snd_rawmidi snd_ac97_codec snd_ac97_bus snd_seq_dummy snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm snd_seq_device snd_timer snd_page_alloc snd_util_mem snd_hwdep snd soundcore e1000 floppy ext3 jbd ata_piix ahci libata sd_mod scsi_mod
Mar  3 11:04:40 faime kernel: CPU:    3
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: EIP:    0060:[]    Tainted: P      VLI
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: EFLAGS: 00010246   (2.6.19.2 #1)
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: EIP is at _nv005493rm+0x66/0xc0 [nvidia]
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: eax: 00000000   ebx: 00000000   ecx: 006013d5   edx: 00000000
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: esi: 00000000   edi: f616f000   ebp: cc685db8   esp: cc685da0
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: ds: 007b   es: 007b   ss: 0068
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: Process sensors (pid: 26706, ti=cc684000 task=f7890030 task.ti=cc684000)
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: Stack: f616f000 f60d1000 f617b200 0000001f f616f000 f60d1000 cc685e28 f923eeac
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:        f60d1000 f616f000 00000000 000000a0 00000001 00000000 cc685e28 f923ee86
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:        f60d1000 f616f000 00000000 cda3201c c238c800 00000000 00000000 00000000
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: Call Trace:
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] rm_i2c_write_buffer+0x1a8/0x200 [nvidia]
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] rm_i2c_write_buffer+0x182/0x200 [nvidia]
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] nv_i2c_algo_smbus_xfer+0xca/0x1cd [nvidia]
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] i2c_smbus_xfer+0x7e/0x54c [i2c_core]
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] do_path_lookup+0x8d/0x20f
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] generic_permission+0x52/0xe9
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] may_open+0x4d/0x256
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] open+0x0/0x170
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] i2c_smbus_write_byte+0x33/0x38 [i2c_core]
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] eeprom_read+0x29a/0x30c [eeprom]
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] read+0x9a/0xfd
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] vfs_read+0x89/0x145
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] read+0x0/0xfd
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] sys_read+0x41/0x6a
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  [] xfrm_add_sa_expire+0x79/0xa3
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel:  =======================
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: Code: 50 57 8b 55 08 52 8b 87 64 03 00 00 ff d0 83 c4 20 85 c0 0f 95 c3 31 f6 3b 75 18 73 3c 84 db 75 38 8d 74 26 00 0f b6 db 8b 55 1c <0f> b6 04 16 50 8b 45 10 50 57 8b 55 08 52 8b 87 64 03 00 00 ff
Mar  3 11:04:41 faime kernel: EIP: [] _nv005493rm+0x66/0xc0 [nvidia] SS:ESP 0068:cc685da0

Looks like it popped in the NVIDIA kernel driver.

The deal with Linux is that if you've 'tainted' the kernel with closed source kernel modules, the Linux folks on the Linux Kernel Mailing List won't give you any support. Worse, the crash seems to be in NVIDIA to do with I2C bus writing.

I've had this problem a few times now and I think I've figured out what is causing it. I have a HP P110 monitor (Sony Trinitron GDM-500PS chasis) with dual inputs. The crash seems to be caused when I switch inputs between a Windows PC on the 2nd input and my Linux machine on the 1st input. It doesn't crash every time, so there may be a combination of whether either machine is in screen saver or power saving.

As I was switching inputs frequently at the time I temporarily switched the X.org graphics driver to the open source "nv" driver from the proprietary "nvidia" driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Must post something to the NVIDIA forum if I get time!

Stockholm

2007-03-04T16:54:00.000Z

I spent last week working in Stockholm, Sweden. So far in 2007 I've spent as many weeks working outside the country as I have spent working inside the UK.

I stayed in Stockholm for 2 weeks towards the end of last year, but I was surprised that I'd already forgotten the direction of travel of various T-Banan (underground) stations, the layout of T-Centralen and the correct final destination trains to board. I think I still had the destinations of buses and trams in Gothenburg in my head from last month.

Although I stayed in the same hotel I was in a different room. Actually a more expensive executive room, but bizarrely in a different block of the hotel and with a crap view over an adjacent building. The last time I stayed here I had a cheaper room with a wonderful view over Gamla Stan and a small balcony. For only a week I wasn't too bothered - at least the hotel now offers free Internet access.

If you've read my blog before you'll know that the last time I flew to Stockholm from Birmingham I had to transfer at Schipol. We took the same route and flights again but this time there were no delays and I got a quick look around the airport shops. Even my stuff made it too!

The security checks are still a pain the neck though, especially when you have to go through the routine each time you transfer. As before, it seems completely inconsistent whether they want me to remove my shoes or not. Plus is takes ages for me to empty my pockets, take my watch off, get my laptop out, then get all the stuff into the proper trays and down the x-ray belt... then reverse the procedure at the other end - at the same time as everyone else!

I won't talk about work, but I will say again that I do love Stockholm. It really is a beautiful city. As there were a group of us staying out there at various hotels, we ate out together most nights. The food was great everywhere, with many places completely packed out every night.

I even managed to visit the Vasa Museum, which is a must-see if you've never been there before. The building itself is as impressive as the ship!

For personal reasons I really need to limit the amount of away travel I'm doing, so if my boss is reading the above please don't assume my comments mean I want to do _more_ away travel! I'm supposed to be doing the minimum amount already! I'd hate to see what 'heavy traveling' is like!

Linux kernel 2.6.19.2

2007-02-24T23:15:00.000Z

Just a quick update on the reliability problems I was having with my Linux PC.

The stability problems seems to have gone away finally. At the time of this blog entry my uptime is as follows:

23:16:56 up 14 days, 1:44, 4 users, load average: 3.35, 3.28, 3.21

OK it's only 14 days, but that's pretty good for me considering I was getting hangs/resets after 2 or 3 days previously.

I'm not sure what has fixed the problem exactly, however the only major changes are a new Linux kernel and the latest NVIDIA drivers. For the record I am now running:

xxx 2.6.19.2 #1 SMP Sun Jan 21 11:56:55 GMT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9746-pkg1.run

There's a new Linux kernel available but I'm reluctant to take it in case my system becomes unstable again.

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