You can disable everything else but you cannot disable Yahoo Toolbar if you want to install Yahoo Messenger. No problem I thought; I’ll fire up Internet Explorer and disable the toolbar later. Once I started up IE 8 security popups appeared one after another informing me that the toolbar was attempting activities prohibited by my security settings. This is not good, but what was worse was the browser locked solid after I clicked the last. I had to kill the process to get going again. I tried twice more and the same thing happened both times. I had to use Add/Remove Programs to get rid of it in the end.

What gets me is the sheer arrogance of Yahoo, expecting their users to tolerate the major degradation in performance and security just so they can put extra buttons on the browser to go to their services. Another friend of mine once had so many toolbars on his browser one time (Google, Yahoo, AVG & WOW as I recall) that he was browsing through a tiny 2″ high window. The browser took 2 minutes just to load the homepage because there was so much crap loading up in the background.

My one pain point was state flapping. A service can go unresponsive for a fraction of a second under heavy load and come back right again. All to frequently my inbox would get swamped with problem…ok…problem…ok….problem…ok messages. By the time I’d log in everything had settled down. It’s not a perfect situation, but doesn’t warrant getting out of bed to repair either. Nagios has a flapping detection function but Zabbix doesn’t.

What I’ve found is that the AVG function can be used to average the status values (“1″ or “0″) over a given period and only trigger an alert if it drops below the alert value. For example

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}<1

will only trigger a second alert if the web server stays responsive for at least 30 seconds between outages. Also

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}=0

Will only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds at a time. Further you can combine the two in

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(60)}<0.5

to only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds and only trigger an OK if it stays back up for 30 seconds.

Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, a netbook and an iPhone, it made sense to try and keep my data where I could access it regardless of device. I basically have 3 categories of data: email, my web browser environment (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) and unstructured data (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEGs etc. files). I use a few cloud based services to supplement these, but more on them another time.

Documents: I’m fairly neat when it comes to organising data on my laptop. Everything is in the My Documents folder. I used to use Beyond Compare to manually sync my desktop and laptop but for the last while I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh Beta to keep everything in sync automatically. A change or addition on any system ripples around to all the rest in real time. This means I can start work on a document in the office and seamlessly pick up where I left off when I get home without having to do a thing. On the new PC I just installed the Mesh client and left it to do it’s thing over night. It pulled my data from the online copy and placed it just where I’d expect it.

Email: POP is for noobs; IMAP is king. Seeing as Google are generous enough to give away 7GB+ of email storage I’d be a fool not to use it. A few years ago (pretty much as soon as it was available) I created an @garypigott.net Google Apps account and shoved all my email up there. Right now there are 118,527 emails, occupying 2298MB of space, and vitally, it’s completely searchable in exactly the same way you’d search the web using Google. I access exactly the same data using Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and the iPhone mail client.

Web Browser Environment: My browser of choice is Firefox,  which is handy a) because it’s multi-platform and b) because of Weave. Weave is an add-on that moves your bookmarks, history and passwords into the cloud. You can install the add-on on each of your computers, regardless of OS and everything is kept in sync. Weave is open source, so surely some enterprising and generous developer out there will churn out a Weave add-on for IE, Opera and Safari…

Risks are manageable if you’re a large corporate, but it’s a huge ask if you’re a start-up. Start-ups need capital and for most of us in Ireland that means the banks.  If you do somehow manage to get approval for a loan or overdraft, they’re routinely requiring personal guarantees before handing over the cash. For small fry that means that if your business fails in a big way you could end up bankrupt and lose everything and be on the sidelines for 12 years.  With risks like that is it any wonder that young knowledge workers aren’t willing to try the entrepreneurship route?

In the USA you can be in and out of Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy in a year and get back on the horse. As importantly, your core family assets (house, car and household goods) are safe. While never to be entered into lightly, it’s almost regarded as a right of passage for the entrepreneur in training.

Banks need to get fair in their business lending and government needs to put a proper structure in place to manage the failures in a humane way if they want to see a real culture of entrepreneurship grow in Ireland.

I dug out my old order confirmation email and clicked on the link to Macromedia’s web store. I got redirected to the Adobe store login, where my old Macromedia login worked, and could go straight to my order history and not only re-download my purchase 4 years later, I could also view my license key! If only all online stored operated this way I’d shop online for software more often.

He (or his advisors) is exhibiting a strange naïveté about the ways of internet business for someone so successful in other areas. Geography is immaterial and operating costs are minimal so there’s lots of competition for eyeballs and wallets. Your business either needs to be either new, better or cheaper; and preferably at least two of the three. Bendunne.ie or his previous attempt tenderme.ie (also launched in the same way) is none of these.

Adverts.ie, an offshoot of boards.ie, crucially realise that the buyers don’t come unless there’s a large volume of sellers. The only way to get a large volume of sellers is if you have a large volume of buyers (like eBay), or you make it cheap enough that they’ll list there products on the off chance… Crucially by charging a fee bendunne.com are reducing the volume of sellers as who’s going to pay for a listing on a site with no track record? Adverts.ie makes it’s money by embedding Google AdWords advertising in the listings and allows anyone to list for free. They’re listing 1000+ items each day and generating serious traffic, and traffic = money.

title Ubuntu
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

This has the effect of kicking off the bootloader on /dev/sda3 (i.e. the Ubuntu one) when selected, booting Ubuntu!

It’s an old joke, but frequently true. The Irish Internet Association are electing a new board at the moment and each of the nominees get a quick paragraph about themselves on the site. There are twelve nominees but only Trinity College alumni Clare Dillon and Catrina Sheridan see fit to tell everyone about their degrees and diplomas.

The factory installed Linpus distro is OK-ish, but it doesn’t get upgraded as new versions of the component software gets released, so still includes Firefox 2, rather than 3. Also, it tries to simplify things too much.

I tried installing XP Home, which isn’t as easy as you’d think because there’s no optical drive. I followed this guide to installing XP using a USB key, and after an age (well 2 1/2 hours actually) I had a working XP install. The problem is that this isn’t the speediest of hardware (the SSD in particular is woefully slow) so there’s a huge amount of tricks and hacks to get it running at an acceptable speed. In the end I decided to revert to Linux.

There are a few distros tweaked to run well on these systems. About the best is Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It’s an official branch of Ubuntu, so gets continuous support/maintenance. I ditched Evolution for Thunderbird, but other than that it’s pretty much perfect out of the box.

go play

Aaaagggghhh

Why is it that VMware hide their VMware server downloads behind a password?

Like many I run headless Linux servers without a GUI installed. I’d like to be able to download VMware Server (700MB+) using wget via an SSH session, but I can’t because you need to log in first, and it’s not a vanilla HTTP login that I can work through wget either! I’m expected to log into the site on my desktop, download the installer and then SFTP it up to the Linux box. That would be OK if the server was on the same LAN, but it’s in a data centre and I’m on the end of an ADSL line with a 672Kbps upload. Surely controlling access to the serial numbers is good enough as the installer is useless without it. Still, at least I could use w3m in the end.

(Photo from last weekend’s win over Castres)

Version 1 had a web UI for day to day management (starting & stopping VMs, tweaking networks etc.) and a separate Windows application for console access. VMware tried to make an all powerful web UI for version 2, and integrated the console functionality.

There must have been a backlash during the beta, because they’ve included VMware Infrastructure Client at the last minute. It leads to an odd division of capabilities. On the VMware Infrastructure Client I can create a new VM or import an appliance, but I can’t open an existing VM. On the Web UI I can create a new VM or open an existing one, but I can’t import an appliance.

What’s happened is that in version 1 you had a web UI for management and a console application for maintenance. Now both functions are split between interfaces, which is a pain in the rear.

IT staff, no matter how good, will never be CEOs of major corporations. The one exception, John Reid of Citicorp, just proves the point, because he got fired too. Therefore IT staff are useless employees and no good at being managers.

A friend of his gets paid way more than you’d expect for someone with no responsibilities, and reports direct to the CEO. Why? Because from time to time he saves the company from ruin. This is Cringely’s Door Number Three. The natural position for the IT personality in an organisation.

He sees this as a precursor of tomorrows corporate structure. IT staff are used to coming up with quick “good enough” solutions to rapidly evolving technical situations. The pace of change in the wider world is speeding up to match, so business structures need to change, with today’s IT departments, with their loose quasi-meritocracy structures being a possible solution.

From I, Cringely

One of our favourites is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. It’s a strategy game set in the distant future. You build and control an army and battle another army controlled by the computer or another player somewhere on the internet. It was fun until last Monday, when his Necron army so totally humiliated my Space Marine one that I gave up and ran away before he could wipe my army out. 

Clouds are cool ‘n all, but what ever happened to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!). Simple architectures go wrong in simple ways which are easy to understand and quick to fix. The team in MediaMax obviously didn’t fully understand what they needed to do to safely move all their customer’s data over, and everyone is out of a job as a result.

There are two elements to online security: data encryption and identity verification. If your data encryption is good enough it doesn’t matter who gets hold of your data. Being sure you’re sending the data to the right server adds to the security. Online backup typically deploys two layers of encryption: the data is encrypted using a key, and then the data is transmitted through an SSL tunnel that encrypts everything again. The SSL tunnel uses a digital certificate to verify the server is who it says it is. These certificates are issued by a trusted source, (Thawte, Verisign, Geotrust etc.) and provide the sender with a key to encrypt the traffic (the public key). Data encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with a matching private key, and vice-versa. Only the owner of the certificate has the private key.

Software on the user’s end should throw up a big fat warning if the certificate isn’t issued by one of these trusted sources. Unlike Carbonite and Mozy, Ahsay doesn’t throw up a warning and just sends the data anyway. A determined individual can create their own certificate and keys and trick your PC into mis-routing your backup to their server (DNS cache poisoning is easier than you think). This gets them through the first layer; the SSL tunnel. They then have access to the username and password (which are transmitted unencrypted, because the SSL tunnel should be secure enough). This in itself isn’t a huge deal except for one thing…… To make things simple Ahsay’s default behaviour is to use the password as the data encryption key! They can then log in to your account and download all your data and decrypt it with your key. Carbonite & Mozy also use the same password/key shortcut but at least Mozy throws up a warning and Carbonite refuses to go any further if the key isn’t genuine.

I decided to use him as a guinea pig for Restore, and open source client-server disk backup platform. He has a reasonably powerful server in the office (I bought it for him) and a web hosting account with 10GB of space (also thanks to me). I wanted to set it up so it would backup the desktops to disk on the server, which I’d then rsync off-site. I’ve used VMware Server a lot, so the plan was to take Restore’s “VMware Appliance”, drop it on the server as a totally self contained virtual server, spend a 1/2 hour configuring it and I could go back to the day job.

It didn’t work out that way. The VM was created using VMware Workstation 6, whose VMs are incompatible with VMware Server 1.X. All they needed to do was click “VM” > “Upgrade or Change Hardware” before publishing the VM and everything would be fine. Now my 30 minute favour for a friend will balloon into a 3 hour job because I need to install it the old fashioned way. Grrrr!

Fox News were interviewing a PR flunkey for Washington DC’s Union Station, and the PR guy was making a great attempt at persuading the interviewer until….. a security guard tried to stop them from filming!

via

SiliconRepublic.com: Irish Stock Exchange firms not tracking web visitors

Jazz Biscuit: » Seize drunk drivers cars

1. While the application is fully 64 bit, the installer isn’t quite, and the error it throws isn’t the most illuminating.  You need to install 32 bit support by running “apt-get install ia32-utils”
2. You can’t connect to your freshly minted VMware server with the VMware Server Console. You get the error “There was a problem connecting: Cannot connect to host X.X.X.X: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”. It’s because VMware-mui hooks into inetd, which doesn’t get installed in a bare-bones Debian Etch 64 bit system. “apt-get install inetutils-inetd” is the quick fix.

The server originally came practically free with some disk arrays we bought a while back so I wasn’t expecting the best, but was still slightly peeved when I saw it only had a CD-ROM drive, so my copious quantities of DVD+/-R media were useless. Off I went to my local mirror and downloaded the “ia 64 netinst” CD image and I burned it to my last CD-R. I bunged it in the drive and hit the switch and it booted straight into Windows….. I tried a bootable Windows CD and it booted off that fine. Hmmm. So I Googled and found this. apparently if you want to use an E64MT CPU you need the AMD 64 bit install CD, rather than the ia64 one, which only works on Itanium CPUs. I’m off to the shop now to buy more CDs.

Re: Debian Installer on DELL PowerEdge 850/860

While push IMAP worked perfectly fine with our previous service, it’s a bit flaky on Gmail. We tend to see random disconnections without warning and the phone’s “reconnect every X minutes” function seems to be a bit of a crock and isn’t fixing it……

Outsourcing to a managed service provider is the only thing that makes sense if you’re small and have these functionality requirements. I could sign up with someone like Intermedia on a syndicated Exchange server for $125/month. ActiveSync (mobile device synchronisation) is another $2.95/inbox/month, and there’s loads more optional, but essential extras, like additional storage. Basically at the end of it you’re looking at €150/inbox/year, which is a big improvement, especially when it means that I’ve no hardware to manage, and no housekeeping to do.

Google have had their Google Apps for Domains suite out for a year or so now. You get Gmail with your own domain name instead of @gmail.com, a calendar app, a basic browser based word processor, presentation & spreadsheet app that allows multiple users update the same file simultaneously, and a Wiki. We started using it informally when they launched the “Team Edition”, that gave you everything but Gmail, so you didn’t have to move away from your email provider. The Premier Edition gives you 25GB inboxes for $50/inbox/year, and the standard edition, with conventional Gmail adverts and a 6GB inbox is free!

We went with Google and threw the switch last Tuesday and it’s bedding in nicely. Over the past week though a couple of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” things have come up:

• Full contact information, and not just name & email address would be good.
• Proper contact sharing would be nice. Contacts are shared, but only in as much as the auto-complete function can pull addresses from other employee’s address books when you’re composing an email on gmail.com.
• The ability to sync contacts with Outlook and mobile devices would be a huge step forward.

RSS was a lifesaver for me. I went out and bought FeedDemon and for a time I was happy. It would fetch all the headlines for me and display them in a list. I could click on the ones that interested me and they’d open up in the built-in browser, and I could mark everything else as read.

A short while I bought a laptop wanted to read my feeds there too. Fortunately FeedDemon had an answer. As well as using an internal database to store your list of feeds and what was read and unread, it could connect to Bloglines, a web based feed reader. Now I could read my feeds using a web browser and on my desktop and laptop PCs where I had FeedDemon installed. It wasn’t 100% perfect. Adding feeds was clunky, and it had issues if more than one location was accessing the data simultaneously (i.e. if I forgot to close FeedDemon on my desktop PC when I was on the road), but it was better than nothing.

Then Google Reader came along. It was entirely web based, and had decent hotkey support, so I could read stuff almost as quickly as with FeedDemon, and a lot faster than the Bloglines clunky interface. It was also 100% bulletproof. Being an AJAX application, activity was communicated back to the server in real time, rather than at the end of the session, so I never had to mark the same headline read twice. I preferred FeedDemon’s way of displaying feeds, where each feed had it’s own folder, and it was easy to go back to read headlines for review, but Google was overall an improvement, but still slower than FeedDemon.

FeedDemon have since been bought by NewsGator, who are another web based feed reader service in the same mould as Bloglines and Google Reader. The software can pull it’s subscribed feeds and read article data from your NewsGator account, so you can install it anywhere and view the same feeds, and what’s marked as read in one location gets marked as read everywhere, and more importantly, it does this reliably, unlike Bloglines. It’ll do nicely for the moment…..

Nick Bradbury: Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader?

Via Graham Linehan’s blog

Many of the old timers still called it ARPANET and begrudged the intrusion of undergrads into what was supposed to be a serious academic and scientific tool. We were the kind of people who would post requests for budgie roasting recipes to the rec.pets.birds Usenet group just to see how many people we could upset.

Boredom, thy name is whatever this game is called « Why, That’s Delightful!

The UK were looking at deploying them but the Institute of Advanced Motorists, who were originally lobbying for them (probably because they were better than nothing) are now coming out against them. Maybe someone should have a word with the RSA here in Ireland before someone here is killed or maimed…

UK motorcyclists saved from being sliced in two by wire rope barriers – Autoblog

Three things have ben brewing over the last few years, and have now formed a perfect storm. 1. You no longer need a big expensive studio to record music. You can do it on a laptop with the right software. 2. Internet distribution has opened another route to market for the bands to get their music into the hands (well onto the iPods anyway) of their fans and form closer relationships. 3. New products, such as phone ringtones, lucrative stadium concert tours and product endorsements have eclipsed the CD as the principal source of income for the band.

I no longer need a large dedicated studio to record music. I would still need talent behind the mixing desk, but that mixing desk is now an Apple Mac running GarageBand. A €2,000 laptop with €100 of software is all you need to make your masterpiece.

Back in the day a band would play local gigs and build up a fan base in the hope of being spotted by a music publisher. They’d get a “deal” and make some money. If you weren’t spotted a life of playing in a wedding band awaited. Now a band in outer Mongolia with 5,000+ MySpace friends could easily get noticed and signed by an A&R rep in a Los Angeles.

But not getting signed by a major label is not the end of the world. A small band can record their album on their MacBook, promote it on their MySpace page and sell it on one of a hundred websites dedicated to selling music unsigned bands online and you’re making money. The costs of entry into mass distribution are now so low that the bands can finance it themselves. All it takes is a computer and some low end software to manufacture it. Because the website sales process is totally automatic they can afford to charge a % of the sale, rather than look for up-front money. Once you’re up and running you might even be able to get your music offered on iTunes, where you’re mixing it with the big boys.

The other thing that has happened is the realisation that there are other ways for musicians to make money. Nobody under thirty has a ringtone on their phone that was there when they bought it. Everyone now has either an amusing sound clip, or a 15 second clip of their favourite chart hit which they’ve paid €3+ for. You can now buy video ringtones, where your phone display plays the music video at the same time.

At the height of his fame Michael Jackson made a staggering amount of money endorsing Pepsi, but it now there are specialist brand agencies pairing up products with stars. Everyone of note is endorsing cars, drinks, shoes. The Police made $142,000,000 touring this year. They haven’t released music in two decades and they still raked in $3m for a nights work! I even paid my €138, plus a €35 t-shirt when they came to Dublin!

Most of these new, non CD related activities do not require the help of a record label to pull off. In fact unless they all work in concert (i.e. the ringtone being in place when the single is released, along with web promotion, and a tour ready to go…), the band’s income will suffer. In recognition of this Madonna has famously signed a “360 degree” contract. A single company will manage all her activities for the next 10 years across CDs, touring, TV, movies, ringtones etc., and vitally, this company isn’t her old record label, who she left after 25 years, it’s a concert promoter.

The Year The Industry Broke – News Story | Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV News

It would be nice to have a body representing native industry for a change. The only companies in this industry getting any mind share from government are the foreign ones, who may provide lots of jobs and pay lots of taxes, but they take their profits home at the end of the day.

Ireland Inc. Let’s just do it!

3 Skypephone FAQ

As long as you top up with €20 a month, even the data transmission is free. In theory you could use up the €20 on Irish mobile calls (where 3 are about the same price as SkypeOut) and use SkypeOut for everything else, thereby getting very close to the absolute cheapest call rates anywhere….. on a mobile!

It seems that 3′s Skype client is actually a bit of a cheat though. These guys say that the software actually makes a standard local voice call, and it’s only at a central hub that the call gets routed over the Internet/Skype network. It makes sense, seeing as the Skype clone (IM+) that actually does a full Skype implementation has fairly major lag, due to the weedy CPUs in most smartphones.

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Testing out the 3 SkypePhone

Arse End Of Ireland: *yawns, stretches*

Cal Band- Video Game Show 2007

 VMware recently announced the first beta of their free low-end VMware Server 2. It is a beta, and as such the sensible part of my brain tells me to stay away and let someone else take the pain. Unfortunately the gadget & gimmick loving part of my brain made me install it on my mail/web/everything else server that had a perfectly functioning v1.0.4 setup. Bad idea!

Version 1 has this very nice web UI for monitoring, starting/stopping, and tweaking stuff, and a separate Windows/Linux application for creating new VMs and accessing the console of each one. Version 2 has dispensed with the application and instead relies on a beefed up web interface, with a browser plugin to display the consoles. Unfortunately being beta, the web UI is ugly and unfinished, and there’s so much un-optimised debug code the VMs run at less than half the speed they did on the old version. I run Debian Linux web, email and SyncML servers, a Windows XP desktop, and the odd test Linux VM, all on a single 2.4GHz Celeron Dell server that I got for free. Obviously the beta had to go…..

Rolling back the server and toolset installs was a bit long winded, but it was straightforward enough. What wasn’t straightforward was un-scrambling the network config. Each VM has at least two interfaces, usually bound to the host system’s wireless interface (I keep the server in my garage, where I can’t hear it, so there’s no Ethernet out there) and a “host only” LAN for NFS, backups etc. The reinstall remapped everything arseways.

VMware Server 2.0 Beta – VMware

Backups should be automatic. If a human has to do something to ensure your backups happen, then once and a while that human will do it wrong, so your backups are not 100% reliable.

Backups should be redundant. There’s no point doing a backup to a local disk, because it’s possible that the event that causes you to lose your data will cause you to lose your backup. he uses the example of Francis Ford Coppola, who had his laptop stolen earlier this year. Much of the data was irreplaceable, including a script for the movie he was about to start work on. He had a backup alright, but it was a USB hard disk. the thief stole the disk at the same time. A similar scenario I came across before was the company who instructed their sales reps to backup their laptops to CD-Rs. Unfortunately the reps had a habit of storing the backup discs in the laptop case….

Backups should be restorable. It’s an obvious one, but often overlooked. People diligently follow their backup procedure, but fail to ensure it actually works. With tapes this means frequent test restores, but tapes by their nature have a finite lifespan. The verification puts more wear on the tape and can damage the data while it’s being verified. Basically, even after you verify the tape you’re never certain that the act of verification didn’t damage the backup, so you need to verify it again, and again, and again…….

To be honest, it makes me feel a bit warmer in side that the solution my company offers ticks all the boxes….. Our online backup platform is a pure software solution, so there’s nothing to interact with. It just works in the background, and is monitored by the service provider, so it ticks the automatic box. Data is immediately transferred off-site over the Internet, so a theft or natural disaster isn’t going to take out your server and ours at the same time, so that’s redundancy taken care of. Hard disks can take a lot more read and write cycles than tape, RAID and high end storage technologies prevent data loss, and built in continuous integrity checking mean that backup data is difficult to corrupt and is spotted and corrected immediately if it happens, so data on our service is always restorable.

The Pirate Backup System – Network World

From Web Worker Daily

We’ve started to grow, both in head count and sophistication, so now we’ve got a lot more documents to manage and a lot more people wanting to manage them. Our documents are usually authored by one person, but in many cases require review and comment by sales, marketing and technical people prior to release. What would be great is something that would manage the workflow, with notifications and audit tracking, and integrate with our website to make the final result available to clients, all in a controlled manner. We need a Document Management System. Our company likes to use open source software wherever possible, so my first port of call was Google, which gave me the following:

• xinco
• contineo
• KnowledgeTree
• Epiware
• Alfresco

Most of the above are Java applications, which I really don’t like, and I’ll cover in a later blog post. KnowledgeTree is written in PHP and ticks all the boxes. Alfresco is a Java app, but it’s functionality is too good to dismiss straight away. Let the testing begin!

A professional wouldn’t even take your phone call if he heard your budget was only a grand, and nobody in the business is going to spend the time it’d take to do it properly on spec. I’ve been paid more for nixers!

Don’t these people realise that web design these days is a serious profession what takes a lot of talent, knowledge and experience to do well? A good website is not something an enthusiastic amateur can pull off. Blanchardstown SC haven’t cottoned on to the fact that an amateur-looking website reflects poorly on the company it represents.

Link via Irish Retailers Don’t Get The Web

I just saw this on Moby’s blog. CNN New Zealand did a vox pop on the streets of the USA asking questions like "where is the Berlin Wall?" and "What religion are Buddhist monks?" and asking them to point out places like Iran and North Korea on the map… It’s very funny and more than a bit scary, but makes you wonder about the information these people are being given about the world around them.

The US government & military are waging war abroad on behalf of their citizens without properly explaining to their people why, and communicating the repercussions (i.e. that nobody likes them or trusts them anymore). It’s often said that you can ask 10 people on the street why Iraq was invaded and 9 of them will say that it was to do with Iraq supporting Al-Qaeda, when in fact a fundamentalist Islam movement like Al-Qaeda would have nothing to do with a very secular regime like Iraq.

Over here every political and military action is scrutinised and dissected in the media on a nightly basis, so we’re pretty much on top of who’s doing what to whom in the world, but this obviously isn’t happening in the US. There’s a possibility that the heavily politicised media in the US (such as Fox News, which has a heavy republican bias) can mislead the populace into electing another leadership with a dangerous foreign policy agenda.

last night was really fun. | moby.com

"Reason for Selling: Purchased without proper consent from the wife. Apparently "do whatever the F**K you want" does not mean what I thought."

Link via The Register

Link

The only bitches I have about the gig were:

1. They brought along Sting’s son’s band as a support act, and to be honest, they should stick to the London pub circuit.
2. People started leaving early to beat the traffic. For fuck’s sake, they missed the entire four song encore!!!

They’re a serious R&D outfit that will take on anything that takes their fancy. They’ve been working on active suspension for a few years. Springs and dampers are reactive. A bump in the road hits them, and the springs compress to soak up most of the jolt. The damper then slows down the decompression so the car doesn’t kangaroo down the street. No two bumps are the same severity, so even the best mechanical suspension systems can only cope best with an average bump at an average speed.

Cars roll when going around corners. Again, passive systems can only do so much. As long as the centre of gravity is above the road and the springs can be compressed, the car will lean away from the corner.

Active systems such as Bose’s take dumb mechanical components out of the equation. Springs and dampers are thrown away and replaced with computer controlled pistons that move the wheels up and down to lift them out of the way of bumps and push them into potholes. It’s trivial to ensure that a car stays level the whole way through a corner. They could even make a car lean into a corner if they wanted to.

there are two key things to get right. 1. "something" needs to read the road ahead and make sure the suspension moves at the correct time, and 2. the pistons need to be very precisely controlled and be capable of moving extremely quickly. Bose are nicely positioned to work on both problems.

Bose do very nice noise canceling headphones. They work by taking the sound wave, generating the exact opposite, and feeding it through the headphones. One cancels the other out and the wearer hears nothing. Bose treat the road surface as just another sound wave. They generate the exact opposite, and feed the output to the suspension actuators.

A conventional speaker moves a paper cone very rapidly to produce sound. The cone is attached to a magnet which is positioned inside a magnetic coil. A good speaker must very accurately and quickly move the magnet in and out of the coil to produce the best sound….. which are the same requirements that a good active suspension system needs.

Take a look at the video clip above. At the end they really start showing off. They do a Knight Rider "turbo boost" move and jump a Lexus equipped with their suspension over a kerb without a ramp.

Link via link

Dudley Moore was right in Crazy People.  Why not just say that it helps you go to the toilet!!!!!

Immediately after hammering Portugal 103-18 in the World Cup, they gave them a chance to even the score at soccer (they lost 3-1), and they all ended up drinking beer in the NZ dressing room afterwards. Now that’s sportsmanship!

From The Times RWC blog

They’re also going to have phones with wi-fi, which, in conjunction with a free hotspot, will avoid one of the calls, instead connecting directly to their international SIP infrastructure.

Irish firm launches ‘global’ mobile phone | The Register

Marketing execs are seeing Second Life, the leading “virtual reality” world online, as a new way for large corporates, such as Dell, Cisco and IBM to have a “presence”. They spend big money to design, construct and maintain showrooms that people can wander through and virtually examine their wares. Many argue that the volume of people using SL right now isn’t great enough to make the numbers add up, but the companies are seeing this as a long term thing. IBM even use it as a private colaboration tool. Rather than travel to meet face to face, or use teleconfernecing, they’re meeting virtually in a SL boardroom. Cisco are even using it to hold new employee interviews!

The RSU are going to picket the IBM building in SL on the 25th September. They’re giving out strike kits that include avatars with slogans on their t-shirts, and placards. It should be interesting….

From New World Notes, via Boing Boing

Update: John has posted a comment to say that the 25th is just the start of the public campaign. The actual protest will be a flash mob event, at a future date. Sign up at uniglobalunion.org to find out when the flash mob will form.

There is an optional second argument that will connect to a specific connection, but if I force it to use this new remote database, all the other queries after it will connect to the wrong database, unless I modify them to force them to use the correct database. Aaaaaggghhh!

The logical option is to modify the other bits of code, but it’s already been tested and verified, so I’m not touching it if I can avoid it. What I’ll end up doing is separating this new function out into a separate PHP script, that I’ll call with CURL and pass the necessary data in the query string. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only way to integrate the new function without making radical changes.

Phase one was to install a webcam in the office, so he could see and hear what was going on, but he couldn’t answer back, and it wasn’t what you would call mobile. They ended up building a remote controllable platform with a webcam, speakers and a touch screen on a pole, so he can roam the corridors, attend meetings and drop into coworkers cubicles just like he was there. He controls it all remotely using a joystick, and the touch screen displays a live feed of his face from his webcam. Some would discard the idea as a toy or gimmick, but I see this as a very workable solution to the disconnect often felt by those who work away from the office.

The Record via Slashdot

Right… I’m a business user of Shannon airport, so forgive me if I have a bias. Lots of people are saying that London is reasonably well served from Shannon by Ryanair, but “London” is a big place, and Ryanair’s main London airport (Stanstead) is actually half way to Scotland. The Gatwick link is a joke. One flight a day means no way to get in and out on the same day.

If you’re going on your summer holidays, and have all day (an hour to get into the city centre, and another 30 minutes to get the tube across town, and then another 30 minutes to get out to Heathrow, at a cost of at least £40 in train fares) to get to Heathrow, then that’s fine, for the rest of us, it’s 4 hours that we’d rather spend at home with the family.

Right now I can get the morning flight into Heathrow and be in town by 11am. I can do nearly a full days work and be back out on the 7:30pm flight. Because Heathrow is such a major airport, industry has grown up around it. A lot of technology companies (like Dell in Bracknell) are on the M4 corridor within a half hour of Heathrow, but outside London. Visiting these guys via Heathrow means I get to eat dinner with my kids. If I have to go via Stanstead I need an extra 2 hours in each direction on the M25. It requires getting up before dawn and not getting home until after 10pm. My other option is a 2 hour drive to Cork to fly out of there, or a 3.5 hour drive to Dublin…..

I’m in London at least a couple of times a month. If I lose a 1/2 day on each trip I lose more than two weeks a year sitting on commuter trains, rental cars and taxis in and around London. I’m just one person, but there are large companies around here who’s entire executive group are over and back to London at least as often as I am. This will cost them serious money. While they won’t (I hope!) pull out of the region because of this, they’ll certainly think of redistributing these higher paying jobs to other locations that are better connected to the real world.

Let’s be honest, the Mid-West is a backwater. Property and pay rates here are cheaper than Dublin, but Poland (which is very well connected to Heathrow by the way) is cheaper still, so the region will turn into a wasteland without some positive discrimination. This is why there are several incentive plans, such as the NDP, to keep industry in the area. The lack of a frequent direct link to the largest hub airport on the continent will lead to a net increase in the cost of doing international business out of the region. This is A Bad Thing. It’s already expensive to operate out of Ireland. Making business people piss away half their day to get here won’t make them think any better of us.

Subject: Virus Alert!!!

There is a dangerous virus being passed around electronically, orally, and by hand. This virus is called Worm-Overload-Recreational-Killer (WORK). If you receive W.O.R.K. from any of your colleagues, your boss, or anyone else via any means DO NOT TOUCH IT !!!

This virus will wipe out your private life completely.

If you should come into contact with W.O.R.K. put your jacket on and take two good friends to the nearest grocery store.
Purchase the antidote known as Work-Isolating-Neutralizer-Extract (WINE) or Bothersome-Employer-Elimination-Rebooter (BEER). Take the antidote repeatedly until WORK has been completely eliminated from your system. You should forward this warning to 5 friends.
If you do not have 5 friends,you have already been infected and WORK is controlling your life !

You stick it on with the supplied double-sided sticky tape and from the outside looks real. The questions section is the best bit. One reader wants to know how the light gets through if there’s no hole cut in the roof. Others are asking if the sunroof leaks, and where are the switch and motor housed. Priceless!

I think I might put together a Google Maps mashup site, where visitors can maintain a list of petrol stations that stock E85 ethanol and maybe biodiesel. It’ll be quick to put together, I’ll learn something (I’ve not used Google’s AJAX APIs before) and not cost much to host, so very minimal Google Adwords should cover costs.

But why rely on the colo to do all the hard work? Some people put their own UPS equipment in their racks, but if the colo’s power dies, then the aircon goes too, so personally I’d have the servers drop suddenly rather than slowly cook themselves. Besides, the power to the meet me rooms will go too, so you’re going to be without connectivity in many cases too. Fires, floods and earthquakes happen, so all the power, server and storage resilience in the world won’t help with that.

What we’ve had to do is setup a remote warm site. If we lose Dublin totally we use BGP and a few cooperative bandwidth suppliers to route the traffic to our London site where we’ve got replicated data and servers powered on and waiting in the racks. In theory the changeover is instant, but in practice some customers could see up to 5 minutes of an outage, but most are back connecting again within 90 seconds. It’s not cheap to operate this way, but surely Craigslist & Co. have the cash.

Edit: This would have to happen on the very day that they issued a press release boasting about 2 years of 100% uptime for one of their major customers who closed their redundant site because they didn’t need it

Steorn

This has to be a con. These guys must be trying to get some fool with a wad of cash to buy them out before the world finds out, but the shear quantity of money being spent is huge. They could have announced the technology in an obscure physics journal, but instead they took out a full page ad in The Economist. Wikipedia has more.

The Free Energy Blog is tracking the progress…

I’m starting to use my Laser debit card more and more. Virtually everywhere that takes credit cards will take a debit card too. I frequently leave my Visa and MasterCard at home. The sole wrinkle is that laser payments can only be made in Euros. That’s a non-issue with retailer’s point of sale terminals and 99% of websites, but Aer Lingus are the exception. Regardless of what country you select on the front page, it will insist on using the currency of the country of departure when booking, so I ended up having to call the Irish sales phone line to book, and pay an extra ???15 handling fee for the privilege!!!!!

via the Laughing Squid

I moved servers recently, so this site is now running on a web server VM in my attic. One thing I noticed afterwards was that I stopped receiving spam, or more accurately, Akismet stopped listing spam. Either the spammers forgot where my blog was, or it was borked. I don’t want to risk loosing valid comments due to a false positive, so I need to change my comment spam prevention method. Hmmm…

Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or IMAP servers running on Linux (my preference right now is Postfix & Dovecot running on Debian).

Now days you can’t easily get away with the DIY approach. E-mail is has to a large extent replaced voice & fax as the prime business communication method. We need to support huge inboxes, instant delivery of messages, access on the road, and near perfect uptime and backups. Most of these things can be achieved with any modern email setup, however some require a little help from outside.

Remote access is a major requirement these days. An executive feels naked on the golf course unless he’s got a Blackberry, a Treo, a Symbian or a Windows Mobile smartphone on his hip (mine is a Nokia e61). You’ve got three options if you want to get email onto these things:

1. Scheduled checking of a POP/IMAP server: It works, but there’ll be a delay because the message doesn’t get pushed to the device as soon as it comes in.
2. Blackbery Enterprise Server: Native support for Blackberry units, and add-in support for other platforms. It only supports Exchange, Notes, or GroupWise servers though
3. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push: Native support for Windows Mobile units and add-in support for other platforms. Only supports MS Exchange servers obviously.

The other major issue is how to back them up. You not only have to worry about DR backups, but also compliance. A nightly backup isn’t good enough any more. You either need to run a continuous backup or run a parallel archiving solution.

At issue here is that the remote access and backup requirements require 3rd party support. 3rd parties target their efforts where they’ll get the most business, so There’s no support outside the big three (Exchange, Notes & GroupWise). Nobody’s deploying new Notes or GroupWise installations anymore, so as much as I hate to say it, Exchange is the only option if you need to provide effective remote access and require effective backup.

So far some of the cooler ones are:

• A possible drug deal
• A 1950′s Ferrari (maybe a 410 S) parked on the side of the street
• Scooby-doo’s van

Its not a Mazda 3, it’s a Mazda 3.141592653589793238462643383 (???? to 27 decimal places).

I came across OpenPsa recently and it seemed perfect for what we do. It’s a CRM tool with heavy project management and document repository tools that could be perfect. It runs on a LAMP stack, so I don’t need to dedicate a server (or VM) exclusively to it, like I would do if it was a Java app.

The one thing I always look for when choosing an Open Source product is the commitment of the developers. I’ve been burned in the past by committing to platforms only to find that the lead developers have no interest in improving the product or fixing the bugs. The most recent posting on the news page was a link to a blog entry of one of the lead developers on a Saturday stating that the 2.0 release was coming out the following Monday….. That was last May. He has updated his blog since, but no mentions of OpenPsa in any of them. There is no updates since about developers falling out, selling out or dropping dead. It’s the software equivalent of the Marie Celeste. Too bad. I’d have loved to play around with it.

This made my day. The guy is a legend!

I “upgraded” to Vista a couple of months ago and it’s a crock, but it’s not enough of a crock to make me reinstall XP Pro. Today was the first time I wanted to move a serious chunk of data between my laptop and the desktop. I plugged the cable in and nothing happened. Then I remembered that seeing as I formatted and reinstalled the desktop, I’d need to set n IP address, so I went into the network and sharing center in control panel….. The wireless adapter was there, as was the wired NIC, but no sign of the FireWire interface. I knew the FireWire card was set up because my iPod has been connected since the upgrade, so I checked Google to see if anyone else had the same problem. I found this. Microsoft removed the feature because they have “not identified any customer dependency” on this feature. Bastards!

VMWare Command Line Tools from VM Back is an unofficial open source command line version of VMWare Tools that enables you to shrink your disk images and sync your clocks on any Linux, DOS, BSD or Solaris VM.

Install a bare-bones Etch system by skipping the role and package selection screens during the installation.

Edit the apt sources.list to include the “contrib” and “non-free” packages by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main

Run “apt-get update” to get the package list up to date.

Run “apt-get install sun-java5-jdk” to install Sun Java

The JAVA_HOME environment variable needs to be set for any Java app to run so adding the following to /etc/profile will do the trick

JAVA_HOME=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun”
export JAVA_HOME

Run “apt-get install tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps” to install Tomcat

Run “apt-get install wget unzip” to install wget so we can download jbilling from the server, and unzip so we can decompress the archive.

“cd /opt” and run “wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jbilling/jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to download it and “unzip jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to decompress it.

Edit /opt/jbilling/server/default/conf/jbilling.properties to suit.

Run “chmod 700 /opt/jbilling/bin/*.sh” so we can start and stop the server easily.

Run “/opt/jbilling/bin/run.sh” to start the service and then open http://<IP_Address>/billing/signupEntity.do?action=setup in a web browser and follow the Getting Started Guide here.

A birth defect left him missing his shin bones, so the two options open to his parents were a lifetime in a wheelchair or amputation. He used to play water polo (where no legs isn’t a huge handicap) and rugby (???) at school, but a knee injury pushed him into athletics in 2004. The following year he was running the 400m in the South African able-bodied championships. Tom Hanks is looking to make a movie about his life.

His purpose built legs, designed by a Finnish company called Ossur not only enable him to run as fast as single leg amputees, but even reach the speed of professionals with both legs. The fun will start when the IOC need to decide if his legs are the amputee equivalent of running shoes or are they “performance enhancing”?

This is easy as pie to set up in any desktop email client, but I check my email on the move with my Nokia e61, on my laptop when I get a chance to sit down, Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express or Evolution when at one of my work desktops, and webmail everywhere else! Therefore I need the emails to be sorted on the server, before they get downloaded to an email client.

Sieve seems to be the tool of choice, but you have to compile it from source on Debian, which defeats the point. People use Debian because of it’s package management. I log into each of my servers each week and run “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” and I know everything gets brought up to date. Having to manually track a specific application’s release cycle and bugs just makes things messy.

The search continues….

There wasn’t a single chorus of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” to be heard last week in Croke Park.

I wonder why?

My old Ford Focus, that has carried my fat ass up and down to Dublin for the last 3 years is being put out to pasture. It’ll be spending the rest of it’s days doing school runs and trips to the shops with the missus. I need something with a bit of comfort, so I’ve found a Volvo S80 for myself. It’s bigger (a lot bigger!) and more comfortable, and it doesn’t start to wheeze going up steep hills.

It looks like a bit of an old man’s car, but it’s 2 litre turbo’ed engine will leave a lot of the boy racers in their Honda Civics behind. The top end stereo and heated leather seats mean I’ll be comfortable doing it.

I know my PC isn’t the latest and greatest (a self built AMD Athlon 3700+), but it took 20 minutes to install this from DVD, and then it went down hill from there. I ran the game, created my account and logged in. I then got kicked out to download a patch to v1.12.0. This 485MB file took 2 hours to download… Finally! I can log in!…. I logged in and the same thing happened again. This time a 600MB+ v2.0.1 patch, which I left running overnight. This morning I logged in to see if it was finished…. It had! Result!!!…. but now it needs to down 200MB+ of other patches….. Hopefully I’ll actually be able to spend some of the 14 days playing the game, and not just watching progress bars while stuff downloads.

Asigra supports Fedora Core, Red Hat ES and SUSE ES. I don’t like Fedora for a number of reasons, and this is for home use so I’m not paying for RH or SUSE, so I’ll use CentOS, the free clone of RHES. I’ve allocated a 4GB disk file for the VM. The OS itself should fit under 1GB, but the Postgresql database can hit 2GB, so I need the space. I’ve allocated 256MB RAM to the VM, but backups will run a lot faster with more.

At the OS “Installation Type” screen, you select “custom” to keep the disk footprint as small as possible. Disable the firewall and SELinux. On the Package Group Selection screen, tick the box for minimal install and complete the installation.

The application requires Postgres, so firstly you install it with:
yum install postgresql-server postgresql-jdbc

You need to run it once to build the database and create the config files
/etc/init.d/postgresql start
does the trick.
To make postgresql launch at boot, I use “chkconfig –add postgresql“, “chkconfig –level 345 postgresql on” and to confirm “chkconfig –list postgresql“. Postgres needs some minor tweeks for Asigra. you must add the line “tcpip_socket = true” to postgresql.conf and “host all all 127.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 trust” to pg_hba.conf. You then need to restart postgres to load the new config by running “/etc/init.d/postgresql restart“.

The client has some other dependencies that get resolved by installing “yum install compat-libstdc*” The client installer must be run with the “-console” switch unless you’ve installed X. Agree to the EULA and accept the default install path of “/usr/local/DS-Client”. We’re only going to install the DS-Client on this box, with the Java DS-User UI to be installed elsewhere. We’ll select a normal installation. The self contained install is an evaluation mode where everything is stored locally. We enter “localhost” for the DB host, and “postgres” as the username. We can put in anything for the password. We also want the service to start at boot time. It is normal for the client to give a warning about a missing database during an initial install. At this stage you get prompted for username, client ID and server location. These would be provided to you by your service provider.

The next thing is the encryption level. Asigra supports everything from DES (very weak, avoid) right up to military grade AES256. AES is slow, and the higher the key length, the slower the progress. I usually go for AES128. It’s significantly faster than 256, and it will take millions of years to break, rather than trillions, so it’s still good enough. Asigra uses two encryption keys; a key specific to the PC and an account key shared amongst all backup clients on the WAN. This enables common files to be encrypted and stored once, with this common key, rather than multiple copies being stored with individual keys (inefficient), or all sites sharing a single key (insecure).

Installing it on Debian is a 2 liner if you read this page. “apt-get install procmail” and adding “mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -a “$EXTENSION” DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/ MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir” to the postfix config file and it’s done! Now all I have to do is dump my old procmail configs back in and I’m in business.

My next option was to try VMware’s new free VMware Server application. It installs as just another application on a base OS, so if the OS supports the wi-fi card, VMware will. It’s a fully virtualised solution, so stock OS kernels interact with the VMware server application instead of the hardware. It takes 10 minutes to install and it works just like having VMware Workstation installed on a local PC, only with the additional benefit of the VMs staying running when you disconnect from the server.

The server is now up and running (it’s a Dell PowerEdge 400sc, with a 3.4GHz P4 CPU and 2GB RAM) and is running 2-4 VMs. A Debian Etch email server (Postfix/Courier-IMAP) and a Debian Etch web server (Apache/PHP/MySQL) are running constantly, and I run a Windows 2003 and/or CentOS VM when I need to.

Now installing a driver on Linux is more involved than Windows. If the driver is supplied as a binary, it needs to match the exact version of the OS kernel. Not a huge problem if like Windows the kernel changed once every 4 years or so, but with Linux you could change the kernel every week if you really wanted it, and anyway, different distros ship with slightly different kernel versions.

To get around this, most drivers are supplied in source code, to enable you to compile it yourself to match your kernel. To do this, you need the kernel header files. You can download the kernel headers using the standard “yum install kernel-devel” method, but they’re the wrong ones! It wuldn’t take a lot of time to get around this, but I’m not going to bother, because I’m only going to run up against something else. I’m just going to install Debian Etch on the box and manually set up Xen tomorrow.

Installation and management of the open source version was a bit on the tricky side, so a proper company, XenSource, was formed by the development team to add some polish and make it easier to deploy and manage. They’ve finally cranked out their first release, and it’s better than anyone expected. An extra bonus is that not only are there two commercial versions, but Xen Express is a free cut down version for the enthusiast and developer.

Installation is a snap. Basically all you need to do is boot an existing server from the install disk. It will install the core application layer under the existing OS and transition the OS into a virtualised one. I’m moving my email server onto meatier hardware in a few weeks and my intention all along was to use Xen to have multiple virtual machines for testing purposes. Xen Express just made this a lot simpler. Instead of yet again doing a full OS setup and data migration, I’ll install Xen onto the old server and translate my mail server’s OS into a virtual machine. I’ll then transfer this VM onto the new server, which will already have Xen Express pre-installed. It should turn a full day chore into a 30 minute exercise.

Linux shouldn’t be that bad, because the kernel structure is rigidly defined and every application is written and packaged in a way to just work. In fact most major distros release schedules are marketing or QA driven, rather than by a feature addition. Red Hat release a new major version of their Enterprise OS every 18 months, regardless of what new features are added in the mean time by the community. They do this because it means their customers can plan ahead for the major upgrade upheaval.

Because every package comes from a different source, you need to use the built in package management tools to do updates in an efficient manner. If I want to support PHP 5 on my server and I’m running Debian Sarge, I’m out of luck unless I want to remove the packaged PHP 4.4.3 and install version 5.2.0 from source. This now means that I need to keep an eye on Debian’s bug list and PHP’s one, and follow an extra update process.

Debian are the best and the worst of the major distros. Because they’re one of the few non-commercial operators, they can wait to release a version until it’s ready, so when they finally do release Etch, it’ll be rock solid. The down side is that you can be waiting years between versions. You can get around that by using their second release structure. They have a “stable“, “testing” and “unstable” release structure also. “Stable” is identical to their current full release version. If they release a new full version, in theory your server will switch over to this new version overnight, “testing” is their next release. It’s under constant modification until they freeze development to get everything lined up for release. “unstable” is bleeding edge stuff.

Because so many of us need current versions of packages available to us, we have to either install and maintain them from multiple sources or run the “testing” version of Debian. Unfortunately, Debian don’t recommend using anything but “stable” in the real world, and don’t put the “testing” updates through the same QA as the “stable” version. This morning, I ran an update, and saslauthd got broke. Sasl is the bit that provides the glue between postfix, my mail server, and authentication. It allows me to force a password check before allowing my server to relay email from another computer. This way I can have a globally accessible outbound email server so I don’t have to go reconfiguring my email client when I’m out and about. I’m not happy

Debian don’t “sell” their software at retailers. I download the ISOs from debian.org when I need them, so why should I download a disk image that was fixed 12, 18 or even 24 months ago. Why can’t Debian switch to the stable/testing/unstable structure as their primary release framework? Stable can still be a point in time fork of the testing development track, and deliver the the static OS experience that some need. Additional testing resources for the testing version could deliver a slowly evolving, always up to date, modern distro, with the ease of maintenance that Debian is famous for.

Modafinil, a drug initially created to combat narcolepsy (where you spontaneously fall asleep during the day, often at inappropriate times), is promising 36+ hours of wakefulness followed by 8 hours of sleep, or the ability to function long term on 5 hours a night. Could we soon end up only sleeping on the weekends? I can see college students loving this when exam time looms!

I bought a Navman F20 from Currys a week ago, primarily because cheap (???????260), but also because it was new on the market, so the maps would have some chance of being current. First impressions are pretty good. UK coverage is 100%, but Irish coverage is only 40%, so while it has every house number inside the M50 in Dublin, it doesn’t have anything other than N grade roads outside the cities. This would be a major pain in the ass if I was a Dublin jackeen who didn’t have a clue where I was going outside the pale, but I’m the exact opposite, a culchie lost in the big smoke, so it’s OK. The real nifty feature is the lack of a “make a U-turn as soon as possible” warning every time you make a wrong turn. It just shuts up and automatically recalculates the quickest route.

You cannot blame Eircom. They’re no longer a state owned company with responsibility to the national good (another government fuckup). They’re a private company whose sole responsibility is to use every means at their disposal to make the greatest amount of money for their shareholders. The near-universal response from any Eircom customer who sees how much they’d save by Moving to Smart is disbelief, so Eircom must be doing a very good job milking their customer base for the benefit of their shareholders.

ComReg, the “regulator”, has no powers to regulate! They directed Eircom to speed up LLU and allowed Eircom to come up with a process that the new operators had to follow to get access to the lines. This process involved a the new operator emailing a spreadsheet based form for every customer they want to transfer. Eircom would then print out this form and have one of their clerical staff hand-key it into their order system. Because this process was so cumbersome, they could only handle a limited number of line transfers per week.

When the regulator would try and push Eircom into an action that would ease the transition of customers between operators they’d try to appeal the decision. When their appeal failed, they took the regulator to court and tied it up for years.

This didn’t sneak up on the regulator and the government who defined the regulator’s powers and responsibilities. It’s been obvious for a long time that the regulator would need the powers to impose sanctions and more importantly, an appeals process that would ensure that any disputes could be resolved quickly, fairly, and without possibility of escalation to the Irish court system. There is just way too much money to be made in the Irish telecoms business to expect everyone to play nice. Adherence to a stronger regulatory regime needs to be made a condition of every telecoms operators license in this country, and the regulator need to be able to impose sanctions up to and including suspension and revocation of their licenses.

I work from home a lot and was an early customer of ADSL. At the time Eircom were the only operator in town. Because there is no way of transitioning to another operator without an indefinite outage period (anything up to 2 weeks), I’m stuck paying ???????20/month extra for my 3Mb Eircom ADSL line. There are horror stories of people using other suppliers getting the runaround for weeks in the event of line faults. Eircom won’t let LLU operators repair the lines, and won’t repair them themselves until the lines are temporarily transferred back to Eircom (with the commensurate outage period). Because of Eircom’s actions, I cannot afford to take the risk, and neither can I recommend to others who need reliable service to go elsewhere.

This isn’t a victory for the better company; this is a victory for the company with the most lawyers and the biggest bank balance, and everyone looses.

I’ve got a few gripes though…. The display is big @ 320×240, but the signal and battery strength indicators are so small as to be useless. There is also no way of knowing what method you’re connected with. It would be nice to know if I was connected by wi-fi (free) or 3G (not) before I start downloading the latest podcasts.

The e-mail client is far from perfect. My preferred method of connecting is IMAP. That way I can access all my mail folders and changes get synchronised with those on my PC and webmail. IMAP is pants on this device. Connecting is very slow, and it often hangs when disconnecting from the server.

The other problem with e-mail is the “access point groups”. Because this thing will connect using 802.11g, UMTS, or GPRS, you can define groups with automatic failover. That way you can always have it try the fastest or cheapest and try the next one down the line if it doesn’t work. Unfortunately the e-mail client has a habit of forgetting what group is selected and changing the setting to the currently active access method. It’s happened several times that I’ve been out and about all day on UMTS, and it wouldn’t switch back to wi-fi when I got back to the office

Link

I then thought I’d combine the freebie ADSL modem and an old Linksys access point I had lying around to get up and running until I could get into town to buy a new one next weekend. Leaving something lying around in this house is A Bad Thing. It was dead as a dodo, so I had no choice but to go into Limerick first thing in the morning and buy a new Linksys one in PC World. It’s a shiny silver colour, and has green and red lights, but it violates my one requirement in purchasing replacement hardware. I don’t mind spending the money if what I buy is better than the one it replaces, but this one does exactly the same thing as my old router, in exactly the same way, at exactly the same speed An odd thing though. This unit was available in two boxes. I could get it on it’s own for €100 or with a bundled PCMCIA Wi-Fi card, as a “home networking starter kit” for €75!!!!!

It’s got me thinking though….. I’ve got enough parts lying around the place to repair or replace any other PC or PC related part, but for want of a €75 part, I lost two hours this morning that I had to spend going into town and buying the replacement, and an hour or two that I was going to spend working last night. I think I’ll be going on eBay later to find a spare. I also couldn’t go to IMDB.com last night to find out what else I’d seen the girl played Wil Ferrell’s wife in Talladega Nights before…..