Graham White: My Notes

Computer History

2011-10-04T13:57:00.001+01:00

Hint to where my
first PC came from.

I was digging around clearing out a load of old paperwork from the house the other day and came across a load of old receipts and invoices. I nearly threw them straight in the recycle pile but looked through and thought they actually contained quite an insight into the history of computer progress and pricing.

Not necessarily wanting to hang on to the paper I thought I'd make the info available here for future reference so here follows my computer history from way-back-when. There's a chance not all of it was mine since some of it was delivered to friends houses and I've always regularly ordered kit on behalf of parents (who doesn't?), etc.

1995 June - My first PC system, we actually bought it from a shop in Basingstoke!

Pentium 60 PC with 540MB hard disk, 14" CRT monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, joystick, mouse mat, DOS 6.2, Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1, OS/2 Warp. £1229.

1995 September - Wow, these things really were quite expensive!

10 Floppy disks. £18.60.

1995 November - Replaced my Epson dot matrix (used with my Acorn A3010).

Canon BJC 4000 Printer. £280.85.

1996 January - No idea why I kept the receipt for this.

Worms. £27.99.

1999 August/September - I didn't invest in computer kit in the previous years (during university).

Borland Delphi 4 for Windows 95. £89.30.

2x 16MB SIMM. £47.00.

Maxtor Quantum Fireball Plus 13.6GB UDMA66 Hard Disk £138.65

120MB LS-120 Floppy disk driver. £58.75

1x LS-120 120MB Floppy disk. £10.57.

Abit BE6 Motherboard. £88.12

Pentium III 450Mhz Slot 1 Processor. £88.12

32MB PC100 DIMM. £31.00

2000 February - This was actually for some university work!

Creative Sound Blaster Live Player 1024 PCI sound card. £56.40.

2000 August - Probably my first investment in photography as a hobby.

Agfa Snapscan e40 Flatbed Scanner. £146.86.

2001 January - Interesting hard disk, small (by today's standards) but fast.

46GB IBM PATA100 hard disk, 2MB cache, 7200 RPM. £101.47.

Guillemot Force Feedback racing wheel. £92.81.

2001 June - First home network.

Dlink 8-Port 10Base-T Ethernet Hub. £34.07

8cm cooling fan. £5.87.

5 metre CAT5 patch cable. £7.05.

2001 August - What on earth did I do with all these hard disks?

IBM Deskstar 20.5GB UDMA100 hard disk £69.32

Maxtor Fireball Plus 10.2GB UDMA100 hard disk £64.62

128MB PC100 168 pin CL2 DIMM model £18.08

2001 September - Not yet writing CDs or DVDs.

Pioneer Slot-in IDE DVD ROM, 16xDVD 40x CD £56.40

2002 May - I'm still using both of these today!

Asus 16xDVD 40xCD Player IDE

Epson Stylus Photo 790

Text Analytics Project Ends

2011-09-12T09:30:00.000+01:00

Today sees the end of one of my major work streams for 2011 with a presentation of some research to our sponsors. I've been working for a good chunk of the year researching text analysis, specifically, the automated expression of facts in controlled natural language. It's always nice to see some work come to fruition, well not quite fruition in this case since it's research but at least it's reached an agreed stopping point - for now.

I haven't often been involved with relatively pure research in my day job so that coupled with leading the project presented a few challenges in itself which was most enjoyable. While I can't give away the details, I wanted to express the areas this research concerned here.

The project was a text analytics project, not a new field in itself and a subject on which IBM and my local department (Emerging Technologies) contains many well read and respected experts. For those of you not familiar, text analytics is essentially applying computer systems to text documents such that some sort of processing can be performed e.g. (simple example) the analysis of pages from news web sites to infer what the current news stories are.

One of the complexities we were investigating was natural language processing. This is a major area of research for computer systems at the moment and presents one of the biggest problems of applying computer systems to human written documents. Our brain is able to parse language in ways we've not yet managed to teach computers to do, taking into account context, slang, unknown terms and all sorts of other subtle nuances that make it a hard problem to crack for computers.

My recent work has been investigating how we can express things found in documents in the form of controlled natural language which leads to the question of what on earth is that? Simply put, it's an expression made using normal words but using more rigid semantics than are found in pure natural language. This makes it possible to parse it using a computer but it still feels fairly natural to the human reader as well. This sounds great as you get computers talking a language that feels very usable to humans but with all the added power of memory and processing provided by the computer. It seems to me this approach might only be a stop-gap solution until computers (inevitably it'll happen some time) eventually understand full natural language.

While having a discussion last night with my wife over dinner she expressed a sometimes-heard opinion from her that I occasionally "speak funny". This came to light recently when on holiday in Ireland, I suspect it's a combination of both this type of research seeping into my use of language but also my semi-conscious approach to trialling these techniques in the real world and what better opportunity than when immersed in another English speaking culture.

So, as this article is published I'll be standing at the front of a room of people talking about the details of our work with my colleagues. Wish us luck!

Hursley Extreme Blue 2011 Presentations

2011-09-07T08:51:00.000+01:00

For the first time since starting my own blog I've written a post on the Eightbar blog. It's a site originally set up by a bunch of us working at Hursley to talk about the interesting stuff we're working on in order to show the many different faces of Hursley and IBM. I didn't want to reproduce the entire blog post here so I'll leave you with a link to the Hursley Extreme Blue 2011 Presentations post but since comments are currently turned off on Eightbar feel free to have any discussion here.

Rhythmbox Artist Prefix Plugin

2011-04-13T07:27:00.001+01:00

I've recently started using the Rhythmbox music player. It seems pretty simple to use and like other Gnome applications is actually quite powerful under the covers but hides a lot of the power from basic use. You sometimes have to dig a little to find a feature you're looking for. That said, with no amount of digging was I able to find a feature to enable artists to be sorted while ignoring certain prefixes. This is a pretty bulk standard feature of most music players and allows artists such as "The Beatles" to be sorted under "B" for Beatles rather than "T" for The. There's quite a lot of discussion to be found on this in various Rhythmbox bug reports and on the mailing list. The view of the developers is that it's not possible to automatically provide a one size fits all solution so they implemented the ability to allow users to manually add a sort tag to each track.

I've just written a first versions of a plugin I'm calling Rhythmbox Artist Prefix which allows the user to choose whether to have Rhythmbox attempt to automatically sort artists ignoring certain artist prefixes. If you use Rhythmbox then give it a try!

The plugin works by querying the Rhythmbox database for artists with the given prefixes and that don't currently have a sort order defined (which allows the user to manually override the sort order derived by the plugin). So long as the plugin is active it will watch the database for changes too. The first time you run the plugin it will automatically add an entry to the sort order of all tracks returned by the query and if you leave it running then any time Rhythmbox finds new tracks matching the query their sort order will be updated as well. Whenever the plugin is notified of a track by an artist such as "The Beatles" and that track doesn't already have a sort order, it will chop off "The" from the artist name and add the remainder (in this case "Beatles") to the artist sort order property for that track. Quite simple really and I'm amazed it hasn't been done before.

Another New Home Server

2011-04-11T15:07:00.000+01:00

Those of you following this blog over the past couple of years will know I've already had several low power home servers including an NSLU2, tinytuxbox and Joggler. The NSLU2 and tinytuxbox are both history but we've still got the Joggler at home. After finding it was grinding to a halt with the stuff I was running on it while trying to use it interactively it became clear we needed something else at home too. Since I was also running out of storage space on my home PC a NAS solution seemed like the obvious choice so I went for a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra Plus 2 (RNDP200U).

I opted for the ReadyNAS Ultra series because I run a SqueezeBox Duet for my music and Netgear are the only partner directly supported by Logitech for their music devices. After spending huge amounts of time hacking the NSLU2, tinytuxbox and Joggler I felt it was about time I had a device that "just worked" so the option of simply downloading and installing stuff and having it work is really quite attractive. Of course, other NAS devices can run SqueezeCenter but whether the community supported versions work well and are kept up to date is another matter which I didn't investigate thoroughly. Another good reason for choosing the Ultra series is they're based on x86 hardware so some of the code and plugins I know I want to run which had previously not worked (or been possible) on the slug for example would be fine, a lot of NAS boxes are still running ARM processors.

The Ultra 2 comes in 2 flavours and I went for the more powerful of the two (the Ultra 2 Plus). They are exactly the same except the Ultra 2 Plus has a dual core processor vs a single core on the Ultra 2. Given I'm fully intending to run what is probably more than average on the NAS the chance of getting a more powerful processor was well worth the extra few quid it costs.

On the subject of price, the NAS solution is probably one of the more expensive ways to get yourself a home server. Again though, the "it just works" factor comes heavily in to play here as I'm not responsible for installing the O.S. and setting up a raft of different services on the box, they're all just there, working! Probably the most competition for a NAS would be the Asus Revo running Linux, possibly with FreeNAS on it too. The Revo with the same processor as the Ultra 2 Plus I bought is around 60% of the price. The Revo isn't able to support the amount of storage you can get with a NAS device though, doesn't (easily) support RAID and if I did want to do those things it would have to be with ugly USB attached disks which are hard to spin down when not in use.

It took just a matter of hours to unpack, boot and setup the device in the way I wanted. The array has been formatted and exports a share to Linux and Windows boxes, all my data has been copied on there with plenty of room for expansion and user management is sorted. After that, updating SqueezeCenter to the latest version was simple and installing other additional software (whether official or community supported) is also really easy. So far I've set up transmission (for bit torrents) and enabled ssh access. Hardware management is all done through a web interface so the option of automatically powering on/off the device on a schedule or setting up disk spin down is merely just a box tick away.

I've got it connected to a 10/100 switch which is fine for streaming music to the SqueezeBox or sharing pictures with the Joggler but for access from my PC and to large amounts of data I figured that throughput wouldn't be enough. Fortunately, the NAS has 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports so I've used the second one to direct attach it to my PC and enabled Jumbo frames. The performance over that link has been absolutely fine whether measured simply by the subjective feel of how long it takes to do certain tasks or via a more rigorous iozone test.

With the tasks of device and software management all taken care of the the thing up and running in no time at all, I'm looking forward to having more time on my hands to do some even more interesting hacking with the box instead.

ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus

2011-04-10T16:12:00.000+01:00

I recently bought a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra Plus 2 (RNDP200U) Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and before buying found it hard if not impossible to find out the finer technical details of the hardware specification. In a similar way to some of my previous posts I thought I'd list out some of the key specs as found under Linux running on the device.

It appears to be running a distribution based from Debian Etch which Netgear have modified to make what they call their Raidiator operating system. It shipped with Raidiator version 4.2.15 and this is upgradeable when they release new versions.

The kernel version is 2.6.33.7.RNx86_64.2.2 and (surprisingly) is x86_64 rather than the 32 bit OS I would have expected.

The tech specs list the RAM as 1GB DDR2 SODIMM and I can happily report free sees all 1GB available, there's around 500MB of swap space too.

They seem to carve out some sort of virtual storage on the disks you put into the box too. I've not quite worked this out yet but df reports the following

/dev/md0 4.0G 572M 3.3G 15% /

The CPU is pretty beefy for this type of hardware, Linux sees one processor and two hyperthreaded cores so you get four lots of the following in /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D525 @ 1.80GHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1800.215
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
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 syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm
bogomips : 3600.43
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

The other hardware in the system is pretty much covered by the output of lspci

Host bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device
VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device
Display controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device
PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1
PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2
PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3
USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1
USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2
USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3
USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4
USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller
PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge
ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 27bc
SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GR/GH (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller AHCI
SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller
Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4380
USB Controller: NEC Corporation Unknown device 0194
Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4380

The hardware Specs from the ReadyNAS site are

Physical Specifications
Intel® Atom 1.8 GHz Dual-core CPU (Ultra 2 Plus)
1GB DDR2 SODIMM
Two (42) Serial ATA II channels
Hot swappable and lockable trays
Two (2) 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports
One (1) USB 3.0 port
Two (2) USB 2.0 ports
Embedded 128 MB Flash Memory for OS
Kensington Lock security hole
Software controlled 80 mm chassis cooling fan
Dimension (H x W x D): 101 x 142 x 220 mm (3.98 x 5.59 x 8.66 in)
Weight: 2.07 kg (4.56 lb), without hard disks

Electrical
60W External AC power supply
Input: 100-240V AC~ 50-60Hz 5A(Max)

Power Consumption
34W typical with 2 x 2TB disks
32W idle, 19W with disk spin-down

Environmental Compliance
0 to 40 C (32 to 104 F)
20% to 80% Humidity (non-condensing)
FCC, UL, CE, RoHS, C-tick, VCCI, CCC, KCC compliance

Available Configurations
Diskless
Half-populated

When Jogglers Go Bad

2011-02-26T12:28:00.000Z

My Joggler went wrong over the festive period 2010. It refused to boot, it simply showed the O2 logo on the screen and didn't go any further so it appeared to get stuck during POST somewhere never reaching the boot loader. I was going to replace it with something else but was (quite rightly) persuaded to use the guarantee to get another one since it was only 8 months old.

I contacted O2 early in the new year via their usual support channel. What follows shows just how wrong a company can get it when they venture outside their core business. It seems all support processes and staff just were not cut out for supporting the Joggler. The best way I can put across my experience is simply to recount the notes I took at each point of contact with them. I had a feeling at the start of the process this wasn't going to go smoothly so started taking notes from the very first call.

7th January

Called O2 for the first time to report my broken Joggler. Spoke with "Neil" and agreed the Joggler team would call back in 3-5 days. Direct Joggler support is not available to the customer, Neil has to email the Joggler team to get them to call me back. It seems even O2 customer support aren't able to contact their Joggler team via any other method than an internal email. Neil was not able to find a record of my purchase since I'm not an O2 customer for anything other than the Joggler. Fortunately, I still had a copy of the dispatch email so was able to look up the order number to locate the purchase on the O2 systems. I left mobile and work numbers with Neil and was given a support case number.

10th January

Received a call from "Simon" in the Joggler team. He queried the symptoms of the broken Joggler and asked for it to be sent into O2 for a replacement product to be issued. I agreed to return the Joggler to an address Simon was able to confirm via email. He advised this process should take up to 2 weeks in order for me to receive a replacement and that I should obtain proof of postage.

11th January

I returned the Joggler via first class post to the address Simon provided with a cover note including all my contact details and the case ID number. Proof of postage was obtained.

1st February

No Joggler or correspondence received from O2, twice as long as promised. I phoned O2 support and spoke with "David". He emailed the Joggler team once again and I agreed to receive another call-back from the Joggler team by phone for an update on the issue. Particularly, why four weeks have passed without any contact from O2 when I was promised a replacement product within 2 weeks.

4th February

No call-back yet received from the Joggler team. I responded to the email sent by Simon on 10th January asking for an update.

7th February

Still no call back. Phoned O2 and spoke to "Thomas Wright". He investigated and informed me he thought the case had been sent to the wrong team and he was going to email the Joggler support team. I agreed that I would receive a call-back from the Joggler support team within 48 hours and left my home telephone number in addition to the details already on record with Thomas. He informed me everything I had been told so far must have been incorrect and I could now not expect to receive a replacement product and O2 might instead insist on issuing a refund instead.

9th February

Wrote to Matthew Key, the O2 CEO, via email. I wasn't expecting a response to an individual case query but thought he might be interested in a copy of my notes recounting my poor experience with his company.

15th February

Again no call, email or any form of correspondence from O2. Phoned O2 and spoke to "Robert". He investigated and was going to pass me to a senior advisor but none were available after a lengthy hold period on the phone. He said he would continue attempting contact with a senior member of his team and call me back later.

I raised a formal complaint via email to complaintreviewservice@o2.com and copied Matthew Key for his information once again. I used the advice from the government Consumer Direct site, stating what the issue was with full reference to my notes and case ID and giving O2 14 days to respond before starting small claims proceedings for their breaking the terms of their guarantee i.e. running off with my money!

17th February

Received a call (finally) from O2 but it wasn't from the support department as expected, instead it was a member of the CEO office, Jonathan Moore. It appears my emails to Matthew Key had got through. Jonathan was responding to my formal complaint email sent 2 days earlier. He apologised for the way I had been treated by O2 and promised to take my issue under his wing and follow it through to conclusion. His thoughts on the issue were that I would be issued a refund rather than a replacement product. He was not aware of any support systems that might be able to use the case ID I had given him, seem O2 aren't joined up at all and they have several different support systems.

18th February

Jonathan Moore called twice during the day to confirm he was sending out a refurbished Joggler in addition to organising a full refund for the original purchase. The original purchase include a £10 mobile broadband USB dongle, the cost of which was also refunded. He had managed to contact both the Returns Department to determine there are in fact a small number of refurbished Jogglers available to send out as replacement products and the order team to organise the refund.

During the week beginning 21st Feb I received a refurbished Joggler and was able to verify a full refund had been credited back to my account. I don't think I'll be returning this Joggler when it eventually goes wrong as I don't much fancy going through all that again. While I'm clearly satisfied with the response of receiving both the refund and the replacement I view that merely as compensation for the hours (literally) spent on the phone and costs incurred.

Would I deal with O2 again? Actually, I probably would but that would very much only be for their mainstream products but if a competitor had a comparable offer I'd probably shy away from them now. I'm still awaiting a call return from Robert in support and 2 calls from the Joggler support team... useless!

CEL MT3 Multi Tool

2011-02-22T10:08:00.000Z

I've been re-grouting my kitchen and bathroom recently, not in itself something worthy of a blog post. However, I discovered a power tool to make the job far easier and since a few people have already asked me about it...

The MT3 made by CEL UK is an oscillating Multi Tool with all manner of different attachments, one of which is a carbide grout removal tool. The fact the tool oscillates (rather than rotates, say like a Dremel multi) means you don't fling the grout all over the house as dust. Vibrations from the tool are enough to remove grout and drop the majority of the mess neatly out of the joints in front of you.

I think at this point you probably already get the picture so here's a fun video of someone using the tool before I splurge out a bit more detail on it:

As you can see in addition to grout removal, it can be used for cutting but also sanding, rasping and probably a whole load of other tasks too. There's a bunch of other videos on the MT3 and other tools from CEL on their YouTube channel.

As an alternative, the known branded version of this thing is the PMF 180 E from Bosch. The best deal I found on the Bosch was at Amazon who sell the tool and large accessory pack together for just under 100 quid at the time of writing. This is more or less the same price as the MT3 from CEL so here's my logic for why I didn't go for the big name product.

Accessories are expensive for both products, but the Bosch is even more expensive than the CEL. However, the Bosch is only capable of using bits supplied by Bosch themselves where as the CEL is capable of using bits from pretty much anywhere, including Bosch (they include an adapter for Bosch bits). Given this and the fact the CEL is slightly more powerful I thought I'd go for supporting the small British startup company rather than the large German corporation and if CEL doesn't survive into the future I can always buy alternative bits for the tool from other manufacturers anyway.

Now I've mentioned CEL are a small British startup, it's probably a good point to say they successfully pitched on the Dragon's Den TV programme back in August 2010. You can see the designer and company MD, Chris Elsworthy, making his pitch on YouTube. However, it seems that ultimately CEL didn't accept the offer of investment.

Dealing with CEL while buying the tool was an absolute dream, one of the best Internet buying experiences I've ever had and really shows how the personal service you can get from a small company makes a difference. I wanted to buy the MT3-C Pack which at the time was advertised as "coming soon" and is made up of the MT3 Tool, accessory pack, and a case. Buying all 3 as a pack represented a saving of around £20.

I wrote to the generic sales email address on their web site asking when the pack might be available as I was interested in buying all 3 products together. Within half an hour I had a response back from their office saying they had all three parts, they were willing to put them together as a pack and honour the advertised pack price on the web site. This is where it gets really good, in addition they also sent through a PayPal invoice so should I wish to go ahead with the purchase I just had to complete the invoice and they would send the products out that afternoon for next day delivery! At this point it was a no-brainer, I returned the invoice and followed up via email too. Again, only half an hour later I had a response saying they had received the payment and sent the product out. 8:30am the next morning arrives and I've got my new tool, brilliant!

So far the tool and dealing with the company have both been great so I'm completely sold and wish CEL every success for the future and in creating some more great kit.

Building Native-like Web Apps for Mobile

2011-02-11T15:57:00.000Z

Sencha Touch

I spent a few months at the back end of last year working on a project to bring company information down to mobile devices within that company. I took the decision early on in the project to implement the solution using a web browser to host the application and a Javascript tool kit to fake the look and feel of a native application inside the web browser. It's this technique and tool kit that I want to focus on here.

The first key decision in a project such as this is whether to go with a native application or an app delivered through the browser. Since in this particular case the people I was writing for all used iPhones, perhaps the natural choice would have been to write a native iPhone application. They could, however, just as easily have been using Android or a whole host of other devices. The real benefit of the native application (aside from speed perhaps) is the ability to interact with the hardware on the device your application will be running on. Since I did not require access to a camera, GPS, accelerometers or any other phone features, delivery through a web browser was a very realistic option. In giving up the ability to access these hardware features you gain the ability (if done carefully) to write-once run-anywhere. That is, the application I came up with would be able to run on an iPhone and Android or pretty much any device with a web-kit based browser and a decent touch screen interface, but at the cost of not being able to use, for example, a bar code scanner.

There are probably others but to the best of my knowledge there are currently three Javascript toolkits positioning themselves for the mobile space. Dojo Mobile, JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch. Did I just say positioning for mobile space? Lucky you, if you're playing buzzword bingo, sorry! At the time of creation, Dojo and JQuery weren't options, they are both only now ramping up development in this area and in the case of JQuery releasing early alpha drops. Sencha Touch was much more advanced and already at a 0.90 beta when I first started playing with it. I followed it through the beta development cycle over the summer months in 2010. Fortunately, it seemed the timing of the production release of Sencha Touch was likely to be at the same time the first phase of my customer work went live so it became the obvious choice.

As a bit of background (and again this is my understanding so may not be absolutely accurate) Sencha was formed by the merger of JQ Touch and the EXT JS toolkit when the original author of JQ Touch, David Kaneda, joined forces with EXT development. Essentially, Sencha Touch is the next generation version of JQ Touch but now has a small army of developers, a community, and a company behind it to provide a support network.

I quite like the approach of delivery mobile apps through the web browser, where it's appropriate to do so of course. I've already discussed that in my view you can develop a web app in the browser if you don't need access to the device hardware. If you don't require that sort of access, it's hard to see why you'd want to develop any other way. As an Android user, I often get frustrated when apps (pointless or otherwise) are released only for the iPhone simply because that's what an iPhone user expects. One example I had recently was while reading through my subscription of BBC Good Food magazine who seem to provide only an iPhone or iPad application. In fact if you go to their web site they also provide a Chrome app and a Samsung Wave app, why I wonder? The magazine simply displays content with little or no interaction from the user, sure the online versions contain video and other features you can't put down on paper but there's nothing there to suggest the maintenance of a myriad of different apps for different mobile platforms is worthwhile. Not to mention my surprise that an organisation such as the beeb are carving up their community by device type rather than, as we'd expect, supporting the masses as we saw with iPlayer coming to Mac and Linux after their early Windows only versions. Surely, a javascript toolkit approach here would be better?

In the early days of my playing around with the Sencha Touch beta code I wrote a mobile version of a badminton web site I maintain. It's not particularly advanced and certainly not representative of all the things you can do with a toolkit like this but thought I'd put it out there anyway. It should, at the time of writing work with iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices and quite probably with others too. If you're trying on your desktop then make sure you're using a WebKit based browser such as Google Chrome or Safari, or for something a little bit different the great little browser Midori. For a better selection of demos take a look at the Sencha Touch Demo page and for a developer perspective on the widgets and options available in the toolkit have a look at their Kitchen Sink demo which gives a simple overview of many of the components.

Killer Android Apps

2010-12-08T12:45:00.002Z

There have been plenty of articles written around the web about the top or best Android apps. I always find these lists very subjective but they are at least a good way to share what you've found and a great way for other users to discover new apps they've not tried yet. I've been using an HTC Desire for over six months so I'd consider myself a reasonably experienced user now. It's a world away from the Nokia N73 I was using previously and my first foray into wifi-enabled portable touch screen devices (for personal use anyway).

Rather than bother myself considering which is the most useful, here's an alphabetical list of the apps I'm using right now. I'd love to hear what other people are using for similar things, there's so many good apps out there I'm sure to have not checked them all out.

Angry Birds (Game)
There's loads of games on the Android platform but this is the one I've spent most time playing. I'd be very surprised if you haven't come across it by now but if not then give it a go.

Barcode Scanner (Bar Code Scanner)
When I first got the phone I really didn't see the point of having a barcode scanner. It has, however, proven quite useful on occasion. I've yet to use it to scan any tangible product in a shop for example. Where it does come into its own is opening links from the web on your desktop in your mobile browser. I have, on more than one occasion, now come across sites that provide a QR code (2d bar code) that gives you a link to a web page or even better gives you a link directly to the right app in the marketplace.

eBuddy (Instant Messenger)
A multi-protocol instant messenger for Android. It connects to all the instant message services I use and gives me a nice way to increase the amount of time I spend logged into them so I can still be contacted even when not directly using a computer. I use a multi-protocol client on my desktop so it's great to find a decent one on the mobile platform which means you don't have to run individual apps for each of the services you want to log into.

ES File Explorer (File Manager)
The version of Android I have (2.2 from HTC) doesn't come with any sort of file manager or mechanism for installing APK files. ES File Explorer is excellent for both of these tasks. It's the best and most flexible file explorer I've come across but for some reason isn't the most popular or widely known/used. It has some neat advanced features such as the capability to connect to files over FTP/Samba and integrated bluetooth, etc. A real step up from any of the other file managers I've seen on Android.

Google Reader (Feed Reader)
As I write Google have just released the official app for their Reader service. It's definitely an improvement over the mobile version of Reader in the web browser so I'd recommend it just for that. However, it also seems to be (IMHO) better than other popular reader apps such as Feedsquares. Personally, Reader is the only internet based feed reader I use so having something integrated to it on my phone is fab.

Maps (Navigation)
Google maps in an app. You've almost certainly already seen it, but I still use it a lot and like it so it makes my list of useful apps.

RAC Traffic (Traffic/Navigation)
This is one area where I've not searched around much for other apps in the field. The RAC traffic app shows you where the traffic hot spots and problems are on roads in the UK. It's really useful to check this (when I remember to do so) before going off on a longer journey in order to help pick the best route that day. I'm sure it can't be the best app out there for this sort of thing so would be interested in hearing about others too.

Scrobble Droid (Social Music)
I find the last.fm service on the Internet a really useful way to discover music and share music with friends. I don't tend to use the last.fm clients to listen to music very much so that app doesn't feature on my list. However, this is a really tiny but useful app (more of a utility really) that will send the tracks you play in the Android music player to last.fm. This means anything I listen to on my phone gets added to my last.fm account and helps build my profile on the site.

Skype (Instant Messenger and VOIP)
Either you use Skype or you don't and you know what it is or you don't. The official client for Skype on Android seems to be pretty good to me and a neat way to make free calls to friends over your wireless network.

Todo List Widget (Productivity)
I've tried several todo list apps and widgets on Android but essentially wanted something stupidly simple that would literally just shove a list of stuff on the desktop and allow me to add/remove/tick off items as I deem necessary. Through a recommendation from a friend I found a widget called "Todo List Widget" which does just that, it's everything I wanted, very very simple and easy to use. If you want something advanced or more pervasive across devices this isn't the one for you, check out something like Remember The Milk instead.

TweetDeck (Social Client)
I've ditched the Facebook and Twitter apps in favour of using the same app on the phone as I do on the desktop. I've never experimented with Adobe Air but TweetDeck seems to be a great example built on that platform. I find TweetDeck much more usable than the other apps and it does seem to just work, is intuitive and nice to use. Once again a great user experience wins the day on the mobile platform.

Youtube (Video)
Ever tried watching videos in the web browser, they're rubbish right? The bulk standard youtube app sorts this out nicely, giving a much better view and size of the video and easy to use controls.

I found some other useful apps on my phone too that I have used briefly but can't necessarily recommend with the apps above because I've not used them extensively enough. These are "AndChat" for IRC related chats, it seems to be very similar to xchat but for Android; "c:geo" for Geocaching as it appears to be a fully functional geocaching app you can use out in the field while caching; and "Gesture Search" which is a Google app which allows you to very neatly search for things (apps, contacts, etc) on your phone via gestures.

In full Trevor McDonald style I'll sign off this post with an "And finally" thought... wouldn't it be really useful to have a social market place where you can suggest and rate apps to friends? The ratings system in the market place is all very well but isn't particularly relevant to me. My friends and contacts know me best and I respect their recommendations much more than a generic ratings system. This sort of functionality would certainly remove the need for this type of blog post entirely.

Joggler Linux Boot Mysteries

2010-06-01T20:26:00.000+01:00

PCs boot first using a system known as a BIOS (basic input output system), that's the bit you might see when you very first switch on your computer and might say something like "Press F1 to enter system menu" or similar. The BIOS is responsible for knowing enough about your hardware such that it can start the computer, run your boot loader and ultimately pass on some information to your operating system which takes over control of the hardware. The Joggler doesn't boot using the mechanism most of us as PC users are familiar with, however, abandoning the BIOS in favour of EFI (extensible firmware interface). EFI is much bigger, more flexible and inevitably a lot more complicated than the older BIOS system. I'll attempt to unravel in simple terms some of the mysteries of booting your own operating system on the Joggler here.

EFI has its roots in Intel in the same way as a BIOS has its roots in IBM. Basically, it consists of a set of executables able to run within the simple environment EFI provides. These executables are just little computer programs that can vary extremely widely from talking to a piece of your hardware to providing you with a shell environment in which you can interact with EFI through to booting your operating system. This last function is quite important to us as computer users if we're to understand how EFI is used to start your machine, in this case your Joggler. A BIOS will boot your machine by looking at the master boot record and starting the boot loader that your installed operating system has put there; your operating system is responsible for booting itself. EFI does away with this, moving the responsibility for booting operating systems into the firmware interface itself, you no longer need a boot loader for your operating system. Instead, the boot loader is now just another EFI program that runs within the simple EFI environment I mentioned earlier.

You've been wondering what this FAT partition on your Joggler image is all about? FAT is just another file system like NTFS for Windows or ext for Linux, it's very widely understood so is commonly used these days on USB sticks but not necessarily many other places. If your disk is to be used to boot an operating system then EFI says you need a FAT file system as the first partition of that disk. EFI actually says FAT12 or FAT16 must be used for "removable media" so for us Joggler users with USB sticks or hard disks we should be using FAT16 even though EFI can understand FAT32 as well. You could boot any other disk from your FAT partition but all the simple Joggler cases would just involve booting an operating system somewhere else on the same disk i.e. the second partition.

Fortunately for us, when you start your Joggler its EFI looks both at its internal disk (the one with the O2 interface on it) and removable media (your USB disk). The FAT partition is discovered on your USB disk and by convention the file called startup.nsh is executed. This file is simply a script which can be used to execute any EFI script commands you wish. For Joggler USB booting it just runs a local script on your disk to start your boot loader EFI program.

So for the Joggler we might have something like this in startup.nsh on our disk in order to call the boot.nsh:

fs1:boot2
fs0:boot

And the following in the file boot.nsh to start the grub EFI boot loader program:

fs1:
grub

You now know what to do in order to boot your Joggler from a USB disk but the final missing piece to the puzzle is the EFI boot loader program itself. In the example above I used grub as the boot loader program. Yes, this is the same grub you're familiar with from booting Linux on BIOS based machines. However, in this example it's an EFI program so you'd be right to be wondering how you go about getting a copy of it. In my example here your FAT partition already has 2 files on it (startup.nsh and boot.nsh) and you'll need another 2 files (grub.efi and grub.cfg) to be able to boot your disk

There are two versions of grub. The old version, grub 1 or grub legacy as it's know known is not the one you want. You're looking for the current version which is (or will become) grub 2. At the time of writing grub 1.98 is the latest version, download the released version. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on the Joggler without applying a patch. So it's with thanks and reference to the guys over at Joggler Hacks I got my Joggler booting with my own grub 2.

To compile an EFI version of grub 2, unpack the source you've downloaded, then apply the Joggler grub 2 patch (using patch -p1), run ./configure --with-platform=efi and make. The compilation should proceed through to completion leaving you just finish off by making the grub EFI program. You can do this with ./grub-mkimage -d . -o grub.efi part_msdos hfsplus fat ext2 normal sh chain boot configfile linux. The file grub.efi will be created and you can copy this to your FAT partition.

The one remaining thing to do is create the grub configuration file. In grub 2 this is called grub.cfg and can be put in the root directory of your FAT partition with the other three files already there. If you've got your root file system on your second partition then the following should be enough for you to boot it:

 set timeout=0
menuentry "Linux" {
 set root=(hd0,1)
 linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 acpi=force ro idle=halt
 initrd /initrd
}

This configuration requires your kernel (vmlinuz) and ram disk (initramfs or initrd) to be on the FAT partition too. The final piece to the puzzle is to copy these files from your installed version of Linux in the second partition from the /boot directory. With all six files in place on the FAT partition you're all set to boot the OS on the second partition. Most recent versions of Linux should at least boot on the Joggler. However, the Joggler does have some interesting hardware which may not be optimally supported. Hence, for the quickest out of the box working system you're still better off using a pre-built image from someone else as now you've got the thing booted the hard work is only about to begin.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Upgrading Fedora 12 to 13

2010-05-30T16:28:00.000+01:00

I'm pleased to report that after problems upgrading from Fedora 10 to 11 and minor issues upgrading Fedora 11 to 12 that I've finally had a no problem upgrade from Fedora 12 to 13 on my home machine.

I have only a very slightly unusual setup in that I've got Fedora running on top of a hardware RAID environment which has caused some issues with preupgrade in the past. Upgrades I have tried on other equipment such as my work laptop have always been flawless and now it seems the issues with RAID installs have gone away too.

So this brings to an end my blog trilogy about upgrading Fedora, short and sweet, it just works! Now onwards to enjoy using a great new distribution that's pushing the boundaries in pretty much every area of Linux usage. Thanks to the Fedora team, Goddard looks fab.

Pre-built Joggler Images

2010-05-25T19:40:00.000+01:00

It seems everyone buying a Joggler is doing so for their own good reasons with thoughts about how to hack the device to their needs. I include myself in this too, why else write these blog posts? The majority of people aren't so interested in the hacking side of things as simply getting the device to do what they want and that's where using a pre-built, already hacked, operating system image can come in very handy indeed.

The Images
Easily the two most popular images are Ubuntu based although there are Joggler communities for Android, Mer and Meego, all of which are Linux based platforms. I've only tried the first of these but can lend my recommendation to either of

As I said, both are Ubuntu based with the key difference being the first image uses the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (a.k.a UNR, Ubuntu Netbook Edition and UNE) while the second one uses "normal" Ubuntu. You'd perhaps expect them to be in fierce competition with each other but in good open source spirit quite the opposite is true. Both are produced by nice guys who help each other (and the rest of the community out) by sharing what they do.

There's no sense in me reproducing how to download and use either of these images. Both come with pretty bullet-proof instructions on what to do. I would, however, heartily recommend you produce the images from a Linux system having recently helped a friend struggling with downloading the images successfully and finding the right tools to do the job under Windows.

Fair's Fair
From my own investigations and messing around with putting Fedora on the Joggler I can certainly vouch for the amount of time and effort these guys have put into producing such good quality, usable hacks. So, if you do more than just evaluate these for your own use i.e. you really are using your Joggler with either of these images then do give serious consideration to spending a few quid giving something back to the guys as they ask through a small donation. I have no idea how much they might stand to make through donation and other revenue such as the Google ads, but it's probably not a huge amount and is definitely well earned.

Modification
If you try the images out and there's something you don't like, fine, you don't have to stick with that particular quirk. There's never going to be a one-size fits all approach so if you don't like, for example, the on screen keyboard, the user interface or something else then feel free to change it. It's your system once you've downloaded and booted it after all. There are a lot of, dare I say, complaints on the forums about things not being quite right. If it's something major then let the guy know who produced the image, it will probably get fixed in their next version. Also, there's a huge wealth of help and support out there in various places so try looking for someone who's already "been there, done that".

Subject to some of the Joggler Hardware Gotchas it is possible to use these images on devices much bigger and faster than a 4GB USB stick. I've tried with an 8GB stick and USB hard disks from 80GB through 320GB and even one disk of 1TB. Simply follow the instructions for either image to write to your larger device as if it were a 4GB stick. Then use a tool such as gparted (again I recommend Linux simply because it's easy and the tools are readily available) to resize the second partition to be as big as you like. If you move to a hard disk (rather than USB stick) then you can undo some of the modifications made in the images for efficiency and to try and protect your stick:

Change the file system back to ext3 from ext2
Add a swap file or swap partition

You can change the file system type from ext2 to ext3 either before or after changing the size of the partition. Simply boot the image on your Joggler and run the command "tune2fs -j /dev/sda2" then edit the file /etc/fstab to change bit that says ext2 to say ext3, save that file and you're all done. The reason for making this change is your files will be a little safer in the event of unplanned events such as sudden loss of power. This was quite rightly turned off for the USB stick images because more data is written to the device and since USB sticks are only capable of being written to a relatively small number of times the trade-off between stick reliability and file system reliability has to be made.

Adding a swap file (if you don't know what this is then have a go at understanding paging)is probably easier in many ways than adding a swap partition and with a recent version of Linux such as the ones used in these images doesn't lead to any loss of performance as might have been expected in older versions of Linux. Feel free to add a swap partition in gparted though, don't forget to add a line to /etc/fstab to tell Ubuntu to use this partition as swap. To add a 1GB swap file simple run the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=1024; swapon /swap" then add a line to /etc/fstab so next time you reboot Ubuntu will use this file for swap space.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Joggler Hardware Gotchas

2010-05-21T15:29:00.002+01:00

I haven't (so far at least) attempted to modify my Joggler hardware in any way. It is possible to do so in order to, for example, add an internal USB port. If you're interested in this sort of thing then have a look at the Hacking the Hardware section over at the Joggler Wiki. I have spent a reasonable amount of time playing with the hardware now though so here's my list of things to be careful about.

GMA 500
Contrary to Intel's usual position with regards Linux support, the GMA 500 chipset is an absolute abomination. The basic reason for this is they license some of the technology from elsewhere so are unable to provide the full source code to the community. This means parts of the drivers for the GMA 500 chipset are binary only, cannot be shipped by any of the Linux distributions, so must be downloaded individually by each user. This driver is known as IEGD (Intel Embedded Graphics Driver).

There is an open source alternative known as PSB (or the Poulsbo driver). Support for this in the Linux distributions is patchy at best. Earlier versions of Ubuntu and Fedora have better support for this driver as it best supports earlier versions of Xorg, namely version 1.6.4 and below. The PSB driver has very recently been patched to support Xorg 1.7 and later so should soon start to work with Fedora 12 and above and Ubuntu 10.04. The patch was written by someone in the Mandriva community and has been made available for Fedora 12/13 by a Red Hat employee netbook enthusiast.

I have tried both drivers on Fedora 12. I was unable to get Adam's PSB driver to work (the akmod failed to compile) but I do have a fully working Fedora 12 graphical system using the IEGD driver. There will be more about how to get all that going in another blog post soon.

It's a shame the Joggler (and most netbooks) use this chipset. Before investigating you would think Linux would have superb support for Atom based netbooks given many of them have previously been sold with a Linux pre-install version. My guess is the lack of support for current distributions is why we don't see new Linux pre-install netbooks any more. This can only be due to demand though, Intel would support later versions if a vendor was willing to pay for support but the market has to be there in order to make this worthwhile (rant over).

USB power
The power provided by the Joggler's USB port is dodgy (technical term) at best. In order to support that claim I have tried several different USB hard disks (1 Lenovo, and 2 Freecom disks) and only non-bus-powered ones have worked reliably. The Joggler simply isn't able to provide enough power to operate these drives, two that I tried span up but didn't get enough power to move the disk heads, the third (a brand new Freecom mobile drive classic 2) does work but occasionally drops out causing the OS to crash. My recommendation is to provide an external power source if you're connecting much more than a USB stick to your Joggler.

Options then, well you can either mains power your device(s) or power from a USB hub. Either of these work reliably in my experience (I've tried a mains powered 3½" disk and powered hubs with my 2½" disks) but still there's one more problem. If your device passes power back into the Joggler itself, it wont boot and you'll end up in the O2 interface. You'll know if your device is doing this as the Joggler backlight will be lit even if the Joggler is not plugged into the mains! So now you have 2 options again, (1) stop your device passing power back to the Joggler, and (2) butcher a USB cable.

You can stop your device from passing power back to the Joggler (if it is doing so) by buying a decent powered USB hub. I'm using a Plexus hub I bought from eBuyer along with my Freecom disk. I have tried some cheaper powered hubs but they also passed power back to the host so while allowing me to connect multiple devices didn't solve the problem I was having.

The USB cable butchery option isn't as bad as it sounds. USB cables have 4 wires in them, white and green for data, black for earth and red for live. Simply grab the cable you want to connect your device with (whether it's the device itself or a cheaper powered hub which is passing power back to the Joggler), cut part of the outer sheath away (about an inch will do) somewhere along the cable length, find the 4 cables inside (getting through any braiding or foil that might be in your cable depending on how expensive it was), then simply cut the live wire. Make sure the live ends are not touching each other with some insulation and you can wrap the cable back up again. That's it, you've now got a Joggler compatible USB cable which wont pass power back to the Joggler but, obviously, wont power your device either. The Joggler is able to detect you've got a drive as part of the circuit is still there via the ground cable and data will flow as normal along the untouched data cables.

Partitioning
This observation is a real oddity for which I have no explanation (suggestions welcome). The Joggler will not boot from your USB device if it has 4 primary partitions, don't ask me why, yes it should work, but it just doesn't boot. Using 3 primary partitions works, up to 2 primary partitions, an extended partition and as many logical partitions as you like also works. But, give it a device with 4 partitions on and it's game over as far as booting from that device is concerned.

Usability
Some people have mentioned to me about not finding the touch screen very user friendly while running Linux. When compared with the O2 interface that's a pretty fair comment as things tend to be a lot smaller on Linux vs O2. There are various tweaks you can make to your desktop depending on your personal preference such as:

finding an on-screen keyboard you're happy with (onBoard vs Cellwriter for example)
increasing the font size such that all the things you want to touch (click on) are bigger (do this under System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts in Gnome)
installing touch screen addons for your programs (such as chromeTouch for Chrome)
Make your scrollbars wider

If you've decided the touch screen really isn't for you then look into getting a keyboard/mouse solution or a stylus. For keyboards/mice you'll need a USB hub so you're able to attach more than one device to your joggler. I have and can recommend a wireless BTC keyboard with built in joystick (for mouse control) which uses a radio signal via a USB receiver. You can use any USB keyboard/mouse you like though but I'd recommend something compact and wireless, there's always Bluetooth too for which you can get some pretty tiny receivers these days. If you go for the stylus option there's plenty of commercial solutions out there for capacitive touch screens. I quite like this DIY Stylus as an option, however.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Getting a Joggler, the how and the why?

2010-05-20T16:03:00.003+01:00

Buying a Joggler is pretty simple, you can just go to the O2 shop and get one for one hundred of our UK pounds, or fifty if it's on sale. The reason for putting "the how" in this isn't to teach you how to buy stuff on the net. No no, more to say you can get it for less than fifty quid if you're careful! Those of us who work for IBM have been buying them through a money saving web site we have access to as IBMers such that you buy the Joggler and a PAYG Mobile Internet USB dongle (which you're not obliged to use) for a total of £60 and get £25 cashback for doing so. That's £35 for a Joggler and mobile Internet, bargain! I would think this sort of offer must be out there in the wider world too if you look carefully enough.

So why do I, or you for that matter, want one? There's lots of different uses for it. Even if you look at it as a dumb wireless digital photo frame then it's far cheaper than other wifi frames out there. The neat thing about it is it runs a version of Linux internally, has a USB port and is also capable of booting from USB. This means you can run pretty much anything you like on there instead of the default O2 interface. So, it's the ideal hacking toy and can become a fully fledged computer system disguised as a photo frame if you choose to do so. The sky is the limit.

For me, I use it as a low power home server running:

remote login to home (ssh)
music streaming (squeezebox server)
internet connected photo frame (gphotoframe)
trivial internet browsing (chrome + touchscreen addon)
file server (nfs, http, ftp, smb, etc as required)
backup server (rsync)

I've also found it very useful to have a computer connected to my printer for wifi print serving from my laptop in the past. Currently the Joggler isn't located next to my printer so I'm not doing this but it's definitely an option for the future. Similarly I may eventually reconnect my current cost meter for home power monitoring, sending daily electricity bill via email, graphing and storing stats. Another use I could put it to is as a WOL client so wake up other machines in the house remotely so I don't leave them powered on all day (not that I do this anyway), but I haven't configured WOL yet.

Not investigated yet but it seems to me it should be possible to run the OpenPeak apps on Linux too. These are just flash applications so I should be able to run them on the Linux desktop without any issues which would provide me with the same functionality I would get from the original O2 interface under my own Linux.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Joggler Index

2010-05-19T13:21:00.009+01:00

This post will be kept up to date serving as an ordered index to my notes about the O2 Joggler; essentially a glorified digital picture frame with a touch screen. All posts will use the joggler tag too but these may appear in any order.

The very brief tech spec is:

Intel Atom Z520 with GMA 500 chipset
512MB RAM
1GB Internal Storage (to run the O2 operating system and interface)
7 inch touch screen
USB port, audio jack, wired Ethernet and wireless network

I have a list of Joggler bookmarks.

Blog Posts:

Letter to Altonians

2010-02-25T14:56:00.003Z

This is an open letter to the people of Alton in Hampshire, my home town:

People of Alton (and there abouts),

There is a battle raging in the town over whether the Coors Brewery should be permitted to sell their sports facilities (what's known as the Bass sports ground) near Anstey Park. Many of the local residents object to this for many reasons:
- there is a covenant on the current sports ground stating it should remain in use only for sport
- relocation of sports facilities to Anstey Park means massive loss of public green space in the town
- the coors site would be redeveloped as a supermarket or possibly dense housing

Why should the town lose a park so Coors can profit from land sales on which there is a covenant?

If you agree, you can find out more information from:
http://ansteyresidents.org.uk/
http://www.weloveansteypark.com/
http://saveansteypark.org.uk/
or the Facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=299652801351

Things you can do to help:
Display the poster from the weloveansteypark.com web site
Object to the two planning applications concerned,
http://www.ansteyresidents.org.uk/object_to_footballhub.php
http://www.ansteyresidents.org.uk/object_to_supermarket.php

These campaigns are all fighting the same cause with the aim to protect our open spaces and ensure any development is sympathetic to the surrounding area and sited appropriately in the town.

Thanks for your time in reading this,

Graham White

New Lens

2010-02-24T16:23:00.000Z

I've saved writing about the new lens I was given at Christmas until I've had a decent chance to use it. I've wanted this for quite a while now, inspired by my friend Mim and her wonderful portrait photography <shameless plug>you can hire her by the way</shameless plug>. I'm deliberately not showing off any of my pictures in this post until I've got a little better at using it.

My only other two lenses don't have a massive maximum aperture so it's great to finally have a fast lens in my arsenal. The benefit of greater lens speed is to widen the aperture which allows for throwing the background of your subject out of focus. This has the benefit of making the subject stand out and drawing the eye towards it. It's particularly great for portrait work.

The other great plus to this particular lens is it's just about the smallest, cheapest, lightest lens Canon make. This thing is tiny, weighs something like 130 grams and is less than 80 quid! It's just about the best bang-for-your-buck you can get in my opinion.

Usage is obviously quite simple as it's fixed focal length so there's no zoom ring to worry about. You only get a focusing ring and an auto/manual focus switch, no image stabilisation switch to worry about either. It does feel very strange to use at the moment though, because of it's size and weight it gives the camera a completely different feel. Not to mention that I'm used to zoom lenses so there's nothing to twist unless you're manually focusing. You have to move yourself in order to frame the subject as you want and while none of these things are bad, it does give a different feel to the experience of taking pictures. The results, though, speak for themselves, you can produce really great images from this lens which is a real shocker given the price.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

2010-02-13T17:10:00.001Z

Recently I've been playing around with creating HDR style images. I'll save the full technical explanation for someone else. In my own simple words for the uninitiated, it's a post processing technique where you combine multiple images of the same scene taken at different exposures. The reason for doing this is that your camera is only capable of "seeing" a certain range of light and colours, you usually tell it which range to use i.e. whether you want an underexposed or overexposed image. Some scenes are too mixed in terms of different light levels, you could expose for the dark areas or the light but perhaps not both. This is where a technique such as HDR comes in handy, allowing you to retain the detail in the shady areas as well as the well lit areas for example.

HDR images can look like they're not photographs, perhaps computer generated, depending on the algorithm used to render the final image. However, in the right hands they can look pretty cool, for example this one from the Flickr HDR Group:

I'm still very much learning, I've been working with these three images:

My best attempt so far is:

I think I've still got some way to go, but it's been fun trying and learning.

Contributing to BloGTK

2010-02-04T16:23:00.001Z

I was meaning to talk about BloGTK before my previous post on the topic but never quite had the time so here's a quick follow-up to fill in the holes...

At the end of last year I decided it was about time I filled in a scripting gap in my knowledge, namely Python, so set about finding something to code. I'm also a blogger (D'uh) and have always been frustrated at the lack of a decent off-line client for the Linux desktop. Enter BloGTK, both a blogging client and written in Python.

Step 1 before thinking any further about contributing or reading any source code is to seek permission from my employer. I was glad (and surprised) to find getting permission to contribute to open source projects is actually very quick and simple. A short note to my manager and a couple of days delay later yielded the rather simple response:

Graham

Approved

Regards, ...

BloGTK didn't do a couple of things I consider essential for my blogging purposes, the main one being support for uploading and embedding images. I wrote and submitted a couple of patches to the project, learning a lot about Python along the way. The latest development snapshot of BloGTK (which will probably become version 2.1) includes support for uploading to Picasa and Flickr. If you went looking for Flickr support as a result of my previous post then you'll either have to grab the development code early or wait a while until the release of the 2.1 version. In the mean time I'll do battle with Flickr to find out why they think BloGTK is a personal web site or gallery in order to publicise the App through the App Garden.

Flickr Appgarden Violation‏, really?

2010-02-02T08:34:00.002Z

Today I unexpectedly received the following from Flickr in reference to BloGTK.

Hello,
 
The App Garden is a place for software developers to
showcase applications they've created. Because your app
doesn't appear to fit this description it has been set to
private.
 
Your API key is still active and fully functioning , it's
just not public in the App Garden.
 
The App Garden is not a place to showcase a personal
website or gallery. Please only publicize app pages for
applications that you have developed and that are related
to
the Flickr API. You can review the App Garden guidelines
here:
 
http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/about/
 
Thank you for your understanding.
 
Regards,
Flickr Staff

I hold Flickr in very high regard for their openness, interaction with the community and the great API. This is also the reason I'm happy to sign up for a pro account vs other services I use heavily (such as Geocaching.com) which are a closed managed community. So I was surprised to find this note in my inbox this morning which appears to be an automated message or at best the staff member simply hasn't looked at the application before criticising and taking action.

Teach, Yourself

2010-01-03T21:00:00.002Z

I've recently had the opportunity to teach a class of students on a couple of different occasions. Something I've not done for quite a while now but something well worth doing every now and then. I say every now and then, I don't think I have the vocal stamina to do it for more than a few days and I especially don't think I have the special quality it takes to teach children. The classes were both very different, one a knowledgeable internal audience for a days course, the other a three day course for a customer where the participants were only a short way along the road towards learning what I had to say. Both were similar, on the topics of Linux cluster administration and all the various technologies it takes to run a cluster.

Clustering technologies really are varied and it takes a few years experience before an administrator has a good overview of the inner workings of how everything hangs together. For example, I mostly covered Linux administration and clustered administration with xCAT but to fully understand it you need a fair bit of background knowledge. Your Linux OS, hardware configuration and control, network architecture, storage, clustered file systems, remote management, parallel computing, computer service (NTP, DNS, FTP, NFS, HTTP, TFTP, etc) administration, etc. The list really is quite long and while this is starting to sound like a "Look at all the stuff I know!" blow-your-own-trumpet type blog post, the point I think I'm trying to make is the list of people who know (and I mean really know) all this stuff in any given company isn't very long. You'll know the guy, the one who everyone always asks when something is wrong with their machine, the "he fixes everything" guy. While these people are hard to find locked away in a small room somewhere (think IT Crowd), it can be even harder to teach the "I already know quite a lot" guy but I took up the challenge anyway.

There's nothing like teaching every now and then to keep you grounded. Some people in your class will challenge what you're saying so you have to make sure you're right and know how and why you're right, the how and the why are very important when teaching. Some times the class miss the point of what you said, this resets your view on the assumptions you make, the assumptions you work with every day. When someone in the class misses the point it's often to do with how you've expressed it rather than their lack of understanding. Some people might find this challenge to their knowledge of the fundamentals of what they work with quite stressful but I look at it as an opportunity. Sure, you might set yourself up for a fall but that's all part of the thrill. Fortunately, I don't mind speaking in front of a crowd, at least not about something with which I'm familiar, but the audience does add to the experience.

I can be a bit of a show-off, I know that, so teaching can be very satisfactory. Great for the ego, almost. However, I take great pleasure from imparting knowledge on others. The opportunity to help others understand something about which they previously knew little is not to be missed as far as I'm concerned. It plays to your inner show-off if you're prepared to stand on and risk falling off of the pedestal you put yourself on when you stand in front of a class.

If you're knowledgeable in a certain area then I would heartily recommend you share what you know in front of an audience, risk making a fool of yourself in front of your audience. I think the rewards are good if you don't often teach. Have what you know challenged. Have your assumptions highlighted. Find out the little gaps you didn't think you had. Most of all, have fun doing it.

Macro Extension Tubes

2009-12-30T15:15:00.003Z

For Christmas I asked for (and was lucky enough to receive) a set of extension tubes for my camera. Having no experience with these before, I started off with the cheapest set I could find on Amazon. Whilst they're nowhere near as functional as the more expensive varieties available they are a decent starting point and would make a great present for any enthusiast.

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia has this to say about Extension Tubes:

An extension tube is an accessory for cameras with interchangeable lenses, used primarily for macro photography. The tube contains no optical elements; its sole purpose is to move the lens farther from the image plane. The farther away the lens is, the closer the focus, the greater the magnification.....

I don't mind using a cheap extension tube because it's just a hollow tube and has no effect on the quality of the image produced. The real disadvantage of this set and the reason they're at least £100 less expensive than the next set (and many hundreds of pounds cheaper than the Canon equivalent) is there are no electrical contacts, they're simply plain tubes. This means you're not able to control the aperture of the lens and must use manual focus; manual focus being no biggie since that's advisable with such a small depth of field.

Here are my first test images to see how they perform (click to see larger versions over on Flickr):

Both of these images were taken using my kit lens at 55mm and F5.6 hence the depth of field is so shallow on the magnified image with the tubes attached which also had a lot longer exposure in order to expose the image correctly.

For greater depth of field there are ways, not recommended by Canon I should add, you can change and lock the aperture of the lens before you add the extension tubes. This means if you're really desperate there's nothing stopping you getting a much better depth of field with these tubes at the expense of even longer exposure times of course.

For me, I think I shall experiment with these a little more. Should I catch the macro photography bug then I'll have to make a decision about whether to get a better set of extension tubes or even at some point treat myself to a proper macro lens. For now though, these will suffice quite nicely.

EDIT: My Amazon Review has now been published.

Upgrading Fedora 11 to 12

2009-12-30T14:37:00.002Z

After writing recently about my previous upgrade experience, it seems fair to report my latest upgrade experience going from F11 to F12 using pre-upgrade on the same machine at home.

Everything progressed very smoothly, even more so than last time as I'm pleased to report the bug I had written about is now fixed. Fedora now detects hardware raid devices and employs the correct work-around solution to ensure the upgrade proceeds unhindered. So far so good then and I thought I would be sailing through to another smooth upgrade. However, it appears even at Fedora 12 level there are still some small issues as it proved later in the upgrade process.

This time the upgrade was smooth right through to the end of the upgrade process, after all the packages had been installed. Just as the bootloader config was being adjusted I was presented with a rather user-unfriendly Python stack trace with an "unhandled exception" error. By switching to another console I was able to work out the upgrade had in fact completed successfully all except for the final adjustments to the grub menu and removing the pre-upgrade cache. I reported this behaviour in a new Red Hat bugzilla bug report and have been informed this bug has already been fixed upstream in Fedora development and should not occur in pre-upgrade F12 to F13, lets wait and see.

So it seems the pre-upgrade path for slightly more complicated configurations such as the one I have at home is finally starting to look good. I'm slightly disappointed it's still not quite there yet though but all things considered this was another smooth upgrade and one which someone less informed about Linux might be successful.

Upgrading Fedora 10 to 11

2009-11-17T11:37:00.001Z

Writing on the day of the scheduled release of Fedora 12 it might seem strange to be talking about two previous versions. However, I thought I would take stock briefly looking over my shoulder before moving forward with the very latest and greatest.

I upgraded both my home machines shortly after F11 was eventually released in early June after I had been tweeting about it for some time. Aside from a small problem with my main machine at home, both upgrades progressed seamlessly with the Fedora pre-upgrade tool. I'm a bit more conservative with my main work laptop usually staying 3 months behind the latest release, after eventually finding time to upgrade I've been running F11 on my laptop very smoothly for over a month now.

The issue I had upgrading my home machine was related to the fact my boot partition is on a (hardware) RAID device. It appears there is a bug in pre-upgrade in this area which I found out after a rare question to the fedora forums. In my experience pre-upgrade is pretty decent these days but beware that it still has some pitfalls such as this!

After pre-upgrade finishes your box reboots, in this case taking you from your F10 desktop to F11. All in all I've noticed very little difference between the two versions which raises some interesting questions for me, basically summarised by "What's the point in upgrading?". Having noticed very little difference after the upgrade this may well be a question many less experienced users ask too. On F10 my laptop worked flawlessly, I had compatibility with all the apps I need, accelerated 3d graphics with RandR 1.2 support (for easily switching between display devices), printing and some of the more traditionally contentious Linux functionality worked perfectly, namely wireless and suspend. F11 was exactly the same after my first boot into the system, flawless.

So what, indeed, is the point in an upgrade such as this? For me, I like to stay near (but in the case of my main machine not on) the bleeding edge of development. The upgrade for me was all about getting a few little extras in the Kernel (namely support for hard disk parking which I've not yet played with, and better web cam support) as well as all the little feature additions and bug fixes you get with every library and app you use on your box. The main point though, and the clincher, is that the upgrade process SHOULD be this smooth; these things SHOULD happen without causing any new problems while fixing as many old problems as possible. I'm glad to say F10 to F11 did work like this, it was a breeze, Fedora are getting this right and long may it continue.

The Best Venn Diagram Ever

2009-07-22T21:08:00.001+01:00

A colleague and good friend has this venn diagram printed out at work. I've been looking at it for ages and currently see it every day, I think it's fab...

I often describe my work role as "Professional Geek" and I suppose this diagram gives that some context. We all aspire towards intelligence (well most of us anyway) but most of the people I work with have a slightly obsessive enthusiasm about their subject matter that places us firmly in geek territory.

I can think of people I would place in each of these categories and I bet you can too. Which one are you?

Light Box for Peanuts

2009-03-26T11:41:00.001Z

Haha I'm funny, err yes well... I really have built a light box for peanuts inspired a while ago by Nick's tent. Although I have used it to take a peanut (right) it's built out of nothing more than stuff I had in the house already.

Aside from making it for next to nothing, I also wanted to allow it collapse so I don't have to store a huge empty box when it's not in use. Here's how I went about it, you'll be needing:

For the box:
- 1 cardboard box (say about 12"x18" but that can vary depending on your use)
- 3 sheets of light diffuser (I used greaseproof paper, but tracing paper or white material will do nicely).
- Velcro (just a short length, say 6")
- A spine bar (long plastic paper binder thing)
- Sticky tape
Tools:
- Scissors
- Craft knife
Camera Kit:
- Camera and subject (D'uh)
- Tripod
- 2 or 3 lamps

Now it's time to get all Blue Peter...

Cut the box open at both ends. Seal one end back up again with a few little strips of velcro, leaving the other side open. I stuck packing tape onto the box first as the sticky velcro fixes better to that than cardboard. This will allow the finished box to collapse flat for storage. You should now have a box with a single opening so cut off any of the remaining flaps as you see fit, I just removed the top one and left the other three in place.

Cut three large holes, one on each side and one on the top, leaving a small border of about half an inch or so to fix to. Cut three sheets of your light diffuser about half an inch bigger than the holes in the box. Fix these over each hole with sticky tape.

I fixed a spine bar at the top back of the box. This will grip any sheets of paper/material you wish to use as a background to the photos you take in the box. So far though, as in the pictures above, I've found a simple sheet of white paper on the bottom has worked for the small objects I've taken (such as the peanut above). For best results, don't forget to white balance against your sheet of paper first.

Here's the velcro doing its job:

And the spine bar:

Canon EOS 450d Updates

2009-03-06T09:36:00.000Z

Further to my first post about my new camera and starter kit, I've just added a few more little bits to my starter collection. So here's what else I've got:

Card Reader (my Amazon review)
For years I've been using the older version of the reader I've just bought. They're both cheap as chips at under a fiver in spite of what price Amazon may have them up for now. However, the first worked so well and reliably I bought the new one. The difference? Simply that the new one reads SDHC where the old one didn't and I've just moved both my cameras onto SDHC now.

Blower
Not much to say here. Kept getting dusty/dirty lenses that I didn't want to wipe clean for fear of scratching. A blower appears to be the solution that works.

UV Filter (my Amazon review)
I already had one of these but got fed up of swapping between my two lenses so bought another. Sadly, they'd gone up in price quite a bit!

Remote Control (my Amazon review)
Probably the thing that spurred me on the most to order more stuff because I can't use 2 hands to take pictures right now. Also very useful for some ideas I have about getting close to some wild garden birds I'd like to capture.

This remote is made by a far Eastern company who have simply worked out how to interface to various makes of camera and put together their own set of controls. I would normally stick with Canon or other recognised makes but since this bit of kit has no bearing on the output of the camera I thought it worth a buy. Compared with a genuine Canon remote of the same price (the RC-1) it provides the same functionality but does it using a radio rather than an infra red link. This gives the advantages of using over much longer distances and without line of sight to the IR receiver on the camera. To get this capability from a Canon remote costs hundreds.

I've put more detail in my review on Amazon about this remote. However, in summary I would say you can tell it's cheap but it works well, not missed a click yet. It would probably work more effectively in the hands of a better photographer, but it does work.

BT i-Plate

2009-02-27T12:23:00.000Z

I discovered a new (but rather boring) gadget before Christmas reading through the Think Broadband news. The BT i-Plate could help speed up your ADSL connection so more recently I decided to grab one and try it out. It's marketed through BT Wholesale as a customer installable device so it's very simple to fit and costs less than a tenner to get it to your door. The cheapest I found was £9.29 inc delivery from Broadand Buyer.

Any potential speed improvement results from reducing interference and improving stability at your master phone socket. The improvement seen by some people are staggering so worth a go I thought. The two pictures show before (left) and after (right) fitting. To fit you simply 1) remove the phone cord; 2) unscrew your master socket face plate and remove; 3) slot the i-Plate over the wire to the face plate; 4) plug the i-Plate into the master socket; 5) attach the face plate to the i-Plate and screw in. The socket now stands out from the wall about 1cm or so further than it did. Even with my right hand injured as it is, I managed to complete the installation quickly with one hand.

I did the installation a few days ago (Tuesday) so I've given it some time before comparing results before/after to allow my line speed to be adjusted (this is done automatically on all ADSL lines to keep your speed optimal for current conditions). So the big question is what has it done for me?

Before installation my ADSL router was connected at 5024kbps down and 448kbps up. This gave me an average download speed of 4352kbps and upload speed of 375kbps as measured by speedtest.net. Immediately after installation my connection speed had increased to 6016kbps up and 448kbps down, surprising. However, my download speed hardly changed at all. Today my router is connecting at 7008kbps and download speeds are around the 5200kbps mark using the same benchmark. It seems clear then, I've seen some improvement of around a 20% boost for downloads and hopefully a little more to come as my line stabilises with a little more time. Upload speeds remain the same as before on my "up to 8mbps/second" line, my current ISP is PlusNet.

Dear Wonky BT

2009-02-24T19:51:00.005Z

Dear British Telecom, please when you send an engineer to my house to install a second line would you ask them to take as much care over presentation as getting the line working. Thanks, yours very wonkily!

This week we've had another phone line installed at home for reasons beyond comprehension. The young engineer was very concerned to take care to get things working as well as possible. However, he was only permitted to surface mount. That means any sockets or cables have to unsightly on the walls, not hidden or nicely recessed. Strange, as the first socket (on the left and also not straight) installed in our house before we moved in was recessed. I can live with that restriction perhaps, but is it unreasonable to expect better care over the position of the socket? I don't expect all engineers to be armed with a spirit level but this is just so clearly off level it's ridiculous.

Canon EOS 450d

2009-01-25T15:52:00.016Z

I've recently had the dubious pleasure of turning 30 and having been considering investing in an SLR camera for quite some time decided this was the excuse I needed to splash out a bit. Amazon wish lists come in very handy, I just picked the stuff I wanted and saved to a list so people could just buy from that. My whole family were all very generous and all chipped in to get the following bits and pieces that now make up my starter SLR kit:

This is my first venture into the world of SLR so I'll spare trying to do a full review and leave that to the pros. If you're interested, you can see the specs over at Canon and three pro reviews from sites I would recommend are Camera Labs, DP Review, and Steve's Digicams.

It was never really going to be much of a contest for me as to which brand and camera to go for since I've been using Canon compacts for years. When the 450d came out it immediately caught my attention as a very decent starter SLR and had the much reviewed live view feature that being a regular digital compact user I would expect to see. Now I've been using it for a while though I find I hardly rely on live view at all instead preferring the view finder. For me this actually feels quite retro - how often do you see a compact user with the camera up to their eye? This has a lot to do with the view finder in an SLR being far superior to those on compacts but also the live view is a lot clunkier to use. Using the SLR has made me realise just how fantastic and how much is packed into a decent compact camera like my current Canon A650 IS.

At the moment the starter kit I've got is fairly minimal but does provide the flexibility to take a lot of different shots while I learn how to handle and get the best results from the camera. I'm using the UV filter as a lens protector for the kit lens with the polariser on the long lens mostly. They're not much of a pain to swap, however, I think I'll end up getting a second UV filter for the long lens and swap in the polariser as required. The SD card is great, the Extreme III series have given me no problems in this or other cameras, would certainly recommend. The bags too are great, cheaper and more flexible than the Canon supplied bags and having a larger and smaller bag offers some good flexibility.

I'd welcome comments on other accessories I could get in the future. On my immediate list will be that second UV filter, a lens blower and cleaner, a remote shutter release and a light box (probably to be home made). Longer term I will consider other lenses, speedlights, a tripod upgrade, and possibly a spare battery although battery life is good on the 450d.

You can see my various attempts wit he 450d over on my Flickr pages.

Eco-Wool Loft Insulation

2009-01-20T20:56:00.002Z

So now I'm cold, the reason being I've just been in our loft to take the most boring picture (right). But cold is good, right? That means my loft insulation must be working quite well on this cold winters evening. After my previous eco-minded post about our new LED light I thought I'd put up some info about another of our recent projects at home, insulating the loft.

It's a pretty simple job if somewhat cramped, dark and grim. It's well worth doing though as we can testify to having a warm house, cold loft, and doing well in the "who's roof melts the frost first" competition in our street. Loft insulation is supposed to be about the best bang-for-your-buck thing to do in terms of home efficiency; I've definitely noticed our radiators coming on a lot less. We're now up to a whopping 300mm insulation so well above the rafters and above what I still think is the recommended minimum of 250mm.

The real reason behind this post though is to say be careful when choosing what product you use. Don't just go to the local hardware store and buy the bulk standard "space blanket". Grand though it may sound those products are said to cause quite a lot of harm during manufacture. I've fitted Eco Wool (terrible web site, decent product) which is available in the UK through B&Q. While not the most ecological product ever (it uses 15% polyester for binding) it does use recycled plastic for the most part. It's very thick and has pretty good insulating properties, cheap and is easy to get hold of.

Unlike my post about our LED light I can't finish on any drawbacks with this one, there are none. Go insulate your loft, and think about what you lay first! Eco-warrior over and out.

LED Lighting

2009-01-18T19:41:00.001Z

We're having a little bit of work done on the house and as part of that I had to move the outside light by the front door. On further inspection I found the old light wasn't going to cut the mustard in the new location, it wasn't going to be waterproof for one, which is sort of important. So a great excuse as if any were needed to buy something new and funky!

The obvious choice to me was to look into whether LED lights are available for outside lighting. Imagine my surprise when I found it seems they're actually getting quite commonplace and we were able to nip down to our local DIY store and pick one up. For some reason I was expecting to hunt around Internet sites and order one. The pictures shows what we bought. It's a fairly small chrome effect affair with two plastic panels beyond which are mounted a total of 24 white LEDs, 12 of these are at the front and 12 to the rear.

It provides plenty of light, not massively bright and offensive like security lighting, but easily enough to see your way up the drive to the doorway. The best part of this, as with all LED lighting, is the power usage. My current cost meter doesn't budge when it's turned on, not even a sniff of a change in power usage. Assuming I've not wired it up to some free electric supply I'm not aware of, or accidentally stolen from our neighbours, I can only conclude all 24 LEDs are using less than one watt of power. It's my first LED installation at home and almost certainly wont be the last.

I hate to finish on a downer but there are drawbacks of course. The LEDs are not replaceable so if one dies, however unlikely, you have to put up with it looking silly or replace the entire light. The other is the colour of the light, we've all been brought up with tungsten lighting so the colour of LED light does take a little getting used to.

BBC iPlayer Coming to Linux

2009-01-12T15:40:00.003Z

As the BBC recently announced they have developed a version of iPlayer that works on Linux, Windows and Mac: "The BBC, working with Adobe, has developed the new version, known as BBC iPlayer Desktop."

In a similar way (and name) to Google Labs, the BBC have come up with iPlayer Labs where they will trial the latest beta features for iPlayer before full release to the masses. This brings an exciting addition to current iPlayer capabilities, the iPlayer Desktop. Written for the Adobe Air platform, it works across all the supported operating systems and desktops, bringing the benefits of Air to the BBC developers. I think this is a safe and sensible choice for the BBC and should provide great functionality for we end users along with the slick Adobe interface. The reason this is exciting for Linux users is the desktop version brings the download capability, so no more 2nd class citizen for Linux users as we can now download the higher quality versions of BBC programming. Thanks Beeb!

If you want to give it a try, go to the iPlayer Labs page, click the link to say you would like to be a labs tester, then next time you attempt to download a programme, you'll be prompted to download and install the Adobe Air iPlayer bundle first. After that, just use the iPlayer desktop app in the same way as your other Air apps.

Plusnet or Minusnet?

2009-01-09T15:35:00.004Z

After coming back from New York in September, I uploaded my pictures to my personal web site. Nothing unusual for me there, except this time I realised I was nearly hitting the space limit my ISP enforces for my web space. At the time I figured all would be fine so I set about contacting them for a space increase. Now given I've been a customer for many years and always used their premium services (to get better speeds, more usage allowance and no traffic shaping) and the fact disk space is cheap (especially when talking in terms of MB) I even thought they'd probably give me more space at no charge. I hold Plusnet in reasonably high regard, customer service is great, network speeds are OK and things just seem reliable and work well, on this occasion though I was wrong. The conversation between me and Plusnet follows:

Graham

Is it possible to increase my Web Space quota beyond 250MB?
My current usage is reported as 241MB, 96.4%. I use the web space primarily for my personal photographs which I resize to a small size and use JPEG compression so I'm not abusing the space. However, it seems after 8 years or so I'm now approaching 250MB.
Many thanks in advance for the information.

Plusnet

Dear Mr White,
I am afraid it is not possible to increase the webspace allowance on accounts at the present time.
Kind regards

Graham

That's really very unfortunate. Is there really no option to increase the 250MB quota, even if some charge were involved? I even pay a premium for the Your Way Pro service.
I'm a long-standing plusnet customer and one of the reasons I originally chose plusnet was for the web space and hosting of PHP+MySQL sites.
Are plusnet prepared to lose customers based on something this simple? If so, I'll have no choice but to re-evaluate my web hosting solution in which I will take into account my ADSL provider.
Hoping you can reconsider this decision or policy.
Thanks.

Plusnet

Dear Mr White,
Thank you for getting back to us. Unfortunately it is not possible to change the webspace allowance unless you were to move to our top business account. Our system does not allow us to add additional webspace and although we intend to offer this in the future we have no firm plans at present.
Kind regards

I find it hard to come to terms with the fact "their system" must be so terrible and essentially equate the response to the Little Brittain sketch "computer says no!".

This was all going on at the same time Roo was becoming frustrated with Plusnet as well. I can definitely sympathise with many of Roo's points and Plusnet have left me considering my options as well.

The reason I still maintain a web site is purely legacy. There once was a time when the likes of Flickr simply didn't exist and if you wanted to share photos on-line, you had to do it yourself. I'd quite happily move over to Flickr for hosting my pictures, it would be more convenient in a number of ways and sort of removes the need for hosting my own web site and therefore my tie to Plusnet.

It's got me thinking again recently, what services do I use/need and how much am I willing to pay for them. Currently my broadband is nearly £20 per month, with other providers I could get broadband, phone and television for that amount!!! Unfortunately, I don't live in an area catered for by cable services so I have to use ADSL broadband and non-cable phone/television.

If anybody has some good experiences or recommendations, do let me know as I start to look around now.

Edit #1
Since writing Plusnet have phoned me at home to discuss my requirements, another indication of their really excellent customer service. If I do decide to move away from them it will certainly be hard and with regret. Basically, I want something a bit cheaper with no speed restrictions and a sensible download limit if any. Plusnet offer only one service with no speed restrictions, the one I'm using already.
End Edit

Edit #2
As Roo pointed out in his post, Plusnet are using Twitter and search for people talking about Plusnet. They contacted me through Twitter to point out a relatively recent announcement about changes in their web hosting service which are currently under trial. Great stuff, weird how I only find this out through Twitter though, rather than through the formal methods of their helpdesk, through their community web site or by talking with them on the phone all of which I've done recently.
End Edit

Daily Electricity Bill

2008-11-26T13:11:00.002Z

Way back at the end of July I started looking into how to graph current cost data. I was looking at this from the point of view of putting the information together on a web page somewhere and potentially sending out useful information via e-mail to me and Beth on our power usage.

Recently I've been looking into this again and over the past couple of weeks we've been receiving a daily HTML formatted e-mail with an attached graph image that might look something like this:

This is a really handy reminder each day to try and be as green as possible but also to show us how we did on the previous day. The graph shows two lines, the red one showing the actual power usage in watts and a straight blue line showing our average usage for that day.

Also attached to the e-mail are the charges and a few summary statistics for the day. So on the example above you can see we averaged 240 watts throughout the day with our minimum usage recorded as 61 watts and maximum usage as 2359. The total usage doesn't mean very much without time associated with it, but I've listed it there all the same. The total can be used to work out the kWh reading for the day, total divided by 1440 minutes in the day (and points on the graph) divided by 60 minutes in an hour.

The costs are rather crudely calculated. We're charged for electricity on two levels, our first 225kWh per quarter are at a higher rate than any usage thereafter. For us, this averages out at around 10 pence per kWh cost so that rough average is used to calculate an estimate for the total cost in GBP.

This only a really simple way in which the current cost data can be used, Dale is way ahead of me on other applications for the data. I intend to extend the e-mail we're getting at the moment to integrate into a little web system we can use at home to log in and look through historic records of our usage and also produce other summaries such as weekly or quarterly usage. Also, the ability to add notes to each day will needed so when we look back over historic data we might have recorded what particular spikes in our usage are. All this is an effort to educate ourselves more in our power usage so we can change our behavior to be more efficient with it.

One A Day

2008-11-20T09:00:00.000Z

I'm taking part in a little Flickr group project at the moment to take and upload one picture a day for a month. The group is called A month in my life... and was the idea of Mirriam, an old school friend I've recently got back in touch with through Flickr.

It's a great idea, I bought a new camera earlier in the year and only really used it in anger when Beth and I were on holiday in New York. Having to take one picture a day is forcing me to get off my back-side and look for interesting things to picture. I'm also finding I'm looking at the world slightly differently, stopping to appreciate and think about light and colour a lot more. If I take a picture of a boring subject I'm thinking about how I can make it more interesting while taking the picture but also with a few trivial editing techniques.

I've been going for 7 days now and so far I think my favourite shot of the ones I've taken is this one:

I'd not heard of this one-a-day type idea before, but apparently people on Flickr commit to doing this for a whole year so it looks like I'm getting off lightly with just one month. There's plenty of interesting work going up in the group at the moment, with a lot more people about to start contributing through December. Should be exciting, I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with too.

Super Computing Project Ends

2008-11-17T20:35:00.002Z

Not blogged in a while, will spare the details/excuses but back in September I had the opportunity to get back into Super Computing for a one-off project. It's this that has kept me so busy throughout October and into November where I was really very well submerged into work for an extended period. Normally I like to keep balanced in my work-life balance. However, this project demanded a lot of time and attention and fortunately my wife, Beth, was away for a couple of weeks on business too so I really had the opportunity to get stuck in.

As I suspected (from much experience in the area) in my previous post there really was a lot of information missing at the beginning of the project. This is to be expected, the customer cannot be expected to know 100% what they want, they may not even know what is available, possible or on offer. To compound this, even the best sales team can't look into minute details when proposing a solution or making bid. So we had a productive kick-off meeting, made a lot of good decisions and recorded these to concrete the design details.

What happened next you can never be prepared for, but we've probably all experienced it. Yes, the iron fist of the bean counters barged their ugly way into the project. The previously neatly agreed deadlines and design proposals were lobbed into the air with such careless abandon it was almost humorous. The promise at the start of the project from my ex-manager that "this one would be different", and we "wouldn't have to work silly hours or cut corners" was about to be viciously broken into pieces. (Wow, I can sound like such a drama queen). Project deadlines were brought forward by give-or-take 50% simply to meet a financial deadline (of one of the parties involved not IBM I should add) way out of my control. When you're met with this kind of single-minded decision making as the technical leader of a project it's very frustrating but you know there is nothing more to be done except save time where you can and work your butt off. Anybody who knows me and my work will know I hate to deliver anything less than the very best solution I think is right. So I openly request to Mr Financial Man, whoever and wherever you are to listen to people, who like yourselves, are considered the expert in their area.

This was a Linux cluster, which for the uninitiated consists of a number of computers set up to be joined to work together on a single large problem that would take any one of them an unrealistic amount of time to compute. Using the example raised by OzBeefer on my last post, climate modelling algorithms are quite large and complex taking a single computer a long time to run, so loads of them need to work together in order to predict the weather in the future before it becomes the past! Fortunately, the design of this cluster wasn't rocket science and it was quite small. Things progressed very smoothly without any potential problems that might otherwise have occurred and with some very long working hours (read 12+ hours/day) the cluster was eventually delivered to the new schedule at the customer location.

Well I could ramble on about Linux, clustering, algorithms, networks, storage, optimisations and the projects I've worked on for hours yet, which gives me an idea... for those people reading this in the Hursley community answers on the back of a postcard, comment, e-mail or whatever if you think hearing my ramblings about this stuff might be vaguely interesting some time over lunch, tea/coffee, beers, etc?

Squeezebox Duet: My Impressions

2008-09-26T16:37:00.001+01:00

Having recently had my little whinge about setting up the SqueezeBox Duet it's about time I said something about the box itself. Both professional and user reviews around the web are pretty much universally glowing with praise for it and I have to say to a large extent I agree.

First of all, there's the hardware which is sleek looking with a glossy black finish. The hardware is in two parts (ignore the odd cable here and there), the SqueezeBox Receiver:

Which, while not belittling the technicality of it, is to the consumer essentially just a dumb receiver box. It takes an audio stream over either a wired or wireless Ethernet connection and spits it out through your stereo using a digital or analogue audio connection. Then there's the controller:

Which is an altogether more exciting piece of kit. It's a wifi-device that can talk directly to your wifi router or be bridged onto your wired network via the Receiver if you don't have wifi. It features a rather strangely arranged set of controls that become familiar after a little usage. There is a jog dial with selection button, then buttons for playback, volume, control of the playlist and navigation around the menus. As you can see, it's got a nice full colour LCD display too. This means you can wander around anywhere within wireless range, control your music and get feedback directly on the device on just about anything you might want to know.

Software wise, things also come in two parts (well three if you count the firmware on the receiver). There's the software on the controller and some software to run on your PC which is listed as optional but I would consider very much essential. Both of these parts are open source with decent plugin interfaces and documented APIs you can access.

The controller runs a customised embedded Linux distributions known as Squeeze OS which is responsible for running the user interface application on the controller called Squeeze Play. The nice thing about this is you can take the user interface part, Squeeze Play, and run it on your desktop too. While the controller software is open source and pluggable, I haven't found anybody having written any useful applets to run within Squeeze Play yet but it's still early days so hopefully those people producing screen savers will come up with some good ideas for applets. That said, I can have a bit of a hack around too to see how easy it is to program for and whether I can produce something useful too.

The open source server software is called Squeeze Center and should be run somewhere with access to your local music collection. It supports a huge number of formats including flac, ogg and mp3 of course. Squeeze Center is hugely flexible and configurable, mostly through a bunch of supplied plugins. It provides a web interface as well as access to other interfaces so it can also be used to control the music playing as well as being the configuration hub for the entire setup.

Out of the box Squeeze Center provides access to your local music collection via a number of sorting methods (such as by artist, album, song, genre, etc) as well as providing standard playlist functionality. It also allows you to listen to Internet radio through a number of free and paid for services such as shout cast streams, mp3tunes and last.fm (a last.fm scrobbler plugin is also included). It gives you a favourites menu so you can tag anything as a favourite and later get quick access to it through this menu. Last but not least there's the Extras which doesn't do a huge amount out of the box (this is where most 3rd party plugins are accessed) but it does give you access to podcasts - you can subscribe to RSS or OPML podcast feeds and have them streamed to your hi-fi, cool!

I like to use dynamic playlists and that's some functionality that doesn't get included by default so I've found some plugins that do that for me now. Being a UK resident I want access to the BBC audio content and some kind person has written a plugin to access all their content too, including Live Radio streams, listen again streams as well as BBC podcasts. The final plugin I'm finding useful at the moment is one that automatically adds tracks to my music collection when I copy them to my music directory using a groovy Linux kernel feature, Inotify, otherwise you have to rescan your collection manually after adding new tracks. The plugins I've installed are tagged in Delicious.

Overall, the system seems to work very well. It's great having the flexibility of having an entire music collection at your finger tips ready to play, no messing with things that spin any more, and having access to all the additional content over the Internet is another real bonus. The packaging and interface of the components are really nice and are only set to get better over time, particularly as they're open source. This means I can get my hands on extra code in the form of those useful plugins as well as writing my own. But it also means when Slim Devices get caught up in adding support for new products or bug fixing as they inevitably will, new functionality will always be progressing at least through the community. So now I've got everything fixed up in my config, listening to music at home is quite a cool experience, happy days!

Squeezebox Duet is alive at last

2008-09-22T09:43:00.000+01:00

Back in the middle of May I decided to set up my home stereo properly in our new house so I ordered a new stereo (an Onkyo CR-515) and decided to replace an old Thinkpad I used to store my digital music collection with a new device on the market from Slim Devices, the SqueezeBox Duet and a low-power PC as a media server.

Initially I wasn't able to set it up as I was experimenting with using a Linksys NSLU2 (or slug) as the media server. Unfortunately, this was vastly underpowered for the job so I had to re-think that part of my solution. In late June I had my new server so I looked out some pictures I took while unpacking and wrote my first post about the SqueezeBox Duet.

It's only now I'm able to write that I've successfully set up my complete solution as of the start of September. I've been having huge difficulties getting the box to stream audio properly with all sorts of symptoms. I'll spare the long description and cut to the solution, I changed my wireless router settings from its default channel 11 setting to channel 1 and everything sprung into life. During my 3 months of debugging to find this simple solution I contacted Slim Devices through various means, forums, chat channels, and official support. While the staff were extremely keen to help and reasonably responsive given the time difference between California and the UK, at no point did they give me any useful suggestions towards the successful solution. It was this that prompted me to think about the different types of open source. Now I can conclude that you're pretty much on your own with a SqueezeBox, but that's something I can live with quite easily, so now it's working I'm a happy bunny.

For future reference, next time I move house I'll do a scan of the local wireless networks much earlier and change my channel accordingly. I'm no wireless expert but then I'm no dummy either, so when I can communicate over my wireless network with several devices including more than one laptop, a Nintendo Wii and the SqueezeBox Duet Controller, I would suggest it's reasonable to expect the other half of the Duet (the Receiver) to work too. Not so apparently.

Turning my house off

2008-09-19T07:32:00.000+01:00

After talking recently about the stand-by power savers I've been messing with at home I've made another small investment in the Home Easy range. We now have a switch I've located downstairs we can use to turn one or more sockets off in the house. It's a small step I know, but this simple device will effectively become the on/off switch for our house. Currently, we're only using it to control one socket to switch off all the electrical gadgets in the living room such as the TV, DVD hard disk recorder, Wii, etc.

I like the idea of being able to turn your whole house on/off. So this switch has the potential to be extended should I make further investment into Home Easy kit. We could eventually have computer controlled devices all around the house to activate lighting or any electrical device. With one press of this button the whole lot would turn off in order to make power savings as we leave the house or overnight though. As well as saving some cash it gives you a great green feeling of energy saving too, safe in the knowledge that only the essentials are left on at home. For us right now, the essentials are the home server, network router, our fridge-freezer and currently a second freezer to store our surplus vegetables from the allotment. These typically use 130 watts as an average total which goes down from something like 170 watts I think when we turn off the stand-by switch.

I was hoping for a certain amount of traction and community to build up around the Home Easy range, being the first reasonably complete and affordable range of radio controlled devices in the UK. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. I have loads of little questions I would love to ask Home Easy, mostly about future products and their intentions. So far, it's been difficult to communicate with them or other users of the products. For example, their web site has a forum link with a few registered users on the forums, including some staff from Home Easy. In order to get access though, you have to e-mail one particular guy and wait for him to approve your access which isn't ideal. I e-mailed several months ago and I'm still awaiting my ID. Conclusion, the forum isn't very active and the community I was hoping for doesn't exist, yet.

Dipping my toe back into super computing

2008-09-17T13:07:00.000+01:00

I've been out of university and working in IT for a good few years now and held several different roles along the way. When I started work I was doing an internal support role after which I moved to my current department, Emerging Technologies, where I've held several roles including being an emerging tech specialist and working for IBM's Linux Integration Centre.

I've used the attention-grabbing title for the work I very much enjoy doing but due to certain circumstances thought I had left behind in my career. Super computing sounds very grand and conjures up all sorts of ideas along with other grand titles for the type of work I do such as Beowulf Clustering. The term I prefer, but can also be misleading, is High Performance Computing (HPC). There are all sorts of misconceptions about HPC but easily my favourite is when people pretend to joke, but expecting a serious answer ask something like “Wow, how many frames per second can you get on Quake with that?”.

The opportunity has come up for me to go back to this area for a one-off project, working with some of my ex-colleagues. I'm very much looking forward getting stuck in as the work is usually interesting and my old team are fantastic. As ever with these projects, there are an enormous number of unknown's at the start of the project. I already feel at home knowing the list of things we don't know yet – where the hardware is right now (delivery due soon), what the software stack will be, firmware levels, network layout and design, naming conventions, management and monitoring required, storage requirements, job scheduling, operating system, tweaks and configuration, etc. That's all part of the fun though, I get to work things out along the way and fill in the gaps for areas that, for no fault of their own, people just don't think about answering until implementation time. The kick-off meeting is due soon now so I'm looking forward to getting people to think about all the tiny details I'll need in order to supply our customer with the best suited system I can.

Ubiquity for Firefox

2008-08-28T13:48:00.001+01:00

Today I was introduced to a new Firefox extension called Ubiquity via the blog post from Mozilla labs. It's a completely different take on the user interface and usability of your web browser. This video explains better than I could...

It's only at version 0.1 right now and it's already amazing so I'm really looking forward to seeing new versions come out as it develops. I'm already a big fan and thoroughly recommend trying it out for something a bit different in your web browsing life!

When is open source not open source?

2008-08-26T14:42:00.002+01:00

I've been having a pretty major headache trying to get my SqueezeBox Duet to do media streaming ever since I bought it many months ago. The SqueezeBox is also the primary reason for buying a low power home server that I've been blogging plentifully about too. I'll save the post about my trials with the SqueezeBox itself for the day when I resolve the issue; either with a fix or by sending the darned thing back for a refund. However, it's got me thinking about some other things along the way while I've been trying to solve the various problems.

We're all familiar with open source. It can have a pretty simple definition i.e. where source code for a piece of software is made available publicly. Dealing with Slim Devices which are now a Logitech company has sparked thoughts about just how many different types of open source there are and when open source crosses the line to no longer feel like open source even if I can still download the source code.

I'm very used to working with what I think of as standard open source projects. These are the ones that generally started with one person writing something small to solve a problem they had or because they didn't like other versions of software trying to do the same thing. The more mature of these are generally run by a person or small group of individuals who control the project for the benefit of the community of users in a not-for-profit fashion. Numerous examples spring to mind, not least the Linux kernel itself, but huge amounts of different software some of which get grouped e.g. those from the Apache Foundation, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla; and those that stand alone e.g. Pidgin, X-Chat, Samba, rsync; to name just a few that pop into my head.

I think where I'm going with this post is to look at what happens when open source stops being not-for-profit and these projects tread the line between this standard type of open source project and become something else. This is where I've got to in my experience with SqueezeCenter, but clearly this isn't the first for-profit open source software. I have no idea what the first is/was but there are definitely some prominent examples out there such as MySQL. Slim Devices employ developers to write and maintain SqueezeCenter which is central (although billed as optional) to the hardware they sell. In their case, the software is free to use and completely open source, it's written in Perl. The way this model changes the community is quite interesting.

In my experience so far, instead of having lots of developers donating their time to the project to learn, fix, maintain and progress the code base, developers are paid to do this. In the case of SqueezeCenter this seems to cut down the community to just those developers paid to do so. Why would other people contribute to something for which they could be paid, or for which other people are paid? Plenty of people get paid to write code for the Linux kernel but in this and other examples there is a distributed interest for that code rather than the single point of interest of one company. In spite of the fact I don't feel compelled to contribute to SqueezeCenter directly though, I still take great comfort from knowing it's open source and I think that's where the benefit to Slim Devices comes from. If I did have a problem, I could fix it myself, maybe sending a patch or possibly maintain my own personal patch set if I got that deeply involved.

So how many types of open source are there and when does open source no longer feel like open source? A good philosophical point for debate for which I think there is no real answer. There are so many reasons for using the open source methodology that it can bring benefits in so many different ways whether you're a developer, employee, company or simply a user. Each open source project tends to have a different feel to it, in my experience so far this has generally been governed by those who run or contribute to the project. However, there are clearly some other factors that might determine what it feels like to be part of a project that releases its source code. I'm sure the reasons for these are as numerous as the benefits they bring.

Byebye Ubuntu, Hello Fedora

2008-08-12T08:41:00.002+01:00

My recent experiments with installing Ubuntu on my little home server came to an end this weekend. I'm working hard to debug problems with my media streamer software, SqueezeCenter. After finding tons of forum posts and various problems with installing SqueezeCenter on Hardy Heron I decided to try another approach so I'm now running Fedora 9 at home instead. Both Hardy and Fedora 9 are supposed to be supported by Slim Devices for their Squeeze-stuff. However, it appears neither of these work but I'll save that rant for another day once I've worked out what's wrong (I have my suspicions about Slim Devices testing against Perl 5.10).

I'm actually quite relieved to be back in my comfort zone with Fedora at home again. I really enjoyed the experience of playing with Ubuntu but it's just not for me for various reasons...

I've met quite a few Canonical guys in my professional role and they've all been great; helpful, very approachable and in the case of some, such as Jono Bacon very decent techies too. That's not my experience with non-Canonical Ubuntu contributors though. I found if the Ubuntu documentation (which is excellent for pretty much everything before Hardy Heron right now) failed me, then talking to the community was not a good experience. I found I was met with an abrupt RTFM attitude in most instances, where the assumption of the community is that people asking questions are dumb. Personally, I blame this on the typical Ubuntu user being non-technical where Linux is concerned so I guess the community receive lots of silly questions which must get annoying at times. All that said, I still believe Ubuntu is really important and plays an extremely valuable role in trying to bring Linux to a more mass audience.

I also found Hardy to be down level in various instances compared with the packages available in Fedora 9. The big one for me here, on my little server, is the OpenChrome drivers for the graphics chipset. Fedora have the version that supports my chipset, but when I asked about inclusion in Ubuntu there was no interest in updating the down level version in their repositories. I also enquired about the broken Via proprietary driver in Ubuntu which resulted in the Via driver being marked for removal! So rather than update the open drivers or fix the package for the proprietary drivers, the response was to remove the proprietary one and not update the open driver which left me in a position of manually maintaining my own graphics driver until the next major Ubuntu release.

I've used RPM and yum way more than I have deb and apt so I sway towards the former simply through familiarity. Having the chance to play with debs again recently has been great too, there's some nice additional touches you don't get with RPM such as the suggested packages and the ability to remove dependencies installed with a certain package, etc. Ubuntu have done a nice job of packaging this all up with Synaptic too. Aside from those few nice-to-haves I don't really see any other advantages to the Ubuntu system, yum and RPM would do exactly the same job when fronted by Synaptic but as ever in the world of open source having choice and competition is good.

Hiding root from the general user is a decent idea too, no need for that confusion in a simple desktop environment, and makes it feel a little closer to what people expect from a Windows box.

Gnome is the desktop of choice for both mainstream Ubuntu and for Fedora so I've been going with that recently instead of my usual choice of KDE. I've been really impressed with Gnome too, for a simple desktop environment it's fantastic but I know if I were to use it every day there would be some features and tools I use regularly under KDE that I would dearly miss. However, I think I've been converted for home use over to Gnome, particularly as KDE is going through turbulent times with their version 4 releases right now. Having everything written in one toolkit is really nice, you can't avoid running GTK and QT apps under KDE but at least under Gnome you have the option of not running QT and sticking with the same look and feel everywhere.

I hope I managed to stabalise on one distribution soon so SqueezeCenter actually works, I get the feeling that will likely be Fedora 8 in the short term until Slim Devices get their act together for Perl 5.10 if my current thoughts are correct. So for now at least it's goodbye to Ubuntu until the next time I give it a run somewhere.

Mobile Internet over Bluetooth Part 2

2008-08-08T10:17:00.000+01:00

Following on from configuring your mobile phone for Internet over bluetooth...

Once you have your device configured, the next thing you need is to connect over bluetooth to some machine to route your traffic for you. I have a laptop with built-in bluetooth and I'm running Redhat Enterprise Linux version 5. You need to configure and setup bluetooth, a ppp bluetooth daemon, and some simple routing to get your phone on the Internet. First off you need to pair your laptop with your phone, there's plenty of info on how to do this around the web and it's simple enough I'll assume you now have a GnuBox configured phone paired with your laptop.

First off you need to set up Internet Connection Sharing (in windows speak) or IP Masquerading (to anybody who know's what they're talking about), on Linux this is done with iptables. Insert the following rules:

iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

The last rule for the postrouting chain should point to the interface on your laptop where you have an outgoing Internet connection enabled. In my case this can be either eth0 (the first Ethernet device) or wlan0 (my wireless device, could also be ath0, eth1, etc), so I insert two rules to cover both devices, even though I only show one of these above.

Enable IP forwarding:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

With your bluetooth device turned on, and previously paired with your phone, now all you need to do is set up a ppp daemon listening for incoming bluetooth "serial" type connections. This can be done in a couple of easy commands, first to add the serial protocol to your bluetooth SDP server, then to set up the listening daemon:

sdptool add SP
dund -n --listen --msdun noauth 192.168.1.1:192.168.1.2 crtscts 115200 ms-dns lock

The second command will start a dun daemon on the command line that doesn't background itself so you can debug your connection if necssary. It will set up a point to point connection between your laptop and the bluetooth connecting device with IP addresses 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2, you can replace these with any addresses you like. It will also ensure the connection is operating at a sensible speed and you should provide a DNS server that will be passed to the device to resolve Internet server names - you can see this from the contents of your current /etc/resolv.conf file.

Start your web browser on your phone and tell it to connect using the Bt access point you have already configured. On the command line on your laptop you should see something similar to:

    Using interface ppp0
    Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/rfcomm1
    local  IP address 192.168.1.1
    remote IP address 192.168.1.2

This shows your phone and your laptop are now connected through a ppp serial type connection over bluetooth using the /dev/rfcomm1 device, your phone will have the IP address 192.168.1.2 and your laptop ppp0 device will have the ipaddress 192.168.1.1. Your phone should have 192.168.1.1 set as the gateway automatically by GnuBox and the DNS address will be passed when dund sets up the ppp connection as per your command line options. Once connected, you should be able to browse the web on your phone for free through your laptop!

As I said, I run Red Hat, which provides for several handy interfaces to help with the setup of Internet over bluetooth from my phone. Here are some further instructions specific, but not limited to, how I've done things on my machine so I everything happens neatly during boot and I don't need to run any commands to set up the connection...

You'll want your iptables rules in place when you boot, you can append rules to /etc/iptables.d/ to do this:
- Add the following lines to a file in /etc/iptables.d/filter/FORWARD/
  - -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -j ACCEPT
  - -A FORWARD -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
- Add the following lines to a file in /etc/iptables.d/nat/POSTROUTING/
  - -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
  - -A POSTROUTING -o ath0 -j MASQUERADE
Use sysctl to configure IP forwarding at boot time
- Add (or change) the following definition in /etc/sysctl.conf
  - net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
Register the serial protocol at boot time for your SDP server
- Add the following line to the start definition after SDP is started in /etc/init.d/bluetooth
  - sdptool add SP
Start the dund daemon at boot time with the correct configuration options
- chkconfig dund on (to start the service at boot time)
- Create a file called /etc/ppp/peers/dun with the following contents
  - noauth
  - 192.168.1.1:192.168.1.2
  - crtscts 115200
  - ms-dns
  - lock
- Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/dund so you have the following configuration
  - DUNDARGS='--listen --msdun call dun'

These settings should be enough that you can connect your phone to your laptop without having to modify any settings or start any services every time you boot. Once all the services are configured and started, and your phone is paired with the laptop, you will be able to connect to the phone's Bt access point to access the Internet any time you're in range of your laptop.

Mobile Internet over Bluetooth Part 1

2008-08-05T10:46:00.000+01:00

I'm one of these "mobile phones are for calls and texts" types, but last year I bought a new phone, shoved in my PAYG SIM, and set about working out how I could connect it to the Internet. I have a Nokia N73 so it doesn't do wifi but I still wanted to be able to synchronise to my Google Calendar. For me this doesn't involve using the Nokia tool set as they're all Windows based. I found out it's possible to do IP over bluetooth on the N73 so I got it going that way. This is great for cheap data connection, I can maintain a PAYG SIM and get as much data as I like for free, but obviously only when I'm in bluetooth range of my laptop. That's absolutely fine for something like calendar synchronisation, which is all I need.

What's sparked off this post is I've just got a new laptop and so I looked out my notes on how to do IP over bluetooth once again and have now got it going on my new machine too. For the benefit of anyone else who might want this type of setup, here's what I did for the phone (how to set up the data connection on the laptop will be coming in Part 2)...

My N73 runs Symbian S60 version 3. This type of phone has all the required software and hardware built in to do what I want. All you need to do is alter the communications database to set yourself up a bluetooth access point and you're done. The problem here is, the mobile network operators don't want this option exposed on your phone so you have to pay them for a data connection. With a little research you can discover third party open source apps to make the necessary modifications to your database to enable these options, I found and am using one called GnuBox.

GnuBox works nicely enough, but getting it going on S60v3 can be tricky. The developer makes the app available for S60v2, hence it doesn't need to be signed in order to access the features locked down on your S60v3 phone. GnuBox requires write access to your comms DB which requires the app to be signed on S60v3, you can't download a signed version, so we're into the realms of self-signing in order to get this working on S60v3. So for S60v3 you need to get hold of a tweaked version of GnuBox, sign it for your phone, install and configure.

Grab the S60v3 version (search for gnubox_s60v3.sis) which must then be signed for your phone (since writing the instructions below, it's become possible to sign symbian apps online at symbiansigned.com):

sign up for an ID at http://symbiansigned.com
download their certificate request application
- sadly this is a windows only app, but find yourself a windows box and install+start the app
- Select an output file for your *.csr file (say gnubox.csr)
- If you don't have an ACS pub ID, select No. Then select your key output filename *.key (say gnubox.key) and pick a password
- Fill out the personal info and your IMEI number, find your IMEI by typing *#06# on your phone
- Add all the capabilities to your certificate request, from the left box to the right
- Log into symbiansigned.com, click the "My Symbian Signed" tab and upload your gnubox.csr file.
- You will automatically be taken to the dev cert page. You can download your certificate file (*.cer) to your machine.
now you need the signsis files package to sign your app for your phone with your developer certificate
- run the signsis program, signsis.exe -o -s -v gnubox.sis gnuboxs.sis gnubox.cer gnubox.key [ENTER]
- This will use your certificate file and key to sign the gnubox.sis file and output gnuboxs.sis for your phone.
- You can copy gnuboxs.sis to your phone and install it. You will get a warning about it being signed with a developer certificate!

You now have the software in place to configure Internet over bluetooth on your phone, so lets do just that:

On the phone go to, Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Access points, to set up a new access point
- Options -> New acces point -> use default settings
- Name the access point, Bt, GnuBox uses this name internally so make sure it is called Bt case sensitive (it stands for bluetooth, duh!).
- Change the data bearer to "Data call"
- Set any old dial up number, say 321, this is not at important as it will be nulled by GnuBox later anyway
- Set a username/password combination with prompt password set to No. Say abc/xyz for username/password, also not important.
- You should be able to leave the rest of the settings, including, options -> advanced settings, alone!
Now start GnuBox, it's installed and located in your applications folder.
- The phone number you just entered is printed on the screen, but the ModemBearer should still show nothing
- Go to Options -> Install -> Create records
- Exit GnuBox with Options -> Exit
- Start GnuBox again, the ModemBearer should now be set (the exit of GnuBox was just a sanity check to show you this)
- Select Install -> Set RAS login script
- Then select 2box bluetooth -> Serial Port, which will tell GnuBox to set a point to point connection between 2 machines when you "dial" your Bt connection later

Thats it, you now have Internet over Bluetooth capability on your phone. The next step is to connect to another machine to act as your router to the Internet, but that's for my next post.

What Ubuntu Thinks of a TinyTuxbox

2008-08-01T09:46:00.001+01:00

I've been meaning to log some, I think I'll call it... Linux type stuff, to do with the TinyTuxbox for a while. Here's my attempt to look at what Ubuntu makes of this little box.

First, the CPU (from /proc/cpuinfo):

processor : 0
vendor_id : CentaurHauls
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : VIA Eden Processor 500MHz
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 498.706
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge cmov pat clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 tm nx up pni est tm2 xtpr rng rng_en ace ace_en ace2 ace2_en phe phe_en pmm pmm_en
bogomips : 998.77
clflush size : 64

The interestingness here comes from the fact we have a 500MHz Via Eden with 128k cache and just under 1000 bogomips which (although it shouldn't be) is often used as a trivial performance metric of a processor. Next, lets have a look at what's on the PCI bus (courtesy of lspci):

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge (rev 03)
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:08.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2 IDE
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 90)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 PCI to ISA Bridge
00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Internal Module Bus
00:13.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2 UniChrome PRO II Graphics (rev 03)
02:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA High Definition Audio Controller (rev 10)

Highlights here come from the Realtek Ethernet which is well catered for out of the box by pretty much any major Linux these days. There are also two IDE controllers, USB controllers and an audio controller that are all well supported. It's interesting that most of the PCI devices are provided by the single CX700M2 chipset which I believe is built onto the processor board for the Via Eden's. The one thing from this list that has been a pain in the back side is the graphics controller. It works out of the box both in frame buffer mode and via the open source via unichrome driver called Openchrome. However, Openchrome don't support the CX700M2 board yet (not officially anyway, the code is still in SVN according to the guys I spoke to on their IRC channel) so graphics processing was eating lots of CPU. Fortunately, I found a link to later via drivers at linux.via.com.tw than are available through the official Via driver site where they're still only supporting Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10. Seems I'm caught in the middle for now, the Via drivers work nicely but will be a pain to maintain until the Openchrome drivers find their way into Ubuntu and I switch back over to them.

Then there's the memory. For a small box this one has a relatively generous helping of 512MB RAM, some of which is stolen by the CX700M2 for graphical shared memory. Free is currently showing 439MB total memory, 390MB used and 49MB available; swap is 100% free. That's not bad at all considering I'm running Xorg with Gnome, SSH, SqueezeCenter, 2 instances of MySQL (SqueezeCenter starts its own instance), and a Nanobroker with some Perl code to log my Current Cost data. It'll be running Apache soon too as I move towards writing some more web based Current Cost facilities.

Just in case anyone is interested, here's the list of modules currently loaded into Ubuntu's 2.6.24-19-generic kernel:

drm af_packet ipv6 cpufreq_powersave cpufreq_conservative cpufreq_ondemand cpufreq_stats freq_table cpufreq_userspace sbs container sbshc video output dock battery iptable_filter ip_tables x_tables ac parport_pc lp parport loop snd_hda_intel snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm snd_page_alloc snd_hwdep snd_seq_dummy snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi snd_rawmidi snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_timer snd_seq_device snd soundcore serio_raw evdev psmouse pl2303 usbserial pcspkr button i2c_viapro i2c_core shpchp pci_hotplug via_agp agpgart ext3 jbd mbcache sg sd_mod pata_acpi pata_via ata_generic 8139cp ehci_hcd uhci_hcd libata usbcore 8139too mii scsi_mod thermal processor fan fbcon tileblit font bitblit softcursor fuse

I'll spare the full dmidecode output but from this information I can determine it has an AMI Bios version 8.14 released on 03/28/2008. The CPU is listed with, amusingly, Family "out of spec" and 128K L1 parity cache and 128K L2 ECC cache. A single soldered 512MB Dimm.

I'm still surprised at just how well it matches up to being a standard x86 box, providing all the interfaces you would expect of such a box given its size. Clearly it's never going to be the fastest or have the most memory, but it really does stack up nicely for all but the most intense home serving tasks or gaming. It certainly shows me we can fill most of our computing needs with such a small box and only 8 watts of power. Ubuntu seems no problem for it and it's reported to run Windows XP too. I'll definitely be bearing it in mind next time someone asks me to recommend a box simply for browsing the web, e-mail or a bit of word processing!

<Edit>
Memtest86+ shows the processor as a Via C3 Samuel 2 clocked at 498.7MHz, 128K L1 cache @ 2035MB/s, it doesn't detect L2 cache, and shows 447MB RAM @ 367MB/s.
</Edit>

Graphing Current Cost

2008-07-29T15:59:00.005+01:00

After hooking up my Current Cost Meter to a database recently I've been logging my power usage so the next step is to look at what I can do with the data. As I mentioned when I introduced my meter lots of other people have been looking into this as well.

I like Dale's idea for creating a daily energy bill so I've decided to aim towards that but include a graph of the days usage and possibly a link to a web page where I can look at more details of that days use.

With the web page idea in mind I decided to look into what I could do graph wise in PHP since that's my web language of choice. After looking through a few options I plumped for the obvious library, that of PHP Image Graph as it's part of PEAR so should be fairly decent, complete, well used and flexible. Here's where I'm at so far:
That's just a small snipped of 1 days power usage when I was cooking dinner. You can see I turned on my steamer (approx 800 watts) at about 5:30pm then went on to turn on the oven which heated up then cut in and out while it was cooking before I turned it and the steamer off just before 6pm.

As you can see, I'm pretty much there with the graphing side of things. The only issue left is to sort out the X axis. While it might appear to be a bit crazy, the current cost meter only samples approximately every 6 seconds. Because of the different number of samples in each hour and with a few rounding errors, the X axis appears not to be linear. Hopefully, I'll solve this by ensuring a consistent number of samples in each time slot.

Overall, PHP Image Graph seems very powerful. You can graph pretty much anything with it in all sorts of formats and have relatively complete control over the way the graph looks. I'm not at all artistic so mine looks very plane! There is, however, a reasonable barrier to entry. Documentation for the API is relatively complete if you know where to start, but documentation in general seems really rather thin on the ground and very sketchy. But, thankfully someone produced a great set of demos for a PHP conference that really show off a lot of the features. The source is available too so it's easier to work out what to do with your own graphing and how to get started. I'll probably blog my source code at some point, it's not very long, but definitely requires some tidying before it's ready for a public outing.

What I want to do next is take the graph and produce some sort of daily "bill" e-mail. That will have a link back to a private area on my web site that would allow closer inspection of certain areas of the graph. This is just the next step in education for how to save electricity by learning how much different combinations of devices use together. For example, is it better to steam fish in a steamer, grill, oven cook, etc. Hopefully, I'll be able to apply those sorts of questions all around the house to work out how to be as green as possible.

Next Generation Linux

2008-07-23T19:51:00.000+01:00

The folk following me on Twitter are probably sick of hearing about identity management, the main stay of my work this year. So I was glad to get out of the office last week to present at an IBM conference in London called "Next Generation Linux". A thank you note I received reminded me I should blog about it, always nice to receive those! Next Generation Linux is an event IBM are running in various worldwide locations this year looking at what comes next for Linux for businesses.

Being a Linux geek working in a software services organisation called Emerging Technology Services and with my contacts I like to think I was the natural choice for the pitch titled "Emerging Linux Technologies". I only had a short amount of time to present a vast field of topics so I narrowed it down to just five topics compelling for business and talked about the following:

Virtualisation
OK, not strictly an emerging technology as many businesses have already adopted it. But, it was a good opener setting the scene for some of my other topics and allowed the opportunity for me to briefly run through a few virtualisation technologies for Linux.
Cloud Computing
An exciting name and concept for what is essentially some very well thought out system administration. This technology has always been feasible but it's being made possible now with commodity hardware capable of remote management and some neat software ideas holding it all together. The really novel thing is the way applications can be deployed to run in the cloud environment and the fact we can actually package this up as a solution now. It's the realisation of "On Demand" computing.
Project Big Green
Green computing is becoming much more of a concern as business starts to run out of room in data centers, power requirements head skywards and running costs steadily increase. Last year IBM announced a re-investment of $1 billion into research towards green computing which gives business the opportunity to cut running costs and jump on the green band wagon at the same time. Green computing is essentially about consolidation of services, allowing spare compute power to be utilised elsewhere, and making sure equipment is environmentally produced and disposed of. It's those three words we hear in all good green campaigns, reduce-reuse-recycle, do it!
Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux)
One of my specialisms and a topic I could ramble on about for a long time, I'll try to keep it brief. In this short pitch I indicated security is still an issue in 2008 and it can cost you big time if your security is breached. Enter SELinux, an overview of what SELinux is and where it comes from and a comparison with other technologies such as AppArmour is a good start. To get to the crunch of SELinux though, I explain the differences between Discretionary Access Control (DAC) and Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and the ultimate advantages SELinux brings for security.
Real Time Linux
Real time really is an emerging area with both of IBMs current Linux partners, Red Hat and SUSE, bringing out offerings recently. Real time is built from the hardware up through the OS and in the case of hard real time into the applications too. IBM have certified some particular System X hardware to be real time capable and provide firmware and support for this now. Next comes the Linux piece where some of the firmware functionality removed from hardware must now be implemented in the kernel, there's loads of ways of doing this but to get support for it SUSE and Red Hat take care of that. IBM have also built some enhancements to Java, by introducing a modified garbage collector (Metronome) and providing ahead of time (AOT) compilation while complying with RTSJ, all of which add up to the ability to write real time Java apps - interesting! Now we can offer a full real time system on non-specialised hardware, using a commercially available operating system and a language loads of people can program, backed by IBM through Websphere Real Time. Boy that sounds like an advert, sorry about that, but it is a great idea, very cool!

This is all very much in brief, if you want to know more then get in touch or leave a comment.

Current Cost Monitor

2008-07-22T19:56:00.010+01:00

A couple of guys at work have managed to lay their hands on a funky new device called a Current Cost meter. It's pretty simple to understand, it measures your household electricity usage and displays it on the screen (left). To do this it comes in two parts, you hook a plastic loop around the live feed going into your fuse box (mine is in the garage) which is connected to some electrical wizardry I don't understand to measure the current without interfering with the wire, and a wireless transmitter device to send the data to the unit you just plug in somewhere in your house.

I jumped at the chance to get one of these things and was one of the first batch to get them at work and a little community of current cost users has built up pretty quickly. That said, pretty much everyone else has beaten me to blogging about it with some very cool results. So here's the list (that I know of) right now, in no particular order we have...

As an aside, Dale's just joined my department at work (horay), and Roo is leaving IBM (boo and much sobbing).

There's lots of other people looking into these things too, but those are just the blogs I know about. This type of device isn't exactly new, but what makes this one exciting is the data port and connectivity to a computer. With such a community there's been some cool work done such as graph power usage and send yourself a daily electricity bill. The device itself can't really save you money and definitely doesn't save energy (you have to plug it in) but what it does do a great job of is educating you about exactly what all your household devices like to eat for breakfast.

I'm just starting out at home having had the screen in the kitchen for a couple of months already with looking at what I can do with it while connected to a computer. I'm now logging all the data to a database so I guess one of the first things I'll be doing is graphing my own data. From that I hope to learn even more about what my house does with its power. For now though, the only graph I have (above) is that produced by sending my data via a Nanobroker to Andy Standford-Clark's server. This should hopefully be another fruitful little project for my new (and now you know why it's low power) home server.

Installing Ubuntu On A TinyTuxbox

2008-07-17T16:17:00.004+01:00

With my new toy now in hand the time soon came to get it installed with Linux. At first glance it might appear to be tricky to install given the lack of CD or Floppy drives. However, it boots from just about anything you attach to it whether that's USB, Compact Flash or Network Boot. Setting up a one-time PXE server seemed a little over the top so I was planning to boot from a USB stick until I found someone at work with a USB CDROM.

Usually I like to run Fedora at home, it's the thing I'm most comfortable with having spent my career tinkering with Red Hat and SUSE based distributions so one of the things I wanted to do with this box was install the much hyped Ubuntu distribution. This wasn't to see what all the fuss is about (I'm familiar with Ubuntu having tried it a couple of times before but always gone back to Fedora) but really just so I can get to know it even better. This machine is going to be part desktop and part server so Ubuntu kind of makes sense too.

I installed the hard disk into the box myself and once I got over some initial hardware niggles (that I caused I should add) the installation was simple. Boot from USB CDROM with the Hardy Heron CD in it and the rest is history. It's amazing how such a small box can run a full whack desktop operating system and do all that on just 8 watts.

In these early days, I have three things in mind for the box. The primary use will be to serve my music collection to my stereo; next is to connect my current cost meter to allow some more in-depth analysis of our power usage at home; then there's simply using it as a desktop for the simpler day-to-day computer usage i.e. browsing the web.

Setting up the music streaming was pretty easy after transferring my collection to the hard disk. I added the apt sources for the SqueezeCenter software that operates with my SqueezeBox Duet, did an apt-get update and an apt-get install squeezecenter and job done. The TinyTuxbox can much better cope with running the MySQL server this is based on along with the web front end and the music collection scanning services associated with the software than the SLUG I tried previously. All in all, couldn't have been much easier.

I've not tried hooking up my current cost meter yet, ironically I've run out of power sockets near the computer with only a six-way adapter and plugs for the PC, TinyTuxbox, Printer, Monitor, ADSL Modem Router, and speakers although it shouldn't be a hard problem to rectify.

Last of all, one of the additional benefits of this low-power box is every day usage. It can easily run a web browser so instead of starting up a large PC just for this, we can switch to the TinyTuxbox desktop and browse there. This should add to our power saving, even though it's likely the TinyTuxbox will be run all the time soon to serve the current cost data. That reminds me, I really should discuss batch-uploading of current cost data so I can save even the 8 watts the TinyTuxbox uses most of the time too.

Introducing the TinyTuxbox

2008-07-13T17:47:00.004+01:00

My second choice of home media server arrived on my doorstep last week after my unwillingness to maintain the painfully slow and awkward slug. This time around I've plumped for a TinyTuxbox Series 8 which seems to be a UK resold version of the e-Box 4300. It fits the extra requirements I made after parting with the SLUG, that is it's an x86 based machine and has lots more memory. I'm not the only one at work with one of these types of boxes either, James Taylor has the Netvoyager re-badged version of the previous box to my one, the e-Box 2300.

It is, in fact, a fully functional x86 PC but just a really small one, even smaller than the pretty tiny Fit-PC which I was also seriously considering and probably would have gone for were it not for the excellent pre-sales support of one of the TinyTuxbox staff over e-mail. That said, the excellent pre-sales was balanced with painfully slow delivery. It took 28 days to get it to my door which for a delivery cost of nearly £20 I consider poor. I've been left with a upward feeling though, post-sales support has been promising too as I initially had some problems installing the box, which it turned out were my fault and I solved quickly enough anyway. I'm not going to talk software here though, that's a story for another day. So how does my TinyTuxbox look and spec up....?

The workhorse of the TinyTuxbox is the 500MHz Via Eden ULV processor which provides a 32-bit x86 processor along with a built-in graphics processor with hardware MPEG decoding. The processor is an impressive bit of kit, it runs all that from just 1 watt of power, see the link for the full specs! Away from the processor we have 512MB RAM (some of which is shared for the video output), on-board Ethernet, 3 USB ports, VGA output, a PS/2 connector (supplied with PS/2 Y-Splitter cable to connect both keyboard and mouse), a compact flash slot, sound in and out, power button, and hard disk and power LEDs. The box is also fitted with an IDE connector and can house a 2½" laptop type hard disk in it. I ordered it without the hard disk and fitted my own as the supplied ones were not good value for money probably due to the services incurred from the fitting itself.

The TinyTuxbox site advertises the unit as consuming a maximum of 8 watts and I'm pleased to report that was absolutely accurate. According to my current cost meter, it uses 8 watts with the hard disk spinning so once I get it to spin down on idle it should use very little juice. Click the various images for a link to my Flickr page and some more notes.

Introducing Home Easy

2008-07-11T07:32:00.004+01:00

One of the things I've been giving consideration to while choosing my media server is home automation. I don't want to go crazy about it and have everything in the house hooked up to a computer so curtains open when alarm clocks go off, or alarm clocks go off earlier if it's freezing outside (to give more time to scrape ice), etc. I'm more interested in a few subtle things to help be more green at home, and possibly to help with security, anything I can get that adds convenience is a bonus but not necessary for me.

The first simple step I've taken along this road is to get some stand-by power savers that are getting ever more popular these days. The one I went for was the introductory pack from the Home Easy range which are manufactured by Byron and retailed exclusively through B&Q.

The pack gives you three radio controlled sockets into which you can plug your devices at home, and a remote control to turn on/off the sockets. So, by plugging in my TV, DVD, Wii, and other devices to one of these via their 4-way extension lead I can turn off a whole bunch of stand-by with the click of a remote control button anywhere in the house.

The Home Easy range is relatively complete for a UK home automation solution not based on X10. The kit is reasonably priced too with the 3 sockets and remote costing £20, unlike X10 end points. One of the reasons for choosing Home Easy over another popular standy-by saver is that the range is more complete, but also the protocol is well known so third parties are starting to produce devices compatible with Home Easy too. For example, rfxcom have certified their transceiver to work with Home Easy so it's now possible to computer control Home Easy devices - nice!

The next tentative steps I'll be looking to take on this road are having a home on/off switch. It's annoying having a single remote control, it's small, you have to find it, and it might be upstairs/downstairs and probably not where you are. I want to take advantage of the home easy grouping facility to have a switch that basically turns my house on or off. We should be able to leave the house (or go to bed) and turn all the stuff we're not using off, and turn back on again when we get home (or wake up).

Just this one purchase can save me anywhere between 20 and 50 watts in stand-by power. At 10 pence per kilowatt hour (typical rate) I'll get my £20 back with just 6 months usage. So it's green and saves you some dosh too, bonus!

Squeezebox Duet: What's in the box?

2008-06-27T11:17:00.003+01:00

I've had my Squeezebox Duet at home for quite some time now, since I was experimenting with using a slug as a home media server. I've been waiting for my replacement for the slug for some time now and it's still not arrived so the home media server project has stalled somewhat at the moment. However, I do still have the Squeezebox set up and even though I'm not really using it right now here's what you get in the box when you buy one...

The packaging feels very nice indeed, as it should along with the rest of the stuff in the box given the price if I'm honest. Once you slide the box out of it's card sleeve you're faced with a rather sleek minimal looking flip top black box:

The next thing is to flip that lid up and you see a very neatly laid out set of Squeezebox gear which I've positioned after a little unpacking:

So in the box we have a whole array of different stuff. There is, of course, the squeezebox remote and the receiver boxes, these are powered via some reasonably small AC-DC transformers which have changeable plugs. Plugs are supplied for European, US and UK sockets so you don't have to worry about getting a localised unit for your area which is a neat trick. The remote control has a charging stand so you can return it to its cradle when you're finished using it and it will stay charged all the time. You also get a set of reasonable length RCA leads to connect the receiver to your amplifier. Last, you get a fairly minimal manual which I've hardly used as all the best documentation is on-line:

Setting up really is very trivial, it's just a case of connecting all the wires, so power to the receiver and the remote charging stand, and a connection from the receiver to the amplifier. Once you've done this, just permit access by the two wireless devices (the receiver and the remote are both wi-fi) to your access point. Both devices DHCP and you're up and running with a squeezebox duet, nice and simple. This does, however, only get you Internet provided services if you want to get the full benefit of streaming your own music collection you need the Squeeze Centre software too, and hence I'm still waiting for my media server to be delivered before I get full functionality from my Squeezebox.

New Thinkpad T61p

2008-06-18T10:05:00.003+01:00

Gutted! A couple of weeks ago now I had a bad Friday, the train home from London where I'd been working with a customer all day was stupidly late and I had to change twice instead of going directly home. Then I get home and fire up my laptop to send the e-mail's I'd written during the day and the darned thing didn't work, argh! Seems in spite of working all day, my T41p had died on the trip home. After reporting the problem at work the following Monday it was decided the T41p needed a new motherboard and this wasn't economical to fix, so I was issued with a shiny new T61p a few days later.

I've been pleasantly surprised by my new laptop, I wasn't expecting great things since IBM sold the Thinkpad business to Lenovo but this thing is actually quite nice. I'll spare listing the full gory details to the technical specifications page. However, it has some nice additions over my previous laptop, namely built-in firewire (not that I'm likely to use it), built-in SD card reader (used that already), an extra USB port (always handy), a DVD writer, a hardware wireless off switch (presumably for use in planes), an enormous hard disk (compared to the T41p anyway), and a lovely 15.4" widescreen capable of 1920x1200 backed by a 256MB NVidia graphics card.

Unfortunately, it came pre-installed with Vista so that (along with the stupid Vista sticker next to the keyboard) were the first things to go. I've installed Redhat Enterprise Workstation 5.2 on it which may sound like an odd choice, but IBM have a layer of software designed to sit on top of Redhat to enable us to install things like Lotus Notes, Sametime, etc. This is known as the Open Client internally and works really nicely. Clearly, there are later and greater distributions I could use but on this issue I like to support IBM and the internal community of Linux desktop users so I choose to go with the officially provided solution.

I've been up and running for a week now with no problems so far, I've been able to do all the things I could do with my old laptop and all the things I need to be able to do in order to do my job. Of course, I make some modifications to the way things work to suit my tastes (such as running KDE instead of Gnome) but all these work well too which is a great reflection on the modular nature of all things involved with Linux. I hope I continue to be surprised and pleased with the machine, and I'm definitely surprised at the ease of transition between the two machines for me.

Google Treasure Hunt Question 4

2008-06-12T09:41:00.003+01:00

Question 4 has been out for a while now and it's taken me a while to blog the solution for a couple of reasons, I've not had much time to work out the solution recently, and this question seems a lot more difficult than the other three (for me at least).

Here's my question this time around:

Find the smallest number that can be expressed as
the sum of 25 consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of 99 consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of 189 consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of 467 consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of 535 consecutive prime numbers,
and is itself a prime number.

For example, 41 is the smallest prime number that can be expressed as
the sum of 3 consecutive primes (11 + 13 + 17 = 41) and
the sum of 6 consecutive primes (2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 = 41).

First of all I thought I'd write a routine (once again in Perl) to generate prime numbers. I know I'm not entering a competition to find the worlds largest primes so chose to write an optimised solution rather than a super efficient one. The difference here is computational complexity v coding complexity. I chose the simpler code but less efficient solution rather than the more complicated code but efficient solutions offered by algorithms such as the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

sub primes {
  my $max = shift || 10;
  my @primes = ( 2, 3, 5, 7 );
  return @primes if ($max <= 9);
  my $loop = 9;
  while (scalar(@primes) < $max) {
    my $is_prime = 1;
    for (my $div = 3; $div < ($loop-1)/2; $div++) {
      $is_prime = 0 if ($loop % $div == 0);
    }
    push (@primes,$loop) if ($is_prime);
    $loop += 2;
  }
  return @primes;
}

Now I had a way of populating an array with prime numbers I thought about the solution a bit more carefully and decided it wasn't likely to be simple to calculate, however long the code I managed to write was. So, I decided to search around for lists of prime numbers and decided to use a list of the first million primes. I could, on reflection, just used my routine to generate 1 million primes and written them to a file instead of generating each time.

The solution I came up with is shown below. It starts by populating an array with the first million primes from the downloaded file. Then the sums of the required continuous number of primes are generated and stored in another array. At this early stage, the solution is now contained in this array (with the assumption the solution exists within the first one million primes of course) so it's just a case of searching the array to find it. In order to find the number, I numerically sort the list. Now it's a simple case of finding the first (and therefore lowest) prime in the new list that is repeated 5 times.

use strict;
use FileHandle;

sub sum_primes {
  my $amount = shift;
  my $start = 0;
  my @sums;

  while ($amount < scalar(@_)) {
    my $sum = 0;
    for (my $i = $start; $i < $amount; $i++) {
      $sum += $_[$i];
    }
    push(@sums,$sum);
    $start++;
    $amount++;
  }
  return @sums;
}

sub read_primes {
  my $filename = shift;
  my $fh = new FileHandle;
  $fh->open($filename) || die "$filename: $!\n";
  my @primes;
  push(@primes,split) while (<$fh>);
  $fh->close();
  return @primes;
}

sub is_prime {
  my $num = shift;
  foreach my $prime (@_) {
    return 1 if ($num == $prime);
  }
  return 0;
}

my @primes = read_primes("1000000.txt");
my @sum_list;
push(@sum_list, sum_primes(25,@primes));
push(@sum_list, sum_primes(99,@primes));
push(@sum_list, sum_primes(189,@primes));
push(@sum_list, sum_primes(467,@primes));
push(@sum_list, sum_primes(535,@primes));
@sum_list = sort(@sum_list);
my $prev = 0;
my $same = 0;
foreach my $num (@sum_list) {
  if ($num == $prev) {
    $same++;
    if ($same == 4) {
      print "Found $num, checking... ";
      if (is_prime($num,@primes)) {
        print "PRIME! :-)\n";;
        last;
      } else {
        print "not prime :-(\n";
        $same = 0;
      }
    }
  } else {
    $same = 0;
  }
  $prev = $num;
}

This code takes a few minutes to run. I'm sure it's not the smartest solution to the problem, there must be some maths I can use to calculate a solution. Instead, this approach turns the problem into a search solution but it works pretty well and identified the correct answer of 6990493 for my question.

Showing Off Linux

2008-06-03T13:18:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Ian Hughes for the picture on his flickr. Yesterday, at work, the Hursley Linux Special Interest Group ran a little trade show type event for a couple of hours after lunch. The idea was to provide a bit of away from your desk time for folks around the lab to see what we Linux geeks have been getting up to. Various people interested in using Linux inside and outside work came along to demo their gadgets.

The picture shows me showing off my old Linux audio centre. But, also at the event were the main organiser of the day Jon Levell (showing Fedora 9 and an eeepc), and Nick O'Leary (showing his N800 and various arduino gadgets), Gareth Jones (showing his accelerometer based USB rocket launcher and bluetooth tweetjects), Andy Stanford-Clark (showing his NSLU2 driven house, and an OLPC), Laura Cowen (showing an OLPC), Steve Godwin (showing MythTV), and Chris law (showing Amora).

I thought it was quite a nice little selection of Linux related stuff to look through for the masses of people turning up, plenty of other things we could have shown too of course. The afternoon seemed very much a success, generating some real interest in the various demo items and lots of interesting questions too. Thanks to everyone for taking part!

SqueezeCenter on the SLUG

2008-05-31T07:00:00.000+01:00

At first glance, installing slimserver (now SqueezeCenter) on the SLUG is very straight forward as it's nicely packaged into an ipkg and made available via Optware. However, as indicated on the slimserver application page on the nslu2-linux wiki, things aren't as simple as they first appear. Unfortunately, something is very broken with slimserver and its dependency chain in Optware as things stand at this moment in time. As a result installing slimserver with a view to upgrading to squeezecenter at a later date becomes much more problematic. I need at least SqueezeCenter version 7.0 to operate with the SqueezeBox Duet.

My first target was to run slimserver 6.5.4 which is the latest version from the version 6 line and the version packaged for the SLUG in optware. I tracked the problem down to the mysql dependency for slimserver, it seems since the last update of slimserver in optware, mysql has also been updated and since that time slimserver has been reported as broken on the SLUG. Unfortunately, rolling back versions in optware is not trivial since they only make available the latest version with no access to previously packaged programs. My only option was to check out the mysql build environment from SVN at the previous level and compile up the package from source. This is reported to take in the region of 18 hours natively on the SLUG so I set up a cross-compilation environment on my Fedora 8 box at home. MySQL compiled in about 10-15 minutes and I now had a package to install. The reports were correct, slimserver 6.5.4 was now running on my SLUG, excellent!

The next challenge was to get SqueezeCenter running, and this worked in a similar way to getting slimserver going. There are a few oddities with getting all your ducks in a row while running this stuff on a SLUG, SqueezeCenter is very particular about file permissions, and the newer software introduces a whole bunch of Perl dependencies not present in the earlier slimserver versions. Fortunately, I'm very familiar with Perl as well as Linux (one of the reasons for choosing a squeezebox) and I've managed to compile up the minimum dependencies to get SqueezeCenter going. It seems Slim Devices as a company test against x86 and PPC architectures to the extent they even supply their Perl dependencies for these from CPAN. I'm running on ARM on the SLUG though which introduces a whole world of dependency problems as it seems SqueezeCenter is also pretty sensitive to the version of each Perl module used, it's not just a case of grabbing the latest and greatest from CPAN, a further bind for getting it going nicely. One other thing, CPAN doesn't seem to run at all well on the SLUG, it's far faster to download the tarred packages and compile manually!

I eventually got SqueezeCenter 7.0.1 running on the SLUG, it consumes at least twice the 32MB RAM available so runs pretty slowly while spending a lot of time paging to the USB disk. I set up an additional swap file on disk as well, thinking about it perhaps I should have used the rest of the 8MB flash as swap too! All in all, running SqueezeCenter on a machine with so little memory and on an architecture not supported by Slim Devices has equated to a slow response time and a maintenance headache.

In conclusion, it's been a good experience getting a SLUG and setting up SqueezeCenter on it. But I already need a more powerful box so less than 1 week after the SLUG arrived at my house it's time to sell already. Fortunately, I've found a buyer at work who wants something low power for some really trivial services so the SLUG is ideal for them. For me though, it's a case of getting back to scratching my head over which low power home server solution to try next. Whatever I choose will be more expensive than the SLUG, it's possible I could equal its low power usage, and I definitely now know I need more memory and ideally an x86 architecture.

Google Treasure Hunt Question 3

2008-05-30T07:00:00.009+01:00

I've been keeping up with the Google treasure hunt as a bit of fun rather than seriously going after any prizes. At least one other guy at work has been joining me, Nick O'Leary has taken up the challenge too. Question 3 was recently released, and while I thought it might possibly present the greatest challenge yet on first inspection, it turned out to be really rather trivial.

So question 3 is all about IP routing, and tracing a packet route around the network. I was expecting some hardness built in around working out subnet masks, but there was none of that at all, just a simple route to follow resulting in an 11 node path. The question then:

Below is a diagram of a computer network. The nodes are hosts on the network, and the lines between them are links. A packet is sent out from host G with a destination of 201.89.136.112. Which nodes does the packet pass through on its way to the destination? (include start and final node in your answer)

You are then shown a routing table and must trace your way through it from the start node to the end node recording the path taken along the way. This is a solution that is quickly manually traceable since no node should be visited twice (unless Google have given you some really badly designed network).

Having said about the simplicity of this one, I managed to get it wrong the first time around by starting at the wrong node. Reminds me of maths teachers constantly saying "Always Read the Question!". Once I screwed my head on the right way around I correctly answered GFIHDLOPABC for my network.

Unslinging the SLUG

2008-05-29T07:00:00.001+01:00

Having recently purchased the Linksys NSLU2 (commonly called a SLUG) for use in a hacked form as a low power home server, I've been playing around with it a little to customise it towards my needs. The eventual aim is to run SqueezeCenter on it to power my new SqueezeBox Duet. The most commonly used hacked version of Linux provided by the SLUG hacking community is known as uSLUnG, hence hacking the SLUG with this being called unslinging.

The process of unslinging is made very simple, thanks to the great instructions developed over the years by the community, and with such a large community the amount of testing on these instructions is pretty complete too. First step is to download the firmware binaries as described on the SLUG Firmware site. I used firware version 6.10 Beta which is considered the latest stable version in spite of having a beta tag. Then simply followed the instructions in this README file and I was done. The whole process takes no more than 10 minutes or so.

Now I have a nice little low power Linux box sitting on my network raring to run some services for me. Pretty much anything you can think of has been done on the SLUG, Apache, MySQL, etc, etc, etc. So the list and choice of what to do is very complete. For now though, I've just installed a few basic utilities (coreutils), Perl (I know I'll need that later), GCC, and SSH for remote access.

I'll quickly mention the SLUG specs in passing too. It has a 266Mhz ARM based Intel XScale processor, some of the early models were under clocked at 133Mhz but all the recent editions run at full speed; 8MB flash; 32MB RAM; 2 USB 2.0; 10/100 Ethernet; runs from 5V DC power and measures just 2 x 9 x 13cm. With one USB disk attached my Current Cost meter reads it at about 5 watts power usage which I guess may rise a watt or two under load.

Choosing the media server

2008-05-28T07:00:00.008+01:00

The decision of which media server to go with has easily been the longest and most agonising while putting together new audio solution at home. I'm not the only one at work having recently been looking in this area either, James Taylor has also been looking at home servers with similar requirements in mind to myself. Namely, cheap and low power (low electrical power for always-on as opposed to a slow processor).

In no particular order, options on the list for me were:

Linksys NSLU2 (aka SLUG), about £55 plus a USB hard disk.
Buffalo Linkstation, about £100.
Netvoyager LX1000, about £100 plus a USB hard disk.
Netvoyager LX1010, about £150 plus a USB hard disk.
Fit-PC, ~~about £200~~ £247.93 inc delivery & VAT.
TinyTuxbox, starting at £200 upwards.
Mac Mini, starting at £400 upwards.
Self-build small form factor such as nano-itx or pico-itx, about £180 upwards. Best bang for your buck starts with the D201GLY2 mini-itx board from Intel.

EDIT (suggestions from comments, with my thanks):

Pico PC, about £440 (thanks to Joel Wright, a colleague at IBM).
Aleutia E2 Mini PC, about £200 plus a USB disk (thanks to Mike Rosenberg of Aleutia).
Tranquil T7 Atom PC, about £240 (something I just found).

Viglin MPC-L, about £79 (from Tony Whitmore)
Space Cube, about £1500 and not for sale (from Dave Conway-Jones, a colleague at IBM)

END EDIT

All have clear advantages and weaknesses I wont go into in detail for each box. However, they can roughly be grouped into cheaper solutions as provided by a hacked NAS box, or more expensive PC style systems. Some go straight out of the list on price alone, such as the relatively expensive Mac (I don't understand the Mac fad, single vendor lock-in, haven't we seen that somewhere before?).

I decided to plump for the cheapest of all the options, the SLUG. I figure that even though it has a slow processor and only 32MB memory it does have a fighting chance of running SqueezeCenter to power the Squeezebox Duet based on the reports of other users running SlimServer on it. If all else fails, there are plenty of people at work looking for low power solutions who may be willing to buy a 2nd hand SLUG should I want to upgrade anyway.

The SLUG is a very well-known device in the land of hackery. It can easily be modified to run any one of several different versions of Linux that maintain different levels of compatibility with the original Linksys firmware and interface. It's purpose in life when released (back in 2004 I think) was as a cheap NAS box that simply provides a USB to Ethernet interface. The idea being you plug a cheap USB hard disk into it, configure via the simple web interface, and you have storage you can access from anywhere on your home network. Because Linksys made the device cheap, naturally their choice of operating system was a free one, Linux. The Linux license dictates Linksys had to make their source code available, hence it's easy to modify the original software for your own purposes. The rest follows from there really!

Choosing the stereo and speakers

2008-05-24T11:00:00.000+01:00

While working out how to string together my new audio solution I decided to replace my faithful old Aiwa NSX-S505 stereo system. The Aiwa has been a good servant over the years and seen a lot of action, but with the volume knob broken and one of the two tape players knackered, when the CD player refused to play a CD enough was enough.

I've always loved Denon kit as being simple yet very good quality, stylish and innovative at the same time, so I was immediately drawn to them for a new stereo. I was looking at the Denon D-M35DAB system as my choice item but before I purchased it used it as the bar for a quick shop-around.

While reading reviews I discovered Onkyo which was a company I'd heard of before but never really heard anyone buying their kit. I came across their direct competitor to the Denon model I was looking at, the CS-515 which has pretty much the exact same feature set. I'm no audiophile so I take great note of what the professional reviewers have to say, and with What Hi-Fi product of the year award, and Best Hi-Fi under £500 awarded to it I had to look much more seriously at the Onkyo. It was, eventually, to be the model I decided on based purely on Internet shopping having never touched or listened to either the Onkyo or the Denon before.

I have pretty simple requirements for a stereo. It has to have enough inputs for me to connect my various devices (Media Centre, possibly TV, etc), I wanted something quite small in terms of height so it would sit in my TV cabinet, and something of a better sound quality than the Aiwa (which really was an excellent buy for what I paid for it many years ago). Feature wise, I wasn't bothered about a tape player any more (we ditched our tapes a while ago), so just a simple CD player and digital radio would be good enough. Conveniently, both of the systems I found fitted these.

When I purchased the Onkyo I didn't go for the CS-515, but rather the CR-515 which is exactly the same unit minus the speakers. The Onkyo speakers are reviewed as being an excellent set, particularly for ones that are shipped as a standard set of speakers with a hi-fi system. However, I decided to go with the professional opinion once again and opted for the current set of award-winning small-sized speakers, the Tannoy Mercury F1 bookshelf speaker set. They're slightly larger than the Denon SCM-50 bookshelf speaker set I have in the kitchen, which are fantastic so the Tannoy's had a lot to live up to. I'm pleased to report they sound really quite nice when attached to the Onkyo, although my first sound test was somewhat inhibited by Beth vacuuming the rest of the house at the time!

Choosing the media streamer

2008-05-21T11:00:00.002+01:00

Having recently upgraded my home audio system, the choice of which media streamer to go for was not a hard decision. There are a few different manufacturers out there producing different types of hardware that would result in completely different solutions. These seem to be categorised into roughly three areas.

First, you have the traditional hi-fi system manufacturers who are adding more modern media methods to their kit. Sony have the gigajuke systems with built-in hard disks, while phillips have the streamium systems. I discounted these fairly early on as being rather expensive and full of gimicks I wouldn't really care about or use, while not providing the full functionality that I really wanted at a price I was happy with.

Next there are the traditional NAS manufacturers who are upgrading their firmware to include media streaming functionality. This was slightly more tempting in some ways than a stereo system with this functionality built in. However, the lack of remote control or feedback without a PC switched on was very off-putting here.

What I really wanted was something to stream music from a PC to an existing stereo system that provided good feedback to the user with a remote control too. Enter the third set of devices, the dedicated media streamers designed to work with various media servers such as Firefly, SlimServer, iTunes, etc. When looking at these, my choices were quickly narrowed to a set of 3 possible candidates, in descending order of price:

A collection of various Sonos hardware
A SqueezeBox Duet from Slim Devices (now owned by Logitech
A Pinnacle Soundbridge

I would have dearly liked to get my hands on the market leading Sonos which tops all the reviews while having the reviewer salivate over their nicely designed hardware, excellent interface and crystal sound quality. However, coming in at £700 sterling it seemed a bit expensive, especially as I would be spending more on another hi-fi system too, so it was reluctantly ruled out quite early on.

The next rejection waas the Pinnacle Sound Bridge, rejected for many reasons. It's easily the cheapest of the three on the list at under £100 though. I found it very difficult to find a dealer in the UK who had these things in stock so that was one rather off-putting factor - if there's no demand, then how good could the product be? The killer for me was when I compared to the Roku Soundbridge though. I found out Pinnacle license the soundbridge technology from an American firm, Roku, for marketing in Europe. That's all very well, except the European Soundbridge is inferior (much smaller and less usable display). This annoyed me to such an extent I felt I couldn't buy the European model and there are no American models for sale over here, except possibly some second hand ones on eBay.

The option I went for is the Slim Devices SqueezeBox Duet which seems like a really nice bit of kit, although not exactly cheap to buy either. It comes in two parts, the receiver box you hook up to your stereo system, and the remote control you use to browse and control the music.

The receiver is a pretty simple box, it has an Ethernet port, built-in wireless, RCA analogue audio output, and a digital output too. It sits on your network waiting for commands from the squeezebox controller and outputting any media streams it receives to a stereo (or powered speakers).

The controller is a little more interesting. It's also a wireless device, and has a jog wheel and LCD screen. Wireless means you don't have to have line of sight to the receiver, so you can hide the receiver away somewhere out of sight near your stereo. The interface is quite polished and very easy to understand. It's firmware upgradeable too so it'll only get better over time.

One of the things I really love about the SqueezeBox stuff is their openness. They use open source development to produce the SqueezeCentre (formerly slimserver) media streamer and as such it's got a nice little community of people outside the main company producing plugins to do all sorts of stuff as you can imagine. They adopt a similar approach for their firmware as well, while I've not come across the source code yet (I've not looked to see if it's available), the controller has some nice open type touches to it such as the ability to use your flickr pictures as the screensaver on the LCD screen when it's not in use. Overall I hope, and I think, I've made a good choice.

Google Treasure Hunt Question 2

2008-05-20T08:45:00.001+01:00

After solving question 1 successfully I decided to plod on and answer question 2 as well. It was, for me at least, far less challenging than the first question.

This time, you are generated a set of files with random directories and file names that you are asked to download and process. Once I got passed the immediate suspicion of downloading a zip file (for fear of viruses) it took no time at all to whip up a solution. My question was:

Here is a random zip archive for you to download:
GoogleTreasureHunt08_15866755520722619948.zip

Unzip the archive, then process the resulting files to obtain a numeric result. You'll be taking the sum of lines from files matching a certain description, and multiplying those sums together to obtain a final result. Note that files have many different extensions, like '.pdf' and '.js', but all are plain text files containing a small number of lines of text.

Sum of line 4 for all files with path or name containing BCD and ending in .pdf
Sum of line 5 for all files with path or name containing mno and ending in .rtf
Hint: If the requested line does not exist, do not increment the sum.

Multiply all the above sums together and enter the product below.
(Note: Answer must be an exact, decimal representation of the number.)

Again, my solution was Perl based and generated a correct answer of 364264342 for my particular zip file:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use File::Find;
use FileHandle;
my $total1 = 0;
my $total2 = 0;
find(\&wanted, ("/home/gwhite/GoogleTreasureHunt08_15866755520722619948"));
print $total1*$total2."\n";
sub wanted {
 return if (-d $File::Find::name);
 if (($File::Find::name=~m!BCD!i) && ($File::Find::name=~m!\.pdf$!i)) {
   my $fh = new FileHandle;
   $fh->open($File::Find::name) || die ($File::Find::name." Oops: $!\n");
   while (<$fh>) {
     last if ($fh->input_line_number>4);
     chomp($_);
     $total1+=$_ if ($fh->input_line_number==4);
   }
   $fh->close();
 }
 elsif (($File::Find::name=~m!mno!i) && ($File::Find::name=~m!\.rtf$!i)) {
   my $fh = new FileHandle;
   $fh->open($File::Find::name) || die ($File::Find::name." Oops: $!\n");
   while (<$fh>) {
     last if ($fh->input_line_number>5);
     chomp($_);
     $total2+=$_ if ($fh->input_line_number==5);
   }
   $fh->close();
 }
}

Google Treasure Hunt

2008-05-19T11:04:00.004+01:00

I've just discovered today (rather late I know) that Google have released a treasure hunt which is quite interesting. It's not what you might think. Given the name, I would have guessed it involved using the google search engine to find things on the Internet. However, it's actually a problem solving challenge where they pose questions and you submit your answer. I think question 2 is due out today (they obfuscate when the next question will be released), nobody seems to know how many questions there are, exactly how long this will go on for, etc. But there is a prize for "the first person to answer all the questions correctly" whatever that means.

A word of warning, don't read the rest of this if you want to work out the answer yourself!!!

My question number 1:

A robot is located at the top-left corner of a 65 x 61 grid (marked 'Start' in the diagram above)*.

The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid (marked 'Finish' in the not to scale diagram below).

How many possible unique paths are there?
(Note: Answer must be an exact, decimal representation of the number.)

The problem here is the vast number of different routes that can be taken, which would overflow 32 bit computers for numbers this size. My (correct) answer was 1426507627253102510231886503468838531 which I calculated using the formula (x+y-2)! / ((x-1)! (y-1)!)

A few simple lines of Perl later and I had the answer:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Math::BigInt;
# change these to match your X & Y grid size
my $xgrid = 61;
my $ygrid = 65;
my $x = Math::BigInt->new($xgrid-1)->bfac();
my $y = Math::BigInt->new($ygrid-1)->bfac();
my $z = Math::BigInt->new($xgrid+$ygrid-2)->bfac();
print $z->bdiv($x->bmul($y))."\n";

In with the new

2008-05-16T09:47:00.003+01:00

Related to my previous post "Out with the old" I have been thinking about what's next for me in terms of a home media solution. I've also been spurred on by my recent purchase of a Current Cost meter which I can hook up to a computer, but more about that another time. Similar to my old system, I'm not bothered about video so this is purely an audio solution.

There are some things I took into consideration when building the old system that I don't consider to be so important this time around. I'm not bothered about browsing the Internet on my TV and I'm prepared to spend a bit more cash, for example. But rather than concentrate on those points, here's a list of things I would like to include in the new system:

Switchable speakers in different rooms (kitchen and living room)
Connection to my stereo amplifier
Access to my mp3 collection without leaving my PC powered on
Access to Internet music (podcasts, radio, etc)
Remotely controlled
Separate screen (from the TV)

After much research, here's what I've come up with:
Click to enlarge.

I'm going to use a Linksys NSLU2 (a.k.a. a SLUG) which can be modified to run Linux so I can hack it into submission to be my low powered music server. The SLUG will provide my music collection over my wireless network to a Slim Devices Squeezebox Duet system. The Squeezebox is also able to access all the Internet services I want and similar to the SLUG runs open source software so has a fantastic community of users. The Duet comes with a wifi remote control with built-in LCD screen so I can interact with the system from anywhere in the house. From the Squeezebox is an audio connection to the amplifier which, similarly to my old system, is connected to a speaker switcher box.

That little lot should keep me busy for a while and give me all I want from music at home. As I mentioned, a lot of research went into deciding which components to choose. The weak link here will likely be the SLUG because it's such a small box with only 32Mb RAM and a relatively slow processor (just 264 bogomips) but it should do for the time being. Here's my component list:

Onkyo CR-515 (stereo micro-system)
Tannoy Mercury F1 (living room speakers)
Denon SCM-50 (kitchen speakers)
SqueezeBox Duet (media streamer)
Linksys NSLU2 (music storage)
Freecom Mobile Drive (USB hard disk)
QED MA17 (2 way speaker switcher)

Out with the old

2008-05-13T09:45:00.000+01:00

I moved house pretty much spot on 6 months ago now and we're still settling into the new house. Aside from decorating, emptying boxes and all the other things you have to do at the time, it's also an opportunity for re-thinking some of the technology used in our previous house. To that end, one of the things I want to update is my audio solution. I shy away from saying media centre as that seems to brew up ideas of full on PVR systems for most people which would include recording television; something I don't care about as I have a commercial hard disk recorder I'm very happy with.

My current solution was documented at the time on Eight Bar as a description using an IBM Thinkpad built as a media centre with more details of the process, also on Eight Bar. This solution worked extremely well while having its problems at the same time. My requirements for putting the solution together were cost (it was experimental and needed a good wife acceptance factor so price was all important), fast start-up, easy and remotely controllable, and integrated with my current home stereo and speaker arrangement. I think I achieved this, it cost about 20 quid for the cables and keyboard, the Thinkpad was borrowed from work, I used the Amarok music player which made things very easy, hooked up my stereo remote control to the Thinkpad and integrated it nicely. See the no-expense-spared diagram below...

Click to enlarge.
It's running Fedora Linux on the Thinkpad, with a KDE desktop and Amarok as I mentioned. I don't have a huge music collection so all my mp3s fit on the Thinkpad hard disk. I configured Linux to suspend to RAM and thus boot extremely quickly with auto-login to the KDE desktop and auto-start of various programs including the music player should a cold boot be required. The thinkpad has a serial port so I was able to hook up a serial IR receiver using LIRC to receive signals, with the audio cables going to my stereo using the minidisk port. With no minidisk attached I had spare keys on the remote control (such as play/pause/stop/next/previous) that had no effect when pointed at the stereo while other controls (such as volume) function as expected. This means I can program the spare keys to be picked up by the laptop IR receiver instead, in order to operate Amarok, and with no interference with normal operation of my stereo (so only one remote control needed for the whole solution). A nice bonus of this set up was the ability to display the screen on the television via the thinkpad s-video port. With a radio controlled keyboard and built-in mouse it's easy to sit on your sofa browsing the Internet or e-mailing with the convenience of your TV and wireless broadband.

This is all sounding marvelous and when described like that I wonder why I think about replacing it, but it does have issues. Browsing the web on your TV is great, but it's not particularly convenient when someone else wants to use the TV for its main purpose in life. Niether is it convenient browsing the Internet in 800x600 which is the highest resolution my CRT TV can cope with, then there's the wireless keyboard which is slightly fiddly but I'm just being picky now. The next major problem is a bug with the thinkpad firmware that causes the wireless to stay disconnected after a certain amount of uptime, which is unresolvable and requires a full reboot to temporarily fix until the next time it goes down. Another slight usability issue is user feedback. Browsing songs, playlists, podcasts and all in Amarok is stupidly easy, but controlling from a remote control when you can't see the screen (that was another idea for putting it on the TV) is not easy. It's great you've got the secondary screen you can use if necessary, but if you're trying to do something else or not in the same room it becomes much more difficult.

So, all these little niggles to what is in theory quite a nice setup have got me thinking of a better way to solve my requirements.

Welcome

2008-05-12T13:40:00.003+01:00

I'm sitting here having just started a new blog and wondering whether to write a this is my first post entry or not, cheesy as it may be, here it is...

I've been involved with various blogs over the years but never set one up externally to the company I work for that my overlap with my professional interests. There are, of course, external blogs I've written for including Eight Bar and the blog I write with Beth about our allotment. My personal interests regularly overlap those I have at work, I intentionally use the term professional interests having recently been certified by the British Computer Society as a Chartered IT Professional; I usually describe myself informally at work as A Professional Linux Geek. I currently have some ideas I wanted to write about that don't really fit in any of the places I not-so-regularly write, I hope to log these here and continue to do so in the future.

A quick intro to me then. I've already given away I have technical interests and the name of my current employer. I left Exeter University with a degree in Computer Science and Management Science to work at the Hursley location where I established an interest in Linux. This has since been broadened into open source software generally, and open standards and the web. All this has been through a number of interesting positions working in internal support, super computing, and customer facing consulting. I'm currently working for an organisation called Emerging Technology Services that offer great skills to our customers interested in all things new and trendy.

Away from work I like to get out and about. Whether that's playing badminton (I do that a lot), or out with Beth Geocaching, general walking, or working down at our allotment. I like a lot of sports to both play and watch (except football/soccer). I have an interest in music, listening to as much as I get time for and having played the piano since just before I was 5 I think. When all else fails I can usually be found playing the odd computer game on the PC or the Wii, or around the house somewhere doing some DIY.