Tech

Picture this:

A computer, running XP pro. It is connected to a router (wireless) and is happy to send e-mails etc. All is well you think? Well, if you thought that you would be wrong. It refuses to connect to the internet as far as downloading a page, nor does it let MSN connect.

Having looked around I came to the conclusion it was a bit of spyware or something like that. Norton scans tried to persuade me otherwise, but being the true computing student I am I always know best.

*wanders off to spybot site on own machine* I install spybot on the computer, it opens, I ask it to run a scan. It explains that it can’t run a scan without connecting to the internet and downloading the new updates! WTF? Is it me or do loads of people use this to deal with a machine that no longer connects to the internet?

*will not be beaten* So found the previous version that I just so happened to have on my computer ( I swear I have an archive of the last 5 years for so many free applications).

That installed fine and ran, found the problem, removed it…..

*internet works*

Bloody software developers

Oh, photos from camping about a month ago up: here

Real update to come

Ok, its been an odd few days. Odd and busy. As is the custom with most university courses they like you to do some work every now and then. Unfortunately we had reached one of those “thens”. So part of the reason for no update is that I was actually busy doing some work. The other reason there has been no pointless ramble from me is because what little spare time I have I have been spending on a forum (livewire) due to my fairly recent move to being a moderator there. This is no simple task for the worlds largest teen forum with over 50,000 members and just 27 mods….

Anyway, to the task in hand. The other day I got a NAS server (Iomega 200m). Well, when I say I “got”, I actually mean “took”. The place I took it from was my place of work (a school) and the reason I took it was because of the aforementioned work I had been too busy to come in and fix computers. The NAS unit in question was new and needed setting up, hence it came for a walk home.

Having carried it all the way home (in its “ever slightly larger than my arm” box) I can assure that it is rather heavy. As it is meant to just sit in a cupboard all day, this should not be a huge issue, it just bugged me at the time.

Being the good little beaver I am, I even took some pictures while I got it all out, which I have chosen a select few from for viewing at your leisure….

I have to say the whole thing is rather cool and if it wasn’t for a few little things I would buy one ASAP. The first of these little things is the cost. It was actually only £700, but that’s because we get it VAT free, the other reason is because it is so noisy it puts most fog horns to shame. I actually could not stand the noise so much I had to continue working on it from another room.

Actually, I’m getting border of typing about NAS, as great as it was (and trust me, it was), it isn’t really great to read about, especially if you don’t actually know what NAS is (which must be over 90% of you).

So with my target audience in mind I will tell you where I am typing this from. I am sitting in the room of jonners at Roehampton university. In fact, he is wishing I could type faster on this stupid flat keyboard because I think he wants some sleep.

I had one of those typical train journeys up here. I left Brighton and got the train to Brighton station half and hour earlier than I had planned. I could not get a ticket before that train (no machine at station) so was going to buy it on the train. Bloke wanders along so I get out my young persons railcard and wallet only to have him say “yep, that’s fine” and walk off before I could say anything. Now any other day him being too stupid to look at what I had in my hand would have been great, but these guys know their stuff.

When I got to Brighton station I had to go and queue up get a ticket to let me out, so I coulf go buy the ticket to London. I missed my train by about 30 seconds (I had a large bag, so running very fast was out). I was not a happy bunny. Then to add insult to injury (having taken a sodding slow train to Clapham Junction) I got the platform for Barnes to see it littered with people. All the machines/staff were telling people about trains delayed over an hour. So I called jonners, told him I could be a while etc. Just as I hung up the phone, BANG, the boards change the next train (for me) will be there in two mins….typical *phones jonners*.

This evening was interesting. Had some food (made by beth, and watched by jonners) and played around in jonners room (photo’s to come (they will be worth it)). Also went to a 21st birthday party for someone no-one seemed to know. That didn’t last long, we ran away so we could make a phone call to a girl in Boston….USA.

I give up, I need a little sleep (well I need it so jonners doesn’t open the window in rebellion to my late-night-ness….)

I will deal with this in the only way that makes sense. Events in chronological order.

Ok, Christmas, not a huge amount to report. I have to admit, it’s starting to loose some of it’s magic now. No more do I run downstairs in the morning to hunt for presents, nor do I spend the entire day with a cheesy grin plastered to my face (thank god for that).
Presents are listed in no particular order:

• Advanced drivers course and skid pan practice
• Selection of books such as “Crazy laws and lawsuits”
• Personal organiser (subtle hint me thinks)
• Socks typical isn’t it
• WHSmiths voucher
• Very large road atlas
• Coldplay CD (X&Y)

There were more, but many studies have shown that people’s attention span has been decreasing at a frankly alarming rate. Still here? Good.

Moving on.

As is the case with most years, that time between Christmas and new year becomes a bit of a void. There is nothing in particular meant for it, it’s just there. I’m not 100% on what I filled mine with, but I know a good part of it was spent working on my site (testing version). I have been refining the logging on and off, adding the tags and associated searching (much like LJ). Work on the full text search has also begun, where I encountered the delights of things such as stopwords which you just can’t search for, well not using built in functions and having boolean support.

New Year passed, as it normally does. I’m not a great one for celebrating new year, never have been. I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea of it as a reason to walk out of the house one year and crawl back the following. I don’t consider passing out as a “fresh start”.

Ah yes, I just remember what I did before new year, I went shopping, sales and all that. I even have two note-worthy events. First off, I bought a suit (in prep for Merrill Lynch). Second, I found (and bought) a decent shirt that doesn’t make me look like I work in IT.

Anyway, where was I. After new year I have just been working on my site, seeing friends and that’s about it.

Now we come to Yesterday (Wednesday (04/01/2006)) where I managed what I have been meaning to for some while. I bought a proper digital camera! Well, prosumer.

I met up with in town at about 12:50 from where we made haste to the nearest decent camera shop (Jessops) to browse and pick-up a catalogue, then had a quick look in the window of a crappy camera shop (which is closing down (trust me, if deserves it)) before wandering off to find lunch and mull over the choices.

The two choices we narrowed it down to were:

The Konica Minolta Dimage Z5

And the Fuji FinePix S5600 Zoom

The problem was the choice was not a simple on, both had their up’s and down’s. For every good point of one, the other had a different way of dealing with it. This made for a hard choice. Now I managed to have a go with Z5 in Jessops, so I had a feel for that, but they didn’t have the S5600 in store, so I had a go with a model up. Problem was, the model up was quite different (size, specs etc) so it turned out to be no-good as a comparison. So we left and preceded to wander round town looking for one to try. First place we tried was the crappy camera shop, as we had noticed they had one in their window. Walked in, made my situation clear so they knew I was interested in buying (bear in mind this could have been £300 easy sell for them) and was told that I couldn’t have a go with it because they were selling it at “internet prices” so they can’t offer additional services. So basically two fat blokes sit in a shitty little shop all day on the off-chance that someone who knows exactly what they want comes in and buys it for a price that they can better online. WTF! And the icing on the cake; there was an article about the shop closure in the local paper this week, in which they stated the reason for the closure was the lack of good parking for the town. BOLOCKS! They are closing because they offer a shit service and have no customer communication skills whatsoever (this is not an isolated event, trust me, they deserve to close).

Anyway, I did in the end find an S5600 to have a go with (from a shop with customer service) and eventually (just as it was getting dark) decided to get the Z5. I have little doubt that the question of if I choose the right one will recurs in my mind for many weeks to come, wondering what might have been….

*snaps out of*

Today myself and went back to our old school to visit the IT department. We had a little tour and chatted to staff around the school (the traditional “what you up to then?” stuff).

Then back to my house where insisted that it was a good idea for me to upgrade the firmware on my mp3 player. I wasn’t so keen on the idea, but gave in, in then end.

Below is a picture of trying to work out what has gone wrong with the firmware upgrade.

And a picture of the error (it flashed up so fast we took a picture to read it).

Suffice to say, all is well with it fortunately, but there was a grey panic area of about 5 minutes where we thought it had died for good and was a bit sheepish.

On a plus side, it has reinstated his distrust in manufactures to get firmware upgrades right, so a good deed was indeed done this day, the world is as it should be, well, bar the heathens at the top of the road who don’t understand the “12 days of Christmas” (although it does mean the thing is gone).

Oh how I hate those who just haven’t a clue.

I was asked several weeks ago if I could record a concert being held in my local church. I naturally said yes. The group performing the concert had brought their own sound system. They were quite justified in doing so too. They were using around 30mics, and most places don’t have 40+ channel mixers to hand.

What they did not bring with them however was someone who knew how to use it. The “sound engineer” they did bring knew how to operate it, but that’s a different thing. It took her 20minutes or more to work out which of the mics was the cause of a feedback loop. Interestingly I had noticed this one developing long before she did. In fact, she took so long working it out, I actually had time to walk across the town centre and back and return just in time to witness the cogs whir. Now this I find quite appalling. This problem could have been solved through process of elimination 30+ times over in the time it took her to work out. I might also add that the fault only occurred when she boosted the gain on ONE of the mics! How hard can it be to put two and two together. Not to mention this mic happened to be right next to a monitor speaker. I didn’t think silver platter got much bigger than this one.

Drummers seem to have two settings. On and off. I have yet to come across a drummer who is actually the right level. I have lost count of the number of times I have come on stage during a rehearsal and threatened the life of the drummer if he does not play quieter. They do not notice that they are drowning everyone else out and making things sound crap. They also seem to forget that the sound system can make them louder, but not quieter, so they have to play quietly and then allow/trust me to keep them at the right level. But no, they think they no best. Too many times have I watched an over enthusiastic drummer piss over everyone else’s performance.

In recent news:

– My website is coming on in leaps and bounds. Almost 400lines of very well thought out (almost too secure) code down, god knows how many more to follow, but at least I feel like I’m getting somewhere.

– My fame seems to be spreading as an “all things backstage related” man. I have been asked to rig and run the lights for one of the biggest amateur drama groups in the area. Nice to know I’m noticed every now and then.

– Phoned up the tax office to begin the log and arduous task of reclaiming my tax from the last tax year. I was on the wrong tax code, and so the government took a lot more money than they should have. It turns out I don’t exist. Not by name or number. This does at least have one plus side effect, I’m not mad, you are. You’re the ones who have been talking to a non-entity, not me.

I have in recent weeks had complaint about the content of my journal. I was told it was all about things that were not very important in the grand scheme of things, things like computers. With this remark in mind, I was going to talk about the lovely sunset I saw today, but then I decided that actually, I would rather talk about where I saw it from. I saw said sunset from the rearview mirror of the car today. There is nothing quite like driving down a country road, in the dark with muse – absolution playing very loud on the speakers.

There are so many things that have bugged me in recent days, so I have little doubt I shall have remembered them all by the time I finish writing this. The few that I do remember will have to suffice and be clumped together and labelled “an entry”.

I read (some time ago) that a company was claiming a patent over xml. Now this annoys/concerns me in several ways. First off, I still don’t like this concept of a company claiming an intellectual right over such an obscure and ambiguous thing. In this case, the “transfer of data in its neutral form”. What the hell does that encompass for goodness sake. Having read some of the patent information on the us patent office site, myself I think this patent could actually include html if you choose to read it that way. As is see it, this could have implications so wide spread that it does not even bear thinking of. Imagine having to pay a fee for the use of xml….well, that hits most advanced free scripts for websites (so who knows how many sites), MS, google, all your major open source projects like the much acclaimed OpenOffice. Is nothing sacred to now? This is just becoming another extension of the sue culture with everyone trying to get a cut of money they don’t deserve.

Ah, just remembered the next thing that annoyed me today. It relates back to the driving. Why on earth cant road signs in this country be consistent. Mainly with regards to corners. Many a time do I come across a corner that has signs all round it telling me to slow down, telling me to not go over 20mph for it, telling me it’s a sharp bend etc. The road is marked red, large arrows have been put up all round it. There are more signs than hedge surrounding the corner. Then for all this hype I go round it at 50mph and wonder what all the fuss is about. Then other times I see one that has no markings, no red paint, no big signs with arrows and I take said corner at 50 and really wish I’d been doing 20. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t drive like a madman. I do drive cautiously, but I do rather candidly it seems, rely on these signs to be consistent in mapping out the route ahead for me. Standards are wonderful things, we have so many of them on our computers. It would be nice to see a few more where it mattered.

Now, on to the more computer related parts of my life. I have for some time now been working on a website for myself. In fact this website is linked to on my LiveJournal. It also happens to be the name of my LiveJournal (Please Remove Your Feet From Under My Chair). Now this website (as you would see if you clicked the link) has little in the way of content (bar those sub-domains that I have actually been partially populating). Now there is a good reason that this website has remained under developed for so long. It is not for lack of content, as I have 200+ pages of the stuff ready and waiting. It is dues to this simple problem.

How do you order 200+ page of random, un related content in a way that means they can all be accessed simpley, and quickly from anywhere in the site, without building the worlds most annoying large menu with multiple entries for each page under different headings?

The answer to this problem has eluded me for about 2 years until 3 days ago. I mentioned this problem to a friend and the first thing he said was “why do you need to order them?”. This of course is the answer. You can order unrelated content in a sensible way, so why bother. So the concept that has now been come up with is as follows.

Each page is supplied with a selection of keywords for its entry in the database (the whole site is CMS based). This is very much like LJ tags. A list of key words is then generated so that users can see this list, guaranteeing them of content on the other end of a click. These keywords, along with the page content itself are then searchable (via a nice little bit of SQL). This now covers all those who know what they are looking for, but the final part is the best if you ask me. The menu at the top of the page will contain mainly static links for things like home, contactus, faq’s etc, but one part of it will be a randomly generated dropdown of pages in the site. This means that any users just wishing to browse the content the site has to offer will always be kept happy.

And here end this “entry” as I’m too sleepy to keep going.

I would like to see an end to all free hosting with adverts. That means no more tripod, no more freewebs, no more lycos, no more angelfire, no more msn spaces ….nothing. It could then act like a mass cull of all the sites online that do nothing more than create money for people in advertising (who deserve nothing from this earth), allow so many people (mainly in their teens) to think they can do web design (frontpage has had a similar effect on the world) and just generally slow the whole place down. Google searches would become faster and more up-to-date (as less content would be there to index). The web as we know it was intended as a means for research material to be shared for global collaboration on projects etc. Just look at what it has become though as you stare out into a sea of trolls, pointless information, webcam shots and adverts. If people really want to have a personal site online, fine, I have no problem with that, but we should make them use proper hosting. That way that will stop millions of people who would just put shit up doing so.