tensixtyone

I went to the post office and got my hands on the Huawei E160G with my reduced contract, and so far I am very pleased with it. The modem itself is a large USB stick, very comparable in size to a cigarette lighter. What is interesting is that the electronics can now be packaged in such a small kit, why ain’t they producing mobile phones of this size?

My first step was to get it working on Windows, I plugged in the modem on my old Windows PC and followed the numerous (and strange) online prompts to setup the software. After a lot of beeping, detecting new hardware and other jiggery pokery, I was presented with the Three Modem Manager application. The modem manager is a simple too that enables you to run the “dialup” connection through the modem. I whipped open the setup manual which informed me that no other setup was required bar setting up the software. So I clicked “Connect”…

… and it failed?

According to the tool I had to check my settings to see if they’re correct. This is a fresh setup of the tool, why would I need to check the settings when Three’s own guide mentions theres no setup needed. After 10-15 minutes poking around in the settings menu I finally threw in the towel. Sod it, I wanted to run this thing on Linux anyway so why am I putting myself through the pain?

Linux is, well, the way it was supposed to happen. I plugged in the stick and straight away I had numerous devices available, the “CD-ROM drive” for the drivers, the MicroSD reader, and the “tty” ports for the actual GSM modem. At this time I could of gone the route of setting up Gnome PPP and related tools to dialout to the provider and start using my new fancy net connection, but I’d heard that Network Manager 0.7 had the features to use 3G/GPRS built in without any extra settings. I decided to investigate the new version of Network Manager.

After much digging around on the ‘tubes, I finally found a Debian repository containing a build of the lastest Network Manager SVN. A little apt pinning and installation later I had the new version of the tool install. I browsed the existing menu and found a new option: “Auto connection to 3G/GPRS” , I selected the option and it connected.

I have to have a little moment to reflect here, “Mobile Broadband” is a new fad at the moment for most telecoms providers worldwide, so you would expect the Linux software support to be a little sketchy and buggy, but as it turns out the Linux method is alot simplier and easier to use. I’m not sure if I was missing anything obvious in Windows, but isn’t this stuff just supposed to work?

So, signed on to 3G I decided to give it a run for it’s money. I’m running these tests at 1:08am so it maybe a little bias, as I doubt many people would be actually using the APs at this time. I seem to be getting a variable speed of about 1-2mbps, and 150kbps upstream, not bad at all for a mobile provider. The documentation mentions that you should expect up to 2.5mbps, not the 7.2mbps advertised on some sites, all in all Three do a good job of pre-warning you that the speed on the box is not always what you get.

So far I’m happy with it, I’ve had a few minor issues with the stick not registering on the network but I’m not sure if this was down to my settings or just a small outage. I’ll post a guide in the next few days on configuring Debian up for Network Manager 0.7 and setting it up to work with the E160G.

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At first, when the likes of Three and Vodafone released their “Mobile Broadband” services I was a little skeptical that it’ll be worth the money. 3G data is notoriously rubbish in the UK, either services are capped back to GPRS speeds or are heavily firewalled to make a “walled garden” of approved content. The premise is as follows, Three are starting to reduce their monthly cost in a attempt to get the customers in to back their massive HSDPA expansion in the UK, along with sites like Quidco offering interesting discounts on contracts and special half-price deals, it looks even better…

So I bought in.

On Wednesday I bought Three’s 5GB/month offer package through Quidco, which came to £7.50/per month and £12.50 cashback. For me, the 5GB limit is perfect as I doubt i’ll ever use over that amount in a monthly period. A few people have pointed me to similar packages on T-Mobile, but you can see just from a quick look in that list that the actual price is quite high for what you get, the only bonuses of that package would be the free T-Mobile wifi access (which theres alot of access points for in the UK) and the AUP style limiting, in that if you go over your limit you don’t get charged, you only get kicked up to the higher package if your a constant abuser.

So what’s the catch? Overage. Three charge you £1/per MB in overage, so a extra GB would cost you £1024. In today’s modern telecoms world that is an insane price, which again many people have pointed out to me. If you have no intention of using up to the bandwidth limit, what’s the issue?

Well, I got a useful Royal Mail red slip through the post yesterday, so I have to head down and pickup the equipment. Hopefully by the end of today I can give it a test and write down some more thoughts on it.

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Tuesday night was a slightly reorganised Manchester Free Software, due to a small admin and booking error. It was decided to keep the talk on the 22nd as Ian Forrester had already agreed to the date. Really, the date change didn’t matter to the crowd that turned out, some interesting people from various areas, I also spotted one of the Folly guys in the crowd as well.

Ian Forrester was, up until recently, BBC Backstage, that was until a new member of staff started recently. Backstage is the “freen and open” side of the BBC, spearheading the production of open APIs, free content, and sharing within the BBC. For a media company this may be strange, but due to the “unique way the BBC is funded” we almost have a right to the production content of the BBC to be free and open to all UK license fee payers. As described by Ian, Backstage are at the forefront of new media in the BBC, keeping a eye on new “Web 2.0″ trends and trying to adapt existing data and services to acheive new levels of interaction with the mass public.

Ian described a time where anyone syndicating BBC News stories were instantly sent a C&D order. After stern warnings internally from Ashley Highfield via the Ariel magazine the BBC decided to change its ways an allow access to the services of the BBC by the general public via APIs, and Backstage was born.

Overall, Ian’s insight into the inner workings of the BBC explained alot. He mentioned the Backstage Wild West servers where anyone within the BBC is allowed to use space for any purpose, subverting the already existing Siemens infrastructure. While I was discussing this with Simon this morning he noted that it shows there are key problems within the BBC if a group has to circumvent the normal operating proceedures to carry out their work.

For all those who missed Ian on Tuesday, he’ll be speaking at Geekup Liverpool on 29th July, signup on Upcoming and check it out.

*Edit*

Ian’s video is now available on the BBC Backstage blog.

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Well, the “final” LUGRadio has been and gone, what a weekend!

After the initial fighting with trains, hotels, and various other things, I managed to get down to Wolverhampton with plenty of time to spare before the Friday night unofficial piss-up. After much Hoegaarden and other ales I managed to stumble back to my hotel to continue drinking. As you imagine this didn’t really help me for the next day…

So, mildly hung over, I stumbled down for breakfast at the local greasy spoon, the directions were a little vague and made reference to “The man on the horse” in Wolverhampton city centre. Lucky, some of the more organised members of the group worked out the directions before hand. The choice was good, from a small breakfast up to a 17 piece “death by breakfast” deal for £4.20. Due to the wicked hangover, I was hardly the most social person and proceeded to plow through my food without even a whisper to anyone else.

The event started later on with much fanfare as the previous show, and the jury-rigged improvement to the Atrium stage was a simple canopy over the projector screen, Ingenious. The layout remained the same as 2007 and while we had a little more walking room than last year in the exhibition space it still ended up as a maul to try and walk around.

First talk of the day, for me anyway, was Kevin Sandom on the Lightning Talks stage showing his Bash based clustering solution called GroupHug, as you can imagine the crowd chuckled at the initial idea of it, but as the presentation went on you could actual see use for it, possibly not by sysadmins, but for home projects. The project is amazing, and it seems to work extremely well for such a crazy idea. Maybe it would be useful as a replacement to the MythTV job queue system, but that’s for another post.

Andy Robinson from the OpenStreetMap Foundation was next on the stage, discussing the project as a whole and a brisk introduction to acquiring data for the project. The bright, Hi-Viz jacket amused a few people, I guess they’ll be great for getting the name out there in the public. His talk was straight to the point and gave a excellent overview to a very interested crowd. After the talk I ended walking back to the stall and had a very interesting discussion with Andy regarding the future of OpenStreetMap. In a ideal world, Andy would like to see an expansion in the database to allow dated entries, allowing for the generation of maps for a specific date period. So for example, you could generate a map of what the town looked like in the 19th century, He acknowledged that it would be a massive change in OSM to support this but the interest from the Genealogy crowd would be worth it.

After a quick lunch, I went to see Jeremy Allison from the Samba project on the main stage. Jeremy’s talk gave a quick insight into the milestones and issues Samba had getting to the point it’s at today. Various quips about the state of Microsoft went down well, and the talk was very insightful into the early days of open source software.

Glyn Wintle from the Open Rights Group gave a whirlwind talk on various topics that the group have looked at in the last year. The most interesting is the poor woman who was sued by the BBC for producing knitting patterns for Dr. Who characters, with the help of the ORG and some heavy beating by the likes of the Times and even CBeebies, the BBC backed down and licensed the lady’s works.
Glyn is also responsible of enlisting me as a support of the ORG, while I was slightly intoxicated may I add. I don’t have any regrets as the work they are doing is interesting to me. I hope i’ll be able to support the ORG for quite a long time and hopefully get involved when I can.

After another short break, It was time for LUGRadio Live, the final one. A lot of reminiscing and slander, as per usual. The shock announcement was that after some discussions the night before they have decided to continue the Live shows. The recording will appear in the next few days and you can have a listen yourself, if you missed it that is.

The nighttime entertainment at the venue was something not to be missed. Add Karaoke, quite a lot of drunk people, and you have a situation. Needless to say many people made a complete arse of themselves but it was all in good spirits, and the results can be seen on astopy’s Vimeo. Again, I had too much Guinness and ended up (some how) back in bed.

Day 2, a return visit to the greasy spoon and a groggy entrance into the event. The morning introduction was short and to the point, much to the delight of the hung over crowd. First talk of the morning was dotwaffle / Matthew Walster showing off the demoscene. As my brother was in a demo group called Crusaders while I was growing up, I had to go along to this one. Matthew showed a few demos from the “modern era”, initially I was disappointed that it was all heavily 3D based then later on with the showing of Kewlers/MFX - 1995 I started to liven up a little, a return to the “good old days” from my view. Matthew finished with a little invitation demo to Sundown 08, the Sundown event is accordingly the rebirth of the demoscene parties in the UK. I wish Matthew all the best in getting the UK back on the map for parties.

The Mass Debate was very interested. mrben, Jeremey Allison, Matthew Garrett, and Max Spevack all took the stage to discuss hot topics suggested by the audience, It was a slow start but after a few threats from Matthew regarding the GPL it started to move quickly. Most of the discussion has slipped my mind but I’m sure someone else will be able to go into more details about the topics.

Later on in the day Chris Jones gave a overview of his Terminator application, which might I add, i’m now using as a replacement to Gnome Terminal. The more interesting part is a overview of how he fostered a community around this new application. I’m going through a similar time now with my MythView application, while some basic code is there I need feedback on what feature people would like to see. Chris gave a great talk, which was sadly cut short due to overrunning.

So, it’s all over. The show closed with prizes being handed out and a few last minute slapstick jokes. All in all it’s been a excellent weekend of drinking padded out with talks and I’d highly recommend anyone to keep a space open in July for next year’s event.

photo credit: sheilaellen

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Peter pointed out on the ManLUG mailing list that Liverpool will play host to a “micro-festival” on open source software in media production. The Open Source City festival is running from the 17th – 22nd of June at Mello Mello and various other sites across the city centre. This event has twigged interest from me due to the presentation on open source software from a speaker on IP from the Green Party, i’ve always known that the greens are very pro-open source but i’ve never heard it “from the horses mouth”.

So, my name is down and it’s booked into my calendar. Drop me a message if your also visiting.

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From time to time, to save on resources and make things easier you have to bodge certain items. Today’s example is generating a different report on the first working day of the month than the rest of the month. Crystal Reports doesn’t offer the functionality to identify the first working day of the month, so i’ve created the following fuction:

Function FirstWorkingDayOfMonth(d as Date)
   dim td as date

   ' Grab the first day of the month and check what day of the week it is
   td = datevalue(Year(d),Month(d),1)

   select case dayofweek(td,crMonday)
      case 6
         ' Saturday
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = datevalue(year(d),month(d),3)
      case 7
         ' Sunday
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = datevalue(year(d),month(d),2)
      case else
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = td
   end select
End Function

Just incase this is handy for anyone else.

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With the launch of BBC iPlayer for iPhones it seems they’ve let slip a little extra “feature”. You can now download programs from BBC iPlayer without DRM in a well encoded MP4 format. How? Easy.

First of all, install User Agent Switch for Firefox and setup the iPhone user-agent:

• Description: iPhone
• User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
• App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
• App Version: Version/3.0
• Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Now browse to any BBC iPlayer program page and you’ll notice that it tries to serve up a Quicktime video, the MP4. As the URL isn’t displayed raw in the code, you can use a little Javascript wizardry to redirect you to the raw stream:

javascript:(function(){url = document.getElementById('mip-flash-player').getElementsByTagName("object")[0].childNodes[0].value; window.location = url;})()

Or if you want a simple drag and drop bookmarklet: iPlayer Download

The BBC will either pull the iPhone beta or re-engineer it with the iPhone SDK to develop a full client, either way this will not last long. Initally when I heard the iPhone was supported by iPlayer I was outraged, Why does a device with only around 100,000 users in the UK get priority over a operating system? It almost seems like Karma is against them, but no doubt this will get into the news as “hackers exploiting the system” rubbish. Only time will tell, enjoy it while you can.

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Finally, i’ve got round to moving the /misc folder off onto Amazon S3. I’ve decided to do this due to my upcoming hosting move, not having to worry about several hundred megabytes of static data will ease the strain of moving. So, how have I done it?

First of all I created a bucket on S3 with the name assets.nikdoof.net, from there I setup a CNAME in BIND for assets.nikdoof.net pointing to s3.amazonaws.com to allow direct referencing to the files within the bucket.

assets.nikdoof.net.     IN      CNAME   s3.amazonaws.com.

Then for the relocation of the misc folder, setup a simple Apache mod_rewrite rule to transfer all requests for the misc folder to S3.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/misc/(.*)$ http://assets.nikdoof.net/$1 [R,L]

So now it’s all up and working, and to give it a try yourself, here is a fetching wallpaper of Rachel Stevens.

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Over the last few years i’ve had numerous domains to cover fads or preference changes, so now it’s time for a little spring cleaning.

In the next few weeks i’m hoping to drop my long time domain blueshiftmedia.net, and a vanity domain of bluecalx.net. Both of these domains have served me well, and i’ve also used blueshiftmedia for hosting my home business a long time ago. I’ll miss these two little domains but I can’t warrent the £9 per year just to have them redirect to my blog.

Just a quick note to the spammers/fraudsters who might be looking at this with interest, nothing of any interest goes to the associated mail accounts with those domains and theres no real links in.

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So I finally rebooted my laptop after the 10.4.10 update, fine a few months late but what the hell. Anyway, my Powerbook started kernel panicking on boot. After a few minutes investigation I found that the iScroll kext was causing all the issues, quickly remove the file in single user mode and I was back up and running…

So much for seamless updates eh?

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