Virtualisation (take 2)

Well, hope everyone had a nice christmas and are looking forward to a great new year. I certainly am.

Anyway, just thought i'd blog about a development in my quest for the perfect virtualisation approach. People who know me know that I am passionate about the use of Virtual Machines (VMs) for practically everything I do. I just love the idea of having my main OS (currently Ubuntu 7.04), but being able to run Ubuntu / OpenSUSE / Damn Small Linux (DSL), or, indeed, any other OS that has the feature that I require (such as my 11g instance on Oracle Enterprise Linux, or my Ubuntu 10g XE database, again all running as RDP'able VMs).

In the past, I've always used VMWare Player, and got my head around the creation of VMDK and VMX files by the use of QEMU. However, recently, I've started to get my head around VirtualBox, an open-source project for managing your VM server, and, I must say, how impressed am I? The software is an absolute breeze to install / run, and the creation of the VMs through the use of wizards is a bit funny to start off with, but once you understand it, it's by far the easiest way to create all the fiddly configuration settings for a given VM, such as hard disk size, memory usage etc.

One problem with simply using VMWare player, as opposed to VMWare Workstation (or similar), is that you have to basically manage your VM server like you're managing file(s) and window(s), i.e. through a file manager. However, what I like about VirtualBox is that the software is
full enterprise-class software, having a VM manager, the full works! And, the fact that it's one of the only software which fully supports Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) (although, you can do this with other VM products, they don't fully support it... not yet anyway). For a little bit more information on this, see here.

Of course, it's OSS as well, and extremely light-weight.

So, as I'm writing this, Ubuntu 7.10 is being installed. I'll let you know how I get on with my future VM projects in future blog posts.

Have a happy new year!

Can you adam and eve it?

I just DO NOT believe this... maybe it's just that things are getting put in to the public domain more because of recent events, and granted that this is the Royal Mail, and not, strictly speaking, some inept government department, but how long do we have to live in a country with such a woefully and grotesquely inept attitude towards data security awareness? How can things just go so badly wrong all the time (as seems to be the case)?

Mr Brown is probably thinking "why did I ever take this job?". The rest of us are thinking exactly the same thing.....

Here we go again

Almost as a response to my previous blog, here we go again. Now, nine NHS trusts have "lost" data (one, according to the Sunday Mirror, involved the details of 160,000 children). Utterly unbelievable. The stupidity, ignorance and ineptitude staggers belief!

Data security (or lack thereof)

My previous post sparked a minor flurry of comments (cheers Tim) about top-n lists, but I was shocked tonight (literally about half an hour ago) to find ANOTHER piece on the newswire about a government department / local authority misplacing yet another set of valuable documents and information in some form of internal postal system. Granted, with this one there was not any way that innocent individuals information could be gleaned, however, this is another example of this systemic ineptitude and total ignorance of basic data security principles when dealing with the important issue of personal data.

As somebody who has made a career in the data management industry, with experience in large scale data warehousing and business intelligence projects (even presenting a series of talks of data security principles), this is something I feel I can comment on with some authority. In a sense, Gordon Brown has been unlucky. He took over just as two major data security violations took place in government departments, namely the HM Revenues and Customs (HMRC) and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), and it would be naive to think that government departments and local authorities all work in some kind of revolutionary way such that the Prime Minister knows EVERYTHING that goes on, of course not, he relies on his junior ministers / secretaries of whatever stupid government department's turn it happens to be this time, nor would it have been any different under any other government party, since it's still the same employees who work in the HRMC or DVLA, but just as the managing director of a company is liable for corporate mistakes by employees (generally), I'm afraid the buck stops with Mr. Brown. This has certainly not been a good few months for the Labour party, especially with the other things such as questions over funding rear their ugly head.

I'm afraid, though, as much as I understand about the way that this country is structured, I have no sympathy for any of them. It, quite simply, staggers belief the sheer scale of some of the data security violations (most of which definitely contravene the Data Protection Act 1998).

So, here's the top 10 list of government ineptitude, in ascending order of total inept ignorance and each showing a total lack of respect for the important of security of personal information :

10. Hundreds of HMRC documents (including VAT returns and personal details) found by a BBC reporter on a Nottingham street

9. An ex-employee for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) having thousands of benefit claimant details (fortunately, non-financial) on 2 CDs for over a year after leaving

8. The DVLA sending 1,215 questionnaires with personal details out and 100 going to the wrong addresses.

7. The Scottish Government losing pension statements for 200 people (fortunately, found again a day later)

6. HMRC (again) involved in a postal mix-up regarding the personal details of 50 people being accidentally sent to a training company in Dundee.

5. Domestic violence victim details (names and addresses) faxed by mistake to local shops in Glasgow by Strathclyde Police

4. 15,000 Standard Life customer details "lost" in transit from HMRC (again)

3. Ruth Kelly admitting that the details of three million learner drivers were "lost" by a contracted company based in Iowa, contracted to the DVLA.

2. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) sending the pension details of 26,000 pensioners to the wrong addresses

and, of course.....

1. By far the most staggering, 25 million child benefit records from HMRC (yes, again!) to the National Audit Office (NAO) on 2 CDs being lost in internal mail.

As somebody who has personally been affected by number 1, and also aware that their financial and personal details on a (get this!) "password-protected" set of 2 CDs generated by a junior official and sent by UNREGISTERED courier, seemingly with the full knowledge of much more senior managers (even though the chanceller, Alistair Darling, blamed the fiasco solely on this "junior official"), this shows another absolutely astounding lapse of data security by a government. In any other context, senior heads would roll for this, certainly if this country was a private company, no one would touch us with a ten-metre cattle prod. To add insult to injury, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has stated that the government did break the Data Protection Act 1998 by not safeguarding sensitive data. However, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) lacks any kind of teeth, since the maximum fine that a Data Protection Act 1998 violation can incur is, wait for it...., £5,000. Yeah, that's right, only five grand, although, to be fair, Mr. Darling has promised that the ICO will get more powers of prosecution for future data protection violations. What this will mean for us citizens / consumers, we'll have to wait and see.

Rectification and early 80s animation

I haven't blogged for a while (that's an usual line for me.. not), so thought best had.

Firstly, I'd like to answer a little bit of criticism about one of my previous posts on top 10s. Basically, my mate Tim Hall decided to have a little pop at me about it being quite sad that I posted my top-10 software apps, which is rich really considering some of his posts have been about his top 30 lyrics from songs that noone (apart from 23 people in Crewe Limelight) have ever heard of! ;-)

However, I think it's fair to say that he is probably right, as much as it pains me to say it, and, as penance, will obviously be posting an updated top-10 list of apps, but this time concentrating on linux, again in descending order to importance. Can't wait for the next post on Tim's blog, i.e. the top-10 signal buffers on class-5 rolling steam engines... ;-)

So, to continue, and since my decisions have changed dramatically over the last few months, not least of which is because of my continuing involvement in virtualisation products

• 10. Skype - Now that video is part of the linux client


• 9. Google Earth


• 8. Second Life - This has fallen somewhat, since I go on this far less than I used to, and I wish Linden would get around to sorting out the performance problems that the linux client has


• 7. Envy - A Python / PyGTK app for automating the installation of NVidia drivers for Debian-based distros


• 6. Evolution mail


• 5. Ubuntu Terminal (where would we be without the command line?)


• 4. LifeRea


• 3. VMWare


• 2. Qemu


• 1. Firefox

So, what else have we been up to? Well... of course, it's coming up to Christmas, and the kids are so excited it's unreal. In fact, just watched The Snowman, one of the most beautifully animated short films of all time. The amazing thing about this film is that it never looks or feels dated (despite being made in 1982), and it's a testament to both the author, Raymond Briggs, and the animators that, even now, kids such as mine will watch it and still be enthralled (as I was at their age).

Top 10s

My mate Tim Hall pretty much posts one of three things on his blog over at kalyr.com. The first type of post is the "music review", which involves an in-depth review of some CD or Music gig that he's been to recently (and believe me, he goes to a lot!). The second type is the "train review", which involves an in-depth review of some train convention / exhibition / extensive holiday that he's been on (and believe me, he goes to a heck of a lot!). More relevant to this post, however, is his third type, the top-n post, i.e. the "top 10 CDs ever" or the "top 20 music lyrics ever" etc. etc.

Following in his footsteps somewhat, I thought i'd take a more techie line, and post a couple of top-n lists of my own, with my own personal flavour.

So, here goes.... in reverse order, starting with the top-10 apps I use (on any OS) :

• 10. Skype - A VoIP client


• 9. Google Earth


• 8. Shareaza - A file-sharing app (supporting eDonkey, Gnutella, Gnutella2 and Bittorrent)


• 7. uTorrent - Probably the best Bittorrent app


• 6. Second Life


• 5. VMware


• 4. QEMU


• 3. Liferea - An RSS / Atom feed reader for GNOME


• 2. Evolution Mail - An e-mail client


• 1. Firefox - (easily the best browser in existence)

From virtualisation to remote access

It's been a while since I last blogged anything, and, being a techie, you won't be surprised to find out that i've been playing around with a few things.

If you're a techie like me, you'll appreciate the whole raft of "technical support requests" that come in from various friends and family members... "martin, can you have a look at this vista laptop" or "chadders, can you sort out the display drivers on this ubuntu machine". Now, don't get me wrong, i'm more than willing to help them out, I know they'd help me out if I needed it, but since I'm really the only person in my circle of friends and family that has more than a modicum of IT experience, it's naturally me they ask if they need anything beyond the "how do you do this in Word?" variety.

The only trouble is that some of them live quite a distance away, and sometimes it would simply take all my time to drive to their houses (frankly, it's usually impossible to explain how to sort things over the phone with me, i'm definitely a "hands-on" kind of guy.....). So, internally, I run a combination of Windows XP Home, Ubuntu Linux and Damn Small Linux on various machines (plus a myriad of other OSes using VMs, of course, as outlined in a earlier blog), all networked using a Netgear DG834GT router / ADSL modem, and, crucially, I access them all pretty much remotely using a combination of TightVNC (for the XP Home machine which doesn't support "standard" Remote Desktop (RDP)) and Remote Desktop (RDP).

So, after a recent request for some Microsoft Windows Vista support at my brother-in-laws, I decided to look into educating them into allowing me remote access to their machines.

Now, on an internal network, it's one thing, over the internet, it's slightly more involved. Let's take the Vista case study. Firstly, you have to setup port-forwarding on the router (if it supports it.. most modern ones do). This is so your router's external IP address (and relevant port) will automatically shunt traffic onto the machine which sits behind the router, in this case, the Vista machine. This was relatively easy to do once I'd instructed him how to
access the router admin page. Note, that I actually installed TightVNC on Vista for this to work, for no other reason other than I like the web interface that it offers, there's no reason why I couldn't use RDP (except on XP Home). Once the windows firewall had had port 5800 and 5900 enabled (these are the two default ports that TightVNC uses), simply entering into a java enabled browser (firefox, in my case), http://ip_address:5800/, enter the defined password and bang, I'm in, with his desktop in my browser. Brilliant, now it means I can do most things from here, rather than going to his house.

Heritage and showcaves...

Usual stuff.. it's been a while since I blogged about anything, so thought I'd fill you all in about a superb heritage trip undertaken today. As you all know by now, I'm a member of English Heritage and, as such, I take time as much as possible to visit as many sites as possible. Anyway, the second year of the membership has finally kicked in and, as a consequence, we now get
free access to sites of CADW (Wales), Historic Scotland and Manx Heritage.
The focus will always be on english heritage sites, though, since it's my mother country.

Today's journey was to the lovely derbyshire town of Castleton, and the fantastic Peveril Castle. For the pictures, keep checking on StrangeHub.co.uk (when I get around to posting the images etc.).

While we were there, we went to Peak Cavern (also known as The Devil's Arse), a superb showcave with the largest cave entrance in the British Isles. The cave system extends for miles underneath the stunning derbyshire countryside, and part of the hour-long tour actually goes into the caves underneath Peveril Castle, which is made more intriguing if you've just, like we had, been in the castle literally an hour before!

The tour stops at the devil's cellar, but the cave system carries on for miles more, connecting directly with the other boat-trip oriented Speedwell Cavern.

It should also be noted that the famous Titan cave system, the longest free-hanging cave ever found in the UK, was found in 1999 when cavers first discovered the connection between Speedwell and Peak Caverns.

The promise (and cool-ness) of Virtualisation...

Well, I've been having some fun recently with VMs. Basically, I've got my head around QEMU, along with VMWare Player, and have been having fun with setting up a whole series of VMs to suit my purposes (both short and long term). At the moment, I'm blogging this in Ubuntu (my "main" OS), I've got my own personal wiki running using a MediaWiki via JumpBox VM and evaluating Damn Small Linux ( a 50MB (yeah, 50MB!) Debian / GNU LInux distro ) as an OS which could eventually make it's way onto my kids PC (when they get old enough to want one, of course, and by that time something else will probably have made it's way on to the top of my "this is extremely cool" list.... ;-)).
Oh, did I say that I was also using the same wiki from Windows XP and Windows Vista laptops as well, and I've got a seperate Ubuntu VM for my Oracle 10g XE installation? All this and most of the VMs have either VNC or RDesktop which allows me to remotely access them.



My long term goal is to have some kind of low-energy server (wouldn't even need a monitor) with a very lightweight OS, i.e. just enough to run the various VMs, such as Oracle, proxy server, web server etc., and then have the other machines simply connect to them via TCP/IP (with VNC access, if required). Most companies I know of which utilise VMs do so in this way. True enough, the VM server has to be relatively meaty, but they can be very "hardware light", i.e. no hard disk is required with the advent of NAS drives. Creation of VMs can always be done via ISO disk image, so I suppose that at least one device has to have a CD/DVD drive, but it doesn't have to be the server. Certainly, no monitor is required, since VNC access from a "client" device can see the output of any VM, and booting can be done from USB pen drive.



My current thoughts for a lightweight "computer" for the kids is, therefore, a laptop with no HDD or CD/DVD drive, with motherboard ability to boot from USB and a USB drive with Damn Small Linux (DSL) installed on it. All file system storage can be done on a NAS drive,
and any particular programs that they need, I'd simply set up a VM, but let's face it, there's a heck of a lot of on-line office applications now (i.e. word processor / spreadsheet etc) that simply run in an Ajax-enabled browser.

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An eventful week....

Well, to say it's been an eventful week would be an understatement.

Tuesday morning, 3:15am, house alarm goes off. Thinking that my 2 year old son has tripped the alarm again by going downstairs (which he's done before), I wander downstairs. As I open the living room door, I see two burglars in the kitchen. Well, I (as anyone would) run towards them, yelling all manner of things... They, of course, decide to make a quick exit. A tussle occurs between one of them and myself, resulting in a minor screwdriver stab to my upper arm. Anyway, to cut a long story short, they bolt over the garden fence, and are gone.

Turns out that I'd left the patio doors unlocked, which I never usually do, and they'd been a couple of scally chancers who had been trying the houses on the off chance that someone (like me) had left a door or a window open. Actually, one of the burglars had reminded me of the fact when they were leaving, shouting "Remember to lock your doors in future!". Fantastic, community safety advice from burglars.....

Anyway, a visit or two from C.I.D., uniformed police officers and a forensic officer taking prints, and I'm back to normal again. I'm not going to deny that it was a scary experience, but at the time (with your family in the house with you), the adrenalin starts pumping and you don't really think about the threat, all you're concerned about is getting them out as quickly as possible.

On a lighter note, I went to see my daughter's nursery graduation today. That's right, today is her official last day before she starts school in september. It was also my son's last day as well, since he's moving to a different nursery in september, so it's all change. It was very emotional. The staff always get emotional, which you expect, since they've known the kids for over two years, most of them for most of each week, and then they go off to start whichever school they've managed to get in. My wife and I certainly got emotional, since it's very much the end of an era. As much as I know they're going to enjoy school and the new nursery, I'm going to miss that nursery. It's a lovely place, the staff are great, and it's a place which I've seen my kids develop from being babies to being young, confident children.

On the viewing front, I watched Jimmy Carr's 2005 stand up show Stand Up 2005. Yes, I agree, imaginatively titled.

Anyway, what a funny guy. I never used to be a big fan of his, until I watched him hosting 8 out of 10 cats, along with Sean Lock (another comedian I'd love to see in a live show). Jimmy Carr's fantastic deadpan approach I find hysterical.

Givin' it both barrels...

I've blogged about this before in a previous blog incarnation, but I've just re-watched Al Murray's Givin' it both barrels on DVD. I'd forgotten just how amazingly funny he is, and how so refreshingly politically incorrect.

One of my favourite lines (amongst the ones that I can actually blog about!) is "Look at Switzerland, what an unfortunate position they've got themselves in.... France to the left, Austria to the right, Germany above and Italy below them.... you'd never sell that flat would you?"... Class.

technorati tags:Pub, Landlord, Al, Murray

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Going to the zoo....

Haven't blogged much recently, so thought I'd just waffle on about the wonderful day we had today. Took the kids to Blackpool Zoo, with a preconception of rain all day. However, by about 11am, we had glorious sunshine, and it lasted all day. Also, it's been a while since I've been up there, but what a change! Pretty much the whole zoo has had a complete makeover, a fantastic new entrance facility and a new dinosaur section (obviously, not real dinosaurs, that'd be quite a catch!). Well worth going to see, and it's definitely a full day out. True enough, it's not as big as Chester Zoo, but it's still amazing. One thing to definitely see is Amazonia, a free-roaming monkey enclosure next to the elephant house. Entering the doors, you are greeted by a great number of squirrel monkeys all jumping from one side of the path to another, jumping on your pram (if you have one) and attempting to steal things from pockets! One of the staff commented how a few weeks earlier, someone brought a newborn baby into the enclosure, and one of the squirrel monkeys jumped into the pram, took the baby's dummy (pacifier, for the non-UK reader) and made off with it! Funny to look back on, but not funny at the time, I bet! ;-) What an amazing day, though, and certainly a trip that I will be re-doing very soon.

technorati tags:blackpool, zoo

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Untitled

Well, the observant amongst you may have noticed that my fortean / heritage site, strangehub.co.uk went live yesterday. Log on and have a look, give me your comments. I'd love to get any feedback / ideas about possible additions, etc.

Celestia

One of the nice things about OSS is that there's simply TONS of free software available. This is never more true than on Linux (whichever flavour). Ubuntu (my personal fave) is no exception. Recently, I was introduced to a great site for Ubuntu users, Getdeb.net, which is a software portal, basically pointing you to great software for Ubuntu.

Going back to my childhood, i've had a fascination with the stars, planets, galaxies etc., and so it was with great anticipation that I downloaded Celestia, a 3D space simulator.

Basically, this software allows you to travel between the various stellar (and interstellar) objects which make up our universe (well, a little bit of it anyway).What fantastic software! You could spend many hours looking at the various planets / asteroids / comets / stars / galaxies / nebulae etc. etc. etc. (the list is endless)as though you were travelling through space yourself.

Go.. Ricky!

On the subject of Ricky's.... this time not Gervais, but Hatton! Well done, Ricky! Knocking out
Castillo in the fourth is your finest hour, enjoy every minute of your success, a fantastic fight.

It's always nice to see a brit winning something for a change.....

Flock and the social web

Being an Ubuntu Linux user, i'm a big advocate of Open-Source Software (OSS). As such, I'm a big fan of the Firefox web browser. Being OSS, of course, part of the revolutionary business model of this kind of software is it's ease of being copied, modified, hacked and redistributed as a completely different bit of software (as long as the original licence is still in place of course). Firefox (and other Mozilla technologies) is no different. I recently used the Flock web browser, and am quite impressed. The current version at time of writing is 0.7.14, and is based on firefox, but has various features which facilitates the various social networking services out there, from blogs (indeed, this very blog post was done from within Flock) to social sites such as del.icio.us.

Over and above that, apart from the Ricky Gervais show (read last post), it's been a fairly quiet weekend, went to Mr. Clown's again on Saturday for a couple of hours, and went to a 50th birthday meal (not mine, I hasten to add...) today.

Oh, and the various people who've emailed me on when the new fortean site (StrangeHub.co.uk) will be active (thanks for the interest, by the way!), I'm putting the final touches to it now, so it'll be in the next week or so...

Ricky Gervais

Just (literally, about 20 mins ago) got back from seeing the fantastically funny Ricky Gervais and his "Fame" stand up show at Manchester's M.E.N. Arena. A complete sell-out, about 6000 people, it was another typical example of his amazingly funny talent. Now, to be honest, I don't think it's quite as good as the previous two shows, "Animals" and "Politics", but it was well worth the entrance fee. His unique brand of humour, a mix of political incorrectness and dry observational sharpness, is enthralling especially when he's talking about religion, which is a subject which crops up in a lot of his humour. Snippets such as "I prefer Old-Testament God with the floods and the pestilence whereas New-Testament God is a bit on the wet side" or "Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and if people do believe in God, I don't mind as long as they realise they're wrong", leaves me in no doubt that he is very much in my top 3 of stand-up comics, the other two being Eddie Izzard and, as long time readers of this blog will know, Bill Bailey.

The show starts off with Ricky bursting through the curtains dressed in kingly robes and crown, with a large lit "RICKY" behind him. After that (and explaining how the whole budget went on just that one effect), the show goes along at a good rate, occasionally taking a sip from the handy can of beer which is placed behind the large gold Emmy which is placed on the stage, which actually precipitated a shout from one member of the audience that they couldn't see much of him from where they were, but they were put down once he'd explained that the majority of the show didn't get much more visual than just watching him speak.

One of Ricky Gervais's strengths is just how obviously clever the guy is, but it's often his ramblings about things he doesn't know which is the funniest, such as the oft-said "how did the first human get AIDS, since we know it comes from monkeys?" to which his funny conversation carries on "the human goes to the doctor, doctor tells him he's got AIDS, he asks how he got it.. and is given two reasons... 1) He's been having sexual relations with monkeys, or 2) he's been chopping up monkeys and accidentally cut his finger at the same time", guess which option the human chose to save embarrassment!

His charity work also features prominently in the show, including his AIDS and Cancer benefit gigs in the UK as well as the US, and also there were a few little digs to Dawn French, after her funny sketch in "French and Saunders" ridiculing Ricky Gervais' weight.

Overall, a good show. Not the best he's done (I personally think that accolade goes to "Animals"), but still worth the entrance fee.

Post-post telephony upgrade and abdominal exercises...

Well, the internet connection is staying stable, never dropping to below 10.5dB SNR on the router,
definitely looks like i've removed that little gremlin.

I'm currently in a state of abdominal overload (probably not as bad as it sounds!). I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last few months (about 3 stone) on Slimming World (a diet regime I can whole-heartedly recommend, by the way, it's not calorie counting like some other diet regimes, but a "eat as much of the right type of food as you want" diet), but the stomach area still needs a bit of toning (really fancy that washboard six-pack that all the fellas in the movies have...).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was watching the shopping channels about a fortnight ago,
and saw a section on the Ab Lounge XL Pro, a kind of "make sit-ups a lot easier" type device, the effectiveness of which was being extolled by various amazingly fit people ( the kind of people who sit around on sunny beaches all day and look good ). So, a quick google search later, and I found the cheapest option to be Mochea.com.
Another quick entry of the credit card details, and I was ready for my new lifestyle as the new Baywatch lifeguard that gets his pick of the lovely ladies..... (well, almost!).

It arrived about 3 days later, and I've been using it every night for the past 4 days. What an amazing bit of kit! You only need to do about 20 crunches and you really feel it. Anyway, i've got to the point where I'm doing about 150 crunches a night now, and frankly I'm feeling great.
BUT... my stomach muscles feel as though they're going through ten rounds with Ricky Hatton (good luck against Castillo in Los Angeles on 23rd June, Ricky!). Anyway, that's enough of my abdominal escapades....

Nothing much else has happened really. Couldn't get into second life last night, for some reason couldn't connect at all, just hung at the login page. I know that the main grid has had some
login and performance problems recently, but other people seemed to connect ok.. I must have just been unlucky. Managed to connect tonight okay, but wasn't on long.. too busy trying to get a stomach I can wash the towels on... ;-)

Oh well, catch up with you all later.

Post-telephony upgrade

Title sounds a little bit pretentious, but who cares?

Anyway, the big upgrade to the internal wiring of the house finished last night (as mentioned in the previous post). Out came the master socket and a new one to replace it, re-did the IDC connections (they needed looking at anyway, they were starting to corrode) and then replaced the extension socket in the study. As mentioned, I can't fault the things I bought from ADSL Nation, the quality is superb, plus, because they're all
pre-filtered, it means I can finally get rid of all the dangly ADSL microfilters (each socket has a phone AND an ADSL jack seperate).

After all this, the router is now showing a SNR (noise margin) of 10.7dB, rather than the previous 6.7dB, which equates to a hell of a lot less noise on the line. Also, it means that the invariable "reboot the router after a while" because of the line errors has gone away....

So, upshot is, I've now got a stable ~15 Meg ADSL2+ connection, for about £20 of upgrade kit (and a bit of my time, of course). At last I can meet my good friends on second life without worrying about disconnections.

Speaking of second life, my avatar's gone through a bit of a change recently, it's gone very vampire / gothic (sort of). Obviously, in real life, i'm a 6'4", blonde haired muscle-bound adonis with perfect vision, so I thought I'd down scale with my avatar and have him 5'9" with glasses, short hair with vampire shoes and white angel wings, absolutely nothing like me in real life (what do you mean, I'm lying?).

On a personal note, as I've mentioned before, I'm a long term member of English Heritage (which fits in nicely with my fortean interests, of course), so we tend to be scooting around the english countryside taking in all the castles / abbeys / historic monuments that this wonderful country has to offer. So, I took the kids to see Beeston Castle, which is about an hours drive from Manchester, or about 10 miles from Chester. What a wonderful heritage site, fantastic views from the inner bailey, and astonishing woodland encompassing the outer bailey and grounds. The castle was originally built around AD1225, but there was a hill fort and settlement there long before that. There was also a "medieval day" on, so the kids learnt how to hit each other (and me) with foam swords.. wonderful.. it means that now I get the same treatment from metal Thomas the Tank Engine's or hard plastic Dora the Explorers. Thanks a bunch, Sir Edward of Chester!

I am going to get around to chronicling our trips to the many heritage sites we've visited, such as Stonehenge and the astonishing Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, along side a new website that I'm developing which will cover fortean subjects as well. This should go live in a few weeks or so, and will be StrangeHub.co.uk.

DNS and Telephones....

A bit of a problem occurred with my internet setup this weekend. Basically, effective connection speed was very intermittent on my netgear router, even though sync speed was still it's usual 15M+. There's many different reasons for this, but after looking at the advanced router stats, it was obvious that I had a tremendous amount of noise on the line, CRC errors were about 80% of the total packet traffic and SNR had gone from approx 7.5dB to about 6.5dB (1dB of noise is quite a bit of
noise to an ADSL2+ connection!).

Noise on the line, again has many reasons, and can seriously affect ADSL2+, since it's sync'ing at much higher speeds typically than ADSL.

Testing the router directly in the BT test socket behind the master faceplate, it shot up to 10.1dB! A massive improvement, now with only about 0.5% CRC errors (which is good for a phone line).

So, looks like i've got a re-wiring job coming up. I've ordered a pre-filtered faceplate for both the master socket and the extension socket from ADSL Nation. These are pretty much the best you can get, and they remove the need for a "dangly" microfilter. I'll keep you informed.

Two posts ago, I mentioned I'd moved to using OpenDNS for my DNS resolution service, well, I've been experimenting tonight with dnsmasq, a local DNS cache which I'd heard good things about. Well, they're all true! Fantastic functionality. Basically, sudo apt-get install dnsmasq, configure /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf, /etc/dnsmasq.conf and the obligatory /etc/resolv.conf and you've got a local DNS cache! Now, instead of subsequent calls to OpenDNS taking about 35-40 msec, it now gets it in about 1 msec. Fantastic. If anyone's interested in doing this, then have a gander at http://www.ubuntugeek.com/local-dns-cache-for-faster-browsing-on-ubuntu-machine.html.

Second Life (or lack thereof)

It's unbelievable how you mention a popular site / MMORPG (well, it's not technically a game....) like Second Life, how many responses you get saying people want to meet up online. Thanks to all who emailed, i'll see you in SL asap. The reason why I say ASAP is that a new version of the SL viewer was released today (1.15.0.2) (which i've been keen to see if it fixes any of the annoyances (mostly performance related which really seems to affect the linux viewer, I haven't tried it on Windows) that detract from an otherwise great experience), but the production grid is having login difficulties, hence no-one can access it. The beta grid is available, though, so anyone having serious SL withdrawal can at least get some kind of fix.

On a TV / film front (and I realise that I haven't blogged about telly for quite a while), I've recently got very much into the Catherine Tate show. While I realise that I jumped on the tate bandwagon a few months later than most people, I find the show utterly fantastic. Cleverly written and performed by one of the funniest comediennes I have seen since Victoria Wood came on the scene, it's just so utterly watchable (which is one of the best compliments you could give to a TV series of any kind). To anyone who cares to disagree (and I know she's got her fair share of critics), "How VERY dare you!". Absolute class.... "Dirty, Evil...."

Going all technical...

I haven't posted for a while, various things have occurred, going to florida with the kids and staying in the wonderful Nickelodeon Hotel (the kids are big
Dora and Diego fans), just for starters, and coupled with the fact that i'm just lazy, means that my blog is getting very similar to my diaries from when I was a youngster, i.e. Jan 1st is about a page and a half long, detailing every step I took to school, which girls I fancied etc., but then quickly getting bored of writing diaries and the next entry is July 23rd "Auntie Freda's birthday".

However, I thought I'd just blog about the things that have happened recently. Firstly, and to my great delight, version 7.04 of Ubuntu Linux has been released. I've been using 6.10 for a while now, and loving every minute. 7.04, however, is a different class, so much quicker and easier to use.

Another thing I've switched over to, is using OpenDNS for my DNS resolution service. A fabulous service, and one I can heartily recommend. Much quicker than most DNS services and much more secure, automatically identifying and blocking various phishing sites and also correcting various URL spelling mistakes. It's also a doddle to switch over to, no need to register or anything, all you do is modify your network connection (in Ubuntu -> sudo network-admin and then specify the two IP addresses given on the website in the DNS tab, in Windows, it's done at the TCP/IP protocol adapter properties). Literally, two minutes and you're away.

I'm also more active on IRC (efnet) (usually on #oracle or #sql) and Second Life than i've been for a while (OpenDNS helps here as well!). I tend to go via the IRC name of "sequel" and the Second Life name of "Sequel Acronym" (yeah, ok, I live and breathe Oracle...).

If you're ever on either, IM me and we'll have a chat.

What a bizarre day....

It's a common northern expression in England to say "The weather doesn't know what to do with itself today", and this has never been truer than today. The meterological events of today are (in chronological order) : Rain, Sun, Hail, Rain and, now (as I write), Snow!

And people think that climate change isn't an issue.....

Coding and the silver screen

It's been a while since I blogged last (frankly, not had much opportunity over the Christmas / New year period), and this one isn't exactly war and peace, however, just thought I'd share the following couple of websites which, frankly, had me ROTFL (yeah, I don't use these acronyms really, not since leaving the IRC scene a few years ago anyway, but that seemed a perfect excuse).

Both of these sites are about the way that IT, and coding in particular, is represented on both TV and the movies. I've covered this in a previous blog, but these were hilarious.

• What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies)


• Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers From The Movies and Any Episode of "24"