Week of 7th May, 2001

Last Week

Monday, 7th May

Bank Holiday today, but despite that a goodly proportion of shops were open.

About midday, I was roused out of bed by a 'phone call from Jenny, "Can you come down to the video shop? I can't use the card" The shop operates a membership scheme, and only named people can use the card - Katy and Jenny weren't on the list. So I had to turn out and authorise the transaction, and while I was there I added Katy and Jenny to the list of authorised users. This problem will not recur.

Being out, I decided to implement a change-around in the study. Thus far, Tux has been sitting on a high shelf, with the infrared keyboard interface sensor lower down, where it's convenient to point the keyboard. He talks to the HP mono VGA monitor on a lower shelf - just above head height when I'm sitting in front of Fujisan. Some months ago, the flatbed scanner was on that shelf, but I moved it last time I shifted things, intending to install it on Celery.

Well, I did that today, and Tux now lives under the scanner, on the desk beside Celery. The two computers share a 14 inch colour monitor, via a mechanical KVM switch that I bought today. Keyboards are not shared - Tux still uses the Airkey infrared keyboard, and Celery the IBM clicky-feel keyboard I bought at Ally Pally last month. BTW, that is a lovely keyboard.

I also put an electronic timer in the power supply to the USR Sportster modem, to enforce the time-of-day rules for Surftime. Admittedly, spending UKP13 to save UKP0.25 per month is not good economics, but next time it might not be 25 pence.

While I was moving the scanner, I replaced its plugtop power supply with a soap-on-a-rope style brick. This allows me to plug the scanner power supply into an IEC multi-outlet strip, rather than rummaging for a 13 Amp multiway board. I hate plugtop power bricks, which force you to use 13 AMP sockets - just by my feet as I type this is a 6 way 13 Amp strip, with the plugtop bricks for the Netgear switch, the Netgear hub, the SohoBasic hub, the D-Link dialup server, and the modem (via an electronic timer plug). The sixth outlet feeds an IEC power strip screwed to the uderside of the shelf on which Fujisan sits. The cable from the 6 way is plugged into one side of a double 13 amp wall socket, the other side of which feeds the big desk, with Tux and Celery.

The new scanner power supply is twice as big as the OEM plugtop brick, but that doesn't matter - it's behind Tux, where I can't see it without craning over the desk.

Having done the move, I tried installing the memory I'd bought at Ally Pally in Tux. It went in all right, and the BIOS recognised it (for a total of 56MB - that means the extra is 2x16MB, not 2x8MB as I thought), but Tux repeatedly rebooted at the "checking module dependencies" stage, so I took the SIMMs back out, and all was well. I didn't think there was a dependency on memory size - or maybe the memory is the wrong speed. No matter, it was only UKP6 for the two, so I'm not out too much, and maybe I'll buy another superannuated machine that can use the SIMMs.

The E-Smith ISO seemed to burn to CD OK - at least it is readable, which the previous attempt wasn't.

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Tuesday, 8th May

Lawn mowing today - the first time this year - and the grass was long. The weather has been wet, and grass loves that, besides you can't mow the lawns when they're wet, so after a couple of dry days it was out with the electric hovermower. Now I have backache from pushing that thing through what amounts to a mini-jungle.


I'm trying to put down a drawing of the home network, using an old copy of Visio I have lying around. I've got about half of it done, but the idiosyncracies of Visio are making it a slow process. Mark you, it's the first time of using it, so I'm following the learning curve. I'll post the result here when completed.


I indulged in a little masochism today. I checked on the status of broadband internet connections in my area.

I know that ADSL is available - BT say so, but I wouldn't touch BT's own ISP offering with a ten foot pole. I've seen too many tales of woe - see this site for a representative sampling. Demon are a possibility, but I'd have ADSL charges on top of their tenner-a-month - makes UKP50 or more per month - not affordable.

NTL do cable modem - but I can't even check whether service is available to me - the availablity checker returns a 400 error when I submit my (correct) postcode.

Blueyonder also do cable modem, but despite claiming to offer service in the borough in which I live, my postcode gives back "sorry, not available". At least their site works.

So it looks like dial-up for me - on S(m)urftime it doesn't rack up the money when I'm online for hours. One day I must upgrade the modem to V90 - or maybe even V92.


While collecting and archiving the comic strips I read regularly, I had occasion to try to access Comics.com from Celery, using IE 3.0, as supplied with vanilla Win95 OSR2.5.

The site got locked into an endless loop - redrawing and redrawing the background. No usable content ever appeared, and the only way out was to use Task Manager and terminate IE with extreme prejudice. What gives? The site seems to be scripted to within half-an-inch of it's life - what happened to simple HTML? It's certainly slow - seems like about 50k of script and a 20k GIF image of the strip - which is somewhat overweight, it seems to me. BTW, Netscape 3 and higher, and IE5 all work - why not IE3?

Ucomics.com is even worse - looking at the page source, every image (even placeholders and spacer gifs) is served via a pseudo-URL at Akamai.net, which slows things down, while allowing traffic analysis and click trail capture. The page is very busy graphically, and the source is again heavily scripted. The overall result is unacceptably slow access times - but I have to go there to collect Garfield and Calvin&Hobbes strips. There are ways around the speed, at the cost of typing rather than clicking, but I'm keeping schtumm about those for fear Ucomics plug the loophole I use.

Katy has already complained that Hotmail (hawk, spit!) doesn't work properly with IE3, as installed on Armadillo, so I'm going to have to upgrade. IE5 and higher is overkill, not to mention bloated, so I'll look out my Demon CD with IE4 on it. Mark you, the bloat is still there - the big browsers, with their kitchen sink mentality, tend that way. Oh for a lightweight, fast and standards compliant browser!

I don't want FTP, mail client, newsreader, and all the other bells and whistles (dedicated clients are better for all those) I just want an HTML renderer that runs fast and complies with all relevant standards. It doesn't need plug-ins for Flash, movie player or anything else, just HTML. By all means spawn a dedicated programme of user's choice for FTP or whatever, but don't handle it yourself.

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Wednesday, 9th May

So Tony Blair has finally decided to get his thumb out of his b*m and do what everyone has been saying he will do for some months - he has asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament (jargon for "call a General Election" - said election to be solemnised on June 7th) Don't you just love it? The official announcement of something that has been widely leaked for weeks is made, not at a press conference, but at a Prime Ministerial (or should that be "Presidential"?) visit to a London school, where TB posed with children, probably because his tame spinmeisters said that this would do his image good.

The trouble is, for those who have eyes to see (and/or are cynics - like me) the whole thing smacks of  "How can we make this look as good as possible?" I've had a sickener of 'managed' announcements of political import - which often end up being rehashes of something said weeks before (or at least widely leaked weeks before) It's all of a piece with New Labour's obsession with Image over Substance. A p*x on them.

The only problem is that there is no credible opposition - the Conservatives are in back-stabbing, foot-in-mouth mode, oblivious (seemingly) to the imminent election. Just recently there has been a stink, started by a quango called the Commission for Racial Equality, which revealed that there are several not-so-closet - well, racists is perhaps too strong, but no other word fits - holding office as Conservative MPs. And the Liberal Democrats are still in grass-roots, local issue mode, together with their obsession with Proportional Representation (which would give them about 100 or so MPs, and the balance of power, if implemented, rather than their measly less than 10)


Last two night shifts for the next 8 weeks, so I can get my circadian rhythm back to normal, hopefully.

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Thursday, 10th May

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Friday, 11th May

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Saturday, 12th May

Katy's birthday today - she's 15. So we celebrated with a barbecue, it being a lovely day - hot and sunny. Too hot for my taste, actually - muggy too. Rather uncomfortable. Or maybe I'm just not used to it - the year so far has been notable for the volume of precipitation (read: torrents of rain)


Sarah told me today that Tardis's CD drive wasn't working - it won't read discs. So I checked, and sure enough it doesn't. The drive is visible to the BIOS, and Windows, but data flow is there none. This suggests a fault in the laser assembly, but I can replace the drive for less than it would cost me to send the machine back to Time - quicker too. Then, if all is well, I'll try to get a refund from Time - but I suspect I'll get a very dusty answer, since Time's Customer Support is notoriously *bad*. I didn't expect much in the way of after-sales, knowing Time's reputation, but it is a surprise to have a CD go dead after less than a month. And their local shop has closed - there's a sign in the window saying "We've moved to Hounslow - we will be glad to serve you there".

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Sunday, 13th May

Jane's Aunt decided to visit her sister down on the South Coast, so, as is usual, I got deputed to provide taxi service to Hindhead, halfway down the A3 from London. It was no problem, especially since the roads, while busy, were unjammed. Just over an hour each way - a total of 100 miles round trip

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