Week of 12th March, 2007

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Monday, 12th March

10 o'clock shifts start today. And I've already arranged for a few hours off to get my tooth looked at again. I shall be severely dischuffed if they charge me again for a temporary filling, given that the last one lasted a week, and there are still 3 weeks left until my appointment for the root canal.

The alternative to that will be living on painkillers for 3 weeks, which is not a good idea.

Later: Apparently, the filling is still intact. I have an infection in the tooth, and a script for antibiotics, 1 cap 3 times daily for 5 days - except that the pharmacist miscounted, and gave me just over 6 days worth. And there was a charge for the script, plus the usual per-item charge to get it made up.

And, once again, despite a late, large delivery of commercials, the shelves were empty when I left - with all the evening programme feeds ingested for repeat. I could get to enjoy this - if it lasts, which it may not. And the kit is running well, which is another relief.

Sarah's car has broken, terminally - it needs much more repair than the vehicle is worth, and there may yet be more that we haven't heard about. So she's started searching for a replacement - not too expensive. But everything that might be of interest has already been sold before we got to hear about it from a weekly newspaper that only carries adverts for cars, and parts for cars. We'll keep trying.

And "Airwolf" Season 2 DVDs have arrived. Much less bulky packaging than some series I could name, which is good, because it takes less shelf space.

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Tuesday, 13th March

More of the same today - the shelves empty at day's end, which is good.

Nothing else of note to talk about.

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Wednesday, 14th March

I wish I knew where the Bluetooth dongle for the Acer went to. Today, Jane wanted some photos copied from her camera phone, and printed. Printer cartridges I have (if I can put my hand on them) but moving the photos was a bit difficult. Last time I did this, I used infra-red, but there was something unkosher in the setup today - 2 attempts failed. But the phone has Bluetooth, as does the iPaq, so I BT'd the files to the iPaq (and that's about 6 button presses on the phone, and a stylus tap on the iPaq - for each file, since I couldn't find a way to "select all")

Then I did an infrared ActiveSync from the iPaq, which also worked. Could have done it in one if the Acer's Bluetooth dongle were to hand. Or maybe a Bluetooth Access Point, so that everything's visible on the home LAN? Nah - I'll get another Belkin USB BT dongle, it's easier. There aren't many BT APs, and most of them wouldn't allow the Palm to be Hotsynced - the D-Link is specifically warned against if you want to do that, it will not work. The Belkin seems to, from what research I've done, but it's UKP90 or better - a new Belkin dongle should be less than UKP20. Of course, knowing Murphy, as soon as I buy, I'll find the old one.

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Thursday, 15th March

I've been a fan of the little-known independent film "The Wizard of Speed and Time", made in the late 80s by Mike Jittlov, a film special effects man specialising in stop-motion work (a la Nick Park's  Wallace and Gromit) ever since I ran across it during the days I worked at $ky. I managed to collect a VHS copy of it then, and still return to it for entertainment occasionally.

From information seen on the 'net, there was a distribution snafu - linked to deliberate fraud/copyright theft, if the posts are to be believed - and the movie has never seen much, if any, public showing. Certainly, there is no DVD - 1,600 CLV LaserDiscs were made, and an unknown number of commercial NTSC EP VHSs. It bears rediscovery, if only to boggle at some of the effects, and ask "How the h*ll did he do THAT?"

Comes now news that there is an unofficial DVD rip (sourced from one of the LaserDiscs I mentioned above) which has Mike's tacit approval. It's available via Bittorrent. The Pirate Bay has a .torrent file available, but there are so few people downoading it that speeds are abysmally low - the download fileset is about 4.5GB, and I was getting 1kB/sec, equivalent to 50+ days to get the complete fileset. Which is ridiculous - I can't leave the Acer running for 50 days.

But there are Bittorrent clients available for Linkstations, such as Tux. The official Debian repository has the canonical client, which requires python (which I don't want to install) and linkstationwiki.net have a pre-compiled binary, which requires the ppc-tools package, probably to provide a library or two. I have no objection to that, so I'll go with the linkstationwiki version.

<pause>

Oops. The ppc-tools package brings in C, C++, a bunch of other stuff (which all scrolled through too quickly to get more than a sense of what was there) and Python. So I get it anyway. Oh, well... Now for the Bittorrent client...

<pause>

Well, I've installed the client... but I cannot for the life of me work out how to run it from the command line. There seem to be 4 or 5 .py files that could be of use, but there's no help or manpage, and the home site is aggressively commercial, and M$ Windows oriented. There is no command-line help available there.

So I bailed on the bittorrent client for Tux - maybe later.

There are other bittorrent tracker sites - an appropriate Google search gave me Mininova which has a slightly different version (smaller) but it's active, and I'm getting 30-odd kB/sec, for a total download time of 36 hours or so. That's much better - I could almost let the Acer run that long, but I won't.

Later: After about an hour's running, I've got about 2.8% of the package. Uploads to the swarm, and downloads from the swarm, are running neck and neck at up to 30kB/sec. Remember bittorrent is a bothway protocol, where everyone helps everyone else, getting file pieces they don't have from people who do, and giving file pieces they have to other people who don't (yet) have them.

The problem I have now is that I can really only run in the late evenings - until Monday, at any rate. It's possible that this swarm may die, just like PirateBay's, but I hope not. I'll leave it to trundle overnight, and then read the stats in the morning. So it's me for bed, after I upload this.

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Friday, 16th March

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Saturday, 17th March

After two overnight runs, I have 26% of the download set, and my upstream bandwidth consumption is higher than the dowstream side. Upstream is typically 15-20kByte/sec, downstream 10kByte/sec or (often) less. Currently Mininova are saying that, as of 4 hours ago, there were 4 seeders and 7 leeches - that is, there are 4 complete filesets available, and 7 people trying to fill their filesets. Make that 8 - I've joined the swarm again. The other leeches must have less of the file (or at least, different parts of it) than me.

I took the Acer to work with me, knowing that the workload would be light, and hoping to let the torrent run while I was working. No such luck - the wireless access point was down. It's a NetGear WG-302, and it seems to have blown it's zap. Nobody on site today knows anything about it - the engineer who does should be in tomorrow. I'll pick his brains then.

In matters officially relating to that famous four-letter word, although there's practically nothing missing (and the only thing we don't have will be fed down a line to us tomorrow afternoon for transmission in the evening) we're having caching problems again. I commented a week or so ago about paying for good, stable running with pain later - well, now it's painful. There were 8 things due to air before midday tomorrow that hadn't cached - and the system had given up, "in error" was all it said. And we're not talking commercials or promos here - it's full-length programmes. So I arranged to get the tapes of these programmes upstairs ready, in case it all stays pear-shaped. But when I left, the manufacturer's duty service engineer was on the case, via remote dial-up.

And the ingest trolley is empty... except for one more movie - and the music videos, which will be ready tomorrow.

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Sunday, 18th March

The dial-in last night must have fixed things, because we're cached well ahead - the only stuff not cached within the current lookahead hasn't been supplied yet. It's mostly "what's on tonight" menus, and not needed before 17:00 tomorrow, so that's good. And the trolley is empty.

I left the Acer set up and running all day, to try to complete the download of WoSaT. But the torrent tracker went down around lunchtime, so nothing happened after that until I got home and restarted. 75% of the fileset is now in my possession, and completion is predicted for about 15 hours, with data rates around 15kByte/sec or so. I'll leave the Acer running overnight - should have completed by then.

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