Week of 19th March, 2007

Last Week

Next Week

Monday, 19th March

The download completed about 10 o'clock this morning. Download datarate fell to a mere 2 or 3 kByte/sec at the end, while upload bandwidth continued pegged at 30kByte/sec (my selected upload cap) The default setting in the reference bittorrent implementation for Windows is to continue to seed the torrent for a period after the download is complete, to give back to the community some extra upload bandwidth. This seeding continues until the share ratio, so-called, reaches 80% by default. For me, the download completed at a share ratio of 77%, so I only had to seed for another 45 minutes or so - which I did.

Looking at the mrtg graph for ntp offset shows wild swings during the times when bittorrent was running, particularly when the upload is rate pegged.

I've dispatched a total of 4 VHS180s full of recorded TV to Katy and Jenny. Recordings are ongoing to fill complete series for their watching.

Sarah's search for a new car continues. Today, I was commanded to visit a local mega car emporium, in search of a particular make and model. Which I did, and found 5 assorted instances.

In the evening, Sarah and I returned to view the available cars. She undertook a test drive in one of them, and liked it. Trouble is, it costs UKP4600, which she has, but doesn't really want to spend. And the salesman was pushy - very pushy. I suspect she'll buy it, which is, of course, her choice. I think it's a good example, although I'm a little worried about the brakes.

The landline 'phone died today - no dial tone. ADSL remained up, however. The BT Customer Service line reported a fault, "We hope to have it fixed by Wednesday. Meanwhile, we'll reroute all calls to your mobile." Which they did, and it worked.

Back to Daynotes


Tuesday, 20th March

The landline 'phone rang this morning. It was BT. "We've fixed it." Which they had. Unfortunately, they turned off Caller ID in the process. Must call them again, and request that it be re-enabled. After all, I'm paying for it. Woops! It came back of it's own.

I went out this afternoon, to get a new Bluetooth dongle. Again it's a Belkin, Class 2 (10 metre range) So back home I uinstalled the old software (reboot required) and then installed the new (another reboot, despite the new version using the Windows Installer)

And it didn't work. After installing the software, from the InstallShield package, I plugged in the dongle, which was recognised and (supposedly) set up. At least the Found New Hardware wizard completed without error. But it didn't work. When I plug in the dongle, the blue light comes on, and then goes out a few seconds later. All the diagnostics report "Device not found." What gives? It was found well enough to be recognised by Windows Plug-and-Pray - why won't it work? I'll take it back for a refund.

And then, in the evening, I got the 'phone call from a customer - "No Internet. What have you done?" Well, I left it working, so nothing. But I had to wander round and check...

To find that the ADSL was working, and, mirabile dictu, so was Outlook Express. You may recollect that I couldn't get the verdammt software to connect to it's smarthost mail server. Well, it was, and was sucking down 500-odd e-mails - all held on the mail server, some of them 3 years old, having been read via Webmail. So I spent some time cleaning out spam, and giving a tutorial on OE use, since, of course, there was no mail archive on the mailserver any more. It's easier and quicker to clean out spam in OE than via Webmail, albeit you have to download the stuff first.

Talking of spam, their ISP has spam filtering (Brightmail) as an extra-cost option - only UKP5.99 a year, but still... So we enabled that, and then added Acrobat Reader V6 and OpenOffice.org V2.1, which will allow reading the Word docs that arrive regularly as e-mail attachments.

Back to Daynotes


Wednesday, 21st March

Back to Daynotes


Thursday, 22nd March

That's the last 2 days of this fortnight completed. And it's the mixture as before. When the new system is running well, it's excellent, but when it isn't it causes severe pain to all that come in contact with it.

A case in point: today, for some obscure reason yet to be adequately enumerated, material records downloaded from the scheduling system were showing up duplicated. Investigations into that lost us about 3 hours of ingesting, while the short-form material piled up, to the amount of two shelves full. Long-form is less of a problem - we're about a month ahead, there.

Eventually, we were told that all is good. And it was, until material started ingesting, but not being available for spot-check - everything we did. More ingest time lost, until it all came good again - mostly. Of about 150 or more items about 10 or so suffered the same fate. The problem seems to be a bug in the handling of the state change from "ingest" to "spot-check". Occasionally, the database registers a "not available" state for a clip at this point. This can be recified in 2 ways - one uses science, the other brute force.

The science involves running an SQL query against the database to set the clip state correctly - per each clip. The brute force method is simply to delete the server clip and reingest, which requires more rights than most of us have been given. But there are user ID/password combos that have omnipotence, and are known to we erks, and a server delete can be done using these.

I'm up-to-date on cartoon downloads - I just need to do the cleanup edits on each of 4 strips, to remove excess copyright branding. I consider these images copyright of their artists, not the distributor, so I remove the distributor branding before archiving.

Back to Daynotes


Friday, 23rd March

Back to the shop today, to change the Bluetooth dongle. I took the Acer with me, in hopes of being able to test it on site.

Well, I could install the replacement on site, no problem, but with the same result - it no workee. The tech support guy at the shop was intrigued, and said, "I don't know what's causing this, but Belkin support is very good. Here, use our 'phone." So I did, and the tech support guy at Belkin was indeed very good, including holding on while the shop people tested the dongle on another machine - successfully, I might add, thus proving it works.

Meanwhile, talking to another shop guy, it occurred to me that there may be a software clash here. The old Belkin Bluetooth dongle, with an unknown chipset, used the Widcomm Bluetooth software stack. Maybe the remnants of that don't play well with the new Bluetooth V2.0 EDR dongle, with a Broadcom chipset and driver, resulting in the dongle not being recognised correctly - which was the symptom. So I took the replacement away to play further - I was taking up too much room on their sales counter.

Back home, I started banging on the uninstall. Remove the new, non-working, driver, and then run various registry cleaners - most of which are for-pay, and in evaluation version will not clear more than x number of redundant entries - for x small, and I had 800-odd to remove. Not all of which were Belkin-related, to be sure.

So I punted on programmatic removal, and fired up regedit. And yes, I did take a registry backup first.

Searching found a number of registry keys that seemed to be linked to Belkin drivers - 2 flavours of Bluetooth and USB Wi-Fi. So I removed everything that the computer would allow me to remove, and tried another install.

Hey, wait a minute! It's doing different things! This looks hopeful. And it was - the dongle now fires up, and stays up. And it can see other Bluetooth devices in the vicinity. Can't do anything with them yet, but it can discover available devices, which is a good start. So I declared a result on that, and moved on, having sent e-mail to Belkin, with the details for their information.

Included in the original purchase of the Bluetooth dongle were a few other things - a Targus mini optical travel mouse, and a shop-branded 1GB USB flash drive. The thumb drive works, but it's a U3 device, and wants to install software on your machine - which is a problem in the highly regulated, locked-down environment at work. Not that there's much use in doing it, anyway - they have a policy, enforced from upon high, that all removable media become read-only. This means that you can't download things at work, and carry them home. But you can bring files in - and if an executable will run without installing it, you could thus bring in malicious software. This would, of course, be unintentional, but it might have grave consequences for your status in the building. As far as I can tell, I'm OK, but you never know.

The mouse also works, but it's too small - you have to hold it in your fingertips, rather than the palm of your hand. And it's extremely sensitive - I like to be able to move the cursor across the screen in no more than 2 sweeps across the Acer's touchpad (it used to be 1 sweep, but I've come to the conclusion that that's too senstive for some of my tasks - editing comic downloads is easier with a slightly less sensitive touchpad) but it's way too sensitive with the mouse, which needs to be turned down almost all the way to be even remotely usable

Back to Daynotes


Saturday, 24th March

A quiet day, doing file maintenance. And Hunter doesn't like image archives that are 20+GB in extent - it seems to get stuck in a loop, sorting the entries in the .csv file it creates. Making a .csv is slow anyway - Hunter has to touch every file to ascertain it's size, and compute a CRC32. For large filesets, this takes a lot of time. It's actually one of the few things that slows the Acer down significantly, in my practice. Of course, one only needs to do this once, for de-duping. Therafter, individual image collections get their own, much smaller, .csv files.

I eventually gave up on that, and sorted the files manually, reducing the fileset from 23Gb or so to about 17GB.

Sarah has got her new car - we got the text message late this afternoon, as we were expecting her back from a car-shopping expedition, before work in the evening. And she took it to work, so all would seem to be well.

Back to Daynotes


Sunday, 25th March

Jenny returns to London today, so I'll be collecting her from Euston station this afternoon (in about 2 hours, as I type this)

The UK (and EU) switch to Summer Time (Merkin: DST) happened last night - pretty much painlessly. All radio clocks adjusted themselves without error, except my Casio watch, which required to be reconfigured (I must have turned the auto-DST function off, accidentally) Mechanical tick-tock, and non-radio quartz timepieces required attention. Mem: must do the VHS - the $ky digibox changes automagically.

Computers are fine as well, and ntp continues to trundle on Tux - there is absolutely no effect there due to the Summer Time change. ntp only deals in UTC (formerly GMT): timezones and summer time are the province of the underlying OS, whose clock is accurately maintained in sync with UTC, and the OS handles the timezone offset. Unless, of course, you're running Windows, where your computer's clock runs on local time - and may, for all I know, have repeated epochs in the autumn, when the (local time) clocks step back.

Last Week

Back to Daynotes

Next Week