Peter's Blog

I've been contemplating recently whether to save some money by changing from a dedicated server back to a hosting service, i.e. site5. I managed to break the server by unwisely doing an apt-get update/upgrade which introduced some horrible dependancy problem.

There seemed to me to be a few possible solutions to this:

• hack around in the apt/dpkg files to try to fix it
• wait for someone else to fix it
• compile it all up myself
• start again from scratch

In considering the latter approach I checked out the http://www.site5.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php%3Fid=75 site and found a limited offer of an 80% discount (eight oh) for 15G disk space and 1Tb of bandwidth if I signed up there and then: so I signed up there and then. This should save me over £700 over the next two years (seven hundred). Sold.

The 'condition' of the offer is that I have to tell people about it (the 'tell all your friends' special event). Since I don't have any friends I'll tell you.

The site is now back on site5.com and looking good. It 'feels' as fast as the dedicated server but maybe I'm the only one on it so far.

I have moved house and my new address isn't cabled up for NTL so having to go with ADSL. Made the mistake of choosing pipex. This has culminated in the following email to them:

Hello there,

I ordered broadband on Monday 11th September and I am still not connected so I have decided to cancel the order. This is for the phone number {censored}. I rang your customer services and was told that I have to send an email to this address along with my reasons.

The reasons are:

• After getting the modem on 13th September along with a letter promising that the service would become active within seven working days I have received no further communication from pipex (letter, email, phone, nothing).
• Despite never being given a specific activation date I have tried to connect to no avail. The modem indicates that there is no signal. Tried in two sockets on two different computers.
• I cannot use the 'track your order' feature of your web site as you have not given me my order number. It is not in the letter you sent.
• When I ring your various 'track your order' phone numbers, nobody answers. I have tried numerous times, waiting as long as half an hour.
• I sent an email asking how to cancel and a day later got a reply that did not answer my question.
• When I did ring your customer services to ask how to cancel I had to wait 45 minutes for the phone to be answered (I was getting determined so I waited as long as it took) .

In a nutshell, even if you did manage to provide me with broadband I would feel uneasy dealing with a company that was so awkward to get in contact with while being uncommunicative itself.

I do not intend to pay a whole years worth of subscriptions for a cancellation fee. You are in breech of contract in that you haven't provided me with the service I requested. I am happy to return the modem or pay £20 for it.

-- Kindest Regards, Peter Wilkinson

Four hours after sending the above pipex sent me a email message that started thus:

I'm delighted to inform you that your Pipex Broadband will go live on the 19/09/2006, as all the necessary line tests and checks have now been passed successfully. Once again, thank you for selecting Pipex. We are passionate about our award-winning service and are excited at the prospect of helping you make the most of the evolving online experience.

Two points to note:

• 19th september was two weeks before this email was sent.
• their award winning service includes keeping people on hold for 45 minutes.

Currently pipex have some kind of lock on my line which is stopping me from migrating to BT total broadband. I'm in a grey area where I don't need a MAC number but I do need them to release their bony grasp on my line.

Why am I going BT Broadband? The impression I get is that many technical problems with broadband end up with the ISP and BT blaming each other. I figure that I can avoid this if BT is my ISP. That's the theory... Besides the packages includes the BT Home Hub which is a free ADSL modem/router/VOIP adapter that will allow any DECT phone in the house to make free VOIP calls.

UPDATE: I get home and broadband is working. Coincidence?

I've added no real content to the blog for months and let things stagnate. I move servers to save a bit of money and suddenly my page rank goes from 3 to 5. Is it because I am now on a US server and google has a low opinion of the importance of pages based elsewhere?

Do I care since it is probably a glitch? However, if it stays at 5 it could be time to cash in with some ads and affiliate links

I have missed blogging and feel guilty about not updating the site, especially the two pages of comments awaiting approval.

UPDATE: a week later and looking at the sitecounter stats there is no significant difference in traffic.

Decided to take the plunge and rip my entire CD collection. Recently moved house and decided I don't want ugly shelves in my new room, I'd prefer to rip all the CD's and put them in storage (definitely NOT sell them at a boot sale). Also, hifi can been streamlined to:

• pc
• old NAD3020 amp
• hifi speakers (mission surround sound things, cannot recall model)
• REL Q100 subwoofer (which I have switched off now as it makes whole house shake).

CD player, tuner etc also put in storage.

Ripping solutions came down to:

• iTunes: have a few iTunes tracks, would be nice to consolidate all music
• Winamp: advantage is that it's NOT iTunes
• K*****: some linux based thing or other

Decided on iTunes for these reasons:

• it will rip AAC files which is better than vanilla mp3 but is not an Apple proprietary standard, other devices will play it. Found an AAC player for The Core Music Player on pocketpc so decided mp3 was not a must.
• PC has two CD drives and iTunes can be set up to automatically rip a CD as it is loaded. With two drives, after ripped one has been ripped it will immediately start ripping the other, giving minimal down time. This was fine in theory but in practise one of the drives caused problems, halting the rip so I had to use just one drive.
• didn't want to mess around with linux: if I had hours of spare time then maybe I would track down the lame mp3 codec and piece it all together but I'm a busy man.

Ripping is progressing, 30 or 40 disks through and the iTunes CDDB lookup has not failed me so far, despite some pretty obscure CD's.

Next decision is: do I try squeezing music onto 1G compact flash card on pocketpc or buy an 8G ipod nano? 8G should be ample for me and no hard disk to skip tracks. If I go pocketpc then:

• one less gadget to carry around
• can use winamp to load music and playlists

Update on my fledgeling pipex ADSL:

• No response from pipex to this. Still think they are an uncommunicative company and not looking forward to having to communicate with them in future.
• Seems to be working ok. Download speed 4.3M but not up to 10 days training yet.
• Hasn't been disconnecting noticably but I did set it to automatically redial.
• Hooked belkin wireless router to pc, shared the pipex connection and voila, wireless networking. Works ok on ground floor of house, two floors down.

I'm tempted to get an dedicated ADSL modem/router because:

• I wouldn't be relying on windows firewall
• don't have to go up two flights of stairs to switch pc on/off (or set up X10).

I fancy the Netgear DG834PNUK as it's Mimo and apparently this will even improve reception for old g systems like the wifi cards in my laptops. I read a report somewhere that said that the Netgear lives up to it's promises on speed and range more than the others (belkin, dlink etc: apparently the 'Super G' chipset isn't all that super). My recent experiences of Belkin have not been good, I know of at least Belkin two wireless routers that lock up periodically.

Since I moved house I'm further from work than I would want to cycle so I was in the market for an exercise bike as I am in danger of becoming a blob. I wanted a good quality one, preferably commercial gym quality, one that had programs to simulate hills to make things challenging. New commercial bikes are multiple thousands so I decided to go second hand.

On ebay I found a Life Fitness 9500 being sold by a gym only 15 miles down the road. Current bid was £80 with three hours to go so for the first time I made a bid on ebay. I let the automated bidding do it's thing and three hours later I had 'won' it for £215.

I drove to the gym to pay cash and collect. It is in fairly good condition, it uses ancient red led's but it is very solidly built (it doesn't wobble when I stand on it). I put it in the car and drove it home and when I tried it again there was no resistance as the chain had come off. I undid about a million well-worn screws to take the covers off and the chain was flopping about. I got it back on but it could do with a few links taken out to tighten it up as it has probably been used for tens of thousands of virtual miles and is visibly stretched and droopy.

Since the bike is 'self powered' it has some batterys that you charge as you pedal to keep the thing going. I suspect that these could do with replacing as it goes dead at the slightest pause. They appear to be type D nicads but they are in plastic enclosures so I cannot be sure.

Wife has promised to wash it down with dettol before we take it into the house: I know first hand how much sweat can be poured on one of these things (I used to draw patterns as I used one).

I have found refurbished machines of this model on sale on the net for over $1000 so I'm feeling pleased with myself.

UPDATE:

• tried removing links from chain but then the ends would not meet up: it was only slack by half a link. Looked like a lot more. Put it back as was.
• did a session on it last night: bliss. Play loud music and let the endorphins flow. rowing is hard and boring. No hills.

After a week I got an answer to this message to pipex. Apparently 'preactive' bounced my mail to customer services on 6th October who, five days later, sent me a generic email about what to do if you have no signal. I print it below in case it ever saves anyone from having to contact Pipex customer support and wait five days for a reply. If you do all this before contacting them it will save some to-and-fro.

Dear Peter Wilkinson

Thank you for your email

Sometimes the signal can come back by a reboot or re-installation of the modem drivers but if this fails, you will need to follow the below steps.

Firstly, try swapping over the Microfilter which your modem plugs into. These can sometimes prove faulty which can cause this problem. If you received the microfilter from PIPEX and it is in warranty, we can replace this for you.

If this does not work, you will need to take your equipment to something we like to call the 'basic circuit'. This means removing all non-adsl equipment and trying your wiring in the below order:

Main Socket - Microfilter - Modem/Router - PC

Why do you need to try this?

We fully appreciate that it may be a nightmare to move your PC to another room but unfortunately BT will not accept a fault without this being completed. If the fault is escalated to BT and they decide to send an engineer out, they would try their laptop and modem on the 'basic circuit' and if that works, they can charge you a £58.75 call out fee.

PIPEX obviously do not want you to incur unnecessary costs so trying this yourself will dramatically reduce the chance of being charged. Also if you are able to do so, try another modem/router which will rule out the possibility of your equipment being faulty. If your PIPEX supplied modem does cause the problem and it is in warranty, we can replace it for you.

If you notice a lot of noise on your line or cannot make voice calls at all, please phone BT on 151 from your BT line and they will be able to run a check on the line to rule out a voice line problem. Please also ask them for a reference number as this will help us with our investigations.

We hope this helps with your enquiry, but please feel free to contact us if you require further assistance.

I guess this means they won't suddenly respond to my message and cut me off so I'm safe to buy a wireless ADSL modem. Amazon, here I come.

Just found out that my new site5 server has python 2.4.3. This is Good News. Last time I had a site5 server it was running python 2.2 which was getting a bit ancient. 2.3 introduced generators which have been widely adopted. The latest version is 2.5 which is (flame bait) not exactly a must have, >= 2.3 will do.

Another job for my todo list is to see if I can get django or turbogears running through cgi, but I am not optimistic.

Should I get desperate, site5 offer ruby-on-rails hosting but that would involve selling my soul in a manner akin to adopting asp.net

Another session on exercise bike:

• It's very noisy: will need to chock it on something to try to absorb vibrations. I think the vibration comes from the chain mechanism, more recent models use belt drive.
• It does the job: 24 minute program (longest) left me dripping, had to wipe it down after. Legs felt much better.
• It has three programs, random, hill and manual. I've only used hill so far. It starts off with gently increasing difficulty, an easy bit, a plateau of a couple of minutes of moderate difficulty, then interval training, minute on with greatly increasing resistance, minute off, followed by a few minutes cool down. The hardest bit is like slogging up hill in a high gear. The programming is crude, you can select 6, 12, 18 or 24 minutes which relates to the scaling of the program: 24 minutes = 20 seconds/division, 18 minutes = 15 seconds/division etc with the difficulty of each division shown as a vertical line of leds on the display (thought for the day: how easy would it be to hack the firmware??? Will it run linux???).
• I'm doing it on level four out of twelve, with the aim of increasing this gradually. On four the 'easy' bits are not that easy, I have to work to maintain the rpm. Other machines I have used have coasted on the easy bits, even at higher levels. Could be because it's an old machine, could be because I am not strong, could be both. Not being too easy shouldn't be a problem, it's supposed to be exercise.
• The original ebay picture that swayed me. It's bigger than it looks here, the top of the console is level with my shoulders.
  

Often going through articles on Wikipedia one finds sentences tagged with ^{citation needed}. It seems to be Wikipedias way for people to caste doubt on facts they don't agree with ^{citation needed}. It's a way to say 'prove it'. Surely, following this logic, every statement of fact on Wikipedia should be linked to a citation?^{citation needed}

Maybe I should be using it here when I'm not totally sure what I am talking about and cannot be bothered to look it up?