View From a High Place

Progress report

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:55:00 +0000

Things aren’t quite as bad as I thought last night. I have, for instance, got Agent working, by the simple brute force expedient of running it in Win XP compatibility mode. Sometimes the old ways are the best – literally, in this case.

However, I also ran off a list of all the installed software under the Vista regime. This is going to take weeks to get everything back up and running. Having made myself despondent I thought a bit of hardware hacking might help. It’s always therapeutic to pull the insides out of a PC and put them back together again – as long as it works afterwards.

Needless to say, in this case it didn’t. I’d found an extra SATA power adaptor and data cable, so went for the three drive setup. This involved moving the current system drive to another SATA port – when the right-angle cable necessary to fit under the extended graphics card broke, leaving part embedded in the motherboard connector. One fine pair of pliers later, the offending plastic was removed, and I was able to get all three SATA connections up and running.

Reboot – and only two drives showing. The original data drive was AWOL: this was not what I expected, since it was the one cable I hadn’t touched, so it’s back inside the case again and check all the connections. Turns out that the power lead to the drive had become adrift, so everything gets hammered back in as usual (which is possibly why the SATA connector above broke in the first place…), switch things back on and hey presto, three drives.

Next question – which Samsung is the data drive and which is the old system drive in the BIOS? Trial and error (emphasis on the latter) eventually got the drives in the right order, and I now have a Windows 7 workstation which boots up, complete with operational software. Well, some of it’s operational, which is where we started.

Wish I hadn’t started

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:12:00 +0000

After all the hype, it seemed reasonable to try an update to Windows 7 on my main workstation.

I think my first mistake was to try to to this as a new install, rather than an update. On second thoughts, perhaps the mistake was in the decision to upgrade in the first place.

We have any number of PCs at work with complex configurations and obscure software, half of which is either totally obsolete or tied to hardware that probably belongs in a museum. Frankly, they’re easy compared to this home monstrosity. Servers running tightly optimised programs? No problem. This box? Well, it has so many old and undocumented applications that I can’t track down sources for that there’s no way I can realistically hope to reproduce it in a new build.

So I took a decision to drop all the old stuff, and just concentrate on a core group of applications – the usual things, browsers, mail, usenet.

Problem number 1 – all my passwords and install keys are on the system drive that I’m replacing, and so far I haven’t been able to get three SATA drives running on the PC. It will come with time, but to start with I need the new Win7 drive, plus my main data drive. Why I didn’t store the passwords on the data drive is a mystery that will probably never be solved.

OK, several drive swaps later we have most of the info. On to loading the applications, starting with Firefox: do you think I can find half the add-ons that I’m used to? No, and to get details I have to re-attach the old system drive – again.

Even the Outlook install was difficult, mainly because of the number of external email accounts that I like to monitor directly. I’ve forgotten most of the server names needed for IMAP and SMTP connections. Thankfully, IE does work out of the box and I was able to research the necessary information. Where would we be without the internet? Oh, we wouldn’t have email…

Forte Agent – OK, it installs, and I even got the server account sorted (eventually); but on restarting the app it just hangs. I don’t have the strength to fix this.

On reflection, the easiest components are still the Microsoft ones. The company may come in for a lot of stick, but when things work, they work well: witness this, Windows Live Writer set up and blogging in no time at all. Now if only Steve Ballmer would invest in buying a few more companies – like Forte.

Tied down again

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sat, 02 May 2009 11:55:00 +0000

This wireless stuff is all well and good, but it’s not something that I would necessarily want to rely on in a case of life-or-death. All too often, the links from more than one of the PCs at home break for no apparent reason. There’s no pattern in it, just one machine or another stops responding.

So it’s back to the wired network, and the subsequent upheavals in the office as I try to find out exactly which of the cables I left from last time connect to what. OK, it might have been sensible to leave them plugged into the client systems, but I genuinely thought I’d be removing them for good – only to find out that I’ve somehow managed to thread them through locations where they simply cannot be removed without ripping all the furniture out, so there are a lot of loose RJ45 connectors lying around.

What will be interesting will be the potential effect moving the router of the main BT socket to an extension cable running off a spur socket. I can expect around 5 Mbit/second at the moment – anything more than a 20% reduction in that will not be acceptable. However, the only way to tell will be to try it, so I suppose it’s time to dig underneath the desks – and hope I have left a power socket free. The good thing is that the wireless link will still work (as well as it ever has) after I move the router, so some testing before final installation should be possible.

Oh, the life-and-death bit? Ever tried battling your way through a Guild Wars instance when the connection drops? I lost a Survivor title when that happened once, and that’s not something I’m inclined to allow again.

How not to do it – the Microsoft way

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:18:00 +0000

Does Microsoft (or any technology company for that matter) really understand the concept of being business user-friendly? Leaving aside the abomination otherwise known as Office 2007, which replaced a perfectly workable toolbar with a ribbon interface that seems to actively hide the most useful components, there’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood of any self-respecting PC and/or network that requires fixing in the default setup of Windows.

The latest example of the annoyances in this regard comes in the form of the default behaviour of Server 2008 with regard to remote sessions. Who on earth thought it was a good idea to restrict user logins to a single session? It’s become a joke now when I or my fellow conspirators throw one another off the administrative sessions we have so lovingly crafted just because the system thinks ‘one user, one login’. Actually, what’s really annoying is that this is controlled by a group policy setting that I can never recall – it’s now firmly entrenched in the ‘IT problems and gotchas’ of our company SharePoint site, and needs to go into a build document. But I still wonder why we should have to do this, when the old Server 2003 way worked perfectly well out of the box.

Another default setting that annoys is the prejudice against NAT. I’m tired of going through the registry edit and reboot required to get PPTP or l2TP working via a standard router to the Internet. For bonus annoyance points, MS decided to change the required registry values between XP/2003 and Vista/2008.

The final target of ire this evening is the Windows Firewall. All very nice in theory, but deplorable in practice. We set up all these nice client PCs, get back to base – and find we can’t access them remotely. Group policy to the rescue again, and disable that service.

I seem to spend half my time switching off, cancelling or simply bypassing roadblocks put in the way of simple, successful system management. By all means create a ‘home user’ build for Windows, but please can we have a ‘business edition’ without all the unnecessary hindrances?

Atom’s back

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:44:00 +0000

Someone was working over the weekend – RSS functionality has returned to Blogger, and the feed definitions are being updated correctly. Or at least as correctly as the Blogger style sheet will allow. One monolithic line of code makes it difficult to be absolute about things like this.

I may be old-fashioned (OK, there’s no doubt – I am old-fashioned) and I certainly prefer human-readable text. What does it cost to put a few line breaks and tab characters into a text file? In this particular case, about a 2% increase in file size, which should not be a deal breaker. For that, you get a text file that can be understood, and even parsed by the human eye

Perhaps you might argue that these things are not intended to be read by humans: their function is simply to define a set of data for a computer to work with. But I would respond that we should not lose sight of the need for people to understand what computers are doing. OK, there are some time and space-constrained operations where maximum efficiency is needed, but XML code is not amongst these: by its very nature, it’s a form of text, and doesn’t aspire to terribly efficient operation. There’s a tremendous amount of repetition, unnecessary descriptive strings, and sheer bloat in even the most tightly structured XML file. So why not add that extra 2% and make it readable?

If you want that space back, do something like parameterise the contents. For instance, my atom.xml file contains my name repeated many times over – why not reduce it to a simple variable defined at the start of the list?

If the standard insists on fully expanded strings, then go all the way and just add those two or three extra characters per line and make them proper lines. Apart from anything else, this ensures that mistakes can be picked up more easily – but I must admit, the original mistake with the generating code that caused empty XML files to be created wasn’t going to be found very quickly from a blank output file.

Don’t update software on a Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:17:00 +0000

What’s today’s problem?

Well, bear with me, there’s a list:

Blogger has lost my RSS feed – and that of a lot of other people as well, apparently. The automatically generated atom.xml is being created as a zero byte file. So there’s a better than even chance that you won’t even see this post, at least while it’s meaningful. There is a workaround, for anyone who needs it: use the feed identifier in the form of http://www.blogger.com/feeds/7959034/posts/default, where the number needs to be updated to your own account value. Drop that intot he template, republish, and it’s working at least as far as anyone picking up the RSS feed this time around. Apparently, it’s also possible to copy the actual file to your own atom.xml, but this needs to be done each and every time the blog gets updated, so to date I simply haven’t mustered up the energy. Blogger already know about the problem, but it’s the weekend now and I suppose they’ve taken the time off.

Twitter – someone went and changed the API or something, and my old ceTwit application on the phone gave up reading posts. I did manage to download an update, but this doesn’t seem to show a public timeline, and is consistently reporting a possible broken API and I’m left wondering if this is actually working at all. However, I did manage to locate, download, configure and use a different product Twobile, which is working OK. Since I seem to post Twitter updates even less frequently than I update this blog, however, it probably won’t break their service too soon.

For my final act of IT vandalism today, I thought I’d update the nVidia drivers for the graphics card in the workstation, a mere 8800 GT card. Wonders will never cease – this actually worked. Being flushed with success I also thought I’d go for the Windows Live tools (including Live Writer), and this is where it seems to have gone a little bit wrong – various components seem to be having issues with the firewall, and I no longer know if it will work.

Still, look on the bright side: even if it does work and this post gets published, no-one will ever see it as long as RSS is broken.

Caution - low flying laptop

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:11:00 +0000

The driver update didn't have the desired effect. Still no profile updates, unless I manually change the registry entry. One possible bright spot was the discovery of a script to do that job semi-automatically, but... it's in German and designed for Windows XP, not Vista. My translation skills weren't good enough to get it working in the fifteen minutes or so before my attention was diverted elsewhere.

There's considerable discussion about how the video drivers achieved WHQL certification with such an evident bug - and why they haven't been fixed in over a year. I see a lot of trumpeting success in getting the certification - but not an ounce of responsibility for errors like this. Who is really at fault here - nVidia, Microsoft or Dell?

On the other hand, one beneficial effect of the new video drivers has been to prevent the irritating loss of dual screen functionality that occurred when the PC was locked: on return to activity, I'd see the second screen active for about five seconds, then it would switch off and push all active windows back to the primary screen, necessitating a trip to the keyboard to reactivate the monitor and then drag everything back over. As the system still knew the second screen was there for those few moments, why did it then disable it? Anyway, this bug at least is now fixed. What's interesting is that it took me most of the day before I noticed the change in behaviour, which only goes to show how it should have been right in the first place.

Driven to distraction

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:26:00 +0000

I use a Dell Precision M4300 laptop for work - whilst not the lightest device around, it has sufficient horsepower and storage, and offers enough interfaces and screen real estate to cope with my various demands.

But since purchase it's been running slowly - Task Manager showed around 20-40% CPU utilization, all down to the System process. Now this is a real can of worms, nearly everything that keeps the PC running is handled by this. So I lost patience today and started to research the problem.

Turns out it's a fairly well known issue - Mark Russinovitch (he of Sysinternals fame) had already seen the same issue, and (being who he is) had figured out the cause. Wonders will never cease - it turned out that it was the same driver, same symptoms and same cure that was effective for me.

This begs the question of why an issue that was known about a year ago (April 2008) has still not been addressed by Dell. I was able to follow the Broadcomm links from Mark's blog entry to an updated driver for the NIC, but Dell's support site was less than helpful. Once the new driver was installed, it was like working on a new PC - so much faster, better response to keyboard inputs, sheer luxury. Imagine how much I would have appreciated it if Dell had taken the opportunity to update their support site drivers to match.

Another issue on the same lines is the odd behaviour of the domain profile I use: apparently, this hasn't been updated on the server since around November of last year. This means that changes I make on my desktop, for instance, are not reflected in the server copy, but files I thought I had deleted keep coming back: I have to log on to the server and delete the files from the copy there. This one is weird: turns out it is a problem with the Nvidia display driver (for the FX 360M, a device that seems to be supported only by Dell, not Nvidia themselves) that screws up a couple of entries in the registry, a problem that only becomes apparent when you use Windows Server 2008 as a domain controller. It just so happens that we switched to Server 2008 last November... Not sure if this latter problem is resolved yet, having already rebooted the PC several times to try and fix the NIC driver earlier in the day, I didn't get around to doing it again, so we'll see if the desktop reverts again tomorrow. If so, I suspect the next step is to see if a laptop PC can develop wings in the short time it will take to fly across the office.

A site for sore eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:02:00 +0000

I wonder if there's a degree course somewhere in website optimisation? Even leaving aside the search engines completely, actually managing a site isn't a one-click operation. Over time, the contents get more complex: this is true even (especially?) of a site like mine, which has been in existence for at least five years, albeit woefully lacking attention. During this time, I occasionally discover new tools and new systems that get tried out, leaving remnants of pages and folders containing code that I have no way of identifying or managing properly.

It must take a very organised and disciplined approach to keep a site clean over time: even something as simple as multiple copies are likely to proliferate as local machines are replaced or new server installations come into play. For instance, I have at least two copies of my own site on my home machine, and no real way of keeping them synchronised: Filezilla gives some help in this regard, but it's not really able to deal with things in the same way as, for instance, SyncToy or Microsoft Live Sync. These latter two are very nice, but I haven't managed to get hem to support an FTP folder yet, so they don't quite fit the bill.

Once I have a local copy that I can depend upon, usually achieved by creating a new folder (don't want to risk losing old data. Oops, there's another copy now!), I can check the contents out, and this is where I get really confused. Some of the pages were created in MS Word (I know, I should have used Notepad, but I was feeling lazy); some were creating using whatever the tool of the moment was on the hosting company's site; some are straight from Photoshop or Lightroom; some are out of Blogger. So far, I haven't gone as far as using Expression or anything like that, but I am seriously considering junking nearly everything (bar the contents of the blog) and starting again, with a properly designed site and a tool that I can stick to.

Whatever I select will need to have certain features:

Photo management. Part of my lazy approach is that I don't like emailing pictures to all and sundry. However, neither do I trust Flickr or the like to hold my photos. (The truth is probably that I don't reckon they'd stand up to the public scrutiny there.) So I like to just upload batches of pictures, mail interested parties and leave it up to them.
Blog integration. I like Blogger, and also Live Writer's integration. It may not be professional, but it sure is easy.
Ease of experimentation. There's no way I'll be able to resist trying something new. Pages will find their way in which aren't published via the approved route. A site management tool must be able to integrate these back from the web into local storage.

I think the search is on.

Two steps forward, one step back

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:10:00 +0000

I’m seriously considering reverting to a wired network. Not intending to drop the wifi entirely, but it seems that it doesn’t present the stability and reliability that I’ve come to expect.

A large part of this is down to the adaptors and aerials used by the system. Of course, no two devices are from the same manufacturer, so I can’t really expect complete integration without problems. Come to think of it, no two devices are actually running on the same platform (Win XP, Vista, 7, Mobile 6, and whatever variant of Linux is running on the actual router). I suppose it’s a miracle that they manage to talk at all.

It’s not that connections to the router show any difficulties (apart from the USB stick wifi adaptor on the Win XP box – but that seems to fall out of the USB port if you even glance at it – this takes the concept of quick release to new heights). But I also need to copy data between devices, and this is where it falls down. Speeds are nothing short of appalling, less than the broadband link would be expected to support, and without a properly managed DHCP/DNS on a server, even finding the other boxes can be tricky.

So do I really want to return to the rat’s nest of cables stuffed behind desks and book cases? No, but I may not have the choice. Unless I can sort out a no-cost (and most especially no-extra-box) solution, it will have to be back to wires everywhere.

The real negative, though, is going to be that the router will have to move. It’s currently connected directly into the BT master socket, for best broadband performance. But the no-extra-box constraint means that I can’t use a switch in the study, so the router will have to move up there and serve, with a likely drop in WAN access speeds. And that’s not something that I really want to see happening.

Feature bloat

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 22:17:00 +0000

You know what it’s like – a nice new PC, all shiny, loads of disk space. Then three days later it’s all slow, fragmented, and you start to think that maybe the old system wasn’t that bad after all.

Well, that’s the situation here. The brand new 120 GB disk in my new netbook (has that term been trademarked? If so, I’m in trouble – along with maybe nearly everyone else who has written anything on the web in the last six months) is now no longer showing 120 GB of free space.

OK, I put the Technet Windows 7 beta on it – whoops, there goes well over 7 GB free space in the OS folder alone. Then there’s everything MS loads by default into Program Files. Plus 4.5 GB of pagefile and hiberfil.sys.

Then I started. There are all the default things, like Acrobat Reader, Irfanview, Java etc. The whole of the Windows Live suite – or at least, all the useful bits – like Live Writer! Now it started getting out of hand: Silverlight, Digiguide, Filezilla, KeePass, Notepad++. Anything else? Yes, Live Sync! After all, why waste disk space on one PC when you can waste it on two or more? What was surprising was that so far, the Program Files folder was still only around 1 GB in size

The final straw was Guild Wars – on its own, this doubled the Program Files folder. However, this isn’t the worst of it: I can afford the disk space, it’s the fact that GW will probably take up all the time I’m likely to save with the new system. Ah, the perils of new technology.

PANs and POTS

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:01:00 +0000

Bluetooth on a mobile phone is an amazing invention - wireless headsets and hands-free calling alone would make it worthwhile. However, for over a year I've had no luck at getting it to work as a modem for my various laptops.

Until today. The new netbook, with a bit of tweaking and twisting, is now making L2TP connections via bluetooth and the ORBIT2, and thence via O2's network, all the way to the company network. This has bugged me for so long, and now it's working!

The real answer lay in using Internet Connection Sharing on the phone - I could easily get the PC to see the phone, but never had any way of getting info in and out. This last step fixed that. Naturally, it isn't necessarily that easy - the bluetooth settings on the laptop take a bit of getting the head around, but I have satisfied myself that the functionality is reproducible.

The worst bit, so far, is the absolutely appalling lag - ping times in the 400-600 ms range mean that anything like a complex web page is going to load very slowly. At that sort of rate, I'd almost be better with an old 300 baud modem on a POTS line.

On the instability of reality

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:02:00 +0000

Over the years, I've noticed that IT equipment has a habit of simply disappearing. When you absolutely know you had several power adaptors, spare memory chips and patch cables in the cupboard, and yet the most diligent search doesn't reveal anything more than a dusty old graphics card or 300MB HDD, then you become aware of the essential fragility of nature.

I'm not sure about the power strips or memory, but I do know why the network cables go. Anyone who has worked with a patch panel and network infrastructure very quickly becomes aware that network cables inevitably become tangled. You can leave things as neat and well-laid out as you like, but once you close the server room door and turn the lights off, those cables start to squirm and wriggle, and eventually end up in a state that makes a bird's nest look like a rigidly formatted mathematical progression. There's a Nobel prize waiting for the first person to invent tangle-proof patch cables.

Eventually, the cables reach a state of complete instability - the knots are so complex and topologically impossible that reality can no longer support their existence. And poof - no more network cable. Note that this only happens to cables that are not in use - there must be some extra dose of stability introduced by the passage of TCP/IP packets up and down the line, something that helps the cable keep a tenuous grip on existence. But for those wires left on the side, or simply attached to dead port switches there's no hope. Eventually they will pass over the edge of normality and there's a small collapse of matter in that region. It must be small, because no energy is released - possibly because it's all taken up in maintaining the complexity of the knots. And so, when you come to look for spare cables for that essential new link, and you remember buying a dozen or so 1 metre patches just a month ago, but none are there, then you have proof that matter can destroyed without trace.

Either that, or one of your co-workers has nabbed them for another site.

YAMNMP

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:46:00 +0000

This blog is rapidly becoming a clearing house for Microsoft Network Monitor problems. The latest is an issue with Firefox - if you're trying to download add-ons or extensions for Firefox, and receive a "Download Error -228" in place of the desired coloured tabs or whatever, just disconnect MNM from the network settings and try again.

The acronym? Yet Another Microsoft Network Monitor Problem.

The solution? Works for me (which is an acceptable bugfix resolution code as far as I'm concerned).

How to handle a file

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:04:00 +0000

Occasionally, I come across a problem that, while annoying, isn't really going to be any kind of a show stopper. I'll work at it for a while, then eventually decide that it's too much trouble, put it on one side and forget completely about it. Until I notice that whatever it was still hasn't been resolved, then I'll start worrying at the bit for a while again... and so on and so on.

One of these problems is the inordinate number of file handles that one of my system processes seems to use up over time. I'm referring to a process called 'audiodg', which is apparently associated with removing the DRM data that may be attached to various audio files before permitting other processes to play the file. It's another puny attempt to control access to data. (Hint to MS and various music publishers - someone, somewhere WILL crack whatever protections you use, and then it's all downhill from there on. Why waste your time, our resources and everyone's patience chasing a goal that's unobtainable?)

Audiodg is run as a protected process, to stop all those nasty hackers from breaking whatever DRM the publishers have added (see above). This means you can't easily see what it is up to. However, when it is listed as holding in excess of 4 million file handles after a day or so running, I think questions of exactly what it is up to become irrelevant: what interests me is how to stop it.

Fortunately, the cure is very simple - stop and restart the audiosrv service. This kills and recreates the audiodg process, with a nice clean no-handle instantiation. It doesn't stay that way, but it does at least work reproducibly.

Give the nature of the beast, info is not easy to find. I can't see anyone else complaining about this problem elsewhere, so perhaps there's something odd in my setup. I had put it down to the SoundMAX audio driver, but I'm not so confidant that this is the real culprit - surely if that were the case someone else would have seen and reported this. In the meantime, having just restarted the service, I'll probably forget all about the issue - until I notice the system running slowly and chewing up memory like there's no tomorrow again.

I learn something every week

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:04:00 +0000

Two little snippets of knowledge picked up this week, both in answer to some issues that have been troubling me for some time. I offer them here on the offchance that they will be picked up by whatever search engines happen to come across these pages, and will prove of use to others seeking answers.

1) Microsoft Network Monitor 3.1 can be a right pain. There's some kind of problem between MNM and the Intel wireless network card in some laptops (specifically, in my case, a Dell Precision) which results in a runaway state on boot-up where the SYSTEM process chews up CPU time and memory usage goes up and up. Eventually, various peripherals such as a USB mouse and even the keyboard stop working and it's BRB (Big Red Button) time. Re-booting sometimes works, but equally often just allows the same thing to happen. I've had up to five reboots before I end up with a usable system. The trick (once you do manage to get logged in) is to disable to Network Monitor Driver in the adaptor network properties. All seems to work nicely then

2) Vista does nasty things to some 'shared' files. I have to report a very unusual source for this snippet - although we've been actively using Vista for over a year now, I hadn't seen either the problem or the solution until recently. The nature of the issue is that supposedly shared files aren't always - they can disappear when another user logs on to the local system. This is because Vista tries to virtualise data wherever possible, moving it from the normal 'Program Files' area to a hidden folder in the user's individual 'Local' tree. (There's one oddity which explains why we haven't seen this before - disabling UAC apparently prevents this behaviour. Although Microsoft would probably disapprove, this is exactly what we do as soon as we get hold of a Vista PC.) Where did I come across this? In Usenet, of all places in the uk.rec.motorcycling group, a source of knowledge that is unequalled anywhere else on the 'Net.

That's it for this week. If anything else of interest comes up, you can read it here - assuming the search engines do manage to find this.

I've been given the sack

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:12:00 +0000

Not quite a 'gadget', but |I've just taken delivery of a new rucksack. Hardly earth-shaking, but it looks like it will resolve a couple of problems. I've been looking for a reasonably discrete way of carrying both a laptop and my camera gear round, and the Lowepro Fastpack 250 fills the bill. It holds a 15.4" widescreen laptop (Dell - tick), a large camera (translate - Nikon plus battery pack - tick), extra lenses, memory cards, something termed 'personal accessories', etc. About the only area where I'd take issue with the description is that the bag is intended to hold a flash unit - so far, I haven't been able to find a way of fitting my SB-600 in without straining the zips unmercifully. So it stays out for the time being.

The rucksack has a waist strap, and fully loaded is relatively comfortable when worn properly. Lots of pockets and little hideaways for, well, hiding things away.

The nice bit about it is that it's a side-loader, i.e. by swinging the bag around on the left shoulder you can remove the camera without taking the bag off completely. Whilst this is helpful in that you don't need to shrug the bag off completely, I'm thinking it will take some time to get the hang of it to get to the stage where it's much quicker.

The bag is described as meeting airline restrictions for carry-on luggage, and while I'd think it was stretching the limits a bit, it's certainly nowhere near the size of some bags I've seen being slung into an overhead locker. I seriously wonder how the passengers involved can think these are reasonable - I swear I saw one the size of a cricket bag (that's the luggage, not the passenger) once.

Conclusion - looks like I'm going to recommend this. Of course, it will have to stand up to the wear and tear of daily trips, probably not always fully loaded with gear, but my bags tend to either fail early, or make the grade over extended use. By all reports, the Lowepro's are reasonably well-made and don't seem to suffer from poor workmanship. Some of the zips seems a little small for the loads they are expected to take, but perhaps that's just because I always try to cram more in than the bag is designed to take. Time will tell.

It's high time

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:03:00 +0000

About 25 metres high, if the kite lines stretch to that. Yes, time to invest in some new nylon and string in the form of another power kite. Having taken the 3 m2 one out last weekend, and only just got it airborne due to lack of sufficient wind, a larger model is clearly necessary.

OK, this is me getting 'need' and 'want' mixed up again, but it's in a good cause. Really! Kite flying is just about the most exercise you can have without actually have to get up and do something strenuous. Yes, it's really good for you, promotes health (if not wealth). You're concentrating on what that sheet of fabric is doing (or, if you're better at it than I am, what it is about to do) so much that you don't realise until after half an hour or so just what strain this has been putting on your arms. But at that point it's brought home with startling clarity just what a strain it has been - the forearm muscles are screaming with cramp, the shoulders ache, and you have a crick in the neck from trying to watch where the kite is, your feet are, and what that horrible little dog is about to do just down the beach - although with a little bit of practice, you can sweep the kite low enough and fast enough to give the dog enough of a fright that it ends up doing whatever it was a long way further down the beach.

So I'm now wondering what to move up to - a kite with sufficient lift to start jumping? Or something with even more traction for pulling me along the ground (scudding)? The thought of trying kite-powered buggying is also attractive, albeit even more expensive. That would suggest the lift option is less likely - but the whole idea of grabbing air just seems to say go for it. Then the idea of the damage I'm likely to do to my knees says "no way". I'll probably settle for a 5 or possibly 7 metre intermediate kite - nothing too basic, but not a sports model. Although kites used to be a kid's game, I suspect the extreme powerkites have not matured quite enough to be suited to my advanced years.

Coincidence? I don't think so

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:38:00 +0000

As mentioned here before, I'm looking at ways of communicating, partly out of academic interest, and partly because there may be some merit in some new systems for work. My foray into Twitter didn't really take off - I guess I can't find anything valuable enough to say which isn't equally valuable to keep private. Not being one to let such a simple matter put me off, I recently signed up to the identi.ca service, thinking that not only would this let me stake yet another claim to the 'pemur' tag, but it would also open up the world of openID - which again may have some use ion the future.

Two days or so later, I start getting people following me on Twitter. Now bear in mind that I haven't updated Twitter for over 50 days - what is the chance that I'll get new followers now?

What's really interesting is the complex way that the various openID sites seem to be integrated: I thought I had a fairly good and simple subscription to one, only to find that it gets difficult to navigate all the possible sibling sites, not to mention those which use openID for authentication. I now seem to have at least three openIDs, but they are all the same, if you see what I mean. And if anyone does see what I mean, can you please explain it to me?

We are approaching normality

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:44:00 +0000

There are about fifty applications or tools installed on this PC. That's quite a bunch to recover from just about a standing start. And ensuring that everything is up-to-date and taking as many measures as possible to ensure that the sources are clean means a lot of work.

Even so, there are some oddities: Whisper, used for password management, at first refused to install. It seems that I have about four different variants lying about. I eventually found one that does at least install, but it's windows behaviour deviates from the norm - the minimize and maximise buttons are weird, and the frame certainly doesn't meet Vista expectations. Forte Agent wouldn't recognise my legitimate key at first, but a downloaded version of the same files suddenly decides to work.

On the other hand, reinstalling does seem to have fixed some problems. For six months now, the network configuration wouldn't automatically connect to my wifi link. All the settings were perfectly OK, and manually forcing the connection worked 75% of the time (the remaining one time out of four, I'd have to delete and recreate the security settings). Now it just connects each and every time, without problems, so I have no fears about rebooting.

It will probably take a month or so to get the box bedded in again, and get rid of the occasional crash or other hiccup. It's clear that PCs do require a running in period from a new install of software - I don't know what it is, it's not hardware related at all, but any system will eventually settle down and become more reliable after a few weeks. Of course, that's just before it goes over the other end of the graph and starts to fail, indicating another rebuild is necessary.

And I thought yesterday was bad!

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:39:00 +0000

The day didn't start well. The desktop system, which had been running relatively well for six months, started to throw up odd errors. If I was any more suspicious than I am, I'd think there had been a recent update that was causing problems here and at work, but there's been nothing recently.

So I thought I'd rebuild. Got all the data off on to a spare portable drive, got updated copies of all the software etc. Initially, it looked good - I remembered the problems about multiple disks and RAM limitations, put the Intel RAID drivers on as part of the OS install, and got a quick Vista install up and running in no time. Then I added the extra RAM - still OK - and the extra disk. Ah, that was a mistake. Vista couldn't see the disk at all. The BIOS knew it was there, Intel's RAID tool knew it was there, Vista said "what disk?".

Unfortunately, the resolution to this seems to be to run the SATA disks in IDE mode, losing all that performance from AHCI. I'm still unhappy about this, but having built the box with separate drives (not crossing the RAID systems as I did last time - RAID 0 and RAID 1 on the same disks. Weird but it worked), I reckon I can rebuild it later if and when I find an answer. Right now, I need an Internet fix.

Most of the software has gone back on OK, but I am having some problems with software configuration, in particular with Forte's Agent usenet reader software. I have a legitimate licence, but I think it expired with version 2, and I cannot source a copy that old from anywhere. I do remember declining to update (at extra cost) to the newer versions, because the increased emphasis on email and HTML wasn't what I wanted. I enjoy the simple text presentation of the older product, and have alternative email programs. Unfortunately, nothing else seems to come near to Agent's completely intuitive thread handling. The upshot of all this is that my version 2 key won't do to activate the version 3 software which is all I have at present. I could stick with the Free Agent version, but this lacks one or two extras that I've come to depend on.

I suspect this will be the pattern of the next few days. I've already had a an argument with my Azureus install - it keeps on trying to run some sort of Web 2.0 interface, offering video downloads. I want the old version back. In fact, I want my old PC setup back - this has to be the biggest change in the computing environment (application-wise) that I've suffered for years.

Not one of my better days...

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:26:00 +0000

I guess I should have known when I got to work without my keys - had to wait to be let into the office by a co-worker. However, I thought I'd make up time, because the laptop was only in sleep mode last night - no need for the long and occasionally laborious wait for it to boot, find the network and sort out downloading my ballooning profile. No way. It started fine, opened Outlook, and then stopped dead.

Despite all the IT support jokes, very often the best way of dealing with this sort of thing really is to reboot, which I dutifully did. And the machine hung again. And then a third time.

Now it may have just been coincidence, but it was only yesterday that I wiped my previous system, which had a vanilla XP install with no software now. Who says computers don't have a sense of humour?

So I was simultaneously trying to pull together enough software to make the desktop system usable, while going through all the repair steps I could to get the laptop back to life, and still handling internal and external support questions. Nothing worked on the laptop until I went for the full reinstall. Dell reinstallation CDs are good, but apparently not good enough. I was left without drivers for half the hardware, and of course most of the software I'd spent the last week carefully collecting and installing had gone. Definitely downhill.

Suffice it to say that it's just about back together now. And it looks as though it may have been prophetic. I'm trying to look on it as a dry run, getting up to speed for rebuilding the home desktop, because the bad news is that this latter system is now showing signs of imminent failure. It's just been one of those days.

You never really forget

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:09:00 +0000

Every once in a while I get the urge to try my hand at a racing game, and there's not been one that I've found which beats the old Colin McRae Rally 2.0. The later versions just didn't do it for me, and the DiRT demo just completely failed to load, so I never took that one any further.

What's really interesting is the 'upgrade' path within the game. There are several four-wheel drive cars available to start with, and you open new options once you win championships at whatever level. However, I usually stop trying after getting the novice rally championship - because that's what unlocks the Ford Escort Mk 1.

Rear wheel drive excellence - my first car was an Escort (I can still remember the registration number!), and it slowly metamorphosed into an uncomfortable road rally vehicle. I think it was the Granada rear springs that did it in the end - CD8's, if I recall correctly. Made it corner as though on rails, even if the rear end didn't always follow exactly in the tracks of the front - I always knew exactly where it was and what it was doing.

And it looks as though I haven't lost the knack - I'm slowly demolishing my own four-wheel drive lap records and section times in Rally 2.0 with the relatively underpowered Escort. Get it set up right and it's only the ultra-fast, straight sections where it doesn't dominate.

Wish they made an car like the old Escort nowadays...

They're all out to get me

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:27:00 +0000

It's clearly a conspiracy. Summer's here, or at least what passes for summer in Scotland - the occasional sunny minute between the rainstorms. My wife is talking about finishing work, with the result that I won't have to drive her in every day. I've been looking in the garage, wondering what to do about clearing things up. Petrol price rises show no sign of slowing down. And my colleague at work has given up the car for the time being for a more convenient mode of transport.

I'm going to have to get back on two wheels. Maybe not the 1 litre bike that's currently languishing in the back of the garage, maybe look for a 250 or 400 cc supermoto or similar (I rate manoeuvrability way beyond top speed, especially with all the cash-generators, sorry, speed cameras around). There used to be some superb models in this range, but now it seems to go from 125's straight to the 750/1 litre sports-tourers without much inbetween. I'm not sure I want something of the weight of the KLV/V-Strom type, but the old Yamaha DT400 would have been ideal.

Perhaps not this year, the finances are not that flexible. But a winter project of fixing up the KLV to make it saleable again, followed by a tour around the local dealers for a used, mid-range bike , may be on the cards.

KB940510

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Murray) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:21:00 +0000

Quote from Dave T on the Vistaheads forum:

"So can I assume that if I am not running pirate software I don't need this, and if I am running pirate software I don't want this?"

Absolutely typically paranoid update from MS, of no value to anyone - yet they term it 'important'. Must be another difference in the English language as spoken by our trans-Atlantic cousins.