Over lunch with some colleagues last month, the subject of why Microsoft is paying $8.5bn for Skype came up. “Simple”, I replied, “for years, governments have been looking for back doors into encrypted communication systems, including Skype. The US government must be secretly subsidizing Microsoft’s takeover in return for access to all the Skype traffic”.
Consensus round the table was that my theory sounded just a bit too plausible for comfort. If I disappear suddenly, you’ll know why…
After years of thinking about it, and even writing about it, I’ve finally bought myself a smartphone.
As I write, I’m coming to the end of my third week with my new HTC Desire S. And it hasn’t disappointed.
Carrying it around has proved less arduous than I imagined – although it weighs more than my clunky old Nokia 1100, it’s thinner and flatter, so it fits nicely in my shirt pocket. It gets quite warm when under heavy use (e.g. acting as a WiFi hotspot), but not unpleasantly so.
They’ve packed quite a lot into such a small case – in no particular order, we have FM radio, a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash which works quite well for basic snaps, a second front-facing camera for video calling (makes me look awful, but friends insist it’s accurate), GPS, a half-decent speaker, a headphone jack, a nice big touchscreen, and I’m told it also has a phone.
Typing on the on-screen keyboard has proven easier than I anticipated – even with my fat fingers, I can peck out a short e-mail with reasonable ease. The predictive/corrective text is actually surprisingly helpful here.
The built-in e-mail client is OK, if a little basic. It wouldn’t send outgoing mail via my Exim 4 server over TLS (a TLS packet with unexpected length was received), but I suspect that’s Debian’s fault for insisting that GNUTLS actually, er, works. I ditched the default client in favour of K9-Mail, which boasts PGP integration and is much more customizable. Apart from a few niggles with the UI, it does the job very well.
The browser works much as one would expect – even sites without a mobile option are surprisingly usable – the screen is a decent resolution for its size, and the usual gestures for zoom work well.
The music player worked straight out of the box when I copied some MP3s over, and the supplied headphones aren’t too shabby.
The ability to read bar codes and search online for the cheapest available version of the barcoded thing has proved endlessly amusing.
Irssi Connectbot deserves special mention for making IRC on the go dead easy.
One of the main reasons for opting for an Android phone were the tethering capabilities – with a couple of well-chosen taps, the phone can share its 3G internet connection by turning itself into a WiFi hotspot. This is one of the operations that makes it a bit warm, but it’s very handy if you’ve got a bigger computer with you, but no internet.
Battery life isn’t too bad given the capabilities of the device – it lasts a heavy day’s usage, and charges over USB from almost anything. They also throw in a standard wall-socket adapter too.
Android claims some IPv6 support, which I’ll report back on when my home IPv6 is raised from the dead. I’ve also got a few ideas for app development, so watch this space!
In June/July 2010 I spent ten days travelling in Rajasthan, India with friends; this is my diary of the trip (full list of entries here).
Today we left Jaipur to start on the second leg of our trip; unfortunately all of us are feeling a bit off, but that’s possibly unsurprising after all the rich food we’ve eaten over the last 48 hours coupled with the intense heat. Anyway, we’re OK to travel, and our car and driver to Jodhpur await!
A somewhat dull day in the car, trying not to let the sun dazzle us and stay out of the heat. Quick stop at the services, and into Jodhpur by 4pm. Much faffing before we found a hotel that wasn’t full – apparently some sort of conference is in town, and the guest-house we had in mind took one look at us and said ‘no foreigners’.
I considered asking K to ask the bloke ‘what makes you think my friends are foreign?’ but decided on balance we wouldn’t get away with that…
Finally secured a couple of nights in a decent-ish hotel for not too much; our driver is apparently perfectly happy to sleep in the car. A different world…
Dinner in the hotel and an early night under the best air conditioning we’ve had on the trip so far; turned firmly up to maximum and with ‘turbo mode’ on. Can’t help but reflect that having it on is pumping out CO2 which is likely to make the heat worse in the long term; but when the heat outside is bad enough to kill you if you’re used to colder climes, it’s not the time to entertain such thoughts.
In June/July 2010 I spent ten days travelling in Rajasthan, India with friends; this is my diary of the trip (full list of entries here).
Quite a day today!
First, we drove out (supposedly before the worst of the heat, but certain people didn’t get up early enough…) to see Jaipur’s fort.
Then, back to K’s grandparents’ place for a splendid lunch laid on by caterers for us and a large number of visiting members of his family including my first taste of an authentic Indian curry (chicken, obviously, not beef). Delicious!
After hiding from the heat with my book for the rest of the afternoon; as darkness fell we dressed up and ventured out for one of the highlights of the trip: the last night of a genuine Indian wedding (apparently they typically last several days!). Friends of K’s family were getting married in style with 300 guests, and we caught up with the wedding procession marching up Jaipur’s equivalent of the A34, much to the annoyance of passing traffic.
It had elephants, a man on stilts, a marching band, 300 dancing guests, a lot of electric lights, and a man throwing fireworks into the air overhead.
After going round the block a couple of times, the procession marched into the grounds of the hotel where the dinner was being held. As we gorged ourselves on a wide range of delicious Indian food, TV cameras whizzed overhead on wires, televising the whole thing to screens on stands around the place. I felt quite sorry for the bride and groom, sitting on the grand stage at the front, being congratulated by and photographed with all their guests in turn – no chance to get at all the food!
Returned to our hotel thoroughly full and with lots of happy memories of an amazing night.
Edit: Those of you coming across this post by googling for ‘Sixxs rDNS’ should note that Bytemark’s DNS service isn’t free unless you already have a server with them, but there are a number of free alternatives out there.
With IPv4 address space exhaustion practically upon us, I decided it was high time my house got IPv6. This is quite easy to do even if your ISP, like ours, doesn’t support it natively. Get a Sixxs tunnel, apply for a subnet, set up radvd on the Linux box behind your sofa (you do have one, right?) and there you are.
Even Windows XP can be trivially prodded into IPv6ing itself up, and my router seems not to mangle the radvd broadcasts so even wireless clients can have v6 if they support it.
What really impressed me, though, was what happened when I wanted to set up reverse DNS for my new Sixxs subnet. I’ve been assigned 2a01:348:1af::/48 and the Sixxs page tells you that you’ll need your own DNS server to host the necessary records. I don’t run my own DNS; I use Bytemark’s content DNS service.
I wasn’t expecting Bytemark to support adding rDNS records for random IPv6 /64s, however as it turns out, once you work out what the TinyDNS file needs to look like:
# IPv6 rDNS authority for Sixxs subnet 2a01:348:1af::/48 .f.a.1.0.8.4.3.0.1.0.a.2.ip6.arpa::a.ns.bytemark.co.uk .f.a.1.0.8.4.3.0.1.0.a.2.ip6.arpa::b.ns.bytemark.co.uk .f.a.1.0.8.4.3.0.1.0.a.2.ip6.arpa::c.ns.bytemark.co.uk # Machines in the first /64 (home network) 6router.ipv6.dnorth.net:2a01034801af00000000000000000001:8640
… it Just Works:
$ host 2a01:348:1af::1 1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.f.a.1.0.8.4.3.0.1.0.a.2.ip6.arpa domain name pointer router.ipv6.dnorth.net.
Nice one, Bytemark!
A fond farewell today to my car, which has been in the family since 1999 and suffered both myself and my sister learning to drive in it. The mighty Fiat served me well, but in the end, living and working as I do in the middle of one of the most anti-car cities in England, it had to go.
Not actually my car, but an identical one
I sold it to We Buy Any Car (sponsors motoring on Dave), and they gave me fifty quid, which I shall be putting towards finally getting a smartphone.
A wise man once wrote:
“Unlike the precocious child who will taunt you mercilessly, knowing just how to report the beating they deserve to their school teacher in a manner that will have you in Police custody before lunchtime, hardware is sneaky.“
I couldn’t agree more.
Hardware and I have never really got on, but we’ve always maintained a queasy peace – my laptop may not hibernate properly under Ubuntu, but it sort-of works. Likewise the machine behind my sofa refuses to charge its CMOS battery, but as long as I reboot it rather than shutting it down, it manages to come back without manual intervention.
Last weekend, though, hardware declared war. And it did so under the guise of a familiar occurence – a phone call from a family member about some “computer trouble”. Mum and Dad have their internet courtesy of now-defunct Tiscali UK, which was taken over by TalkTalk. For about three years, the Tiscali-branded black box router had been sitting in their study and working. It didn’t feel like the highest-quality piece of kit in the world, but it did manage to keep the connection open and serve one wired client – a desktop PC – and my sister’s laptop over WiFi.
Three years on, it died. No problem, I thought. I ordered a reasonably priced replacement to be shipped over there, and the next weekend I tried to talk Mum through installing it over the phone. No good – we eventually established, after much frustration, that the router was not DOA, but partially-alive OA, and kept dying within 30 seconds of being plugged in.
Sigh. Grit teeth. Pack it up, return it, buy something a bit more expensive from Netgear. Talked Mum through installing that, no need for WiFi just yet, job done.
Fast-forward to last weekend when my sister rocked up wanting to use the WiFi. No problem, I thought (you’d think I’d know better by now…) – the router is configured with the same network name and password as the last one, so it should Just Work™.
Guess what, it didn’t. So I stepped into the breach, fired up Vista on her machine, point it at the right access point, find it asking me for a PIN. Gah? Turns out that since I last played with this stuff, WiFi protected setup has been invented. And for sure, it sounds like a good idea, but in this case, I don’t want it. Please just let me specify the password by hand. Vista, as far as I can tell, won’t let you do this.
OK, disable WPS on the router, change the network name to make devices forget everything they think they know about it, try again. “Wireless authentication failed because of a timeout”. And no further progress was possible. Much Googling suggests that the Atheros wireless chipset in the laptop is incompatible with certain Netgear routers, and nobody has a solution to this.
Great. At this point, the urge to throw all the blasted computers out of the nearest window was strong enough that I decided it would be a good time to hand my sister the 100 metre Ethernet cable and give up. And it was at this point that Mum wandered in and said “the internet isn’t working”.
Sure enough, the desktop PC had lost its connection. What’s more, it had lost all knowlege of containing a network card, and no amount of poking, prodding or re-seating would make it work. It still had flashing lights on the back, but nobody was home.
It was at this point that I looked up from the screen with bleary eyes and realized I had to be back at work in the morning.
I’m not really interested in aportioning blame for all this, but I do find it depressing that after 10 years, WiFi is still about as friendly as a cornered rat when it goes wrong, and badly implemented all over the place.
Browsing through the URC North Western Synod’s website today, I see they now run it on WordPress. And this is a bit of a relief for me – the site’s previous incarnation was a bunch of hand-crafted PHP written by 16-year-old me, and I’d been having sleepless nights wondering if that code was still in use, and how much pain it had caused. (Not that WordPress is perfect, but if it’s good enough for this blog…)
Not all of my early attempts at computer programming have gone the way of all flesh, though – the Python script I wrote to parse the dinner menus for Magdalen JCR (and the subject of my very first blog post) is apparently still in production and telling people when to expect Chicken Kiev as recently as last week. The time it’s saved various JCR computer reps has presumably now exceeded the two days I spent writing it in the first place. And though I know the code is pretty horrible by my current standards, it does that which got me into computer programming in the first place – makes real people’s lives easier.
Just a quick one to say that the slides and videos from Oxford Geek Night 19 are now up – I very much enjoyed speaking for the second time at OGN, and due thanks must go to TorchBox and the Nokia Ovi Store for making it happen.
Moving a charity’s accounts to a new bank: how hard can it be?
It’s now just over a year since I took over as joint treasurer of Saint Columba’s. And much as my mum (a church treasurer herself for many years) predicted, the first year was the worst.
One of the most tedious bits proved to be moving the church’s accounts to a new bank. CAF specialise in banking for charities and nonprofit organisations, and after years of shoddy service from our current bankers, we were ready to bail out.
I won’t name the current bankers, but let’s call them LlBarcBCWestFax.
Moving our savings was relatively easy – just get the right signatures on a letter authorizing the closure of the account, and asking for the funds to be transferred by BACS to CAF. Sadly, LlBarcBCWestFax’s crack team of account closure specialists managed to ignore my explicit instructions and issue a five-figure cheque, which they posted to the church (addressed to ‘The Directors’!). I found it there after an increasingly anxious few days wondering where the money was.
That was easy, though, compared to moving the current account. Having chased up everyone paying money into it and asked them to move their standing orders elsewhere, we were left with the small matter of 25 direct debits needing switching. No problem, allegedly – CAF supplied a form to fill in asking for them to be moved, and we duly sent it off back to CAF. They in turn made a request to LlBarcBCWestFax, and two weeks later, I got a list of direct debits in the post on which I was asked to highlight the ones to move.
Could have sworn I ticked the box on the original form saying ‘all of them’. Never mind, let’s play the game. Highlighted and sent off.
Two weeks later, things started to move. Out of 25 organisations – ranging from ex-national monopolies to smaller operators, one managed to send a letter saying ‘thanks for moving your direct debit – it’s business as usual’. 20 sent letters saying “sorry to hear you’ve cancelled your direct debit”, followed two days later by “glad to hear you’ve set up a new direct debit!”.
And the other four? Three of them failed miserably to enact the switch and insisted on all sorts of paperwork with the signatures of all people on the bank account being sent. Seeing as the others managed it, I can only put this down to incompetence (one of these suppliers has been running a commercial all over the place lately, and the mere sound of their jingle has me wanting to kick something).
And finally, the one supplier who, two months after the switch, still hasn’t done it? Our ISP. Turns out that all banks are equal, but some are more equal than others when it comes to direct debits. Our ISP “can’t do direct debits from CAF”. I haven’t managed to get a straight answer on why this is, but it looks like our LlBarcBCWestFax current account will survive into 2011. Sigh.
The one positive note in all of this has been CAF’s responsiveness as I’ve chased up issues with them. Being able to phone them and get straight through to an intelligent person who gives me a straight answer is exactly why we took on the challenge of making the switch in the first place. And unlike LlBarcBCWestFax, they don’t charge £12 for cancelling a cheque…
