It was a rather entertaining qualifying session yesterday, and I'd rather like to watch it again, using the wonderful iPlayer service from the BBC.

The session ran on for far longer than it should have, due to rain. BBC showed the session on BBC 1 up until 1930, then switched to BBC 2 after that. So, having watched the first bit on iPlayer, time to watch the next bit...

Oh.

I thought the BBC were envisaging people moving towards the VoD service more and more. If this is the case, then they really need to make it usable, so that people can actually rely on it.

Edit: Lots of other people asking the same thing:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbiplayer/F13735683?thread=7006092
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.autos.sport.f1/browse_thread/thread/722557aafba41aa9/70efd919390ee317?#70efd919390ee317

I rather like the format of this video.

Whilst I can't see what good it would end up doing, I still think that this petition is probably worth the 30 seconds it'll take to fill in:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nfppostcodes/#detail

As a result of my last blog posting, there's now a petition asking the Prime Minister to encourage Royal Mail to make the PAF available to non-profit and community organisations for free. Like I say, I don't imagine much will happen what with an impending postal strike, but still...

Via Neil, I found this article on Tom Watson's blog which has now been reported elsewhere about Royal Mail sending round the boys about use of postcode data. I've had involvement with trying to do geolookup on postcodes, and as I wrote in a common on Tom's article, Google is neatly sidestepping a lot of the issues here - I suspect that this would be more problematic if Google Maps' API didn't allow this. However, without Google offering this function, I suspect that the web would be a much poorer place. I feel that Royal Mail are actively trying to hold back a lot of new ideas which would benefit from either cheaper, or a more relaxed usage model for PAF, but I don't see anything like this happening any time soon. It's an excellent monopoly, and one which must bring in a fairly substantial sum for them. Turkeys, they don't vote for Christmas.

Whilst there's been underground movements towards creating a Welsh language interface to various phones for a while now, Orange and Samsung have apparently made the first official release of an interface to use the language. This is likely to interest a lot of staunch Welsh speakers and probably bring a decent number of new customers over to both the network and the manufacturer. I'd be interested to see how well it handles mutations and the like, although I imagine that Samsung have already comfortably got around the issue with various other Celtic languages.

On the back of my recent blog post about moving forward to new file servers, BackBlaze have published a blog post about how they're managing to fit stupid amounts of storage into 4u of rack for significantly less than the comparable players (EMC, Dell, Sun, etc). If you're looking at adding additional storage or sanitising your existing storage infrastructure, the article is well worth a read.

I popped to McDonalds on Mostyn Champneys Retail Park in Llandudno earlier, and as I drove out, noticed that Llandudno Superbowl has apparently taken the decision to travel back in time towards the days of racial segregation by employing a separate entrance for Poles:

Each photo is clickable which will give you the high res/full size original, so you can zoom in on it if you need to.

I'm sure if I was the owner of the business, I'd nip across to B&Q pretty sharpish to buy anything to cover over that.

I've had a couple of previous generations of file servers before this iteration, each one was a bit kludgy, so this time things have been done properly.

The first version was, admittedly, a full on file server, but bought because it was cheap more than anything. 8x9.1g SCSI drives in RAID 5, in a bloody huge case with (If I remember correctly) dual P2-400 processors. Or something. Either way, it was massive, totally pointless and dimmed the lights across London (where I lived at the time) when powered up.

The next iteration - where I am now, was two boxes, each with a pile of disks, which mirrored via the magic of rsync and crontab each night. This was pretty handy, as it meant that should one of the machines catch fire, or a disk fail, then I'd still have a clear backup of (almost) everything. The hardware is P3 and P4 desktop based, and pretty damn reliable, to be fair. The limitation was that the disks are all PATA, so 500gb each.

With the disks on these machines coming alarmingly close to breaking point, it's time to look at the next version. I've got a fair amount of data, video projects, photos (RAW files come in at around 10-20mb each), music, audio projects I'm working on... all together, it's not insignificant. Hardware wise, I've gone for a SuperMicro chassis and board combo. The chassis can take 6x 3.5" drives, a slim CD or DVD drive, floppy drive and another 5.25" bay with rails preinstalled for a 3.5" disk. Dual on board 10/100/1000 network. 4gb of RAM on there, and a single 3.2gHz processor (ability to add another one, but doesn't seem much point...) So, doing things properly with the disk setup this time involved a little thinking. What exactly did I want from it, and what did I need it to do? Speed isn't a massive issue - the current setup sees me lucky to get much above 4MB/s off the disks, so any improvement over that would be welcome.

The sweet spot on SATA disks at the time of writing is about 50 quid for a 1tb 7200 SATA2 32mb cache disk. Indeed, I managed to purchased 3x1tb disks from different manufacturers for a total outlay of £147 delivered. Why different manufacturers? The reason for this is there's some empirical evidence (and also Sod's Law) that says buying all of your disks from one manufacturer is akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket - get a dodgy batch of disks, and you could see a high number of failures within a short time, possibly wiping out out your RAID.

Anyway - the disks were put into RAID 5 configuration under Linux' software RAID. This might seem an odd choice to some people, but I'm confident that software RAID has matured enough now that it's had all of the quirks and gotchas removed. There's ups and down to both hardware RAID and software RAID. I think each one has to be taken on its own merits. Granted, if I had the money, I'd probably go for a 3Ware 9550 series RAID card, but you have to stop somewhere.

Once the array had built, I then used LVM2 to set them up as one big partition. I'd now got a single 2tb partition backed up under RAID 5. Next step was to use cryptsetup to encrypt the disks. Whilst I don't have anything dodgy on the disks, nor do I intend to, there doesn't seem any particular reason not to do this. My laptop also has encrypted disks - it's there, so why not? Finally, formatting the disks. Whilst ZFS is nice, I don't think it's going to be available to Debian users for some time yet, so ext3 it is.

That's pretty much it. The machine is running nicely and has copied over nearly all of the data from the old machine. Of course, I'm not intending on relying purely on this machine. Once I'm happy with this one, I'll be repeating the performance for a mirror machine to replace the other mirror machine (if you follow me).

Performances from the array: newfs:~# hdparm -T /dev/md0

/dev/md0: Timing cached reads: 1838 MB in 2.00 seconds = 919.25 MB/sec newfs:~# hdparm -t /dev/md0

/dev/md0: Timing buffered disk reads: 172 MB in 3.01 seconds = 57.22 MB/sec

Total outlay for the entire setup (chassis, board, processor, memory, disks, cables) was £308, which is pretty reasonable.

This seems like an interesting idea: http://www.norhtec.com/products/gecko/index.html - the key selling points for this device seem to be that it's possible to run it on AA batteries. The price is also worth mentioning, too - it's not ground breaking in this sense, but it is cheap. The site suggests it to be around $200, which equates to around £150. There are already machines in this price range.

So - the AA side of things. How useful will it be? Some of the higher spec machines such as the Samsung NC10 will happily do a 5-6 hours on a charge, in real world conditions. Whilst the ability to take AAs is a nice idea, I think it seems quite gimmicky.

I've been doing some fairly intensive work modifying a couple of tables within a larger database recently, and rather than backing up the entire database every few minutes when I was doing this work, I looked at the possibility of backing up just a certain subset of tables. mysqldump doesn't have anything built in which allows you to do this - your options are either a single table, or the entire database. In the first instance, if you've got a large amount of tables (as I did), you're going to have a lot of time taken each time, or in the other instance, a lot of space taken if you want to do incremental backups.

So, I decided to script it. The code seems to work pretty well. If anyone has any pointers as to where it might go wrong, then please feel free to comment:

mysql [dbname] -u [username] -p -e 'show tables like "[term]%"' | grep -v Tables_in | xargs mysqldump [dbname] -u [username] -p

Obviously, replace everything in the square brackets. This will ask for your password twice. If you're lazy with security, then go right ahead and pop your password in there. Most people would want to have their backup go out to a specific file rather than stdout, so you'd want this:

mysql [dbname] -u [username] -p -e 'show tables like "[term]%"' | grep -v Tables_in | xargs mysqldump [dbname] -u [username] -p > backupfile.sql

and possible also to add a drop table in, like so:

mysql [dbname] -u [username] -p -e 'show tables like "[term]%"' | grep -v Tables_in | xargs mysqldump -add-drop-table [dbname] -u [username] -p

I think there's been a missing link for a while now in the area of user generated content - wikis, blogs, and sites like Youtube in that there's nothing which can really tie them all together. Of course, a document within a wiki can link to a blog, which can point to a video on Youtube - but what if you're wanting to look further than that and include things like presentations and photos?

I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on the MySQL Librarian project which aims to answer these questions. The post over at http://blogs.sun.com/datacharmer/entry/the_mysql_librarian_is_here has a lot more detail on it, but I can see this idea being used in many more fields. That said, though, the fact that it's being tied to a particular community is going to be an excellent way to ensure the value of it.

I think they're on to something rather useful, here.

It's been, ooh, almost a year since the last entry to the blog. Of course, it's not died. Well, it had. I'm hopefully going to reinvigorate it, and move away from the inwardly facing stuff and hopefully be posting up some stuff which might be useful. Kind of like a scratch pad for bits of code, and so on.

A few years back (probably 5 or so) I built up most of my current main AV setup[1]. It's an all Yamaha rig, with JBL Control 1AT speakers (main and centre) and a Celestion sub. At present, it's:

CD player: Yamaha CDC-685 multichanger. This has now been discontinued, but I'm not going to be changing this because they're not making any new multichangers at the moment. It's a fantastic unit, and has optical out. I also like the PlayXChange function which means you can change discs whilst one of them is playing. MiniDisc - Yamaha MDX-793. Again, this is discontinued. Not many people use MiniDisc now, but I've still got a whole pile of them with concerts on and such. I could transfer them, but well, I'm happy with it for now. Why bother? Cassette - Yamaha KX-580SE. Discontinued again. Brilliant bit of kit. What it does with noise reduction is amazing. Again, we've got loads of tapes. Can't fault it, and I'm happy not to transfer stuff whilst I've got this.

So, that's the stuff that I'm keeping. What am I upgrading?

The tuner deck is currently a TX-492RDS. This is going to be replaced by a TX-761 DAB tuner deck. The DVD player is currently a DVD-S796. There's nothing wrong with this - optical out for the audio, but it's being replaced with a DVD-S1700 which has HDMI (and optical) as well as upscaling to 1080p. Yes, Yamaha have just announced their Blu Ray player, but the specs on it look a bit pants for the £600 or so they're asking, and there's no point buying the S2700 when I'll be upgrading to Blu Ray shortly (when they've got a better offering). So why bother? The amp - I'm not sure on that one. I can't justify a Z11, but the RX-V2800 is apparently just around the corner. But that' been on the cards for months now. I'll probably hold off on making that decision for a while yet.

There's also a new panel on the way. I've been putting off getting a new telly until: A) 1080p panels drop to a sensible price B) The contrast ratios get to a decent level.

Since it's now possible to get a Samsung 1080p with 15000:1 contrast ratio that does pretty good blacks, I'll be getting one of these at some point soon, hence the major updates to the AV setup.

I've been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to get my domain portfolio (both my personal one and that used by my employers) all into one place, as they were spread across a mish mash of registrars and pointing at various different name servers and whatnot.

One thing that struck me whilst I was doing this is the scarcity now of three letter domains (and, indeed, "good" domains) under the most well known TLDs (.com, .net and .org) as well as, to some extent, .co.uk. Whilst a quick Google revealed no hard numbers, I'd suspect that the last of the three letter domains under .com were hoovered up some years ago by Domainers (those who purposefully register domains purely to resell them at a profit). Of those remaining, there's obviously a split between business, and personal users.

The only ways in which these domains might come back into circulation are someone forgetting to renew; a business going under; in the case of a domain registered by a person, that person dying.

This is what I'd been thinking about. In the case of the last two, we've been aware for a while now of the value of three letter domains, so, in the future are we likely to see these domains valued by administrators when a company goes under? What about the Government (in the UK) for inheritance tax reasons? Who would decide these values? With a house, it's relatively easy to do. But with a domain, surely the value is much more difficult to calculate.

I found out yesterday that the exam board used in a project I'm involved with will accept the audio recording from an oral test (ie the speaking part of a test) as an mp3 file. This seems somewhat interesting as it's extremely easy to manipulate the files after they've been generated using freeware audio editing tools, such as Audacity. Obviously, though, this problem isn't a new one - certainly, it's possible to manipulate audio on tape or CD with as much ease.

The easiest way to prove that a file has been edited is to generate a hash of the original. If the hash doesn't match this file, then there's obviously been a change to the file. But how does one know that the has generated is that of the original file, and not one of the edited file? What's to stop someone just generating a hash based on the edited file?

Thinking about this a bit further, I hit on an idea. There's open source mp3 players/recorders out there such as the iRiver. This device runs an operating system which can be developed for applications such as this. It would be possible to create a custom operating system for devices such as this which could generate a hash based on the file that's just been recorded, along with the time, date, and a secret cipher. This hash could then be saved to an associated file.

From here, both the audio file and the file containing the hash would need to be sent to the exam board. As usual, if the hash matches the contents, all is good. It wouldn't be easy to create a new hash based on the edited file unless one knew the secret cipher and the other bits associated with the hash (ie method, and the date and time element). There's got to be something I've not considered here, though. What am I missing?

My Macbook Pro has been having some odd problems with the DVD writer for a few weeks now. I use Toast primarily for recording DVD-R and CD-R. Although the machine would read any media quite happily, I was having increasing problems with writing to CD-R and DVD-R. Out of a cake of 100 CD-R, I'd perhaps get a successful write with about 60, gradually decreasing over time to 20 or so. Not good. Googling suggested a dead drive.

Toast would give an error of "Sense Key=Medium Error 0x73, 0x03". Trying to record the disc from Finder would give me an error of "The device failed to calibrate the laser power for this media".

For reference, this is the device information:

MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857E:

Firmware Revision: ZA0E
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO
Media: Insert media and refresh to show available burn speeds

What concerned me was after the drive failed to write to a disc, the cache line would change to:

Cache: 0kb

After trying the various fixes listed on forums (including Apple's support site) I only had one solution left - a lens cleaner. I've always been somewhat dubious about these things as they seem a little bit snake oil to me. Colour me surprised that it seems to have fixed it.

When I got into the office this morning I found a Dell D630 waiting for me that'd only taken two weeks to arrive due, I'm told, to waiting for a battery. Anyway. The machine had turned up with Vista installed on it. The University is rolling out Vista slowly, but it's by no means well supported yet, and there's still a lot of unknowns with it.

Popping in the XPSP2 CD I'd got ready resulted in the laptop giving me a BSOD, with the helpful error message of STOP: 0x00000007b. I've got an XPSP3 CD which resulted in the installation finding no drives to install to - this was a little more helpful.

To resolve this, pop into the BIOS (hit F2 during startup) and change the SATA operation mode from AHCI to ATA, and also disable the Flash Cache.

Once done, you should be able to install XPSP2 or SP3 as you would normally.

Sioned decided to book a holiday for us a few weeks back through Thomson. We left on 14 June from Manchester, headed to Verona airport, before our final destination of Parc Hotels Italia's Parc Hotel Paradiso hotel. When the booking was made, the following was specified as absolute requirements:
o Kettle in room (for making up Gruffydd's feeds)
o Fridge in room (for keeping said feeds cool)
o Quiet room (such that he can sleep - he's a light sleeper)
o A proper cot (not a travel cot - something for him to sleep in)
o Interweb in the room (taking away a geek's interweb is cruel)

All pretty basic stuff for a 4-star hotel, you'd think. On arrival, we found that the hotel room we'd been given had the following:
o Kettle in room
o Fridge in room
So an overall FAIL so far. We asked at reception about the cot since that would be quite easy to solve. Except it wasn't - the only cot they could offer was a travel cot, the sides on which weren't removable. We're currently at the stage of him only going to sleep if there's no sides on the cot, then putting them on once he's asleep so that he can't roll out. The only solution here was for him to sleep on an open bed next to us and hope for the best.

Saturday night closed in pretty quickly as we'd arrived relatively late, and we found that a wedding that the hotel was holding had their party in the courtyard area outside our room. Our room was 2 rooms away from something called the Grill Bar which was being, unsurprisingly, used as the bar for the event. We spoke to our rep the following morning when he visited the hotel and in turn he spoke to reception about it, who told us that there'd only be noise outside the room at the weekends. We asked if we could take another room as it would likely be noisy on the Friday night before we were due to leave, but were told that the hotel was full. On asking about the rest of the stuff, we were told that there wasn't anything that could be done about it. In true British spirit, we decided to soldier on.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the weather was overcast, but still nice and warm. We had a good few days, good food, nice and relaxing (alas no interweb in the room but I managed to find open wireless in the basement of the hotel near one of the restaurants). Wednesday rocked around with blazing sunshine. Again, another nice day. I mentioned above about the Grill Bar. On Wednesday evening I noticed a PA sitting on a trolley in the corner of the Grill Bar. At around 2130, hearing the impressively loud sounds of a drum kit, I realised that the PA was being used. Now.

Anyone who's got, or has had young children will know that they need routine, and also that they tend to go to sleep quite early. Also, this model is a light sleeper. 2200, the usual time for sleep rolled around and the entertainment outside started belting out crap covers of Elton John, U2 et al. We asked at reception about moving to another room but were told non were available. Ok, fine, we can put up with it for one night. Asking if the entertainment would be outside for the forseeable future (ie the next few days) and we find that "If the weather is good, entertainment is outside". That doesn't bode so well.

Thursday rocks around and - yep - blazing sunshine. Sioned isn't too happy when I mentioned that I'd seen the same "musician" from the night before and the same PA (which I'd taken a nosy at - 500W is pretty impressive for a small venue, I feel) being set up. Again, we speak to the reception staff who tell us that no rooms are available (even after we point out we'd seen people checking out during the day). The music finishes just after 2300, with the bar remaining open until just after midnight. It was at this time the staff elected to reset the seating by dragging metal tables across the slabs outside for around 15 minutes.

Net result of this was a baby that was... rather unhappy, and rather disturbed. Sioned was in tears frequently after a distinct lack of sleep due to having to deal with a confused baby.

We saw our rep again on Friday morning and with pressure from him were given an offer of alternative accommodation in a 2-star property. We asked if we could see the property, but, after 90 minutes, the staff were still unable to produce a key to a room there. We also found that if we were to move, we'd be required to sign a disclaimer (in Italian only) that would waive all rights to a refund (in part or in full) and also require us to not make enter into any discussion with Thomson (the tour operator). Needless to say, this offer was declined.

With our options running out, we elected to book a flight home. We managed to get an (expensive) last minute flight from Venice airport (a 2 hour drive away) and also through our rep, Craig, secure a taxi to take us there. To give you an idea of how bad things had become, we were prepared to pay in excess of £500 to travel home a day early.

One advantage of being a pessimistic tech is that I was able to gain the following:
o Audio recordings of the discussions (some might say arguments) with the manager and reception staff
o Audio recordings of a member of staff confirming the times the music and bar would close
o Video recordings showing the location of the room in relation to the PA
o Video recordings showing the time and audio levels

Hopefully we'll find a satisfactory conclusion to this through our tour operator, although this blog posting is primarily Google fodder to try and warn people about the quality of the hotel and their customer service. That said, the rep from our tour operator was immensely helpful and went well beyond the call of duty to try and help to rectify the situation. Certainly Thomson and Craig did what they could to help - the issue is the service that the Parc Hotel Italia staff and specifically the staff at Parc Hotel Paradiso in Peschiera provided during our stay.

As a general question to the masses, are we being unreasonable? Is it ok to expect that a hotel can provide what's requested, and, furthermore, provide a quiet room for a baby?

The Bangor University Summer Ball took place over this weekend, headlined by Athlete, and I was there taking photos. This was a pretty hard going test, primarily on the amount of time I was on my feet, with the camera in my hands - around 9 hours. One of the things I like most about the Nikon bodies is that they just feel so at home in my hands. The D2x isn't light by any measure, but, after that amount of time to still not feel like my wrist is about to snap is pretty impressive. I was also dragging all of my lenses around with me and various other stuff in my Lowepro AW100 bag - again, this caused me no issues at all - no pain in my shoulders or anything. So, all in all, a good night. The processing took me a fair while to do - the results are available at http://photos.garysmith.org.uk/ball08/

My installation of Office 2008 under OS X automatically updated earlier today and seemed to break itself quite spectacularly. After the update had installed, any of the applications on the suite refused to start, instead automatically starting the installer for the update again, and then trying to check for updates.

The way around this is to make sure you've got your serial number, then delete the following files:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office\ 2008/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008\ Settings.plist rm /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

After this, click on one of the applications that are part of the Office suite, it'll take you through the registration (asking for your serial) and then that's it - sorted.