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2011-07-04T14:49:00.000+01:00

St George's Day Walk 2011

2011-04-28T17:47:00.003+01:00

April 23 saw the annual St George's Day Walk in aid of Help for Heroes. Over 200 people walked the 5 miles from The Smiths Arms to the Windmill Tavern, Hand and Dagger, Sitting Goose, Saddle Inn and back to The Smiths Arms in order to raise over £2,000.

Photos from the day can be found on Flickr here.

Windows 7 Profile Woes

2010-09-05T19:07:00.007+01:00

Back in the days of good old Windows XP there was three ways of assigning a profile to your users:

Roaming Profiles

Mandatory Profiles

A Default Profile stored in NETLOGON

I always chose to use the shared Default profile method but when changing to Windows 7, wiered things started to happen...

Every time a user logged on, they would receive a notification balloon informing them that they had been logged on with a temporary profile and accompanied by a message that my users found quite scary since it mentioned that none of their work would be saved! Whilst this was happening I was also experiencing a problem where folder re-direction would fail every other time that a user logged into a machine. This was particularly annoying!

So where to start?

I decided that the temporary profile warning must be because of using the default profile method above. The obvious thing to do then was switch to a different method with mandatory profiles being the most obvious. However, Microsoft decided that, as of Vista, it would make the production of mandatory profiles a pain in the arse. To find out how bad it is, see the Technet guide.

I spent a whole day building a nice fresh Windows 7 virtual machine so that I could create the mandatory profile. I followed the instructions to the letter only to have it not work! Onto roaming profiles then.

It was now time to experience a roaming profile problem. Despite activating a roaming profile for a user, I was still receiving the temporary profile warning and the profile directory did not contain anything. It trned out that there was some old profile information being left somewhere. To delete this old data I discovered a VBScript that basically does the same job as delprof.exe (which doesn't work for Vista or Windows 7).

Next it was onto the randomness of the folder re-direction failing to apply every other time somebody logged on. I eventually found an event log entry that mentioned that the 'logon optimization policy' was preventing folder-redirection from working. That's right... Windows optomized the logon by turning all the useful stuff off!

I eventually discovered that this was to do with a change in the way Windows performs 'asynchronous processing and logon optomization'. Long story short... enabling the 'always wait for the network at computer startup and logon' GPO setting immediately cured the problem!

So to summarise... turn on roaming profiles and enable the 'always wait for the network at computer startup and logon' GPO and your life will be much easier!

Migrating from Zimbra to Exchange 2010

2010-09-05T12:38:00.004+01:00

Some time ago I switched from using Exchange 2003 to Zimbra to try to reduce the TCO of the school's messaging services. Switching to Zimbra was painless with a handy little tool to copy all the users and their data across.

After several years of admirable service, the time has come to switch back to Exchange so that we can exploit some of its more advanced features and integrate it with our forthcoming OCS implementation. The problem is... how do you migrate all the data to Exchange?

No simple tool seems to exist for the purpose and, short of opening each mailbox and manually copying the mail, I was struggling to find an easy solution.

I stumbled across a post on EduGeek.net where somebody was suffering a similar problem and it gave me two solutions to my dilemma:

Set up an Exchange 2007 server and use Microsoft Transporter Suite for Internet Mailboxes to migrate the mailboxes to Exchange 2007. After this the mailboxes could be migrated to Exchange 2010.

Use IMAPCopy to copy straight to Exchange 2010.

I obviously picked option number two because the first option seemed like hard work.

The whole process seemed to work quite well although I have since discovered that some mail was 'lost' during the bigger batches so it is worth writing the output to a file and double checking it for error messages. You should also be warned that it's not the quickest process in the world and attempting to run multiple copies of IMAPCopy at once simply doesn't work!

My poor neglected blog

2010-09-04T18:12:00.006+01:00

Is it really that long since I last posted on my blog?!? OMG!

It has been super busy at work since November... trying to get things prepared for the Windows 7 and server 2008 R2 rollout. With the little darlings back on Tuesday, I've nearly managed to get everything sorted and I should have a few minutes spare to update my blog.

Watch out for a post about profile pitfalls very soon!

Adobe Badges

2009-11-29T14:31:00.001Z

IMG_3159
Originally uploaded by Ric Charlton

I was sorting through some 'old' pictures to upload to Flickr and stumbled across this one.

I'd forgotten I'd taken this and, I think, it's rather good :-)

Noise versus ISO for Canon EOS 1Ds

2009-11-23T22:19:00.005Z

Gary recently pointed me towards a forum post discussing noise on a EOS 40D at different ISO settings. The forum post can be seen here.

This whole 'faking' of ISO settings - basically using a full stop lower ISO setting and boosting the EV in camera which caused problems.

It seems that the 5D also suffers from this, although the effect is seen at different points through the ISO range. This got me thinking... does my 1Ds do the same thing? An experiment was required!

After a few practices, I settled on the following conditions:

Camera set to Manual

No lens - just the body cap

Eye-piece cover shut

Exposure time set to 30 seconds (this exagerated the noise at very low ISO)

I then took a shot at each ISO setting (from 50 to 1250) and measured the mean luminance in Photoshop CS4. That produced the following graph (which didn't show a lot because I didn't have enough noise!).

I re-measured the luminance after increasing the EV on each shot by 20. This made for some noisy shots at high ISO (as you would expect!). The following graph was produced which showed the differences a little clearer.

So... what does this prove? IMHO, the 1Ds does not suffer from the faking of ISO settings in the same way as the 5D and 40D were described. Although the graphs do not clearly show this, ISO 160 did produce slightly less noise than both those ISOs below and those above it - the difference was only 0.06 on the +20 EV shot mind ;-)

Picasa and Flickr

2009-09-04T18:43:00.004+01:00

I've been contemplating a switch to Flickr from Picasa Web for some time because it tends to have better integration with many Web 2.0 apps - e.g. Facebook. The main reason stopping me migrating, though, is that I really like Google's Picasa application.

Today I came a cross a great little app called Picasa2Flickr which adds another button to Picasa which uses Flickr Uploadr to get the selected pictures onto the web. Not the prettiest solution but it does seem to carry across all the titles, tags, etc. (except for the geotag data).

A note about the installation though... it's not immediately obvious but you need to click the links in the instructions to get the button to install correctly.

Facebook Test Post

2009-08-16T12:32:00.002+01:00

This is a post to check whether adjusting my Blog feed (as per the instructions here) would allow full posts and piccies to automagically import to Facebook.

Anyway... here's a pic...

Blackpool Air Display

2009-08-16T10:37:00.003+01:00

Finally getting caught up on blog stuff since I came back from the EduGeek meetings down south...

Before the meetings, I popped along to Blackpool for their annual air display. It was glorious sunshine and it was really nice to relax on the prom at North Shore for a couple of hours.

The air show also gave me the opportunity to play with my 500mm camera lens :-) By adding my 1.4x extender I got a full 700mm too :-D

Here's a sample of the pics I took (the noise was awesome when the Vulcan flew over - full afterburners, the lot!)

Pocket Scrobbling!

2009-08-03T22:31:00.005+01:00

Last.fm is something I've been trying to use to find new music. It's a massive web application that analyses your listening tastes and connects you with bands you may not have heard of and with people with similar tastes to you.

A part of the Last.fm experience is the 'Scrobbler'. It basically sits there while you listen to music and sends information to your Last.fm profile - it only sends deatails of tracks that you listen to a certain percentage of though so that you can skip through the rubbish.

Anyway, I primarily listen to music on my phone (HTC Touch Pro2), so these haven't been getting 'scrobbled'. Today I stumbled across an app though... the 'Pocket Scrobbler'.

The Pocket Scrobbler will work offline too and only send data when you want it too. Brilliant!

Check it out at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pocketscrobbler/ - I decided to try the 1.8 beta... TinyURL is http://tinyurl.com/l3qrxw if you want to easily download it onto your device.

Web albums updated

2009-08-03T21:56:00.002+01:00

I just got around to updating my online pics. This post has a couple of my favourites :-)

Lazy cat

2009-07-24T17:00:00.000+01:00

Came home today to find the cat asleep in a rather unusual position.

Take a look at the pic!

Matt of the 'Mill

2009-07-03T21:48:00.001+01:00

Matt (the assistant manager of the Windmill Tavern) is going to kick himself for reminding me of the attached photo :-D

I think it looks rather fetching ;-)

HTC Touch Pro2

2009-07-02T18:07:00.003+01:00

So I got myself a second hand Touch Pro and it's been AMAZING. It does everything you want and more with ease. Plus the keyboard made SMS and email a pleasure.

I recently had the opportunity to swap it for a Touch Pro2. I knew it would be nicer but it's INCREDIBLE!

The phone is quicker, smoother and generally easier to use. The bigger screen is amazing and the battery life is far superior. Hell, even the audio from it is better.

I do have one criticism mind... the keyboard isn't as good. The keys are now spaced apart and are bigger - hence less of them. I really think that the old layout should have been kept... it was perfect after all ;-)

How full?

2009-06-28T00:29:00.001+01:00

So we all had a good feed at The Fusion Room for Caroline's birthday. I think some people are starting to feel the affects though ;-)

The Windmill does take-out

2009-06-06T21:08:00.003+01:00

2 pint cartons for taking your beer home! Genius!

The instructions are maybe a little much though... You don't deserve to drink if you think holding the carton upside down is a good idea!!!

Straight from the 80s

2009-05-30T15:29:00.003+01:00

It's like Gav knew that we were going to be going to the 80s bar and he dressed appropriately!

The EduGeek giant and his wine

2009-05-27T23:41:00.001+01:00

Shaun (the EduGeek giant) struggled to drink his red wine out of a normal large wine glass

More Success at The Windmill Quiz

2009-05-07T19:27:00.002+01:00

Whilst I'm waiting in the pub for Chris I thought I'd blog about Tuesday's quiz...

This week the team comprised four and the questions were a lot easier than last week - last week was particularly difficult!

Although we almost came joint first (a re-count was called) we ended up second by one point :-( All was not lost though as this achievment won us a round of drinks :-)

All in all not bad then, eh?!?

So Tom had chicken

2009-05-01T19:59:00.001+01:00

We eventually got seated and had some food. The food was rather nice... Tom expected a little more medat on his chicken though ;)

Eating out for Dad's birthday

2009-05-01T18:17:00.002+01:00

We decided to go out for a meal since it is Dad's birthday and Will suggested 'The Bobbin Mill' at Buckshaw.

After getting lost we're all here now but we aren' allowed to sit down and eat because there's no tables (see picture!)

Anyway... Only another 30 mins to wait.

Blogtastic Birthday Gift

2009-04-24T21:27:00.001+01:00

Caroline and Gary gave me a lovely birthday present that was crying out to be blogged! :-D

Picasa and Picasa Web Albums

2009-04-22T19:33:00.004+01:00

I decided last night (whilst we performed miserably in the pub quiz) that I would post a few of my photographs to the web for all to admire.

The easiest way to do this was to use Picasa (which I already use to organise my pictures) which allows easy upload to Picasa Web Albums. After a few clicks, the job was done.

I've even added a couple of albums on the right hand side for you to enjoy if you can't be bothered bowsing all the way to http://picasaweb.google.com/ric.charlton.

Blakey had an accident!

2009-04-12T18:44:00.001+01:00

Lol!

Quizzing

2009-03-25T19:50:00.000Z

Well the quiz team returned from their holidays last week and we resumed our greatness on Tuesday!

The picture round was easier than usual for us - all Disney characters ;-)

Anyways... we won! Not bad eh? 61 points! So a free round of drinks was ours.

Now we just need to win the higher and lower game... it's up to about £150 now :-)

Finally!

2009-03-17T18:06:00.002Z

Tom, my brother, has finally found himself a job.. It's taken ages!!!

He's going to be an environment officer working for the Environment Agency in Penrith on a decent salary too.

Playing with HDR

2009-03-13T17:21:00.004Z

I've seen a few examples of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography lately and it looked pretty wicked... so I thought I'd have a bash.

I found a tutorial on Instructables that explained the process using the GIMP. This was the result using photos of some snowdrops in the dark.

Touching the music

2009-03-04T00:21:00.002Z

As some might be aware, my local recently closed - we're still not 100% sure why. For this reason, I've had to find another and I had a choice of two - The Windill Tavern near Clifton and The Hand and Dagger near Treales. I chose the Windmill because it's easier to get to while the weather is a bit rubbish.

The Windmill is about a mile from my house and it takes me roughly 15 minutes to walk there :-( This is about 14.5 minutes longer than it took to get to the club!

To make my walk slightly more bearable, I decided I would listen to some music. The obvious choice was to use my phone. I have a 1GB microSD card which I chuck a load of albums onto in MP3 and WMA format. The sound quality is OK. The only problem was that the earphones that come with the Touch Pro are pathetic to say the least. If you imagine a pair of headphones without the headband, you wouldn't be far off the earphones - they're huge and don't even fit in my ears!!!

The Toouch Pro only has a slightly mangled mini-USB connector or everything to plug in to so the first thing I needed was an adapter. Flea-bay to the rescue and £2.50 (inc. postage) later and I could now plug a 3.5mm jack into my phone. Bargain!

Then to choose the earphones. Only one choice really... the Sennheiser CX-range. Unbelievably I managed to find a set of CX-500 earphones for a meagre £17.50 delivered (another Flea-bay bargain - new and in the box!). Considering these earphones are £60 at Richer Sounds it's amazing!

I've been using the combination of the adapter and earphones for about a week now. It's brilliant. The earphones produce excellent sound... nice and basey and excellent top too. Background noise is irradicated too - possibly not a good thing when you're walking but as long as you're careful....

Falling into the mobile Internet trap

2009-02-23T20:03:00.003Z

Lately I have been increasingly using my phone for mobile Internet goodness.... it was just getting to be a pain using my LG Secret.

I spotted a bargain-priced HTC Touch Pro on flea-bay and decided to have a punt... £250 later I had a nearly new Touch Pro with car kit and a PAYT SIM (which I have no use for).

The first thing I did was use the new Google Mobile Sync Beta to get all my contact details on my phone. This was dead easy and my phone was soon set up to sync the contacts and calendar!

Next came email... very important! Again, this was super easy to setup and I was soon sending and receiving mail.

Next for mobile blogging. I use Blogger (another great Google App!) and decided to use the Mail2Blogger function rather than the 'other' way of working Blogger simply because it made the most sense to me. An example is the post of my tidy office below ;-)

The next thing I needed was an IM client but I needed it to be compatible with XMPP (for the EduGeek.net chat server) and MSN. Ideally I wanted Pidgin for Windows Mobile but this doesn't exist :'( After some Googling and seeing some rubbish apps, I stumbled across Palringo which seems to do the trick quite nicely. My only criticism is the random noise it makes when it receives a message - although this is probably configurable if I really looked into it!

Finally... a few important favourites for Opera Mobile... my work email uses Zimbra which has a mobile web interface and of course EduGeek.net has a mobile interface which can be easily accessed through http://edugeek.mobi.

My 'tidy' office

2009-02-20T20:35:00.000Z

A pic of my 'tidy' office (before the new shelving)... Sent from my mobile.

Wii Fun on New Year's Day

2009-01-04T20:08:00.004Z

Lots of fun was had with the Wii on New Year's Day... the Raki (ridiculuous Turkish vewrsion of Ouzo) definitely gave an incentive to do well (with the losers having the opportunity to down a shot!).

We had the Salwick Club Bouncer...

Some hoola-hoop fun...

And don't forget the ski jumping...

Guitar Hero World Tour

2008-12-27T10:30:00.002Z

I've neve played Guitar Hero before, but tmy brother ended up with a copy of Guitar Hero World Tour for Christmas and I decided to have a go.

How addictive is that game? OMG... 3 hours I must have played for!!!

Some of the music is pretty amazing which helps matters but I have beaten the fingers on my left hand into submission and my left-middle finger had a bruise on the end! :'(

Finding Fiji

2008-12-22T19:30:00.003Z

I managed to find a download of Fiji (aka the Microsoft Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 - or whatever it is called this week!). Why did I go looking for this?

Without this pack, Vista Media Center doesn't 'do' interactive ('Red Button') content on digital channels and this is a feature I happened to want at the time so that I could watch the snooker. Associated with this is teletext support.

I'm not sure if the other features will be of much use (different file format for TV recordings and DVB-S support) but the updated guide looks a little nicer - although they have annoying moved the clock but I'll get used to that - and it takes less clicks to set up the tuners.

The Citrix XenServer 5 Upgrade

2008-12-04T08:43:00.002Z

Ever since the release day of XenServer 5, I have been trying to upgrade my two hosts. This should have been a painless task taking less than an hour.

My first problem was that the documented uprade method was wrong... rather than putting a host into maintenance mode, all the VMs had to be moved to a pool member from the pool master and then the pool master had to be upgraded first.

The problem I then hit was that one of my storage repositories (SRs) would not reconnect. The full account is documented here but basically, the XenServer hosts decided that the LUN was wrong.

I have now got that fixed and it's all running smoothly. I activated the new HA features - how easy? Clickity click and it was done!

The new performance monitoring is amazing and everything seems good.

Time to virtualise some more servers I think ;-)

Jinnette on Fonejacker

2008-11-17T19:48:00.003Z

So Jinnette, the old deputy steward of Salwick Club was on Fonejacker the other night. Rather funny, even if they did chop it down by about 25 minutes!

For some reason Chennel 4 won't let me embed the vid so you will have to follow the link instead... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xLID8JQaEzU

The EduGeek marketing trip

2008-11-13T19:45:00.003Z

On Tuesday I embarked on a trip for EduGeek with the aim of drumming up a little sponsorship for BETT 2009.

The trip began by travelling down to Brockenhurst in the New Forest to visit Navaho (the makers of the excellent Mediacat digital signage solution).

The hotel that Navaho booked me into was called The Watersplash... it should have been called Fawlty Towers... it was AMAZING. I was greeted by a lovely french girl who spoke english OK but really struggled to understand english. When she showed me to my room she was extremely apologetic about the single cobweb that she had missed cleaning earlier and the proceeded to try and grab it - however she struggled since she was rather short!

I then went down to the bar for a drink... where I couldn't pay because the french lass didn't have a key for the till (I did pay the next day!). A couple (I believe the only other guests at that point) came down for their evening meal. A table had been set in the corner and in typical Fawlty Towers style the couple complained that it was a bit chilly in front of the window... the girl simply smiled, agreed and laughed. After a few seconds she realised that the couple wasn't too amused and asked, "what is chilly?" and they explained that they were a bit cold. "Not a problem!" she exclaimed... and proceeded to drag the table nearer to the fire!!! You couldn't teach it!

Anyway... James and Chris then appeared and we went out for a nice curry followed by a couple of pints in a local pub. The genius that is the New Forest meant that on my way back from the pub I had to walk through a small heard of cattle with disturbingly large horns!

The next day I had another chat with the lovely french girl - she probably still has no idea what I said - and a nice breakfast. I checked out of the hotel and drove 1 minute down the road to the Navaho offices where we had an extremely productive meeting discussing how we could help each other at BETT and how I was using the Mediacat in a school environment.

After the Navaho meeting I did the trek to Reading where I met up with Mandy and Nathan from Westwood Associates for lunch followed by a trip to an academy in Reading for a brief meeting about how we could help each other at BETT. Again, quite productive.

Then the epic trip home to try and get back for snooker in the evening... it didn't happen :-(

What can you do?

2008-10-30T14:34:00.001Z

Another great game of snooker last night. It was our '6-man knockout' game against Greenlands A team. I wouldn't be exaggerating to say 30 people turned up from their club!

Anyway, top of the third division - unbeaten with only a handful of lost frames - it was going to be tough. Tough wasn't the word though!

I'm not the best snooker player on the team and I did make a slight mistake which then meant that my opponent went on to get a break of 55! What can you do when that happens? I battled on and managed to score another 20 points bringing the score to 80-23.

The other games were pretty uneventful (again, all losses) except for Lee's game where the opponent, for some unknown reason, decided he was going to play EVERY shot with the rest. There must have been a reason but we couldn't figure it out!

XenApp 5's Web Interface

2008-10-28T16:28:00.001Z

So I upgraded to Citrix XenApp 5 last week at work... painless as ever although it was a bit more awkward than usual since it was purely the additional components that had been upgraded.

Not much has changed... except for the XenApp Web Interface. For years this has had the same look... a bit plain and boring. So as I'm finishing off setting up Secure Gateway, I navigate to the site and up pops this shiny blue loading graphic!

The new interface is black and shiny, with shiny blue graphs and lots of Web 2.0 stuff such as drop-down menus and messages. A great improvement!

Only problem now is that I need to find some nicer icons for my applications... the current ones just aren't shiny enough!

Peter Griffin in 'The Club'

2008-09-29T19:46:00.003+01:00

How surprised was I to find Peter Griffin from Family Guy sat at the bar in my local?

Amazing!

Acer Aspire One

2008-08-28T18:27:00.004+01:00

I recently took Currys of all places up on one of their special offers. I'd been thinking of buying an Acer Aspire One netbook and then I spotted the Currys offer - basically a VAT free One!

It's fantastic! I tought that the Asus EeePC was pretty great but I never liked the screen size on the 701 and the other models are way too expensive IMHO.

The One beats the Asus EeePC 701 hands down. The screen rocks (you can see full width web pages - see t gallery below for an example). I don't even mind the oddly-placed touchpad buttons - the Eee's 'rocker-style' buttons get rather annoying when you keep having to jab at it.

The keyboard on the One is OK to use too. I've typed this blog entry on it and my fingers hit every key - the Asus' miniature keys are just too small for my fingers. Considering the larger keyboard and screen, the pictures also show that the One is only marginally bigger - in fact closed it is actually thinner!

Anyway, I've pimped mine a little bit - installed some more apps, tweaked the menus, added teh 3D Compiz effects...

I'll probably publish some guidelines soon for further pimping. For now, enjoy the gallery ;-)

Acer Aspire One Gallery

Dragonfly by the canal

2008-08-12T20:47:00.001+01:00

This is the only pic I managed to get of the dragonfly I saw the other day... there was some random clicking going on as it shot past!

Anyway, this thing was huge.... I'm talking almost 6" from head to tail and the wingspan was easily more than that. Tom got a book out when I got home - as only he could - so that I could identify it and apparantly it's one of Britain's largest species.

Chris and Chappy

2008-08-11T06:14:00.001+01:00

So from what we just heard ... Chappy has been rubbing off on Chris and Chris is constantly pulling Chappy!

You learn something new every day in The Club!!!

The Ploughmans Challenge

2008-08-08T18:00:00.003+01:00

So we ended up having a drink and Wayne announces that he has some crzy hot chillies and chilli powder. Out it comes and he loads up a 'ploughmans lunch' bar snack with a load. Every credit to Blakey for doing it!

After Chappy suggests that it's far too hard to do, I foolishly agree to have a go. I really should have known that Wayne would try to do me and I probably ended up with about three timesa as much of the hot stuff... and boy was it hot?!?

Anyway, I managed it... stealing Blakey's crown from him with ease :-D

More YouTube Entertainment

2008-08-05T17:51:00.002+01:00

Here's another clip of the fun that Sambo and Blakey got up to over the weekend.

2009 A True Story

2008-08-05T17:24:00.002+01:00

On my travels about the Internet, I stumbled across a series of short films on YouTube.

2009 A True Story can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/2009atruestory and it chronicles the events after some kind of terrorist attack. It's pretty dark but all the better for it!

Pimping the EeePC

2008-07-31T18:55:00.002+01:00

I have been loaned an Asus EeePC 4G (boosted to 1GB RAM) so that I can experiment with it to aid in the deployment of a load of them for a Lancashire schools project.

I have also added some ideas for ways to 'pimp' the EeePC... my idea being that you could teach kids to hack the configs and generally 'geek it up'.

In keeping with the open/free nature of these I decided to share some of my findings on the EduGeek Wiki too. Check it out at http://www.edugeek.net/wiki/index.php/EeePC_-_Linux_OS - I cannot take credit for it all mind.

Mobile Google Mail

2008-07-29T08:59:00.001+01:00

This is probably nothing new but I've just discovered the wonders of mobile gMail. :-)

I have an LG Secret on Vodafone and all I did was go to http://m.google.com/mail and it took me to a page where I could download a little J2ME gubbin. Once installed (in the Games folder by default for some reason) this gives an even quicker way of managing your gMail account than through the standard mobile interface!

I now just need to find a way of making my gMail-hosted EduGeek email work as easily ;-)

Handy iGoogle gubbin

2008-07-22T20:55:00.002+01:00

Just found a handy widgetty-thing for iGoogle that allows you to quickly post a blog entry (e.g. this one).

Sam has a dance in the Windmill

2008-07-22T18:33:00.003+01:00

Unfortunately I wasn't there to see this - too busy selling Dave a 'puter. Anyway, Ollie sent me a video of the night's events for your viewing please ;-)

BTW - Ollie has a rubbish phone so sorry about the quality ;-)

Dancing in the dark in Salwick Club

2008-07-13T13:51:00.004+01:00

Sorry about the poor quality but it was dark! It is still pretty funny though :-D

The things that people do at 11.30pm eh?

Blakey's Colar

2008-07-11T21:13:00.001+01:00

No running away now Blakey!

EduGeek North '08 Conference Pictures

2008-05-31T15:34:00.003+01:00

A selection of my pictures can now be found in my EduGeek.net albums at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/members/ric_-albums-edugeek-north-conference-2008.html - a few notes will be added soon (along with comments for the pics).

See if you can see Jenny the Horse too ;-)

Jenny the Horse on her travels again

2008-05-12T18:16:00.004+01:00

This weekend, Jenny the Horse went on her travels again... this time for a walk along the Lancaster Canal. This picture was taken as she stopped off for a quick drink of water out of the canal. :-D

A wildlife walk (trialing Google Docs)

2008-05-05T20:18:00.000+01:00

I took another walk today to photograph some of the local wildlife.

My camera had decided to go off on one when on Aperture Priority mode which was a pain... everything was under exposed! :-(

Anyway, the wonders of shooting in RAW allowed me to rescue some images and I got some good ones later by switching to manual and keeping a better eye on the shutter speed.

I have decided to add a selection of images using a Google Docs presentation. Here goes ;-)

Jenny the Horse

2008-05-05T20:14:00.001+01:00

Named after Jenny at Document Express, Jenny the Horse was taken on a walk today. I thought it only fitting that a horse should have its picture taken in a field ;-)

Sorry Vista... It's turned out well now

2008-05-01T20:13:00.003+01:00

It turns out that Vista hadn't shafted my PC after all... the rubbish Western Digital hard disk (that I had previously stolen from a Dell) had died in a major fashion. Being the system disk, this prevented any OS booting :-(

The only upside from doing this is that it forced me to buy a NAS - I got a bargain 750GB Lacie NAS (rackmount) for £160!!! I have put the Samsung Spinpoint from my external caddy into the media centre and installed MCE 2005 (yeas I finally found the disk).

I haven't quite finished re-instlaling eerything but it seems to be working like new again. The lack of Vista bloatedness is making it fly too!

Bloody Vista!

2008-04-14T18:04:00.002+01:00

Apart from deciding to go for x64 which caused a whole load of its own issues, Windows last night decided it was time for some updates and the obligitory reboot.

Very kindly of course, Windows waited until the middle of the night to do this, thus waking me in the early hours of the morning when the black screen with bright white writing appeared to inform me that my registry was stuffed. I duly turned off the computer and went back to sleep.

I returned home from work today thinking I would fix the problem. Tried booting 'Last known good configuration' and tried booting 'Safe Mode' but received the same error message over and over.

I went for a hunt around for my Vista media. After a good 15 minutes of searching, I found the disk and booted off it, selecting the repair option. Apparently my system volume had bad sectors. I then restarted my computer and exactly the same problem occurred!

So I booted off the disc again and again it told me that it had to repair my system volume and told me to wait... restart... same again!

Around I go again - note that the process of booting from the DVD takes a while... especially if you forget to press a key when prompted! - and after a couple more attempts and the advanced CLI that I opened up to run chkdsk /F for myself, it eventually tries to fix the registry.

Same message again! I'm starting to get a little annoyed by this point but I persevered to no avail.

My computer is now reinstalling Windows in the faint hope that I might be able to resolve the problem and then perform not too many tasks to get my computer working 'properly' again... at least this might fix my problem with Windows only using one of the tuners in my dual-DVBT card!

Another Walk

2008-03-24T20:21:00.007Z

Following my little walk on Friday, I decided to go on another walk today. I was a little unsure about the weather but it was warm and sunny and the 24 hour weather forecast showed nothing but overcast skies.

I set out walking, spotted some ducks and got some nice pics with lovely reflections. The weather could have been nicer but I was even able to get some relatively nice landscape shots.

Anyway, about three-quarter's of the way to the Hand and Dagger (my usual point for a half-way pint!), the weather turned and it started to spot on... then we had sleet... then full on snow! How much did that annoy me!?! (I just had a fleece on!). I got a couple of pictures with snow... this one of the lambs was taken while I hid under a canal bridge at Salwick.

Canal Walk

2008-03-21T17:00:00.004Z

Today I went on another of my little walks down the Lancaster Canal. As always, I took my trusty camera with me (Canon EOS 10D). I came across the usual pair of swans, although they weren't together today.

Just as I noticed the swimming swan, the sun poked its head out. Thinking that the swan would do one, I thought that I would take a picture from the rear to begin with... the swan clearly liked having his picture taken because he turned around and came closer! I thought that it was going to jump out of the water and attack me at one point!

Here's a couple of the pics anyway.

Flexing

2007-11-23T21:21:00.001Z

My broadband connection through Eclipse (link on the right), allows me to 'flex' the speed up temporarily. Although I know that my line is pretty poor I thought I'd perform a little experiment and given that an hour of flexing to 2Mbit is only 5p at the moment it will hardly break the bank!

I chose Speedtest.net to perform the tests and from there I used the Maidenhead and Dublin servers to test against.

The results were (download/upload):

Standard speed to Maidenhead = 544kbps/528kbps
Standard speed to Dublin = 619kbps/528kbps
Flexed speed to Maidenhead = 692kbps/527kbps
Flexed speed to Dublin = 652kbps/530kbps

My conclusion from this little test is that my line could handle a little more speed but it is hardly worth the effort (or money) realistically.

If I lived in an area with better lines, nearer to an exchange, this model would be great because you could just flex up when you need to download a big file. I wouldn't be surprised if some people could double their connection speed for that 5p! For me, unless BT get their arses into gear and sort out their infrastructure, I don't think that there is much point in me flexing again.

ADSL Speeds

2007-11-17T13:21:00.001Z

Today I thought that I would spend some time seeing what sort of speed I actually get on my ADSL line - those of you that know me will be aware of my living out in the sticks and so being limited to an appauling speed :-(

Anyway, as long as I am getting my full 512kbps I'm happy. So off I go to www.speedtest.com and run a few tests. A representative result of my tests to different servers in the UK and overseas gave the following result:

I then decided to run some more tests...

www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk - 629kbps/531kbps

www.kbps.co.uk - 530kbps/-kbps

From my limited experiment, I can see that the results vary quite a bit but I can pretty safely say that I am getting around 600kbps download and 530kbps upload which IMHO is pretty good for a line tat supposedly is only good for 512kbps ADSL. I particularly like the upload speed that Eclipse Internet gives me :-D

Phillips Pronto Remotes (on Linux!)

2007-09-18T19:39:00.000+01:00

Some of you may know about my little project at home which will ultimately mean that that I have a Linn Knekt multiroom sound system, Comfort Alarm system (with home automation stuff) and multiple Pronto remotes.

I recently purchased 5 Prontos from eBay (one for each family member) and now need to program them but have found ProntoEdit to be a PITA to work with... plus it doesn't work on Linux :-(

I have found a project called Tonto (see http://giantlaser.com/tonto/ ) which is written in Java. I haven't fully tested this yet but it does look promising and is supposedly more intuitive. I will update soon on this!

What I will say is how to run the bloody thing in Ubuntu because that was a bugger to set up!

First you need the latest JRE...
apt-get install sun-java6-jre

You then need to extract tonto to /usr/share and edit the tonto.sh file to point to the jre...
JHOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre"

Then make the tonto.sh file executable...
chmod +x tonto.sh

Then simply run tonto.sh and the job should be a good 'un ;-)

More on LinuxMCE

2007-09-10T21:01:00.000+01:00

Since my recent foray into attempting to set up LinuxMCE I have purchased a second-hand Hauppage HVR-1100 tuner. This has much better support in Linux! It should be noted that IMHO the picture quality on the GDI BlackGold cards is far better and less affected by poor signal quality.

The only difficulty I had was that I had to recompile the Video4Linux DVB drivers - I believe that this is an Ubuntu problem but it isn't exactly hard to do ;-)

Anyway, I re-installed LinuxMCE and it works quite well... I'm undecided whether to switch back to vanilla Linux with MythTV or not though - I'm not using LinuxMCE to its full potential and I haven't got time to investigate more at the moment.

LinuxMCE

2007-08-13T20:11:00.000+01:00

I recently spotted a news item on AutomatedHome about the new release of LinuxMCE (http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Software/LinuxMCE-0704-Released.html). Basically, the project aims to be a Linux replacement for Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition... with extra bells and whistles.

I have been using Windows MCE for almost 2 years and I have found it great as a PVR using my two GDI Black Gold digital tuner cards. I have found that it is a bit limited though... particularly if you want to intergrate it with other systems.

One of the biggest of these drawbacks is extending it to other rooms - this requires a Microsoft Media Extender and even then you can't watch live TV in the secondary room. With LinuxMCE, thin client devices boot from the 'core' machine and media can follow you around the home... this can be seen to good affect in the video on the LinuxMCE site.

Anyway... I checked compatibility for my existing hardware and all seemed well... I downloaded the quickstart ISO (a DVD featuring Kubuntu and LinuxMCE - which is itself a collection of several other projects) which took an age due to its size!

I proceeded to install the distro on my PC and all went well until the initial hardware setup wizard began. No output on the screen! I tried every combination of the number keys to get a resolution that my DVI-connected TFT would accept to no avail. I then tried the second DVI port on my graphics card and it worked straight away! That was a serious schoolboy error!!!

I then followed the rest of the setup wizard (which includes a number of video with a lovely woman telling you what to do) but at no point were my TV cards detected :-(

By reading the dmesg output it seems that my card type isn't automatically detected. This has been my major stumbling block as there seems to be nothing on the net about my particular card in Linux. By editting the modprobe.conf I have successfully got Linux to recognise one of my cards but that is as far as I can get.

I cannot seem to make the card play any further... either through the LinuxMCE wizard or MythTV. I'm not going to give up now that I have got this far and I'm hoping to have an influx of people telling what to do. An update will be forthcoming when I crack it ;-)

Neglecting my blog

2007-07-30T21:30:00.000+01:00

I've let things slip a little and haven't updated my blog for a while... partly because I have been busy with bits and pieces and partly because I haven't done anything of any particular interest :-(

Anyway, I will try to remedy that soon.

In the meantime, a quick note... I found a dual-head PCI-X graphics card (in fact it is a quad-head card!) although Beryl isn't playing yet. I have also spent a bit of time playing with Joomla for the work's website - some nice pics there too now :-)

VMWare Server (Part 1)

2007-05-01T22:42:00.000+01:00

Also tonight I have installed VMWare Server on my Debian Etch laptop. After my last attempt, when Etch was still Testing and the kernel headers were conspicuous by their absence, I was surprised with the ease with which it installed.

This has given me a cunning plan for my new workstation at work... I have just purchased a HP ML350 G3 to use as a workstation and I think I will now install Debian Etch onto that too so that I get the groovy eye candy and the power of Linux. My Windows admin tasks could then be performed in a VM running Windows Server. My idea of running Server is so that I can install Citrix and connect in to that remotely to access things - rather than using the generic server farm that I would have to share with all the other lusers ;-)

Now I just need to find a PCI-X dual-head graphics card with 3D capability to run my twin NEC MultiSync LCDs :-D

Part 2 will tell of my success ;-)

Citrix Fun

2007-05-01T22:36:00.000+01:00

If anybody doesn't already know... I love Citrix!

Anyway... since getting my X60 laptop, I haven't been able to run the ICA Client :-( It turns out that this is a known bug to do with UTF-8 locales - something that Etch uses by default.

After trying the recommended work arounds to no avail, I discovered that the only bit that wasn't working was the selection of the applications from the browse list (ignoring the warning messages when running wfmgr from the command line).

If I type the application name in manually, I can connect to my applications.... YAY!!!

I know that this configuration isn't ideal but I can put up with it for now because it works. I was a little dissapointed not to have any replies to my post on the Citrix forums though :-( Usually you get a response within the hour (and a good response at that!)

Upgraded works laptop - Lenovo Thinkpad X60 running Debian Etch

2007-04-16T21:17:00.000+01:00

I have just upgraded my works laptop to a very lovely Lenovo X60 after reading about how easy it is to install Linux on Thinkpads at ThinkWiki (an excellent site).

The laptop is unbelievably thin and lightweight whilst still having an excellent spec (Core Duo 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM and 40GB HDD). I will probably upgrade the RAM soon and the hard disk may need an upgrade but it will do for now ;-)

The installation of Debian went well too so I thought that I would detail some of the specifics here...

A stock install of Debian Etch was performed from CD without problems (I did not choose to use a mirror during install)
Removed some bits of rubbish from the install
Updated the distribution after specifying a mirror in /etc/apt/sources.list
Added a few of my favourite packages (such as gaim and synaptic)
Followed the instructions on ThinkWiki to enable some of the Thinkpad-specific bits and bobs (such as tpb for the special buttons and acpi for hibernation and the like)
Installed packages to enable wireless (it uses an Intel 3945 chipset so the following packages were needed - firmware-ipw3945, ipw3945d and ipw3945-modules-2.6.18-4-686)
Followed the instructions at http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install/Debian to install Beryl... I then needed to change the 'Rendering Path' in 'Advanced Beryl Options' to something other than 'Automatic' because the contents of Nautilus windows did not display but now all the wonderful wobbling and cube effects work OK
Checked that my USB-Serial adapter worked... it did without having to do any configuring!

PyKota Update

2007-04-10T18:46:00.000+01:00

Today I have been mostly migrating to PyKota from Print Manager Plus... as I have mentioned earlier.

An updated guide on how I have been doing this can be found at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=78029#78029 - still a bit of a work in progress though at the moment.

There is one little niggle with doing this mid way through the year... a lack of abiility to export the existing print quotas into PyKota from PMP. What this means is that anybody who doesn't have approx. £2 of credit left (the default balance given at the start of the year) has to be manually created in advance with their initial balance set. You can probably imagine that this is taking some time (approx. 1000 to do!!!!!).

Qemu - My fault for being bleeding edge!

2007-03-13T21:10:00.000Z

Those that know me will be aware that I am a fan of Debian - I love the package management and you don't get the dross or quirks that come with Ubuntu et al. Anyway, since the announcement that Debian Etch (or v4) was to be released back in December I figured why not upgrade?

Unfortunately, Debian being as stable as it is means that they won't release a version until ALL the major supported platforms (something like 9 out of 15) are completely bug free. As you can guess this is pretty tricky to do... hence the slow pace of new Debian releases.

Because I couldn't curb my enthusiasm, I've been using the release candidate (aka Testing) and I'm very pleased. Anyway... I digress.

As a result of my using this 'bleeding edge' OS, I'm currently running kernel version 2.6.17 which is perfectly stable IMHO. However, to test out my Pykota instructions (see earlier post), I wanted to install VMWare Server (another one of my favourite profucts) but to do this you need the kernel header files and for some reason these haven't been made available in the Debian repositories!!!

What does all this have to do with Qemu? Qemu is an open source virtualisation product which is very easy to install on Debian since it IS in the repositories.

After downloading the Debian Testing install disks (again - I keep leaving them places!) I've started up the app and kicked it off installing. All seems to be going well so far (touch wood) and I will write an update when I've had chance to test it further. It has certainly got around my problem for now though so I should be able to test my Pykota instructions ;-)

PyKota - Another update!

2007-03-08T16:32:00.000Z

Following on from yesterday's update, I managed to find some more time between a Nedap meeting, meeting with the architect and cabler for the new extension and ringing DELL to arrange for a new motherboard to be sent out to take another look at PyKota.

I tweaked some accounting settings and re-added the test users. The printing AND accounting now works a treat! YAY!!!!

As a result, I decided to publish my installation notes on EduGeek so that others can learn from my experience. I will be refining these to create a 'proper' installation guide as soon as I get chance.

In the meantime, anybody who is interested can check out the guide at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7100

Update on Pykota

2007-03-07T17:43:00.000Z

OK... so I've been playing with this Pykota lark in every free minute that I've had at work (and many at home too!). I'm sure that it could be a lot easier than this but I'm still learning... I'm by no means a Linux guru.

When I've got the whole thing working, a howto guide will be produced... this is something seriously lacking with Pykota IMHO. There are lots of installation guides but they all seem to make a lot of assumptions and miss significant (if menial) parts out.

Anyway... back to the progress so far. I have configured CUPS with Samba - this was relatively easy. As I mention above, Pykota was the tricky part but it all seems to be working now, bar one 'tiny' detail... it isn't counting the pages :-( This has a knock-on effect in that it prevents the user from printing :-s

Anyway... back to trawling the net for ideas and re-reading the config files.

A Quick Guide to Thin Client Computing

2007-03-06T23:12:00.000Z

Many people on EduGeek have recently been looking into thin clients as a way of reducing TCO in their schools. Many of these people have turned to me as I am somewhat of an authority on this. As a result, I promised to write a little guide explaining some of the basics. The guide can be found at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7035 - enjoy!

As a background, my network setup uses 6 terminal servers running Windows Server 2003 and Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to server approx 200 thin clients... most of the clients in the school are thin clients.

Eagles of Death Metal @ The Manchester Academy

2007-03-06T23:03:00.000Z

So... the long awaited Eagles of Death Metal gig was last Saturday at the Manchester Academy. I haven't been to the Academy before (only Academy 2) and I was impressed by the venue. Beer was cheapish (only £2.45 for a pint of Grolsch which is VERY cheap for a gig!) and the room was just the right size.

The support act was Mother Vulpine... a pretty heavy indie rock band comprising of a singer/guitarist, bassist who bounced around like Zebedee, a drummer and a female guitarist. I was quite impressed... their music was OK and the female guitarist wasn't too unppleasent on the eyes ;-)

Then the gig started proper and when EODM came one we bounced our way to about 5 rows from the front! It was great and everyone was having a good time! The only problem is that it was a little warm and cramped so I had to bounce back a couple of rows to try to cool down. My old age (of 25) meant I later had to go back further still as the sweat was still pouring off me!

EODM were fantastic and played a great set. It really was one of the best gigs I've been to in a while. Definately worth watching again!

Kaiser Chiefs @ The Manchester Apollo

2007-02-25T08:31:00.000Z

On Thursday Pete, Kath, Caroline and myself went to see the Kaiser Chiefs at the Apollo in Manchester.

The first support act were called Ripchord and can only be described as The Beatles on speed with a touch of Geaorge Formby chucked in for good measure. I was not overly impressed.

The second support band were called Th 1990s (I think) and they were much better.

Next was the Kaiser Chiefs who were very good - although not quite as good as the last time I saw them. The set was a mixture of existing material as well as material from their new album which I believe is out tomorrow.

The gig itself was quite short, finishing at approx. 10.45 but it then took us half an hour to get out of the car park!

On the whole then, a very enjoyable evening.

Motorola KRZR

2007-02-14T15:25:00.000Z

Well my Motorola RZR finally gave up the ghost the other night. The battery had been going for a bit and I think that I have had it nearly 2 years. Anyway, on Friday night it finally packed in and will now no longer turn on!

Anyway, Sunday I got around to ringing Vodafone and arranging a phone upgrade. After a good chat about the cheaply available handsets and my requirements, I decided to shell out £25 for a MOTO KRZR.

The phone arrived yesterday, whilst I was out but from using it to make a couple of calls and send some text messages it seems OK.

The thing that did worry me slightly was the slowness of my old RZR but this has been much improved and the clarity of the keypad is far better too. The silver mirror finish puts my black RZR to shame and it certainly looks dated. This finish looks equally good on the included bluetooth headset too.

Talking of bluetooth, the bluetooth connection worked flawlessly when transferring names from my PDA. I'm also glad to see that Motorola have finally decided to implement a 'proper' phone book that allowss you to save multiple numbers with each name.

Jodrell Bank and the Dog Inn

2007-02-14T15:04:00.000Z

Well yesterday I had a lovely day out with Caroline, taking advantage of my holiday.

It was decided that we should go to Jodrell Bank because we often see the large Lovell Radio Telescope from the motorway.

For the princely sum of £1.50 each we were admitted entry to the small visitors' centre and, after declining tickets for the shows in the '3D Theatre', we had a quick look 'round and watched some videos about the Lovell Telescope - although the screaming kids making a lot of noise made it somewhat difficult to concentrate.

We then had a walk around the base of the Lovell Telescope, which was unfortunately parked and so wasn't much to look at, before have a look at the 'Granada Arboritum' - a rather pleasant landscaped area full of trees.

After having a good look around we ventured off in search of a pub with a humorous name... we had a couple that we had found by trawling the web earlier in the day but the directions (courtesy of the RAC) sucked. We did happen upon 'The Dog Inn' and it was decided that the name was suitably humorous (plus it was in Lower Peover - which is a funny name in itself).

The pub was quite quiet, only a few customers other than us and the service could have been a little quicker but the food was excellent and the atmosphere was lovely too.

Wolfmother @ The Manchester Apollo

2007-02-10T16:11:00.000Z

Well, last night we braved the elements and went to the Manchester Apollo to watch Wolfmother.

By the time we reached Domo's in Farnworth, the snow was falling quite heavily but we got some lovely chinese food and then off we went... by the time we reached Manchester the snow had vanished... although this didn't prevent some stupid woman nearly driving into the side of me!

The support act for the evening were called Wolf & Cub. Their set started well... 2 drummers and a prog-rock style! This soon deteriorated into some trashy indie rubbish.

Anyway, the support act was soon finished and Wolfmother came on. Wolfmother were far better and it was most enjoyable. Very loud and some strange 'chicken-dancing' by the lead singer!

CUPS and Pykota

2007-02-07T21:50:00.000Z

I decided a couple of days ago, after reading more about the capabilities of Pykota, that it may be the way forward for print accounting and management. For those not in the know, Pykota is an addon to CUPS (the printing subsystem for Linux) which does lots of clever accounting and reporting stuff on a print server.

Some of the particularly interesting features of Pykota and CUPS are:
* Users are not charged if the job does not print
* Jobs can be 're-processed' to add headers and the like that could include the username!
* Ability to save PDFs of all the jobs printed for keeping an eye on the little darlings
* Windows clients only need a single printer driver - CUPS then converts to the relevant format for the printer

We currently use Print Manager Plus and I don't have an issue with it. I recently upgraded to an MSDE backend and since then it has been VERY stable (not that it was unstable before) and it takes care of charging the little darlings like it should.

The reason that I decided to take the plunge with Pykota though, is mostly cost. The annual software maintenance is approx. £200 and if this cost can be saved it could be better spent elsewhere. There is a nominal fee of €25 for Pykota (I paid £25) which is a kind of donation to get access to the downloads of current and future releases - even just for an initial play it's probably worth it and it supports open software too.

Anyway... software downloaded and armed with a spare server from the cupboard (loaded with hard disks in case I want to start saving PDFs) I began the install.

I'll post more soon... possibly a mini-howto. It's just a bit of a steep learning curve at the moment since I've never run a Linux print server before.

StumbleUpon

2007-02-03T19:19:00.000Z

I heard about a great Firefox addon in Linux Format recently called StumbleUpon - you can check it out at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/138/

Basically, it gives you a button in the toolbar which you press and you will be sent off to a random web page based upon your pre-defined preferences. This thing is great for finding new sites and general time wasting when there is nothing on TV.

EduGeek @ BETT

2007-01-27T12:23:00.000Z

It's taken me a while to get these pics up but here we go...
Monday - The Week Begins

We arrived relatively early on the Monday to begin the preparation of the stand and were presented with an empty shell.

Nothing could really be done until we had some hardware stand so we decided to go off for a wander amongst the ensuing chaos of stands being built to find our very kind sponsors to collect bits and pieces.

Anyway, we had pretty much no luck fining anyone... in fact we discovered some people wouldn't be turning up until Tuesday afternoon! However, we eventually managed to grab somebody from Promethean so we could set up the interactive whiteboard and projector that they loaned us.

Of course, all the time that this was going on, Tony was being mithered by work about SIMS stuff which made my eyes glaze over every time he tried to explain it to me.

By this time we had begun to start getting hungry so we popped off for lunch... to a traditional english pub - except that the entire menu was made up of curries! Quite odd. Upon our return we didn't have to wait long for a delivery from LapSafe - a nice kiosk to display our fancy web site on :-)

Tuesday - Not long to go

So Tuesday came and we eventually got some hardware. Firstly a box on loan from Stone Computers to run demonstrations on and connect to the Promethean board.

Then came the SmoothWall box - kindly donated to TickMike after we'd been let loose on it!

Then, in the afternoon, came the monster DELL server (which we would later name BEAST). This quad-dual-core Opteron with 16GB RAM and SAS drives was quite something. The only problem was that it had no OS and no setup disks.

When we did eventually get the server going, it was quite something to look at as it sat there without breaking a sweat with 6 virtual machines running!

So anyway.... there wasn't much time for picture taking during the show's opening hours. Steve Thomas from Novus did get rather tired of the standing at one point though.

And Tony made time to print some additional promotional material.

Finally a quick thank you to Art Lader - our Moodle Evangelist that was flown in from the States by Sun to help out on our stand. Well done for pulling that one off Tony ;-)

I'd also like to thank Jo (aka LinuxGirlie) of Koroshi fame.

Another thanks to our sponsors who had people helping out on the stand. Of course there was Steve Thomas (Novus), two experts from RM and two experts from Solutions Inc. (Apple experts). We also had a helping hand from Mandy Brereton and Sacha at EuroLaser (who also donated 2 laser printers as prizes and are generally very nice to everyone).

If there's anyone or anything I've missed out (I know that there is a lot!) I'm sorry.

EduGeek North West Christmas Gathering

2006-12-03T19:13:00.000Z

Yesterday was the Christmas Gathering for EduGeek members in the North West... organised by Dos_Box himself!

We had hoped for a larger turnout, however only 4 of us made an appearance. Despite this pitiful showing, a good time was had by all with drinking and a nice curry.

Nagios Update

2006-11-12T19:43:00.000Z

OK... Chris pointed out that I am a numpty... spotting that I hadn't installed a VRML plugin into my browser. Plugin installed, I can now view the 3D status map... not that it's very exciting!

I have also just found out why my icons were missing. For some reason they weren't in the website folder! This is very strange because I remember putting them there and I have even changed the permissions on them. :-S All fixed now though :-D

I spent an hour or two today splitting my config files into template-based versions. This was easy enough to do but it was very time consuming - I'm monitoring a lot of services and hosts! What this should mean, is that I can more easily add new hosts and service checks to existing hosts.

All that remains is to complete the NRPE_NT installation on the remaining servers and possibly passive SNMP trap checks for devices like the SAN and Citrix which don't respond to SNMP get commands.

Oh yeah... I need to fix the mail on that box so that it emails me properly ;-)

VPNs and Nagios

2006-11-09T23:11:00.000Z

This last week, I have mostly been playing with the new VPN that CLEO have set up for me. After much argument, trying to tell them that the ACLs were wrong, they finally caved and admitted it!

Since then I have been playing with my Nagios box in the evenings - sad I know...

I have uninstalled the installation of Nagios that I installed using the package in Debian Unstable in favour of compiling it myself. I found that the installation structions documented this quite well and barring a couple of minor problems it went on painlessly. I only need to fix the icons for the hosts and the 3D status map now.

I have re-installed all my old config files successfully too and can now process 'external commands' successfully (the main reason for switching to the compiled version).

Tonight's forray into Nagios has involved the setup of NRPE_NT. This involves installing a service on my Windows Servers so that plugins can be run when the check_nrpe plugin on the Nagios box polls them. This has allowed me to monitor disk usage, memory usage and CPU utilisation... items that should prove quite handy!

My next task will involve the installation of NRPE_NT onto the remaining 11 boxes, fixing the problems with images and splitting my config files into neat little template-based ones ;-) Maybe a job for the weekend?

I'll also post something about my trip to Edinburgh soon :-D

Ross Noble in Manchester

2006-10-24T19:21:00.000+01:00

At the weekend I went to see Ross Noble at the Opera House in Manchester. We had rather good seats, 3 rows from the front of the circle, which allowed us to see all the hilarity unfold. Right from the outset, you could tell we were in for a treat... a short animation with dancing characters asking people not to make a noise and ensure that their telephones were switched off.

Mr Noble started by heckling the late comers and it just got funnier and funnier from there on. Skits about 'Cheeky Cheeky Muslims' (involving pearly-queen dancing), arse-faced children being bummed in the face by baboons and much more besides had us all in stitches!

For anybody who has the opportunity to see Ross Noble live, you MUST go. I cannot recommend it enough!

Where did I go?

2006-10-10T18:55:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Chris for pointing out that my blog vanished!

Something bizzare appears to have happened to my Blogspot space... a quick republish and all was well. That will teach me for neglecting my blog I guess. :-D

It just gets better!

2006-09-18T19:45:00.000+01:00

OK... when I just think I'm starting to make some inroads into my HUGE workload, the next problem crops up. The stoopid standalone licenses for Sibelius were registered by phone on Friday and I today enterred the magic numebrs into the machines... first machine i get to says "invalid registration code" - I tried every possible permeatation of spaces to no avail! The idiots at Sibelius have given me the wrong code!

Next up... the 30 wireless laptops have stopped talking to the network. I take all 28 out of the trolley (2 are dumped elsewhere at the moment) and find that the WPA authentication on ALL of them is buggered! I restarted the Bluesocket controller to see in a vain attempt to get it working again... fat chance! I knew that these things were going to make my life hell!

Then... the deputy head announces the latest SIMS upgrade. Of course I have to install this since the stoopid county support team installed SIMS on a partition that is too small. This upgrade should have been a simple 5-10 minute job. I was quite impressed that I got it installed in under 1 hour and I only had to run SOLUS 5 times and DBUPGRADE 3 times (with the /nobackup switch)!!!

Anyway... tomorrow is another day and I'll have to see what I can think of with the wireless. Here's hoping that it all magically starts working ;-)

Those Bloody Macs

2006-09-11T19:06:00.000+01:00

OK... after weeks of trying to sort out the 11 new iMacs for the Music Department, I finally got them into a state where I was pretty much happy with them.

I have an image with the basic software on (albeit with incorrect permissions on ONE file for some dodgy old piece of software). The macs are connected to an OS X server for locking them down with Open Directory and they authenticate against my Active Directory network. Not bad considering I'd never really touched a Mac a couple of months ago.

Anyway... back to these iMacs... I decided to take the plunge this afternoon and take them over to the room where they are to live. This would also entail moving some PCs out the way... into the room next door.

I slowly went around the room unplugging and removing the PCs and pulling the iMacs out of their boxes and associated swathes of packaging! After plugging the things in I set off NetRestore loading the image onto them and when this was finished I renamed them and sorted out the OD and AD authentication.

So from 2pm I plodded through this and by 5.10pm I had fully installed 7 iMacs and the eighth was still loading the image. In the meantime, the two music teachers had been wandering back and forth through the room... . Obviously it's my fault that it's taken me 8 weeks to get these things into a workable state without their stoopid Sibelius software which I haven't had time to sort out the new network licenses for after they puchased a load of dumb-ass standalone ones... each requiring an activation key that you have to telephone for.

So tomorrow I will have to install the remaining three Macs (which are already built and what-have-you) plus plug in all the PCs which I have abandoned in the other Music room. These will also need to be rebuilt because the music-types aren't happy with what software is installed! Then of course there is the other work for me to fit in around them!

I've finally got around to the VLANs

2006-08-01T19:37:00.000+01:00

For ages now I have been putting off the setup of the VLANs on my switches for the implementation of my Bluesocket wireless network. With only a skeleton staff in School at the moment, the time has finally come and with the installation of some new switches imminent, now seemed like as good a time as any.

I decided that to configure the switches I would use my shiny iBook G4 which I got a while ago with the idea that some of the network managlement tasks would be easier using the BSD-based OS X. Before I could begin, I downloaded and installed the drivers for my 'Prolific' USB-serial adapter. I then found out how to communicate with the switches... you simply open a terminal window and type:

screen tty.usbserial 9600

The tty.usbserial is my iBook's device name for the serial adapter. IMHO this is a lot less hassle than using HyperTerminal in Windows.

Anyway... starting at the outer-most switches in the areas of the School that are currently not being used, I have been reconfiguring the switches (remembering to give my 'data' VLAN an IP address for later configuration) and labeling the up. At the same time I have also been tidying some of the cabs, using different coloured patch leads for uplinks, wireless links, telephony links and 'regular' ports. I've even got some new cable management bars to help things along!

Once all this is done I will move the Bluesocket controller into the server room (I'm pretty happy with most of the config now) and start mounting the APs and, if all goes to plan, they will all connect to the controller automagically.

Today I have been mostly... installing Sophos

2006-07-31T18:44:00.000+01:00

For several months now, one of my servers has been a little overloaded. It is a dual Opteron 248 with 4GB RAM but it has been performing the following roles:

Exchange 2003 Server (for 1100+ users)
WSUS Server
Sophos Enterprise Manager and Library Server
Print Server (including Print Manager Plus)
Retrospect backup

As you can imagine, it didn't like doing all this (especially the huge email database combined with the two instances of MSDE for WSUS and Sophos). I decided that the easiest thing to move was Sophos and the re-homing coincided nicely with the release of the latest release of the admin software. Having downloaded the package from the Sophos website, I unpacked the files and set about installing it my second DC. All was going very well until the installer tried to set up MSDE. No matter what I tried I could not get MSDE to install... even when I tried to install it from the redistributable fresh from MS. It was most odd; the MSI installer crept along until a couple of blocks from the end and then sort or re-wound with no explanation other than a message in the event log saying that the MSI installation had failed! After this had annoyed me for nearly an hour, I decided to approach the problem from a different angle... enter SQL Server 2005 Express. I installed this and then just told the Sophos installer to use this instance rather than installing MSDE... easy as! After then going through all the EM Library options, I left the server downloading the Sophos AV packages for 2000/XP, OS X and Linux over lunch and upon my return all was well. The new version of the EM Console works well and all the installations went flawlessly. I was particularly impressed by the new policy-based system. Time will tell how well this continues to work and I must admit not all of my machines were on.

I officially HATE SIMS .Net!!!

2006-07-20T18:27:00.000+01:00

Up until now, I haven't really had too many problems with SIMS - not as many as most. Admittedly, there is the usual voodoo that needs to be done to the file permissions to let it run and auto update using SOLUS... plus the strange problems that FMS seems to throw up but all these things are easily overcome.

yesterday, however, all hell broke loose. I don't usually do the updates to SIMS; leaving it to the deputy head instead... he seems to like doing it so why upset him? ;-) When the download of the new packages with SOLUS 2 went tits up it became my problem though. This was approach. 11am.

I eventually re-downloaded the packages only to find that there wasn't sufficient space on the disk partition to perform the DBUPGRADE backup... this is due to the cr@p way that our local SIMS support people installed it and is worthy of a rant in itself. After removing everything I possibly could plus compressing lesser used files I managed to have 1.84GB free... still not enough it turned out (despite the fact that the database is only 1.73GB!).

By this point it was 5.35pm and I decided enough was enough and I went home.

This morning I waited for 45mins for the support desk to open, only to be told to re-download the packages another couple of times only to prove that there wasn't enough space to do the upgrade. The support guy then told me about the '/nobackup' switch which allowed me to run the database upgrade... this eventually finished at about 1.30pm.

After the database upgrade, I then had to download the packages AGAIN and after another 45 mins the setup started to run and eventually ended successfully.

At this point I then had to go around 13 workstations to make sure that they all upgraded properly and that the permissions mentioned above were OK. Obviously they weren't and some of the machines required intervention... it was 3.40pm by the time I had all the machines finished.

All in all, it took about 13 hours of my time to do this upgrade. Ridiculous!!!

On the upside, the new GUI looks quite nice and the front-office staff like the new easy-access icons that happen to give them access directly to the areas that they use most often.

I am dreading the time when I move the database files in a couple of weeks though. I'm definitely not going to pay the local support guys Â£70-odd per hour to do it for me though until I know it's going to be too difficult!!!

YAY! MCE Works Again

2006-05-31T22:41:00.000+01:00

For a while now, I've been struggling with Windows XP MCE... in particular I couldn't watch a handful of channels (including Channel 4 and E4 which I watch a lot!).

After copious Internet scouring, I came to the conclusion that it was something to do with the dual Black Gold Digital TV Tuners that I use. I think it was a recent MS update that mangled it.

Anyway, I eventually found an update to the drivers... from v5.11 to v5.17 (although I had to get the updated drivers from the Evesham website rather than GDI's). After much wire fiddling, re-scanning, registry hacking (deleting the bit to do with the tuners) and more re-scanning, it all now works.

It was a little late to record the new series of Lost, although I've managed to watch all the episodes so not too much 'lost' but better late than never I suppose.

I can now thoroughly recommend these cards again - the picture quality is great! MCE is now great again! I can now automagically sync the recorded programmes with my Creative Zen Portable Media Center! 'YAY' all round!!!

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter Multiplayer

2006-05-28T18:07:00.000+01:00

Right... I just got off my first go on the Internet multiplayer game of Ghost Recon. It's pretty good, even if I'm not!

Most people appear to play on the 'Domination' style of game. This involves wandering around the map to out-number the opponents in different zones. As a bonus, you re-spawn when you (inevitably in my case) get killed.

I think that I will be enjoying the nultiplayer for some time ;-)

Yesterday, I was playing the multiplayer on my brother's XBOX360. Although the games have the same title, they are quite different. The attitude of the XBOX Live players is different too, taking a less strategic approach to gaming. Just an observation - not a bad thing because sometimes people sniping you from on top of some remote building just pisses you off!

MMC In Vista

2006-05-23T22:06:00.000+01:00

I was having a quick look at the MMC in Vista earlier and it came to my attention that EVERYTHING is done using a MMC of one form or another. This could prove promising for further customisation and locking down systems at a later date. Even your standard folder explorer is a MMC! I think that the MMC writers at MS were probably the second highest earnest after the Wizard writers ;-)

Along with this new MMC-centred view, a load of new and glammed-up MMC snapins have been added. Performance Monitor and Task Manager have been combined to form the shiny new Performance Diagnostics - by far and away my favourite new MMC. This also includes clever graphs about reliability and all sorts. Well worth a look... even if it doesn't help to explain the constant hard disk reading and the 68% memory usage when idle!

I have yet to check out the new GPMC and other gubbins (such as the printer stuff) - I need to be connected to a domain for these features but they should be good if the local tools are anything to go off.

Maybe I'll get chance soon ;-)

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter

2006-05-23T20:07:00.000+01:00

I'm not a big gamer but, since I acquired my new machine, I have been eager to see what the stupidly big graphics card can do. I decided to buy the latest in the Ghost Recon range of games and try my hand at killing some rebels.

I installed the game and though... why not try it at full res with all the trimmings? I do have a Pentium-D 3GHz with 2GB RAM along with the nVidia GeForce 7800GTX (256MB) after all. It didn't like this and locked up on me :-( So since then I have been playing it at a lowly 1024x768 without issue ;-)

I must admit, a lot of thought has gone into the game graphics and it looks really good. The controls took a little getting used to and I don't think I've ever played a game like this before where you can't jump. I do like the way you control your team members though and they generally do what you ask of them - only occasionally getting in your way and they usually stand where they tell them too.

I'm still rubbish at playing these games so I haven't attmpted the multiplayer yet - a little more practice first methinks. When I do, I'm sure it will be good and I'll update all you keen blog watchers ;-)

More on the woes of wireless in Vista

2006-05-16T21:05:00.000+01:00

OK... so I managed to blag a different NIC off a teacher - a Liksys WPC54G Wireless-G adapter which uses a Broadcom 802.11g chipset. Again, I could not connect to the AP successfully - no matter what combination of encryption I tried.

This led me to have the genius idea to upgrade the firmware in the AP. I flashed the AP (not by revealing myself to it!) and I found that I could connect if I set the AP to use no security. Things were looking up... or at least they were until I re-enabled the encryption and it all went tits up again.

So, at the moment, I must conclude the wireless still sucks in Vista and I will be continuing to use a wired connection... an unsecured network is not an option in this area!

On the plus side, the paging problem doesn't seem as bad as it was and I know that TFTPD32 runs in Vista! ;-)

Stay tuned for more!

More on Vista

2006-05-14T15:12:00.000+01:00

I've been playing with Vista a little more today. Today's topics will be the 'Windows Sidebar' and WiFi.

The Sidebar is not automatically enabled in build 5381 so I had to have a hunt through the annoying wizardy-things. I eventually found it lurking in the depths of the Control Panel. Anyway I enabled it and immediately decided that suing the 'always on top' option was out of the question on a 4:3 screen. Secondly, I'm left thinking, "what is the point?"

There is a big analogue clock which looks very pretty but you may as well use the (easier to read) digital clock in the taskbar. An RSS reader could be handy, except you only get two lines of each feed item and the text is tiny too. A PostIt Note-type pad could prove handy for jotting things down and there is a CPU/memory usage 'gadget' that showed me how hard my machine is working just typing this!

Onto the disaster that is wireless networking. Until I have a different NIC available, I cannot promise that part of the problems aren't due to the D-Link DWL-G650+ cardbus adapter that I am trying to use. My AP is a 3COM 8250 which has had no problems with MacOS X, Windows XP or Windows Mobile.

After trying every type of encrypted and unencrypted connection, I couldn't get a connection between the laptop and network. When a connection was made, no IP address could be gathered. Most bizzarre!

As an aside, something else that I have noticed, is that the laptop is CONSTANTLY reading from the hard disk. This certainly does not bode well and I'm not even sure why it is happening - it's not as if it needs to be paging!

More to come soon ;-)

A few pictures from today

2006-05-13T17:25:00.000+01:00

I took a few pictures around the house today.

I began with the pond. I was looking for frogs and newts but they had decided to hide so I had to settle for the fish. The first one is some odd fish and there appears to be lots of them. I haven't got a clue what they are.

There are also some goldfish.

I then decided that it was about time to take a couple of pics of the new lambs. These Hebredian sheep rarely have more than one lamb at once and are supposedly bad parents. You can imagine our surprise to find twins. Pretty cute eh?

Finally, I checked out Tom's chicks. These were a little more tricky to get a decent picture of, due to the chicken wire, but I managed to get a couple of half-decent ones.

The Vista trial begins!

2006-05-11T19:41:00.000+01:00

Firstly, a big thanks to Nick Umney of Microsoft UK for kindly getting me an invite onto the Windows Vista Beta 2 program.

I downloaded the DVD ISO of the x86 version of Vista (Build 5381) last night... it only took three and a half hours on my cable connection! I then installed it on a HP nc8000 laptop this morning.

The install was very easy, asking only for a couple of details and then going off and doing its stuff. After about 1 hour I had a laptop running Vista! I then just had to tweak the display settings because they were in 8bit mode for some bizzarre reason and install a driver for the cardbus.

So after a day of on and off usage, I've not found Vista to be nippy by any means but it's not as slow as I thought it may have been. I've also noticed that the MS 'Wizard Designers' have been earning their money. EVERYTHING has a wizard and it is VERY annoying. You also have to confirm stuff all the time - "Do you want to do this?" "Are you sure you want to do this?"

I'll update the blog more as I get increasingly pissed off or find nifty little features. I'll also mention how to make WiFi work when I figure it out properly - it hates me at the moment!