Al’s WebLog

So I joined the masses and now have a Jesus phone. It’s more toy than phone really. We’ll see how it goes.

I’d been thinking about getting a “netbook” since the original Asus 701 was released, but having tried that there was no way my fat fingers were going to manage using it. The whole market has expanded recently and I tried the Merida thingie (another MSI Wind clone)  in Sainsburys the other day and it seemed pretty good. Sadly though, it had no bluetooth so I didn’t buy it. Looking online threw up that PC World sold the Advent 4211, same thing but with bluetooth and a higher spec webcam, for 20quid less - 70quid less than the equivalent MSI Wind. I happened to be driving past a PC World on Wednesday afternoon so I stopped in and bought one (that experience is worth a posting of its own…).

I have no idea what the ULCPC bit means but it comes with XP, which works much like XP does. Its been bastardised by “The Tech Guys” but I’ve not really seen how other than the restore partition and the pointless Advent manual that is for desktop PCs and so was swiftly deleted.

The hardware itself is pretty nice. Its a full spec MSI Wind (bluetooth, 802.11n, Atom 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, 10.1 LED screen) but with Advent written on the hood and in silver and black. The first thing that I noticed though, and so have others by the looks of Google, is that the trackpad sucks. You can not disable tap clicking (which I always do on laptops ‘cos I hate it) and consequently I keep mis-clicking and often find the curser darting about. The buttons too are a but poor, smal and  because its one bar, pivoted in the middle, hard to click. Its better with time, but I feel a mod is needed.

Otherwise the little netbook rocks. Its pretty nippy for general internet browsing and Putty work (which is all I do when out and about). The bluetooth talks to my N95 so I can dial-up with 3G. The battery (a titchy 2200mA thing) seems to last for about 2 hours and the charger is pretty small for carrying about too. The keyboard, though small, is quite usable and is better after a few days use (the , . and / keys are really to small, but hey). The screen is gorgeous and despite being small is really nice to use.

If I was picking fault, aside from the trackpad, I’d say it is weghted badly so tends to rock back when the screen is open and that the power cord connector could be higher up the side (sit the 4211 on your lap and you find it pushing the cord up, which isn’t good for it).

I may stick Ubuntu on it too, but to be honest XP is behaving pretty well for me. All in all, I’m pretty pleased thus far with Advent 4211 and hopefully time will be favourable to it. We’ll see.

Well here is an interesting thing. I looked at my on-line banking today and saw I had been charged twice (same merchant, same amount, different dates one day apart) on my debit card for a transaction. I called my bank to question this, ‘cos I certainly didn’t fill my car up twice… As soon as the lady heard me say “Asda Petrol” as the merchant, she stopped me. It would seem, according to my bank, that Asda have double charged a whole lot of people due to a “major processing error” on their end. I should be refunded by “the middle of next week”. One wonders how wide a scale this double charging is. I have heard nothing on the news and there is nothing on the internet, yet my bank knew right away of the issue when I said “Asda Petrol”. I hate to think what would have happened if I had not had a spare 40quid in my account - I’d certainly be asking Asda to pay charges. How can this happen in a modern banking world? Still, for me, no harm done and I’ll be happy once I am refunded. I will think twice though before using Asda’s pay-at-pump again though.

I had not seen any real world power consumption figures for the new Dell R200 1U servers, so as I have a paid sat behind me I thought I’d stick a power meter on and see what they draw.

• Turned off, 0.11Amps.
• Booting, peak at 0.69Amps.
• Turned on and sat pretty much idle, 0.49Amps.

Power factor 0.90, Voltage 247V.

(Spec: Quad core Xeon X3220 @ 2.4GHz, 4×1GB RAM, 2×146GB SAS)

Through the joy of blog comments (see here) the Junipers Network connect VPN client is now working for me on Leopard. This is good, as I can now switch my MacBook over to Leopard. Sadly that is not as easy as I had hoped, because Apple’s Migration Assistant can’t copy my user’s data again to refresh the Leopard system data from the Tiger install. I could probably hack it with rsync but I figured I’d just reinstall Leopard… I don’t remember it taking this long last time.

I am looking forward to little things like using Spotlight as a calculator, To-Do’s in Map.app 3 and tabs in Terminal. Thankfully since I last ventured into Leopard many of the things I didn’t like have been (or can be) fixed, like the transparent taskbar and Stacks icons (I kinda wish you could remove stacks altogether  TBH).

Whilst I wait for my MacBook to finish installing I shall sort my pics from Paris at the weekend.

So  being the Mac fanboy I am, my Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) family pack arrived yesterday morning. Amusingly the courier delivered to my sisters work about an hour later and said to her “I know what you’ve got for Christmas, its one of them new iPods I’ve been delivering all day.”. My sister put him straight; that there isn’t a new iPod, its a new operating system. Apparently TNT had loads to deliver  on Friday, which is nice.

Being busy with work during Friday day I didn’t get round to installing (onto an external drive on my MacBook) until about midnight - surely the best time of day to upgrade an OS, no? Unsurprisingly it installed fine, it booted fine, it worked fine. So this morning I swapped the internal and external drives over, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while as I was low on free space. Lovely then, all sorted.

Sadly though, in a bit, later today, I’ll be swapping the hard disks back over and going back to Tiger. This isn’t because Spaces isn’t as good as VirtuDesktops, of because the Finder isn’t all jazzy or because of anything like that, no, it is because the Juniper SSL VPN software I need for work at the moment plum doesn’t work on Leopard.  Juniper acknowledge the issue and say it will be fixed, in Q2 2008. Suck.

Its a shame, 10.5 seems nice (well, TBH it seems like Tiger with the addons I used added in.).

I’ve been pondering a PVR thingy for a while but could never justify the cost or really needing one. Tesco have allegedly had a barginous 70quid Digihome one but its never in stock (been watching for 9 weeks, apparently its 60quid now too, but again, no stock) that is the same as the 95quid one at Argos. So, yes, today I found a proper reason for needing one - Le Tour is only on ITV4 so I can’t use my VCR! Still, 95quid… but oh no! Its on sale for 80. So, toy, a Digihome PVR80 which thus far has been impressive. It works, it doesn’t look bad and yeah, it works. I don’t suppose I could ask for more. Apparently I can connect a serial cable to it and hack the software to it will record two channels at the same time, but for now I will be leaving it as it. Recorder set for ITV4 7-8pm for the next 3 weeks. Marvellous

So the day _after_ I buy an Intel Core2Duo for my new home server shit hits the fan and Intel say that maybe actually the chips have, you know, the odd bug. Ah well, I doubt it will affect me in all honestly, but isn’t it just typical.

Anyway, upside of above purchase is that Avoriaz is now a much improved boxen (though currently off-line as its under the desk at work, recompiling world because I can). If things stay well for a bit I may by another to replace Whistler, even given the above.

Morgins, Manchester colo box, is also to be replaced by a Dell SC1425 I have bought from the administrators of my soon to be ex-employer. It will be nice to go from a dual 650Mhz P3 with 512MB of RAM to a dual 3GHz Xeon with 2GB

I have a need for external storage. Mainly to make ‘backups’ portable *cough*. I also feel the need for more disk on my MacBook so I can install Windows (work means I need to, sadly). So, I was thinking I’d buy an external 160GB 2.5″ drive and swap that disk into my MacBook and put the 60GB in my MacBook into the enclosure. PC World have Maxtor jobs for 80quid, which is nice, but I note from http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/OTIII_Mini/ that these claim to be ATA, now ATA to me means PATA and not SATA. I need SATA so ATA wouldn’t work - but of course ATA could be PATA or SATA so I am confused. Anyone know if a) the Maxtor minis are SATA b) the drive is swapable? Alternative options welcomed. Ta.

Update: It is a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 inside, which is an Ultra ATA/100 drive, so no go.

What with OW going bye-bye in 3 weeks, I figured I should remove any OW servers from my domains - things like secondary MX and DNS. I could just use Morgins (colo in Manchester) and Avoriaz (ADSL in my house), but ADSL is not to stable and Avoriaz gets turned off now and then when people stay over and turn it off so they can sleep (fair enough!). So, I needed someone that did secondary stuff. I read UKNOT and Gradwell.com gets mentioned a bit so I had a look. They do slave DNS and MX relaying for up to 50 domains for 20quid+VAT a year. I couldn’t argue, so signed up. I have to say it was the smoothest on-line technical thing I have done in ages and apart from them not making it clear which IP I needed to allow transfer from (its in the FAQs but they could stick it on the set-up page) I can’t fault it. So now I have nice secondaries and I can remove OW (well, I could if 123-Reg would answer emails!).

Speaking of 123-Reg, they suck. Since they got bought by Pipex they have restructured they now never answer the phone and take up to two weeks to reply to basic support requests (like removing a 5th name server. Their on-line system only deals with up to 4). I will be moving my domain registrations to Gradwell ASAP I think, before the rooting carcass (a quote from UKNOT) creates too much gas and explodes sending maggots everywhere. Sorry to be graphic, but its a good analogy!

In other news, a US ISP I’m working with for a client is telling me LVS doesn’t work how I want - they thus suck. I am right damn it, so I am setting up LVS at home to prove I am indeed as correct as the documentation