Ben Francis

Firewire burns out… nearly

Needing to copy about 600mb of files to over 50 iBooks this lunchtime I decided to copy the files to four firewire drives which we could then use to connect to all the laptops.

To save time I thought it would be a good idea to copy to all four drives at once. Sensible? I thought so. These particular firewire drives can be daisy chained so I daisy chained two drives to each firewire port of an eMac. I arranged all the windows neatly on the screen and started to copy to all four at once.

Pow! Error! Device Removal! All was silent in the room and the LEDs on all four drives ceased to shine. Frell. I unplugged one, plugged it back in again, nothing. Dead. Kaput. For a few terrifying moments I thought I had killed about £800 worth of kit in one go. Luckily after a sequence of unplugging and plugging into different machines they started working again.

So let this be a lesson, not enough power on the firewire bus to thrash four hard disks at once.

Holiday in danger

Argh! The wuckfits at lauperr‘s work won’t let her have a week off to go to Cyprus, despite her giving the required four weeks notice. What makes it worse is they have no good reason for refusing it and still expect *her* to change *her* shifts at the flick of a hat for *their* convenience. It’s not like it’s a particularly nice job or she’s treated nicely or anything. Grr.

Xjournal

Just testing out XJournal which is a LiveJournal client for the Mac, seems pretty cool so far.

eMusic

I’d like to make a bit of noise about the *new* eMusic web site launch.

They have different subscription options ranging from 40 downloads for $9.99 to 90 songs for $19.99 and “booster packs” which are worth looking at. Importantly the downloads are 192k mp3s free from DRM and you are free to copy them to any medium for personal use.

eMusic caters for independent labels, not the huge ones, so you’re not going to Busted or Will Young there, but there are plenty of well known names including The Pixies, Bob Marley, Ray Charles, They Might Be Giants and Van Morrison (and a load of much heavier bands which I don’t know but I’m sure some of my friends will).

It’s not perfect but eMusic is the best legal download service I’ve seen yet working on a big scale (I count half a million tunes as big). They seem to have got a lot of things right. I hear Magnatune is going to be distributing through eMusic soon which gives it bonus points.

Life

So, life in general then. Work is going fine, the work is reasonably fun, the people are great and the free dinners aren’t bad either! Money is still an issue but it looks I’ll be going to Cyprus with lauperr in October half term so I can’t complain! Really looking forward to that.

Now that djkoa has gone off to University I’m really starting to miss djkoa, mchicago and bouncykaz and I feel like I’m missing out on things at the moment. I’m missing lots of other people from school too and it’s weird that it’s all over. Now that things have calmed down and I’m settling into my new job I’m starting to notice things that aren’t there any more as much as things that weren’t there before but are now. If that makes any sense at all!

I feel really bad about Adam’s 21st birthday party being cancelled and wish things could have been different but I guess it was just too far for a lot of people to travel for one night. At the time though, it was all completely overshadowed by onelessmoment‘s personal tragedy. She has my most sincere sympathy and I want her to know that she can get all the support she wants from me and our other friends, emotionally or for practical things. We all love you dearly.

University

For those who don’t yet know I didn’t get into Nottingham and I declined my insurance offer from UEA. This was a very difficult decision to make because the course is so good there and accepting the place would have been the safest (and probably most sensible) thing to do. The problem was a little sentence on the UCAS form I was about to sign which said that if I accepted UEA’s offer I wouldn’t be able to apply through UCAS again the following year if I changed my mind. Being the indecisive person I am I decided that risking not being able to change my mind in a years time just didn’t make me comfortable. Anything can happen in a year and I might not even want to go to Uni by that time so I felt generally uncomfortable with the sitiuation and pulled out.

I’m looking into different options now, ranging from staying in work to courses that will accept me with my maths grade, even re-taking my maths A Level.

lauperr and I visited Birmingham University last weekend and I found out about a great course called “Computer Interactive Systems” At first I have to admit I thought it sounded like a bit of a Mickey Mouse course but after looking into it and sitting through a couple of lectures I was really sucked in! It basically looks like CSE with congnitive psychology and product design thrown in. It’s about Human-Computer Interfaces and designing systems centered around humans, but I’d get to do a lot of geeky stuff too. I have to admit the extent to which the department seemed to be in love with Microsoft did make me feel uncomfortable, but not to the point that I was put off the course. Just another option open to me.

LLUG

The first Real Life (TM) Lincolnshire Linux User Group meeting happened, and it was good! Good turnout and well organised. It was a shame there weren’t as many talks as were originally planned but that did give us more time to chat amongst ourselves which was nice. My talk went suprisingly well considering how unprepared I was, perhaps the Guinness helped 😛 I especially enjoyed MJ Ray’s introduction to Free Software and learnt a lot.

The informative talk on Knoppix from Marc was good, most of Chris’ “Linux from Scratch” talk went right over my head, but I still found it very interesting and I’m still dying to give LFS a go. Jan talked about “Integrating Linux into a Windows and Mac Network” which was also very useful.

Boring stuff that’s left…

I’m currently applying for my passport and new driving license which is boring and expensive and I spent the morning setting up our new all-in-one HP Printer/Scanner/Copier which is suprisingly cool (it takes a lot for a printer to impress me! I spend most of my time fixing them). Hopefully this afternoon I’ll get chance to put the innards of my computer (frell) inside its shiny new case, fix my lamp and clock, finish tidying my room and try and sort my music folder.

Until next time bloggers, goodbye.

I know I’ve been doing things worth writing about because I’ve not had chance to write about them for a while!

Health

I seemed to recover from glandular fever the day after being diagnosed, I have no idea why. The throat infection has gone but I still feel tired all the time.

A-Level Results and Uni (A little late I know)

A Computing
A DT: Product Design
B General Studies
E Maths

I am of course thrilled with the two As, couldn’t care less about General Studies and I’m gutted by my maths result. I needed a B to get into Nottingham University to do Computer Science, I was hoping for a C, I was expecting a D and I got an E.

I was the wrong side of the Irish sea on a camp site the day my results came through sitting on the end of a mobile phone with extremely expensive call charges back to England and a borrowed dialup internet connection from the owners of the camp site who were very accommodating. After being sent my results by text message and boggling over the UCAS web site I rang Nottingham just in case. Upon hearing my results they weren’t in the least bit interested, they didn’t even ask for my name or application number. They weren’t interested in what I was doing in my gap year, my “personal statement”, my plans for the future, nothing.

I did badly in my maths exams, therefore I wouldn’t be suitable for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I can’t help but find that very narrow minded and I’m confident I could have more than coped with the course, but I suppose they have to differentiate between people somehow. It makes me angry and disappointed.

Computer Science at Nottingham was my firm offer and the same course at UEA was my insurance. That means I’m currently lined up to do Computer Science in Norwich in a years time. I rang up UEA to confirm and they said everything was fine. The admissions tutor asked me what I’m doing in my gap year. I told her that I have a job as an ICT Technician at a community college for 30 hours a week and the rest of the time I’ll be doing Freelance Computer Support and the odd bit of web development. Her responce was “It doesn’t sound like you need an undergraduate degree!”. I won’t tell you what I thought when she said that. I also asked her if it would be possible to switch to Computer Systems Engineering before I start, which I’ve been thinking about for a long while. She said there should be no problem with that with my academic record.

djkoa ended up in clearing poor guy. His firm offer rang him up a couple of days before his results came out to tell him they’d cancelled his course!! In a few days he will start at UEA doing Computer Systems Engineering. That means that two of my friends will have started the same course as me at the same university but before me, one of them (mchicago)has just finished it. That feels a little weird. If I sign the letter UCAS is sending me soon then I can not re-apply for University next year through UCAS and I’m just not sure in a years time if I’m going to regret signing it.

Driving Test

My brother and I were due to take our driving tests last Thursday. On Wednesday night we had a phone call telling us our tests were cancelled because the examiner was sick. My brother’s test was rescheduled for September 9th and mine for September 13th. This means I’m screwed because I can’t get to work at my new job for two weeks, that’s assuming I pass my test first time (I have no driving lessons for that extra two weeks so that means I’ll be out of practice in my instructor’s car). I hate relying on lifts from other people and I hate having to pay double the petrol money as well! To make it worse my grandad who is giving me lifts when lauperr can’t because she’s working is moving to Peterborough any day so won’t be able to take me any more.

I rang up the DSA to explain my situation and asked if it was standard practice to cancel tests the night before and would I be compensated for it? They said that the examiner was ill and they couldn’t get cover and they only cancel tests as a last resort. I could be compensated for half a days unpaid leave from work. That hardly makes up for all the extra petrol being used, the inconvenience of taking a day off work when I’m not really allowed to, two extra weeks of lessons I should really be taking to keep up to scratch but can’t afford to, all the potential on site Computer Support work I’m missing out on because I can’t get anywhere!

Work

I’ve now done two weeks of work (overtime) at the college, we’ve been setting up all the computers on the network over the summer holidays. I must have helped set up about 150 Apple Macs (22 of them single handedly). It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve learnt loads about Macs and built several PCs, shifted around a lot of kit, argued over a skip with builders and been treated to a pub lunch!

Tomorrow I start for real though when all the teaching staff start, then on Thursday the year 7s start then on Friday the rest of the college. So far it’s just been me, Adam (Network Manager), Gary (IT Technician) and a couple of guys who came in to help out (James and Tom). As of tomorrow I’ll be working mainly with completely different people and the job’s going to be very different when the college is actually full of students!

On top of the “day job” I’ve been doing bits of Computer Support work and I’ve got two web development projects running at the moment. With all that and the money I’m owed from the Royal Albert Hall job two months ago, my bank balance may see a sharp rise at the end of September before a sharp fall when I pay back about £700 I owe people!

LLUG

The first real life Lincolnshire Linux User Group meeting is on September 11th, more info here. I’m giving a talk at the meeting, very scary.

Holiday

See the photos here

A week ago I returned from two weeks touring the Ring of Keri in Southern Ireland with the family in our VW Camper. Camping isn’t much fun when it rains every single day of the holiday, but it wasn’t all bad.

The whole story

Sickness
So, I finally drag myself out of my sick bed to write something. I’m feeling awful! I’m on antibiotics and lots of pain killers, both of which I generally try to avoid at all costs. I have an extremely nasty throat infection and I’ve had a blood test for Glandular Fever which is *not* good. It’s easy to get down when it hurts to eat/drink/swallow/breathe and I can’t kiss my girlfriend for risk of infection.

But before the lurgie set in lots of stuff happened….

Work
I’ve finally had some tech support work to do retrieving data from a badly broken hard disk and a web site job has come up. Sorry mchicago but the hosting fell through because the client has set up their own hosting and domain registration.

I went to the induction day at my new work place which was cool. Got to meet my new work buddies and have been warned about the political situation I may be starting off from! I must also be careful from here on in what I say in my blog in case workmates are reading 😛 (Hi Adam and Gary!)

I’ve been asked to work for two weeks during the summer holidays to help out setting up some new kit and getting used to the network which is good (extra money, won’t be such a shock in September) and bad (major panic about passing driving test in time which is looking increasingly unlikely). Driving is going OK but booking a test in time is proving impossible because the people I’ve got my lessons with messed me around.

Prom
The following day was Prom night which turned into an extremely romantic and memorable evening… and morning. The jazz band was very cool and the food wasn’t bad either. The room wasn’t fantastic but it didn’t really matter. Especially seeing as lauperr stole enough soap, shampoo, shower caps, tea, coffee, sugar, toilet rolls etc. to more than make up for the rip off price!

Cinema and Shopping
The next day lauperr and I went to watch Shrek 2 with my Aunty and her boyfriend which was really nice and the film was great fun. Had a relaxing evening with lots of pizza and shopping the next morning, and afternoon. A very successful shopping trip actually, a total of £2 was spent 😀

Propoganda from “Corporate B******s”
I’m getting increasingly irritated at the bollocks propoganda I’m being bombarded with at Showcase Cinemas and in Blockbuster about film piracy and how evil it is, funding terrorism, yadda yadda. I’ve found some of the video clips offensive, verging on threatening. “Corporate B******s” are not my words btw, but those of someone standing at the back of the Cinema who had nowhere to sit. The reason they had nowhere to sit is that the Cinema was breaking fire regs and had sold too many tickets to maximise profits.

lauperr‘s 18th
Yesterday was lauperr‘s 18th birthday which started with a Champagne breakfast with strawberries, cream, chocolate and roses courtesy of yours truly followed by presents and cards which I’m sure she’ll tell you all about.

After taking the dog to the pet shop for pampering and me to the doctors to have needles stuck in me (something wrong there, I’m sure) I treated lauperr to a meal at the Angel Hotel which was some seriously good nosh. Then we rented a couple of films (‘Identity’ (15) is a brilliant and clever film and ‘Love Object’ (18) is an OK film and also quite clever, not porn as lauperr‘s parents suspected!)

In the evening there was a birthday family meal at the Cantonese which was also seriously good nosh and extremely filling. After the meal we went pubbing with onelessmoment among others.

Today
And finally today my family was invited to lauperr‘s house for the afternoon to meet her family (lots of them!) which went suprisingly (I thought) well.

I’ve just realised that the flash memory card from my phone containing all my phone numbers and mp3s has fallen out and disappeared. Please oh please don’t let it turn up in the washing machine!!!

Hope djkoa is having fun in Holland.

Thursday

My first driving lesson in about a year and a half, went OK but stalled several times and didn’t enjoy it much. Navigated to Godmanchester and back and lauperr drove on a motorway for the first time!

Friday
Went up to Godmanchester again for lauperr‘s interview at the Woodgreen Animal shelter which she did brilliantly at!

At 6pm I travelled to London in Russ’s car to stay in the Columbia hotel overnight, drove past the Abbey Road studios and narrowly avoided crashing into a Ferrari. After seeing the Ferrari Russ tried to show off by accelerating quickly out of some traffic lights and nearly broke his car, there were some funny smells coming from the engine 🙂 We had some very interesting discussions about the future of the music industry and sachets of ketchup before running to the car in *pouring* rain only for the rain to stop as soon as we got in. When we got to the hotel all the engineers sat around drinking beer telling stories and I geeked a bit.

Saturday

Met in the foyer at 6:30am to get a taxi to the Albert Hall. Amusingly, because we’d asked for a taxi from the Columbia Hotel to the Royal Albert Hall the company assumed we must be important and sent a silver Jaguar with personalised plates and a chauffeur in a suit! We weren’t going to tell him otherwise and quite enjoyed the ride. Perhaps he thought we were something to do with Elton John who was on the next night. We’d been stood in the foyer for ages waiting for the taxi and Russ joked that the Jag outside must be for us and the guy at reception said “Yes, that is your car, it’s been waiting for some time” in a very posh voice.

We got the nice control room again this time with air conditioning, a fridge, water cooler, kettle, bathroom, sofa, mirror with lights etc. although the bathroom became out of bounds after one of the engineers was… ill in it and went home. We stayed well clear. The recording went reasonably well and we managed not to kill anyone with the new “safer” sling system for the flown microphones despite it being ludicrously worse than the old system 🙂 I did a lot of dangling off balconies with heavy objects and running up and down endless stair cases frantically with bits of rope, chains and cables.

After the usual amusing comments in the tape logs and pressing yellow buttons lots of times the recording was over and we got to rip it all up again, put it in boxes and ride them down slopes into a lorry. The journey home was uncomfortable because I was sat in the third seat of a two seat 7.5 tonne truck. When we got back to the studio we unloaded the lorry and by the time we finished it was 2:30am the following morning and we’d been working for 20 HOURS! In my half asleep state I started to wander home in the dark but was rescued by a beautiful fair maiden in a red carriage.

Monday

I took my driving theory test and passed despite being given zero for one of the hazard perception clips for “reacting inappropriately” or something. There was a frelling cyclist pulling out in front of the car!!

Tuesday

Today was the regional finals of the Young Engineer competitions at Rolls Royce in Derby. We were given a very long lecture about how gas turbines work from a wonderful eccentric guy who insisted on acting out the part of a packet of air very dramatically and singing a song about the cost of fuel relative to the amount of thrust generated! I didn’t win anything which was a bit disappointing, I could really have done with the cash 😛 Photos to follow.

We looked around some huge turbines before coming home with my Rolls Royce cap and balloon copter.

Phewf. Now we’re up to date.

My exams have been over since Friday which is such a huge weight off my mind I can’t tell you. I’m currently recovering from nervous exhaustion and also swollen lymph glands after a virus. My head and neck are aching like I’ve been run over by an ocean liner but none of this stops me feeling happy, relaxed and relieved it’s all over! Apart from the fact that drinking any of my 18 cans of celebratory Guinness from the supermarket just makes my head worse 😛

I won’t go on too much about how I think I’ve done but Computing and DT went very well and Maths was almost as bad as I had expected and nowhere near good enough. Having said that the improvement on last year was good, not hard.

My current fad is learning 80×86 Assembly Language on a 486 laptop but we’ll see how long that lasts when I start trying to debug the stuff 😛 I’ve finally got the time to do all the things I’ve been planning on doing for months which is wonderful, but it does make my diary rather full.

Coming up in the next two weeks I have an intensive driving course, Mac hacking, Prodesktop playing, Debian installing, driving theory test, meetings, “book return day”, at least one day at my new work place, a weekend of work in London, Young Engineers regional finals in Derby, a Prom and a cinema visit… and the list is still growing. I forgot that being busy could actually be fun.

I’ve spent some very relaxing time with lauperr recently although she’s still a little strung out because she has a couple more exams left. Soon we’ll both be able to relax and spend proper time together.

For the moment things are good.

I bring you the mildly amusing tale of the “GMail Machine”.

Some bright spark came up with the following great idea:

“Welcome to the Gmail Machine. As most of you know Gmail accounts have been rather difficult to come by. Soo.. We decided to create this service to allow you a chance to win a free Gmail invite. Simply click your refresh button over and over again to see a random number(hippygeek: between 0 and 99999), if you see the number 1337 (hippygeek: oh dear :S) you win a free Gmail invite!” [Google Cache]

Another bright spark posted the URL on Slashdot. At this point they apparently had over 200 Gmail codes to give out.

6 hours and about 10,000,000 hits later, no more GMail codes have been given out and the GMail Machine is no more! That’s some serious bandwidth.

I do try to stick up for Slashdot now and then because it’s a great news source if you ignore the subsequent flame wars underneath each news item – but this just shows the kind of people who read it 🙂

For some real humour, visit today’s User Friendly

A good in depth article on OD2 music dowloads is here (OD2 provide music downloads to companies like Virgin, MSN and Wanadoo). I’m yet to find a download site for mainstream music which isn’t a rip off.

Is there even a fair solution? I suspect the problem is more the business models of the record companies rather than the download sites themselves – and now they’re trying to make things worse by making us pay to listen to a song rather than pay to own a copy of a song. OD2s DRM licenses only last for a year for example! And what happens if you burn a track to CD legitimately then your hard disk dies and you lose all you licenses… how do you prove you payed for the music? Oh and btw, if you run Linux you’re screwed anyway because the software only runs on Windows. It even appears that burning the tracks to CD is breaking the terms and conditions of the OD2 service desptite being a major selling point! (read the article for more).

Yet again I am impressed by Mozilla’s products. Following the announcement of the release of Mozilla Firefox 0.9 yesterday I find out today that a Thunderbird 0.7 release is hot on its heels as announced here today!

If I didn’t know better I’d think the guys who hack at the Mozilla products were reading my mind, adding all the features I really want. One of the features added to the Thunderbird mail client is the ability to have multiple identities per account – i.e. several email addresses for one account. This is a feature I’ve been wanting ever since I first installed Thunderbird but I didn’t even know how to describe it, let alone ask for it! Basically it’s useful because I only really have two (actually three but I’m trying to get rid of one) pop3 accounts but I send and recieve emails from and to several addresses using that pop3 box.

I know I know, call me sad but I really am impressed by these guys. I find it mildly amusing that both the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird mail client are technically still only previews (they’re not even to version 1 yet) and they’re already more stable, useful and slimmed down than IE and OE by an order of magnitude!

If you’re still using the unruly Internet Explorer beast, do yourself a favour and download Firefox. Once you’ve experienced stable tabbed browsing you’ll never look back 🙂 Long live Mozilla!

OK, I’m done evangalising now.

I’ve been meaning to mention that Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” won the Aventis Science Book Prize on Monday night which was well deserved. Bryson was the first non-scientist to win the prize and decided to donate the £10,000 winnings to charity. Upon hearing this, “Oldenburg was impressed and pledged the foundation would match Bryson’s donation.” I can recommend the book which took me an age to read but was well worth it.

djkoa is getting a GMail account which I’m dying to have a look at and Firefox 0.9 was officially released today. You can copy images at last! A few good improvements and things fixed.

I spent most of today setting up a bank account and filling out medical forms and writing letters, very dull.

I was awoken by a beautiful woman bearing warm croissants and fresh bread for breakfast this morning. I was delighted when I realised I wasn’t dreaming 🙂 I don’t tell lauperr how special she is often enough.

iTunes has been launched in the UK France and Germany so I downloaded it to have a look. I do appreciate what Apple are trying to do but for me the the DRM on the downloads makes it useful for one thing: Finding cool online radio stations! I’m just not happy about buying music files which have so many restrictions on them. Once I’ve bought the music I expect to be able to do whatever I want with it providing I’m not breaking the law.

I’m thinking that wasn’t really worth a 20mb download… hmm…

I’ve been reading the EFF web site regarding file sharing but I’m not sure all of their ideas are really all that well thought out.

I’ve seen an amusing video about the music industry, although its message is a little… corrupt. I’d rather people watched the videos here[creative commons]. Creative Commons licenses still need work though, currently none of them are DFSG-free. but we’re working on that.

I’ve spent today revising maths, watching Gladiator for the first time and doing some web development stuff. Only two weeks including this one to go before exams are over.