donder.co.uk

I was in at work for 5:40am this morning as part of replacing two older servers that provide the network addresses to the new phones that the university uses.

I’d planned the deployment and prepared the hardware for the changeover. Without getting too technical it was roughly:

• check I’m all ready
• disable the service on the old servers
• copy the active information across to the new servers
• tell a bit of networking equipment to forget about the old servers
• enable the service on one new server (it can run on one or many servers)
• check all the phones work and the world hasn’t ended – preferably before 7:30
• carry a second server across town to a room with no windows
• set it up also running the same service in case the first building burns down
• unplug the old server and carry it back

There’s more to it but you get the rough idea. It all went without a hitch.

I’ve cancelled my CCNA second part exam (ICND2) as it’s currently too busy to get meaningful periods to revise before the exam date on the 17th and it’s too close now to do anything but cram for the exam, which isn’t the way to pass – I want to pass because I know the subject area from learning and experience, not from memmorising enough to get a pass without properly understanding the subject area.

I am still revising when I can and recently produced an article for our various department/college IT support staff on using a networking technology covered in the exam called spanning tree. I’m not so hot on network hardware compared to servers and scripting (code), but I need to work on this and enjoyed writing the article. I’m also doing various exercises to speed up my binary arithmatic (e.g. converting “137″ into “10001001″ and certain other operations) as the exam I’m revising for requires you not only to make networking calculations based on this but also be fast due to the time constraints of the exam.

At work I did a second IPv6 talk to about 45 IT staff and gave out some standards we want them to meet if they want to take part in the early testing of IPv6 with us, mainly so it’s easy to troubleshoot issues with their IPv6 deployment without other pre existing problems confusing the issue.

The actual IPv6 deployment itself is a little closer as we’ve had permission (via a little gentle pressure) from our security team to go ahead with enabling IPv6 to our core services so that we can start enabling it on services we provide to the university (which other peoples networks depend on). The security team aren’t quite ready for us to deploy it to a unit but this gives us a lot to get on with.

So my next tasks coming up are

• replacing the DNS servers – that turn names like “www.google.co.uk” into number that computers understand and can talk to (and back again)
• replacing the DHCP servers – that tell peoples computers what settings to use when they plug their laptop in or turn their workstation on
• enabling IPv6 on all our core network services
• hunting for switch (network device) tasks as part of my exam revision

You’d know if either of the first two went wrong as it would take the university offline and hence might actually make the news. That won’t happen – luckily it should be reasonably straight forward with some planning and testing beforehand plus the changeover will be quite gradual (part of a service at a time) rather than the ‘big bang’ approach used for this mornings work.

I’m quite looking forward to the third one but have to do the first two before as the replacements are urgent – I’m not happy about the hardware and software the service is currently on as it’s too old. We had an odd ‘blip’ with the existing service about 3 weeks back that affected members of the university, I fixed the immediate issue and did the service announcement to IT support staff about what had happened but I don’t like the idea of it happening again.

After all the above is done it’ll probably be Christmas and time to take off my shoes and take a deep breath, then aim for a complete and convincing pass on my exam. I suspect there will then be some other work that crops up, but it’s what keeps me employed and it’s fun. The work is just the right balance of challenging.

Outside work I’ve lost weight from 84.5kg (April) to 79kg although I seem to be stuck at the latter, I’ve been on it about 2 months now. If I lost another 5kg that would probably be about right. I’ve been swimming a lot in the evenings at the local council gym but not too much riding.

I did recently get to ride the Ridgeway South of Oxford with a friend – it’s quite flat (which is just as well as my bike was stuck in only the big cog at the front and I’d forgotten since I’m always on the road riding to work in the big gear) but it felt great to actually ride off road again, no matter where.

At work I presented my universities IPv6 deployment progress to an audience of roughly 105 members of our IT support staff. Bob Franklin from higher up the food chain in a similar team at Cambridge University did a 20 – 25 minute presentation of what IPv6 is beforehand.

• I explained what auditing we’d done of our hardware and what pitfalls to look out for in their own switches, routers and firewalls
• I described how to audit their services, plus all the ‘glue’ scripts that hold everything together
• I described the test network I’d built to test our existing services under IPv6 and document all the gotchas along the way
• I explained the production of a formal deployment plan and involving management, sister teams and customers
• I then explained where we were currently at, and what the future action was to be.

I’d been practising the talk in the server room where noone could hear and had later rounded up some tame staff who weren’t able to attend the event as a test audience. I was quite nervous before the talk having only spoken to at most perhaps an audience of 12, but knew the subject matter well and fielded questions at the end.

At the end of the talk people clapped without pause or prompting and I think I was actually surprised. I’d been quite nervous about how it would be received. I felt quite proud and there was a lot of good verbal feedback from persons afterwards.

Sadly although the day was great I think it’s all downhill from here.

The start of this week was marked by a senior technical member of our team (I’d suggest our unofficial team leader) and close friend announcing he was leaving to take up a position at a new employer (new challenges, more pay, plus other factors – he’d be crazy not to).

This is of course a normal part of life, however it’s complicated by the fact that another team member is leaving as is our main senior manager (3 leaving in total, leaving 3 technical staff remaining, one senior, two standard).

Ok so a big staff turnover event. It gets worse though because I don’t think anyone is aware of the work I do nor the needs of the team so I’m not confident they will may the right employment decisions. Sadly I don’t think management is listening:

• The run up to today has been marked by 3 years of annual reports from us, screaming out for more staff, or more assistance or any kind of support for our team. We were told it’s impossible as there’s a university wide staff recruitment freeze however multiple projects with alternate funding are recruiting in our unit and a sister team was able to advertise for another post using central funding. It’s now too late as the remaining staff are watching those leaving and wondering if that isn’t the correct solution for themselves as well. I think if another team member leaves we’ll be unable to effectively function. Even if the remaining persons stay it’s going to take time for the existing staff to train up new staff and if too many staff change at once then it might be simpler for the new staff to simply implement new replacement services rather than study the (possibly complete) documentation for the existing ones.
• Some of the projects I work on, like the university DNS and the IPv6 deployment are mind numbingly mission critical, yet only the (seemingly flash in the pan) website projects appear to get management attention. Once I finished the formal IPv6 deployment plan I presented it to the sister teams in our unit, who attended and asked questions. I then did a presentation open to all in our unit, to which I was hoping some of the senior mangers might attend since it’s of direct importance to the future of the university. No one attended, not a single person but I didn’t give up. At the practise before the recent conference there was a good number of technical persons who attended but again no senior managers. Last I heard the IPv6 project has been assigned joint lowest priority by the senior mangers in their list of projects as a direct decision when going through the current list of tasks.

Lastly I don’t think anyone non technical knows what I do nor what drives me. I presented a formal remote working application to senior management offering a pay cut together with other concessions and detailing trial periods and potential problems with solutions. This would be a first for my unit in the university so I was aware it would likely be rejected, but was expecting some deliberation, a compromise or offer. Sadly it appears it was rejected immediately and unanimously by the senior managers in the first meeting it was put forward and I then had to fight to get a discussion or explanation from them, having eventually offered a cut to half my current pay and any conditions they imposed (for the same tasks duties). I told my employer I was open to any offer they might think of, no matter how one sided the conditions, if it meant I could work remotely for the same team. The best I could get is that some work as a contractor (no longer employed by the university) might be possible but no guarantee would be offered and it would be for specific tasks rather than with the team or my current duties.

The general feeling seems to be that working permanently remotely is impossible. I pointed out that the university already employs ‘remote data collectors’ who are overseas academics that work remotely for the university. It was also suggested that the teamworking would be impossible – but we’re the Networks and Communications team – we’re deploying voip, teleworking solutions and no doubt the new Cisco Ceus once available. If we can’t make teleworking work socially or technically then we deserve to be shot. In terms of remote collaboration the university prides itself on work with other universities worldwide not all of which requires a plane flight to an expensive conference. In my own employment history I’ve worked long term for employers I’ve never met (webdesign) and I’ve worked on Sourceforge projects that went fine without any argument. About once every two years I attend the IT conference in the university to meet people (because your team isn’t just the people you share an office with) having dealt with them all year long via RT (a helpdesk system) or email and never having met them.

I tried to explain my reasoning to a middle manager who immediately dismissed it within 20 seconds as “impossible because of the impact on your team”, which is incredible. When people are so rash and certain about a complex situation can they be anything other than rash, reckless or logically flawed? After a subject change in the conversation the same person then described how they prefer to come into work as a late shift as they can’t stand their teammate (who starts early). But I thought physical presence had just been stated as necessary for teamwork?

I love the work at the university, I like the technical challenges and providing services but the future is looking frustrating.

Someone brought me back an ebook reader from a visit to America, which is the Barnes & Noble Nook- I wanted a reader as I’ve been lugging about great big Cisco study guides and reference books as part of my revision at work. I live in a city and cycle to and from work so it would make things a lot easier, plus it’s a new toy to play with.

The kindle is available to the UK but you have to purchase through the amazon.com site rather than the .co.uk site, then pay for currency conversion and so forth, which brings the price right up. The Nook is cheaper but B&N won’t ship it outside the USA. Luckily unrelated forum posts from US customers suggested that the staff in B&N stores didn’t know much about the nook, so I suspected a UK visitor could probably buy one in store as the staff wouldn’t be aware of the restriction, which turned out to be true.

The eink screen, which is near identical to a sheet of paper to read is pretty impressive and the battery life after the first week has also been an eye-opener. It came with the latest firmware so I’ve had no major issues with the software although I haven’t worked out how to make a structured index of my books – they all just seem to be listed in one great big list.

The speed of the device isn’t an issue for me, the page turns (the eink screen takes longer to update than a LCD screen) take about as long as to turn a normal page. I can see impatient people would get cross with it, but we’re into the third paragraph on this page so they will already have headed off to another site and wont be reading this advice.

The downside is that the device is quite small: you can increase the font size of the book you’re viewing however that can cause layout oddities if the publisher has done something odd. As an example some of the Cisco Press texts I have from Safari Onlineuse full stops to space out the contents page entries which I would class as a publisher oddity.

The main problem I have isn’t the device, which is fine, but the experience in getting ebooks that you actually want. There’s three main sources I’ve turned to.

• free ebook sources
• commercial ebook sources
• commercial sources that can be used as ebooks

So the free ebook sources are probably well known, all you need to do is Google the two words and you’ll probably bump into Project Gutenbergin the first couple of results. The books are out of copyright and downloadable in pdf and epub (and other formats but the nook in stock form handles these two), of which the epub files are a smaller file size.

The commercial book sources I’d class together as any site promoting itself as a source for ebooks.

• I don’t believe I can use amazon.com as the output is in a format designed for the Kindle, Amazons own ebook reader.
• Barnes & Noble has it’s own ebook store – due to imposed restrictions I can’t purchase ebooks using either the nooks interface or by browsing the B&N website because my billing address is outside the USA. I tried anyway but was rejected at payment time, the site refused to sell to me. I understand them not wanting to field support requests for the Nook outside the USA, where they don’t have support for the roaming wireless abilities however I think the basic export restrictions on the ebooks to a standard B&N account not in the USA are annoying.
• ThePenguin book publishers website caught my eye as it offered ebooks in epub format, which I knew the nook can handle. I purchased two books to try out the system, I would recommend checking the prices against Amazon for what you intend to buy as you might decide to wait until the book is on offer. Instead of getting a .epub file to download, I had missed the warning message that Adobe Digital Editions was required which means you download a file that kickstarts the Adobe sofware into life which then goes and downloads a digitally rights managed epub file from somewhere. I was slightly filled with dread as to what would follow since software and product incompatibilites can be a nightmare but it went without a hitch. After installing it from the Adobe website and then downloading the files from the checkout, I plugged in the nook which ADE autodetected, asked me if I wanted to authorise the device and then let me drag and drop files to it (which open, and seem fine).
• The Waterstones site didn’t overwhelm me with the selection, but this appears to be a problem with a lot of the ebook sites. The computing section had only 12 ebooks but there’s a gigantic mountain of trashy romance novels which pollute any search in more general categories. For instance there does seem to be a large selection of ebooks under £2 which is great but hunting through them for a bargin is offputting as there’s so many love novels that must be vomited out by the authors in a constant stream. It’s like watching daytime tv, it doesn’t seem to have quality or content. On the plus side Waterstones supported Adobes system and the downloading and transfer were fairly simple as for the Penguin site experience.

For commercial sources that can be used as ebook sources I’d suggest any book that comes with a pdf version of it on a CD in the back cover, and also Safari Books.

I’ve a couple of Cisco Press books which come with a CD that contains a PDF version of the book, which have loaded up fine on the nook.

My place of work have a subscription to Safari Books which is (visiting the site will get you a better description) essentially a portal site where you can read computer related books online, and download sections or entire books. I’ve used pdf files from the site but noticed some titles also offered an epub option which I’m going to try out (we get a limited number of tokens to use on these downloads each month, so I have to be careful not to use them up)

The Adobe software is interesting that it made downloads easy, the system was fairly painless and I assume the copy control mechanisms help placidate authors concerns about piracy, allowing more content to be provided in ebook format. The negative side is that I’m nervous of accidentally using up the 6 activations in some way I hadn’t expected and the support forum isn’t at all empty for the software; many people are encountering issues and there seems to be tales of Abobe not responding to actual support tickets raised.

I’m really for the Amazon mp3 method of piracy control – don’t put DRM copy protections on the files but instead sell cheap. As a consumer I’d buy more ebooks if they were cheaper, I’d buy more if the copy protection was less concerning.

I’m looking forward to the Apple iPad release, not because I think it will be a good product, but because no matter how bad it is people will buy it in the millions – one marketing claim is that it is an ebook reader, so it should have some affect on both lowering the price of ebook readers and improving the competition/technology. I’d also like to see the ebook sellers sort their various problems out, and the tidal wave of Apple fanatics should be enough to overwhelm any support forum. I’d love to see something like the nook but Kindle DX sized and without any worries about file formats.

So in summary the things I’m currently bumping into are

• Lack of real selection in titles – mostly trashy love novels on any commercial ebook site, whereas I was trying to hunt down mainly reference titles
• Still some publishers only supporting their own file format
• Export restrictions on the Barnes and Noble site.

I also made a cover/wallet for my nook out of an old pair of trousers, but I guess that’s just going to scare people.

Thanks to my girlfriend feeling sorry for me, a small army of good friends was put together on my behalf and I was instructed they would help move my shed, which has been sat in a flat packed pile at the wrong end of the allotment site for about 6 weeks now. We decended on the allotment and carried the shed to the plot at the other end of the site, panel by panel, after which I bought everyone lunch at the local pub. The shed is now sat on my plot next to the area where it will be built, with the base in place.

I even had time to do a bit of weeding and to pick the last marrows which I later gave to people at work.

The free shed has so far costed £40 to pickup. About £20 to dispose of the discovered asbestos roof and about £30 for getting it all into place. I still need to get a roof but otherwise I think I’m all set. I’m quite looking forward to having somewhere to put the tools and occasionally hide from the rain. Now it’s moved I also don’t feel quilty when I visit the site since the question that I always felt was about to be asked was always “when are you going to move that shed of yours?”.

I’m looking forward to the coming winter, when I can do a bit of digging and clear all the weeds out as they die off.

With winter coming up I took a look to see if I could leave my home pc running and doing something useful while also heating up the house a little. We have a very small house and it’s got electric heaters anyway – a computer is just a slightly noisier electric heater that also happens to do other useful things.

I took a look at the folding@home site which folds proteins in order to research cures for various diseases. The client runs on your computer and just number crunches all day.

To cut a long story short I’ve dug out various rejected/returned bits of hardware and am going to build them up. Cambridge Universityhave a folding team so naturally I’ll be looking to try and get the existing Oxford teamscore above theirs (nothing like a bit of competition for a good cause). The research is for Stanford but we’re all on this planet together – I’m not too bothered how the credit is given out for research that provides cures. Especially with the opportunity to beat Cambridge at something no matter how small.

So far we’ve gone from the top 35,000 teams to (as of tonight) 10,998 out of 166,827 teams in the past fortnight. I think it’s going to take about 45 days to overtake Cambridge.

The hardware I’m building up should help a lot. The client runs very fast on graphics cards. These are normally used for games but due to their architecture are also quite useful for certain scientific computational problems. I’ve managed to find a second hand motherboard that can take 4 graphics cards, plus a cheap but multi-core cpu and 4 graphics cards that have all been opened and then returned to the factory for one reason or another (“It’s too big for my case!” etc). All in the machine should cost less than a modern netbook, use up about 400watts and pump out about 15k points of computation for the folding project/day.

That’s not a massive number but it’s cheap and a lot of performance for the watts used. It should keep the house warm for the winter too.

So I’m afraid it all went a bit wrong.

It was going ok, I was planting stuff in the raised beds I’d built and slowly reclaiming the plot, but then it got busy at work and I didn’t go to the plot for about a month. When I got back the weeds were gigantic which was pretty disheartening.

Luckily my girlfriend attacked the plot and got the weeds under control. She also grew a great wildflower spot and a herb area. I’ve just purchased more disk space from my web provider so I’ll upload the photos of all our veg we grew – I think we earned back the money from the plot on the courgettes alone.

For about a month or two we had an unstoppable supply of potatoes, runner beans, broad beans and courgettes. We had hardly any slugs but the tomatoes died of blight before we got anything from them.

We were offered a shed from another allotment site for free if we took it away. I paid for a man with a van and got it to our site but then immediately got reported because the roof was made from asbestos and so had to be removed. I bought some builders polythene and duct tape and double wrapped/sealed all the asbestos before getting a friend to help transport it to the local council disposal site.

Currently the rest of the shed is sat flatpacked at the entrance to the allotment while I try to get a group of people to help move it to my plot since each section is too heavy and large for me to move myself.

It was a good summer but I’m a bit fed up with the shed incident and a bit overwhelmed with the weeds on the plot which is further away now that we’ve moved house. I think I’d originally been expecting the allotment to be populated by friendly old blokes drinking tea in sheds but that’s not the case. Although it’s been fun I’ve not felt like part of a community and it’s now quite far away and feeling like a liability.

Family members: this is a geek post that you might want to ignore.

So my workplace provided me with a hp tablet when I started. It’s been pretty amazing but the choice of Windows XP tablet edition or Vista wasn’t terribly inspiring. (I did try Linux and I use it on my workstation but on a tablet it just wasn’t all that polished.)

So after hearing that the new Windows 7 release candidate was more responsive than XP or Vista I figured I’d give a try. I thought I’d write about it here in case it helps someone.

So I got the RC1 64 bit candidate from Microsofts site. I’m aware I might be making things harder for myself with the 64bit version but hey, I wanted to give it a try.

After the install has finished, just check for updates and the recommended updates section will include a fair few drivers. After a reboot I then had 4 unknown devices still needing drivers.

I had all the xp/vista drivers for the 2710 downloaded from HPs site already so I used winrar to unpack all the contents from the install files into one directory, then asked windows to update the drivers for each unknown device, pointing it at the big directory of files. This fixed one of the devices.

For the fingerprint reader, you can get a beta driver for Windows 7 64bit at Authentecs websitewhich is the manufacturer of the fingerprint reader of the 2710. The new driver and interface is great and quite polished compared to the original shipped version.

I would recommend you don’t install the hp protect suite or the buttons software, at least on the 64 bit version. Installing the protect suite just wont work and the buttons software will make the screen rotation work but make the mute light toggle every 15 seconds or so.

I haven’t found a solution for the screen rotation yet but I can use ctrl-x in the meantime to bring up the mobility interface and toggle the rotation. It still only rotates in 2 directions instead of all 4, I believe there’s a complex fix for this so I’ll come back to it another day.

Other oddities are that when the sound is muted, if I shutdown then I get the dialogue that the system is waiting for explorer, with the subtext stating that it’s attempting to play the shutdown sound. As part of the shutdown process the computer appears to then turn off the mute, the sound plays the dialogue disappears and then the system shuts down. Normally the system copes fine with sound from an application and the mute on… it just wouldn’t be audible.

Software

I installed Artrage on it, which I’ve the paid/full version of as it’s cheap and a beautiful little program that keeps loved ones entertained and out of your hair for entire evenings at a time.

I’ve put a trial of Autodesks Sketchbook Pro on from Autodesks website in order to try out, but it’s about £90 and I’m not a great artist so I suspect I wont purchase the full version at the end of the trial.

I guess I’ll have to put Onenote on as Agilix seem to have abandoned gobinder (and the Franklin Covey packaged version of the same program). In fact they abandoned it some time ago, just after I paid for the full product (ho hum). The old Gobinder binary struggles on vista with various bugs, and under Windows 7 in caries a known issues warning if you attempt to install it.

I had a play with the built in speech recognition but I’m undecided on it. It was fine in a quiet office environment but not when demonstrating to others.

The handwriting recognition seems better, I’ll try and use it in anger over the next week.

I wont bore you with the more minor details, but essentially the release candidate works, and does so to a better standard than their current full products.

This month the entire family sent me their seeds, and all the seeds seem to need planting in April. This was a bit awkward as April was really busy in terms of visiting people or needing to do other tasks away from the allotment, yet I really needed to recover more of the plot to make beds and to regularly water the new plants.

Towards the end of the month I realised my seedbed had some quite reasonable looking radishes in it, but they needed seperating out, so about 30 were moved to locations around the plot. At this point there were then 3 days of sun and mose of the plants I moved look pretty dead. I’ve been watering them a lot this past few days so I’m hoping they’ll recover.

The potatos are coming out of the ground and starting to look bigger than the weeds. The garlic and runner baens are about 2-3 inches high and the chives are having a great time. The grass I’ve sown on some of the pathways is looking great.

I’ve planed more lettuce, onions, carrots, peans and beans.

I’ve got between 1/4 and 1/5 of the allotment left to reclaim from the wilderness. I’m hoping in May that the plants will become big enough that a lot of the weeding isn’t needed.

Only just got back today but the photos are all up at:

http://donder.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2863

Will write more later, but figured people would be more interested in the photos.

Right well, march seems to have flown by, I didn’t think the digging would end but it all seems to come together laster Saturday.

Photos are up at: http://donder.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2828

So I’ve planted
* Radishes and plain leafed parsley in one raised bed
* Lots of blight-resistant potatoes of 3 different species.
* Garlic cloves from my sister
* Chives which grew all by themselves and that I transplanted
* Broad beans

And as seeds I’ve started growing:
* spinach – Giant Viroflay
* courgettes – Zucchini

I’ve finished moving all the earth for all but one raised bed. I’ve dug down the level of the ground in the path areas by about a foot to get enough earth. I’ve used lots of log offcuts to make the borders around the raised beds where I’d run out of wood. I’ve put down some wildflower meadow mix grass seeds on the path areas although I don’t think it’ll grow – it’s just to hard and compact – I should find a way to get some turf. The raised beds are all now at the height that they’d be above the flood the allotment experienced in February if it were to occur again to the same level.

I’ve been doing a little research on forest gardens, I’d quite like to plant some dwarf trees but I know the allotment managers are a bit twitchy about the growing number of trees on the plots. I’ll send an email tonight to test the water, but I’ll only be allowed dwarf trees rather than the monster apple trees I remember from Gloucester.

In all it’s gone quite well, I’m probably ready to attack the second half of the allotment in April but I’ll need to find wood for raised beds, which I’m hoping to do without spending money.