Pointless Offers

My mobile phone company has given me one of those topup offers. I've topped up a tenner and been given 300 free texts. Not bad... until you remember I've sent 5 texts since Christmas!

The RTL8187B

The RTL8187 range of wireless chips has been supported in Linux for a while. The exception to this rule is the RTL8187B. It's now supported in the Linux kernel but support is patchy at best.

The sad news is, the wireless chip in my laptop is the ever so wonderful RTL8187B. It works ok on Windows, so no chance of a refund on that one. However, I can (under Ubuntu 8.10) use unsecured and WPA networks. I'm still to test it on Eduroam, but the fact it works on the WPA network at home is a good sign.

Though, I do have to use the "sudo iwconfig rate 5.5M fixed" trick. For some bizare reason, letting the card do it's thing can cause packets to stop being shifted. Go figure.

However, by sheer concidence, the USB wireless dongle on my desktop uses the same chip. The dongle in question is the Belkin F5D7050. Thankfully, it's slightly more stable than the laptop card. That's as long as you don't let it overheat, which it does on a whim....

Exams Over & Work Begins

Well that's it for another semester - exams are over and university work quientens off for a few weeks. However, I'm still busy as ever.

For example, I'm helping with two different radio stations and changes to their studios. One station is moving premises so a lot of work to be done (thankfully there's a team). The other wants to replace the playout system and change the studio layout. There's also a new mixer (their first actual broadcast mixer) to be installed as well.

It all kicks off with a meeting about a website tomorrow. No rest for the wicked eh?

New Hardware

With my daily commute to St. Andrews by bus, I decided to purchase myself a cheep laptop to do small amounts of work on the move (always a good thing close to deadlines).

I decided to go for an Advent unit sporting a dual core processor and 1Gb RAM. Pre-loaded with Vista of course. So the first thing I do is attempt to install Ubuntu (dual boot).

Ubuntu doesn't even boot. Turns out I've got to disable ACPI support in the boot options. So no battery monitoring (though the machine is nice enough to beep and flash at you at low battery) and the system runs at full pelt all the time.

Not really major issues. The one thing I spent ages getting to work was wireless support. The machine uses a Realtek RTL8189 chip. Not supported by default (though will be in the next version of Ubuntu!) and requiring the download of a leaked and patched driver it was not what I would class as fun. Also, I couldn't just use the Windows drivers as they don't work with ndiswrapper.

Ah well, it's working on my home network just now (WEP for various reasons). The real test will be Eduroam (WPA2-Enterprise) with much mucking about with wpa_supplicant.

Though, while on the topic of Eduroam, I'm rather thankful that an access point has now been installed in the top floor of the union. Very useful when I'm there all week.

UPDATE:

I've managed to get rid of the crash on the "processor device is not present" message. Using nohz=off in the boot options allows the boot to continue and I get a battery meter!

Say Cheese

So, I'm minding my own business, driving to the supermarket when what should I come across but Google taking photos for their "streetview" thing.

 

I don't really have a problem with it (they would only get a shot of my car anyway) but I found it rather odd where they were taking photos. Now, if you know Dunfermline, you will know it has some nice historical buildings in the centre of town. Google were taking photos of the new houses on the outskirts of town.

 

Anyway, if I come across the photos, I'll be sure to post a link.

Dropping Down A Level

Most of the programming discussed in this blog has been in managed languages (e.g. VB.NET, C#) where almost everything is done for you. Garbage collection, memory management. In most situations, it's great to have it all done for you and concentrating on the programming. However, this weekend, I decided to program in a bit of C.

The application in question is a small command line application that calculates accurite track lengths. Making use of the FMOD Ex API, it plays a track, constantly checking the levels. From this the actual end point is calculated. The result is no dead air on STAR.

It's not been without its problems though. I've completed the audio part of the application and most of the database side of things. However, I have run into the error "Could not connect to database. Reason: could not create socket: Too many open files" when trying to connect to the database. Annoying, and surprisingly the suggested fixes on google are no help.

So, I'm planning to test it on one of the STAR machines. Problem being I'll need to install the FMOD library on the machine. Thankfully not really an issue as it is supplied compiled. The installer just copies files over. So we should be ok without having make on the machines to run through the script.

I've also been informed I should be packaging the application. Specifically in a .deb package as we are running debian. Not really a priority in my book (I'm more interested in getting the application working and running) but would be nice. Though I should point out that the debian packaging documentation was not the easiest to find. Once there, it seems easy enough.

Best Intentions

Working in customer services, my job consists of handling complaints from time to time. Some complaints are valid, need investigation and fixed. Others not so much.

There also exists a sub category of valid complaints. These are valid issues that need taken up and investigated, but are reported for the wrong reasons. Take the example of the allegation of staff at the fish counter not using gloves. That is something that will be taken up with the branch management. However, it was reported not because of *just* cross contamination (the reason I would have it investigated) but because this cross contamination may put vegetarians off eating the fish!!! I'm a bit lost by that one. Why would a vegetarian be eating fish (a meat)?

There are also the bizarre. I was reading on the internal notice boards system that a customer had complained about the refurbishment at one of the small, town centre stores. You would think it would be because of noise, disruption, works, etc. You'd be wrong. Turns out the food was being moved to different locations during the works and the customer insisted we hand out maps! This is for a store with about 3 isles in it.

And finally, a story was printed in the local press about hospital staff wearing uniforms on public transport. Not something they should really be doing. The paper quoted a person taking about contamination from the "unwashed masses". Bit full of yourself, eh? No wonder you asked to remain anonymous.

Live Across The UK

Network programming. Personally, I have nothing against it. Without it we would not get a Top 40 show and it's sometimes good to hear something a bit different on the radio. However, if you're going to do it, either make it really obvious (e.g. "across the UK, this is Jimmy's show!") or integrate with the local station properly.

Take for example one station I listened to in my local area. I will not name and shame however there were a few obvious give-aways that it was not a local program.

Now, the presenter was not saying the station name, only backtiming to a locally played jingle. Fair enough, we can cope with that. However, not giving any phone number out because it's probably different was a bit taxing. "Call us on the usual number on get onto the website...". I hope people can remember it.

But that's not an issue. It's expected with networked programming. The glaring mistake was the presenter promising us another program up next. The catch, the local station doesn't carry the program. Hmm... at least try to keep up the appearance of being local.

Thank you for the Music

Summer has it's perks. Free time is one of the major ones for students.
But unlike some, I've decided to be productive. Rather than lazing
about as I have done for the past few weeks, I've decided to do some
software development.

My big project this summer is AllDay DJ. Currently, I'm working with a
small team to work on new features and do some bug fixes. Those of you
that want to know what's coming up, here's a sneak preview.

I've already managed to make the database management screen more user
friendly and added a drag and drop instant player. In fact you can now
drag and drop onto the main playlist now as well!

Instant players can now be stopped (there was a fair few complaints
about that one) and search as you type has now been disabled for
performance reasons.

There's also been a few behind the scenes works as well including
search results in alphabetical order and the database is no longer
preloaded (it had minimal benefit for a large trade-off).

Those of you itching to make your music library sound like a radio
station can get involved. I'm looking for voluntary beta testers for
all these new features. Joining the teams is as simple as sending a
message to:

beta [at] radioautomation.co.uk

Note that I'm looking for people I know or are involved in the radio industry at any level.

A Busy Day

Although yesterday was my rota Saturday off, it did not mean I did nothing. The day actually started a little later than usual with a gala in Invergowrie (west of Dundee). What was I doing there? No, not idling my day away wondering round the stalls. I was in fact DJ-ing (with Mark and Joe as well) on behalf of Bridge FM.

That turned out to be both a fun and interesting experience. Firstly, there was a falconry display (yeah, the spelling is miles off!) display that was fairly impressive. We got to watch the bird of pray "hunt" for food. Though, later in the display, the local birds appeared to have taken action about being upstaged and tried to get in on the act.

So when that finished, we got on with the music playing. Until the power kept cutting out (apparently it had been doing that before I arrived). So we just pressed on through the problems, only taking a break for the raffle.

The weather had been on and off rain and thankfully held out for the duration of packing up the equipment. That part wasn't so bad. The interesting part came at the hospital when we went to return the equipment.

We had managed to obtain the use of a trolley from the porters. However, these things have only one set of setting wheels to navigating tight corridors was tricky to say the least.

Roll on a few hours, I finished the day off back in Bridge FM's studio presenting the "Night Shift" (called so because it finishes at 11pm).

Not too bad a Saturday off (I've had worse) and I'd certainly do it all again. Today, I finally managed to get my tax return submitted online. The result... HMRC owe me the huge sum of £24. Oh well, better in my pocket than theirs.

Getting Things Going

We're a few weeks into the summer holidays now and I feel I've had enough time just lazing about sleeping, eating, drinking and going to work part time. With a tax return sitting on my desk and money to extract from the Scottish government to go to university, I though now is about the time to get things moving.

One of the major items on my todo list this summer is STAR's website. It's not the most updated of sites. The committee are looking to get a new website. I've been a little more sensible and looking at all the options.

A New Site

If we go for a new site, we can keep it seperated from the admin side of things (mailing lists, etc.) possibly even keeping the current staff portal but slimmed down. There are a number of "off the shelf" options. However they would require a fair amount of customisation.

I've been experimenting with this option. In fact in a day I managed to get this site together for experimentation.

Update The Old One

The old site could easily have the look / layout changed without too much work. However, there is a fairly sizable list of "requests" from the old committee over the website. Considering I'm already getting flack for refusing to follow through an order for duckers (we don't need them and they would be too difficult to install correctly with our setup), I would have to implement most of these changes.

The old site can be found here.

Get Involved

The options are open, what's your opinion?


I've dropped the requirement to register to submit your comments. You will need to supply an e-mail address but I promise not to sell your information to anyone that looks a bit shifty.

The Server's Online

Well, after many problems yesterday, I decided to update the firmware on the router. The result, no more drop-out. So the piggy back connection is no longer required.

 

I've decided to setup a simple web and ssh server for personal use. Making use of a patched version of Debian, it's up and running. There was no problems in the starting of the server, the issues came with SSL. I have self-signed the certificate for the server and have setup Apache to use mod_ssl. It's not the easiest to setup and took hours of searching to find the correct settings to use in the virtual host.

 

There were separate guides for signing certificates (worked well) and using certificates with apache (worked not so well). We could really do with a combined guide. Oh well...

 

If you want to take a peak, goto http://steelehost.dyndns.org/ [normal] or https://steelehost.dyndns.org/ [secure]. There's nothing there yet, but proof it is working.

Network Woes

Well, I'm back home and mostly unpacked now. So what needs attention...? Only the computers at home. Firstly, the hard drive on the parents machine has failed. So I've spent a little while recreating the system for them on a new hard drive.

 

The more interesting problem is the home network. We were using a combined wireless router and ADSL model (Zyxel 600 series if you're interested). Unfortunately, the modem bit seems a bit faulty and keeps dropping the connection.

 

Looking for a simple fix, I managed to find the modem our ISP supplied to us. Thankfully is has an ethernet port on the back. So my plan became piggy back the wireless router on the modem connection.

 

Sound simple, right? Well... it's not as easy as that. To force the router to route traffic via. the modem, I had to make use of the backup WAN settings. This allowed me to specify an alternate gateway for if the DSL connection failed. That's ok so far. Now to simulate failure. This was done by simply removing the phone cable from the router and inserting it in the modem. The router should now attempt to ping google every so often on a connection without a cable. I think you can guess the outcome of that one... constant failure.

 

Thankfully it works but I'm very surprised I had to simulate failure to get the unit to do as I wished. It's a bit easier doing this and using the built-in DHCP server rather than going manual and having to change the gateway on every machine on the network.

And Finally...

Well, that's me mostly packed and ready to leave halls for the summer. Looking towards the summer it's going to be busy but fun. I prefer it that way as it gives me something to do. Due to not being able to find a room, I will be commuting next year across Fife. It should be interesting being out of halls for a while.

Talking of something to do, I got bored a little earlier and knocked together a demo. I don't expect to get paid work out of it but I will be sending it to voluntary stations closer to home. As it's constructed from tape recordings, I can only apologize for the noise in the background.

It would be fantastic if you could review it for me. To listen to it click here.

A Mixed Day

This morning saw me going to the midnight showing of the latest Indiana Jones film. Based on the mixed reviews it's had so far, it was better than expected. Not an unexpected ending is all I'll say so as not to give away the surprise. Let's just say it's not the usual Indiana style.

So after a good start, I thought I may be able to continue the trend with my car's MOT. Apparently not. Only one failure point thankfully, a cracked gaiter joint. I don't honestly know what it is but it's only £60 to fix.

Late Night Love Songs

So my alternative to "Late Night Love" on hospital radio has shifted from Wednesday nights to Saturday nights. A bit of a shock at first coming in on a weekend but fun none the less. It's also made a bit more fun by the crew on before me who just happened to remind me of the AGM next week.

The journey home was "interesting". I was most of the way home, behind another vehicle. This person in their big, expensive car attempts to overtake the queue of traffic. Failing just before a blind corner, they pull in front of me, causing me to slam on the brakes! I dropped back to a safe distance just to watch this person tailgate the car in front all the way in to St. Andrews.

I've got the person's numberplate. Should I report them?

Flying, Crashes and Crunches

Well, today saw the publishing of a story here about a "near miss". From what I've read here, the pilot was showing off the plane to his kid, performed some turns. He then has to climb to avoid a mid-air collision.

That sound feasible, until you understand they claim he was too close to the plane in front and turns slow down an aircraft. In fact, it's one of the technique the space shuttle uses for landing. I've got a feeling the two parts are unrelated but that's probably just me.

Now, demonstrating aircraft to kids has gone wrong in the past. I remember reading about a Russian airliner that entered a spin after the kid accidentally disengaged the autopilot. It was a tragic ending to this flight.

I treat flying as safe and enjoyable. In fact, it was the reason I joined the Air Training Corps. Though, based on the accident reports I read during bad weather on my gliding scholarship, things can and do go wrong.

Forgetfulness and Last Minute

There seems to be a rumour kicking around that students always do things last minute or forget all together. I'd like to dispel this myth, but I did not get out of my pit until 0845 today therefore running late for a tutorial. Not a good move but it's the last week of classes and I've lasted out so far.

Anyway, yesterday we were asked to provide assistance for live artists on one of STAR's programs less than 24hrs before the show. Thankfully, a few of the tech team did step up to the plate and help out! But, we technically should have said it was not doable.

On the forgetfulness front... I did walk in to the studio the other day to a recorded show still running on loop from CD the night before. It looks as though they expected people to turn up at midnight / 1am to stop the CD while they were away.  No great problem fixing it... but it gave me an excuse to play Meat Loaf on the radio!

A bit of tech update as well. Wired's new server seems to be moving along nicely (according to the updates I've read from Hash9). We are going virtual with this server using Xen (the hardware supports it). Should be a fun new experience as we currently run separate boxes. However, the assistant sysadmin (Jaunty) does claim he's had training in virtualisation. A possible scape goat when things go wrong... :)

...only joking Jaunty!