Gmail gadgets

While I was (spending far too much time) investigating the best Gmail theme for my purposes, I had another look at the other bits in Labs that might prove interesting to me. Google's own gadgets didn't seem very inspiring but the "Add any gadget by URL" caught my eye as, perhaps, having the greatest potential.

The only obvious this I could see missing from this gadget is the facility to adjust the order of the gadgets that it displays, with its default behaviour to apparently sort everything alphabetically. Perhaps this is a deliberate deduplication as another Labs option, "Navbar drag and drop", does allow you to tailor the gadget layout to your needs.

Having tried a few, PolyClock is by far my favourite. For me, this has completely replaced the erstwhile essential Qlock application that I had installed quite liberally around my PC estate. The developer responded instantly when I found my chosen theme had a narrower Navbar than the default, causing scrollbars to be unnecessarily displayed, thanks Sterling! I'm sure my friends living in the future, by a few hours at least, will be grateful of me realising the time before I try to wake them up with Chat and other annoyances.

The only thing with these gadgets that's not so nice is that they tend not to be available over HTTPS. This causes an "Always use https" Gmail session to warn of mixed content. Hopefully this is something that will get better over time, as the gadgets become more popular.

As an aside, it's quite scary to me just how much I come to depend on Google's email service, especially when I'm away from home, and quite amazing how very, very infrequently it's ever let me down. Long may this continue!

Houdini hound

We're not sure if this is a consequence of Belle's "current condition" but we are very sure that in recent days she's become quite adept at escaping from her cage.

As she's still a puppy, Belle sleeps in her cage overnight and goes in there when we leave her home alone. It's quite her favourite place and she gets anxious when the door's closed and she's left on the outside. The cage apparently "provides territorial reassurance" and limits the area she has to guard when we're out and about.

Unfortunately, she's learnt how to break out of her confines by either flexing the door sufficiently that it bursts open or by forcing herself out through one of the corners. Either route must be very uncomfortable for her, particularly the latter.

Once out, and on her own, she immediately feels responsible for looking after the whole of the downstairs and it seems she finds this very stressful (as well as very exciting). Even more unfortunately, she manages to calm herself by jumping up on the settee and eating huge chunks out of the arm rest, scattering fabric, foam and hardboard all over the living room. After four episodes she's managed to make a whole big enough for a football to comfortably pass through, or indeed a significant part of me as it's at my end of the couch. :-|

I suppose we should think ourselves lucky that this is the only bit of furniture she's taken to "modifying". We've attempted to spoil her fun with the liberal use of cable ties (on the cage!) and, hopefully, this has put an end to her destruction. I'd weld the thing up if we didn't have to fold it down once in a while for transporting.

Heading into Winter

It seems I'm reminded every single day that Christmas is fast approaching. With teacher training days, autumnal illnesses and school half terms, we rarely seem to have a child free house or indeed a moment's peace and quiet. I'm very happy to report my personal shopper is doing a great job of getting everything ready for the festive event, so I suppose I shouldn't complain too much(!).

We're contenting ourselves with planning holidays for the next year. First will be another boys' trip high up into the French Alps. The star-studded guest list has the boy and I very excited, it will be good to catch up with all the foreigners (yes, even the one from Basingstoke). After that will come a two family trip to sunnier climes in Cyprus at the far end of the Mediterranean. The only depressing part of this is the £/€ exchange rate at the moment, fingers crossed that will bounce back a little before we travel.

Work for me is quite fun at the moment. I've just about got back into the routine of 9 to 5 and of going to bed at a reasonable hour. My journey to the office involves a 50 mile trip across the Pennines and Peak District. This trip can be very pretty, especially some of the sunrises and sunsets, but can also be pretty hairy with the heavily loaded quarry lorries and other locals / lunatics who choose to drive without lights in all but the pitch dark. The weather can be pretty spectacular too, so much so I've invested in chains and socks just to make sure I am able to make it home every night. I've not needed them - yet.

Belle's integration into family life has continued, pretty much to plan. She now knows her place in the pecking order and is generally a good deal more relaxed for that. The back garden still looks like we regularly host speedway races with an oval muddy track cut from corner to corner. We're having some fun and games walking her at the moment as, at just over eight months, she's currently "enjoying" her first season. This will also prove to be her last as she will be visiting the veterinarians in the New Year for a jolly good dose of spaying.

Other than that, not so much news at this end. How about you?

Web-non-sense?

In recent days I've found myself perusing the electric Internet through the eyes of a rather prudish WebSense device. The policy that has been deployed is as draconian as I've witnessed in a real World environment but some things are more than odd. For example...

I wanted to refer to a friend's posting on his blog. Trying to visit http://clintspot.blogspot.com/ fairly predictably redirected me to a page saying that "personal and social networking" sites were disallowed.

With my tutting out loud, a colleague said he thought I was "doing it wrong" as he was able to reach my (this) blog from his work PC. A vigorous investigation was immediately kicked off.

Indeed this blog is available via the filter. Clint's blog is so far the only blogspot.com site I've been unable to reach. Random sites such as http://clint.blogspot.com/ and http://spot.blogspot.com/ are rendered without complaint.

So, what's up with http://clintspot.blogspot.com/? Am I missing something? Or perhaps WebSense can't cope with the NZ accent... :-)

Hurrah for version 2.0

Following on from my rather miserable post berating Google for letting themselves down, I was delighted to see that they promptly took my comments on board and on the 23rd announced v2.0 of their "Gmail for mobile" application. Now I've had chance to live with it for a couple of days I feel I need to rave on once more about Goliath's latest offering.

I use the S60 3rd Edition version of the app on my Nokia E71. I've been very happy with this handset, finding it much quicker and more reliable than the E61i and E61 that preceded it (although at the time I said the same about each of these). The built-in IMAP client for my work email is good but I like the threaded interface of the Gmail app and have persevered in spite of the lack of a similar offline mode.

As my current workplace happens to be sited in a "chuffin' great 'ole" in the Derbyshire hills, cellular network reception varies from extremely patchy to non-existant. With the old v1.5 app, when I did find a signal it would frequently not last long enough for me to connect and read my email online. Now with v2.0 I can do a quick burst of send/receive and then peruse my inbox and compose messages/replies at my leisure.

Another good thing is that I can now have the "always use HTTPS" option ticked in my Gmail settings as this version doesn't barf in the same way as its predecessor.

For my own reference, I installed the updated app on my venerable E61. The Gmail app on this phone had become progressively slower, so much so that in the end it took over 30 seconds from clicking start to actually seeing something appear on the phone's screen. Whilst not as quick as my current phone, this version starts up quickly enough on the old hardware.

So, happy again with Google Corp I've decided to waste more hours of my life on the new Google Earth for iPhone/iPod touch. Très super.

A Saturday morning lie-in

With the boy under strict instructions not to leave his room until 8am at the earliest, Mrs S and I were looking forward to a reasonable lie-in after an unusual string of early morning starts during the past week. Thanks go to CE Electric UK for preventing our attempted lapse into this slothful sort of behaviour.

07:32 Power off. Everyone's house alarms sounding, my UPSes beeping and Mrs S nagging. :-(
08:16 Power back on but at 88VAC. Stuff with motors being fried. :-|
08:32 Power off. Motors breathe a sigh of relief. :-)
08:48 Power restored. :-)

A few things spring to mind. Firstly, I noted the hexadecimal symmetry of the timings, all taken from the UPS logs. Secondly, what the chuff caused a power cut at seven thirty on a Saturday morning? Hardly a time when demand would be at a peak. And thirdly, I discovered that I am unwilling to fire up my generator when it's early and cold. Perhaps I should have splashed out on the auto-start option after all.

We're now looking forward to the extra hour in bed tonight as the clocks go back. Woe betide anything or anyone who wakes me up in the morning!

A quiet September

Whilst not so much has happened in recent weeks, gentle prompting has again persuaded me that I should provide some sort of update for a few distant friends. (For the record, I don't very often give in to nagging!)

Last month's torn calf muscle took a fair while to heal and only in the last few days have I really been properly back to normal. Just of good measure, at the start of the month I snapped the nail on my little toe against a wheely bin, not something I would recommend. And to top it all, I managed to sting both my ankles silly with poison ivy with the itching taking a good week to subside. Had the Piriton not been so effective, I think I may have considered amputation.

Belle has continued to grow in size and character. She's now had three "holidays" at two different kennels and doesn't seem to mind one bit. She's very keen to show off her full set of adult teeth and (thankfully) she's now got some idea of how hard she can bite without being immediately banished to the garden. Unfortunately for the rest of the nearby canine community, she's yet to understand what "I don't want to play" means.

The boy's school routine is now properly re-established, as are the daily activities such as swimming and piano lessons. He's started walking to and from school with a couple of his friends, something his Mum and Dad will appreciate when the cold weather arrives.

I've gone back to school myself this term having signed up for some further education in the form of twenty evenings of City & Guilds Introductory Welding. Rather unsurprisingly this has turned out to be fairly hot and hard work, although just as much fun as I expected. If only I had something at home that I could practice on - perhaps an old Land Rover or the like... ;-)

For the last weekend we went away with two other families to Sherwood Castle, only about 45 minutes from home now that the A1 is roundabout-free in these parts. The weather and accommodation was great, the kids pretty much entertained themselves, the company was top notch and I didn't get into too much trouble for watching the Singapore F1 qualifying on Saturday and the full race on Sunday.

As the evenings have started to draw in, we've been busy booking holidays for next year, one warm and one cold for starters. We'll be taking a trip to London in the not too distant future as well. I'm not sure Belle's so excited at the prospect.

Cheap remote power control via SMS

Following on from the spasmodic power interruptions of this summer I've been investigating how to improve the survivability of my IT infrastructure. Now, in the event of any electrical trouble, my infrastructure powers itself off in an intelligent and orderly fashion, save for a minimal core of low-power equipment that tries to stay alive until the very, very last gasp of battery power. A couple of APC switched PDU devices allow me to control sixteen individual sockets remotely so even my most archaic machines can be effectively managed. Having already beefed up my lead/acid capacity and remote control capability I decided to look again at notification.

Whilst I have most things configured to cry for help via email, this relies on someone actually monitoring for such messages if any useful remedial action is going to be taken. I used to use a free email-to-SMS gateway but this type of service seems to have dried up, in the UK at least. It occurred to me that perhaps I could attach a pay-as-you-go GSM phone to my always-on Asterisk server and then send SMSes using shell scripts. A brief Google turned up the gnokii toolset.

I've got a number of old Nokia phones lying around, most with an accompanying data cable, but all of these require a separate charger. Ideally I wanted something that would get it's juice from USB power provided by the data cable itself. An old Samsung clamshell did just this and "gnokii --identify" configured for USB and the AT command set confirmed that the phone was recognised.

Sending SMSes proved to be very trivial indeed and I now have any critical power events from my UPSes forwarded on to my mobile. I've tagged the remaining PAYG balance onto the end of each message so I am reminded of when I need to (remotely) top-up.

Once this was up and working, it was obvious that I could parse messages coming in the other direction. Configuring gnokii's smsd and some more very easy scripting now allows me to control most of my infrastructure from my mobile. I've restricted access so that only a whitelist of CIDs are permitted to use the (of course unpublished) service and have made the command syntax pretty much unguessable with no feedback to failed commands. This leaves me vulnerable to the very few suitably skilled and authorised bods working for mobile phone companies who could eavesdrop and then spoof instructions, so I'll hook the scripts up to my two factor authentication box when I get the chance. Functionality wins over security once again. :-)

The six week holiday

As we approach the end of the summer holidays (he's back to school on Tuesday!) I thought it was high time for update for family and friends. I haven't had too much spare time to blog as we were going along so here's the more significant happenings from the last few weeks.

I've embarked on quite a few mini-projects during August (fixing a friend's electrics after a break-in, demolishing another friend's wall and then rushing to hire some Acro-props(!)) but my greatest achievement has been in the field of carpentry. A trailer for the boy to tow behind his new go-kart is the near-perfect product of a borrowed mitre saw, a scientific calculator (with the original batteries that got me through my A-levels) and my unlikely remembering of some fairly complex trigonometry. Pictures will have to follow once I've completed some of the modular decks for carrying children, dogs, BBQ coals etc.

Speaking of dogs, Belle has continued to grow in size and confidence at a frightening rate. Her re-enactment of the Great Escape is repeated frequently at the back fence, although she's yet to make it to freedom. Training is progressing well and she's moved up a class - clever girl! So clever in fact that she can now from time to time open doors, her cage or anything else to which she applies herself. We've distilled a collection of toys that can withstand her chewing and she seems to be thoroughly enjoying herself.

We spent a fantastic weekend with Adrian and family in Bristol to witness the Balloon Fiesta. After meeting up in Shrewsbury on the way down so the girls could visit the QVC Outlet shop (even they had to admit it was a miserable pile of junk), we made a brief stop at the excellent RAF Cosford air museum. Unfortunately the weather in the South West was far too wet, windy and muddy for any balloon watching but this did nothing to spoil the trip. The hotel pool and four hour meals in various restaurants were great fun for all.

Over then Bank Holiday weekend we set an alarm for 1:30am so we could head over to Meadowhall to witness the demise of the Tinsley Towers. The boy and I were joined by another family and 8,000 or so other people who thought being out in the middle of the night was a good idea. Right on schedule at 3am, the towers disappeared into a huge cloud of dust. Once this cleared there were cheers from the crowd for a 100 foot chunk of one of the towers that was refusing to lie down quietly. We headed around via Kimberworth to get a better view (here) and to allow the masses of cars to disperse before we headed home. The nibbler drivers certainly earned their danger money as they razed what was left.

For this last week I've been limping around after tearing my calf muscle. "Just one last time" of launching the boy on his go-kart across the tennis courts in the local park resulted in the classic symptoms (I thought the wife had thrown half a paving stone at the back of my leg!). Thankfully it was only a minor injury with most of the pain subsiding after only a couple of days. Seven days on and it's nothing more than uncomfortable, although stairs are still not my favourite thing.

We're now looking forward to Sunday when the boss and I will become godparents for the first time. Proper bedtimes will then be restored and the countdown to Christmas will begin in earnest.

Gmail's half-baked "always secure" offering

I was very happy to see the introduction of an "Always use HTTPS" option in my Gmail settings. For a long time I've been accessing Gmail via https://mail.google.com/ as this caused all traffic to be encrypted (rather than only the sign-in process), a good thing especially when you are away from home.

Unfortunately, enabling this new option breaks the Gmail Notifier application. Rather than release an updated version before offering the new feature, Google ask you to download the original file and apply this patch, actually a Registry file. Poor. And they don't even make this fix easy to find.

Also the S60 Gmail application for my phone is broken by the same setting. This is particularly surprising as a "Always use secure network connections (slower performance)" feature has been available for a long time. There is a workaround (here) but again this is much less than polished.

Come on Google, we expect better!

Asterisk, TDM400P and reliable Caller ID in the UK

Since my post back in March, I've been quite remiss in keeping my own Asterisk box up to date. As it has been getting significantly more use in the last couple of weeks, I've noticed that I sometimes get external calls appearing to come from "asterisk asterisk" instead of the usual Caller ID information. Delving into the logs, it seems I've been failing to capture the calling party's CID about once in every five calls.

Blindly hoping that a freshened install may help, after having already shamed myself by running code that was over four months old(!), I brought the Zaptel software up to 1.4.11 and Asterisk up to 1.4.21.2. Unfortunately, and very predictably, this didn't alter the CID behaviour.

Reading around the subject I learned that for each incoming call my UK BT line undergoes a polarity reversal, a 300ms delay and then receives a burst of V23 CID information before the first ring. My ATCOM TDM400P clone and the wctdm drivers support the polarity reversal detection. Watching the Asterisk console showed that, on a failed CID capture, a "Got event 2 (Ring/Answered)..." was processed just before the CID information should have been displayed. Some further Googling eventually turned up this 2006 post and the answer.

I had to update chan_zap.c manually and have taken a new diff file that can be found here. To apply it, save the file to the root of your Asterisk source code and from there "patch -p0 <reliable-uk-callerid-1.4.21.diff", compile and install. I've tested this patch successfully on Asterisk 1.4.21, 1.4.21.1 and 1.4.21.2 and now Caller ID information is captured every time.

Progress of the beast

Seven weeks with our new companion seem to have, quite literally, trundled by. I knew having a puppy would be hard work but, to be quite honest, I didn't think it would be quite so tiring. We've been very fortunate I'm sure, managing to have Belle toilet trained almost from the start, sleeping for most of the night in her cage and accepting the same confinement when we have to go out, leaving her behind. She's continued to grow at a frightening rate and we're beginning to wonder just how big she's likely to get.

Last weekend we found the first puppy teeth on the carpet, hopefully signalling the start of the end of the biting. Belle has been responding to our controlled play and whilst she still enjoys a good gnaw on arms and legs if she can get away with it, at least she now has some appreciation of how hard she can bite down and for it still to be fun. Her chewing on the furniture, woodwork and table legs has just about been brought to an end and her barking always seems to have good reason.

The boy should be awarded a "NoBelle!" prize for his attempts to instil some discipline into our girl. It seems she interprets his shorter (than adult) stature as meaning he is more of an equal, seeing this as an invitation to chase, wrestle and bite him. He keeps plugging away reasserting his authority and, sometimes even through teary eyes, I can see he really likes her.

Our back garden has taken a bit of a beating in recent weeks. Belle likes nothing better than depotting the hard work of my green-fingered wife and digging holes in the lawn that seem to be joining up (imagine puppy-scale WWI trenches!). With hindsight, Horiko ("堀子" meaning "digger girl") would not have been a bad choice of name. She doesn't mind getting dirty either and we've had to hose her down more than a couple of times. Sadly, she thinks this is a great game and I'm sure she gets herself dirty just to play it.

Other moments of horror have included finding Belle gently chewing on the "skin" case for my iPod Nano 3G, having somehow removed it from the device all by herself. Amazingly, neither the case nor the iPod had any visible damage but for the thick layer of canine saliva that had to be carefully washed away.

Puppy training will continue this weekend after it was rained off last Sunday. We're going to try to accelerate her learning, particularly her walking to heel which is not quite(!) there yet.

XP SP3 won't install? Back to the command line!

After my post back in May reporting no problems with the installation of XP SP3, it was inevitable that I would come across a machine that wouldn't play ball.

A client's XP SP2 machine was reporting errors during the Registry backup phase, complaining of "access denied" to the keys of "HKCR\MsTscAx.MsTscAx" and "HKCR\MsRDP.MsRDP" and some of their numbered duplicates.

The tech had chosen to ignore the errors, so allowing all the file updates to proceed, unfortunately only to be rolled back at the very end of the update process. Thankfully, as he'd also chosen not to take notes of the message details, "%SystemRoot%\svcpack.log" provided me with a full list. Trying to view the errant keys with RegEdit also reported the same error and attempting to repermission them did the same.

There are all sorts of misleading reports on the Web, most of which suggest hacking around while in "safe mode". In fact, Microsoft KB article 949377 provided the answer with its "method 3". Running "subinacl.exe" as suggested on each key solved the problem, allowing SP3 to install itself with no further issues.

Whilst it remains a mystery what caused these keys to become inaccessible, there are a number of discussions on the Web suggesting these particular keys often cause problems. It's amusing that one of MS's own products seems to have caused the difficulty.

RJ25 to DB9 serial port adapter

Hopefully this post will help others in a similar predicament. Recently I needed an APC 990-0144 RJ25 to DB9 serial cable so I could configure one of their Switched Rack PDUs but (rather predictably) the original wire was nowhere to be found. Extensive Googling did not provide many answers so I set about with a multi-meter to make my own. To make a long story short...

The pinouts of the RJ25 socket/plug, the RJ45 plug and the RJ45 socket to DB9F adapter are shown in the following table. The minimum three wires to provide the terminal connection are highlighted in bold. (Note that most of the Cisco adapters only have these three wires connected.)

RJ25	My cable	RJ45	DB9F
1 - Not connected	Blue
2 - GND	Yellow	5 - GND	5 - GND
3 - Rx	Green	2 - RX	2 - RX
4 - Tx	Red	3 - Tx	3 - Tx
5 - CTS	Black		8 - CTS
6 - RTS	White		7 - RTS

I took a trip to Maplin and picked up a "FCC68 6P6C" (RJ25) IDC plug, one metre of "FCC68 6-core" cable. From my own box of tricks I collected an RJ45 IDC plug and a spare Cisco RJ45 to DB9F adapter (so as to eliminate the need for any soldering). Assembling the cable as per the table above, and shown close-up in the picture, worked first time.

As only pins 2,3 and 4 from the RJ25 are used, if you have a more common and spare RJ11 (6P4C) telephone cable you could chop one end off and terminate it with a RJ45 in a similar way to end up with the same cable.

This cable would appear to have the same pinout as used on, amongst others, some old DEC equipment and IBM FastT200 controllers (the IBM part number for the same cable appears to be FRU 19K1179).

The sun shines on the righteous

Despite a few showers on the drive down to RAF Waddington air show and the fifteen minute monsoon as we progressed through the checkpoints into the parking area, the boy and I have managed to stay reasonably dry all day. By 11am there was no more than drizzle and by 12:30pm the precipitation had ceased altogether.

We'd followed TomTom's shortest route that brought us into the village from the West and we headed down Mere Road and Manchester Road, maintaining a straight line until we managed to park not 50 yards from the front and bang in the middle of the runway. To our right on the old cross runway was a B-52H and just in front of that was the reason for our trip, the Avro Vulcan XH558 attending her first air show in 15 years after a mammoth restoration project. I couldn't quite believe how lucky we were, having almost the same view as the Vulcan Trust VIP area.

The air show stayed pretty much to schedule and was action packed to say the least. A departing Typhoon, heading for the competing Yeovilton air show, was spectacular even in the rain. The first few displays were limited by the cloud base being not much more than 1500 feet, the Red Arrows being the most noticeable casualties. We had a good scout around in the hangars, found a great example of a British Leyland Allegro and had a clamber around a Shackleton cockpit. By the time we emerged into the daylight once again it was bright and blue was beginning to spread across the sky.

Shock and awe was the order of the afternoon. The French AF Mirage 2000C was stunning, a Chinook followed by a Royal Navy Merlin both did things helicopters just should not be able to do and a second Typhoon accompanied a Spitfire before blasting around the heavens in a superlative demonstration of the meaning of agile. The Spanish CASA 101 display team put on a good show but by then everyone was waiting for the main event.

Almost perfectly on cue, the sun started to shine down from an uninterrupted sky. Vulcan departed in age old style by giving it a huge amount of beans to climb steeply and deafeningly. She lurked in the background as a Lancaster, Spitfire and Hurricane put on a great show. Vulcan then slotted in behind the Lancaster and pursued it on a circuit of the airfield - a scary sight to have in your mirrors! A quick flash over her open bomb-bay doors preceded her signature gear-down go-slow along the display line before once again finding the on switch to lurch skywards in immense fashion. On landing she also managed her usual party trick of decelerating with her nose wheel high off the ground until she was at taxiing speed. Just before shut-down the pilot ran up the engines to 80% with the brakes hard on to give us one last treat and shake. To be honest, it was all a bit too safe and short but I suppose they're wanting to be ultra careful with the old girl, so new from her rebirth.

Many started their journey home once Vulcan was safely down but that was a mistake. They missed a "tactical scenario" enacted by a Chinook, an Apache, an AWACS E-3 Sentry and four utterly terrifying Tornados as they dropped smoke bombs and generally caused sensory mayhem. A Lynx helicopter display followed and to finish, the first Typhoon returned from its other engagement and took advantage of the now clear skies to rampage around without limits.

Amazingly, most of the 1127 photos (3.26GB!) from my DSLR are in focus, reasonably well exposed and actually have a decently sized subject. Admittedly there are a few duplicates in there but I reckon I'll have about 800 keeps. With the snaps from the compacts we had with us, I fear a storage review is going to have to be on the cards.

All in all, a brilliant boys day out. I wonder if I could get away with returning for day two tomorrow...

Lead us not into temptation

Here's an interesting method of protecting people's personal data. In the Eye Clinic at my local NHS Infirmary I saw a notice, pictured to the right, in a waiting area outside the consultants' rooms. It reads "ATTENTION Please refrain from looking at these notes as they are STRICTLY confidential". Whilst it's true many of the people sitting opposite this invitation appeared to have very little vision at all, other bored hangers-on and passers-by could not but help take a glance at the intriguing pile of documents.

It may be that the damage from recent spate of Civil Servants leaving secret Government papers on trains and in taxis could have been mitigated by similar highly visible notices. Sadly, I think not. I'll continue trying to keep all my secrets far away from prying eyes as I fear there may be far too many people sharing Mark Twain's view; "I deal with temptation by yielding to it".

VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 installation foibles

Earlier this week I was helping a customer update their VMware ESX environment to v3.5 build 82663 (from v3.0) and the associated VirtualCenter management server to v2.5 build 84782 (from v2.0), after they ran into problems trying to do the work themselves.

Following the successful installation of the "Infrastructure Client" and "VirtualCenter Server" packages, both the "Update Manager" and the "Converter Enterprise for VirtualCenter" plugin packages failed to complete, instead giving errors 25089 and 25086 respectively - "Error 2508x: Unable to logon to VirtualCenter". Knowing the that username and password supplied were correct, I started digging around the log files but there was nothing of interest to be had.

The customer's password was a complex one and happened to include a ";" (semi-colon) character. As the installation process connected to VirtualCenter over the SSL based (broswer) interface, and having prescious little else to go on, I wondered whether this might be the trouble. Sure enough, setting the password to a simple alphanumeric-only string solved the problem and setting the password back to its original form after in the install left everything as it should. I imagine this may prove a good deal trickier in some environments where a minimum password complexity standard is enforced, as I suspect more the just the semi-colon character may cause the same symptoms.

Final testing revealed one more problem. We couldn't manage to get to any of the virtual machine consoles. Network sniffing revealed the VI Client was making a connection to the ESX host on TCP:902 successfully but then trying also to connect on TCP:903 and this was failing. Examining the ESX host itself confirmed it wasn't even listening on TCP:903. This post on the VMware forums provided the answer and adding "vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy=TRUE" to "/etc/vmware/config" restored full service (VI Client now only uses TCP:902).

Inflation under control, Mr. Brown?

The ML115 G5 I ordered on Wednesday last week from LambdaTek for £94.61 (£111.17 inc. VAT) has suffered a price increase over the weekend. The same thing is now listed at £252.60 (£296.81 inc. VAT). Here is the link to the product page. I'm sure this must be a pricing error but I'm still very happy I got mine at the right time.

[Update: 02-Jul-08 09:15] Now that LambdaTek are out of stock (coincidence or sharp practice, I wonder) the price has dropped to £89.60 (£105.28 inc. VAT). IT247 are still advertising their "Deal of the Week" for the same product at £186.26 (£218.86 inc. VAT). At the time of writing, Micro Warehouse have it in stock at £92.18 (£108.31 inc. VAT). The HP part number is 470064-786 and the HP UK site lists this as £199 before VAT.

Exciting Sunday

We were expecting a quiet one this weekend. Perhaps we should have better understood the portent of what we found when we returned from having tea out on Friday evening. Our "darling little puppy" had managed to escape her cage and then had rampaged around our living room, knocking over just about everything and making a fine old mess. Fortunately, she had been most occupied by "recycling" a pile of newspapers so the damage looked far greater than it actually was and the clear-up operation took only a few minutes.

A good dose of man-flu saw me stay at home on Saturday for some recuperative time while the rest of the family headed over to visit my in-laws. Unfortunately, Bellezepup stayed at home with me and seemed to be possessed for all but ten minutes of the day. By evening I was exhausted, as was the supply of plasters and ointment needed to patch up my shredded hands, arms and feet.

On Sunday, fifteen week old Belle attended her third puppy training class. At least she's made some good friends from her fellow students over the last couple of weeks. Sadly, academic progress has been somewhat less of a priority for her and we're going to have to change her collar to something that will cause her to listen just a little more. As the tuition takes place on a show ground, the equine, bovine and other animal smells seem to prove far too distracting for our beast.

After bacon sandwiches, the boy and I headed over to Sheffield with our bikes (in the back of the car) to join some friends for a ride out in the forest. Although reasonably fine as we set off, the sky got increasingly dark and angry and as we arrived the heavens opened. Whilst we don't mind getting wet, and it certainly wasn't cold, we weren't prepared with a change of clothes and accordingly we had to wimp out. We headed back down towards civilisation.

As we travelled to our friend's house, a full size, saddled and riderless horse came straight across our bow. She was clearly very frightened, easily outrunning her pedestrian pursuers. We followed for over a mile along country lanes, trying as best we could to warn oncoming traffic. After a few scares at major road junctions, she eventually took a wrong turn and was arrested around the back of a barn. We drove back to where the pursuit had started and flagged down the local constabulary to tell them where she was.

By the time we got to a kettle for a much-need brew, the sky was absolutely beautiful with not a cloud to be seen, it's true what they say about Sheffield's weather. We had a sit down and relaxed further by following the password recovery procedure of a misbehaving appliance while we recanted our adventures.

Then, on the motorway travelling back, just as we reported our anticipated ETA using a non-distracting phone car kit(!), a folding caravan that was being towed by a car about 200yds ahead of us decided it would be a great time to rear-up and scatter itself across all three lanes of the carriageway. We managed to avoid running over any of the debris and were glad to finally return to the safety of home. Phew!

A screw loose?

This financial year's technology refresh has just got under way and yet another HP ProLiant bargain has made it on to my list. The ML115 G5 comes with a 160GB HDD, 512MB PC2-6400 RAM, SATA DVD rewriter and AMD Opteron 1214 dual core 64 bit processor, all for the princely sum of £94.61 before VAT (£111.17 including). The LO100c remote management card costs £112.99 (£132.76 including VAT), more than the server itself and so tiny it physically hurts me (a Yorkshireman!) to part with so much brass for it.

Like the other ML1xx servers the case is designed to accommodate four 3.5" HDDs and two 5¼" drives and, pleasantly, there are enough power connectors to cater for any combination of Molex or SATA devices. The six SATA channel G5 servers have no IDE channel (the ML110G4s, ML115G1s had four SATA and two IDE) and only one PCI slot, although they do have three (x1, x8 and x16) PCI-E slots (the G4s, G1s have two PCI and two x8 PCI-E). Extra memory is cheap as chips at the moment and this box doesn't need any more disk for its designated role.

Now, perhaps I'm taking this a little out of perspective but my server arrived quite incomplete. In the case there are, as usual, twelve screws for three additional 3.5" HDDs and four for an additional 5¼" device but where's the screw to hold the LO100c in place?!? I even had to suffer the ignominy of having to snap the pressed steel cover out of the way to install the card, presumably left in place to save the cost of the blank and screw that are to be found on the G1, and curiously the ML110 G5, variety. Obviously, I had a spare in my box of tricks but clearly that's not the point. I sincerely hope this is not the start of some slippery slope that will result in HP kit being just as poor as its main competitors. ;-)

YouTube to MP3

A couple of people have asked me how to extract the audio track from some YouTube or MySpace ditties so they can play them on their iPods. You can buy commercial (and almost always rubbish) programs to do this but, at least if you use Firefox for your browser, you can achieve the same for free in two easy steps...

Downloading the content is simply a matter of installing a suitable Firefox plugin. The nicest one I've found so far, compatible with Fx3, is the inexplicably spaced and capitalised "Video DownloadHelper". This installs an icon in Fx's toolbar which in turn provides a drop-down list of media that can be downloaded on the page you happen to be viewing. YouTube videos arrive in the form of Adobe Flash Video ".flv" files. Once you have these on your hard drive you can play them with the utterly brilliant VLC Media Player.

Extracting the audio from the .flv file is made very easy with FLV Extract, to be found here. Simply drag the .flv file onto the FLV Extract window and the selected bits of the file will be saved back to the location of the dropped file. The video ends up as an .avi file (that Microsoft's Windows Media Player usually doesn't like but plays fine in VLC) and the audio ends up as an .mp3 file.

Before anyone decides to flame me, the same can be achieve using Microsoft's Internet Explorer but as there are no plugins to be had, usually you need to copy and paste YouTube URLs around the place - all very messy. See the light and give up on IE!!! :-)

Firefox 3's killer feature???

Reading through the list of new features in today's release of Firefox 3 leaves me a little bit underwhelmed. My "user experience" has always been fine and I haven't yet spotted any must-have improvements, my "security and privacy" has remained unimpinged (as far as I know!) and "performance" has never been a problem either.

I've been using Firefox 2 as my main browser pretty much since it was released at the end of 2006 and I've been very happy with it. Most things seem to work better than IE and now I take the trouble to install Fx if I'm going to be on a client's machine for anything more than a few hours.

The only thing that makes me fire up IE at all is printing. Microsoft made some great improvements with IE7 and leapt ahead of Fx2. I realise that printing the Web is not a great way to browse but for the most technophobic members of my family it's the only way for me to share my excitement.

I've been installing every release of Fx3 from the very first beta and have been using it was my main browser pretty much since beta 3. I like the new look and I'm happy to make the move, especially as all the plug-ins I use are already supporting Fx3 (I note Google have updated their Toolbar as well). Printing has got a little better but it's still not great. Try printing this blog to see what I'm struggling with.

I wonder whether this is going to be Fx3's greatest triumph. I'll just have to wait and see.

Day 24 in the house

Three and a bit weeks seem to have flown by and Belle is now a fully enrolled member of our family. Her indelible mark is easy to find around the house, in the carpet and furniture, on the wood of the back door and in the garden where she's taken a liking to the potted plants, manure and general large-scale excavation projects.

Although her kennel name is Akiko ("明子" meaning "bright/cheery child") we have wondered whether Kibako ("牙子" meaning "fangs child") might be somewhat more appropriate. For an hour or so twice each day we are visited by Bellezepup, Belle's more challenging (demonic?) alter ego, who enjoys sinking her puppy teeth into anything she can reach, humans limbs most definitely included.

Having already met a handful of dogs belonging to the rest of the family and on the local park, today she attended her first puppy class. Being kept on the lead curtailed her wilder instincts and she had a great, if not not a little cautious, time with some new friends. She even managed to respond to some of the instruction, perhaps a glimmer of brightness that we can work with.

We've been enjoying deciphering the semaphore of Belle's ears. Last week both were up and crossed so she looked like she was wearing a bishop's mitre. A few days later her left ear was standing erect like an adult's with her right ear completely down. Now they're both floppy once again and she looks as cute as is ever likely. She's starting to change colour too with light fur appearing on the top of her forelegs and the bottom of her back. She's putting on weight fast and has grown an amazing amount in the short time with us. I should be running a book on how big she's going to end up - not too big we hope!

Ce n'est pas un Bonjour

This is really getting my goat. More and more I'm finding machines that have Apple's Bonjour (for Windows) service chatting away on the network unbeknownst to the system owners.

The Bonjour service "Enables hardware devices and software services to automatically configure themselves on the network and advertise their presence, so that users can discover and use those services without any unnecessary manual setup or administration.". Well, I don't want that and I object to not having been given the choice.

Even worse, forcibly removing this service can cause problems. On Windows XP the install adds a DLL to the LSP list and if this removed without correcting the list, all network access is lost. (It's good to have a copy of LSPfix downloaded beforehand.) Some good advice on how to remove the service safely can be found here.

Disabling the service in Windows is quick and fixes the problem in the short term, at least until I next dare to install something that may well re-enable it.

But where is it coming from? On my usual work machine I run a local firewall and process checker that catches the installation of Bonjour during the iTunes setup. However, blocking the Bonjour installation causes the whole iTunes installation to roll back so I am forced to accept. A brief Google reveals Adobe CS3 also installs the service, not even an Apple Inc. product, and I seem to remember that the Apple AirPort management utility did the same thing.

I don't need or want to have this service running on my machines. In the immortal words of Mr. Angry (from Purley): "it makes me so angry... I could throw the phone down!". Or even worse - arrggghhhhh!!!!!

Pitying the poor consumer

Earlier this week I was asked to look at a brand new Compaq "delivered to you by HP"(???) C773EA laptop that a friend had bought from PC World for a very reasonable £399. He asked me to investigate why it was "running so slow", something I found quite surprising for such a new machine.

Headline specs are Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 1.83GHz, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, 15.4" BrightView screen and Vista Home Premium. For me, the only things missing are a serial port and Bluetooth, both of which could easily be remedied by USB adaptors. A more than reasonable hardware platform that reports a respectable Windows Experience Index of 3.5 (only brought down from 4.5 by the graphics adapter, no surprise on a laptop at this price point). So why should it seem to be so slow?

Looking at Task Manager revealed the answer. Compaq/HP had preloaded this consumer machine with so many auto-starting wizards and software packages that the boot time to reach a usable desktop was in excess of five minutes. Removing AIM6, AOL Toolbar 5.0, EA Link, My HP Games, The Sims Life Stories and a whole host of other HP rubbish immediately restored the machine to the expected snappy performer.

As the machine appeared to have been manufactured in April I was hopeful it would be reasonably up to date and that it might have SP1 already installed. Alas this was not the case. The good citizen in me insisted that the machine should be returned in a fully up to date condition (meaning I know how bad my friend was at updating his last XP laptop).

Running Windows Update revealed I needed to install 30 updates totalling 79.8MB. Although there are no prerequisites for SP1 I wondered if it would show up after these were installed so I went ahead, slowly "configuring updates..." on the way down and on the way back up, without any problem. I ran Windows Update again but still no SP1 was advertised. On the Microsoft website is the answer - "Windows Update will download SP1 when it's available for your PC. (It could take a month or more before SP1 shows up on your PC, so please be patient.)". Wait a month? Not likely!

I ran Windows Update once more and installed a further 4 optional updates of 15.8MB before downloading and running the "five language" standalone package. True to Microsoft's warning, it did take "approximately one hour" for the service pack to apply and again this proceeded with no problems. A final pass installed a further 2 updates of 29.4MB and now all seems good.

The hardware is a pretty good package for the road, not too heavy and it has a built-in webcam that is missing from my business HP laptops. I think I'll have one for myself and force myself to use Vista in production, rather than just in my test environment that is currently the case.

One week later

After seven days with our new mini BabyBelle, I think we have the measure of our new nugget of pressed cheese. In fact, I've even managed to capture her essence in a photo as you can see to the left. Most of the time she's an adorable bundle of fluff but from time to time, especially for the first two hours or so of each day, she's nothing short of a mad and mean destructive bundle of razor-sharp teeth. I think that's what's known in the trade as a training "opportunity" and we've already started saving for when we replace the downstairs carpets.

Settling in doesn't seem to have been too much of a problem to her and we've already got a pretty good routine instilled. Bedtime is shortly before 11pm and only a few minutes of howling precedes solid sleep. Each morning she's been waking up a little later, from 05:45 on the first morning to 07:00 today. And she's certainly been making the most of her rest as she's already a degree bigger than when she arrived. Her ears change everyday and it won't be long before they're both standing to attention all the time.

Travelling in the car has proved to be a little bit of a challenge with short trips to a National Trust park being enough to cause some sickness. Each time she has appeared to be a little more relaxed and she obviously enjoys all the new smells that the woods have to offer. Maybe the trees, stones, snails, shoes and other detritus she's eating is not helping.

Yesterday Belle endured her first trans-Pennine (sleepy and sickness free) journey to meet her adopted grandparents and two new canine friends. The first of these, George, is a large Pointer cross who used to be Cocoa's best mate. He was quite confused by his new acquaintance and Belle was overawed by his size and bark. She did find her own voice for the first time, a sign of things to come.

The second was a young chap called Alfie, a 20 week old Border Collie, and he was much more fun. After a few minutes of polite and respectful sniffing, Belle launched into full speed and volume GSD play mode, giving her opponent, nearly twice her own age, a good and proper kicking. I'm sure they both had a great time and expect they'll be friends for life. However, I also expect Alfie will get a shock when the two of them next meet as Belle will have gained a good size advantage by then.

There's a dog in the house

After many hours and days of deliberating and arguing over a new name for "Vernabell Akiko" we all decided this morning that a Belle would be coming home with us.

As soon as we arrived at her kennel, where she was sleeping with her brother and sister, she clearly knew this was her big day. "Number 31" was the only one keen to return behind bars while her siblings were messing around outside on the grass. She was very clingy with her breeder as we completed the paperwork but then it was time for her to take the car journey to her new home.

Not being so sure of her new travel crate and having never been very far at all in a car (just two trips to the vets), she settled down without too much fuss. Unfortunately the weight of traffic on the M1, the warmth of another sunny day and a big breakfast all came together to result in a little bit of travel sickness. The first of many little accidents I'm sure that we will have to deal with over the coming months.

Following a quick exploration of the garden and a scout of the downstairs of the house, Belle collapsed into her first sleep on her new bed. She seems to be quite content with what she's found so far. She even entertained some lunch, with some spectacular encouragement from her new mistress, and is now going to spend much of the afternoon being fussed over as she starts to meet the extended family.

For a little girl of only ten weeks, she's already a fairly sizeable dog as you'll be able to see from the pictures. For those of you who haven't seen the boy recently, he's huge too!

As she only had her second vaccination yesterday, Belle won't be meeting any new canine friends for a week or so. We'll register her with our local vets before then too.

XP SP3 everywhere

Following the yin of my recent road trip to Scandinavia I discovered the yang when I realised Microsoft had finally released Windows XP Service Pack 3. As I am one of the many who have failed to embrace Windows Vista in any meaningful way, I still have a reasonable(!) number of XP machines, both physical and virtual.

Pre-install research revealed few reported problems. I was, however, intrigued to read that MS currently seem to recommend not installing SP3 on HP desktops that have AMD processors, due to an "infinite reboot loop" problem. No doubt this is a fair few machines and apparently MS Update does not check for this before starting the SP3 update. There is a Registry fix but that all seems like a bit of a hack. My hardware estate running Windows is exclusively Intel with my few AMD based machines running Linux of some flavour, so no problems for me there.

I distributed SP3 using WSUS to most machines and used the off-line package to the remaining four, encountering no real problems. One of my machines running Agnitum's Outpost Firewall complained that "C:\WinOS\system32\services.exe" was in use but this was just a symptom of OPF's self-protection which I had forgotten to disable before running the update.

I also took the opportunity to reclaim a fair chunk of disk space on each machine by deleting the uninstall directories left behind after each hotfix. IMHO, this is something MS should really look to address as unnecessarily full system disks are never good news.

Now it's done, all the machines seem to be running happily. The only remaining task is now to slipstream SP3 into the network and CD build media.

A new addition

After my first full day of rattling around in an empty house and the unbearable silence when our postman walked by the front window, I too had come to the conclusion that our family needs a dog.

Had Cocoa stuck to the plan and lived to a riper age - I had expected her to be with us for at least another three years - I would have kept with my view that we should have a pet-owning holiday to allow for some serious travelling with the boy when he would be old enough to appreciate it. However, stick to the plan Cocoa did not and none of us wanted to be dog-free for such a long time.

This evening we all headed over to Derbyshire to meet a prospective family member, at the moment living with four of five her siblings and both her parents. I'm very happy to report that the meeting went well and "Number 31" will be coming home with us on the 23rd. By then she'll be 10 weeks old, fully documented and inoculated and will hopefully have learnt all there is to know about how to be a social and well-mannered dog from her mum.

It was a pleasure to witness the family pack playing together. Her German father and local mother are both very handsome, friendly and playful beasts. All the dogs are clearly very well looked after, much loved and content. The puppies are growing quickly in an idyllic rural environment and are having a wonderful time.

The moniker "Number 31" comes from the tattoo number in her ear and is currently the only reliable way to tell her apart from her sister. Whilst we already have some good ideas, we're taking suggestions for names. If you happen to have a moment of appellative inspiration, please don't hesitate to send it on.

Back to reality :-( and family :-)

Much to our surprise, Antwerp was very busy and lively. Our late night Italian restaurant was quick and good, unfortunately not like the live entertainment in front of the cathedral that I incorrectly identified as a rather well oiled Karaoke singer. The Hilton is situated right in the middle of the action (but be prepared for a long walk to the rooms).

An early start, some last minute photos, a fuel (and bug removal) stop and the car's SatNav writing cheques Russ's right foot simply could not cash, we just missed the 09:20 Eurotunnel and had to wait for next an hour later. A DVD helped us not notice the 35 minute trip under the water and the journey on to King's Cross was not too bad either. I'm currently on the 12:00 National Express service, expected to arrive in Doncaster at 13:39.

Looking back on our week, we're both determined to return to Norway and to see more of its beautiful scenery, especially to the north of where we reached on this trip. It was a pleasure for me to meet Jens and I'm sure he can point me to some equally interesting places to find in Sweden (Jens, I'm not joking!).

Of course, as usual, we did enjoy the place names we came across. Fister, Åsbø (near Gangstø) and Baksidevegen in Norway along with Båstad and the Asia Kock Restaurang in Sweden were all worthy entries. Wankum in Germany was pretty good too but the award for the town that caused most amusement goes back to Norway and Søre Våge - we chose not to visit. :-)

A change of plan

Late last night we decided we were going to skip our scheduled day in Denmark and the Dana Sirena DFDS Esbjerg to Harwich ferry which was booked to take us back to the UK. Instead we decided to follow this route from Sweden, through Denmark, Germany, Holland and Belgium to Antwerp. From here we'll head to Calais and the Eurotunnel to arrive back in Folkestone before our originally planned vessel docks in Essex, so getting home a little bit earlier (we hope).

After the excitement of the Oresund and Great Belt crossings we headed across Denmark to Kolding. Lunch was nice and the town was pretty. Then it was a fairly quick trip down Denmark and to the Autobahns of Germany. The roads down past Hamburg were speed-limited to 120kph (only from 6am to 8pm) and were busy with traffic. However, the Germans kindly vend 100 octane fuel to help you whizz along their well-maintained roads and to make the most of any gaps.

Towards Bremen the traffic got a little bit lighter and we managed to get the car up to 226kph. Eventually we stopped in Münster for a quick look around and a cup of coffee. Then it was back out on quieter roads and our fastest run of the day. Near Marl a well-timed surge saw us at 160mph indicated, 246kph (or 153mph) according to our Road Angel. This was still not at the limiter but unfortunately a Porsche Carrera was in our way doing only ~140mph - pussy!

We're staying right in the middle of Antwerp which seems like a huge city in comparison to where we've been this week. A quick bite to eat and sleep is now the order of the day so we have half a chance of waking up in the morning.

Just one day in Sweden

We all slept long enough this morning to miss breakfast and didn't head out into the bright sunshine until 11am. Gothenburg centre is vibrant and it was easy to wander around and to grab some lunch before extracting the car for the next leg of our journey.

Today's plan was to take advantage of the wide and quiet Swedish motorways to travel via the Königsegg factory. The route planning was good but unfortunately it seems Königseggs are about as common as moose in Sweden - we didn't even get a sniff. Even the brazen "hello, we're from England, can we have a look round?" ploy failed to work.

As we had some time to spare we decided to stop at Helsingborg for a drink and the promise of our first view of Denmark across the water. We did see the Danish coast and the city centre was lovely. The place had a really nice feel about it and the fortification that overlooks the town was an unexpected bonus.

The trip into Malmö was easy too and we dropped Jens off at his friend's before teatime. We've ended up in the Hilton with a room on the 19th floor and a view of the bridge that will take us over to Denmark in the morning.

Ciao Norway, Ay'up Sweden

Not so much sightseeing today as we needed to make some significant progress towards Sweden. Our route first took us to Gjøvik to have a quick look at the Olympic ice arena that was built inside a mountain. We managed to sneak in and had access-all-areas until Russ tried to walk along the roof gantry. All in all, very impressive.

We headed on towards the border and took a brief stop in Fredrikstad. The old town was pleasant enough but the charging for parking and to look at the museum of the town felt too much like a rip off.

At the border Russ was very keen to get pictures of "the motor" with the expected Norway and Sweden signs, although as it turns out these were hard to find. We entered Sweden, came back to Norway and then once more over the toll bridge completed our international excursion.

Despite Jens' promises of better roads once we were in his native land, much of the promised motorway down to Gothenburg is yet to be built. Although Sweden's speed cameras look like they're from this century compared to their Norwegian counterparts, they were still reasonably plentiful so keeping our average speed in check.

After checking into the Radisson SAS in Göteborg (very nice) we headed out to the bright lights of the big city for dinner. Whilst Norway has the better scenery in terms of the landscape at least, it has to be noted that Sweden does do somewhat better in the young lady department. :-)

Heading inland and East

Today's route was spectacular to say the least. After calling at the tourist information centre in Sogndal to stock up on paper maps, we headed to the Nigardsbreen glacier in the Jostedal national park. Unfortunately the snow was too deep and the ice was too thin for us to actually make it right up to the ice flow (we did try really hard) but we were plenty close enough to be amazed. We only saw a tiny part of the Jostedalsbreen glacier but the trek up

After drying out as best we could, we headed over route 55 towards Lom. This road, closed to traffic from 8pm to 8am because its so icy at night, took us up to above 1400m and into vast and breathtaking snow-covered landscapes. The little Evo X did a great job of steering us through the narrow roads surrounded by 3m high snow walls. None of the mountain restaurants were yet open (apparently the season starts on Friday) but we had no trouble getting through

We had a late lunch in Lom and I was amazed to see example after example of Ford cars from the 1970s. A MkII Granada and a MkIII Cortina were both in fantastic condition. And we'd already seen a MkI Cortina as we arrived in Stavanger on Sunday. Quite how these beasts have survived all this time in this salty and snowy land is a mystery. Lom must be a university town as there were lots of students cruising around with our car getting more than a few stares. The second hand value of any red Transit-like van must be huge in Norway as it seems everyone needs to have one.

The journey down to Lillehammer was a bit of a drag with the E6 speed limit constantly dropping down to 70kpmh or 50kmph from its unrestricted speed of only 80kmph anyway. Heavy lorries slowed progress and overtaking was not easily achieved. However, we arrived at around 7pm and found a hotel with no problems.

After a rather pleasant tea in the hotel we headed out to look at the Olympic Park. Russ and Jens wimped out when we realised there was a farmer's field that had to be circumnavigated but it seems I'm made of sterner stuff. The ski jump arena was open and deserted. Climbing to the top of the terraced seating was a mission indeed (I can only assume the air was thin as clearly my own fitness cannot be questioned) but was well worth the effort.

On the way back down we cruelly took some photos of a car we had encountered on the way up. A young girl was puzzling what to do with her Golf that only had one front wheel on the ground after a rather ambitious manoeuvre over a rather large drop. We had tried to help although to no avail and we did laugh when she said she needed to "go and tell the owner, he'll be so mad". :-)

We're planning to leave Norway tomorrow for the wider roads of Sweden and to make some more ground towards the South.

Bergen to Sogndal

We had a look around Bergen, taking in the fish market and the old harbour-front buildings, before heading up on the funicular to Fløyen to take pictures. Then off to Sogndal via two more ferries along this route.

The evening was spent drinking beer, trying to forget about everything else that happened today. As ever, the Norwegians made the perfect hosts and a good night was had by all.

It's just not fair

Terrible, terrible news. Cocoa had been to the vets a couple of times in the last ten days as she was crying while resting from what we thought was probably arthritis. More crying and some sickness over the weekend meant another trip this morning and an x-ray image was taken. This showed a massive tumour in her spine and she was never brought round from her anaesthetic.

Worse still, I am away from home so all this happened on the end of a phone line, I wish I could hug my wife right now. Cocoa's death has come so suddenly and unexpectedly.

Cocoa was 11 years old last October and had been a part of our family since 1998. She was the kindest, most faithful and honest soul I've ever had the pleasure to know, much more than just a dog despite how silly that sounds. Her early demise is so desperately unfair. This life just sucks.