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!!!!!