Power cut ridiculissimo

A morning of madness. Alarms outside, and a very agitated dog, alerted the entire household to the fact that the power had gone off at 05:40. Not so much of a problem except the heating would not be on when it was time to get up and everyone would start the day in a grumpy mood.

More house alarms let us know the power came back at 07:03, but only for about 5 seconds. Then same thing happened again at (times from my UPS log) 07:08, 07:28, 07:31, 07:40, 07:59, 08:02 and finally at 08:06 the power came on and stayed on. Eighth time lucky!

It seems that someone at CE Electric has a grudge against my electronic equipment and is hoping to toast some if not all of it. I suppose I'll find out later today if they've been successful. Update. One of my Linksys routers is dead. F**ckers! >:-<

After Monday's power cut the heating at Tom's school had not started as expected and the children had to wear their coats in their classrooms until morning break. We wondered whether there would be a similar problem this morning and listened to the local radio where we heard all the schools were open. Needless to say, Tom was very disappointed. However, a brief excursion into the strong winds and rain revealed that his wish had been granted and his school was closed for the day.

I'll devote some time this morning to see how much more of my IT estate I can get behind the UPS or indeed how much bigger a UPS I might be able to justify.

JTAG joy

A couple of weeks ago I managed to pick up an apparently toasted Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router for a fiver thinking that I might be able to resurrect it. (I realise I can simply buy a new one for £23 from Ebuyer but that wouldn't be half as much fun.) Well, this morning everything has come together - wahey!

What makes this router such a bargain is that it's ideal for running DD-WRT, an alternative firmware to the standard Buffalo offering. I wanted to make a wireless bridge to a neighbour's AP (with their permission of course!) and I've used these before with great success.

On powering up the router had the classic symptoms of a failed flash attempt. All the LAN lights were on and steady and the thing was generally unresponsive. I tried the pin 12 trick to reset the NVRAM.

A quick Google reveals all you need to know about building a JTAG cable, so I'm not going to go into too much detail here. Most of the information talks about the Linksys WRT54G router but it's basically all applicable to the Buffalo. I had most of the bits in my stores and a trip to Maplin completed the inventory. In summary I needed nothing more than a 25 pin D-sub plug, some pin strip, an old IDE ribbon cable, some resistors and my soldering tools.

This particular Buffalo has a few things to watch out for. The JTAG header is intended to go on the underside of the PCB. If you solder a pin-strip to this side you won't be able to put the case back on so I fitted the pin-strips to the "wrong" side and reversed the wiring of the cable. Also a standard unbuffered JTAG cable requires four 100ohm resistors. After some failed attempts to erase the flash, I found some forum chat about the G54S needing 450-480ohm resistors. Adding four 390ohm resistors resulted in a functional, if not very messy cable.

With all the bits in place I erased the flash and reflashed the CFE firmware. The CFE code is the bit that runs the TFTP server on boot and allows the loading of the DD-WRT firmware. I found the trick is to to take your time - the erase and flash took in excess to four hours so don't be impatient!

I had a high-gain antenna left over from a previous project. As the connector wasn't quite as slim as that of the original antenna, I modified the case with a minature file to allow a usual size RP-SMA connector to fit snuggly.

And there we have it. Not too many ways you can have more fun for only a fiver!

Power cuts

Sometimes I wonder whether Yorkshire is in fact in a "developed" rich G8 country at all. I realise it is not so widespread these days but I certainly don't live out in the sticks, yet we still have six or so power cuts each year. Unfortunately this one is a little different.

The electrical power went off at 18:10 and appeared to come back on at 18:13. However, none of the low energy light bulbs came back on, the sodium street lighting did not recover and displays such as the microwave appeared very dim. I checked on my UPS and saw the incoming voltage was only 88VAC, as opposed to the usual 240VAC.

One other thing of note. Although the DECT telephone bases appeared to be alive there was not enough transmitter power for any of the handsets to function. That's why it's important to have an ordinary line-powered phone in case of emergency.

Speaking of emergency planning, it would be good to know who supplies your electricity(!). A torchlit search of the Phone Book turned up nothing for Yorkshire Electricty and I eventually found out that we're supplied by "CE Electric UK". At 18:40 I managed to report the fault on 0800 375 675 and was told an engineer had been despatched.

Normal power was restored at 19:42. So for 89 minutes we suffered a major and sustained brown-out. Fortunately I realised what was happening and switched everything off at the Consumer Unit, (hopefully) before any damage was done to my own equipment. Thankfully nothing was damaged save for a couple of 5A fuses that proudly died in action.

Of course any device that does not manage its input power will have been suffering, anything with motors being prime candidates. 88VAC suggests that somewhere upstream two phases have failed. All those poor fridges!

At least it was a good test for the "business continuity" of my core network devices. I'm blogging this in the dark from my laptop and am still connected wirelessly to my ADSL. :-)

(I've used italics above to highlight post-mortem editing of this post.)

More "English (UK)" Google quirks

Today I found myself giving instruction to a young whippersnapper on the basics of using Google Chat. I was very impressed when my pupil started sending me a whole string of increasingly intricate smilies. When I enquired how they might know so many smilie shortcuts they told me they were clicking on the "blue smilie face, to the right of the 'Pop-out' text". Needless to say, one of these I did not have.

I remembered that Google Chat was initially only available when the Gmail language setting was "English (US)". With my language option set to "English (UK)" the Chat functionality simply did not appear. But this was fixed months and months ago.

Sure enough, reverting my settings to US caused me to gain the missing icon. I'm now left with two questions.

1) What benefit does the Gmail "English (UK)" display language option give me?

2) Why is there any functional difference between "English (US)" and "English (UK)" anyway?

Now that I'm using "English (US)" once more I see the mysterious "Older version" option that does not appear under the UK variant. I wonder what that does...

Happy birthday FiL

Yesterday we celebrated my father-in-law Bill's upcoming 72nd birthday in some style at the highly recommended Italian Orchard near Preston, specifically here. Despite its proximity to the M6 you have no idea its next to a motorway at all, until you fall out of the wrong side of the children's play area(!).

I trust much golf paraphernalia will be delivered by way of presents. Perhaps you may treat these as a few less excuses for your performance on the course? :-P

Many happy returns from all of us.

Legitimate apps on iPod touch

Excellent news! When I plugged my iPod Touch in this evening to charge, I saw there were updates available to iTunes (to v7.6) and iPod Touch (to v1.1.3). A brief Google for the change logs revealed very exciting news. For $20 I can have five applications and some other bits. I expected the email app alone will be worth this extravagance. And even better, no need to worry about jail breaking. Happy days!

Then the annoyances started.

I completed the updates using my Mini Mac and all went well. The link to the "iPod touch January Software Update" was displayed prominently on the iTunes Store front page. Following the link and reading some blurb got me as far as the "buy now" button. And next to this button was "£12.99". Yet again Apple Inc. see fit to fleece their UK customers. $19.99 at today's exchange rate is only £10.18. The hardware costs more here, the music costs more here and now I see the "updates" are no different. For what it's worth, earlier this week I decided against the frivolous purchase of the MacBook Air simply because the UK price is a 29% more expensive than the US price tag. £2028 versus $3098 is £450 dearer - unacceptable!

Anyway, I made the purchase and... nothing happened. The transaction appeared in my account history but not on my iPod touch. The £2.81 UK premium seemed more expensive than ever. After a little searching I realised I was not alone. An Apple support page revealed the answer. As I choose to "manually manage my music and videos" I cannot have the update. I have to deselect this option, have all my music, audio books, podcasts and photos deleted, wait for the license to be applied (yes, there's no download, all the apps are already in the 165.5MB v1.1.3 firmware) and then start again from scratch.

To top it all, all new iPod touch devices come with the apps preinstalled with no price premium over the original launch price (16GB for £269 or $399 - don't get me started!). So all the existing owners are being asked to pay an extra £12.99 for Apple Inc. to do no work or incur any other sort of cost. Marvellous! :(

A Safari for Windows that's worth testing

I realise this post is a long way behind the curve. However, while I have Apples in mind I thought a reminder would do no harm.

The madness of no NTLM support in the Safari for Windows beta programme was fixed in November 2007 with the release of v3.0.4. For the 5 months prior to this Safari would not function behind an authenticating proxy. In most corporate environments this will have stopped any testing dead.

The good news is now a Windows-only workplace can test their own website in Safari without having to shell out for Apple hardware.

Google Mail goes Northern???

A couple of days ago I noticed that the list of folders in my Google Mail looked odd, although I couldn't quite work out just how. This morning it seems as plain as day. My erstwhile "Trash" folder has been renamed to "Bin".

After the very briefest investigation I've established switching my Google Mail preferences to "English (US)" restores my "Trash" folder and it is my usual choice of "English (UK)" that causes "Bin" to be displayed.

Of course it is very pleasant to learn that someone out there has seen it as important to choose the right word for users in Blighty. Perhaps it is just very miserable of me but "Bin" just does not look right. Surely it should be "Waste paper basket". But then that's perhaps too long for Google's purposes and, in any event, would it be correct to throw electronic mail into a waste "paper" basket?

Then I started to wonder "what's happening to me?". As a proud Northerner I should be delighted at Google's choice. Waste paper baskets are very firmly in the domain of Whitehall offices and the inhabitants of the South. I imagined I would find many pages of the North/South debate devoted to these words but there seem to be none.

I can only conclude that I've spent far too much time south of Watford and have become confused as to my true cultural origins. A trip t'pub is in order so I can seek the opinion of the council of (ex) miners.

This week's day out

At the kind invite of Mitsubishi Motors, today I took a trip to the Autosport International Show at Birmingham's NEC to meet with Russ. He'd been sent the tickets so he could see his next car for the first time in the flesh.

On the stand, seemingly the largest of any main-stream manufacturer, were two Lancer Evolution X cars. One was a bit of a dodgy orange-red affair ("it looks fantastic in the daylight", hmmm, I wonder) while the other was a very nice looking metallic black. The former was a GSR SST FQ-300 "flappy paddle" gearbox version and the latter was a GSR FQ-300 manual. Those of you who know Russ will not be surprised to learn he's planning to go for the GSR FQ-360 (the number signifies the horse power) and he was delighted to learn he's somewhere near the top of the list of 52 deposit payers.

For completeness, we had a good look around the car an established the boot has been replaced with a sub-woofer and somewhere to put your golf shoes (any clubs will need to go in the cabin). All in all we were both very impressed.

Elsewhere in the show we had to endure various trials, avoiding the gaze of the promotion girls with their sprayed-on micro-shorts - we found the best way was simply to stay behind them(!). The engineering section was fun too with all the CAD-CCM mills and weird bodypart scanning robots. An F1 clutch assembly was impressively small. And the German (we assume) robot controlled shelving was a sight to behold. We were a little puzzled by SiliconHoses.com, "the new name in silicon hoses" - what on Earth was the old name?!??!?

The journeying to/from the venue was particularly wet and not much fun. Still a good day out. I was intending to visit with Tom tomorrow but he's not so fussed so we'll give it a miss, "it's not the Motor Show after all" he says. I dare say we might look to make the trip next year.

Holidays over :-(

A truly brutal return to the mundane. Driving rain against the windows woke us and taking Tom to his first school day of 2008 left my hands sufficiently cold that it hurt to hold Monday's first cup of coffee. At least the blustery winds blowing the clouds away have made things look bright and fresh.

By way of coincidence after seeing our friends off to their new life in New Zealand a few days ago, "Wanted Down Under" on BBC1 this morning is following a family as they look for a home in Auckland. Despite the "proper" rain, the place looks fantastic and we're all looking forward to making a visit sometime soon.

Today I'm hoping to take the opportunity to spend some quality time with Tom's Christmas present. Halo 3, Rainbow Six Vegas and Far Cry are all waiting for me in the cupboard. My holiday's not finished just quite yet!

The difficult first post

Having enjoyed my first taste of blogging last year when I went partying in Tuscany (IDxx) and shamed by the better efforts of friends, here's the start of my own online ramblings.

My initial intentions: For the benefit of friends, many of whom seem to be moving farther and farther away, and my increasingly Internet-enabled family, I'll be offering a digest of my travels and significant events. And for my own amusement I'll probably record some of the more useful things I come across as I wander along the journey of life.