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. :-)