Apocalypse - Not!

So, the Rapture didn't happen on Saturday 21st May 2011. Still, it's not the end of world, eh?

But it was the end of my venerable Compaq Evo N610c that is so good IMDb didn't want it back when I left. The hard disk failed a mere 7½ years after being replaced. Oh well, it's been doing a good job for the last (almost) two years as a firewall machine with Ubuntu installed and a PCMCIA network card.

I recently retired it from firewall duty (as it's on-board network connection seemed to be playing up, although the problem disappeared once I'd retired it), so it was left acting as a local DNS server and a WebDAV server (for sharing iCal calendars). Both of which I would rather the Time Capsule would take care of - but it doesn't.

I've managed to resurrect it for now using the 160GB drive that I removed from my MacBook when I expanded that, attached to the Evo using a cheap USB enclosure, put another Ubuntu install on it and installed dnsmasq and got lighttpd running as a WebDAV server, and everything seems dandy again.

But I can't help thinking I'd be better off with a proper low power server to do this kind of thing.

Javascript Speed Tests

Every so often I think about changing the browser that I routinely use. For the last five years or so I've been using Camino, first on my PowerBook, and now on my MacBook.

Today I decided to try the sunspider-0.9.1 Javascript benchmark on a variety of browsers that I have to hand, and here are the results:

  Camino   2.0.6        3085.3ms
  Chrome   10.0.648.134  319.0ms
  Firefox  3.6.15       1014.6ms
  Firefox  4.0           313.8ms
  Opera    11.01         347.9ms
  Safari   5.0.4         333.7ms

So it seems I am currently using the browser with the slowest Javascript performance (by a factor of almost 10x), and although I've become very used to Camino, maybe it's time to consider a switch (again).

Update 2011-03-22: Added in Firefox 4.0 (which is the current leader, and means that all the alternatives are about 10x faster than Camino in this test).

Top Time Machine Tip

Here's a Top Tip for those using Apple's Time Machine...

If you are backing up multiple computers to a single Time Capsule, and one of the machines decides there isn't enough space to complete a backup, try compacting the other backups - especially if they are quite large.

Open a Terminal and the following command:

# hdiutil compact /path/to/backup/sparse/bundle

I did this on the backup of my machine, when another laptop was deleting old backups trying to make space, and it freed up over 90GB of space. Plenty enough to allow the other machine to complete it's backup.


I turned off automatic backups while it was running - remember to re-enable them afterwards.

This is something that Time Machine will run itself if it's runs out of space, but it will only compact the backup for the machine that it is running on, so if there is a potentially large amount of free space in a backup for a different machine that won't get reclaimed. Instead the first machine will start sacrificing it's older backups to make space.

Note: I'm running Time Machine on OS X 10.6.6

These Boots Are Made For Walking

How long should a pair of walking boots last?

Berghaus - worn out after 6 months.

In March 2010 I bought a pair of Berghaus Explorer Trek lightweight boots, and was a bit disappointed when the soles wore out after only six months of use. However, thinking about it in a bit more depth - six months is 26 weeks, I probably walk around 20 miles a week with the dog, and so the boots could easily have gone for 500 miles or more before the soles wore out - at a cost of around 17p/mile (interestingly a similar amount to what petrol costs are for the car).

This compares fairly favourably with my "proper" walking boots (Meindl Burma Pro), which have, by my reckoning, covered around 650 miles in the last 7 years (albeit quite tough miles in some cases). But given they cost almost twice as much as the lightweight boots they are currently coming in at around 25p/mile - although they are still serviceable, so I expect them to clock up a few more miles. But it is sobering to think that they will have to do almost 300 more miles to reach an equivalent economy to the lightweight boots.

Zamberlan Trek Lites - 480 miles.

My previous walking boots (db Mountain Guides) covered around 660 miles, to come in at 18p/mile (although they had been replaced early in their life, when the eyelets in the original boots failed). Eventually they became too uncomfortable to wear, rather than actually failing.

Before that I had a pair of Zamberlan Trek Lites, which although they only managed 480 miles before one of the soles started coming off, also came in at around 19p/mile.

Hawkins Kestrel - 5p/mile.

But all of these have some way to go in order to beat my first pair of boots - a pair of Hawkins Kestrel boots, bought for £23.50 in 1986. They managed 550 miles (including the Wolds Way, the Coast to Coast and the 10 Highest Peaks in Britain, along with many other walks) before one of the heels finally fell off while backpacking on Beinn Challum, clocking in at under 5p/mile.

So looking back, it seems that 500-600 miles is about par for the course for a pair of walking boots, and just because I covered that distance in several months rather than several years I shouldn't feel that the Berghaus boots have underperformed.

Setting Camino to be Colour Managed

I've wondered for a while why photos sometimes look a bit washed out in Camino.

It turns out it's because Camino is not observing the embedded colour profiles in the images.

And the way to switch on Colour Management in Camino is:

1. Go to about:config.
2. Set gfx.color_management.enabled to true.

For more information on Colour Management in browsers, see this post: Web Browser Color Management Tutorial.

Orange PAYG Fail

So, Caroline wanted to get an iPhone 4 to run the Hipstamatic App.

I did a bit of research and it seemed like the best way to get an iPhone 4 without being tied into a contract is to sign up for the Orange PAYG package, especially as it comes with 250MB/month free data usage for the first 12 months as standard.

What follows is the ongoing saga of our attempts to get Orange to actually provide the service they claim to offer "as standard".

Day 1 (Thursday, 23rd September 2010)

We walked over to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre to pick up an iPhone 4 on a PAYG tariff (I had called the previous day to check that they actually had them in stock) and bought £10 of credit for it.

By buying the phone from the Orange Shop I thought it would all be set up to work properly at the shop and we wouldn't have any problems getting going. Boy, was I wrong about that.

Orange offer several animal based tariffs, but we wanted to go for Raccoon as that is the easiest to understand (12p/min calls, 12p/text). The assistant told us that once the phone was charged we should dial 343 to select the package.

We got an SMS message on the phone saying that "you can start using it [the phone] straight away".

OK, I tried calling 343 from the phone several times during the day, and always got an automated voice response system telling me that the request couldn't be processed due to an error in the system.

Day 2 (Friday, 24th September 2010)

I called 343 and managed to talk to a human being and get the phone set up to use the Raccoon tariff. I mentioned that I was concerned that the free data package had not been activated and they said they would attach a note to the account, but it didn't sound very convincing.

Day 4 (Sunday, 26th September 2010)

Caroline got an SMS message saying that there was only 19p credit left on the phone - despite the fact we've made no chargeable calls/texts on the phone.

OK. I'll take it back to the shop and they can sort it out. I checked on the Orange Web Site and it said that the Clifton Down Shop was open on Sunday from 11am - 4pm. However after I walked over I discovered that this information was incorrect, and the shop was not open on a Sunday.

So I got back home and tried to call Orange. However it seems that you can't call Orange Customer Services if you have no credit on your phone (they want to charge you 25p for the privilege), even if the reason there is no credit on the phone is because Orange themselves have stolen it.

I sent an email to Orange, via their web site, detailing the problems we had had so far and requested them to get them sorted out.

Day 6 (Tuesday, 28th September 2010)

Having not heard anything back from Orange, I walked over to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre, to see if they could get the account sorted out.

A very helpful guy was on the phone for about 30 minutes, and said the data package was enabled and the £10 credit would be refunded in 24-48 hours.

Day 7 (Wednesday, 29th September 2010)

There was no sign of the missing credit. Someone from Orange rang back (apparently in response to the message I had sent via the web site on Sunday). They promised they would double check that the problems had been resolved and would sent me an email confirming the following day.

Day 8 (Thursday, 30th September 2010)

No sign of the missing credit. No email from Orange.

Day 14 (Wednesday, 6th October 2010)

There has been no indication that Orange have done anything. The missing credit has not shown up, and we are unable to use the phone on the Internet except via the Wi-Fi at home.

I composed another email to Orange and submitted it via their website. However this time I got a message saying "Oops, an error occurred. Try again later". A few hours later I was able to successfully submit the message.

Day 16 (Friday, 8th October 2010)

I got an email back from Orange saying they were unable to deal with the problem via email and that Caroline should call Orange Customer Services (even though you cannot do this if there is no credit showing on the phone).

While I was out walking the dog and quietly fuming about the inability of Orange to provide the standard service they have offered, a representative of Orange phoned Caroline, took the IMEI number of the phone and promised to have everything sorted out in 24 hours.

Day 17 (Saturday, 9th October 2010)

24 hours later - nothing seems to have changed.

Day 19 (Monday, 11th October 2010)

Another trip to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre. A very helpful assistant listened to my woes and then spent a considerable amount of time (around 40 minutes) on the phone trying to sort it all out. He genuinely seemed to do everything he could to help, but whether he will have any luck with the people on the other end of the phone is yet to be seen - I left again with a promise that it should all be sorted out in 24 hours.

Day 20 (Tuesday, 12th October 2010)

Almost 24 hours later, and nothing seems to have happened, so it's back to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre. This time they said there were going "bypass Customer Services". Almost immediately I got an SMS through saying there were new settings for the phone, followed shortly by another with the password for the 12 months BT OpenZone access (that also comes "as standard" with the iPhone package). I was also told a request had been made to re-apply the missing credit.

Day 21 (Wednesday, 13th October 2010)

At first, nothing else seemed to have happened, but at 10:00am an SMS came through saying the 12 months data access (250MB/month) had been activated.

At 3:00pm there was another SMS saying the 250MB data allowance for this month had been activated. (I'm not really sure if that is different from the last message, but I'm just pleased that something seems to be happening).

Shortly afterwards the missing £10 of credit showed up on the phone, so the phone can finally be used with all the services it comes with "as standard" after only 3 weeks of hassling Orange. Phew!

I Predicted Right

I was recently listening to Come Together by The Beatles, with a view to suggesting Macaroni Penguins give it a bash, and in listening to the dissection of the master tapes (well worth a listen BTW), it was eerily spooky to hear John Lennon singing "Shoot Me" in the intro, somewhat predicting the method of his death.

This comes after I was similarly spooked when listening to Free World by Kirsty MacColl, where she sings: "You've got to get in to the water / Like a lamb goes to the slaughter", (which I always thought was a bit of an odd lyric when she was alive) again presaging the events of her death.

Any other songs where the singer predicts their own demise? I don't recall Elvis, for instance, singing the lyric: "I'm gonna die in the toilet / Full of drugs and cheeseburgers".