Spring is over already. It's been a cool, moist one, and though the temperature was higher
today, it's still looking like being wet for some time to come.
Despite the weather, Yvonne decided to mow the lawn today,
which involved me more than I had expected. First the tyres all needed pumping, and I
discovered that I couldn't connect the tyre pump attachment from the new compressor to the
old compressor: the connections were of the same kind, but both the connector on the
compressor and the one on the gauge were male. So I had to use the strange connections of
the old compressor again.
Then Yvonne came in: she had run into something and damaged the lawn mower, which had
promptly stopped working and produced lots of smoke. Further investigation showed that one
of the blade assemblies had fallen down in the housing, and the smoke was coming from the
drive belt.
Yvonne called up CJ, who was a mechanic in another life, and he came over to take a look,
and we decided that he would take it home with him and look at it there. While driving it
up the ramps to his ute, the cutter housing caught on one of the ramps, pushing it aside,
and the mower fell off to one side and on top of my leg, the one that has just healed from
my accident three months ago, pinning me in
place. Fortunately it didn't do much harm, but Yvonne thought I had broken my leg. Clearly
not the way to transport the thing.
While the mower was lying on its side, took the opportunity to take a look at the cutters.
As I had feared, the cast aluminium mounting of the shaft, which the workshop manual calls
“Housing Mandrel Vented”, had sheared off from the mounting holes. Hopefully we
can find a replacement. Yvonne went over to the Yeardleys to borrow their horse float to
transport the mower, but in the end they came over and drove the thing themselves.
While we were at it, gave CJ the new compressor to play around with. Possibly we can get it
fixed relatively cheaply. We're also talking about putting up shade cloth to the north of
the verandah; hopefully we can get that done relatively soon.
In the evening, Yvonne went and dug out some of the mystery flowers that we had seen
two weeks ago. She thought she had
brought about 4; in fact, there were 14 corms. They look like the same kind as the
Watsonia and the Chasmanthe floribunda:
Five of the corms have flowers on, and we planted them immediately in the hope that they
will survive a while. We still need to decide where to put the others.
I haven't been doing much in the garden lately, but that changed today. In the morning spent
some time weeding the old vegetable garden, which has become seriously overgrown. That'll
keep me busy for a while, but I've made some inroads. Also took a look at the Melaleuca which has been in bloom for the
last two weeks. It's now coming to an end, and has dropped a remarkable number of stamens
on the ground:
The first of the Gazanias that we
picked up in Stawelltwo months ago is also flowering (last photo
below). Interestingly it doesn't quite match any of the photos I took at the time. The
first two photos are the most likely candidates, but I can't decide which one it's going to
be:
In the afternoon, Yvonne decided that she needed to do
something about the area outside the entrance to the house, which had been severely
overgrown by Euphorbias and
Pelargoniums. She removed a
lot of stuff:
Chris came over to pick up a lot of the cuttings, and we recalled that she wanted some
Arums, so I started digging out the
ones that we wanted to remove from the middle of the east garden. This is what it look
like after she took her 20 or so plants:
The water pouring through the first photo came from the junction between the roof of the
house and the roof of the verandah. The latter terminates over the gutter (second photo),
so either the gutter is blocked again or there's something else I don't understand.
The rain was also accompanied by one of the fastest temperature drops I've seen in a long
time, 10° in 35 minutes:
mysql> select time, outside_temp from observations where date = "2010-12-2" and time > "15:00"; +----------+--------------+
| time | outside_temp |
+----------+--------------+
| 15:00:52 | 26.1 |
| 15:01:52 | 26 |
...
| 15:35:01 | 16 |
+----------+--------------+
And of course when there's heavy rain, there's usually a power failure. Today there were two, both mercifully
brief.
Another effect of the rain was that, once again, the rainwater filter got clogged up, not
once, but twice. We must have a lot of crud in the bottom of the tanks. Time to find a
tank cleaner.
I'm subscribed to the Oxford English Dictionary's
“Word of the day” service, for which they conveniently don't provide a URL.
It's vaguely interesting, and of course OED is the authority when it comes to the
English language. As you'd expect, there's not a word or punctuation mark out of place.
But that's the book. As we've seen elsewhere, nobody on the web takes accuracy seriously.
Their word of the day stuff was sent in HTML, of course, and in extremely bad HTML at that.
In particular, the phonetic characters were sent not as characters, but as images, which of
course didn't scale:
They've recently changed the format of the pages to remedy this, but they don't seem to have
tested it before releasing it on the world. What I see with the new pages is:
The text was in UTF-8, but the content type has been set to ISO 8859-1. A simple mistake,
one that I make myself from time to time. But I usually see this kind of error and correct
it before anybody else sees it. This example is the third day that they have been sending
this breakage. It's not a minor issue, and it's not limited to pronunciation; it seriously
impairs readability:
1897 Westm. Gaz. 23 June 2/2You drink in the picture.‥ This, you involuntarily
cry, ‘This is the champagne of the century!’
It also doesn't fit in the category of errors that don't get detected on Microsoft due to
some bug in their software: “Internet Explorer” renders it in exactly the same
way. How can a big company with a reputation for accuracy allow this sort of thing to
happen? But it's clearly the way of the future. They've removed all the images for the old
pages, so now I can no longer read the pronunciation for the older pages I haven't read yet.
It's been nearly a month since I cancelled
Telstra BigPond's network
“service”, and I have been meaning to change to their business service. I
haven't done so: the problems I had with BigPond have so completely drained me that I've put
up with this appalling SkyMesh service.
Not that it's good: it's getting worse all the time. I have the distinct impression that
they have put somebody else on the same channel as me (cancelled the “Special Class of
Service”), as they call it. The terrible implementation of their satellite protocols
means that any reconnection can potentially disconnect somebody else, and I'm seeing
something similar: when I start a larger data upload, for example syncing my photos to the
external web site, I regularly get disconnected after about 30 seconds. After reconnection,
things can run well for a while, probably because the other station has chosen a different
channel. But it's all so difficult to determine, since the other problems are still there.
How many disconnects do I get? I don't know. I originally wrote my tracking software for
ADSL lines, and there it was reasonably accurate. On the satellite, I regularly get
dropouts that are so short that I don't register them. But so far this month there have
been 29 outages long enough to measure:
Date Outages Duration Availability Date
(seconds)
1291122000 10 1007 98.83% # 1 December 2010
1291208400 8 1030 98.81% # 2 December 2010
1291294800 11 1181 98.63% # 3 December 2010
I should really do something about this.
In passing, it's interesting to note that even with the antenna, I still can't get any
signal at all with the 3G21WB that
they haven't asked me to return. It's possible, of course, that I have received two
non-functional units, but that doesn't sound overly likely.
Yesterday's weather was strange enough to comment on, both the heavy rain in the afternoon
and the sudden plunge in temperature. We had pretty much the same thing today: not as much
rain, but an even steeper plunge, from 30.5° to 16.2° in less than two hours:
The considerably higher temperature also made work in the garden less pleasant, and didn't
do very much. Finished tidying away the Arums and planted Pelargoniums there, as planned.
Talking on IRC about when we started using UNIX today. In my case, I got my first desktop
UNIX system (Interactive UNIX System V/386) in May 1990, when I was manager of Tandem Computers' European UNIX
Technical Support. When I left Tandem, I switched to BSDI BSD/386, which I got as beta. For the
first few days, I put in beta test reports, as I had been used to do, but it became clear
that that wasn't the way people in BSD land did it, so I stopped. But I still have the
reports, and today I formatted them for the web and put them up as my diary entry for
March 1992.
Then it dawned on me: with horizontal orientation I have the nodal point of the lens on the
rotational axis of the pan head, but when I mount it vertically, the pivot point is 1.5 cm
further back. I make up for that by moving the focusing rail forward 1.5 cm, but that only
works when the lens axis is horizontal. I do this panorama in two rows, and the vertical
rotation is round the wrong horizontal axis, so I get parallax again. The following photos
show the principle, though the camera is mounted the other way round here, 1.5 cm further
forward:
Today the weather forecast predicted rain and storms, so of course it was bright sunshine
all day, and once again very warm, with a top of 32.9°. That created more than usual
problems with contrast, so for one of the panoramas I took a full 5 EV sweep (5 exposures
for each view, 1 EV apart). That had one obvious problem: how do I tell my processing
software what to do with these 72 images? I have basically two description files. The
first, makejpeg, is simply a list of source file names and the names they should
get:
The other two values are rotation and gamma correction, something that I no longer do at
this point. That gets put through a script imgconvert that creates the files. In
the case of HDR photos, the names contain the EV offset, as shown above.
Creating that list is enough fun in itself. Under normal circumstances I use an interactive
script that prompts me for the names, but that doesn't work for the house photos. Today I
had a total of 269 images requiring processing. Clearly I need a script to generate
the makejpeg file. That takes another input file, housephoto-notes, with the
names of the individual files and not much else:
#### verandah (36 base images)
# From irrigation distribution to S side of door of 10
# 1 to-verandah-a+0EV
-
1 to-verandah-a+1EV
1 to-verandah-a-1EV
# 1 to-verandah-b+0EV
-
This describes which photos to convert and which to skip (the lines starting with -). It
also serves as notes to me about what to do. The initial digit is no longer used. I have
written some Emacs macros which will generate a sequence of these names. The problem
is that the sequences are fairly rigid, and the generated text is difficult to read. Today
I needed something like:
I could have done this with another Emacs macro, but it's getting tiring. Instead,
wrote a short PHP script that I had hoped would generate a makejpeg file, but that
required accessing the source files, and I didn't want to wait with the processing, so
instead I got it to generate a housephoto-notes file. The input to this script
(mkmakejpeg.php) is much more concise:
This specifies the base name of the photos, the number of views, and which of the views are
to be used (marked with *). Thus in the first panorama, all images of each view
are used, in the second panorama just the first, second and fifth image, and in the third
the second and third image.
So was it worth it? It's difficult to say. Here's the panorama done with -1 EV, +1 EV and
+3 EV, followed by the one taken with the other two images (0 EV and +2 EV):
It's been like that for three months now. That's absolutely extraordinary. The previous
highest level of fill was on 10 November 2007 after some particularly
heavy rain. That didn't last, and it wasn't nearly as full as on 4 September 2010:
Since then I've changed the view: the location from which I took these images has been under
water for that time, and the panorama looks more interesting. The new viewpoint is on the
rise to the left of the dam in the old photos, and the old viewpoint is at the extreme rear
right of the panorama:
On the first Saturday of each month I take some additional photos that I don't do on the
other weekends. The newest is the ex-“cathedral”, for which we're hoping great things. At the moment, though, I only
have two images; the first was taken four weeks ago, and the second now. They show one
thing: how much the weeds have taken over in that time.
A couple of birches and the Araucaria bidwillii had disappeared below the weeds, and despite the weather I dug
them out. Fortunately they were none the worse for the experience. I'll do the rest when
it isn't so hot.
Today wasn't as hot as yesterday, but still too warm for much work outside, so spent some
time updating my house photo display pages,
which are in a bit of a mess. In particular, I've changed a number of views of the garden
in the course of time. What do I do? Do I destroy continuity and rename the photos, or do
I destroy the view and give the new one the same name as the old? Either way it's a
problem. So in the past I have done it both ways, depending on the view.
The very oldest view of the house is north-east from the verandah in front of the lounge
room, looking at what is now the south side of the verandah. Things have changed greatly in
the last 3 years. Here the first photo, taken on 19 October 2007 and
the one taken yesterday:
The first photo is exactly the same viewpoint as the first of the previous two photos.
Was that the right thing to do? Or should I have renamed it? That, too, has changed beyond
recognition, but the new panorama seemed sufficiently different from the old that I chose to
keep the old one as well, and gave the new one another name. Here the images from
11 September 2010 and 18 September 2010:
That proved not to be the way I wanted to do things, and I modified the panorama to leave
out the left-hand part, which is yet another view, so now the first and last photos in the
series look like this:
Once again, the first photo above is exactly the same viewpoint as the first photo in the
previous pair.
That required a surprising amount of juggling, not without mistakes, and in the end I had to
rebuild the entire house photo series. To my subsequent surprise, it's even bigger than I
thought. I currently have 106,916 files in my photo pages (31,616 MB), of which 105,767
(31,459 MB) are taken on days with house photos, fully 99.5% of the space. Some of the
photos on those days are not house photos, but the proportion is still much larger than I
thought. Rebuilding the photos took all afternoon, and I can see that there's still work to
do.
Looked out the window while showering this morning and saw our Strelitzia reginae almost ready
to flower. Got dressed and out with my camera, but it was too late: it had already started
to open, and within an hour or two it was completely open. Here photos taken over a period
of 100 minutes:
I assume that this is a slightly different cultivar.
Not all things are that positive. Two years ago Diane Saunders gave me a Leucospermum cross between Leucospermum
conocarpodendron and Leucospermum galbrium with the rather silly name “Mardi gras ribbons”, which has been
happily growing and flowering every spring. For some reason, I never took any photos of it,
but here are a couple of excerpts from other photos, the first taken on 19 October 2008 and the other almost exactly this time last year:
After some consideration, there are a number of possibilities:
The heavy rain of the last few months might have been too much for the plant, which
prefers the dry.
It could have got too much phosphorus, which is poisonous to proteas. Possibly the
heavy rain has leached out fertilizer from the Buddlejas next to it.
Possibly something else in the soil, like parasites, was responsible
All of these issues have one obvious potential solution: remove the plant from the soil,
clean the roots and plant it elsewhere. That's what I did:
That was the largest pot I have, and I couldn't get it in straight because of the roots,
which seem to want to radiate out. It can't stay there long, but maybe we'll be able to
stop it dying.
After transplantation, saw something that points towards solution 1. After an hour, the
water I used to wash the roots off had still not run off:
My satellite network connection continues to be appallingly bad. Today I had 19 dropouts
that my monitor scripts detected; I suspect that the real number is double that:
Date Outages Duration Availability Date
(seconds)
1291554000 19 1446 98.33% # 6 December 2010
That's only part of the story. Of the 1367 entries in my log files for today, 143 showed
reduced connectivity. That may look like 10.5%, but in fact it's even worse. Normally the
entries are one minute apart, which should have given 1440 entries. Because of timeouts,
the time between entries with reduced connectivity increases. Probably the easiest way to
look at it is to say that there were only 1224 good entries where there should have been
1440, so the real time with reduced connectivity is round 15%.
Almost every time this happens, BST ensures that I
drop all my TCP links. So maybe it would be easier just to disable BST. Tried that and
yes, it worked, at least for the shorter dropouts. But of course it slows
things down, and though according to my scripts the longest outage was “only”
124 seconds, the connectivity during some of these periods was so slow that TCP connections
timed out anyway:
--- www.lemis.com ping statistics ---
98 packets transmitted, 22 packets received, 77.6% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 653.357/1036.120/1822.073/327.561 ms
It's becoming clear that there are two different kinds of dropout: the messy ones with
reduced connectivity over periods of time up to 15 minutes, and the fairly clear two-minute
variety. While watching the web display for one of the latter, I found the message
“Logging Out”. Why does a modem log out? Clearly it's seeing some kind of
problem, but it's not saying.
Another message to Paul Rees. Maybe they have some other issue which they're not going to
blame on my modem.
Also set to putting up some shade cloth in the area north of the verandah, but ran into
problems: we needed two brackets and two screws, and it really didn't make any sense to work
around them. So in the end we only put in a post, though the geometry of the construction
kept us busy: we have unusual angles in two different directions.
The last photo shows one of them on the handle of the sliding door to a verandah, and that
they're only about a centimetre long. No idea how it got there.
From midnight on 1 December until 18:00 yesterday I had 72 satellite dropouts, an average of
one every 31 minutes. At 17:54 I sent a message to Paul Rees asking him to do something. I
didn't get a reply, and by 18:20 I had had another two dropouts.
But that was all. The connection looks better (none of the flakiness that accompanies the
“messy” dropouts). And no further dropouts. Well, not until 16:13 today. Then
I had one completely atypical dropout: neither short nor messy. 17 minutes, and just as I
was firing up pain to find out what it thought was going on, it came back.
What's that? My guess is that the fix yesterday was to put me back onto a clear channel,
and today they updated firmware, typically without warning. Unfortunately I don't have any
record of what I had before, but this is what I have now:
I'll wait a while to see how things progress. In the past I've seen a similar sudden
improvement after a complaint, though on that occasion Paul said that they hadn't done
anything. Should I believe him?
Tony of Ballarat Water Tank Cleaning along this morning to clean out the water tanks. He
had some trouble starting his “self-priming” water pump: it seems it only
self-primes if it has some residual water in it. He had cleaned it out yesterday, so there
was no water in it at all.
Based on my previous experience, I had expected to
collect a lot of solid gunge from the tank, and had brought along some baskets for the
purpose, but in fact it was all quite finely divided, so we just pumped it out onto the
ground:
I don't think I like that very much, but the batteries charged well enough. Now I have
three new batteries, and it'll be a while before I can discharge and recharge them all once,
let alone the twice that I think I need to do to confirm that they're OK.
I was quite puzzled at first, but it seems to be normal: Sarracenias have both flowers and
pitcher traps. The Wikipedia
page has some nice photos that correspond well to my plant. About the only thing is
that it happened so late; according to the page, the flowers bloom in early spring, and last
year the pitchers were well developed in mid-November.
We're back to heavy winds again, which have damaged some of the tomatoes, defoliated some of
the roses, and generally made life unpleasant. Did some weeding, but that was about all.
The story of Julian Assange and Wikileaks has been
pretty much the top of the news lately, so when I got a phone call from Andrew Crook of
Crikey. I thought he wanted to ask my
opinion. But no, it seems I had a connection to Julian: at the hearing after his arrest, he
gave his address as 177 Grattan Street, Parkville (Melbourne). In fact, it's in Carlton, and that's
where I lived as a child.
Of course, the time difference makes any connection via the house impossible. We moved out
12 years before Julian was born. But after getting another call from Reid Sexton of
The Age, I went checking. After all, he did
have some computer connections.
To my surprise, it seems that Julian is a BSD person, and that he was quite active on the FreeBSD and (especially) NetBSD mailing lists up to about 10 years ago. I even had
an invitation to meet up in Melbourne on 20 October 2000, but
unfortunately I was in the USA at the time.
He's well-known elsewhere, including in the Linux world, where I heard of nntpcache, which is also in the
FreeBSD Ports Collection and NetBSD pkgsrc, though the collected messages I have
suggest that he was more of an advocate than a coder.
It seems that Julian doesn't have much time for Linux, to judge by some of the comments in
the NetBSD fortune datfiles:
%
NetBSD - free yourself from all Stallmanist thought!
-- Julian Assange
%
NetBSD - the cathedral versus the bizarre.
-- Julian Assange
%
NetBSD - the power to swerve (penguins, worse than cane toads).
-- Julian Assange
I'm really quite surprised that none of us knew of this earlier.
It seems that yesterday's improvement in my satellite connection was only temporary. Today
things were nearly as bad as they have been all month:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttypl) ~/public_html 83 -> ping www PING www.lemis.com (203.10.76.45): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=13 ttl=55 time=852.591 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=26 ttl=55 time=867.098 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=40 ttl=55 time=2425.866 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=41 ttl=55 time=5535.110 ms
^C
--- www.lemis.com ping statistics ---
59 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 93.2% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 852.591/2420.166/5535.110/1908.679 ms
That's the entire ping output for a minute. And then the modem logged off. I suppose that
could indicate a link issue. But I still have no response from Paul Rees. This whole thing
makes me so angry that I can't get round to doing anything about it.
More investigation of the sick Leucospermum today, and found a reference to propagation:
in a mix of bark and polystyrene foam! That's the sort of thing you use to propagate
orchids. No wonder the soggy ground made it unhappy. I don't have the bark and polystyrene
foam, but I do have a quantity of Sphagnum moss, and now seems to be the time to plant them, so cut off four stems and
put them in moss:
A root pathogen, Phytophthora, is detrimental to the Proteaceae. Symptoms include the
plant looking wilted and dry, followed by yellowing and death. As these symptoms are only
seen once the fungus has damaged the plant, the best course of action is to remove the
infected plant and burn it.
That doesn't look encouraging. But I've done the work now, so I'll observe what happens.
Another plant that is looking less than happy is the Abutilon that I propagated last year. It
(barely) survived being planted in the ground some months ago (I think slugs were getting at
it), but it picked up noticeably when I put it back in a pot in the greenhouse. But now the
leaves are curling up:
What's that? It could be a parasite, a fungus or a virus. I couldn't see much with the
naked eye, so took some photos that didn't reveal anything much:
There are a couple of spots there that could conceivably be insects, but I can't imagine
that there's enough to make the leaves shrivel like that. Fungus? Let's hope so; a virus
could be fatal.
The moist weather continues, though it's not as bad as had been forecast. But the result is
not just lots of weeds, but lots of growth. The stairs to the southern entrance of the
house (which we don't use) had completely disappeared under Gazanias and Pelargoniums. Spent some time cutting
them free again today, and ended up with about a wheelbarrow full of cuttings. Somehow I
should be able to do something with them. If I put the Gazanias on the compost heap,
they'll probably take root.
Off to Geelong today to have my
teeth looked at. All OK, but what a long way to go.
On the way home, picked up some local mussels, looked for a cheap petrol station, and off to
Bunnings to buy some hardware, all in the
greater Geelong area. It took me over an hour to get to Bunnings, not made any easier by
the way my GPS navigator changed its mind in mid-travel.
Grattan Street, Carlton: Spiritual home of Wikileaks?
The press people who contacted me yesterday wrote their stories. Crikey preferred to make it available to only
registered users (though this is free). That's somewhat at odds with the fact that they
published a photo of mine without permission (though admittedly with attribution). The
article contains a copy of this photo (and not a link to it, which I would have
considered legitimate):
In any case, the article mentions me, and even gets my job description (“A retired
Linux computer hacker”), though it claimed I had lived there since the early 1950s (I
didn't arrive there until September 1957).
The Age also had an article with their own photo taken from almost exactly the same viewpoint:
I'm pleased to note that mine looks letter. The article had the interesting title
“Leaks began in student terrace house”. That's an interesting concept; it could
even be true. Wouldn't that be amusing? For me, Grattan Street saw the arising of another
concept, at least for 9-year-old Greg: I started learning about chemistry and electronics,
and those short 17 months defined much of what I would do in later life.
The report also included part of our discussion. I had gone to some trouble to explain to
the reporter, Reid Sexton, what a hacker is, but it seems
the concept was too complicated for him. He went on to write:
He [Greg Lehey] said he had never met Mr Assange
despite their both having backgrounds in computing, but said he would have liked to.
''I wish I had of - I would have loved to have some involvement,'' he said.
''I think he's done some things well.
''I think he's going to do more [about] changing the way we talk about sharing information
than anybody else. But I think he's doing it too far.''
That's a fair paraphrase of what I said, except for the choice of words. “I wish I
had of” indeed. I wonder if he misheard (I'm sure they record these conversations;
they'd be crazy not to). I can't work out what he could have misheard like that, though.
And “I think he's doing it too far” was definitely “I think he's doing it
too fast”.
But that's my opinion, all right. Sometimes I think that this current situation may change
the world even more than online commerce. We're living in interesting times.
Still no reply from Paul Rees about my satellite problems, so sent a reminder. In response,
got a bounce of a mail delivery report:
<skymess@lemis.com>: delivery via spamfilter: delivered via spamfilter service
And indeed, so it did, and SpamAssassin had a field day with his message, including the
bounced copy. And he replied in extreme detail, about everything except what I was asking
for. The funniest, though, was this point, which I have reformatted the way he should have
answered in the first place:
> I would still like to hear a technical justification for this "cable
> isolation".
The practical justification is that if you don't do it, IPSTAR will
not progress the trouble ticket any further and we can't help you any
further.
> The last time a techie told me is was to "let the electrons drain
> out", and that report has caused much mirth amongst my networking
> colleagues. It also makes me greatly doubt the technical competence
> of anybody who comes up with such a ridiculous idea.
While I have no basis for a judgement on the technical competence of
you or your networking colleagues, static electricity (still involving
electrons) can build up in the cables (essentially long thin
capacitors) and in the capacitors in the modem due to wind passing
over the plastic (or metal) dish and it can upset the delicate balance
of the modem.
IPSTAR claims that static electricity can cause problems and they say
that if you disconnect the cables the capacitors in the modem
discharge over half an hour or so. When the cables are reconnected
the static goes. That explanation came to IPSTAR from the
manufacturers of the ODU and the designers of the modem and it's been
proven to work. They have qualifications to back up their claims. We
have had customers who refused to disconnect the cables when asked to
do so, or said they did when they didn't, because they didn't believe
that it made any difference. Unfortunately IPSTAR can detect when the
cables are disconnected and simply refuse to progress the ticket until
it's done.
What unmitigated nonsense! It's difficult to know where to start to tear it apart, but
let's try:
“In the capacitors it can upset the delicate balance of the modem”. I can
just see the poor thing crying its eyes out. In fact, a static charge doesn't have any
effect on the line if it's isolated by a capacitor. If there's also a resistor across
the inputs, as most devices have, it can't build up in the first place. And this modem
has a resistance of about 440Ω across each of the cables, apparently combined with an
electrolytic capacitor, so there's no way for any charge to build up.
The quickest way to remove a static charge in a cable is to short-circuit the two
conductors. It's immediate.
The best way to maintain a static charge is to ensure the maximum resistance between the
two conductors. In the context of the modem, this would mean disconnecting the cables
from the modem so that the modem input circuitry can't drain them. Disconnecting the
cables is worse than useless against such a problem.
“It's been proven to work”. Yes, I've seen their “proofs”.
Even now, Paul is claiming that IPStar have “proven” that the modem is
defective.
“IPStar can detect when the cables are disconnected”. With a divining rod,
no doubt. If the modem is powered down, they can't detect anything at all.
I am completely amazed at this stupidity. But these are people with
“qualifications”. Maybe bought from spammers?
About the only thing that Paul said that was of use is that I'm coming up to 3 years with
the service. After that, I can sign up for the Australian Broadband
Guarantee again. That would at the very least replace the modem for free, but at the
same time I could try a different satellite. But what choice do I have in rotten apples?
Woke up in the middle of the night with a horrible recognition: I had bought 3 joist hangers
for the shade cloth frame, as CJ had told me. But since then we had changed our plan, and
we needed 4.
CJ came early, with Sue, and while getting the tools together I found a joist hanger of the
correct width, though a little longer. That was OK: we cut the edges off to the appropriate
size and we had everything in place.
We finally got the joists up, but how do we attach the shade cloth? I'm particularly
concerned about it tearing, and it's not clear what we can use, though I'm tending towards
nailing some kind of strip on it. One way or another, we don't have the parts, so I'll have
to think about it more.
Sue thinks it's a native, but she can't say what. It's a good thing it flowered; it was in
the middle of a clump of grass, and the stem also looks like grass. To be investigated.
The other flowers on the Strelitzia reginae are ripening nicely, and the first one is looking a little tatty
already. Or is it? It seems to have got a new lease of life:
It appears to be two flowers in one: the old part has lifted up and is visibly tatty, and
the new part looks the same as the old one. That probably explains the discrepancy I
noticed between my flower and the photo in the Wikipedia
article: on on Monday:
House photo day today, in a bit of a hurry before bad weather arrived. Finally got round to
drilling a hole in the correct place on my L bracket so that the verandah photos would join
properly. Did it work? I don't know. As a result of the new position, I can no longer
tilt the camera as high as before: the body touches the edge of the bracket. The result,
comparing last week and this week:
I can now tilt further down (previously the edge of the tripod got in the way), but I can't
tilt up as much. And the issues were with the area at the top which now no longer appears.
But even so there are a couple of minor jaggies at the top right, which suggests that I
still don't have it right. More playing around to do.
People have been saying for some time that modern CPUs have more power than people need.
But certainly multimedia has proven that wrong. Today I measured some of the times I needed
for processing my house photos:
Stage
real
user
system
time
time
time
Image conversion
5:18.069
16:16.446
1:22.720
HDR, panorama
122:14.454
281:6.479
5:38.739
Optimization
2:32.024
3:6.285
0:15.384
Web pages
1:0.700
2:20.060
0:15.496
131:5.247
302:49.27
7:32.339
Total
That's over 5 hours of CPU time, and it's not even everything I did. Without a
multiprocessor system it would have taken much longer. No wonder I don't get much else done
on Saturdays.
Chris Yeardley over for dinner, as on most Saturdays, and we had lots of things to bake, so
we did some in our old toaster oven. In the middle of it all, heard UPSs screaming in the
computer room, and discovered that the circuit breaker had thrown. It worked OK when I
turned it on again, and it wasn't until later that we discovered that the toaster oven
wasn't heating. They're on the same circuit, so it seems that one of the elements had burnt
out, taking the circuit breaker with it. And that when we had been talking about replacing
it anyway couple of days ago, since ALDI had
them on special. Hopefully they haven't sold out yet.
One of the biggest problems we have with foodstuffs in Australia is the lack of cold-smoked
(or even hot-smoked) food, and I've been meaning to try doing it myself some time. So when
a couple of weeks ago ALDI had a smoke oven
(their description) on offer, we bought one. It proved to be damaged, but I (finally) found
the well-hidden instructions, which told me to use mesquite or hickory chips, and definitely
no pine.
Yvonne exchanged the oven, but where do you get mesquite or
hickory here? My guess is that you don't, but there must be something else you can get.
I've tried the library catalogues, but it's a pain to work through the titles, since most of
them relate to smoking nicotine, not food. As a result, though, I didn't get round to
unpacking the new oven until today. At least it's not dented.
Off with Yvonne and Nemo to the German Shepherd Dog Club of Victoria training and subsequent Christmas dinner. Yvonne has been going to training regularly,
but I stopped going months ago, and only came today because of the Christmas dinner.
Dropped Yvonne at the training ground and back to ALDI to pick up a new toaster oven. Then on to Gays looking for wood chips for the smoker and a sharpening stone for the garden secateurs.
Found some red gum chips, but are they suitable? They're intended as mulch, of course.
I'll need to read up on that one. The stone was non-trivial too—the sales assistant
who helped me didn't know what I needed, but I got what I think I need.
Then on to Formosa Gardens to
look around, and found some pretty looking Leucospermums—I think I'm going
to have to accept that mine is dead—and also some white Alstroemerias which looked quite
pretty.
Back to dog training, and today they did some “new” training, but in fact it was
the sort of thing that he did during puppy training:
I wonder where the money comes from for this sort of thing. We had to pay $3 per person,
but that can't cover it, and it can't come from membership fees. I wonder if the sponsors
might have something to do with it.
In next month's Gardening Australia magazine there was a catalogue of interesting-looking bulbs from
people I have never heard of, Lambley Nursery. The phone number looked familiar, so I had checked and found they're just north of
Ballarat. After lunch, set off
to take a look.
It's really quite depressing: it's not just a nursery, also a very nice water-wise garden,
which looks so much better than what we have achieved that I don't know how we could catch
up. Took a number of photos to ponder about:
Then back to Ballarat and Formosa Gardens, where Yvonne decided she didn't like the
Leucospermums very much, so we didn't buy any. She did like the Alstroemerias, though,
so we bought one of those (Alstroemeria stapricamil “Camilla”), and also a
Passiflora edulis (passion fruit) “Black pearl”, which they say is suited to greenhouse culture:
For once in a while, got round to planting nearly everything we bought yesterday; the only
exception was the passion fruit, which will need more preparation. Put the Alstroemeria in front of the verandah,
behind where the pond will one day be:
When it's done, we should have white just about all over the foreground, with mauve plants
behind.
Spent quite some time considering the Delphinium. In the end, it went in at the left end of the bed south of the verandah,
where it's currently barely visible:
Yvonne wasn't to be outdone: her office window looks out to
the south, and onto an overgrown bed. Today she tried to remove most of the content. She
got about a third out, overfilling the wheelbarrow. And then it occurred to us that the
compost heap is full too. I'll have to move some of the oldest compost to start a new bay
before we continue.
I've been exchanging mail with Paul Rees of SkyMesh for some days now. He keeps claiming that they have done things that they
didn't, such as a complete check of the modem configuration. They intended to do
something like that months ago, but didn't. Finally he agreed to do “Level 1
troubleshooting” “again”, ignoring my statement that it hadn't been done
yet. And today I got a call from William at SkyMesh to look at my problems. He asked if I
had “little silver boxes” about the size of a matchbox on the cables (these
proved to be attenuators); I didn't. Then he switched me to a secondary beam. And that was
that. I should observe the connection for a few days and get back to him if there were
still problems. I didn't need to wait that long; in the following 4 hours I got 6
dropouts. In other words, no noticeable change.
Mail message from Paul Rees this morning. He has found a solution for the satellite
problems, at least from his perspective: he has terminated my satellite contract. I don't know whether to be happy or sad; at least
it means that I'm going to have to do something if I want continued access to the Internet.
It also annoyed me by making incorrect claims,
that I wanted to move to another provider.
Called up the Department of
“Broadband”, Communications and the Digital Economy and spoke to Sarah,
who was rather surprised by their actions, but said that there was nothing that the DBCDE
could do about it, and that the TIO was
responsible for that sort of thing. She did confirm, however, that I would probably be
eligible for new equipment when my current 3 years are up (on 20 December 2010), and she also came up with the interesting information that Aussie Broadband has a WiMAX service that is supposed to cover my
area. Called them up and spoke to Carly, who told me that they had towers at Mount Warrenheip and Mount Emu. They went and did a check and
came to the conclusion that due to the lie of the land and the distance, I would be unlikely
to get coverage. Damn. The prices and speeds really look comparable to ADSL.
Returned to investigate Telstra
Business wireless connection, and discovered a little condition on all tariffs:
Customers with 13 digit account numbers are not eligible for this offer.
This seems to be a particularly stupid way of saying “Only applicable to registered
businesses”. My private phone bill does indeed have a 13 digit account number. Took
a look at the online order form, and one of the required fields is “Telstra Account
Number”. What kind of nonsense is that? They also require a company name and
ABN, which I
suppose makes sense, but this sounds like “if you're not a customer, you can't become
a customer”. I suppose I could register the account in the name of LEMIS, but I don't really feel comfortable with that.
It was particularly warm today, and there was almost no wind, ideal weather for spraying
weeds. I didn't really want to: the straps on the spray unit backpack are particularly
uncomfortable. But this kind of weather is so seldom that I didn't really have a choice.
Also did a little playing around with the weed burner I bought last month. It might be good
for stuff like grass growing between other plants, where I can't spray, and where it's
difficult to pull them out. The grass seemed to react well; we'll see.
Also got around to pruning our Westringia, which has been encroaching on the Strelitzia:
The issue with this kind of shrub is that little information is available on how to prune
it. It's pretty bare inside, so I only cut it back a little, but it should be enough to
free up the Strelitzias.
Had another power failure in the
middle of the night. They're particularly irritating, because they mean I need to wake up
enough to reset the alarm clock.
We've been talking about a mobile phone tower for
Dereel for years now, and it's one
of the main topics on Scott Weston's http://www.dereel.com.au/ website. Nothing much is happening, but he's not taking it sitting down. Today I got a
flyer in the letter box asking me to go to http://www.dereel.com.au/tower-support and register my support for the
installation of a phone tower. I wonder if this will make the necessary difference.
I still haven't accepted SkyMesh's notice
of termination, but it's clear I need to do something, especially as the connection is so
terrible. Yesterday I had 22 detected disconnections, the worst ever, and in the first two
weeks of the month it has was 172. And that's only part of the story; in the course of
today I had 144 IRC reconnects, each indicating some issue with the connection.
While looking at the phone tower
page, found a link to Scott's How to get wireless broadband in out the sticks, where he describes pretty much what
I had been planning to do. But he's done it, he has found the correct hardware, and he had
proven that it works here. Did some investigation: as he says, Virgin Mobile offers 8
GB traffic (measured in both directions) for $39. I'm currently paying SkyMesh $69 for 6 GB
download only. For $59, I could get 12 GB from Virgin Mobile, clearly more than I get from
SkyMesh even factoring in the not insubstantial uplink traffic.
What about performance? Scott's page shows the result of a test with speedtest.net, showing adequate speed. In fact, the
downlink speed is slower than my satellite connection (first image), and the latency isn't
spectacular, but it's much better:
But Virgin? Don't they have a terrible reputation? According to their page, APC magazine gave them the “Editor's choice”,
so they can't be that bad. But it was enough reason to go looking, and found that
Internode also offer 3G service using the
same wireless network but their own backhaul. And for $39.95, I get 9 GB instead of 8.
They also confirm that I can get the service, and that it's 2100 MHz (important because of
my equipment):
That's pretty much a no-brainer. Internode may not be as good as they were in the
good old days, when they were a small operation in
York St, but they're miles better than anything else I know. Started to sign up, not
helped much by typical stupid web programming:
Called up the phone sales people, but the consultant said that due to “security”
reasons they required payment by credit card. She couldn't tell me (or didn't want to
understand) why this requirement isn't stated up front: effectively it means that the
monthly charge isn't $39.95, it's $40.94. Internode may be good technically, but this isn't
the first time I've seen the bean counters behave like other companies. Still, there's no
choice, so I signed up anyway and sent a message to Simon expressing my concerns.
The first of our 6 Strelitzia reginae flowers is gradually fading, and none of the others have opened
yet. But they're developing—just completely differently from the first one. The one
next to it is already larger, but it hasn't opened yet:
At first sight I thought it was a birch, but it's clearly not that. The leaf shape proved it to be a Paulownia kawakamii, and it was
growing in the vicinity (bottom right of this photo):
It looks as if the flowers are fertile, and there's the prospect of more popping up. And we
wouldn't mind having another tree or two. But when should we transplant it? Yvonne suggested as soon as possible, before the roots sank too far into
the ground. She transplanted it into a pot, which in retrospect proved to be a mistake.
It wasn't a seedling at all, but a sucker from the parent plant, and it was joined by an
underground root nearly 1 cm thick. After severing that, the plant looks really unhappy:
Message from Paul Rees in the evening: IPStar have looked at the problem (finally!) and are tweaking some of the link parameters. The
immediate result was an increase in EsN0 from about 8.5 to 9.7. Maybe that will make the
difference.
I've been getting a lot of spam purporting to come from Yahoo!, but lately there's a difference: it really does. Have they lowered their
standards, or is some other issue in play?
A few days ago Greg Perry sent Theo de Raadt a message claiming that the US FBI had inserted back doors into the OpenBSD crypto framework (OCF). He was bound by an NDA
not to say anything for 10 years, which have now elapsed.
Huh? Can you believe this stuff? The message was intended as a private message to Theo,
but Theo chose (probably wisely) to publish it. Normally
that's not a nice thing to do, but if the software has been compromised, I tend to agree
that it's a valid reaction.
But is it true? So many things speak against it:
If any work of that nature had happened, they would have kept it as secret as possible.
Greg claims that he wasn't directly involved, so he wouldn't have been informed in the
first place.
Keeping it as secret as possible also means “forever”. No 10 year limit
here. My guess is that it would run contrary to US law (not that this is a reason to
believe it didn't happen), so they wouldn't want it ever to become public.
The OpenBSD project is renowned for its thoroughness. Theo states that none of the
crypto work was done in the USA, nor by US citizens. They examine all commits
thoroughly, and I'm sure they'd have paid particular attention to such sensitive issues.
One of the people that Greg claims did the work is Jason White, who denies any
involvement. That in itself doesn't mean anything, of course, but he gives details that
are easily checked, and I'm sure the OpenBSD people have already done so. He wasn't
involved in likely areas. He also gives timelines which suggest that Greg Perry had
already left the project when OCF was being developed.
So I don't really believe that there is a back door. There's no way to be sure, of course.
If they find one, I'm wrong. If they don't, that doesn't make me right.
I had hoped that yesterday's increase in EsN0 of the satellite link would improve the
service quality. If anything, they had the opposite effect: on Tuesday I had 22 dropouts,
the highest number ever. Today it was 27:
Date Outages Duration Availability Date
(seconds)
1291726800 9 1310 98.48% # 8 December 2010
1291813200 7 1206 98.60% # 9 December 2010
1291899600 12 1412 98.37% # 10 December 2010
1291986000 18 2363 97.27% # 11 December 2010
1292072400 12 1221 98.59% # 12 December 2010
1292158800 17 1624 98.12% # 13 December 2010
1292245200 22 2121 97.55% # 14 December 2010
1292331600 16 1722 98.01% # 15 December 2010
1292418000 27 3527 95.92% # 16 December 2010
Is that statistically relevant? The availability hasn't been below 97% in months (the
previous lowest was 97.27% on 11 December), and today it was only 95.92%, one of the lowest
of all times. If so, it would point to configuration problems, and maybe there's a way to
solve them. Chris Yeardley is also complaining loudly about her satellite service (from
IPStar directly), as did the Nottles across the
road (with active8me, but also IPStar
satellite). They wanted to monitor things for 48 hours, and maybe they'll change some
things during that time, so I won't complain yet.
My upcoming 3G connection is another issue. I told Callum Gibson about the fact that the
local tower would have a 2100 MHz connection, but he didn't believe me, and went to check
for himself on the Optus web site. Somehow he managed to mistype the street number, so we ended up with
two different statements. For our house, the PNSA 03ROKEWOOD has 2100 MHz, and
down the road it's 900 MHz:
It's difficult to guess where 03ROKEWOOD is, but in all probability it's the one in
Corindhap, assuming that it is
already in service. That would place it about 10 km south of our house. 24 Kleins Road is
almost exactly in the other direction, 250 metres away. Even if the tower handles both
frequencies, you'd expect that information to be the same for both addresses.
Called up Internode, who told me that
they couldn't give me any details about the tower, and not to worry. I explained that the
modem I had only did 2100 MHz, but that didn't seem to sink in. Spoke to the supervisor,
who was a little more understanding and went through and confirmed that he got the same
results, but suggested I should talk to Optus, since it was their information.
Did that, and was told that the software was probably correct and that I shouldn't be so
negative in assuming a bug. In any case, if I signed up with Optus I'd get a free modem
which can handle both frequencies, and there's a 14 day money-back guarantee, so what's the
problem?
Finally sent a message to Greg, the project manager who visited us two years ago. He replied saying that yes, no problem
with the info, but he's out of the office until Monday. Hopefully that will clarify things.
Yvonne finally located some wood for the smoke oven:
surprisingly unevenly chopped chunks of Hickory imported from the USA, the princely sum of $12 for 1.8 kg of it—or, as
the volume-obsessed Americans write, 360 cu. in. How can you measure something so chunky by
volume? It seems, though, that I only need one or two pieces of wood per operation, so we
can survive that.
Put the thing together without too much difficulty—the instructions are surprisingly
good, hampered only by being out of date. The quality is poor even for ALDI standards:
It was also covered in warning stickers (“Warning! Hot Surface”). Gave the
thing a dry run to remove the smell of paint, and solved the problem of the stickers:
Woken up early this morning first by the sounds of horses galloping around and then round
6:15 by one of our neighbours, whose name I forget (might be John). One of their fillies
had not only broken out of their paddock, but into ours. That explained the
galloping. He couldn't stay, had to go to work, and I promised to get it out for him when
we got up.
That didn't happen, though. The horse broke out again, and we couldn't find it. Yvonne assumes that it went back home.
As if that wasn't enough, got a call from Nele Koemle, who is agisting some of Chris
Yeardley's horses, and one of them injured itself. She, too, had to leave for work, and so
Yvonne and Chris set off for Leslie to attend to it. Fortunately it wasn't badly hurt.
And while I was doing something completely different, found a cat in the garden:
Chris Yeardley mentioned recently that she, too, would like to change to 3G for networking,
and that the Optus web
site gave her the frequency 900 MHz. This really puzzles me. Was the Optus
consultant correct when he said that the application is clever enough to give different
results for each address? The Nottles' house was number 50, so tried that. And yes, I got
yet another result:
So, like here, they are supposed to have 2100 MHz coverage. But unlike anywhere else, only
one of the three services is available. Potentially that could even be correct: if the
tower is where I think it is, we have a fairly clear view, while the Nottles have trees
immediately to that side of the house. But the effort required to collect that sort of
information would be enormous. We'll see what the truth is when I hear back from Greg.
The IPStar link continues to be terrible.
I beat even yesterday's record 27 outages: today it was 30. But there's something funny
about it: my TCP connections don't always drop. In the past any modem reboot would
automatically drop all TCP connections because of the BST protocol they wrap around it. Now
it doesn't. This suggests to me that we're looking at some different problem. Anyway, if
we can get the 3G connection working reliably, it'll all be uninteresting.
I'm looking at spam more carefully lately, blocking whole domains who don't behave. Today I
found one that surprised me:
Received: from acadianacompression.com (mail.acadianacompression.com [12.222.48.98])
by mx1.feebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 090368FC15
for <groggy@feebsd.org>; Thu, 16 Dec 2010 08:08:42 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 02:19:36 +0000
From: Admin Junk Summary <groggy@feebsd.org>
To: "groggy@feebsd.org" <groggy@feebsd.org>
Subject: Summary of junk emails blocked - 1 Junk Emails Blocked
X-Mlf-loginurl: http://192.168.115.2:10080
Junk Box Summary for: groggy@feebsd.org
The 1 emails listed below have been placed in your personal Junk Box
since your last Junk Box Summary and will be deleted after 15 days.
To retrieve any of these messages, visit your Junk Box at:
<http://192.168.115.2:10080>
Login using your standard username/password combination.
I wonder what they hope to achieve with that IP address.
House photos again today, and this time managed to mount my camera on the panorama bracket
so that I could get more of the roof of the verandah in the verandah panorama. Result:
worse than before. Here two weeks ago, and then today:
Today's panorama was clearly worse than two weeks ago. Spent some time investigating with
manual control point settings, but again didn't get much of an improvement. One thing that
became evident is that Hugin didn't
create many control points between the upper and the lower layer of the panorama. In the
process, found yet another source of potential parallax, so maybe I should rethink the whole
thing.
I'm gradually getting some information about smoking food. One of the things most people
agree on is that most smoking is done at temperatures between 110° and 120°, though in some
cases you can go as low as 60°. But I can't get any of these temperatures with the oven:
the flame is far too hot even on the “low” setting:
There's a vent at the back, but it doesn't seem to make any difference in the temperature.
So: what to do? There must be a way to reduce the flame. Most gas burners have an
adjusting screw for the “low” position, but this primitive burner doesn't.
About the only alternative I can see is to control the flow of gas to the oven on the high
pressure side. Fortunately I have an adjustable regulator, so maybe that's an option. But
of course the fittings are all wrong, so there's not much I can do there either for the
moment. I'll have to go into town on Monday and get the fittings then.
The petunias I planted yesterday showed one thing: they had been in desperate need of
planting into something bigger. The punnets are completely full of roots. We've been
planning to put them in hanging baskets—for some reason, probably snails, they don't
do well in the ground—but we didn't have enough baskets free. But then we have two
pots with wild strawberries in them, and they're looking less than happy:
So: big reshuffle. I transplanted the strawberries from one of the pots into the vegetable
garden, in the process also planting some Nicola potatoes that Yvonne had bought at ALDI, and which
she prefers to the ones we can normally get, and also some basil, two kinds of lettuce and
dill. The other pot will stay where it is until we're sure that the ones in the vegetable
garden will do better. Then I was finally able to plant the petunias. We now have three
baskets waiting for the plants to grow a bit:
The snails are a real problem this year, almost certainly because of the continuing wet
weather, and the snail bait I put out seems all to get eaten quickly. There must be
hundreds of them out there somewhere.
Chris Yeardley had a birthday a couple of days ago, so for tonight we cooked a paella valenciana. One of the things that
most paella recipes get wrong are the quantities of saffron. Most English language recipes
require “a pinch or two” or and one just writes “saffron”.
“The Joy of Cooking states “a small quantity, or up to two teaspoons if you are Spanish”. The
only one I found with a specific quantity was Bonniers Kokbok, which specifies 0.5 g saffron for 3 dl of rice—however much
that might be. But the quantity sounds reasonable.
It's an important consideration. Here in Australia, as in other countries I know, saffron
is sold in quantities of 0.1 g, usually in packs of 4 for about $4, but I've seen
packs of 0.1 g go for $11. My recipe
(larger than Bonniers) requires 1 g, which could cost up to $110 if you buy the expensive
version.
The problem, though: I think we didn't have enough saffron. Was it just the quality of the
saffron we were using this time, or do we need even more?
We were celebrating Chris' birthday, but somehow the discussion took on a particularly
morbid tone. Part of it was definitely the fact that Sue Blake is in hospital dying, and is
unlikely to come out alive. We've been watching her decline for over a year, since she
told us that she had
terminal cancer.
In fact, as we discovered later, she had died on the previous day.
On IRC today read a message from Juha Kupiainen suggesting that Sue Blake died yesterday.
But nothing certain. He called the hospital and was told to contact the relatives, but we
weren't able to do that by the evening. Things don't look good, though.
The satellite problems continue unabated. Today I had a new record, 32 disconnects. But as
I've been noting, there's something different about recently: it happens at specific times,
notably when I'm uploading data. Once a day (theoretically) I run rsync against my web photos, currently about
115,000 files. Today I had to run it 4 times before I got beyond this point:
building file list ...
112000 files to consider
The number counts up, but on each occasion it stopped at 112,000 files. Running
a ping -A showed that the connection effectively died, then about 20 seconds
later the modem noticed it and logged off:
The interesting thing about this image is that it still thinks that it's transferring at 110
kb/s. And I've seen that before: something in high speed
uploads causes the link to drop. I even have this in my sync scripts:
# Uncomment this if we run into problems with IPStar
# BWLIMIT='--bwlimit=20'
Time to uncomment and try again.
While looking at that, also saw another issue that looks
familiar:
... there is a possible fault with their ground stations which is causing services to
randomly disconnect thus forcing a \221log off\222 on an active connection.
Still, when I finally get a 3G connection, all this should be history.
One of the “features” that Olympus introduced some time ago were the so-called
“art filters”, a kind of in-camera processing of the images as soon as they are
taken. I've always thought the idea silly, and I've never taken any photos with the
feature, but a number of people on forums are really excited by the results, so today I
tried them out on my E-30. They don't make things easy: there's almost no documentation. Anyway, there
are 6 different filters, entitled “Pop art”, “soft focus”,
“pale&light color”, “light tone”, “grainy film” and
“pin hole”. Here are the results taking a photo of the garden. A normal image
looks like this:
The art filters make this out of them (unretouched). The first image is in fact the
identical same photo as above; the art filters are applied to the JPEG image only, and the photo above comes from
the raw image.
Watching a documentary on the history of Singapore, and once again saw an image that I
recognized. It's almost identical to a photo I took some years
ago.
But how did it get such an exact registration? The buildings in the background show that it
was taken from almost exactly the same angle. I had thought I had taken it from my hotel
room, but the continuation of the film show that it was taken from one of the lifts in the
Pan Pacific hotel; thus the
horizontal but not vertical alignment.
This spring and early summer has been amazingly cool, and today was a good example. The
maximum temperature was only 17°, but it rained much of the day, and the daytime
temperatures dropped under 10°:
Pruned the Begonia that Yvonne bought at the end of October.
They say you can propagate them easily, so put some of the canes in a pot of water to see
what happens. Yvonne did the same with some of the leaves.
One of the other Strelitzia
reginae looks like it's going to bloom soon. But the shape is very different. Is
this a double flower? The other flower had nothing resembling the right-hand part of the
new flower:
More playing around with the smoker today. Discovered that if I filled the water pan with
boiling water, it would reduce the temperature in the oven to about 115° to 120°. That's
still too warm, but good enough for some experiments. Tried smoking some beef and chicken
breast. After 1½ hours the temperature in the chicken had risen to 60°, but in the
following ½ hour it only rose to 62°. For some reason I decided to aim for 76°, so in the
end removed the water, turned up the gas and let the temperature go up to 180°, which
worked.
Certainly something that can be improved on, but for a first attempt certainly acceptable.
The temperature in the chicken had risen to 78°, which was definitely too high. Next time I
do a breast by itself, I'll aim for 70°. The beef came out at 72°, which was quite
acceptable.
Mail this morning from Mary Davies, a friend of Sue Blake. Sue died in hospital at 1:00 on
Friday morning.
What can I say? We've known that this was coming for well over a year, after she explained
her blog posting of
10 September 2009 on IRC. It was sad to see her decline, but also somehow
a privilege to experience the process. And now it's over. Should we be particularly sad
right now? I've been through this before when my father
died. It's not the moment of death that is the issue. I've updated her blog, which she wanted to live on, and Mary is going
to send me some stuff to put up there. And it's interesting to note on the side that she
beat the odds by 2,352 hours.
Mail today from Greg, the Optus project manager, addressing my concerns about the accuracy
of the coverage information on the Optus web site. Despite
what the Optus telephone consultant said, I was right to be suspicious:
The proposed site in Rokewood is not built yet, and won't be built until next year. It
will be located at Crn of Dark Lane and Reservoir Rd (I believe also known as Halls Hill
Rd) 1.6km north of Rokewood. The site will run on the 900MHz band (UMTS/3G).
And the site told me that it was serviceable and running at 2100 MHz:
He's enquiring about what went wrong, and will get back to me. One possibility is that the
PNSA is only a reference point, and that maybe I do have coverage at 2100 MHz, though the
nearest site is some distance away.
What do I do now? The USIM from Internode should have arrived today, but they decided to require a personal signature for it (for a
$10 USIM!), so I can't pick it up until tomorrow. But it looks as if I'm going to have to
buy new hardware, possibly what Scott Weston has done. At least we know that that works. But he has bought a router
that requires a separate modem, and that makes it very expensive, well over $200 for the
combination.
Europe seems to be in the grip of a particularly cold winter. The news gives reports of
heavy snowfall in the UK, France, Benelux, Germany and... Victoria. But it's summer
here! Admittedly, snow fell only in “Alpine” areas (a strange term for a state
whose highest point is 1,986
m), but it's indicative of an unusually cool summer. Today was a little better than
yesterday, but we're still getting above-average rain and well below-average temperatures.
At least we haven't seen any snow around here.
Into town today, mainly to pick up the USIM card from the post office. Also dropped into Whiteheads to get some timber for
mounting the shade cloth, and to Formosa Gardens, where in the end I only bought fertilizer.
It's fairly clear in advance that the Optus towers in the area will only deliver 900 MHz, no matter what their coverage tool says, so
while in town checked at OfficeWorks to
see what kind of 3G routers they had.
Nothing with modem, as I had almost expected, but lots of buzzwords: “Do you want 54 G
or 150 N or 300 N?” What does that mean? It seems the numbers were Mb/s, clearly
nothing to do with 3G wireless. Then it dawned on me: 802.11g and 802.11n. The sales person had never heard
of 802.11, of course; they've hidden it behind this horrible buzzword Wi-Fi. And it took me some time to find the
terms 802.11g and 802.11n on the package of one of the routers.
They didn't have any modems at all, so that killed the idea of buying one just in case and
only opening it if I needed it. On to the Optus shop in Bridge Mall, where they couldn't
sell me a router, just a USB stick. I suspect the salesperson had never heard the word
“Ethernet” before.
He suggested I went to Dick Smith, where
allegedly they had that sort of thing. All I found were USB modems and a sales person
talking at length to a pretty customer trying to choose a cover for her mobile phone, so off
without any further enlightenment.
That's the card itself in front, mounted in a credit-card sized frame. Does any compatible
equipment still use that format? There was also a single sheet of paper with configuration
details. No stupid installation software like Telstra's abomination. In any case,
took the card, put it in the router, edited APN, user name and password, and pressed
the Connect button:
21-12-2010 13:48:43 > * gr0Ogle returns with a shiny new USIM.
21-12-2010 13:49:11 > gr0Ogle: Oh.
21-12-2010 13:49:15 > gr0Ogle: Two bars signal.
21-12-2010 13:52:34 > gr0Ogle: Dec 21 13:52:02 pong-gw chat[848]: send (^M)
21-12-2010 13:52:34 > gr0Ogle: Dec 21 13:52:02 pong-gw pppd[844]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
21-12-2010 13:52:34 > gr0Ogle: Dec 21 13:52:11 pong-gw pppd[844]: Could not determine remote IP address: defaulting to 10.64.64.64
21-12-2010 13:52:34 > gr0Ogle: Dec 21 13:52:11 pong-gw pppd[844]: local IP address 59.167.1.3
21-12-2010 13:52:38 > gr0Ogle: Dec 21 13:52:11 pong-gw pppd[844]: remote IP address 10.64.64.64
21-12-2010 13:52:41 > gr0Ogle: Dec 21 13:52:11 pong-gw pppd[844]: primary DNS address 192.231.203.132
21-12-2010 13:52:44 > gr0Ogle: Dec 21 13:52:11 pong-gw pppd[844]: secondary DNS address 192.231.203.3
21-12-2010 13:52:58 > gr0Ogle: Amazing.
The whole thing took less than 4 minutes, including commentary on IRC. And I was connected!
It would be nice to say that that was the end of my problems. In fact, it was only the
start. As we had all expected, the connection was at 900 MHz, and all I got was GPRS. That gave me ping times in the
same order of magnitude as satellite—as long as I didn't try to transfer any
significant amount of data. When I did, I got things like:
21-12-2010 14:03:19 > gr0Ogle: 64 bytes from 150.101.140.197: icmp_seq=19 ttl=57 time=8608.959 ms
21-12-2010 14:03:19 > gr0Ogle: 64 bytes from 150.101.140.197: icmp_seq=20 ttl=57 time=7631.864 ms
OK, I had it connected to an 850 MHz antenna. That would help at 900 MHz, but probably not
much at 2100 MHz. Tried replacing the external antenna with the toy antenna, with the
result that I didn't get any signal at all, neither to the east of the house (which I
suspect is the direction of the 2100 MHz tower) nor to the south. So that's out. I need
new hardware.
Spent the rest of the afternoon looking for hardware. Why is it so complicated? First
there's the issue of compatibility between the modem and the router, a problem you don't
have with an integrated modem. Ran into an amazing number of problems finding good
hardware:
I couldn't find any summary of what's available. Took a look at the Broadband Choice pages on Whirlpool and found lots of
pages, all almost completely incomplete, and no overview at all. That's completely
useless for finding hardware.
Took a look on eBay and found a number of devices tagged at “3G routers”,
all with one thing in common: no 3G connectivity.
It seems that there are about 3 or 4 potential candidates in the range $50 to $100.
The TP-Link
TL-MR3220 seems to be the cheapest, and the specs are completely adequate for
what I need. There's also a model TL-MR3420 with 802.11n 300 Mb/s instead of 150
Mb/s. But the only review I could find about it was very negative, and the unit had
been sent back. It seems that the connection was very unreliable. Not the sort of
thing I want to worry about for a few dollars.
The ASUS RT-N13U, which includes a printer server. The documentation is
available online, nicely prepared, and incomplete: although the specs include 3G
modem support, they don't say how to use it. The support was added in revision B of
the machine, so hopefully it's just out of date. There are also some strangenesses:
it only has one USB port, for example, though they talk of connecting more than one
device. No mention of having to buy a hub for it. But the printer support is only
for printers from Canon, HP and Epson, none of which I have, so the printer port is
not of great interest.
The D-Link DIR-412
Wireless N 150 3G Mobile Broadband Router. It's closer to what I need, just
an Ethernet port, the obligatory 802.11n network and a USB slot for the modem. But
it's actually more expensive than the other two. It's also slower than the ASUS
device, though that's really not of interest to me.
The router is only half the question, of course. Which modem? Again, Whirlpool was
useless. I had heard that the Huawei E1762 was a good choice, but the Whirlpool
page contains almost no information.
The manufacturer's web site was no better. It gives a list of 32 devices, 20 per
page, starting with the oldest. That's certainly a case where chronological order
doesn't make any sense. All the current models are on the second page. Did I say all?
No, the E1762 isn't there at all. The links from Whirlpool are also invalid.
With some effort managed to establish that it's considerably faster than the other
model, the E160, which doesn't do HSUPA, and that there doesn't seem to be much else available.
Finally decided to go with the ASUS router and the E1762. The E1762 may not be listed on
the Huawei site, but it is listed as compatible on the ASUS site. Bought both on
eBay, and was greeted by another surprise in checkout: the listed postage of $9.95 had
suddenly become $12. Sent a message to the seller, who responded quickly with an amended
bill, conveniently requiring me to re-enter all the details that normally get filled out
automatically. Still, it's done: I have ordered a modem and router. What about an antenna?
That'll have to wait until tomorrow: it was 18:00 before I finished this stuff.
Look at that cup! It's enormous, presumably the kind of cup that people still use as
a measurement in the UK today (half a pint,
or 284 ml).
The other thing of interest is the Kenwood mixer. It's almost identical to the one I have now, 47 years later. I
suppose there's not much incentive to develop new kitchen machines any more.
Finally the weather's getting more summer-like, and this morning CJ came over to clean the
gutters (since my little accident five years ago,
Yvonne doesn't want me to climb ladders). We had also
intended to finally put up the shade cloth, and the weather was right, but somehow I was too
tied up with the networking stuff, so in the end CJ went off to make some hay.
So now I have a 3G modem and a router on their way. Yesterday I had received a mail message
from the seller of the modem, asking if I wanted a (free) USIM, and of course I replied
“yes please”. Today I got a phone call: the reply hadn't arrived. Why is
eBay such a pain? Anyway, it was nice of him
to go to the trouble to call me.
But I still need an antenna. Which? Scott Weston used a 22 dBi Yagi which cost $148.90. Or did it? I had more or less decided to buy one
when I discovered that I would need to pay at least $20.90 just for a cable (only 3 m long
and with the wrong connector) and another $16.50 for an adaptor to connect to the modem.
The 10 m cable I would need would cost $30.80—a total of $47.30 on top of the price
just for a cable!
That's not the only game in town. RFShop have a 11 dBi Yagi complete with 10 m of (correct) cable for “$74.00”, which
proves to be a price without tax, not a thing we do in Australia. So the real price is
$81.40. But that's only $34.10 more than the price of the cable alone from City Technology.
Clearly an 11 dBi antenna is not nearly as good as a 22 dBi antenna. This one has only 5
directors, while the 22 dBi one has 13. Clearly the latter is more expensive. But is it
necessary? I'm getting reception now with a rod antenna, and the little Yagi will almost
certainly be enough. If not, I can buy just the 22 dBi antenna, use the existing cable, and
be only $34 out of pocket. So I ordered one.
Where should I mount the antenna? The current position of the rod antenna isn't ideal:
It occurred to me that I have a second satellite dish on the top of the house, for some Pay
TV thing that the previous owners used. I never had any intention of using it, and it's
still there only because I saw no reason to remove it. But it has the ideal mount for a
Yagi antenna, and it's even on the correct side of the house. It's the one on the right
here, seen from the south:
As if that wasn't enough, that's my office to the left. All I need is a hole for the cable
under the eaves and I can go almost directly into the office. There's a small externally
accessible cupboard in between, but that's not a problem. Took a look inside and found a
cable without any markings, but which could be RG-58, coming out of the ceiling and going
down through the floor. At first I thought it was from the dish, but that cable runs
elsewhere. I wonder what it is.
Even with GPRS, of course, I have
one great advantage over satellite: reliability. And one of the most frustrating things
I've had has been the continual IRC reconnects. I'm running a proxy on the external mail
server, so I don't actually lose anything with the dropouts, but I've been having up to 90
reconnects a day, and the client shows me status windows, not data windows, so I have to
change windows every time. Now, though, I can set the route to the mail server via
GPRS—speed isn't important—and leave the rest to go via satellite.
How well does it work? As expected, no dropouts any more. What I didn't expect, though, is
that I didn't get any satellite dropouts either. The last one for the day was at 05:50:39.
That could suggest that the problem was with data to the mail server, but that looks
unlikely. I pull mail down every 15 minutes, and it takes about 1 minute on average. This
last one finished at 05:45:38, well before the dropout. So I suppose it's only a
coincidence. And the lack of reporting of the problems is only a partial indication: I had
several dropouts on an ssh connection during the course of the day.
My hardware is starting to arrive: this morning I found a Huawei E1762 USB modem in the
letter box, clearly less voluminously packed than the USIM card the other day. There's not
much I can do with it until I have the antenna, which is unlikely to arrive this week, so
I'll have to wait for it at least until Wednesday. But that doesn't mean I can't play with
it.
Documentation? What's that? There's a 16 page booklet with precious little information, a
diagram showing the orifices on one page and a description of them over the page. But it's
another device with an ISO 9660 CD-ROM image on it, and even Apple complained with many
instances of this in the log:
SAM Multimedia: READ or WRITE failed, ASC = 0x20, ASCQ = 0x00
It proved that the image contained 15 MB of files. I don't know what they are, but
none of them are documentation. I know from others that this thing has AT-style
modem commands. But where's the documentation? It seems that you have to reverse engineer
things to get any information at all.
I installed the software on boskoop, my Apple. Not surprisingly, I couldn't get it
to work. I had a new USIM card, but I don't want to activate it now, and it looks as if I
don't have any signal anyway. But why are these toy “Applications” so
primitive? Modern routers have web servers that present most of the information you want,
not necessarily as well as I'd like, but an order of magnitude better than these toys.
More investigation of the satellite connection. It really is better than it has been, but
not as good as I had thought. My scripts only register an outage when I can't access any of
the 5 systems in my list. And one of them is w3.lemis.com, which I'm accessing via
GPRS. Thus no outage reports at all after I set up the link.
But even when I corrected the information, there were fewer outages than before:
Date Outages Duration Availability Date
(seconds)
1292677200 32 3056 96.46% # 19 December 2010
1292763600 23 1598 98.15% # 20 December 2010
1292850000 16 1628 98.12% # 21 December 2010
1292936400 7 459 99.47% # 22 December 2010
1293022800 7 626 99.28% # 23 December 2010
Why? Who cares. Let's get this 3G thing flying, and forget the satellite.
Mail from Scott Weston, who had been travelling. Most of my questions have been overtaken
by events, but he did manage to point me at a web
site with a graphical representation of the towers in the area. It's particularly
difficult to interface to, but I was able to establish where the “local” towers
are. The closest one with 2100 MHz is apparently in Ballarat. More likely towers are located
in Cressy (presumably
the one Scott uses) and Willowvale, both in a direction accessible from my mast. For places
like Ballarat I'd need to raise it considerably.
Somehow this networking stuff is keeping me preoccupied, and I haven't been doing much
else—not even photography. The garden is in almost its usual state of neglect, but I
did get round to attacking some weeds, and it's even visible.
Which mobile tower gives best connectivity? Spent some time looking at the Spench web site looking for local ones, and far too
much time trying to enter them on a Google map, not helped by the fact that the thing always looked for the closest road.
To be finished.
Note in the letterbox this morning that I had a packet to be picked up at the post office.
That could only be the ASUS RT-N13U
router. Was it worth it? On the one hand, I really needed the antenna to be able to
do anything useful. On the other hand, today was Christmas Eve, and the way the feast falls
this year, we'll have Monday and Tuesday off, and I won't be able to pick anything up until
Wednesday. So I decided to pick it up anyway.
At the post office, asked on the off chance if the antenna had arrived. To my immense
surprise, it had. So it was really worthwhile: now I have all the equipment I need for the
3G connection.
On the way home, for the fun of it, went to take a look at the towers in Smythesdale and Willowvale. The first
was pretty much what I expected, but my GPS navigator had difficulty getting me to the
second one, and unfortunately I hadn't taken my long telephoto lens with me:
As near as I can tell, the Willowvale tower is built on top of a high voltage pylon. It
interesting that you don't hear much in the way of complaints about pylons (any more,
anyway), though they're much more obvious and have real dangers associated with them.
Back home and took a look at what I had. The router left a mixed impression. On the one
hand, it states on the box:
That's certainly an improvement on what Telstra do. It also includes an afterthoughtsheet of paper with
instructions on how to set the router up as a 3G router. It requires first installing on a
Microsoft box. I don't know if that's just to ensure that you can localize any problems
that may occur, but I've heard rumours that the Microsoft installation reconfigures the
stick, and that you can't use them on FreeBSD without first installing on Microsoft.
On the other hand, it comes with a “Quick Start Guide” that really contains
almost no information, not even the default IP of the box. It describes the switch on the
bottom, with positions Router, Repeater and AP, stating to make a
choice, but not describing what the positions mean. Fortunately, I've already established
that there's a good manual, but who can use the quick start guide?
The antenna came with two cables, not the one I
had expected: a normal 10 m connector with female connectors at each end, and an adaptor for
the USB stick. The female connectors are clearly of the same kind as the ones on my whip
antenna, which has a male connector, so tried to join them together. No joy: the length of
the connector is different for some reason, and though the threads are compatible, I
couldn't get them close enough together. Still, for playing around with, found a solution
to keep them together, and also supply continuity for the shield:
Installing the software from the USB stick was surprising: it was “already
there”. I can only assume that the Telstra software I installed a couple of months ago also installed software for
the Huawei, though that has nothing to do with the equipment I got. Removed the stuff and
reinstalled it, despite a flurry of popups from bottom right on the screen telling me that
it had found all sorts of strange hardware, and that it wouldn't work. Looking at the
“Control Panel” showed indeed that there were mobile devices, CD-ROMs, disks and
modems. And the detailed install dialogue showed that something like documentation must
have got installed as well. I sometimes wish I understood this Microsoft environment
better.
Finally it was installed, and I tried running it. It asked for an SP Code, as you would
expect, but that was all. No user name, no password. But what I did get was a couple of
text messages:
Where did they come from? The status light showed that there was no signal, so they
couldn't have arrived out of thin air. Were they stored there last time I tried to connect?
Are they maybe there on the device? Certainly the date of the older one is anything but
recent.
But what does this have to do with setting up connections? Was I connected? How do I find
out? The status page doesn't say anything about that; the information is encoded in some
silly undocumented icon that I've never seen before, but which after some research proved to
say “no, not connected”.
Every time I work with Microsoft-based software, I'm baffled by the non-sequiturs I find.
And how do you set the user name and password? Why does it try to connect before it's
configured? Why is this software so completely different from the software that the same
device provides for Apple?
Finally found something in the “Instructions”: you select the menu
sequence Tools, Options, then Profile Management and Edit.
There you can enter your user name and password, which it promptly swallows and pretends you
have never entered anything. This image was taken after setting user name and password:
But after that it connects, and the LED colours on the device showed that it was running
with UMTS, which it calls WCDMA.
So even with this primitive antenna connection, I was able to connect to the net. It looks
as if I'll have no trouble at all with the real antenna.
Almost in the middle of all this, we had another brief power failure. This time the Telstra router
in the garage gave a pretty exact time with its stupid LOG_EMERG message:
Message from syslogd@pong-gw at Dec 24 13:36:22 ...
pong-gw BCM96345 started: BusyBox v1.00 (2008.12.12-03:29+0000)
Today the Geelong Regional
Libraries mobile library came along and brought me a couple of books about smoking.
As I imagined, hot smoking is done between 60° and 110°; even the lowest temperature of this
ALDI smoker is closer to 120°, so clearly
it'll have to go back. Cold smoking is done below 37°. I still need to find out how to do
that, but one of the books offered some suggestions.
The Alstroemeria that we
bought two weeks ago didn't make it back home unscathed.
A flower stem broke off, and we put it in a vase. It's gradually past its use-by date, but
that's been 12 days, and at least one flower still looks happy:
It's Christmas again, and somehow we're less and less interested every year. This year we
(mainly Yvonne) decided against turkey, and we did a big
chicken instead, filled with the same
stuffing.
Somehow things didn't want to work. I had started making sourdough in the morning, so the
mixer bowl was in use, and I ended up putting the stuffing through the mincer. Managed to
drop an egg shell in the mixer, and had various other problems with what should be a simple
dish, and finished in quite a bad mood. Yvonne didn't fare
much better: somehow the cream got spilt in the fridge. Not quite what we planned.
The chicken also took longer than expected. My cooking times called for 88° in the breast, which should happen after about 100
minutes for a 2 kg chicken. But by that time we were only barely at 82°. Checked and
discovered that the all-important upper leg joints looked good. Clearly the filling was
lowering the temperature of the breast in relationship to the legs, a good thing. We should
fill chickens more often.
It's still not perfect, but it's very difficult to see any of the jaggies.
What's the difference? I think it's because I levelled the pan head as well as the ball
head before taking the photos. Clearly the pan head rotates around a vertical axis, but
that doesn't stop me from tilting the pan head forwards or backwards, and that brings the
entrance pupil away from the axis. This time it stayed in the right place.
Into the office this morning to discover that the NetComm router had lost the connection to Internode. No messages, good signal, just no network connection. Rebooted the
machine and it worked again.
High time to install the antenna and the router. The antenna was easy enough to
install; what I hadn't reckoned with was the difficulty of getting the antenna cable through
the walls, since there are two parts to the wall with a cavity in between, and it was
difficult to aim for the second hole.
Got that done, though, and connected to pain again, noting significantly better
signal. About the only strangeness is how Microsoft configures multiple interfaces:
Apart from the multiple ^M characters, which Microsoft users don't see, what's this
nonsense with one default gateway per interface? How does that work? My experience was
that it doesn't.
Then continued with the ASUS RT-N13U
router. What a catastrophe! I've complained about stupid hardware in the past, but I
think this takes the cake. I ran into one problem and irritation after another:
First I tried to set the IP address of the device to my network. But that's not allowed:
For reasons that make no sense at all, it insists on an RFC 1918 IP address. That's almost
enough reason to return it by itself.
Well, the thing runs Linux, so maybe there was a back door to the config information.
Just look for files that have changed recently and look at what's inside. No ssh
connection, just telnet. I can live with that, but it doesn't sound very
professional or up-to-date. It proves to be another BusyBox implementation. But the utilities!
No times! Why not? Even the NetComm
software has that. And there's no -R option to ls:
# ls -alR / ls: illegal option -- R
BusyBox v1.12.1 (2009-12-30 16:46:58 CST) multi-call binary
Usage: ls [-1AaCdilnsTwxk] [filenames...]
No find, almost no tools. Went looking in likely places, and found a
directory /var/state/parport/svr_statue. On IRC we weren't able to work out
whether they had meant /var/state/parport/svr_status
or /var/state/parport/svr_state.
Gave up on that for the while and tried setting the system log to log remotely. I
couldn't enter the host name. The input field was too short:
Clearly it wanted IP addresses. But why? Finally set the address and rebooted the
box—another Microsoftism—and got no less than 10 LOG_EMERG
messages. Why do these router desingers so love LOG_EMERG?
“Emergency! The router has booted!
After reboot, connected to the modem again, and got another silly message:
Gave up on any kind of sensible configuration and turned my attention to the sheet of
paper telling me how to configure the modem. It was really very brief: “Insert
modem and select Advanced Setting, USB Application and HSDPA:
Enable HSDPA, select the modem type, ISP, APN, dial number (what's that for? Anyway,
Internode supplied one), user name and password. Did that, and discovered that, despite
documentation to the contrary, my modem wasn't listed. Selected the E176, which is
hopefully similar, pressed Apply, and once again it took an eternity before
returning—with a number of the parameters reset to the default values:
Click Apply, then you are prompted to configure your Wi-Fi network.
It's not clear what any of this has to do with a “Wi-Fi” network, but I
couldn't find a way to connect the modem, and I couldn't find anything else to try.
Clicked on the network map, and sure enough, the modem showed up. Clicked on it and got
messages in Chinese:
Clicking on the links just took me around in circles. The instructions suggested a
firmware upgrade if there are problems, so went to the ASUS site, which cleverly ensures
that you can't refer to their content, and checked. Before getting any information, you
need to select the operating system. But BusyBox isn't on the list. Selected Microsoft
“WinXP” and found no less than 15 firmware versions. Mine is 2.0.0.3
Beta software without warning in a device of this nature? They should be ashamed of
themselves. But I repeat myself.
Downloaded the firmware and tried the instructions to install it. It hung.
Gave up for the night; this stupid “easy install” router had kept me busy all
afternoon. It looks like the others on IRC were right in asking why I wanted one in the
first place. If I had known what I was up against, I would never have bought it, but now I
want to see if I can get it to work. Others on Whirlpool have reported success with exactly this combination. Is this really what networking is coming to?
My attempts to connect with the 3G network yesterday ended with a failed attempt to upgrade
the firmware in this terminally broken ASUS RT-N13U
router. Tried again today, in the process noting the messages that appeared during
normal startup:
Dec 26 09:33:13 dereel named[910]: client 192.109.197.163#57803: RFC 1918 response from Internet for 1.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa
Dec 26 09:41:19 192.168.1.1 kernel: klogd started: BusyBox v1.12.1 (2009-12-30 16:46:58 CST)
Dec 26 09:41:19 192.168.1.1 kernel: PROC INIT OK!
Dec 26 09:41:19 dereel named[910]: client 192.109.197.135#53569: RFC 1918 response from Internet for 1.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa
Dec 26 09:41:19 192.168.1.1 kernel: devpts: called with bogus options
Dec 26 09:41:19 dereel named[910]: client 192.109.197.135#56454: RFC 1918 response from Internet for 1.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa
Dec 26 09:41:19 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: usdsvr_broadcast starts Dec 26 09:41:20 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: usdsvr_unicast starts Dec 26 09:41:24 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: watchdog starts Dec 26 09:41:24 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: ntp starts Dec 26 09:41:24 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: ots starts Dec 26 09:41:24 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: pspfix starts Dec 26 09:41:26 192.168.1.1 WAN Connection: The cable for Ethernet was not plugged in. Dec 26 09:41:34 192.168.1.1 USB device: usb device HUAWEI Mobile(12d1/140c) plugged Dec 26 09:41:34 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: ledoff starts Dec 26 09:41:47 192.168.1.1 kernel: hub 1-0:1.0: port 1 disabled by hub (EMI?), re-enabling...
Dec 26 09:41:54 192.168.1.1 syslog: pppd started
Dec 26 09:41:54 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: pppd 3.3 started by admin, uid 0
Dec 26 09:41:58 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
Dec 26 09:42:14 192.168.1.1 RT-N13U: ledon starts Dec 26 09:42:31 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: IPCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Dec 26 09:42:37 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: Connection terminated.
Dec 26 09:42:53 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
Dec 26 09:43:26 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: IPCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Dec 26 09:43:32 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: Connection terminated.
Dec 26 09:43:48 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
Dec 26 09:44:21 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: IPCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Dec 26 09:44:27 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: Connection terminated.
Dec 26 09:44:42 192.168.1.1 pppd[608]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
The messages in bold were logged with priority LOG_EMERG (“A panic
condition. This is normally broadcast to all users.”), which vomited all over all
my xterms. Why specifically these messages? And what doesn't get mentioned at all
were the pppd messages, which show on the one hand that it appears to be attempting
to connect, but it has some failure. Clearly not as much as serious as the discovery that a
modem is connected. And the messages from named on dereel (there were many
times the number shown here) shows the stupidity of limiting IP addresses to RFC 1918
ranges.
Tried the update again, and again it hung. So tried it with Microsoft “Windows
XP” and “Internet Explorer”, and got further:
According to the instructions, “After receiving a correct firmware file, RT-N13U
Rev.B1 will automatically start the upgrade process. The system reboots after the upgrading
process is finished.” But it finished and still didn't reboot. When I rebooted
manually, I still had the old firmware version.
Why am I having this trouble? I'm doing everything according to the
bookslip of paper supplied with the router, using “standard”
Microsoft tools, and it still doesn't work. That's a far cry from the NetComm 3G21WB router. Once I got past Telstra's broken software and installation procedure and used my own method, everything Just Worked. That
was the rationale for buying this thing at all, to avoid setup problems; instead I've found
a whole new range of them. Out of interest, I'll call ASUS after the Christmas break on
Wednesday, but it's almost certain that it'll have to go back.
For the sake of completeness, tried to run the modem on boskoop, my old Apple
machine. Again I couldn't get it to work, possibly because the machine only has USB 1.1
ports, which are conceivably not fast enough.
The real alternative, of course, is to use the modem directly on a FreeBSD box. I had avoided that because of the fear that
the instructions would be even worse. I was right.
It would be nice to say that all the instructions say the same thing, but they don't:
Azril (not sure of the real name) starts by stating that you need entries
for /etc/devd.conf, which in fact don't seem to be necessary. He then points to
Nick Hibma's configuration files.
Nick's files don't have very much to do with Edwin's files. Took a look at both of them
and tried to work out what they mean. Nick has this chat script:
set dial "ABORT BUSY TIMEOUT 2 \
\"\" \
AT OK-AT-OK \
AT+CFUN=1 OK-AT-OK \
AT+CMEE=2 OK-AT-OK \
AT+CSQ OK \
AT+CGDCONT=1,\\"IP\\",\\"internet\\" OK \
AT+CGACT? OK-AT-OK \
AT+CGATT? OK \
AT+CGCLASS? OK \
AT+COPS? OK \
ATD*99***1# CONNECT"
By contrast, Edwin has:
set dial "ABORT BUSY ABORT NO\sCARRIER TIMEOUT 5 \
\"\" AT OK-AT-OK ATE1Q0 OK \
AT+COPS=1,2,"50502",2 OK \
AT+CGDCONT=1,\\"IP\\",\\"VirginBroadband\\" OK \
\dATDT\T TIMEOUT 40 CONNECT"
What do those commands mean? It seems that the important ones are AT+COPS,
which sets the network operator, and AT+CGDCONT, which defines the PDP (Packet
Data Protocol) context. And clearly they're different for the two configurations. But
what are the rest? At least we get a log of what's going on (/var/log/ppp.log),
which in contrast to the toy routers is so voluminous that it's difficult to find your
way through. Discovered that the ATE1Q0 in Edwin's script caused the chat
script to fail, so removed that, and finally came up with something that connected, got
as far as successful authentication, and then failed in the IPCP phase:
Dec 26 15:08:56 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: IPADDR[6] 192.109.197.138
Dec 26 15:08:59 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: deflink: SendConfigReq(2) state = Req-Sent
Dec 26 15:08:59 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: IPADDR[6] 192.109.197.138
Dec 26 15:09:02 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: deflink: LayerFinish.
Dec 26 15:09:02 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: Connect time: 16 secs: 0 octets in, 0 octets out
Dec 26 15:09:02 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: 0 packets in, 0 packets out
Dec 26 15:09:02 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: total 0 bytes/sec, peak 0 bytes/sec on Sun Dec 26 15:08:46 2010
Dec 26 15:09:02 swamp ppp[1114]: tun0: IPCP: deflink: State change Req-Sent --> Stopped
That's pretty much what Edwin described in one of his pages, but I had already applied
his workaround. Then I looked at his log more carefully: he had offered the IP
address 10.0.0.1. And that was in his ppp.conf, but in mine it was
commented out. Removed the comment, and success!
The problem here, of course, is knowing what went wrong. The message from IPCP didn't
exactly explain the problem. Time to update the PPP chapter of The Complete FreeBSD. In
any case, here's roughly what I have in my ppp.conf. The user name and password
(authname and authkey) are invalid, of course, but the dial string should
work for anybody. I have disabled a lot of things because others have done so; I'll play
around and see if they're necessary. I have also disabled DNS because I run my own name
servers.
internerd:
set device /dev/cuaU0.0
set timeout 0
set authname agony
set authkey no-way-jose
set dial "ABORT BUSY ABORT NO\sCARRIER TIMEOUT 5 \
\"\" AT OK-AT-OK \
AT OK-AT-OK \
AT+COPS=1,2,"50502",2 OK \
AT+CGDCONT=1,\\"IP\\",\\"internode\\" OK \
\dATD*99# TIMEOUT 40 CONNECT"
set crtscts on
disable vjcomp
disable acfcomp
disable deflate
disable deflate24
disable pred1
disable protocomp
disable mppe
disable ipv6cp
disable lqr
disable echo
nat enable yes
disable dns
resolv writable
set ifaddr 10.1.0.2/0 10.1.0.1/0 255.255.255.255 0.0.0.0
There's lots of other information. By default, when it is inserted, you get a lot of
messages from the kernel:
Dec 26 15:47:02 swamp kernel: ugen0.2: <HUAWEI Technology> at usbus0
Dec 26 15:47:02 swamp kernel: ugen0.2: <HUAWEI Technology> at usbus0 (disconnected)
Dec 26 15:47:08 swamp kernel: uhub_reattach_port: port 2 reset failed, error=USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
Dec 26 15:47:08 swamp kernel: uhub_reattach_port: device problem (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT), disabling port 2
Dec 26 15:47:08 swamp kernel: ugen0.2: <HUAWEI Technology> at usbus0
Dec 26 15:47:08 swamp kernel: u3g0: <HUAWEI Technology HUAWEI Mobile, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2> on usbus0
Dec 26 15:47:08 swamp kernel: u3g0: Found 4 ports.
Dec 26 15:47:08 swamp kernel: umass0: <HUAWEI Technology HUAWEI Mobile, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2> on usbus0
Dec 26 15:47:08 swamp kernel: umass0: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0000
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: umass0:2:0:-1: Attached to scbus2
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: umass1: <HUAWEI Technology HUAWEI Mobile, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2> on usbus0
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: umass1: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0000
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): TEST UNIT READY. CDB: 0 0 0 0 0 0
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:3a,0 (Medium not present)
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: cd1 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: cd1: <HUAWEI Mass Storage 2.31> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-2 device
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: cd1: 1.000MB/s transfers
Dec 26 15:47:10 swamp kernel: cd1: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: umass1:3:1:-1: Attached to scbus3
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim1:1:0:0): TEST UNIT READY. CDB: 0 0 0 0 0 0
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim1:1:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: (probe0:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:3a,0 (Medium not present)
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: da0 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus3 target 0 lun 0
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: da0: <HUAWEI SD Storage 2.31> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
Dec 26 15:47:11 swamp kernel: da0: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
I'll need to investigate these in more detail later. It also creates a whole slew of
devices:
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 119 Dec 27 11:14 /dev/cuaU0.0
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 120 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.0.init
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 121 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.0.lock
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 125 Dec 26 16:03 /dev/cuaU0.1
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 126 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.1.init
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 127 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.1.lock
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 131 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.2
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 132 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.2.init
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 133 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.2.lock
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 137 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.3
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 138 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.3.init
crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 0, 139 Dec 26 15:47 /dev/cuaU0.3.lock
/dev/cuaU0.0 is the modem device itself. Thanks to Peter Jeremy, discovered that the
modem returns continuous status information from one of its other ports. On my system,
it's /dev/cuaU0.3, but it seems that there are other possibilities:
^MODE is the link mode. 5,6 and 5,7 are HSUPA and HSPA but I'm not sure which
way round - 5,5 is HSDPA.
Not sure what ^BOOT is.
^RSSI is signal strength: 0..31 => n*2 - 113 dBm. 99 => unknown. Mostly
in e169-stats.c
^DSFLOWRPT should be link uptime, tx data in last 2 secs, rx data in last 2
secs, cumulative tx data, cumulative rx data. Not sure of the last two fields.
And apart from ^DSFLOWRPT, other fields only get reported when they change.
That'll give me something to investigate.
And the result? Not good. I had already noted extremely long ping times when
running in GPRS mode, but they
haven't gone away. I'm still getting things like:
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=22 ttl=55 time=4396.038 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=23 ttl=55 time=3395.921 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=24 ttl=55 time=2395.867 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=25 ttl=55 time=1395.839 ms
64 bytes from 203.10.76.45: icmp_seq=26 ttl=55 time=395.755 ms
All five of these ping replies arrived at the same time. What's causing that? I don't
know, but it's not acceptable. One thing might be the signal strength, but that doesn't
tally with my experience with GPRS, where it happened even with moderate signal strength.
And monitoring RSSI show that there's no correlation between signal strength and these
delays. Hopefully it's something that can be fixed. I didn't have anything like this in
the Telstra network, and I'd hate to have to change back after this investment.
Did a test with speedtest.net, which didn't
show any of those problems. Here's a comparison with satellite a few days ago (left) and to
Internode in Adelaide today:
Clearly the speed of the satellite is better. If it weren't for the latency and the
unreliability, I'd stay with satellite. But then, the signal strength I'm getting now is no
better (possibly worse) than I got with the whip antenna. Maybe I'm pointing at the wrong
mobile tower. I need to calculate some directions and try pointing at different towers.
For reference, here's my location and the locations given from the Spench web site, the latter specified with a precision
of 11 nm (0.0000011 mm):
It's the last Sunday in the month, time for more photos of garden flowers. Lots of things are
looking good, including the best flowering Anigozanthos (Kangaroo Paw) I have
seen. The Strelitziae
reginae are also in full bloom, and one of the succulents that never seemed to do
anything has burst into orange flower:
For some reason, none of the roses are looking particularly happy, though I'm sure they'll
come again. The lilies seem to have finished, and the Pimelea ferruginea that we planted 3 years
ago seems to be dying:
There's no obvious reason why the Pimelea should look so unhappy. Maybe, like many
Australian plants, it's just short-lived. It looked spectacular when it was small, but now
I think I wouldn't mind replacing it with a Hebe
This looks exactly like the chocolate Easter bunnies they sell in Germany, except for the
wrapping. It looks like they had some left over from Easter, and they've repacked them.
So now I'm connected to the Internet by Internode's NodeMobile Data service. How is it working? Parts of it are excellent. Uploading
photos/Photos.php?dirdate=20101226 showed markedly varying speeds:
This is rsync, which measures in the wrong place, so it's normal for the first few
files to be shown faster than they really are. But after that the speeds are roughly
correct. Here we had upload speeds in the middle of over 110 kB/s, which I believe is
correct. And later in the same transfer the rate dropped to 5 kB/s. I've never seen
anything like that on satellite. The ping times are similar:
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=9 ttl=254 time=37549.872 ms
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=10 ttl=254 time=36554.637 ms
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=11 ttl=254 time=35580.567 ms
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=12 ttl=254 time=34594.494 ms
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=13 ttl=254 time=33719.358 ms
...
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=48 ttl=254 time=1453.151 ms
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=49 ttl=254 time=487.911 ms
Once again, 40 packets arrived back at the same time. The real ping times are much shorter:
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=37 ttl=254 time=96.107 ms
64 bytes from 150.101.212.19: icmp_seq=38 ttl=254 time=94.853 ms
But what good is that when you can't rely on it? There's something seriously wrong here.
Didn't have much time to worry about that, though: once again we had Nele Koemle and her
mother Magda Delva for Christmas dinner (well, it's still only the third day). We had hoped
to have dinner on the verandah, so Yvonne had prepared cold
food:
Unfortunately, it was quite cool. By lunch time the temperature was only 18°, so we ate
inside. And it proves that Nele—unlike Magda—doesn't like berries and things,
so the Pavlova got shuffled round a bit:
It got a bit warmer after lunch, and we spent some time outside on the verandah. Found a
number of plants to give to Nele, and then back to the office to scan a document for Magda,
who is planning a trip to Argentina. They wanted the document (printout with a signature)
sent as an 800 dpi JPEG. That doesn't make much sense, and clearly a 175 MB TIFF was out of
the question, so considered sending it as a GIF instead, but even the GIF proved to be
nearly 24 MB in size, and that blew my mail message size limits:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 176930817 Dec 27 16:03 img608.tif
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 23933928 Dec 27 16:13 WTZ.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 7147914 Dec 27 16:14 WTZ.jpeg
Finally got the message sent with a JPEG attachment, which took forever to send—the 3G
link must have been feeling sick again.
Talking a bit about Magda's visit to Argentina: it proves to be work related. She works for
the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is
involved research into the planet Venus. It seems they're continually coming up with new
discoveries.
Into the office this morning full of thoughts about what was wrong with the network
connection. But whatever it had been, it had changed:
I had been off the net almost continuously for 8 hours. What was wrong there? Kept a
careful eye on the network connection all day, but it didn't repeat. I didn't even get the
long ping delays I had been seen. Was this nocturnal outage some kind of maintenance
work to fix the problems? It's too early to be sure that things will stay this way, but it
looks promising.
Tried an alternative bandwidth testing site, Ozspeedtest. I'm not convinced. It doesn't believe in measuring latency, something
of utmost importance to satellite users, and it does upload and download separately. It's
difficult to use, and the results seem incorrect to me. Possibly they're related to the
mirror, but I'm more interested in the link than a specific server. Here the results from
speedtest.net and Ozspeedtest:
About the only interesting thing is that they appear to keep the results online. I
wonder for how long, and why. Still, one way or another the downlink connection appears to
be as fast as my first ADSL line, and the uplink is faster. I can put up with the slower
raw downlink speed in return for the better latency, which I am confident will make web
pages more responsive—if the link remains as stable.
I'm quite irritated by the fact that the firmware upgrade of the ASUS RT-N13U
router didn't work. Took a look at the online manual, which pointed me at a different
page on the router with a slightly different approach to the same procedure:
Check if any new version of firmware is available
on ASUS website.
Download a proper version to your local machine.
Specify the path of and name of the downloaded file in the [New Firmware File].
Click [Upload] to upload the file to RT-N13U Rev.B1. Uploading process takes about
three minutes.
After receiving a correct firmware file, RT-N13U Rev.B1 will automatically start the
upgrade process. The system reboots after the upgrading process is finished.
Followed that link. Yes, it's a download page. Once again this stupid “Select
OS” box. But it's empty. No OS, no firmware.
So back to the other, non-linkable page that you can only access by climbing down multiple
levels from the home page. To be on the safe side, downloaded the firmware file again and
compared it with what I got last time. Same thing. Then it occurred to me: the file was a
ZIP archive with a single file in it:
=== grog@dereel (/dev/ttypk) ~/Desktop 220 -> unzip -l FW_RT_N13U_B1_2011.zip Archive: FW_RT_N13U_B1_2011.zip
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
6060949 09-14-10 18:34 FW_RT_N13U_B1_2011.trx
-------- -------
6060949 1 file
Did they want me to unzip it first? That's contrary to the instructions. Tried it anyway,
and Bingo! it worked:
What stupidity! Incorrect links, something that they didn't have to break, incorrect
instructions, and inadequate error checking: the upgrade application just needed to say
“Invalid firmware file format, please unzip” or some such.
And the results? The Chinese messages are gone, but the thing still wants me to use an RFC
1918 address for the router. That makes the thing useless for me. Finally found the number
for ASUS support in Australia (it's not under Support). You have to select the correct icon
at top left from this collection:
With the aid of a magnifying glass, it's easy to see that the middle of the five blue icons
bears a passing resemblance to a stylized telephone, or possibly a floppy disk with a magnet
attached. Run the cursor over it and the text “Contact” appears. Isn't
technology marvellous? For reference the phone number is 1-300-278-788, which they write
1300-2787-88, and the opening hours are given as “(09:00-18:00 Mon.~Fri.)”.
Called the number, round 14:30, and received a recorded message telling me I was calling out
of hours. After a while, it conceded that they had shut up shop last week, wouldn't be
supplying any support at all this week, and they'd be back Tuesday next week.
I'm amazed. I had thought of ASUS as being one of the better companies. Everything I have
seen about this product and the company itself had given me a very different impression.
The router goes back, and it'll be a long time before I even consider buying another ASUS
product.
Since yesterday morning's sudden improvement in network connectivity, I haven't had an
outage. But the throughput has been pretty rough at times:
--- lns1.mel4.internode.on.net ping statistics ---
7468 packets transmitted, 7339 packets received, 1.7% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 79.510/1228.666/34187.441/3615.062 ms
Clearly I'll have to undertake something. Spent some time modifying my network status page to reflect 3G networking. Part of it involved
modifying the “TCP speed” scale, which is now about 3 times as fast as with
satellite. If only it would be more reliable.
Still, now we can use VoIP again.
Called Yvonne's brother Michael in Germany: it was his
birthday. The connection quality was completely acceptable except when I tried to download
a web page with lots of images in the middle of the call.
Didn't do much in the garden. Finally disposed of the Leucospermum, did some weeding, and
pruned the roses and the Salvia in
front of the verandah, using my ancient electric hedge trimmer, which did a surprisingly
good job.
About the best thing I can say about my current HSPA connection is that it
doesn't seem to be noticeably less reliable than satellite. On the other hand, it doesn't
seem to be any more reliable either. Did some more modifications to my network status page. Previously I did a ping to the other end of the
link, and reported whether it succeeded (1) or not (0). Now I've changed that value to
indicate a reciprocal function of the ping time. Normally the ping time is in the order of
100 ms, so I've divided 500 by the ping time. It should give a value round 5, but of course
it can drop so low as to be unrecognizable. It's the second column in this file, and the last column (after the date) is the real ping
time:
1293697023 4.07179 5 # Thu Dec 30 19:17:03 EST 2010 122.796 ms
1293697090 0.214603 5 # Thu Dec 30 19:18:10 EST 2010 2329.884 ms
1293697154 4.7929 5 # Thu Dec 30 19:19:14 EST 2010 104.321 ms
In the course of the afternoon, ran into some serious problems. From 15:15 to 16:00 I had
almost no connectivity at all. Called up Internode at 15:52 and was given the opportunity to leave a phone number and be
called back, which I did. 20 minutes later Billy called me back, and I explained the
problem. Then he went through his script, asking me exactly the details that I had
explained. He wanted to see the output of a GUI application, of course, and was a little
confused when I told him I was using ppp. He asked what OS I was using and seemed a
little confused when I told him it was FreeBSD. I got the impression that he had never heard of it. Internode started out as a purely
FreeBSD shop. I see now that their web server is running Linux. O tempora! O
mores!.
At his request I removed the modem from swamp and put it in pain, my Microsoft
XP box. Then he asked me to connect to on.netforward/test. I couldn't access that, not just because he had given me the
name incorrectly, but because this
stupid Microsoft system had two default routes and seemed to be using the wrong one. He
couldn't tell me how to fix that—I don't think he understood the question.
Interestingly, the download was very fast, about 250 kB/s. I haven't seen that from
FreeBSD.
Rebooted pain and was able to establish good communications. But still he seemed to
suspect the hardware or the software; this seems so typical for help desks. Maybe that's
the case for most people, but I only go to a help desk when I'm reasonably sure that it's
not my own fault. He even wanted to go as far as to send me a replacement modem, though I
had told him I had had the same problems with the NetComm 3G9WB under GPRS. He went off to discuss the matter, and finally he came back with the ticket
number 3278561 and the suggestion that I send in evidence of the problems and they'd take it
up with Optus. That makes more sense.
Internode's not the only game in town, of course. Three and a
half years ago I called up Bluemaxx, who
weren't able to help me at the time, but who promised to call back. Today they did so: I
got a call from Calvin, who sounds like a woman, offering Internet connectivity. I asked
what alternatives to ADSL (s)he could offer, and she asked me who my current ISP was.
“Internode”. “Ah, inter... what?”.
I tried to string her along for a while, but she was so slow that I couldn't be bothered.
Still, that's interesting enough that they still had something on their records.
Pretty warm today, not the kind of weather where I wanted to spend much time outside. But
Yana and Sundance are coming
tomorrow to spend New Year's Eve, and years ago they gave us some Australian native plants:
two Lilly Pillys, an Araucaria bidwillii and
an Podocarpus elatus
(Illawarra plum). A few months ago we finally planted the latter two in the
ex-cathedral, and we've also transplanted
the Syzygiums. I'm sure they'll be happy, but we have a problem: the whole ex-cathedral
area is so overgrown that I had difficulty finding the saplings. So off with the lawn mower
(really Yvonne's job) and mowed at least the larger areas.
Now I'm going to have to come in with the push mower for the rest.
We still have a pork roast which Yvonne bought some time ago.
I had been intending to smoke it, but I'm so disappointed in this ALDI smoke oven that I couldn't be bothered. But the
meat's still there, it needs to be cooked soon, and Yvonne doesn't want to eat it unsmoked,
so took a look in the library books that I have on the subject: “Charcuterie”,
by Michael Rohlman and Biran Polcyn, and
“smoking food” (yes, lower case) by ricky gribling, for whom I can't find a canonical web site.
Neither book is convincing. Despite the name, “Charcuterie” is American, and it
shows. “smoking food” is Australian and has some very useful information about
equipment and other details. For example, it states unequivocally that “most
kinds” of Eucalyptus wood are suitable for smoking (the oils are in the leaves). The origin of the book lends
credibility to that statement. It also gives smoking temperatures: below 37° for cold
smoking, and between 60° and 110° for hot smoking. But it says little about preparation of
the food. In particular, there's no recipe for smoked loin of pork. There's a recipe for
loin of pork, first cooked and then smoked, but that doesn't make sense to me.
So took a look at “Charcuterie”, which tells me to first spice the leg with a
dry spice mix for 12 to 48 hours, then to
smoke it—at 160°! That sounds more like roasting than smoking. Maybe that's the
scenario for which this oven was built.
So: what to do? Decided to try the “Charcuterie” approach and then to smoke it
cooler, round 110°. Today just made a variant on the spice mix, which also looks very American. It wants
cayenne pepper, chile powder and Spanish paprika. I know cayenne, but what do they mean by
the other two? In any case, made up the powder (with considerably less chili) and rubbed it
into the pork. The rest happens in a couple of days.
When Yvonne took Nemo for a walk this morning, she was confronted with a couple of problems: Lady, one of the
horses, had escaped from the paddocks, and our letterbox had been knocked over:
Robert, our neighbour across the road, came out and told Yvonne that the horse had done the
damage to the letter box. That sounded unlikely, so I went to check, and found that she had
obviously put on wheels to do the deed:
The tracks disappeared into Robert's driveway. Fortunately, it proved trivial to bend the
thing back into shape: only the concrete base had been moved.
It's been quite a cool spring, on average about 1.5° cooler than last year, but today summer
suddenly came: we had a top temperature of 42.2°, the second-hottest on record:
mysql> select date, max(outside_temp) from observations where outside_temp > 40 group by date; +------------+-------------------+
| date | max(outside_temp) |
+------------+-------------------+
| 2009-12-16 | 40.4 |
| 2010-01-09 | 40.6 |
| 2010-01-11 | 44.9 |
| 2010-12-31 | 42.2 |
+------------+-------------------+
As a result, we spent most of the day inside. The strong winds didn't help either.
Mail from Tim Bishop in the UK today. He's staying at Butlins, who provide free 802.11 access in their
facilities—as long as they meet their quality standards. I clearly don't:
We managed to avoid traditional Christmas fare on Christmas
Eve, but today Yana and Sundance arrived, so we had
to find something to feed them with. I had thought that turkeys would be cheap after
Christmas, but there were almost none to be had. Finally Yvonne found a crippled turkey with no legs, which she somehow managed to stuff:
The warm weather continued into the evening, so spent it on the verandah. Despite our
fears, all except Yvonne made it until past midnight, and we
somehow managed to finish off not one, but two bottles of bubbly. Sundance doesn't drink
alcohol, so that's an achievement; normally we drink about half a bottle.
The warm weather meant lots of insects, of course, and we spent some time trying to both
chase away the ones we didn't like and get photos of the ones we did, both with little
success.
We had a lamp shining at the wall, and of course there were hundreds of moths flying around
it. But could I get a photo of them? Almost complete failure:
A couple of insects are barely visible to the left of the reflector. Focusing was also much
worse than I had expected, and when a Praying Mantis came along, this was the best image I could get. It's on the right,
towards the top, and not very much in focus.
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