Ians Ramblings

Nosferatu

2009-07-07T22:33:00.004+01:00

I am continuing my spree of classic film watching, after having seen it mentioned in so many other newer films and having seen small clips of it I thought I should watch Nosferatu, the classic German silent horror film.

Usually I am not one for modern horror, it's just mindless rubbish primarily, but I thought I would give one of the older horrors a go.

Great film, though you really have to bear in mind how old it really is 1922! It certainly feels old, and more like a play broken up into acts.

I tend to look at these older films more for their camera work, the unusual colours and grany film, just feels like a flicker book of almost victorian looking post cards, something you just won't see anymore.

I played my own music along with it, being as it is silent, and the music that accompanied my version was a bit on the questionable side. I went for a score of Mozart and Verdi.

In short I would recommend checking it out if you liked Metropolis for example, or just looking for something a bit unusual.

Here is a little snippet!

Ah well other than that all is the same with me here, though work is getting a bit like groundhog day these days, hopefully things will get better, I think I just need a holiday..

Boo Pirate Bay

2009-06-30T20:49:00.003+01:00

One of those days when I realise the "old" internet is dying out, companies and governments have finally tightened their grasp around the last true free place on the planet.

Soon heavy flashy web 2.0 drivel about when someone last went to the shops or when their cat was last fed will bloat the internet. People thinking that instant chat via facebook is a new thing, people accepting being forced onto a mainstream browser, forced to give over geographical locations and details about their own machines just to be allowed onto the sites.

I have realised as more and more people get onto the internet, the simpler and safer the millions of committees running it feel it should be, slowly but surely all the things it stands for will be whittled away... if it indeed ever did stand for freedom of speech, was that just an assumption due to a lack of enforcement.

I wonder if a new sub layer will emerge if it hasn't done so already effectively anonymous hosting and internet usage over anonymity networks such as Tor. Using the Internet's infrastructure but avoiding its horrendous filtering and invasion of privacy. ...

The Press - Michael Jackson

2009-06-30T13:31:00.004+01:00

I have started to see the press trying to squeeze and snatch every last reader out of the Michael Jackson story, it seems the magazines in this country are usually the first to stoop to the lowest level.

I will be watching them and not reading them to see who are the worst offenders, so far it is Hello magazine. Any that are stooping to low levels to get readers should be boycotted in my opinion.

A Legend - Gone

2009-06-26T01:59:00.003+01:00

There will be millions and millions of tributes to Michael Jackson by the morning, but I just wanted to say too that I think he is an irreplaceable musical genius and a legend in our time.

I remember spending so many nights listening to his albums again and again on little walkman on tape back in about 88 (especially Bad) when I was a little kid and never stopped listening to his songs.

I hope the press treats this with sensativity and the respect the man deserves, also that they respect the privacy of his family.

Every song he ever released was unmistakabley his how many others can you say that about, he was a true one off.

Everything's Overheating Capt!

2009-06-25T21:52:00.002+01:00

Bahh, my blue motorbike is overheating, now my server is overheating too, one disk had to be removed as it was beeping as loudly as a fire alarm!

Hopefully I can get my blue bike taken into the Honda garage and let them see why she is a bit twitchy on tick over from what I have read so far it may be related to fuel flow, either the carbs or the fuel tap or filtering somewhere.

The weird thing is, tip it quite far to the left when idling and it'll stall its a strange strange creature. Not to mention if you turn the lights on the temperature goes up by about 25%

Ah well that's my whine for the day,

Suse Linux

2009-06-25T13:54:00.004+01:00

This is just a general little posting about getting the newer ATI GFX cards to work on Suse 11.

A chap at work was having some trouble getting this working, just thought I would write down how I did it.

Originally we were trying to use the linux bin.run file from the ATI site, as you would on Red Hat 5 etc, that's not what you want. It says it only works on X version 6.7 or higher, using the command "X -version" red hat 5 shows as 7.7.1 for me, Suse 11. was showing up as 1.5 something.

What you actually need to do is login as root "su -" then run "yast" press enter on software management then in the search type "ATI" uncross the ignore case option and search.

Then select the driver that matches your running kernel, usually its the PAE one these days, press space on it so you get a little +.

Then select finish and press enter, then run "reboot" once restarted X should work for you.

Pidgin Linux Yahoo

2009-06-25T12:04:00.003+01:00

Just a quick one for anyone who uses Pidgin on Linux and is having trouble connecting to yahoo, I did the following to get it working again.

change to root.
su -

copy their repository file from http://www.pidgin.im/download/centos_rhel/ for example into /etc/yum.repos.d/

yum remove pidgin
yum remove libpurple
yum install pidgin

The above will re-install libpurple which otherwise conflicts, at least it did for me.

As for windows users just have to download and install the latest version from http://www.pidgin.im/

Summer Rides

2009-06-23T22:36:00.003+01:00

Having some great evenings at the moment taking my little blue NC30 out in the evenings. The light is gorgeous at the moment so really photographic. Unfortunately I can never stop riding in order to take the photos.

Anyway even though in shadow I thought I would take this of my NC30 resting on a country road between Crich and Matlock gorgeous little roads for a nimbler bike.

I also put the route that you'll want to follow if you want to see it for ya self. Brilliant.

View Larger Map

Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones

2009-06-22T21:34:00.004+01:00

After a small previous rant about the events in Iran at the moment with an ever increasing clamp down on protests I noticed a story here at the moment regarding Emily Apple and a fellow demonstrator who were abused by our own police.

I think it's only fair to show that the police force in this country seems to be loosing any impartiality it had, usually it seems picking on and singling out weaker individuals, either pushing over disabled people or beating women.

I notice however they do nothing about large groups of yobbish teens cruising the streets of the countries large cities.

I am sure others will feel the same that they really need to start explaining themselves properly and if they are caught purposely not wearing their number they should be immediately suspended from duty pending investigation into their reasoning.

I am usually not a particularly left wing person but the actions of the police lately and the excuse that everything is being done with respect to anti terror laws is wearing very thin.

Well incase it is later removed I have locally hosted the video of what they have been up to, and this was even made by the police themselves, I find their apparent feeling of superiority discusting and enraging.

Political Rant

2009-06-15T22:01:00.003+01:00

Regarding protests in Iran, I was quite shocked by some of the videos and images that had appeared at work (news agency) about the protests, seems there is alot of negativity and just a small spark of positive democracy.

I don't think anyone could argue that there isn't alot of people there looking for change and looking to engage with the west. People who also want to be recognised and accepted and respected by the rest of the world as a whole.

I just think it's sad that there are some, trying stamp it out in such a heavy handed way, trying to brush under the carpet the views of almost half the entire country (if not more..). These same individuals will use this chance to blaim outside influences driving a greater divide between Iran and the West just alienating themselves more.

Will be an interesting one to watch, it could have been such a great step forward for them to be able to engage with the rest of the world again, I guess it will be another four year wait.

VMWare tools - When you have all the time in the world

2009-06-15T21:55:00.002+01:00

What a pain in the ass! Unless you have some time you want to burn I wouldn't bother trying to install VMWare tools on a SUSE Guest if I were you.

Mounted the cdrom, copied over the tar extrated it, no probs so far, had to install "killall" which was actually under the package psmisc incase anyone is searching for it. Then I had to install the Linux source code for my running kernel, not too much of a pain, except again SUSE wont find kernel-devel or even kernel* you have to faff around in their commandline interface yast2.

Anyway after getting all the pre-requisites installed and compiling the vmware tools to match my running kernel and installing it basically just crapped out my network card and provided no performance enhancement that I could see as I don't use X.

Basically a waste of time, had to uninstall just to get the network card working again, rubbish.

Cheeky little blue lady

2009-06-13T22:40:00.009+01:00

Well The little blue motorbike is purring again for the time being I fitted a new regulator rectifier to see if it would stop the cutting out problem she has been having. So far so good touch wood hehe

Fitting the Regulator Rectifier is as easy as removing the rear fairing with a few bolts, with a flat head screw driver, locating the unit on the left side of the bike, removing the two nuts and the cable. Then pop on the new unit, paste a little dielectric grease around the edge of the connectors and screw it all back up.

We'll see if it continues..
Well so far so good had a nice run out with my Honda over to Matlock in the gorgeous sun. The road in was closed due to what seemed like an accident so went through lots of little woody lanes which was interesting, found a few different ways in and out of Matlock via Holloway.

Well if any other NC30 owners do stumble of this site, and you need parts, I should recommend the two best places I have found so far, namely David Silvers for retro honda parts and for retro bikes themselves and second hand parts Fast Line in Preston.

Python Yuck

2009-06-11T14:31:00.002+01:00

This may just be because I have gotten so used to Perl and so gladly forgotten my Python days, but I just thought I would put a little posting to help others avoid the annoyance of Python's join syntax.

Perl: -

my $str_items = join(',', @ians_array); Gives you a nice string comma separated

Python: -

str_string=""
str_string.join(",",ians_array)

Gives you join() takes exactly one argument (2 given)

Hmm, you think maybe I have to use that dirty syntax I have seen?

str_string=""
str_string+= ''.join(ians_array)

Hmm apparently working but no delimeter, lets make it even uglier

str_string=""
str_string+= ','.join(ians_array)

I am so lazy

2009-06-10T19:29:00.002+01:00

Almost a month since I last posted anything, I must be the laziest person who blogs their thoughts ever, either that or thoughts are few and far between..

Well in truth I have had the site down for a while, as it has been so hot here the beast of a server has not been a happy bunny when running in the cupboard and has been annoying with it's temperature warning beeps.

All probs at the mo with technology my Honda NC30 is not running correctly again and I almost had to push it all the way home, luckily I found a hill for a jump start.. So will be getting another new regulator rectifier this time not a second hand one hehe stingey me!

AC3 Directshow decoder

2009-05-17T18:50:00.002+01:00

Ever had the annoying message "You may need to install a Directshow decoder for this audio format, in order to hear the soundtrack of this DVD" when trying to play a film on XP or Vista? I had these ages ago, sorted it out with a free codec, but since then I have re-installed Vista after all my hard disk firmware issues and finding it on the net was a real pain.

So I decided just to pop it on here, like the firmware update for the hard disk just to save people the trouble of sifting around, should allow you to actually play your DVDs properly without the sound being missing!

Thundersprint 2009

2009-05-13T19:59:00.003+01:00

Had a brilliant time this weekend gone, attending the Thundersprint up in Northwich. It's a classic motorbike show, with a sprint, with a range of motorcycling personalities including James Toseland this year who I was able to chat to briefly and get his autograph on a photo of my number 52 Honda NC30.

I look really chubby cheeked for some reason hehe but ah well still want to put it up anyway :P

Analie also got her photo taken with James, and he is a really decent bloke, really down to earth and happy to chat to anyone.

It was a good weekend of driving motorbikes which I always love hehe.

The NC30 seems to be getting better now, passed its MOT yay! But still gets a little hot under the collar, not totally sure the fan is working again yet and the electrics may be a touch suspect,, still more work to do!

Vista Woes Finally Resolved - HP m9265.uk

2009-04-26T17:08:00.006+01:00

Everyone at work will be aware that I whine on about Vista being a horrendous resource hog and disk thrasher, I finally found out it was a firmware issue with my own hard disk which actually lead to it's severe thrashing by Vista.

A while back HP released a firmware update for my home machine, the Pavilion Elite m9265.uk which said it only effected a small number of seagate drives and that it fixed a message that appeared on boot.

Now as my machine was not seemingly effected and displayed no such message on boot I didn't install the firmware update, in my experience, if it aint broke don't fix it.

If the firmware update is not installed what it does to the drive is slowely cripple it until instead of rating 5.9 in Vista it rates 2.1 and it takes about 45 minutes to get into the operating system.

Unfortunately HP do not provide a link to the firmware update on their site under the model of PC and there is no indication anywhere that it is so vital to keeping your machine actually usable.

I have created an ISO of the bootable disc you need to update your seagte drive and am sharing it here for other users of the HP Pavilion Elite m9265.uk. Basically if you have one of the Seagate drives, you really have to install the update, who know's what the deal is for people who have the machine and no internet connection, but still that's modern PC companies for you..

Well after the firmware update the machine sprang back into life and re-rated appeared 5.8 which was much nicer..

Anyway just incase people were interested in creating ISOs from CDs or DVDs I found a nice little freeware tool that I am also putting up here for download.

Honda NC30 - Service Time

2009-04-19T01:05:00.002+01:00

First service for my Honda VFR400R today, I don't believe the last owner had given the bike a proper service in the last 5 years or so, so I really wanted to be sure everything was in good working order internally.

I checked around a few places and luckily the place that was the best value also had the kind of atmosphere I was looking for in a garage that I could use for all further work, Full Throttle over in Stapleford in Nottinghamshire.

I was able to observe, learn and assist with the service which taught me alot. I have included a few pics of the bike during the service to show how in depth it all was, and if any other VFR400R owners wanted to see how stripped down the bike needs to be during a proper service.

The first parts of the fairings coming off, the bottom fairing is fairly fragile and needed a little tightening underneath.

All fairings and the petrol tank removed

Engine cover off when checking the valve clearances

Nice clean red new air filter in place

Air filter box back on ready to have the fairings all put back on.

I also had an oil change, oil filter replacement, breaks checked over and cleaned up, tyre pressures and the usual safety checks.

Pirate Bay

2009-04-18T00:00:00.003+01:00

Feel the need to add a blog comment as millions will be about Pirate Bay today being convicted of the bizarre crime of assisting others to break copyright laws.

One question I wondered,, if,, Henry Ford could have been prosecuted for assisting others to commit death by dangerous driving? Oh yeh of course not, he made alot of money, they wouldn't ever go after someone like that.

For a bit of a nostalgic moment thought I would post a link to how Pirate Bay looked back in 2004 when it was just one year old.

In my opinion I think the penalties handed out, were extremely over the top, I wish I could see these sentances handed out to all the teenagers stabbing people down dark alleys instead, unfortunately they just get told not to do it again,, I guess that shows where the law's priorities lie, where the money is..

This is only the start of what could be a six year appeals process however, and it annoys me that once again the news sites have got their magic balls out and have already predicted the future once more. The BBC getting over excited and claiming the defendants have been jailed already.

While I agree that all artists deserve to be paid for their work, I think it may be time that the artists, producers and distributors realised that there is an unjust balance of wealth, and that they have effectively had it too good for too long.

I agree people should be paid a fair price for the work they do, but that just because it has become the norm that a film star or one hit wonder musician gets millions of pounds in royalties doesn't make it right, maybe it's right that the prices should nose dive and the money perhaps will be re-directed more fairly throughout society, and perhaps,, god forbid it arriving in the hands of people that need it or who contribute something truely useful to society.

Ah well that's my rant, I do feel it is certainly political, the music and film industry claiming Pirate Bay did it for the money, well have seen the homes of the guys who run the site and they're hardly palatial, far from it.

I think they fear it more as an almost online communism, a sharing an equalling for apparently no reward of gain and they can't understand that.

Next posting will be another privacy related rambling, but will show how to create a nice little Tor proxy for your network so you can use it to anonymise your browsing, if you don't always feel like being one of the drones.

Birthday 2009

2009-04-04T20:23:00.003+01:00

Well it was my birthday this weekend, and I had a great time. I decided after working hard lately on our next project at work and it being my birthday and all I would have three days off which were wisely spent chilling out in the sun and riding my motorbikes.

Had a great time out at the pub with all from work, so thanks again for popping along all. On my actual birthday I decided to get out my Honda NC30 and take a ride down one of my favourite roads the A6 between Buxton and Matlock. I think it was a three or four hour round trip as I went via all the smaller roads through all the twisty bends the NC30 was supurb, I noticed GSXRs gingerly disapearing in the bends only to hear them hammering away on the straights and breaking the speed limit to get by.

Perfect weather for it and I enjoyed chilling out at a cafe with my bike parked opposite catching some sun.

Analie also visited over the three days and today so we went out and about to the city centre and over to Wollaton always a great place to take a long lense and photograph some of the deer that inhabit the grounds.

Google Street / Maps Privacy Issues!!

2009-03-19T22:58:00.005Z

Well excellent news, if you dont want the world and their wife spying on your personal life, knowing what you have in your home, garden, what locks you have on your doors and windows, when you are at home, where you park, if you have left valuables around the side of the house it is well worth telling the pea brained people at Google to remove your pics as it actually works!

This is a screen shot of my whole street now, since my strongly worded complaint was received. And before anyone thinks it,, no thats not Chrome, it's Iron,, come on dont be silly.

There was however no appropriate response in an email from them but I can accept that they did as they were told.

If anyone out there has their face shown or anything that annoys them in anyway however I would seek to find out if there is anyway to claim compensation for emotional distress, if it has indeed upset or distressed you in anyway.

The last thing you need is a glorified peeping Tom driving around in a black van taking photos of your home without permission!!!

Privacy

2009-03-19T12:41:00.004Z

My first rant of perhaps many to come on personal or lack thereof on the internet. After speaking to a friend of mine, I realised my home had been photographed without my permission and plastered on Google's street view.

Now in principle there is nothing wrong with having streets mapped out and perhaps cg house just representing the location of buildings on that street. I find the photographing of each individual house hugely invasive moreover when combined with all the other information drifting around that would easily allow the linking of this to an individual I think it could be hugely irresponsible too.

It's even worse for people who are individually identifiable, my friend was photographed leaving his home!

Now there is a process for removing your home from this orwellian tracking site and the procedure is as follows: -

Go to google maps search for your post code, then when you see the little popup click the link for "street view" then at the bottom there is a report a concern in tiny semi transparent lettering.

Click that and report your concern, so far I have this response, I will post their responses as we go and see how this plays out!: -

"According to our records, you recently submitted a report regarding an
inappropriate image in Street View on Google Maps. We are currently
reviewing the material you reported to determine whether the image
should be removed from the product. We appreciate your assistance.
Yours sincerely,
 
The Google Maps Team"

Honda NC30

2009-03-15T20:58:00.002Z

Had my first ride of my new bike over the weekend, and she's supurb. Great handling nice sounding smooth engine and starts everytime nice and easy.

Just had to make sure all the moving parts were all well lubricated and took her for a trip over to Matlock Baths today a hugely popular biking destination.

Really fun and a different position from what I am used to made it feel more like a day out at the go-karts.

Here's a quick pic my Dad took shortly before I went over to matlock.

New Bike

2009-03-14T11:10:00.003Z

Yay!!! After alot of reading around about alot of different sports bikes, and having had a model of one as a child I decided to get a Honda VFR NC30!

I looked around hard to find a good one with very low mileage from a reputable chap, but finally found a great one currently in 2006 James Toseland WSB colours.

Should be taking her for her first trip out today! It is a lovely sunny day too. Here are a couple of pics of her, but soon will probably add some little videos hehe.

I also found an electronic copy of the manual and specifications in english! hehe alot of them are Japanese, incase anyone else who has an NC30 needs one, here it is. It also contains a lot of handy tips and tricks.

Luckily I have a Haynes manual but these tips and tricks look very useful for keeping her running and in good condition.

NFS mount with differing UID and GID

2009-02-25T23:24:00.003Z

Geeky post alert! Just thought I would put this snippet of info here incase anyone else has the same problems I did when getting an NFS mount to be writable when you do not have automatically synchonsed user accounts on both the NFS server and the machine you are mounting on.

The following actions should be carried out on the "server" machine, i.e. the machine that actually has the directory(s) that are being shared.

Firstly you need to ensure that NFS as a service is running (execute these as root): -

rpcinfo -p

This should return something like the following if the service is running: -

100003 2 tcp 2049 nfs

100003 3 tcp 2049 nfs

100003 4 tcp 2049 nfs

If the service is not running you should run: -

/etc/init.d/nfs start

Create the user you want the client machine to authenticate as with the useradd command, once the user is added run the following command to get the UID and GID of the user

id boristheuser

Should return something like: -

uid=500(boristheuser) gid=500(boristheuser) groups=500(boristheuser)

You can then add the directory you want to share with read and write access to the given host.

The directory must then be listed in the exports file "/etc/exports" an example is: -

/opt/share Client(rw,sync)

In this example the machine I intend to mount the directory on is known as "Client" in my "/etc/hosts" file.

Once added the following command should be executed or I believe you can restart the whole NFS service and get the same result: -

exportfs -ra

The next set of instructions should be executed on the "client" machine.

Now you can add the NFS mount point to the "/etc/fstab" the entry in the fstab should be something like (all one line): -

Server:/opt/share /opt/nfs_share nfs rw 0 0

In this example the machine I intend to mount the directory from is known as "Server" in my "/etc/hosts" file.

You now need a corresponding user on the "Client" you should add the user using the "useradd" command, if the uid and gid differ on the two machines, you can either automatically keep both in sync with a tool such as RSync, or you can manually change both UID and GID's to an arbritary value, usually over 99.

You can change the UID and GID of a user with the "usermod" -u and "usermod -g" commands

Once the command "mount -a" is executed the directory should now be available and read / writable in /opt/nfs_share/

This can be checked by running "df -h"

If you need to make changes to config and re-mount you will need to run the umount command against your mount point first, for example: -

umount /opt/nfs_share/
mount -a

where the directory being umounted is the one mentioned in your fstab.

I used the following page for troubleshooting this procedure: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-HOWTO/troubleshooting.html