This is just a quick rant really. Normally sites have more uptime than downtime, especially small ones with not much traffic. Why is it then that the Xilo forum is almost always not available for one reason or another? In the last 2 months it has literally had almost 2/3 downtime. Thankfully their actual customer servers are superb on uptime, but not having the forum for most of the time is really starting to get on my nerves.

VBulletin is one of the best paid for forum systems out there. Why do they have so many problems with it? I’d have less problems with an out of date phpbb install on a home server with all its ports open and some trojans on board. Sort it out folks.

My CMS add-on for phpBB got a fully fledged search engine this weekend, when I finally finished the relevant code. The search function allows you to sort results by a variety of criteria and also include additional information with the results such as the last time each result was updated, who updated it and a summary of the page content.

Also included are some site map functions that provide the ability to list all pages, pictures, forums and supplementary features on one page with descriptions/titles.

This addition to the CMS has already been applied to Halifax Online and RouterTech. Anyone using my CMS system who would like a copy of this addition is welcome to contact me for the code

After the recent leeds school of computing Linux install fest and my resultant tinkering with many machines I have now perfected the fastest way to install ubuntu Linux on a newcomer to Linux’s computer while leaving their Windows install intact, even if initially they only have one partition on their hard drive.

The trick is to use the GParted utility on its own boot cd, this can be downloaded from Sourceforge. Boot from this cd and resize the Windows partition to leave space for Linux, then on the free space create your root, home and swap partitions. When the utility is finished (5-10 minutes max), remove the cd, insert the ubuntu alternate cd (not desktop or server) and restart the machine. Boot from the new CD and run the server install of ubuntu. You will get a Linux install and grub on the machine in 5 minutes or under using this method, and with almost no risk of the installer crashing (a problem with ubuntu on slower machines and laptops). Then, boot into Linux and using apt-get, install the main ubuntu package from the cd. This will pull up the normal package list as dependencies and install it all at once for you, taking no more than 10 minutes.

Thats all folks! Restart the machine ensuring all cds are removed, boot into linux and your install is ready. It’s a bullet proof way of installing linux onto your system and I will be sure to repeat this method for all people in the school of computing who ask me to get linux on their machines. If any folk I know in Leeds want an install of Linux on their machine I can pop round and do it for you; all I ask is a pint in return

Leeds SoC now has a student blog in the form of SoC Gossip. This is a special site setup by myself with the assistance of a few school of computing friends to allow what will eventually be a fair number of committed students to post blogs in the one place, and even syndicate certain posts from their own blogs onto the central one.

The exact aim of the site is a little bit of a grey area. Initially it was supposed to be a place just for gossip about people we knew, but as the notion of this is rather closed minded and possibly even a little immature (*ducks for cover from Chris and Sarann*), it has been given a much broader scope in which anything to do with the school of computing, be it gossip about the students in it, how how well a compsoc event went or interesting comments about module content is welcome.

We don’t exactly know how well this is going to do yet, how many people will read it, and how many people will post to it etc. but hopefully people will find it a fun place to read about what the students here at Leeds SoC get up to.

To encourage new computing students at Leeds to adopt the wonderful operating system that is, CompSoc will be running a Linux install-fest on the 3rd of October. This is basically where all students who want Linux on their machines or want to learn more about it and why they should want it on their machines can come along with their PCs and have it installed for them and be shown how to use and maintain their installation. The local Linux users group will be there too, allowing people to sign up for membership and there will also be a few talks going on from a number of studnets about using Linux and how it can improve your computing experience.

I will be putting myself forward to give a talk so all interested computing students who want to come along and hear me talk about using Linux for beginners and a few tweaks and tips for existing and advanced users that you probably didn’t know about, come along. At the very least it will be a chance to chat with other Linux users and enthusiasts and of course grab a few beers afterwards.

One of the key developers of WordPress has lost his blog due to a catastrophic RAID array failure. Owen Winkler, author of Asymptomatic has posted a temporary message saying that all his blog postings have been lost because his backups were stored on the same array. You can read about the specifics on his temporary home page. Its sad to see someone lose precious content, especially a blog because they do almost become a part of you as an individual, but even more sad to see someone losing a blog because their backups were not on an entirely separate system.

I can’t stress this enough folks; if you have content you don’t want to lose, make sure you have at least one backup on a machine or medium that has nothing what-so-ever to do with the machine that normally holds the content, preferably in a different location. If you run your own site and use cPanel, please use my backup utility. It’s quick, painless, automated and FREE. It will also mean pain is restricted to just a few hours downtime in the event of catastrophic server failure. It sounds so simple, but people just don’t think until it happens to them.

Anyone who has been keeping up with the technology news of late will have spotted that a legal music download service offering DRM free MP3 files for a flat subscription each month has been launched (BBC article here). Being a Linux user, this is the only kind of download service I could possibly use, so I took it upon myself to investigate their catalogue, music files and their download methods and give some kind of review as to if its a step in the right direction or not.

Firstly I decided that I wouldn’t sign up for the free trial; the website provides open access to browse the catalogue and listen to clips of all the music, so I figured that a glance at the subscription packages would give me enough of an indicator combined with that lot without surrendering my personal details which are required even for a trial.

My general impression of the music on offer was good. I’m a jazz fan myself and I found a wide range of jazz I knew about and a lot more I didn’t, much of it proving interesting to sample, and a fair few tracks making me wish I’d taken out the trial. There were notable holes in the catalogue though, especially for some of the more recent releases and more modern music in general. I’d definitely say it is a great place to discover new music and grab some legal copies of it, but if you are going in search of something specific, you may be disappointed.

Interface wise, the site is easy to use and cross-browser compatable. There isn’t over-use of javascript, and the default colours are easy on the eye. I mention this as browsing through and reading about music is important to me and so if you couldn’t bear to spend more than 5 minutes on the site due to design it would be a problem. Thankfully this isn’t the case and you become immersed in the music on offer, not distracted by bad layout.

The eventual method of downloading tracks (I discovered this by reading the help files, which I might mention here are simple but complete) is by client side software (software you download for the non techies). Initially this concerned me as a Linux user but a Linux client is provided and indeed there are a number of completely open source clients out there which work very nicely and put your mind at ease in the software department. Windows and Mac software is of course available as a matter of course.

From all user accounts downloads are fast and without congestion, although I couldn’t check this for myself. Sample tracks play in MP3 format at 128kbps and are 30 seconds long. There is also an option to download a .m3u playlist of all the sample clips on an album for easy listening in a player of your choice, something that sites like amazon cd shop lacks and is a nice touch. Full tracks are encoded at 192kbps VBR. This should be fine for most music, but some notable exceptions may be mainly vocal performances and classical pieces. I favor at least 256kbps for these types of tracks, but you can’t have it all and with a library of over 1 million tracks, there has to be storage to think of. Still, I do think they should deliberately encode classical tracks at a higher bitrate; when I rip my own classical music at high and lower rates I can tell the difference.

Costs for the service range from 40 songs a month for £8.99 to 90 songs a month for £14.99. As a 10 track album can cost me over £14.99 in a high street record store I consider this exceptionally good value as the files you get are unprotected and you can do everything with them you would be able to do with MP3s obtained by ripping a CD. If you wish to exceed the limit on your account you can either upgrade or for a one off time (or if you are already on the max plan) you can buy extra “burst” credits, the price of which seems to be hidden in the members only account area. I wouldn’t imagine this would be too pricey though. The only slight downside is that track allowences don’t carry over into the next month, which while isn’t a big issue means if you are into getting whole albums you may have to get half the album in one month and the rest in the next just to make sure you don’t lose out on the credits. Not a huge problem, but having half an album for a few days would annoy me - I’d rather wait and get all of it at once, but in this case that causes you to lose out.

Overall I think eMusic marks the beginning of something I have always said is the future of music online; a subscription based service with generous track number limits, DRM free music and reasonable prices making significant savings on CDs. We’re not there yet, but this venture certainly makes the first step on the road.

If you want to check out eMusic, you can do so at your leisure by visiting their catalogue

Ok, so I raved about the wonderful feature on facebook that allowed you to syndicate your blog into “note” form over on their site not so long ago. I have found a problem with this though; it time-stamps each syndicated note with the time at which it was syndicated not the time in the RSS feed and if you made more than one posting since it last checked the feed then it assumes they were made at the same time and makes you look like some kind of typing freak for managing to rattle out 1000 odd words in under 30 seconds.

The question I have is why do I take the trouble to provide fully time-stamped RSS feeds if facebook’s feed parser is just going to ignore them? I don’t send these packets to people for nothing you know. Seriously, a little reminder to all developers of great features out there; just because you wrote it, doesn’t mean you can re-write the standards of the systems you rely on for your idea. If your idea uses times and the feed you are parsing provides times then read those times. If I wanted you to ignore the times of my postings then I wouldn’t be sending them to you on the feed now would I *sigh*

I setup a new Dell computer for my sister today and was driven so mad that I felt I had to write something here. On the face of it its a nice little machine, good spec, came fairly cheap, is well built and has a nice sharp 17″ flat screen. My gripe isn’t with the hardware at all though, its with what I was presented with on the hard drive.

The system came pre-loaded with Windows XP, which is fine and what my sister needs, but on top of that was a SHOCKING (and I mean shocking) number of needless programs. There were about 6 trial programs all setup to pop up registration/purchase reminders on start-up and on top of that there was an ugly set of internet trial programs loaded on as well. To get a “bare bones” windows install with just the dell drivers and a few other items my sister needed before putting her own programs on I had to remove about 18 applications and restart the machine 7 or so times in the process.

Then I found something that made my blood boil. A standard install leaves you with a C drive with all your data on it. You can then use an application of your choice to reduce the size of C and repartition the remaining space as you wish or leave it as is of course. This system however, because it came with a Norton Ghost trial was setup to have a “backup” partition, which as only a trial program was provided was completely useless and a rubbish size for anything other than taking a C drive image, which my sister wasn’t going to do. I had to use a 3rd party (paid for) application to fix this partitioning issue because Ghost wouldn’t do it either before or on uninstall. Given the number of trial programs I had already found I was shocked the machine wasn’t programmed to try and sell me a copy of partition magic as it sat smugly and watched my predicament.

Last but certainly not least on my list of gripes was the number of Windows updates that needed to be downloaded. I had to gobble up well over 250Mb of bandwidth just to bring the machine up to scratch, yet the machine had only been built a week earlier, and boasted it was SP2 ready. While it did have SP2, it didn’t have updates realeased at the same time as SP2. Go figure.

All in all I’m angry with Dell. Not because their hardware has gone downhill, it hasn’t - its still as good as it ever was, but for selling out to as many software companies as possible and serving their customers effectively ad infested machines rather than something that can be used out of the box. I used to recommend Dell as perfect for the novice to just get out of the box and use, but now you need a phd level education just to remove the trial pop-ups that insist on interrupting your work. Needless to say I shant be making such recommendations in the future.

I guess the small mercy is that automatic updates and the firewall came enabled by default. At least the newbies won’t be hacked while they enjoy their ads then.

RouterTech has announced the release of version 2 of its landmark AR7WRD firmware. Supporting more routers than ever before and providing lots more features with it, this really is one of the best firmwares you can be using on any compatable router. Full support is being provided in the forums. Stability is the best yet and a range of little tweaks have been applied to the firmware to ensure the best uptime possible for your home network internet connection.

I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank the developers (thechief and biro) who have worked tirelessly on this release for RouterTech; the whole project would be nothing without you.