I’m currently sat on the bank of the lake, watching the fountain spew water into the sky. It’s hot and sunny and really quite pleasant. The free city-wide wifi helps too, as does my dad’s Asus Eee PC, my N810 fails to connect to the network at all.

The plane is in a few hours.

Welcome aboard EasyJet flight Screaming Baby 592 from Liverpool to Geneva. On your flight today you will spend more time waiting in the airport than on the plane itself. Upon reaching Geneva, remember we have landed in Switzerland and not France.

After failing to buy a new mobile phone we zoomed off to the airport, got on our plane full of shouting children and were transported to Geneva. From there we caught a bus to Chamonix.

The hostel is quite basic, but has all the essentials - warmth, lighting, electricity, water and free Wifi conveniently provided by some wifi transmitter nearby. My N810 fails to connect consistently, but my dad’s Eee PC is quite happy.

I’ve just managed to extract the GPS route from my GPS and have it on my N810, unfortunately I can’t upload it to any mapping sites because it takes too long and the connection dies. Guess I’ll have to keep them until I get back and upload then.

Chamonix is an interesting place, containing people from pretty much every nationality we’ve got. There’s lots of places to eat and buy tourist crap from, and a giant muddy river running through the middle. Supposedly there’s some large hills or something around it, but all I saw was cloud

Tomorrow we’re off for a walk up something high and steep if the weather is good. I’m charging my camera batteries as we speak. I hope I have enough memory space to store all the photos! I think I have about 7GB of space spread over all the various memory cards I own, and with this Eee I can copy things around.

Assuming this wifi holds out, I’ll continue posting

It’s pretty foggy out there. I’ve just been ‘over the border’ (between Yorkshire and Lancashire) along the M62 to visit Steve to sort out some things we’re doing. The weather wasn’t so bad when I left, just the usual drizzle and rain, but over the tops it’s a near whiteout. Coming back in the dark was a slow and difficult affair, playing the game of ’spot the red lights’ and avoiding the trucks.

Steve’s local pub has wifi, and also a rather poorly chosen password on the router. We did the slightly poncy thing of installing Visual Studio on my Macbook in VirtualBox while eating our tea.

I’m running VMWare Fusion on my Macbook. In it is an instance of Windows XP. I have a Samba server on my network that is configured to be a domain controller. If I connect my Macbook to the wired network, VMWare Fusion will create a bridged network device and the XP instance gets its own IP address from my DHCP server.

Irritatingly, if I use the Airport wireless connection, the VMWare bridging doesn’t work. I get a message saying /dev/vmnet0 doesn’t exist. After a bit of reading and asking it seems this is because Airport cards don’t support promiscous mode, which is needed for VMWare’s bridging device.

So since the Windows instance then has to use NAT, it gets given an IP address for a tiny private network living in my Mac, which is totally unreachable from the outside world. Also it means any broadcast messages to discover network services won’t go out onto my real network. The main one being Windows saying “hello, is there a domain controller out there?”.

Took me ages to work out that putting the Samba server’s IP address into the WINS part of the XP instance’s network config solved that problem. I can now do a domain logon over a VMWare NAT connection that is using the Airport card in my Mac.

I still haven’t solved the issue where I need the domain controller to be reachable in order to log in at all. Since this is a laptop it’s a bit of a failure if I can’t log into it with the usual profile when not plugged into my network. I don’t want two profiles as this will cause a right mess of duplicate settings, and me having to configure everything twice. I also don’t want to point the local user’s profile at the cached copy of the network user’s local profile. Somehow my work laptop is configured to allow me to log into the domain, even when the PDC isn’t there.

Ever since I created a server in my house with all my music on, I’ve been looking for ways to play this music throughout my house without having to put PCs all over the place. PCs are great inventions, letting us listen to music, watch video and communicate with fellow humans. Their only failing is they require time to boot up, and who wants a PC whirring away in their front room? It’s a front room, not an office.

So to begin with I had ideas of building a small “media PC” to put under my telly. I could stuff Linux on it and leave it on all the time. It’d work and I would be in my technical ability to make.

Then I got an Xbox, chipped it and put XBMC on it. The Xbox boots up in about ten seconds and works with a remote control. I can now listen to music and watch video in my front room without a PC. Problem solved. Now how can I do the other things I want like browsing the web or chatting to people…

Well obviously I could get a laptop, then I could do everything on that without a problem. I could Internet while on the toilet if the desire took me. Laptops are just PCs though, and when their batteries fail they require plugging into the mains. I’ve got two though, and I do sometimes drag them about my house when the need arises.

However, I also own a Nokia Internet Tablet. It’s tiny, it stays powered on all the time and runs Skype. It also streams music from the web and has a fairly good web browser. I can now do random web searches while watching TV, or in bed. It’s much easier to Skype with a small VCR sized box in your hand than an entire laptop crushing your legs.

Its music playback facilities are a bit… limited though, and streaming music off the web is a sure way to eat battery. This is where I discovered the world of “Internet Radios” and the Squeezebox 3. This magical device will not only stream music off the web, but also your local network, and they do a wifi version. So I could have one in my bedroom and listen to my music without needing another PC whirring away in my house.

They’re a bit expensive though. Cheaper ones exist, but they don’t play OGG which is the format all my music is stored in, and I’m not transcoding all my music into MP3 just to please some cheap music player. Last night this changed when I discovered the rather cheap Logik IR100. It plays OGG/MP3/WMA from the Internet or local network. It is also £40, which was cheap enough to make me get in my car and whizz off to PC World last night to buy one.

So now in my house I can either sit in my office and listen to music and watch videos, or I can sit downstairs and do the same, and now I can sit in my bedroom and listen to the exact same music. Should the urge take me I can also fire up my Internet Tablet and wander about chatting on Skype to people.

Convergence was something people were banging on about in the early 2000’s and it was going to revolutionise the way we live. Well I think it’s crept up without anyone noticing. Once I’ve imported some music into my server it’s available for playing on any of my network devices with no further effort. I don’t have to synchronise anything with a central server, nor do I have to use proprietary “server” programs. It’s all either standard Windows sharing/NFS or UPNP.

hijack-hacked-linksys-wireless-router

Read on for an amusing tale of what happens when people fail to change the default settings in their hardware. I’ve got a wireless network, my neighbour seems to as well. Fortunately for him he has WPA, fortunately for me I have MAC address filtering.

Unfortunately for me I have a Belkin router that doesn’t work properly

Keep reading…

Last night I set out to write a world class lesson plan for my interview today. Something different, something useful, something that shows I can make kids remember things.

Hmm… well group work goes down well, they can find me information about parts of operating systems, different types of GUIs. They can do a few past exam questions. We’ll discuss it at the end. Yeah.

Or with some modification I can take my laptop running Linux in, show them that and actually demonstrate the difference between a GUI, CLI and a menu based interface. We can then compare and contrast Windows and Linux, GUIs and command lines. Do a few questions and explain what the examiners are looking for. Even better, bonus points for doing something different.

So I set off at 6:15 - never arriving late to an interview ever again, I was due there at eight. I obviously arrived at 7:15, bang on the target time Google said. Oh well, half an hour of web browsing on my N800 helped to pass the time. And then in I went.

Laptop was connected to projector. Laptop didn’t like the projector. X config file was edited and the projector behaved itself. Then my USB drive didn’t like the school’s computer until a real teacher logged in. Right, objectives are on the board, lesson plan is on the desk. I know what I’m doing, I know who I am… go go go!

And the lesson went well, even with two people doing proper formal observations of me. The kids sat there in complete non-comprehension about GUIs. They couldn’t even tell me what kind of user interface Windows was.

Right… I see a problem here, can I fix it? Can I get the kids to at least recognise a GUI when they see one?

Well yeah, I can. It took an hour and a lot of repetition, and examples. Being able to boot my laptop and show them a real, live CLI was useful.

The lesson ended and I was given to the IT techies for a while with the comment of “he’s technical too, tell him about this place’s computers”. They have site-wide wireless networking with roaming capabilities, staff laptops, a new tape loader that isn’t working properly and people who ring up and moan about their pc not working. They aren’t BOFHs, give IT teachers higher privileges than regular teachers, and generally aren’t afraid to show off their system.

Eventually the school remembered I existed and asked me into another interview. This one was full of people very high up the school foodchain. I’m fairly sure there was a governor there too. We had a talk, I had more tea. They offered me the job, I took the job and signed some contracts.

Yeah, I got it I start in September.

So it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

University want me to talk to the rest of the ICT trainees about interviews and getting a job since I’m supposedly the first person to do so. That’ll be another odd experience on Monday.

As announced a few minutes ago on the maemo-developers list, the source for the N800 wireless lan drivers have just been released. Find them at

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/cx3110x

Found this, it sounds much more fun than the usual WEP/WPA/Mac Address blocking we do…

Upside-Down-Ternet

powered by performancing firefox

Finally my ADSL connection has been transferred to my new house. Mysteriously my username had changed, but after fixing that the magic box under the stairs (well, the four of them) said I was connected

And it’s my connection, in my house using wires. I don’t have to shuffle my PC around the floor trying to get a signal or sit on the floor and wonder why the connection keeps dropping.

Normal is indeed great when you get it back.