Gallery Update

There's been a bit of pruning up in my gallery - all my original work is still there, just some of the rather crappy picture of celebs have gone.

Posted by Alex at 10:41 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

4 months of a piercing

It's now been four months to the day that I had my piercing done.

Not a great to remark upon since the last time I posted about it, last week was a little uncomfortable; a bit of encrustation (eugh) that took a few days to fix, but all sorted now.

I did say that I'd leave it until the four month mark before trying to stretch up again, but after last week's little set back I think I may want to leave it a little longer. The piercing is still quite tight, and I think that the stretch would do some damage and set me back a bit.

Until 5 months then!

Posted by Alex at 12:51 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Belkin Pre-N Router Review - Part 2

Well, I have to admit at least I'm getting replies from Belkin, but I'm not really getting anywhere.

As a précis, it seems that the router cannot support full sized Ethernet MTUs (1500) in 802.11b mode. 802.11n seems to work fine with standard MTU sizes - I haven't yet tried the 802.11g mode.

If anyone can decipher the latest reply, a small prize will be yours - or rather, if you can tell me that they're not talking absolute rubbish:

Alex, the MTU is nothing but the Maximum Transmission unit which is used for the rate of data transfer. Usually most of the ISP's or the programs use the MTU as 1400 by default. If a particular pc has issue in transferring files or connecting to some websites, this might be the issue with the MTU settings on the router/computer, since there is no proper data transfer.

In your issue, the Pre N card works fine even without changing the MTU size (before changing the MTU). So the issue is only with the non-Belkin wireless cards which are running at 11 mbps speed. May be this wireless card is not able to transfer the files when MTU is set to 1500 but at the same time the pre N card works at 1500. So the MTU depends upon the computer. Some computers work at 1400 and the other at 1500 and third may be at 1100.

Apparently, they're passing it onto their research team to investigate, but I don't hold out much hope (although I said that about getting any sort of reply). You will, of course, be the first to know when I do.

Posted by Alex at 10:59 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

The Hut

This is where I work - that shabby white hut purched atop the roof of another building in the centre.

It seemed to feature quite highly on a program last night about an ex-colleague called Babar Ahmad, called "The New Al-Qaeda". It was complete with reconstructions of Babar and my boss - fairly poor ones though.

It was rather full of hyperbole - Babar really didn't work with "powerful" computers, unless you count a 4 year-old Pentium III desktop as powerful (which it isn't).

Anyway, a little bit of excitement in the evening.

Posted by Alex at 12:00 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Present food fads

My present expensive food fads include:

Japanese White Pearl Tea - A very light tea that comes as little jasmine flavoured balls that unfurl in hot water. Cute.

Sauternes - Stupendously lovely, honey sweet desert wine from Bordeaux. The sweetness comes from the fact the grapes are rotten when harvested. Lovely with chocoloate and rotten cheese.

Posted by Alex at 2:43 PM| Permalink | Comments (1)

Crazy search strings

A few of the more unusual search strings that have brought people here:

• "Pierced dick"
• "bum fluff"
• "brewer twins gallery"

The last one features quite highly in Google it seems, hurrah for the lawyers!

Posted by Alex at 11:35 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Belkin Pre-N Router Review - Part 1b

A swift update to this problem of any form of uploading from wireless clients of the Belkin Pre-N router / wireless access point.

In summary:

• Uploading via any protocol - HTTP, SMB, FTP etc. with a content or file size greater than 1kB hangs.
• This is to any host, whether that be directly connected to the WAN/LAN side of the router or elsewhere on the internet.
• Using IPSEC or PPTP VPNs do not help.

I have reported this issue to Belkin, but as yet have had no reply.  A swift Google reveals others with similar issues.

The strange behaviour with file sizes >1kB lead me to think it might be an MTU problem. Anyway, on my two problematic laptops, I used the Dr. TCP program to set the MTU to 1100 for the wireless NICs and that's sorted it.

Well, it's a workaround - I don't consider the issue resolved fully until Belkin publish some working firmware that's able to cope with the proper MTU of 1500. After all, that's the ethernet standard.

For now, avoid Belkin router and wireless products until this issue is sorted.

Posted by Alex at 9:41 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Windows Vista - world's most rediculous OS name

Windows Longhorn has been in development for, well, a while. Things are now starting to progress, but only at the expense of dropping all the good bits out of it like WinFS.

On top of that, they've decided to reveal its launch name today - Windows Vista.

Dreadful. It's supposed to convery "clarity". I think I'll just call it "WinVi" or something. And here's the logo look:

The release schedule has also been published, but I wouldn't pin my hopes on in too much:

Posted by Alex at 4:32 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Futuristic Taps

As well as having a crazy chute style system instead of your normal tap tube, these taps from Hansa glow somewhere between red and blue depending on the temperature. No more burnt handies then...

Posted by Alex at 4:28 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Belkin Pre-N Router Review - Part 1

This is the first part of my review of the Belkin Pre-N Wireless Router.

It's not going to go into too much detail - there are plenty of indepth technical reviews of this product floating around, this is going to be more of a real world example.

First up, getting it up and running was very straightforward. Being an über geek, I dispensed with the automatic setup software and just decided to plug my laptop in and connect to the router's web interface. As all I needed it to do was be a wireless access point (or bridge), I simply chose the option "access point only" and the Belkin disabled all the routing/NAT/firewall features automatically. I assigned it an IP address for the LAN address on my fixed network, then plugged it into my switch. Now it was just a matter of setting the SSID, WEP keys and MAC address filtering and I was away. Probably 10 minutes at most.

One of my laptops refused point blank to see the network, but it's been a bit dodgy of late anyway. Amazingly I told Windows XP to "repair" the wireless connection and it sprang into life! My Netgear MP101 music player was also a bit funny - in the end I did a factory reset on it and it too started working.

The reason I dispensed with my old Buffalo APs was their shoddy range. The Belkin is absolutely awesome in this regard. Before, I would get no signal in my bedroom (furthest point away from the AP), or worse still, some signal that would drop out every minute. Now, I get at least 3 out of 5 bars' strength and the full 11Mbps on my 802.11b wireless card. After I installed a Belkin Pre-N PC Card into my laptop, I got the full speed of 108Mbps and full strength in there - absolutely amazing!

So, from the point of view of easy-of-setup and range it scores pretty highly. However, today (48 hours after installation) I've discovered a problem: when attempting to use the 802.11b cards you cannot upload any files via FTP or SMB. With the Belkin PC card in place, it works a charm. Having tried a plethora of different settings and laptops and firmwares, it seems to be an issue with the AP itself. I've contacted Belkin technical support in Europe, so fingers crossed they can tell me what the problem is.

Hopefully good news for part 2 of the review then!

Posted by Alex at 7:52 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Wireless Stuff on EBay

I'm selling some of my old wireless access points on ebay at present:

http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZalexlomas

I've got a new Belkin Pre-N AP, review to follow!

Posted by Alex at 9:30 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Adsense

Maybe or maybe you haven't noticed the Google ads appearing on the right hand side and at the top of individual archive pages.

It's just an incentive for me to try and keep this thing updated, and perhaps make the odd cent or two. Go, click if you like. Or not.

Posted by Alex at 1:42 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Best end of Lamb with Pea Pancakes

I thought it might be nice to give you a recipe I did this evening, but it's mostly an aide-memoire.

You will need:

For the lamb:

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C.
Ensure you have a nice piece of french trimmed lamb, with the bones at the end cleaned so that it will be easy to slice into individual portions later. Also, remove any fat on the outside of the lamb.
Start by browning off the lamb in the roasting tin on the hob, once this is done, brush the outside with the mustard and sprinkle on the chopped herbs - mint & rosemary are a good combination.
Now put it into the hot oven - around 20 minutes will give you a medium pink middle, 30 minutes will be more well done. Ensure it rests out of the oven for 10 minutes once it's done.

For the pea pancakes:

Whilst the lamb is cooking, take the fresh or thawed frozen peas and blend together in a liquidizer with the egg and the egg yolk, the flour and the cream. In a griddle, melt the butter until it is nut brown in colour and add that to the blender. Season to taste and blend until smooth.

Drop a small ladle's worth of the mixture onto a hot griddle brushed with some oil or butter. This quantity will do you around 6-8 pancakes of 80mm in diameter - remember they will spead out on the griddle.

Once done, set onto a wire rack and top off with some small thumb sized floretts of cauliflower that have been quickly blanched in salted boiling water.

Add some of the grated chedder (you could use red lecicester instead) on top.

For the tomato salsa dressing:

Take the skinned and seeded plum tomatoes, and chop into small pieces. Combine with a little white wine vinegar, chopped corriander and optionally some finely chopped red onion.

To assemble:

Quickly flash the pancakes under a hot grill to melt the cheese.
Cut the lamb into individual portions (they'll look like lamb chops now!).
Plate up the lamb and pancakes and dress with the tomato salsa.

Posted by Alex at 8:35 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

FCKEditor and Movable Type

You may or may not know that this blog runs under Movable Type. It's great, because it's easy to use, powerful and runs on a Perl backend :)

The one thing that it lacks though is a decent HTML CMS editor. Never fear though, because there's an awesome, free and open source product called FCKEditor that will do the fluffy entry editing for you!

A guy at the University of Leiden has written a guide for integrating them both. Go do!

Posted by Alex at 4:51 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Sharepoint URLs

Carrying on with the tech theme this week, a small salutary lesson on sharepoint URLs. I am currently the Sharepoint 2003 administrator for my work - it's a small pilot project for around 200 people at present, but it could get bigger.

Anyway, there's a lot of stuff "they" don't tell you when you're setting it all up; one of those things involves the URLs of subareas that you create. A small example:

•  Top level page
  • Sub area 1
  • Sub area 2
  • etc.

Sharepoint will kindly create friendly URLs based upon these, so these will appear as:

• http://sharepoint.mysite.com 
  • http://sharepoint.mysite.com/subarea1
  • http://sharepoint.mysite.com/subarea2
  • etc.

Not so long ago, Sharepoint started putting ugly URLs like http://sharepoint.mysite.com/C1/subarea20 etc. in. It turns there's a reason that Sharepoint adds in C1, C2, C3... to the URL after a certain amount of time.

Each site can only have a certain number of WSS sites (each subarea is fundamentally one of these, only with fancy wrapping). To get around this, Sharepoint uses so called "bucket sites" - each of the C1, C2 parts is a bucket.

After you create 20 sub areas (doesn't matter in what hierarchy though), Sharepoint will then move onto the next bucket, C1 and so on.

If you want to preserve your friendly URLs without the bucket site addition (for example, a top level hierarchy in a company), create an admin only accessible area with 20 (less any that you're using) subareas to reserve the top level URLs. When you need to use them, delete one of the place holder area in your admin area and then immediately create your new "top level" area. Sharepoint will happily reuse any free URLs from the lowest available bucket.

My lesson here - do this before you open Sharepoint to the world, there's no going back!

Posted by Alex at 4:18 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

TechEd Roundup

All in all, it was a great week, nice and relaxing despite the fact it was work! So, to sum up some of the most interesting bits for me:

- Some various excellent sessions on Sharepoint, mostly on successful implementation plans and disaster recovery.

- Two fabulous sessions on UNIX/Linux authentication & authorisation with Active Directory (unusual to see *NIX represented at a Microsoft conference!).

- Good news that MOM 2005 SP1 is due out in August, and that it fixes a whole host of problems including DTS jobs for reporting, and the renaming of hosts.

- Oracle products run on Windows. Who would've thought it!

- Windows compute cluster edition looks great, it should give all those *NIX solutions a run for their money :)

- Exchange 2003 SP2 adds a whole host of interesting mobile features: ability to wipe remote devices, policy enforcement of PINs etc. A BlackBerry killer if ever I saw one (granted, they're features that have been copied, but they're free!!!).

A little late, but still...

Posted by Alex at 7:00 PM| Permalink | Comments (1)

TechEd Diary

So, this week I'm unexpectedly off to TechEd in Amsterdam. Yes, it's a geek fest of monumental size; mainly geared around those who do MS related stuff in higher education (like me).

Presently I'm sat in poxy Heathrow waiting for my plane, which is now delayed. Hooray BMI. At least I have the miracle of company GPRS and bluetooth on my laptop for company.

Missing the boyfriend already ...

Posted by Alex at 9:20 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)