Life

Identification and money laundering rant

Alistair Laing — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:51:00 GMT

Why is it, in this day and age when suppliers want us all to go paperless, that the same type of suppliers insist on a person providing a recent bank statement or utility bill to prove that you are who you are that lives at an address?

They haven't thought it out....

ZoneAlarm issue an update

Alistair Laing — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:42:00 GMT

Zonealarm have issued an update to the clash with the Windows XP Update mentioned in a previous post. It seems to work, but unfortunately it also means that Windows Security Centre can't see that ZoneAlarm is doing its firewall bit on my machine. So I still have to have something switched off to stop my PC nagging me.

ZoneAlarm Clashes with Windows Update

Alistair Laing — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:07:00 GMT

I've been rebooting and doing all sorts of things to my main desktop PC tonight, as certain services were not connecting to the internet.

Turns out there is a clash between one of the updates in the recent Tuesday Microsoft XP Release and ZoneAlarm. I picked up the news message from CNet via google. Turns out KB951748 which corrected a dns exploit mucks up ZoneAlarm. The two companies are working it out, but it is not the first time that ZoneAlarm has stopped working on me due to an update of Office or Windows. Arrgh. The options for fixing it aren't too brilliant at the moment either.

My Cat Died Today

Alistair Laing — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:01:00 GMT

My cat Perdy died today (well, I should say our - I found out my wife had acquired her more or less when she appeared in the house). She had been in decline for the last 12 months or so. We "inherited" her years ago from a young couple we know who were at the time starting a family, and Perdy's habit of sitting on everything was a bit too much for new parents. Her exact age was uncertain, though we reckon she was at least 16 years old. The last few months were the usual old age problems of not cleaning herself properly, losing a bit of mobility etc, but she still managed to get stuck behind the kitchen units a couple of weeks ago.

Before that she did the usual cat things, sitting on anything you wanted to read, sitting on my computer keyboard, climbing wherever possible. She also did a few different things like being very vocal, never scratched, liked getting her tummy tickled, and at times liked to climb on my shoulders. She illustrated some of the real cat attributes of offsiding (always being on the other side of a door) and played cat chess with the other cats in the street. I think she shared the house with us for about 10 years. And for those who know me, the fact she was black fitted in with my casual wardrobe. I'm not exactly macho in admitting, but I think I was quite attached to the daft cat. I'm quite sad about it.

Monitoring my ISP Stats - ADSL2+ fastpath 3dB profile

Alistair Laing — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:34:00 GMT

I'm beginning to play with this less as I settle on the highest throughput I can drag out of this old copper connecting me to the BT exchange a couple of miles away. What I will try to do in the coming days is match the time I run a speedtest to the stats on the router, the sets below are out of sync by about 15 hours.

Speedtest latest says (picked one of the best from the recent goes):

What is good is that you can see the drop in ping of around 10ms as a result of the removal of interleaving for fastpath. It doesn't make much difference to me at the moment, but the gamers like it.

Simple stats from the router go like at the moment:

ADSL Link	Downstream	Upstream
Connection Speed	8427 kbps	1308 kbps
Line Attenuation	46.0 db	23.8 db
Noise Margin	4.1 db	3.3 db

Be broadband have dropped the connection profile to 3dB which is having an impact on errors, but my long line appears to be generally ok and I am watching the more detailed stats every so many days.

Planning website for travelling in Edinburgh on foot

Alistair Laing — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:28:00 GMT

Mental title that, I was trying to come up with a short, snappy title to point at a website that shows you the best route for walking between two places in Edinburgh.

Walkit.com is great for route planning when you aren't using public transport or a car. Google maps are fine if you are sticking to the roads, and traveline scotland is great for public transport, walkit fills the gap for a small number of cities in the uk.

I'd decided I'd walk to Ocean terminal from the office for some exercise, and the directions were great for making sure I got there and back in the shortest distance.

Monitoring my ISP Stats - ADSL2+ fastpath

Alistair Laing — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:38:00 GMT

As I was getting good error stats on my long wire from the exchange, I asked to get interleaving switched off on my line - i.e. fastpath. So with nothing else apart from standard ADSL2+ and fastpath I get:

And I get the following summary from my Netgear DG834PN

ADSL Link	Downstream	Upstream
Connection Speed	6100 kbps	1157 kbps
Line Attenuation	48.0 db	24.7 db
Noise Margin	6.1 db	6.4 db

Assuming things stay stable (based on the advanced stats) I will go for a lower noise margin profile.

Monitoring my ISP Stats - playing around

Alistair Laing — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:02:00 GMT

I tried to make myself not do it, but I've spent the last week playing around with settings on my router and configuration profile settings with my new ISP to wring the most I can out of my internet link.

The fastest I have managed so far is shown here:

The sad thing is is that I've been playing with settings so much that I can't remember exactly what the settings are that produced that result. That said though, the one thing I am sure of is that I have now switched to the Be Unlimited (or Be Home) package as the distance I am from my BT Exchange means that I can't get the full benefit of the more expensive package, so I've downgraded so that I get the same speed for £4 less a month.

To get improved settings I've been evaluating what is called fastpath, or interleaving removal. I was reminded reading a post that ADSL technology originated in cable tv over copper, so some of the technologies (like interleaving) are really targeted at video delivery. Leaving TCP/IP to deal with error correction improves latency.

The other thing I have been playing with is signal to noise ratio margin, or at least I think that is what it is. Using a downloaded tool to talk to my router and make it run closer to the wind on this margin ups my speeds to what you see above.

MORE SPEED ! :)

Monitoring my ISP Stats - Demon FUP Cap in action

Alistair Laing — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:12:00 GMT

Had enough so kicked a couple of bittorrent downloads into action and crashed against my 60Gb limit for the rolling 30 days, so I'm now capped to 128k during the day - a slight difference in speed:

Although 128k is the figure Demon quote, you get an illustration above of the congestion on these speed tester sites. Either that or the kids and my proxy server are using bandwidth.

Line stats are much the same as before:

ADSL Link	Downstream	Upstream
Connection Speed	5856 kbps	448 kbps
Line Attenuation	42.0 db	22.0 db
Noise Margin	9.4 db	22.0 db

Me and networks sometimes don't get on - wifi channels

Alistair Laing — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:42:00 GMT

Well, a few hours after that post about changing wifi channel numbers and I have learned a little more than I expected about WiFi configuration. Turns out that changing the channel number made a big difference to a particular machine on my network, my desktop PC.

The other machines were happy following the wifi around the different channels, but my Dell 5000 (with exactly the same card and drivers as the old Dell 4100) would only work on Channels 1,7,8,9,10,11,12 and 13. As you can guess I was working my way through the channels in sequential order and that big gap at the top lead to all sorts of changes by me to try and trace the problem.

Of course the engineer side of me should have said "The only thing that has changed is the channel", but I was in there rebooting routers and fixing wep keys. Then I discovered a post about channel powers and worked through the options - that was the issue.

But what was really confusing was that everything else was happy reconnecting, just not the machine I was using. Strange. So I'm sticking to channel 7, which has the best connection speed.