I have been running with .Text blogging software since I got this hosting arrangement set up back in 2004. At the time development was quite active on it and it was an introduction for me to blogging, and on my platform of choice of .NET.

Since then things have moved on and I have been looking to bring my software more up to date. Mainly to support more recent developments like blog writing tools that let you compile things offline. I’ve attempted the usual work arounds, like using notepad as an offline tool to draft posts, but it niggles me that more up to date options are available.

The chap (Scott Watermasysk) behind .Text moved on to some success with Community Server, but it appeared to be bigger than I needed. A few years later I was pleased to see that a generous community of developers had branched the .Text code under the project name Subtext. Since I found out about it, I have been planning to upgrade to Subtext and even made an abortive attempt at upgrading but bottled out. Prematurely it would seem as the error I encountered was easily remedied by the support team at my hosts. I was again pleased during a recent visit to the Subtext project site to see that they have recently issued version 2.0 of Subtext after a while where I wasn’t that sure of progress on the application. And as they mention good Windows Live Writer support (which I am using with my work blogs) I think I will give it another go to upgrade.

It may mean that the blog drops off the web for a little while, or it may go very smoothly. I don’t know if the feed URLs may change, I’ll be doing my best to make sure that things are easy to find if they do move.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.