Alan's Ramblings

As I documented at length earlier here, here and here I bought a Garmin eTrex Summit in October of last year, and had no end of problems with it powering itself off for no apparent reason. Garmin replaced it (twice) and the third unit was OK-ish but still tended to turn itself off occasionally. After an email exchange with Garmin I said I'd try to track down exactly what the problem was. I persevered, and the clincher was when I turned on the inbuilt magnetic compass and the unit immediately turned off - a fresh set of batteries, no low battery warning, it just turned off. Once this had happened a couple of times I felt I had enough information to send a detailed report to Garmin. I'd expected to be told it was a fimware issue and that I'd have to wait for a fix, but I was pleasantly surprised to be told that they were just releasing a new version of the Summit and that they would send me one. I was even more surprised when it turned up a day later! It appears that I've been sent a pre-release unit, as it has features that aren't mentioned yet on the Garmin product page for the Summit. It turns out that Garmin have made a whole bunch of improvements:

• The biggest change is the addition of support for WAAS (USA) / EGNOS (Europe). This is a satellite-based differential GPS system - basically a network of accurately surveyed ground stations watch the GPS signals, calculate the difference from where the signals says they are and where they really are, send the correction back up to some other satellites which then rebroadcast it so that WAAS/EGNOS-enabled GPS units can use the correction to improve their accuracy. At the moment the European system isn't fully deployed, but when it is it should give a 10x improvement in accuracy - indications are that the accuracy will be around 1 metre.
• New 'Trip Computer' page which allows you to select 5 fields from a list of 31 to display. The list is very comprehensive - just about every parameter I can think of is covered.
• When navigating to a waypoint the map page can display a line from where you are now to the destination (as per the older model) or a line from your starting point to the destination. This is the way the GPS12XL works, and it's much more useful as it allows you to easily see if you are wandering left or right from your course.
• The compass can be turned off as well as on by holding down the PAGE button - on the older model you could only turn it on.
• The track log can be turned off, and the point collection mode can be set to one of three modes:
  • 'Auto' which has 5 different resolution settings.
  • 'Distance' which allows you to specify the distance between sucessive points.
  • 'Time' which allows you to specify the time between sucessive points.
• More internal memory, which means the following changes:
  • Waypoints per route up from 50 to 125.
  • Track log points up from 3,000 to 10,000.
  • Points on saved tracks up from 500 per track to 750.
• The fairly useless Hunt/Fish page found on some of the other eTrex models is now available.

Overall Garmin have made an already impressive and useful GPS even better, and despite my best efforts I haven't managed to get the new one to power itself off, so it looks like they've fixed that problem too. Yay Garmin!

Posted by alan at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Whilst the SSH clients I found for my phone were an interesting gimmick, to be honest they weren't actually much use because of the small screen on the phone - a simple 'ls' fills up screen after screen, even on the tiniest (i.e. unreadable) font setting. I thought IRC might just be doable, and in fact there are several Java IRC clients available for phones. I tried WLIrc and jmIrc. jmIrc was originally a fork of WLItrc, and the shared heritage is evident. I couldn't load either of the clients over WAP onto the phone, but they both installed fine after I downloaded them and squirted them into the phone via the IR link. Once on the phone, both clients were configured as detailed in step 5 of my SSH client post.

WLIrc proved to be less than useable as it kept dying with a Java null pointer exception. jmIrc however seems to work fine, with just one minor quirk that I've been able to find so far - If you modify a connection profile and then quit rather than saving the entry it loses the entry, and the next time you start it it dies with an array bounds exception, the only fix is to reinstall.

Once you have started up the client you can set up profiles to connect to your favorite IRC servers, specifying which channels you want to join, your nick etc. When you connect to a server each channel is indicated by a small coloured square on the screen. Backgrounded channels that have had traffic since you last viewed them are highlighted by changing the colour of the indicator square for that channel. You can switch channels with left and right with the joystick, and you can scroll up and down with the joystick as well. The number keys can be used to page up/down a screen at a time, home/end etc. When entering text with the fold-out keyboard closed you can use the phone's predictive text feature to compose your messages in the same way that you would if you were composing an SMS message. All in all it's an impressive illustration how careful interface design can yield a truly useful application even when the platform it is running on is limited. If I had any boring meetings to sit through I'd certainly be using it to chat to people I'd rather be communicating with, but one of the benefits of being a remote employee is that I very rarely have to sit through any such meetings :-)

Posted by alan at 10:44 PM | Permalink

My old Motorola Timeport finally gave up the ghost recently. To be honest it was always less than excellent anyway - I only got it because it was the only tri-band phone available at the time. The user interface was at best idiosyncratic, at worst unusable - certainly for sending SMS messages it was a joke - I used to challenge people in pubs to send a SMS in less than five minutes. I had a scan through the list of phones we can choose from, and quite liked the look of the Nokia 6820 as it has a really cute flip-out QWERTY keyboard - I figured that even I could sent a SMS using it! I paired it up with a Jabra BT250 bluetooth headset so I'm car-legal as well.

I'm really happy with the phone so far, and yes, even I can send text messages with it! The fold-out keyboard is quite useable, I can type quite comfortably with my thumbs on it. When you open the phone up to use the keyboard the display rotates around to match the orientation of the keyboard which is kinda cool. The phone has lots of toys, it supports GPRS, SMS, MMS, WAP, yada, yada, yada. It also has a simple inbuilt PIM so I can keep my diary and to-do notes on it. I used to use a Psion 5mx, but to be honest I couldn't be bothered carrying it around with me all the time. I've already started using the phone as my main diary, and it has got the balance between simplicity and usefulness just about right. I've also had endless fun downloading stupid ringtones onto it, however I have noticed that if you set up ringtone groups it doesn't always pick the correct one, which is a little annoying. It also has a 352x288 camera, but quite frankly it's useless - it's not only that it's low resolution but it produces pictures that look like they have been drawn by a three year old in wax crayon - and then left on a radiator for a week.

The phone also comes with some PC software that allows you to manage the address book and upload/download files to the phone. The phone shipped with version 5.8, but I subsequently noticed that version 6.41 was available from the Nokia website. I duly removed 5.8 and installed 6.41, and that's where my problems started. 6.41 couldn't see the address book entries I'd created with the earlier version, even after I'd de/reinstalled 6.41. And to cap it all, the 6.41 version was distinctly inferior to 5.8 - for example the address book editor wouldn't let you assign contacts to caller groups, and wouldn't allow you to assign email addresses to contacts either. I tried rolling back to 5.8, but that also didn't work any longer. In the end I had to uninstall the software and manually delete all files and directories it had created, and then go and manually delete all the registry keys that had 'Nokia' in them - eek! However, on reinstalling 5.8 everything started behaving. I contacted Nokia tech support and they gave me a strong hint that 6.41 was to be avoided in favour of 5.8, so 3 out of 10 for the software, Nokia!

The phone has a web browser which is OK in a 'WAP is pretty crap' way - I used it to check the reviews for the rather good Gurkha restaurant we ate at in Fleet when we were down there on Monday, and I suspect it might also be useful for cheating at pub quizzes ;-) The other thing that intrigued me was that the phone has an email client that includes IMAP support. My service provider (Vodafone) supplies it's customers with a free email account - if you register and upgrade your voicemail account you can manage your voicemail from the web, and if people email your vodafone.net email address you can get the emails read out to your phone by an electronic lady, which is kinda spooky. The website gives instructions for how to set up Microsoft Outlook to work with the email system and from that I figured out how to do the same for the email client on the phone. I thought I'd document it here as it will probably work for any similar Nokia phone. The first step is to register to upgrade your voicemail account, then configure the phone as follows:

If you now fire up the email client you should be able to both send and receive emails via your vodafone.net account. One thing to note: the phone email client doesn't delete messages on the server even if you delete them from the phone, so you'll occasionally have to log on via the web interface to delete them. You can use the web browser in the phone do do this - the web-based email system is linked to from the Vodafone mobile homepage.

Posted by alan at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thanks to PlanetSun I found a link from Geoff Arnold's blog to Baghdad Burning, the blog of a woman living in Baghdad. It's very sobering stuff, whatever your position on the war is. As with all wars, its the ordinary people that suffer the most. What's really sad is that she seems to have received her fair share of abusive emails from people who think that the Iraqi people should be grateful that they were invaded. Sheesh.

Posted by alan at 11:25 AM | Permalink

I was playing Go online with a really nice guy called Jerry Plaaten on IGS, and as well as very kindly taking a considerable amount of time to show me lots of hints and tips as we were playing (including letting me retake some of my more cretinous moves!), he pointed me to another server, the Kiseido Go Server. This has an excellent client (Java again!) that allows you to recall, review and edit games, so it offers very good facilities for teaching. There is a dedicated area on the server for beginners, and it is gratifying to see that it isn't just populated by beginners, but that better players hang out there too just to play games against the less able and help them improve. I played a 9x9 game against someone there earlier today, and I ended up passing on some of the tips I had picked up - so what goes around comes around I guess. As Jerry said to me, "a little knowledge goes a long way"!

Like other Go servers it has a ranking system, and interestingly it explicitly flags up people who tend only to play people better than themselves, so such behaviour is obviously frowned upon by the Go community. Go has a good handicapping system, which means that two players of significantly different standards can still have a challenging game.

It is nice to see that some areas of the web still have a real community spirit.

Posted by alan at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was hunting around in Borders looking for something to buy for James, my eldest, and I found a boxed beginners Go set and book. For those of you who don't know what Go is, it is a 3,000 year old game that originated in China. Go is the European name for it, derived from the Japanese name, Igo. Other names for it are Wei Ch'i in China and Baduk in Korea. The game consists of a 19 x 19 grid, with one player playing black stones, and the other playing white. Unlike other board games, the pieces are played on the intersections of the lines rather than inside the squares. The objective of the game is to surround territory with stones of your color. Pieces can take each other, but that's a secondary objective - the winner is the person who has captured the most territory.

So that I wouldn't get hammered by my 10-year old son on Xmas day, I thought I'd better get a head start and find out how to play. It turns out there is an enormous amout of information on the net - not surprising as the game is played by an estimated 50 million people in the Far East. A good introduction can be found on the British Go Association website. There are also quite a few online Go servers, that allow you to play other people online - and having played a few games, I'm hooked!

At first sight the game appears to be straightforward - the rules are fairly simple, and it all seems pretty easy. However, having played a couple of games online and been soundly thrashed, it has really grabbed my interest. It's actually a far more complex game than chess - unlike chess the best Go-playing programs are of a distinctly crummy standard. The reason it is so much more difficult for computers than chess, according to this overview of computer Go is that at any given point in a Go game there are vastly more potential moves to be considered, and that in addition evaluating each potential move is far more difficult and costly, and to cap it off libraries of precomputed game openings and endings, which are used extensively in chess playing programs, really don't work very well for Go - in all it is thought that 10^27 more computer power is needed for a world-class Go program than is needed for chess. At least there is still one thing left where we are better than the goddam machines :-)

The largest online Go server is the Internet Go Server (IGS). Most of the Go servers are based on telnet, but there are a quite a few clients available that give you a graphical board to play on, and you can also watch other games that are in progress. I quite like gGo - it's written in Java so it is cross-platform. I shouldn't say this bearing in mind who I work for, but it is the first Java application I've come across that I actually consider to be worth using!

Posted by alan at 09:49 PM | Permalink

I've collected up a few interesting/funny links over the last couple of days, so I thought I'd immortalize them here ;-)

Someone pointed me at this page of optical illusions, I particularly like the first one, it makes my eyes go "well wonky", as my kids would say.

I also found this site which concentrates on paintshop and flash animation satire. I't a bit scurrilous, not for the easily offended and some of it is rather hit-or-miss, but there are some gems hidden in there, ones that particularly ticked my warped sense of humor are Arafatboy Slim and this spoof google search (geddit?).

I also rather like the http://bbspot.com satire site. It's a bit like the more well-known http://theonion.com, except to my mind it is much funnier and much better done. I particularly like these:

Blair Says Britain Must Back Bush In Order To Become 51st State
Open Source Community Developing Their Own Viruses
SpamAssassin Unveils New HomeAssassin Product for Unwelcome Visitors

Posted by alan at 07:25 PM | Permalink

Flushed with success after my recent Paint Shop Pro exploits, (here and here), I decided that in the interests of avoiding RSI I needed something better than a mouse to draw with, so I bought a cheap (~ £60.00) A4 tablet, a Trust 1200. This makes drawing much easier, after the initial clumsiness caused by switching from a relative-position mouse to an absolute-position pen. I've also explored some of the more arcane features of PSP - the 'paint with a texture' feature is a complete waste of time, but being able to control line thickness , colour intensity or a host of other features by varying the amount of pressure on the pen is a real boon. I've also noticed that heavy use of the warp brush makes PSP unstable, and it crashed a couple of times and didn't get better until I rebooted - Doncha just love Windoze. Anyway, I was fiddling around to see how I could enhance the following not very inspiring photo:

And kinda got carried away and ended up with this:

However, compared to some of the digital art (created from scratch) that I have seen on the web, my effort looks a bit second rate. Never mind, it kept me amused for a while :-)

Posted by alan at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro 7 that I used to create the now-infamous spoof Perl 6 book cover, and I noticed that version 8 has come out, so I phoned up and ordered the upgrade for £50.00. Version 8 has loads of whizzy new tools for fiddling around with photos, and it is a fraction of the price of the more well-known Adobe Photoshop (£84.95 vs £585.99 for the full versions). PSP does more than everything I need, and for the life of me I can't see how Photoshop can justify being nearly seven times more expensive. I've only just started playing with the new version, but already I've knocked up this image of my friend Elaine, the CPAN administrator, I hope she will be suitably offended :-)

Anyway, Paint Shop Pro 8, highly recommended.

Update I found some reports of people having problems with PSP 8 locking up and being slow, but I notice that there is a patch to bring PSP up to version 8.01 available here. The release notes mention "crash" "lock up" and "performance" lots of times, so installing the patch seems like a good move.

Posted by alan at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As a result of the torrent of spam I've been receiving from the Sobig.F virus, my tolerance for spam is at an all-time low. Like most people I get my share of 'medical' spam, offering products to increase, decrease or otherwise modify various parts of my anatomy. In the past most of these have gone to an email address I have kept for web use and were therefore easy to catch, but I'm now starting to get them on my primary email address as well. I therefore decided to whip up a procmail recipe to deal with them, using a list of keywords and procmail scoring. However, as I soon learned, the spammers have tried to prevent you doing this by obfusticating the contents of the spam. They do this by sending out HTML-format emails, and obfusticating the HTML so that a simple keyword match won't work. However, with a small perl script and a little bit of procmail magic, this was easily circumvented. I've written this up because I think it show some useful and underused features of both perl and procmail. If you are interested, read on.

Continue reading "Procmail and obfusticated spam" »

Posted by alan at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If like me your website is hosted on a machine sat on your ADSL line, the total amout of bandwidth used by people hitting your site can be a concern. My friend Stephen pointed me at this rather cool utility - Trickle - that you can use to limit the total bandwidth used by people downloading - the really useful thing is that it can limit more than one application at once, so if you are running say a website and a FTP server you can limit the aggregate bandwidth used by both. Another friend Gary who has libxml2 binaries for Solaris on his site has used it to limit his bandwidth, and says it works well, although I haven't needed to deploy it myself (yet!)

Posted by alan at 02:59 PM | Permalink

"Linux gives us the power we need to crush those who oppose us" - check out Everyone looks spiffy with a Tux (requires Flash). I'm sure I've met Steve before (several times ;-)

Posted by alan at 11:26 AM | Permalink

Last time I was in the US, I was wandering around Frys looking for something to take home for the kids. I ended picking up a couple of packs of Whitewings paper gliders (http://www.whitewings.com) - 12 different models for about $15.00. It claimed on the box that they are the "World's Best performance Paper Gliders', and I can vouch that they are! They are a combination of a balsa body and paper wings that you glue together with PVA craft glue. I made them ages ago and never got round to flying them, so today we finally had a go, and they are excellent. You get some gauges that you use to set the dihedral and camber of the wings, and to fly them you launch then into the wind using a little rubber-band catapult. They will easily go the length of a football field, and if tuned properly will fly in a wide circle as they drift downwind. The kids loved them. I've not been able to find a stockist in the UK, but I'm sure there must be one.

Top tip: After you build them, spray them with sealer - the type artists use for protecting chalk and charcoal drawings, and they won't get soggy if they land in a puddle :-)

Posted by alan at 06:53 PM | Permalink