I often want to go to bed while iTunes is downloading podcasts at snail’s pace. You can Start->Run this to make your Windows PC turn off after an hour:
shutdown /s /t 3600
That’s 3600 seconds, or 60 minutes, a.k.a. an hour
Category: article
Plusnet – they did me proud
Less than a week ago I signed us up for broadband with plusnet. They beat the deal my existing provider was offering by £5. No contest.
The last time I switched broadband provider it was a certified palava so I was quite cynical this time round.
After signing up the first step was to get the MAC code from my current provider BT. I did that via live chat and although I had to ask for it three times, they did finally concede that I was lost to them and said they’d email it to me. It came a bit later. I called plusnet the next day to give them the code.
Then I got an email late last week saying that we would be swapped over on Thursday 21st March and they attempted to deliver the new router Friday. We picked that up from the post office yesterday.
This is rivetting, eh?
Anyway, I wake up this AM and our broadband from old supplier is disconnected. I don’t have time to check it out so I head out to work. Got an email early this evening to say that our new bb was up and running. Two days early. So, I return home this evening with some trepidation at setting up a new router.
We received a TG582n – not sure it matters because they are all made by Thompson anyway – and it’s a great liltte box, very speedy, extremely intuitive. It poops on the BT Homehub already.
Luckily it was already set-up to use the same IP range as we currently used so I basically plugged it in, changed the SSID and the key to be the same as the old router and… that was that.
I’ll have to do some port forwarding at some point but that looks simple enough. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
There was one negative in this whole thing: when I opened the router box up I noticed that it has WPS. You may not know but Wireless Protected Setup is a fucking stupid idea that lets anyone connect to your router in a “secure way”. It’s easy to exploit to gain access to someone else’s network without permission and it’s not so much a back door as a gaping window with a “swag here” neon sign above it.
I had a quick Google to see if it could be disabled. That yield this page. I was delighted to find this for two reasons. Firstly, it points straight to a fix and, secondly, it has responses from plusnet staff that don’t just say “we’ll look into this” but show that they are proactively investigating. All good news.
The fix is here and it took about 30 seconds to apply.
So, why is this sad AND epic? Well, this is how it should be. I have been home an hour and my switch to another broadband supplier has been completely stress free. I now have some time to relax. That’s the epic part.
What’s sad is that this experience so greatly exceeded my expectations that I felt compelled to spend 15 minutes writing a blog post about it that no one will ever read.
Chrome Frame
So, I installed Chrome frame on a work PC (naughty) in an effort to get some sites to work better. We use IE 7 and 8. Maybe I should say IE7 and 8 are inflicted upon us as some form of bizarre punishment.
Anyway, I immediately ran into problems when I “roamed”.
The plugin itself installs to the “machine”, whether virtual or not, and so doesn’t roam with you. However, it writes to your User registry, which does roam.
Needless to say I started to get errors on certain webpages, mainly regrading aspxpopupcontrol or lack there of.
The simple solution is to look at the location below in your registry and delete any keys that mention Chrome Frame:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet SettingsUser AgentPost Platform
It’s up to you whether you backup before you do this or not.
Searching Windows
I just discovered you can exclude a sub-folder from a search using:
.jpg NOT path:porn
Awesome.
Tweaking Windows 7 Services
In an effort to disable Windows Media Player from “sharing” on our home network I delved into the murky world of Windows Services
Running
services.msc
as an admin opens up a whole new world of potential improvements and costly mistakes. Playing it safe I googled a few things I was not sure about.
I stopped and disabled (on startup) both Window Media Player Network Sharing Service and Bonjour. I find the very presence of Bonjour on my system an insult and would consider a swift kick in someone’s balls worthy of the price of a ticket to Cupertino. After a quick check I also disabled the NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D Driver. I would imagine almost no-one needs that.
Apart from that I switched a few applications from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed) Startup, these were mostly updaters. I absolutely want these to run but I don’t need them urgently enough to start them all at the same time. For example, I don’t need Secunia checking my programs are up to date the very instant I log in but I don’t want to have to remember to do it myself.
Skype Updater
Secunia PSI Agent
LogMeIn
Adobe Acrobat Update Service
Google Updater Service
I am surprised that these services don’t use this setting by default as many similar services do. I was pleased to see that, for example, the No-IP DUC does. At least “small” companies can get it right.
Digital Dusting
It’s something I have been planning to do for a very long time but this weekend I finally got round to a little electonic house-keeping. As a hoarder I have a modest collection of old components that “might come in handy.” I’ve got two 56.6k PCMCIA cards. Top that.
Inevitably some of this junk is hard drives and, obviously, I have no idea what is on them, so they had to be wiped before disposal. That’s one thing I did. One of them made a noise like a dentist drill. It was not pretty.
Also, I have an old Dell laptop that served me well for many years until it was laid low by a broken hinge. To my surprise it still boots and I was somewhat delighted to discovered it was like an Arch Linux time capsule. Last login? Circa 2007. I’ve got a lot of photos which I’ll post later.
Needless to say the drive on this old favourite is partitioned to within an inch of its life. I think it might even be triple boot. So, i had to have a hunt through there for anything that could be move to our NAS or just deleted.
Generally that meant scouring some FAT32 partitions for media files but my /home directory is a gold mine. I don’t want to do just back that up in bulk, I’d rather pick through and move things I want to keep over to my desktop. The best way to do that is scp but some home network “restrictions” meant that was going to be a headache.
We live in a town house, which is lovely, but the router is on the ground floor so wireless signal in the top floor office is poor. It shouldn’t be that bad but it is. As a result I have my desktop connected directly to the router via some “ethernet over AC” adapters, which works quite nicely. However, for some time I have wanted to add an extra box upstairs and boost the wireless for (what is becoming) my wife’s laptop.
While I am certain I had a Netgear wireless router laying around I have not been able to find it since we moved house. That router would solve all my problems, including transfering my old home dir from the old laptop to the desktop. So, what to do? Dive on eBay and try and find one?
Well, I decided to give freecycle a go and quickly found a brand new boxed Netgear 15 minutes up the road. Since we were heading that way yesterday anyway I arranged to pick it up and spent a few hours setting it up last night.
Now I am all set to finish cleaning up and retire that laptop for good. I’ll also be able to give my occasional server box a permenant home.
Updating an old Arch Linux install
Arch Linux has had some major changes recently and this has made updating a neglected installation a bit tricky.
However, I managed a flawless update on a system that hasn’t been touched since May.
Before you do anything, go to the Arch Linux news page and read everything since your last update. If a package needs manual intervention make sure you add it to –ignore list when the time comes.
Firstly, you want to get setup for the new /lib symlink. There is a guide here – however, you will need to ignore some other packages as well. The main goal here is to stop pacman from breaking:
pacman -Ud http://pkgbuild.com/~allan/glibc-2.16.0-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -Syu --ignore glibc,curl,libarchive,bash,gpgme,filesystem,fontconfig
So, we’ve installed Allan’s special glibc version and we’ve updated the whole system while ignoring all of pacman’s dependencies. I also ignored filesystem and fontconfig as they need intervention. You will almost definitely be asked to upgrade pacman first and foremost. Do that when offered.
Next I updated the filesystem package:
pacman -S filesystem --force
Then I updated all of pacman’s deps:
pacman -S glibc curl libarchive bash gpgme
Lastly, I fixed the conflicts for the fontconfig package and did another system update.
find /etc/fonts/conf.d -type l -exec rm {} ;
pacman -Su
Word of caution – once your system is up to date and make sure you update the initramfs, just in case.
mkinitcpio -p linux
You will also have to upgrade to systemd compatible settings. Next post is about how I handled that.
At least I have learned to be cautious
Last night I was trying to install mysql on my Arch Linux netbook. Now, this would not be note worthy but for the fact it was going badly. The post-install of the pkg .install script is supposed to do basic set-up so you’re ready to go out of the box. However, it failed with a disk full error.
Hmmm. The netbook has at least a 300Gb disk, would an Arch install really fill that? So, I ran
df -k
And, yes, it showed 0 free space.
Weird. But pacman checks for free space when it installs a package, so when I installed mysql the packaged files miraculously fitted in and used up the remaining space? That seems unlikely.
I uninstalled and reinstalled the package several times (it was late) and when I kept getting the same error. Not exactly the most efficient troubleshooting (it was late). My main instinct was to jump on the forums for help and to tacitly “blame the devs”. Instead I decided to call it a night (it was late).
So, this morning I thought “what can I do to quickly free up some space and check remaining space again?”
pacman -Sc
df -h
…ok, so my disk was full!
du /var
Not much
du /usr
Again, just a few gigs. Paranoia sets in.
du /
Whole thing is less than 5 gigs.
By this point I am suspecting it is something to do with my LVM setup and I head off to work with the intention of investigating on the train.
A small amount of reading and one command later
lvs
I can see that, for a reason I can’t rememeber, I made my root volume 5G. Maybe I didn’t understand what I was doing when I set up or maybe it seemed like enough at the time.
At least I know how to resize it now too!
Accounting other’s mistakes in SQL
I’m running a report on our database using Crystal Reports. Sadly some chimp on the vendor side has got the data type wrong on a field and I can’t do the join I need. Obviously I’m not in a position to change that data type myself.
So, after some searching I have this:
SELECT
eval_id,
bvpi_id,
type,
status,
awarded_date,
CAST(awarded_by AS INTEGER) AS awarded_id FROM BVPI_EVALS
I’ve never used CAST before but here I’ve used it to convert a STRING to an INTEGER. I’ve used this in the Add Command section of the Database Expert screen.
I’ve then removed BVPI_EVALS from the query and used the table created by the Command to do the joins.
It’s super slow, though. I think I might need to parameterize the query too.
Store Loyalty Cards
Right, so, I just want to chuck something out there with regard to privacy.
People are generally pretty hot on protecting their privacy online but who’s got a loyalty card for a store?
Let’s pick on Tesco. So, if you have a Tesco Clubcard, what do they find out about you?
What you buy.
That’s it, right? If you ask anyone what Tesco’s find out from your clubcard they’ll say that.
Obviously there’s much more to it than that. For example, they also know:
Where you live
How old you are (probably)
The time you bought it
The date you bought it
The store you bought it in
That’s for each individual product you buy.
So they know if you only buy toilet roll once a month when you go to the big super store. They know you mainly buy milk from smaller stores.
Or maybe you don’t buy much milk at Tesco. In that case, based on where you live, and other places you have shopped, they’ll identify other places you might be getting your milk.
And you wondered why Tesco was popping up everywhere?