Hopefully the campfire pic uploads, hello to all you from East Dean!

So on the way down here… (the only thing I have to comment on so far), I really wish people would learn to drive! From the lane hangers to the woman in the Mercedes (which make her excempt from all laws governing the roads), please, buck you attitudes up!

Over taking the army truck with no doors (at speed) on the M25 was a tad scary too!

And did anyone notice issues with GPS past night? Only for about 10th minutes both my satnav and phone lost all signal. By the way most other drivers started slowing up and moving into the slow lane, I’m guessing they experienced it too.

Well anyway, sunshine here … time to wash

I cannot thank Henry and Tara enough, their dedication to the gospel – their confidence to preach Christ and Him crucified, sin and Hell.

I was fortunate enough to find opportunity to take some photos during some of the events.  Below a couple of favourites, the others as always can be viewed on flickr:

But some came out OK.  There’s nothing there I’d say I’m particularly proud of, but they’re “good enough”.  They are photos of other people, so please respect their rights and privacy if you choose to download them or have them printed or whatever.

If you were one of the guys or gals unfortunate enough to have me photograph you, let me know – FaceBook or my blog.  If you want prints, it can be arranged.

(Please note, I have limited bandwidth on my server – it may take some time to load!  Full set can be viewed nice and fast at http://flickr.com/photos/matzi/)

Apparently somewhere, myself and Wonga were trying to meet half way, and consistently missing.  But fortunately that’s no longer the case.

You’ll see the blog entry originally outlining my issues has now been removed, hidden from the prying eyes of Google and those who clearly want nothing more than to flame (which I will mention in a moment).

To the guys at Wonga, thank-you for finally sorting this out.  Thank-you for taking on board what I had to say (politely, and in no way aggressively) regarding your customer services, and thank-you for the personal assurance that everything is now resolved.

If you are the unfortunate victim of fraud through Wonga (through, as in “by means of using Wonga maliciously”) – then keep hope.  I’ve witnessed that they do respond, it’s just perhaps not yet quite as easy as it should be.

Hopefully this is now the close of the chapter, and the start of a new one.  A huge stress of my mind, and something to be vigilant about in the future.

So I grab a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 UNR and try to install it via USB (as there’s no CD drive in the netbook – and I’m lacking a USB CD drive).

It’s been 24 hours now, and I’ve still not got it working. For someone who’s done plenty of initrd hacking, I’m shocked it’s *this* hard. But still, I will prevail. I must prevail. It is just an inanimate object after all.

I’ve no idea if anything like this has been done before – if it has, then fair play.  If not, then I think it’d make an interesting experiment to try.

The idea is simple – there’s a lack of bandwidth available to home users, thanks to BT’s monopoly and purely reactive attitude toward rolling out fibre, reducing contention, traffic shaping, etc blah.  There’s also an increased demand for long durations of large bandwidth, like iPlayer for example.

Previously, contention and traffic shaping were sufficient (although in my opinion – unfair and hidden), but these high bandwidth, intensely saturating streaming services require constant amounts of bandwidth being available.

Increasingly, it would seem, businesses up and down the country are taking residence near groups of houses, or perhaps the other way around – houses are increasingly being built near industrial estates etc.  And these businesses in industrial estates often fork out a lot of money for expensively low contention bandwidth – like leased lines.

My proposal is simple – businesses start selling their available bandwidth on to houses near by for some nominal fee (because let’s face it, any money made is a win) – during the problem hours of 6.00pm through 7.00am, weekdays.  Weekends of course would be optional – but advised.

As far as I’m aware – leased lines are a set fee per month, and provide a guaranteed amount of bandwidth (say 5Mb).  If that 5Mb were provided purely for iPlayer use across 20 houses, on a first come first served basis (i.e. 2x 2Mb streams allowed at once, and no more), home users with limited available bandwidth could be entitled to a program an evening at full speed.  Perhaps the special “booster router” in their living room could shine a bright white LED when one of the two slots is available?

Alternatively, the system could be provided vice versa – avoiding all problems of “aggregated bandwidth” etc by having BT provide cost breaks for businesses willing to have their phone lines used to push the excess requirements up from the exchanges to their buildings, where it’s placed onto their unused leased lines (a kind of “put power back on the grid” kind of thing).  The big disadvantage here is, the only problem dealt with is contention – not the last mile problem to houses far from the exchange.

But it’s only a thought, and it’s probably a rubbish one at that!

(It’s the IT Crowd piracy parody)

Recently I received a Windows XP machine which “wouldn’t start up”. The BIOS would simply output “A error reading disk drive” after the POST. Note this isn’t the same error as “Insert system disk” etc.

I proceeded to check the obvious, trying every boot order and boot option in the BIOS, all without avail. I then booted Knoppix and attempted to mount the data partition (what was C: in Windows), without success.

Important note: I made two stupid mistakes here. Firstly, I tried to initially mount it in Konqueror, and secondly I tried to mount it read/write. If you’re suspicious of a device’s health, mount it readonly and mount it via the terminal. It’ll possibly save your data and save you some wasted time.

I then tried to mount it from a terminal, but I received a variety of errors regarding DMA read failures. I proceeded to disable DMA (K Menu/KNOPPIX/Utilities/Harddisk/CD/DVD DMA Acceleration) and tried again. Still read errors.

At this point I plugged in an external 500GB hard drive (USB) and started an ntfsclone with the command

ntfsclone -o /mnt/sda1/hda1.img -s --rescue /dev/hda1

Whether due to the computer’s USB speed speed or (more likely) the HD’s state, it took about 9 hours to copy 10GB of data off. It unearthed several hundred unreadable sectors in the process.

It’s important to note at this point (if you’re not familiar with the NTFS tools) that the “-s” switch for ntfsclone causes it only copy parts of the filesystem which are actually in use. That means it does not do the same as:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/hda1.img conv=noerror,sync bs=8k

I’ll probably go down the same route as before, using my Autopsy script to get off what good sectors I can. But the above commands and flags might just make some else’s life a little easier.