Google Maps gets better and better

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I used to use the AA and RAC websites to plan routes but these days Google Maps is faster and easier. And I just noticed that the Google Maps service has been improved with the ability to drag and drop the route line to customise the route.

Another feature (which may have been around for a while – it only seems to be available for US directions at the moment and I generally need to look at UK routes), is the ability to get directions using public transit. I’m planning my trip to the States next week (more on that in a couple of days) and it’s really useful.

iPhone: should I? shouldn’t I?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My mobile handset used to be just what I needed. It’s a phone, with a WAP browser. Basically, it works for making calls and reading my e-mail via OMA – and it fits the full handsfree kit in my car that my work phone uses (yes, I have two phones… one so I can be contacted by friends and family whenever I want and the other so that work colleagues can only call me when I’m working).

But I have been tempted. I’m a geek, and geeks feed on gadgets. And whilst common sense tells me that a Windows Mobile phone would best match my needs, I am seriously tempted by the Apple iPhone, which goes on sale in the UK next week. The trouble is that even hardened Apple fanboys on some of the podcasts that I listen to admit that this is just a first generation device – an iPhone beta if you like – and at £269 (on an 18-month contract at between £35 and £55 a month), it’s expensive – especially without the 3G and GPS that other handsets offer.

I did look at the Nokia N95 but Apple’s decision not to allow their phone to be subsidised by the networks means that other smartphone vendors are pushing up their prices too (thanks for nothing Apple) and Vodafone
wanted over £300 on an 18 month contract, plus an extra £7.50/month for 120MB of data.

My existing Vodafone contract is up in a few days time, so I called them and asked for my PAC code so that, if I do buy an iPhone next week, I can transfer my number to O2. Not surprisingly, Vodafone’s customer retention department wanted me to stick with them (that’s their job). After I rejected their revised offer (“ah, the £300 was retail, but we’re able to make you a better offer”) of an N95 for £170 (still £120 more than it would have cost me a few months ago…), they suggested that if I could source an iPhone from somewhere outside the UK it would work with any UK network (UK models will be locked to O2), and they could offer me another 12 month contract, with lower charges. That sounds good, but it’s a bit underhand of them to offer that solution as I don’t think it will work – this is why:

  • Even though I’m planning to be in the US next week (so picking up US iPhone would be reasonably easy) an unactivated iPhone can’t even perform non-phone related tasks like playing music and videos and activation would require a contract on a network in the country from which it is sourced (i.e. AT&T for a US-sourced phone).
  • Whilst I’m sure that hackers will find a way to unlock the iPhone (again), Apple is playing cat and mouse with them, so the next software upgrade (which I could ignore) would prevent me from using my Vodafone SIM in it (and possibly “brick” the device).
  • In any case, even if I never used the phone with the AT&T SIM once it was activated, I’d have problems opening an account without a US address and I’d be legally bound to a contract.

So, here’s the choice as I see it:

  1. Wait until next Friday and buy an iPhone on O2 with an 18 month contract: Cost £269 + (18 x £35) = £899 (with 200 minutes/200 texts/unlimited data each month).
  2. Buy an iPhone from an Apple store in the United States and use it over here (if it works): Cost £191.66 (at today’s exchange rate) + ((9 x £10) + (3 x £16) + (12 x £7.50)) = £419.66 with 75 minutes/stop the clock/120MB data each month.
  3. (Wait for the next iPhone model/buy something else/do nothing).

So option 2 looks best on paper, but what if it doesn’t work? Does anyone know if I’m right about options for using an unactivated iPhone in the UK?

Connecting to a Linux server using VNC

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Many of my computers are not in my office/den but are providing server functions for which the need to access them directly is rare. When I do need access to the Windows machines, I can connect to them using a variety of RDP clients; for my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 box it’s a similar situation but this time using SSH (for command line access) or VNC (for a GUI).

Although RHEL includes a VNC server and I’d opened up TCP port 5900 in the firewall configuration (using system-config-securitylevel), for some reason I was still having problems creating a VNC connection and it turns out that there were two main reasons for this.

  1. Each VNC display will use a new port number, so display 0 is on 5900, display 1 on 5901, etc. I was trying to connect on port 5900 but it’s not as simple as opening the port – I needed to start a session with vncserver (supplying a password if required – the vncpasswd command can also be used for this), then note the port number (open the appropriate firewall ports) and connect from my chosen VNC client.
  2. For connection to an existing logged on console session on the server running a graphical environment (display 0), it’s necessary to enable this in the Remote Desktop preferences:

Remote Desktop PreferencesOnce I’d got around this, it was fairly straightforward to connect to display 1 on port 5901 but the default display was using the rather dated Tab Window Manager(TWM) GUI (although starting GNOME applications like gedit applied the GNOME look and feel to that application’s window. By editing the /root/.vnc/xstartup file I could comment out the twm & line and replace it with startx &; however, because there was already an instance of X running on the server (for display 0), I found that the startx & command failed and I needed to use gnome-session & in its place. I also commented out the line starting with xterm and included gnome-terminal & at the end of the script so my xstartup file now reads:

#!/bin/sh

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:
# unset SESSION_MANAGER
# exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
# xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
# twm &
gnome-session &
gnome-terminal &

Just for completeness, here are a few more notes that might be useful:

  • Use chkconfig --list to check whether the VNC server service is started by default (if necessary, use chkconfig --levels 5 vncserver to make it start in run level 5 in future).
  • If not already running, then start the service with service vncserver start.
  • Kill VNC desktops with vncserver -kill :displaynumber.
  • VNC sessions may be tunnelled through SSH for a secure connection.

Problems connecting to a Windows Server cluster

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks back, I was at a Microsoft event where the presenter was struggling to connect to a Windows Server cluster using the Cluster Administrator tool. It turned out that the problem was down to having started devices in the wrong order (it should be storage, then network, then cluster nodes) but when one member of the audience suggested entering . as the cluster name in the Cluster Administrator dropdown he was able to connect to the cluster (with much relief!)… may be worth remembering for the future.

Programmer’s Bladder

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I saw this on Hacking Hat (an interesting blog written by Steve Knight – an old mate from Uni’ who I haven’t seen in years) and it seemed to ring true somehow (even though I’m not a programmer):

Main Entry: pro·gram·mers blad·der
Pronunciation: \ˈprō-ˌgra-mərs ˈbla-dər\
Function: noun phrase
Etymology: Birmingham, Richard Pinchin
Date: circa 1994

1 : A condition that requires the victim to sit at their terminal for extended periods. The condition denies the victim their normal bodily functions until: that [f***ing] thing compiles, or more caffeine is required.

UK time WordPress plugin

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Probably the only gripe that I have with my hosting provider is that the clock on their server is permanently set to UTC (i.e. no timezone changes for daylight saving – I’m told that’s normal practice for web hosting but it’s not something I’ve come across in my experience of corporate computing). Until recently that’s meant that, twice a year, I’ve had to tell WordPress to update the timezone offset but not any longer. You see, my buddy Alex (who also runs the company that provides my hosting) has written a WordPress plugin to handle UK time changes:

The UK Time plugin for WordPress checks the time of each post that’s being displayed, and if it falls inside the British Summer Time window the post time is incremented by 1 hour and you no longer need to change the UTC offset every March and October.

Of course, you may already have hundreds of posts spanning several years and you switched the UTC offset at the right time, so they already show the right time. That’s okay, they will still show the correct time.

I tested Alex’s plugin last weekend when the clocks changed and everything seems to be working just as I expected. UK-based WordPress users might want to give it a try.

A plea for Apple to update the MacBook Pro

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I really would like to buy a 17″ Apple MacBook Pro but if I’m going to spend all that cash then I need to know that it’s the right thing to do. I’ve been waiting for OS X Leopard (not that I can see much advantage in upgrading to Leopard but it seemed daft to buy a new computer with Tiger on it) and now I hear rumours that there will be a new MacBook Pro announced in the New Year. So, if anyone from Apple is reading this, please, please, please, consider the following for the next update:

Apple MacBook Pro (17

  • Why is there all that wasted space to the side of the keyboard (which is the same size on both the 15″ and 17″ models)? With a 17″ unit, surely you can fit a larger (even full-size) keyboard on there instead of larger speaker covers?
  • Why is the wrist rest so huge, with the keyboard set so far back? (it’s fine on the 15″ model but with the larger chassis of the 17″ I’m really not sure that it will be comfortable…)
  • Please, can I have a two button trackpad?
  • Oh yes, and if you really want to justify all the extra cash (after all, it’s really not an inexpensive purchase), how about a docking station too?

The MacBook Pro has plenty of features that make it better for me than a standard MacBook but if I have to keep on plugging in an external mouse and keyboard, then that really defeats the object of buying a desktop replacement notebook PC.

A quick look around the Microsoft RoundTable

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this week, I blogged about some of the gadgets I’ve been using whilst I’ve been learning about Exchange Unified Messaging and Office Communciations Server (OCS) 2007 and today I got to experience one of Microsoft’s showpiece web conferencing devices – the RoundTable.

Microsoft RoundTableBasically, it looks like a normal conference phone, but with a 30cm pole at the top of which are mounted a number of mirrors reflecting a 360-degree view from the room back onto cameras.

This means that Live meeting can display a panoramic view of the room and (this is the really cool part), the RoundTable recognises who is speaking and displays the appropriate part of the image. It really has to be seen to be believed – so here’s a screen grab from the PC that had the RoundTable connected, showing the panoramic view, the currently selected view (with picture in picture from the remote caller’s webcam). Other LiveMeeting content could also be shown (e.g. a presentation, or a shared desktop), but the point here is the camera.

Microsoft RoundTable images viewed in LiveMeeting

(Incidentally, the guy in the blue shirt is Peter O’Dowd – an Exchange and OCS MVP whose claim to fame includes playing guitar under the pseudonym of Pete Petrol for the punk band Spizzenergi, who were most famous for the song where is Captain Kirk?)

Some might feel that the RoundTable is a solution looking for a problem but I’ve been dialled into enough conference calls where I haven’t a clue who is speaking because as soon as there are more than three people on the conference it becomes unclear who is speaking at any one moment.

With the RoundTable and Live Meeting, remote attendees can have their individual webcams running and people back in the office meeting room can use the RoundTable to project an image of whoever is speaking at that time. Or multiple RoundTables can be used for conferences between multiple groups of people.

I’m sure that Cisco, Polycom and the others who have been doing this stuff for years have devices that are just as exciting but this really rocks.

Does the T in T-Mobile stand for “Trouble staying connected”?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

It’s getting on for midnight and I’m here in a hotel room in Prague, after fighting to get my Internet connection working (again). There’s a T-Mobile hotspot here but I’ve been having problems with it all week. A few nights back I couldn’t successfully login after buying a 24-hour pass from the hotel, so I returned the pass for a refund. Then, later in the day it seemed to be working again, so I paid 595Kč (about £15, or $30) for another 24-hour pass and was able to browse the ‘net and connect to work over the VPN. Sorted. Or at least I was until I went out for the evening and returned to my room to do some more work only to find that the connection was so slow as to be unusable.

The Google homepage took about 90 seconds to load and everything else timed out – either as unreachable, or coming back as a google search on the domain name.

As Google seemed to be the only site responding (pinging the gateway came back with Reply from gatewayipaddress: Destination net unreachable), I ran a ping test using ping www.google.com -t and after a while I could see that I was losing about half the packets on the wire:

Ping statistics for ipaddress:
Packets: Sent = 157, Received = 74, Lost = 83 (52% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 45ms, Maximum = 69ms, Average = 49ms

Restarting the computer didn’t seem to help. Neither did disconnecting and and reconnecting the wireless network connection. So I called (T-Mobile’s English helpline for the Czech Republic) but after 35 minutes on hold at international mobile rates (goodness knows how much that cost), I gave up.

Thanks for nothing T-Mobile.

After a week of fighting with this (and a successful call to T-Mobile, during which they admitted that I could have held on all night because there were no English-speaking staff working…), I’ve discovered that logging out manually (from the link on the page displayed after a successful login, or by typing logout. in the browser address bar) works fine; however if T-Mobile log me out for inactivity, and occasionally when the connection suddenly drops of its own accord, the only remedy is to shut down the computer, wait a while (the shortest I’ve tried was about half an hour) and then start up again, after which everything seems to work as expected.

According to the receptionist at the hotel where the hotspot is, only the people in my group (all attending Microsoft training) have reported any problems. Hopefully this information is useful to some other poor soul who’s trying to get their T-Mobile Wi-Fi connection to work.

(For reference, I’m using Windows Vista Enterprise Edition, 32-bit, with an Intel Centrino 2200BG chipset and Internet Explorer 7.0.6000.16546.)

Gadgets for audio-visual interaction with Microsoft’s unified communications products

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

18 months ago, I attended one the Exchange “12” Ignite training courses – basically Exchange Server 2007 training for early technology adopters. This week I’m refreshing my Exchange knowledge for the release version product but in train-the-trainer style with the intention that I will be training a number of colleagues across the UK and Europe in the coming months to bring them up to speed. I’m also doing the same for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.

One of the nice things about this training is that it’s being held in Prague. Our hotel is a few miles out to the east of the city centre but it’s a great place to visit in the evening (and I get to do very little international travel in my job and even less sightseeing, so I’m making the most of it).

The other great thing is that we have each been given a webcam and headset for use with Exchange unified messaging (using the Exchange UM test phone and headset for voice access to Exchange) and Office Communicator (with audio and video from the headset and webcam). I already have a desktop webcam at home (the Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000), as well as the iSight on the Mac, but this is a great portable setup – a Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 webcam and the geeky but surprisingly comfortable Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 wireless headset (which includes the XBox 360 wireless gaming receiver for wireless communications).

Later in the week we should be playing with one of the Microsoft RoundTable conference phones/webcams too.

Oh, I do love my toys!