Renumbering all your hosts is always “fun”. Today I’ve obtained a new range of addresses from my ISP, Andrews & Arnold, a shiny new /26 block of IPv4 (and in time before RIPE runs out, too.)
So for those of you that care about these things, you’ll notice I have a different IPv4 address range now (the IPv6 addresses are unchanged). Hopefully this won’t make a scrap of difference to anyone, but if you do experience problems, let me know.
It’s now less than four days to go until the MX record for garysoft.co.uk disappears from my DNS server. In English, this means that any mail you send to ….@garysoft.co.uk will not work any more – but you’ve had two or so years to update your address books, so hopefully this won’t affect any of you.
But in case you hadn’t noticed, just replace garysoft.co.uk with garyhawkins.me.uk in the e-mail address, and all will start working again.
I found out an interesting thing the other day – that the instant messaging client I’ve been using for quite a while, Pidgin, doesn’t actually support some features in the XMPP protocol. (If you’ve never heard of XMPP, it’s the open standard protocol behind instant messaging servers such as Google Talk, but you can run your own XMPP server if you like and that’s what I’m doing, using a piece of software called ejabberd).
The main problem with Pidgin (or more correctly the library underneath it, known as libpurple) does not support the concept of ‘priorities’, apart from a hard-coded default of 1 (or 0 if you’re away) mainly because most other instant messaging services don’t have the feature, and as libpurple supports mutiprotocol, this is a bit of problem. In case you’re wondering, XMPP priorities are useful for times where you have multiple IM clients running at once and you want to choose which one provides the ‘status’ to other users. For example, I could run client on my desktop, and one on my mobile phone, and one on my laptop, and I might decide to give the desktop client the highest priority, and if that one is offline, then the laptop takes over, and if that one’s offline, then the mobile takes over.
So, I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement instant messaging client. The one I’ve decided to settle on is called Psi+ (which in turn is an enhanced fork of the Psi instant messenger). It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac. One advantage of it is that it is designed for XMPP only, so that it doesn’t have to work around the limitations of having to support MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL, etc. as well. At first, I found it a bit complicated to use – but then again the ‘advertising’ for it does clearly state it’s an XMPP client for ‘power users’ – and that it certainly is. It’s chock full of features including a few little known ones, like being able to set ‘mood’ and ‘activity’ (so, for example, you could set mood to ‘Thirsty’ and activity to ‘Drinking’). It also, more importantly, supports XMPP priorities properly, and also does XMPP Jingle voice calls too. It took me quite a while to set up since there are so many things you can set, but now that I’ve got it how I want it, I’m pretty pleased with it.
Unfortunately, one casualty of this means that my MSN account can’t be used with Psi+ so I’ve decided to cancel it. Therefore, if you were talking to me using MSN, you’ll now have to switch to XMPP instead – but I don’t think that will affect too many people. You can reach me on XMPP at gary.hawkins@garyhawkins.me.uk using your favourite client.
Last year, World IPv6 Day was held on 8 June, where lots of well-known (and some not-so-well-known) Internet sites turned on IPv6 for a day to see what would happen. Well, the Internet Society have come up with a sequel, called “World IPv6 Launch” – to be held on 6 June this year – and this time the plan is not to switch the IPv6 off.
Major companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and the Bing division of Microsoft are taking part, which is probably a large proportion of the IPv4 traffic currently going and up down the Internet today, so it will be interesting to see what effect turning on IPv6 will have. Although it must be said that most ISPs in the UK have been very slow to roll out IPv6, some have and this will at last mean that we get to talk to all these big sites over the new protocol at last.
I’ve never really made a big secret of the fact that I think the UK ISPs really need to get a move-on with the v6 rollout – at the time of writing, the predictions are that RIPE will run out of IPv4 addresses around the end of July, so time is now of the essence. What are you all waiting for?! (I suspect the answer is “someone else to do it first”)
More details at http://www.worldipv6launch.org/
A little bit late than never, since today is the twelfth day of Christmas, but never mind. Favourite present this year has to be Shaun the Sheep series 2, followed closely by the Blu-Ray edition of A Matter of Loaf and Death, which conveniently goes very nicely with the new HD TV and Blu-Ray player that I bought in November. Looks very crisp and sharp in HD. It’s easy to keep me entertained (as long as it involves Wallace and Gromit or Shaun/Timmy) …
Apart from that, no socks this year (good), no slippers (also good), and only one box of deodrant and shower gel. Which is nice since I can never seem to use it at the rate I get it… (perhaps I should stop buying it during the year!)
So I finally bit the bullet and decided to replace my T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream) – the first ever production “consumer” Android phone with a newer model. I went in the end for the Sim-Free version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for several reasons – one, it’s a “Nexus” phone which means that Google tightly control the user experience and firmware, so there’s no unexpected surprises or manufacturer/operator add-ons in there.
Compared to my previous phone, it’s certainly much lighter, and seems a lot more “flimsy” – but much of that is probably because it’s lighter. The screen size is far bigger than the old one, at 4.65″ diagonal and is one of Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays. Very nice quality screen, nice vibrant colours. One of the downsides of having a thin phone though is that there isn’t enough space for a “real” keyboard like the G1 had – personally, I found using the onscreen keyboard of the G1 a total nightmare because the combination of large fingers and too small a screen size meant that I ended up getting the wrong letters out most of the time. Thankfully with the Galaxy Nexus this isn’t the case, since the screen size is bigger and therefore more accommodating to my larger fingers.
The phone has NFC (support for contactless smart cards, etc.) built in and does actually work (inasmuch as I proved that the NXP application could detect my Oyster card), which when the carriers/card companies/banks get their act together could be very useful. Battery life is also much improved compared to the G1 (which frankly isn’t hard).
The phone comes with the brand-new Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) operating system which is completely different in design but thankfully I had a go with it on the Android Emulator before I bought the phone so I knew exactly what to expect. A big downside of this phone is that there is no SD card slot, it just has 16GB of internal Flash memory. However there is a good reason for this, which is that most applications can’t be moved to an SD card slot anyway, so there’s limited use for it. I can cope with that, and the phone therefore isn’t able to work as a USB Mass Storage device, but can cope with the Microsoft MTP and PTP protocols so it appears as a Windows Portable Device, and you can use that to copy files to and from the phone.
Camera is average (at 5 megapixels), but I’m not too worried about that since I don’t tend to use a mobile phone to take serious pictures anyway. Front camera is 1.3 megapixels. There are no physical buttons on the phone apart from the volume controls on the left, and the power button on the right – all the other buttons are ‘soft’ buttons and are part of the display. This seems a bit odd at first, but you soon get used to it. And the ITL41F firmware update rolled out to me yesterday to fix the so-called ‘Volume bug’, which probably wouldn’t have affected me much anyway since the mobile provider I use does not use 900MHz 2G, but I’m glad to see it fixed anyway. Another nice feature is that it does support (albeit in a limited way) 5GHz wireless networking, which means I can use it with the 802.11a standard (I don’t have an 802.11n capable access point).
As this phone is a Nexus, unlocking the bootloader was a relative piece of cake – install the phone USB drivers, and put the phone into fastboot mode, then run “fastboot oem unlock” from the Android SDK software, and accept the ‘Do you really want to do this?’ message on the phone, and job done. It does however wipe your phone when you unlock the bootloader, but at least that means I now have the choice of any third-party firmware that I like once Google have stopped issuing updates to the official one.
All in all, I’m very pleased with the phone, having had it less than a week. The only thing I’m really unhappy about is the fact I can’t get a suitable pouch case for it yet, but that’s only to expected with a newly-released phone. I can definitely recommend buying one if Android’s your thing and you’re looking for a no-nonsense Android phone. Some people may not like the “bare Android” experience though, and might be better suited to going for a phone with the extra bells and whistles put in.
I’d like to apologise to all two and-a-half readers of this blog that I haven’t posted anything for three months or so… been busy … :)
Probably not the most exciting event for most people, but last night was ‘Oxford DSO Stage 1’ – that is, the first stage of digital switch over when one of the analogue channels was turned off (BBC2 in our case) and in its place (on the relays, anyway) goes the ‘BBC A’ digital mux containing the BBC channels (obviously, including BBC2).
Two weeks from now, on 28 September, all the other analogue channels get turned off and the relays start broadcasting all three digital muxes, with the main Oxford transmitter broadcasting all 6 muxes at full power.
Sad as it was, I thought I’d stay up till midnight to see BBC2 analogue disappear – there was a trashy film on BBC2, but instead of going off at midnight they actually waited until 01:13 (end of the film) to turn it off (I was yawning a lot by then!). Snow appeared on the screen, and BBC2 analogue was gone forever. At the same time, BBC1 analogue also disappeared, but that was to come back by the following morning.
Then I went to bed (understandably).
The following morning, I was expecting the worst. The powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to switch UHF channels 34 and 53+ around which could only have ended up in disaster. (The reasoning behind it was sensible – to get all the PSB muxes into Group C/D so existing non-wideband aerials could be used). Instead of the box thinking ‘oh, it’s the same LCN (Freeview channnel number) just on a different UHF channel’ it just refused to show it. Hmph. So I had to do a manual retune on the box. And just as I feared, this did the usual thing of deleting all my timers on the replaced channels. I really don’t understand why the manufacturers haven’t sorted this one out yet – it makes things very user-unfriendly.
Anyway, retune done, everything worked okay again and I had all six muxes back. I will have to do all this again on September 28 when more channels move (68 is moving to 60-, 51- moving to 62, and 34 is moving to 59-, and 29 moving to 55 – putting all the muxes in Group C/D at last). And I’ll lose virtually all my timers – again :(
Today I have managed to get the garyhawkins.me.uk domain DNSSEC enabled. So what is it and why do you need it? DNSSEC is a mechanism for digitally signing your DNS servers so that you can reliably prove that the result you get back is the correct result and not a fake one provided by an attacker.
Say, for example, Google signed their google.com zone with appropriate DNSSEC keys (which, actually, they haven’t got round to doing yet!) Instead of the computer just blindly accepting whatever results have been given to it, the computer will first do a verification check on the results returned by verifying a special digital signature given to every DNS name. If the digital signature is wrong, then the result is invalid and an error will be returned. So when you type in “www.google.com” into your web browser, then you can be something very close to 100% sure that you are being sent to the correct web site, and not a fake one.
(This is quite similar to, but not exactly the same as, the way that DKIM works with email – the mail headers are digitally signed and decrypted with a special DKIM key stored in the DNS in an effort to verify that the mail has genuinely come from the sender and/or domain name that it says it has.)
In theory, this means that if an attacker were to redirect all requests for garyhawkins.me.uk to another server, then the attack would fail because the attacker shouldn’t have the private key to sign the response with, because the response wouldn’t decrypt with my public key stored in the DNS. So therefore, it makes it very difficult for an attacker to return fake results, hopefully meaning that when you access a server on garyhawkins.me.uk, you’re getting the real results!
Had to buy a different brand of bread sauce last week since my usual brand was either out of stock or they’ve stopped selling it. So I thought I’d give the “house brand” a try.
First impressions were, well, about average – it was a rather finer powder than the other stuff, and I wasn’t that enamoured with the ingredients list – celery powder?! But I measured out half a pint of milk, brought it to the boil and mixed the powder in as per the instructions, then simmered it for a few minutes.
I found the sauce to be very smooth (which is not necessarily a good thing in my book), but the overpowering taste of celery in the sauce really put me off. All in all, it tasted quite bland, and too much celery and onion taste. And it wasn’t very thick. A rather disappointing bread sauce overall, but not entirely inedible either. But I probably won’t be buying that again if I can help it.
Rating: 3 out of 10
Comments: Need to do better, Tesco!