David Morris – brassedoff.net

One of the bits of software I’ve never managed to get going on myLinux machine is the music editing and sequencing software, Rosegarden. I’ve been using Linux for years but never managed to crack  this goal… until today.

I was cruising the blogosphere earlier in the week looking for inspiration.  I’ve got some two part Christmas carol arrangements to do for Daniel and myself and I was faced with having to switch the Windows box on for the first time in a couple of months (yes, it’s been that long) and use Sibelius when I found the answer.

What I needed was a soft synthesizer and to pipe the midi output from Rosegarden in to that. It was all so blindingly obvious. I’d been barking up completely the wrong tree trying to get jack working properly.

Into Yast, install QSynth, follow a few simple instructions here and we were nearly off and cooking. the little green light on the QSynth tab was flashing to show that things were happening. The volume was turned up, but something was still missing…

Ah. Soundfonts.

Back to Yast, install the soundfont, a few program restarts and Rosegarden was alive, alive I tell you.

Yet another reason not to turn the Windows machine on at home. Can I think of any more?

If  there was a Linux or Mac port of Rail simulator now…

I’ve got my CurrentCost php graphs to a point where they’re suitable for a wider audience. The graph takes data from the mySQL database that’s holding the load data coming in from the CurrentCost sensor and display, does a little bit of massaging (all statistically acceptable!) and generates a dynamic graph.

Currently, the graphing routine is automatically scaling. I’m not sure long term whether this is the best option or not. It would probably be better to take a long term maximum and stick with that, but as the scaling rounds up to the nearest 1000 watts above the daily maximum, it should cope with all eventualities except the kettle AND the microwave AND the oven all on at the same time (and the electricity meter going in to overdrive!).

I’ve also added a tweak that allows me to go backwards and forwards a day at a time on the graph.

If you want to see the current load graph, look here. As this isn’t linked to the date or time of this blog posting, depending on when you look at it, there may not be much data on it. A better view would be to look at yesterday (which is always yesterday relative to YOUR today).

There are still a few more things needed, and a proper wrapping page would be nice, when I can get around to it. I’ve also still got the cost calculations to add in (daily cron job just after midnight and results going to another table perhaps?). Also, I’ve not yet given a lot of thought to what’s going to happen when we go into / out of daylight savings, but that’s not for a couple of months yet!

If you want the PHP that’s producing these graphs, it’s available here. (It comes with a  full Government health warning).

I’ve just spent the last hour or so playing about with graphing the data from our CurrentCost data collection. It’s not brilliant – more work is definitely needed, but I can now at least see the data trends.

Mark Phelan has sent me some SQL queries to have a play about with to consolidate the data (who needs figures ever six seconds?!) and James Taylor has (quite correctly) suggested using RRDTool to graph the data. I’ll probably play about with the home-grown stuff for a while longer then give up and go over to RRDTool.

I spent the duration of my bike ride home thinking about kilowatt hours, joules and watts. More of this to come. It’s essential to work out the cost electricity from the simple watts data coming from the CurrentCost.

Hmmm…

No, it’s not a green or environmental post. It’s a techie post. I’ve been exchanging tweets recently with my ISP over their record bandwidth usage lately. The cause of these records? Tennis. Well, indirectly, tennis. In actual fact, BBC iPlayer. The Murray quarter final match yesterday afternoon accounted for a massize 25% of Plusnet’s bandwidth at something like 1.8Gb/s. It’s probably a good job they brought another 155Mb pipe on recently.

There’s a lot of discussion going off in the press at the moment about who should pay. Some advocate pushing charges back to the content provider, but they’re arguing that they’ve paid their whack in getting their server farm connected to the Internet in the first place with the necessary high capacity pipes.

As we look more to Internet delivered services, this argument is going to rumble on and on and users like thee ‘n’ me are going to want to make sure we’re using an ISP that can make the necessary investments in bandwidth to ensure consistent delivery of service. The situation is only going to get worse. Virgin will sell you a 50Mb fibre connection to home. Plusnet and others are trialling or have already rolled out ADSL2+ with up to 20Mb on copper.

Is, therefore, the current charging model the right one moving forward? Commentators more skilled than me will probably be having that argument for years to come. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up with TopGear from the weekend tonight on iPlayer and I hope there’s no tennis on to pinch the bandwidth!

From today’s silicon.com weekly roundup email, speculation on what a proposed Microsoft High St store might look like…

So what would a Microsoft Store look like? Let’s indulge in a flight of purest whimsy and find out.

For starters, as you approach the shop front you’ll notice all the windows are broken – the glass held together with little sticky patches (updated regularly of course).

Once inside the store you’ll be faced by a phalanx of security guards who question your every move as you make your way past the wall of antivirus software boxes and towards the software stand.

Once you’ve bought your copy of Vista you can take it and your laptop directly to the Downgrade Zone where a grizzled, bitter Windows Veteran will downgrade you to XP free of charge with complimentary cursing.

Once you’ve taken advantage of your Vista downgrade rights you’re free to explore the rest of the store. Head upstairs, treading carefully around the store manager sitting on the floor muttering “I’m a PC, I’m a PC…”

Upstairs, it’s all about fun.

Granted the Xbox 360 area will absolutely rock but your enthusiasm will soon wane as you head quickly through the ‘Zune Zone’ where industrial strength fans whirl constantly in a vain attempt to keep the music players dust-free.

Then there’s the Genius Bar-equivalent where angry men with high blood pressure will shout: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” at you as you approach.

Finally, as you leave the store you’ll be handed a complimentary box of tissues because you’ll have almost certainly picked up a cold while you’ve been shopping…

One of our groups was landed with a £600+ phone conferencing bill last week. All necessary calls, but the cost took them a little by surprise. I’ve done a bit of ringing around to see if I could find a cheaper service, but at the same time, had a little think. Most of the time when this group are conferencing, they’re VPN’d in to the office so they can share desktops. I’ve got an Asterisk server running on one of my desktop machines that I’ve played about with in the past. Asterisk supports MeetMe conferencing. All we need to do is give the users a copy of X-Lite – a free SIP softphone, a handset and off we go. Instant savings. In these days of credit-crunch, every penny saved is a good thing isn’t it? Don’t forget about the ztdummy module if you’re using it without a zaptel card for providing timing though. I found the zaptel kernal modules package for openSuse11.0 had the dummy driver in. Symptoms of not having it loaded are errors about not being able to create the psuedo-device when trying to call in to the conference and a spoken error message about an invalid conference number.

Asterisk may be a bit of a bugger to configure, but it does the job. I’d really like to get to install it in a live environment though! As well as a conferencing server, £500-worth of hardware would enable it to work as a pretty good voicemail server as well.

Anyone want a bit of consultancy work doing? :)

It should be second nature to most people working with web sites that they need to be easy to navigate around, but there are some very bad examples out in Internet-land. This video from the BBC explains how we view web sites and offers some quick design tips for making sites better for the user. For what it’s worth, Richard did a cracking job in my opinion on the Scimitars site, especially if you compare it with the mess that is the Steelers web site. I think the latter is a good example of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”.

There’s yet another data loss making the news. This time, someone related to the West Midlands Police force has lost a memory stick and the Home Secretary has been informed about the loss.

Whilst I can accept that memory sticks will get lost; after all, they’re usually transported in a pocket and probably pulled out with keys or cash, there’s no excuse for not encrypting the data stored on them.

Truecrypt is a free bit of software and takes less than 10 minutes to set up and install on a memory stick.

I’ve been using it for several months on my memory stick. There’s nothing particularly sensitive on my stick, but if I’m going to initially ask then demand that our users use this type of software, I need to lead by example.

Last week, I recruited four guinea pigs for the software as we start to widen the trial. After sitting with each of them for 15 minutes (most of which was taken waiting for the memory stick to format), they all went away happy that using the encryption tool was nothing more than a 30 second process every time you insert your memory stick into your PC.

C’mon people. Get real. It’s free software. It doesn’t stop you losing the things, but makes it unlikely to impossible that anyone finding a memory stick is going to be able to recover the data without knowledge of the passphrase.

It also has other users. You could create a ’secure’ area on your exitsing hard drive for storage of particularly sensitive information (bank details etc). I’m not sure what the implications would be of doing that on a work computer though. Hmmm. One to think about there!

Oh, if, dear reader, you’re already a Truecrypt convert, I note that version 6 is Vista-compatible. The only thing I’d caution against is that the encryption technologies used may be illegal in some countries.

We look upon our treatment of old computers (WEEE waste) as environmentally friendly in that we make a special effort to collect them all up in a single location and send them to an approved source for recycling… or so we hope. I really hope that our old gear doesn’t end up at this dump in Ghana. It’s frightening that changing the designation of this kit to reusable second hand goods seems to get around any export issues, especially when we try to ensure that the gear when we’ve done with it is unusable, especially the hard drives (after all, we wouldn’t want any data to be recovered). Perhaps a phone call to our recyclers will be in order on Monday morning to check up on the route old kit takes. We have a duty of care (in my opinion) to make sure we aren’t indirectly dumping it in a third world country for kids to pick their way over, polluting their drinking water and their seas.

Who’s the techie in this house? For once, not me.

I’m upstairs writing a blog post because although we’re all home, there’s no-one to talk to (1, 2, 3, ahh).

Mrs Woolforbrains and Daniel (he of the new computer) have discovered Club Penguin. It’s a bit like Second Life for kids. It’s a virtual world inhabited by penguins and aimed at six to fourteen year olds. It’s fully family safe and moderated. Youngsters’ penguins can be set up not to allow free chat and the environment is ad-free.

So, Daniel’s in his bedroom playing, Mrs W’s downstairs with her laptop and my niece 100 miles away is also in. In fact, Leah and Dan have just been sled racing against each other. Me? I’ve gone upstairs to write a blog post and bemoan the general lack of bandwidth available for Dad-type activities.

If you happen to pop in to Club Penguin and see a morose-looking penguin called BoringOldFart, that will be me.

(Just in case anyone is wondering, this post was written with tongue firmly superglued inside cheek!)

You may also remember from several weeks ago that I wrote about problems with noise on my broadband connection caused by the surround sound amp / DVD player? Well, I’ve fixed them

It’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I tried wrapping wire around the speaker leads and earthing it to try and screen them. I tried running a separate earth from the amp casing to electrical ground. I tried putting those little clip-on ferrite cores on the speaker leads. The result of all this activity was no change.

So, plan B.

I had a look around at what integrated systems were on the market in the price bracket I was in, and none of them had optical inputs (which I wanted for the XBox 360)…. go on, call me picky.

An hour or so browsing Richer Sounds web site and a quick phone call did have some payback though, and a plan was formulated.

After a few sketches on Coreldraw to work out what the wiring plan needed to look like gave me enough info to suggest that a Yamaha RX-V361 AV receiver was just what the doctor ordered. Couple this with a cheap DVD player (no need for HDMI here as our LCD TV was purchased before the advent of HD-ready branding… that’s what you get for being an early adopter), a new subwoofer and a pile of (expensive) component video cables and we were in business. I re-used the speakers from the old Sony system we had, but that had a passive sub and the new amp would only drive a powered sub, hence the big black box in the corner (:evil grin:).

The $64,000,000 question though: what has it done to the signal to noise ratios on the broadband connection?

Well, I’m pleased to say that it’s cured the problem as witnessed by this screenshot. It was the most unlikely device in the house, I would have said, to have ever caused this problem, but it’s now gone away… and we’ve got a nice shiny new toy to play with (not to mention the job of consolidating the remotes again – I hope I can reprogram our old Kameleon All-In-One!). The other thing it’s done is st us back off down the hifi separates route again which is where we were before we put the Sony box in around seven years ago.