I couldn’t go a whole month without posting something …

My run of technology troubles has continued, and I’m no greater fan of silicon based lifeforms than before.

But I have come to appreciate good support when I get it even more , and I would like to take this opportunity to praise Dell, who are obviously one of these companies who know how much value they can get by looking after their punters once they’ve taken their money.

I turned into a right twonk a few days ago and panicked that I’d screwed my laptop up - terrified that by fiddling I’d make life worse I resorted to contacting Dell support. I won’t embarrass myself by saying what the fix was, but suffice it to say that the very helpful scot on the other end quickly and efficiently put me back on the right track. I’ve rated Dell for years, and this experience has made me even more of a fan.

I can’t write about support without mentioning the other company that I have nothing but praise for and that’s Rackspace - I’ve been at the sharp end of servers playing around previously (with another hosting company), and I have to say that when I’ve been shopping for managed hosting since the first thing I do is check out the support, and the Rackspace claim that their support is fanatical is no understatement - I can vouch for it.

Probably unfortunate given what I do for a living, but there you go. Actually, I’ve always wondered if it’s a useful trait - I’m not usually a proponent of technology for technologies sake - if I can solve a problem without getting high-tech, that’s my preferred option.

I may just be feeling paranoid, but it seems that the bytes have been ganging up on me recently - I have a growing number of niggling problems that refuse to go away. The odd challenge can be quite enjoyable, as long as the implication of not fixing it is not too severe - but you soon start to realise how much we have grown to depend on email / google / multimap / skype and all the other trimmings when you can’t get them.

And worse, it almost makes me feel physically ill when I start to feel I’m not able to keep it all running - when things go wrong faster than I fix them; when the silicon is ruling me rather than vice versa. Is judgement day coming?

Having decided to give Vista a chance, how is it repaying me? My machine has started bluescreening two or three times a day at the most infuriating times (like when you’re blogging about it). I’m going to live with it for a bit longer rather than doing anything rash - ongoing.

The lighthouse webcam crashed earlier in the week - usually gets sorted by turning the power off then on again, but from inside the lantern there was no sign of life outside - meaning a second trip with more keys, tools etc. Turns out it was a blown fuse so nothing major - fixed.

I’ve replaced the firewall in my modem / router with a mini-ITX box running IPCop - the idea was to secure my network a bit better while allowing certain individuals more access to growing numbers of devices I’m hosting - but it absolutely refuses to let OpenVPN work as advertised, and I’ve loved that application when I’ve used it in the past - ongoing. While fiddling I did muck something up with the blue network meaning it wouldn’t grant dhcp leases to wireless devices - fixed (phew). Postscript - OpenVPN is now working perfectly - turned out it was a problem within the network and not with ipcop - zerina is a great plugin that makes managing OpenVPN a doddle.

My Acer easyStore NAS is pretty much up and running now, but I still have a niggle where every time I restart my laptop the backup application can’t then see the drive - you have to remove protection then re-protect to run a backup, meaning you have to do it manually every time - that wasn’t the idea but I haven’t been bored enough to try and get some more support after the last time - ongoing.

Do things like dodgy starter solenoids on my truck count as computer problems? Still adding to my irritation though - hopefully this week I’ll crack more issues than arise and get back to a tolerable level of ’silicon rage’.

Of course I’m my own worst enemy - I will not leave well alone, and have to keep fiddling or trying to improve things. But the moral of this story (if there is one) - don’t let the machines grind you down!

Nature is analogue, our senses are analogue, once upon a time the way we interacted with the world was analogue, and life was great.

But then, with increasing power of microprocessing, a steady creep of digital representations of an analogue world has been invading our lives, ready to take over control.

My first encounter with an almost moral objection I have to this process came in the 80’s with the introduction to the mass market of CD players - at the time I was deeply in love with my Rega Planar 2 turntable, Akroyd Coniston speakers and Nytech Obelisk amplifier - not extreme HiFi, but certainly enough for me, and I just couldn’t face the thought of losing the pure simplicity of an analogue system by introducing an alien technology in the heart of it.

To this day I’ve still never bought a CD player as a component - although my Rega isn’t hooked up to anything at the moment I still hold the view that the ‘proper’ way to listen to music doesn’t involve any sort of digitisation or digital signal processing along the way. Hissing and scratches are all part of the analogue world, but some of the weird noises you get when digital signals corrupt are just not ‘right’, let alone the ‘concert hall’ type effects that can be applied at a whim. But yet I have an iPod, because isn’t it so much more convenient carrying your entire music library in your pocket?

Next came photography - I’ve still got a pair of Olympus OM2 bodies with a selection of lenses, and I have a crude but functional mono darkroom in boxes on a shelf that I keep meaning to set up again somewhere. I had a blast trying out the various methods described by Ansel Adams etc. where you can almost ‘touch’ light. Yet all the photographs I’ve taken in recent years have been digital, because it’s so much more convenient than lugging round a bulky large format camera.

I’m a hypocrite - I want to remain in an analogue age, yet when it comes to the crunch I listen to my iPod more than my Rega, pick up my Fujifilm F700 instead of an Olympus OM2, and put up with all the other insiduous digital invaders like Sky+ because it’s so much more convenient.

But there is more to it than just convenience - the ‘miracle’ of technology opens up new possibilities to the average punter undreamt of in the analogue age. I never got into movie-making, but I know you can do an awful lot now with a digital camcorder and a PC for not a lot of money, compared to what you used to have to spend in the Betamax days. And if I were a composer or a musician I might appreciate the capabilities of the recording studio I could set up without needing a big win on the Premium Bonds (before the days of the Lottery!) like you used to need to afford all the gear.

But here is my real dilemma - digital technology offers almost limitless possibilities and potential for creativity, but I’ve found personally that my limited creativity is at its best when constrained - too many shiny spangly distractions get in the way of achieving simplicity and purity.

Back to photography, the limited number of variables available don’t stop the ability to produce stunning images. On a manual film camera, ignoring for the sake of this argument issues of composition, lighting, choice of film etc. you really only get to play with shutter speed and aperture, the combination of which creates an exposure on the film. Take that exposure into a simple mono darkroom, and you have a few more variables available to you, but it’s still somehow on a ‘human’ scale - how you process the film, what paper you choose, how long you expose the print, any dodging and burning effects - it’s all done mostly by hand and feels very natural.

I’ve recently upgraded my copy of Macromedia Studio MX to Adobe CS3 Web as it’s now marketed (must blog some time about my love/hate relationship with this suite of software) and I spent some time yesterday playing with Photoshop CS3 which is included in the package. Feeding it a RAW file from a digital camera is very similar to cooking your own film in a darkroom, but my initial feeling was being totally overwhelmed not just by the things you needed to do to make a technically correct image - that’s just me having to ‘pay my dues’ by learning a new set of techniques - but also by the unbelievable scope of creative tools that are made available, not only familiar ones like dodging, burning, filters, masking etc, but also control of things like tonal curves beyond the wildest imaginations of a simple darkroom setup.

Out of interest, here’s a comparison of a straight shot from my F700 on the left; on the right is a Photoshop manipulated union of an overexposed and an underexposed image which is starting to approach the dynamic range of the human eye (and incidentally a good photographic film!). Technically interesting, but it’s certainly not ‘art’. Is digital manipulation any more ‘wrong’ than what I used to do in a darkroom, or did I get any less satisfaction from it? Let’s just say it’s ‘different’.

OK, my interface to this analogue world is now mostly digitised, but I still can’t remember a sense of ‘inner piece’ listening to music on my iPod like I used to with my Rega, and although I get a buzz taking pictures with my F700 I’ve never felt as satisfied with the end result as I have when taking the time to construct an image on an OM2.

Thinking about it as I have been whilst writing, although I seem to be blaming the technology, I think it’s how I’ve been relating to it - digital devices and techniques seem to be too cheap and easy, I don’t put in as much time, effort and thought that I used to in a purely analogue world - there you used to think harder every time you pressed the shutter release, or picked an album from the shelf, because you knew you were going to have to put up with the result for a long time - you invested in the outcome much more.

I still seem to yearn for the analogue life, but yet for convenience my life is mostly digital

I’m sorry that my first post in so long has to be a rant, but having spent hours on the phone to various technical support lines I have to vent…

Worrying about the vulnerability of work on my new Dell laptop, and wanting a bit of resilient storage to boot, I bought an Acer Altos easyStore NAS device which comes bundled with a bit of software called DiskSafe Express. I know there are many ways of doing this, but I thought this was a ‘proper’ one (should be for the money) but what I wanted was a setup that automatically keeps a current image of my entire drive somewhere safe, without me having to think about it.

What the easyStore appears to be is a funky little box running linux, with 4×250GB SATA drives in hot swap carriers, a gigabit ethernet connection and 2 USB ports for additional drives. The web interface allows various configurations of drives, but mine out of the box had the drives arranged in a RAID5 array giving just under 700GB storage.

Reading the instructions, most of this is left free to be used to maintain ‘backups’ - you have to specifically allocate space for network shares, and it chonks away when you assign more - advising you don’t increase any share by more than 20GB at a time. So this ‘backup’ thing is quite integral to the device it would appear, and I’m happy so far.

When I come to install the bundled software on my Vista Business laptop is when the trouble starts - it complains ‘Microsoft iSCSI Initiator v2.00 or later is not currently installed’ and sends you to the Microsoft site to download it - but on that site amongst the list of supported operated systems Vista is missing - it appears iSCSI Initiator is included in the Vista distribution. Downloading it anyway doesn’t do any good because if you try and run that installer you get ‘Setup could not find the update.inf file needed to update your system’.

SO Googling etc. around iSCSI and Vista doesn’t shed much light, so as a desperate last resort I try and get some technical support from Acer. I hope I heard a sympathetic groan there - because my forehead has brick shaped imprints - I was directed to a premium rate phone number for technical support so I created a ticket online. Two days later a reply comes back saying I was probably downloading an upgrade from Microsoft, try the full software or failing that ‘discuss the problem further with Microsoft’.

Microsoft quickly determine that Vista was ready installed on my new machine when I got it so I should contact the manufacturer for support, or they were happy to help, for something like £46. Dell were very friendly, but were unable to offer any meaningful advice on an obscure aspect of Vista - the most useful thing they suggested was I get an external hard drive which could back up my entire computer ‘at the push of a button’.

What I’ve read about iSCSI sounds very good - if it can be got to work, because it’s supposed to enable direct communication to a physical device on a IP remote network device (block level I/O). These network devices are typically SAN (Storage Area Networks) or NAS (Network Attached Storage).

I’m going to see how much further I can get as I’m sure I can’t be the first person to try and use this kit on Vista, but I’m already dreaming up an alternate strategy - so much for thinking this would be easy.

Postscript: Although top marks go to Dell for ringing me back this morning to see how I was doing, taking details and promising to find out what they could for me, duffers award goes to Acer support. Fiddling with the box management pages I found an obscure link to Acer support. There was an FAQ section which offered no help whatsoever, but then I spotted a ‘Windows Vista’ link on the left taking me to a secret world of downloads to make Acer products work with Vista including … an updated DiskSafe Express - it looks like it’s installing … to be continued (no doubt)

http://xkcd.com/417/

From Critical Faculty Dojo:

“It is stupid, even bordering on criminally irresponsible, to just throw their [Natural England’s] hands in the air and just abandon large swathes of the country to the sea until we are absolutely forced to - and there is no guarantee that this will in fact happen.”

Amen!

I’ve discovered, there are increasing questions being asked about the new quango Natural England that took over from Countryside Agency and English Nature.

No matter how well meaning and reasoned arguments may be for how best to cope with unsustainable defences, they’re all based on the premise that the defences can’t be maintained. My position is that they must be maintained until it’s impossible - we may not be able to stop nature, but we can at least give it a bloody good fight.

As for these suspicious motives wishing to abandon swathes of coastal communities - I wonder how much Horlicks it takes them to get to sleep at night?

I’ve used Amazon S3 for some time now on and off - it’s a great, fast, cheap service, but it does have its own quirks.

Developing a site that hosts a Flash movie displaying a series of flv encoded videos, we decided to host the flv content on S3 to save on bandwidth costs in case we got mass amounts of traffic.

First problem we encountered was performance - with a bucket created using the default location the videos were loading slower than they were playing, but switching to use a bucket created to be located in Europe, the speed has no longer been a problem.

The last issue which really took some head scratching was reported by some testers that the videos weren’t loading - they tended to be testing from behind corporate firewalls.

It would seem that when we used the S3Fox Firefox extension to upload the files, it didn’t know what flv’s were so didn’t set a Content-type. S3 default response is not to sent a Content-Type, which it would appear these obtuse firewalls didn’t like so blocked it.

The solution was to knock up a php based upload script using the Amazon S3 PHP class written by Donovan Schonknecht specifying ‘video/x-flv’ as a Content-Type - works a treat.

It must be coming on six years ago that I took a deep breath and fired up my first Windows XP machine You see, I’m from Norfolk and we fear change.

I’ve probably used every flavour of Windows way back to Windows 3.0 which went onto good old 286 machines with a couple of floppy disks. I still have a couple of machines that run 98 and Me - they’re doing what they need to and wouldn’t support anything higher, so why bother upgrading?

I’ve always thought Windows a bit frivolous, but as the power of modern machines increases exponentially, I think even these spangly 3d transparent gui interfaces have a hard job using up all available resource, and being one who uses a machine for far too much of the working day, I wouldn’t be without it now. I’m not a good enough typist to survive with a command line interface alone, but I like to think I still could if I needed to (I’m proud to say I use vi regularly!)

I won’t get into the Windows vs. Mac debate, or even Windows vs. Linux - suffice it to say I’ve spent time on most modern desktop environments, and given the choice I still revert to Windows. Servers, well that’s a different matter…

Back to the main story - It was about time to get myself a new working environment, so once again I took a deep breath, and this time volunteered to move into modern times and chose a machine with Windows Vista Business installed.

For reference I’ve been a big fan of XP since that day six years ago - although I will point out that the first thing I do is switch the theme to ‘classic’. I’ve had my share of blue screens, but on the whole I’ve found it as bearable as you could hope for, and I’ve never really hankered for anything else.

So I’ve been using Vista for a few days now… and I’m pleased to report that I’ve had no major issues. I’ve not had to hit F1 yet or otherwise ask for help - everything seems fairly familiar and intuitive. I think I’m a fan of the new interface to Windows Explorer, which from recollection of how OS-X does it seems more like Finder than the old XP Explorer - a crumbtrail instead of an address bar allows you to jump back several levels at a single click.

I’m currently finding it a bit hard to navigate around networks though - ‘My Network Places’ seems to have subtly chaged and it’s catching me out. Similarly, ‘My Documents’ has morphed into just ‘Documents’ - these are just little navigation niggles I’m sure I’ll adjust to as time progresses.

So far I’ve stuck with the default Aero theme, and I’m faintly amused by the ‘glass’ effect, but might try switching back to classic just to be stubborn. And I’m not overly bitten by the widget bug yet, although I do like the big analogue clock on the Desktop.

Here’s hoping I end up as happy with Vista as I have been with XP - I suppose I can always downgrade if I have to.

Last weekend there was a splurge of national publicity over a leaked document that considered options including allowing the sea to breach defences between Horsey and Winterton, flooding low-lying areas as far inland as Potter Heigham and Stalham, where new sea walls would be built. The villages of Eccles, Sea Palling, Waxham, Horsey, Hickling and Potter Heigham, as well as parts of Somerton, would be lost to the sea.

It is one of the options that were discussed behind closed doors at a conference in Norwich on climate change in the Broads, organised by Natural England and attended by representatives of the Environment Agency, Broads Authority and Norfolk County Council, plus other organisations.

Listed as option four in the document outlining the proposals for the Upper Thurne basin in the face of rising sea levels: “Two retreated defences would be built at Potter Heigham and Stalham and land seaward of these would be breached, creating an embayment on the coast between Eccles-on-Sea and Winterton Ness,” it reads. “The total flooded areas would thus be approximately 6,500ha. The broads (Martham, Horsey, Heigham Sound and Hickling) would become inundated by the sea, fen vegetation would be lost. It is likely over time that a spit would develop behind which coastal and inter-tidal habitats would develop.”

The document says that maintaining coastal defences in their current position will become “increasingly difficult and expensive”, adding: “The increasingly unsustainable nature of the Horsey to Winterton frontage beyond the next 20-50 years thus opens up the possibility of re-aligning the coast as described above within this timeframe.” It continues: “There is an argument for progressing straight to option four, for it can also be argued that by selecting a radical option now, the right messages about the scale and severity of the impacts of climate change is delivered to the public. However, a decision to progress immediately to option four is likely to be met with strong political resistance and the up-front costs would be large.”

The first option listed is to do nothing to adapt to climate change: to fail to maintain coastal defences and inland flood embankments, allowing them to fall into disrepair and be breached by the River Thurne and the sea.

The second is to hold the line, the current policy of the Environment Agency. This involves maintaining the sea defences and flood embankments in their current positions. Under this option, saline intrusion - something all farmers fear - would get worse as sea water passes under the coastal dunes.

The third option is to adapt the line: allow the sea to flood some places while building barriers and embankments to protect other parts.

Now this isn’t actually a new plan - it was was initially drawn up by English Nature and the Environment Agency in 2003 under what was called the Coastal Habitat Management Plan (CHaMPS) for the Winterton Dunes. It has been discussed widely by those involved in coastal issues and is not some new secret conspiracy, it just hasn’t grabbed mass public attention before.

Neither is it a certainty - the people who drafted it and considered it’s merits are mainly doing so from a viewpoint of wildlife, environment and habitat. Little or no thought has gone into the practical effects on economy, infrastructure or practicalities, let alone trifling subjects such as human rights.

I’m not about to add my voice to those who are slamming the Eastern Daily Press for initially publishing the story - I believe they are doing their usual top class job of responsible journalism - the public in Norfolk have a right to know what is being discussed that could impact their lives, irrespective of whether or not it could / will happen, it’s being talked about.

At Happisburgh, we can clearly demonstrate the result of taking the view ‘it will never happen here’ - because it can and probably, eventually, will. What we’re fighting here is a growing reluctance to expend effort and resource defending our vulnerable coastline against an encroaching sea.

I appreciate the view that we can’t fight the sea forever; that there must be some land lost, but I have seen absolutely no evidence that anyone has considered how we can actually allow that to happen in a controlled fashion with due regard for fairness and social justice to those that are affected by that move.

Despite all their rhetoric and considered sound-bites, at Happisburgh we have found out what it means in reality - that those on the ground are just abandoned to ‘take on the chin’ the loss of property, livelihoods and communities, and without even any sign of appreciation for the sacrifice were being expected to make, if indeed they even realise we are making a sacrifice.

Many in Happisburgh had their head in the sand about losses on the cliff: “It will stop before it gets to the village” they said until we lost the lifeboat ramp to the beach - then the village got behind the fight. Neighbouring villages said “poor Happisburgh, but it will never happen here” until the publication of the second generation Shoreline Management Plan announced the intention to abandon defences of all but Sheringham, Cromer, Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. Now there is vocal campaigning from Overstrand and Scratby and others now those communities realise what’s in store for them if we don’t stand up and be counted.

I hope this news finally gets the rest of Norfolk to wake up and see what’s in store for our beloved county if we don’t stop these faceless bureaucrats.

Somewhere between defending all of our coastline forever, and retreating sea walls to a more defendable position (Norwich?) there lies the path that will be followed. And I bet if it’s not a formal ‘do nothing’ strategy then that will still be effectively what happens - it costs them less! But next time a storm surge comes down our coast we may not be as lucky as we were last November - this time the sea might get in somewhere and we could have a major disaster.

If this were a fight against a new airport runway, victory is preventing them doing it - here we have to stop them not doing something - in the mean time they’re winning.

We cannot allow this to happen - we have to fight, now!

A piece by Raphael Pontual in this months .net magazine led me to think about what it is I do, and how I expect to compete in a marketplace filled with those who spend far more time than me keeping up with current techniques and technologies.

I’m only just starting to really get into jQuery and design patterns, and I have to make an effort not to keep reverting to old tried and trusted old skool strategies that have worked for me in the past.

The piece I believe was more aimed at design, but a relevant excerpt is: “It might seem crazy, but the older and busier you become, the less time you have to find out about the latest trends and adapting to the new graphics software. Meanwhile, there’s always a new generation that spends hours learning everything about the latest creativity suite.”

I’m a developer, not a designer, but I get what he’s saying, that successful professionals concentrate on identifying and solving problems, rather than just throwing gadgets and glitz at a project. A design for the sake of it is nonsense, it has to solve the problem, and the best solution is often the simplest whether it uses the latest whizzbang2.0 bling or not.

A good friend Sujvala kindly left a comment on an old post of mine ‘I want to be Clarkson‘ and one opinion he has is that I have an ‘infantile enjoyment of new toys‘ yet I’m ‘old enough to keep the safety catch on whatever is being tinkered with‘. I really like that.

Yes I do like toys, especially well thought out ones, but there’s a big difference between a toy and a tool. A tool has to earn a living.

The challenge when developing for the web, or making a fibreglass mould, or fitting a satellite dish (or most of my other previous employments) is to identify what it is you’re trying to do, what the challenges are, and what the most appropriate methods are to solve those problems.

Tried and tested (and safe) often beats bleeding edge, although you always have to be open to the idea. As Confucius said “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.“