Retrochallenge Day 2.. er... 8 ..er .. 10

Blimey, has it been a week already?

OK.  I've not done much coding since last time, but I have been reading code and daydreaming planning out my next move.

Now Javascript is not my strongest language.  I can read it, and modify it, but actually writing new code is a bit of a challenge.  Part of the rationale behind this task was to get myself a bit more familiar with this hideously back to front language...

The teletext browser I used is that created by Adam Dawes based on Simon Rawles (et..al.) edit.tf editor, and grabbed from Jason's captures at uniquecodeanddata.co.uk.  The modifications are to add a pile of new functions, and truncate and or redirect others.

As the original editor has moved on somewhat since this was done, it seems logical that, if I want to do more mods to it, then i should base my code on the latest version.  If I can do it in such a way that I do not need to actually modify the editor, just call it, then that would be best.   In PHP I would, assuming it was a class, extend the class in a new file and override the relevant functions.  So... How to do this in Javascript...

I tried using prototypes ... but hit the problem that the editor is written with lots of private variables and functions, which the new functions in the viewer refer to.  Using the existing editor as the viewer's prototype doesn't work because it cannot access the private variables.  Drat.

<days pass>

After spending more time than I ever expected looking at javascript objects, inheritances, etc., I have decided not to commit myself to ever having to do anything major in this language!!

Sticking with Javascript, I think the best approach at this point would, after all, be to fork edit.tf and modify it to separate out the actual display part from the editor part, that way I can provide for a viewer, indeed, different viewers...  Might even be a mod Simon would like...

Sigh.  Bloody Javascript.

The other option would be to go back to my own viewdata viewer class, which runs serverside to create the images.  I understand this, but I was hoping not to have to do this, as it makes updating the "screen" with the page number being keyed dependant on the server, rather than being local.


So, ten days in, and all I've achieved is discovering that what I thought would be a simple task is much more complicated than I thought it would be.

How to annoy your users.

1. Use percentages to decide if a seller is "top rated" or "below standard".  Never mind that fact that a high volume seller can create 100 unhappy customers without even dropping a feedback percentage point, and keep their "top rated" status, but just a couple of mistakes by someone who manages to sell a few dozen times a month means they are damned for all eternity.  Where does "protecting the customers" feature in that?  High volume = piss off as many people as you like; we don't care.

Particularly annoying since the mistakes were caused by a third party (official!!!!!) software we used over-selling items. I could thus justify a "Not Our Fault" as it's not easy to keep track of over 1000 items manually, which was why we wanted to automate it!

2. Stop that small seller from listing any more items, so they don't have a hope in hell of raising their performance levels again whilst still charging them £60 per month for the shop they now can't use.

3. Restrict the seller's own personal account as well, because they are "linked" even though they are plainly used for totally different purposes.

4. When the seller attempts to contact you about the personal account, reply back telling them that their user-id violates their user-id policy, despite it having been used unchanged for nearly 15 YEARS, and if  they don't change it immediately, it will be changed for them, and cannot then be changed again for a further month.

I think that after 15 years, it is at the very least an implied contract term that they find the name acceptable.   Particularly as we have been in contact several times before this incident over unrelated matters!

5. Refuse to discuss even the possibility of compromise.   Refuse to even close the accounts when asked to do so.  Because they can't close an account that is restricted until it's performance is raised. Which it can't do because WE CAN'T SELL ANYTHING!  aaarrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!


I'll have to add up the figures, but I think the business actually LOST money trying to sell on eBay recently.  Sales have been low, with not enough gross receipts to even cover their fees, never mind cover the cost of the goods sold and make a profit out of it.  


I want to swear very loudly and break something.  This post will have to do for now.

Teaser...

Please note:

If you wish to attach a length of timber to a brick wall, and you find that the screw stops going in any further, it's likely that you are doing something wrong -

This is to be expected if you didn't drill and plug the wall.  The screw will work it's way through the plaster, and stop when it hits the bricks.

This also, of course, means that it's not really attached to the wall, either.

Google Play: Couldn't sign in

My better half has an android tablet, which I've already touched upon.  It's configured with her Google account, and works fine for gmail, youtube, etc., but one thing that's been bugging her for ages is an inability to purchase anything from the Google Play store.  Free apps are apparently OK, but not paid-for or, indeed, in-game purchases.

The error we get is a page headed "Couldn't sign in" with the rather unhelpful "An error occurred connecting to the Google servers".

Searching these found advice such as "clear the cache", "reinstall the play app", "Disable 2-step authentication" even. But nothing worked.

I have, however, found the problem, so am documenting it here for others to search for and find.

Her Google account is actually a Google Apps account - it uses an email address based off a custom domain rather than a googlemail or gmail domain.  This seems to be the root of the issue.  In the store, the payment options are done via "Google Wallet" which, when accessed on the laptop, when logged into Google as her, brought up a page "Reinstate your Google Wallet online account - If you’ve arrived at this page, it means that your Google Wallet online account is currently suspended."

It turns out that any administrative action on a Google Apps based account automatically suspends access to Wallet! Presumably they think that a domain's administrator is not to be trusted with their users' card details.  There's a form to fill in to get access back - give the last transaction details, last four digits of card number, etc.  It's not much help when the account has never been used before and so we didn't have any details to fill in..  It also looks like that's then sent off to Google themselves to action, manually.

In the end, the solution was not to use that account.  She's got a hotmail email address that already has a Google profile associated with it, so we logged into Wallet with that, and then set that up as an additional account on the tablet.  It's mail is already fetched by gmail and added into the Apps mail, so that means any correspondence won't be lost.  Jobs a good 'un.

So, if you are getting this error just in the Google Play store, and your account is a google Apps account, then you have two choices - don't use that account for the store, or login via the website, fill in the recovery form, and hope for the best.

The Xoom Saga

Back towards the beginning of the year, I purchased my good lady wife a new tablet computer.  She'd been using a cheapie 7" one for a while, but it was not very well supported, on an old version of Android, and a little heavy.  But it was cheap, and it worked, and I hadn't wanted to spend too much because we've a house full of gadgets that get played with just once...

Anyway, the cheap tablet was a success, so come birthday time, I bought her a new one.  After reading around, and doing the whole budget versus features thing, opted for a Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition.  Slightly bigger screen, but thinner and lighter, and much more responsive.  It cost me about £330 via Amazon (yes I did shop around, that was the best I could find it at the tieme) and she loved it.

Three months down the line, though, a slight reluctance to charge properly had turned into a complete refusal.  If you held the cable just so you could get the charge light on, but it didn't seem to actually take it. Obviously it was faulty, and presumably something loose around the usb/charging socket, despite us taking care with it all the time - I've come across enough laptops with damaged power connectors to ensure we're careful on that score.

So I tried talking to the original seller.  They told me to send it to Motorola under guarantee, which I did. They just sent it back with a rather vague "internal damage, outside warranty" report.  When I called them they were equally vague, said it must mean it would cost more to repair than it was worth.  Now we didn't damage it, so it must have arrived like that, but the seller wasn't having any of it.   Despite having the Sale of Goods act on my side, they blanket refused to do anything.  Amazon weren't any help either; the seller had already stopped selling anything through them, so I suspect that there was little they could do anyway.

I'm still considering going through the credit card company, or maybe a small claims against the seller, but it's all my word against theirs it seems. At worst, I could claim it on the house insurance, but there's a £100 excess on that!

In the meantime, I'm stuck with a dead tablet and a frustrated wife - going back to the old tablet was pretty hard work by now, and despite the cost coming down, it'd still be over £200 to buy an identical replacement...   so, who you gonna call?.  ACR Limited, in Heywood.  No simple board-swappers this lot, they actually fix things like proper engineers should!  My last employer used them for laptop repairs, and I'd had them look at a laptop of mine last year (it was too far gone, so they didn't charge me anything) so thought I'd let them look at this.  Despite never having seen one before, they managed to find the parts to fix it, and it cost me less than the insurance excess and substantially less than buying a replacement.

So, this post is really just to recommend them for if you have anything computer related that's broken, not just laptops!

Nothing to report

It's been a busy few weeks. Kids broken up from school, house to tidy, and another week coming up where I have to completely box up and remove everything in the attic in order that the floor can be sorted out. I've already moved out a lot of stuff in there, but there's a heck of a pile remaining - mostly the stuff which wasn't already in conveniently sized stackable storage crates!  I've also had no end of other things to sort out that has been taking up an inordinate amount of time, plus all the trivial stuff that doesn't take long but seems to keep building up.  So lots of late nights and early mornings and which only makes me tired and slows me down further.

Throw in the odd random day out and this means, of course, that I've done virtually nothing on the retrochallenge entry - I keep promising myself a day on it, reworking the BBS side anyway, but it's not happened yet.  Maybe today ... there are still a couple of days of July left!  And then it can all go into boxes too...   On the plus side, when all the work is done, I'll be able to unbox it and set everything up much neater - but that won't be for another month or so at the very least, so outside the time limit.

Watch this space ...

Hicups and Hostings

Ok.  Part of my retrochalllenge entry was to get the viewdata website sorted out - it's been in the process of being Wikified for over a year now!  Some of the work involved in that relates to simply translating the article markup from one markup language to another, but it also means I need to re-write all my custom plugins too.  And to do that, I need to finish the re-write of the viewdataviewer code... and holding me back on all of this was a webhost that made everything behave as if I was walking through molasses whenever I tried to change anything..   It used to be pretty good, but as with all shared webhosts, seems to have become oversubscribed and slowed to a crawl as a result.  Add in a good stir of never-updates, some virus infections, and I should have waved them goodbye a long time ago!

Anyway, I've taken the plunge and shifted my hosting... I'm now renting a VPS which means I'm effectively in control of my own server (albeit merely a tiny part of someone else's system) but I can keep everything up to date, and I don't have to worry about somebody else letting a virus in.  It's very nippy, compared to the previous host anyway, so I'm satisfied.  Maybe I'll not see visitors getting fed up waiting for the next page, now .. (how they would have coped at V23 speeds I do not know ...)

As of yet, there's no new content (although I've got a little titbit waiting to be released - thanks Ant) but that's because it's taken about a week to get everything shifted over - there's 17 websites to deal with! Most are placeholders or simple html-only things, but there are a few complicated ones.  But everything seems to work.. phew.... now to concentrate on more interesting things...

The other part of the challenge is re-working the hardware running the BBS.  This, I might not manage.  Rather than tidying up the mess in the photo, it's got worse!  I had to move everything on the left over in order for a surveyor to examine the floor joists - back in 2008 we got a builder in to put in a "proper floor" and better access, so we could actually use the space, among other things.   Unfortunately, he turned into one of those cowboys you see on the TV, and did a job that nto even the worst DIY nut would be proud of.  There's a lot more to tell, which I'll no doubt blog about eventually, but there's a chance we might finally get some of it sorted soon.  This, unfortunately, will mean packing everything up from up there while it's done, making it impossible to do the BBS side of things.

Bandwidth theft and reciprocal links

I don't often pay close attention to my access logs; most traffic to my websites seems to be robots, but the other day, I was looking to see if a file over on viewdata.org.uk I had referred to in an email had been accessed, and spotted something strange going on.  An image of a Prestel welcome page had been accessed a few times, with a referrer elsewhere.

I accessed the referring page, and it turned out to be something pretty standard - a blog entry by somebody remembering Prestel, and how things used to be.  And there in the middle was my image, a 1987 Prestel signin page with my name (well, an alias I used) on it.  The page was appreciative of "volunteers and enthusiasts who raise the profile of the past" and linked to someone, not me, who did this.  A search of their website had no mentions of Prestel though, so I don't know why they were chosen to illustrate that point.  There was no mention of me, or my website, despite it being probably the only real resource documenting Prestel and other viewdata systems on the net.

Comments on the blog article seemed to be allowed, but required a site login, which I didn't have and was unable to create, so I sent the author an email instead.

Nice mention of Prestel. I'm one of those trying to preserve it's memory - it'd be nice if I'd been mentioned or linked through to, since you are including an image hosted by me - found you through the referrer logs! (I do have a T&C page that requests you don't do this without at least a link.)

I hope that's polite enough?   I have the policy simply because including external images is also referred to as "bandwidth theft" for good reason.  Any access to my website goes towards my account limits at both my DNS provider and webhost, and if I go over them, I have to upgrade my account, committing to pay out more money each month.  I don't mind if there's a chance that the person seeing the image, say, will follow a link and see what I have to say about things, find out more information, and perhaps realise that there really was online life Before The Internet, but I certainly wouldn't want to end up paying to provide images to illustrate an article diagrammatically opposing my own views, for instance.  (Not that it was in this case.)  All it takes is for an acknowledgement and a link to where you got the image from.  Heck, if you're writing about this stuff, you'd probably want to be linking to me anyway.

Anyway, I received no response.  Nada. Nothing.  However checking the blog post again, I see he's changed the image.  He now includes an image of a different welcome page (not one of mine) hosted over on A Limey in America's blog.  Nitecloak acknowledged it's source; our current writer didn't. Again.

I have a dilemma here.  On the one side, I want to encourage anybody who wants to to write about Prestel to do so, and to get their readers interested enough that should they come across anything relevant, that it's not immediately thrown away. On the other side, the bloke is obviously an arsehole who doesn't care for simple courtesy when it comes to using other people's content.  I guess he made up my mind for me by not even replying to my email, though.  Which is why I'm not even mentioning the website; I'm not going to do anything to send him readers.

Updates? What are those?

It's been a while since I wrote something on here, but never fear, I've been busy. Most news about Tiddler is now appearing on her own blog now, which has had several updates since I last wrote on here. If anybody following this one is interested in her, best head over there.

Latest project is trying to get her actual website up to scratch. The simple holding page written in basic HTML was starting to feel insufficient, especially if she's going to be getting any more work. A brief sorté through the free web templates for some ideas came up with this which I thought looked good for a front page; slideshow of photos and a nice theme.

It's a pretty simple HTML page, a somewhat larger CSS file, four javascript libraries (one of which doesn't seem to be used) and a selection of images.

The images were simple enough to replace, no problem there, and running the files from the local disc worked fine. But uploading it to the website, it all fell apart, with the slide show not sliding, and all the images stacking on top of each other. Refreshing the page didn't change anything, but just selecting the URL and hitting enter worked fine. So it's something to do with not having the images available quickly ehough? The first access, or a reload, it's not got them, but re-accessing the page has them in browser cache. (And accessing locally is fine as it's got them immediately available.) It behaves the same in Opera, Chrome and Firefox.

Much messing about with pre-loading images gets me nowhere; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so I call up the "slidertron" script homepage for help. Nothing there but a download link, but I download the latest version anyway. This actually makes it worse, but it does comes with demo files, which do work, so I delve into the source code to find out why. Looking at the css, it's got the image sizes specified. The template files I downloaded don't have this. So I add them, and bingo, everything works. Do these people not check their templates in a live environment first?

Now the task is on to turn a flat html file into something that can actually be used as a template!! I'm not going to copy it and edit it individually for every page I want to create on the website. The code has parts that look like it's a snapshot of some dynamically created content (e.g. the menus have a style of "current" on one entry to highlight the current page) but it's going to take some work to turn it back into a dynamic site.

For the moment, the flat page is available on her website but I hope to get the dynamic version working shortly. Then I can start working on actual content. Work-in-progress is happening here if anybody fancies being nosey...

At the moment I'm trying to decide on the visible page structure - should I go for a simple /index.php?page=foo or a /pages/foo/ or a /p_foo layout... Good Practice and SEO recommendations seems to indicate not using the first version; second is prettier, but needs some playing with mod_rewrite to translate it into php calls, which them upsets relative links.. so I'm torn.

Anyway, as the saying goes, watch this space.

DNS

Just a quick warning, due to a hardware failure primary DNS is down for viewdata.org.uk, irrelevant.com and most of my domains. Secondary should continue serving though for the time being. This will affect ALL services, so if you can't access any of my websites, that's why. I will fix in the morning. I hope.

Edit 8am 2011-09-22. Wake up to find that DNS is still holding out, but my webhost has suspended the account for going over usage on disk space (on an unlimited account, go figure..)

Why it had to happen at the exact same moment, I don't know. Sod's law I guess!!

Edit 3pm 2011-09-22. DNS was back up this morning on temporary hardware. Hosting back online at 12 noon. Everything seems OK now. Thank you for your patience.

Thanks, Comet. Not.

Some time back we splashed out on big plasma TV for the front room. It was seriously expensive, although free credit helped, so we thought it probably best to take the extended warranty.

Now over the last few months, it's had little red sparkles over the dark areas of the screen, so I called out the engineers and they agreed to repair it. It was duly carted away two weeks ago for repair, and Wednesday we got a call saying it was on it's way back, after having had it's actual display panel replaced!

It arrived yesterday. Two delivery men huffing and puffing as they carried it in. They opened up the shipping container, pulled off the bubble wrap and revealed the TV. With the screen totally smashed....

They were gutted. As were we. It's now on it's way back to Comet service ...

Aaarrggghhhh

It's rare that I find myself detesting a piece of software, but I'm sorry, I've got to the point where I now do. And what is the subject of my hate, you may ask? Why, it's Windows 7, and specifically the file Explorer.

In windows terms, I would probably be described as a power-user. I do a lot of work at file level - I prefer to use the file manager, see the files, and decide what I want to do with them there and then, usually using the right-click context menu and often the send-to options. To this end, I usually run explorer in "details" mode, with the folder list enabled, and most of the time I'm using the keyboard to move about in it!

Windows 7, however, has broken me. The folder list is, well, dreadful. No + and - boxes and lines linking folders. Just little triangles that come and go as they feel like it. Change the folder you have selected using the keyboard, and the list of files doesn't change. Not without pressing Enter or clicking. If I'm scanning down a long list of folders looking at the files, this doubles the keypresses, and more than doubles the time, as they are different keys!

And the damn breadcrumb thing in the address bar... what's that all about? I just want the path to the folder.

Oh, and a status bar that doesn't have anything useful in it - like spare space, total of file sizes, etc.

This is, by the way, on a new laptop. Which to add it's own brand of misery has a different keyboard layout to the old one. So I'm forever pressing End instead of Home, and Fn instead of Ctrl and turning the screen brightness down! .. sigh...


I've got Ubuntu installed in a VM. I might see how well I can work in there for a bit, and if I can cope, I will wipe this goddamn awful windows 7 and install an operating system fit for grown ups. Or XP at least.

(Originally posted at http://blog.irrelevant.com/2010/05/aaarrggghhhh.html)

Some data located, and CSS, argh!

Not quite the mother-lode, but it seems that at least one former Prestel IP has retained a significant amount of data from their service, plus portions and snapshots from various other bits of Prestel. There is only the relatively minor issue of arranging to get the data off a variety of formats of obsolete media now. More info when I'm in a position to detail it...

A couple more "no information has been kept" responses to the FoI requests...

And I wish I knew more about CSS - I just can't persuade a new part of the website to look like the old part.. sigh...

Only the echoes remain

As anybody who is reading this knows, I've been putting together a website at www.viewdata.org.uk to celebrate the heyday of Viewdata in the UK, especially Prestel. Prestel was invented by the GPO back in the 1970s, and launched in 1979, to encourage use of the telephone system, and was basically a dial-up computer network that allowed individual companies to publish information and offer interactive services. Name something you can do on the Internet today, and it's likely someone was doing it on Prestel in the 1980s. All on a teletext-style screen!

Last week, armed with the Prestel Directory, October 1983, I launched myself at What Do They Know? with the intent of eliciting any remaining information from the many public bodies that had had a presence on Prestel.

I only got two pages into the directory, somewhere in the "B"s, and found a dozen people to write to. So I did. It's only been three days, out of the twenty they are allowed, but so far four of them have indicated that they have nothing remaining.

Unfortunately, this seems fairly typical. I've not yet found anybody or any company that still has a copy of their pages, apart from myself. For a publishing effort that would have taken much time, many people, and several thousand pounds of investment, it's amazing that every public body that has so far replied hasn't got a single scrap of paper remaining about what they did at the time. I'm still amazed that there's no trace left anywhere of data and software from Prestel itself.

I learned yesterday too that an archive of the Music Link site from Prestel survived to late 2001, before being ruined while outside the control of the owner.

Sometimes it feels like a whole piece of our history has been snipped out of the timeline. Just like a bad Science Fiction film, where somebody made a mistake, and travelled back in time to correct it, changed the future, but left echoes behind of what should-have-been. All I can find are the echoes and none of the substance..

Viruses...what a time waster!

For the last few days, I've been working on another website. It's been fun, writing code that people actually seem to be impressed by.

Yesterday, I woke up, opened up the laptop, started to play, and found myself looking at a "Windows security centre" screen and a prompt to install a "Windows Malware" program. Hmm. Now I'm not quite that gullible, so try to just close the windows, but it still pops up an installation dialogue and runs through something too quickly for me to catch and kill it in Task Manager,

So...I've been infected with a virus. It knocked out the AVG anti-virus I had on here, and seemed to block access to several websites that dealt with virus issues. Trend Micros' one-shot "housecall" did run, and spotted four "FakeAV" Trojans, and deleted them, but didn't manage to cure the problem, and indeed got knocked out when I tried to run a full scan rather than the quick one.

In the end I only managed to get rid of it using the f-secure emergency boot disc.. That's a nifty little disc that boots into and runs Linux from memory, and then can scan the NTFS disc partitions where Windows lives. All it can do is rename the infected files, rather than move them anywhere else, but that's usually enough, and it was.

Of course, making the disc was a story in itself.. Suffice to say that my wife's nifty little Dell XPS laptop white elephant couldn't even burn a CDR reliably, so I ended up using an old Acer that mostly these days tends to run software from Fisher Price for the little one!

So, after spending nearly five hours getting rid of the thing, and another three trying to re-install some anti-virus software (AVG failed to reinstall, even after uninstalling it, so I ended up with Avast) I set about looking for how on earth I had been infected in the first place.

Now I use Opera as my browser, and it usualy just opens up all the tabs I had open in the previous session. So I fire that up, and the new AV pops up a "website blocked" warning message. OK... I've got close on 40 tabs open, which one is it. And why? I thought Opera was fairly resilient to attacks. I'd been suspecting the old copy of IE6 that I had fired up for the first time in ages the previous day, to access the courtservice government website, that doesn't like Opera. So I close all the tabs that I didn't need any more, all those I'd run across when looking for something else, that sort of thing, leaving just things like my email, the bank, the stuff I was working on, etc. Close Opera and reload it - same warning. The bad website it's referring to is rokobon.com, so I start doing a view-source on each page in turn, looking for the reference.

And I find it - on my own viewdata.org.uk website!! There's an Iframe link added to the end of the index.php page! WTF?! Has somebody hacked my FTP password? Is there a bug in the CMS that allows injection of code?

I've not looked into it too closely, but at one point I remember seeing an Adobe Acrobat warning that the document I was trying to open was written in a later version than I had installed, so might not work properly. I thought it odd at the time, as I'd not tried to open any documents, and the warning box didn't give an option to cancel the load. I suspect now that this was where the issue was - something somehow added the iframe to my page, which then included a PDF of some sort in a hidden window. This took advantage of a vulnerability in Acrobat to fire off the virus code. So Opera itself was not at fault.. At least I can press F12, turn off plugins, and carry on browsing safely.

So I check my other sites. They all have the malicious code added. That lets off the CMS, but when a simple place-holder website that has nothing more than an index.html page with a single JPEG image has been infected, then there's something else at work. I check the access logs for that site - it gets maybe one or two visits from search engines a day, and that's all it has. However the virus got there, it wasn't via an HTTP connection. It has to be server-side. Drat. This is confirmed when I look up and visit several other random web sites that are hosted on the same machine, and absolutely nothing to do with me. Everybody has the same code on their website.

I logged it with my hosting co's Tech Support, and they seem to know about it, and say they are removing the codes. But eight hours later they have still not fixed the issue. So please be careful if you visit any of my websites. (This blog is safe, as the subdomain is hosted elsewhere.) I tried removing the code manually last night, but it came back..

There's something to be learned from this. Don't just keep your browser up to date with all the security patches. Anything that provides it with a plugin is vulnerable, too. Time to go update Acrobat..

And try and work out how to catch up on a completely wasted day..

Ephemeral Coding

I was thinking, last night, about the many programs I've written over my time, and I suddenly realised that the vast majority of them are now completely redundant, and that sort of saddened me. All that time and effort now feels wasted and my efforts are completely forgotten. So, just in case anybody is interested, here are some of the things I've either been paid to write, or were major unpaid projects, that are now of no use whatsoever:

Programs for use with the Prestel viewdata service:
SuperSub - to assist main IPs manage their Sub-IPs.
MailboxMassacre - bulk email handling software.
StopPress Viewdata terminal - the only implementation I knew of that correctly handled double height characters.
AutoF - moderated "bulletin board" and message handling system.
Various modules for the Autonomic Viewdata host.

Programs written in the BOS operating system
Almanac - Room booking and management system mainly used by Local Authorities.
Syrian - took over this EPOS system and almost completely re-wrote it.
COMP - poor mans' IDE for BOS Cobol/SpeedBase, handling macro for recompiling different versions of a project.

Programs written for use with WorldsAway (V.1 of what is now vzones "Dreamscape")
Various game hosts.
Various client mods to add functionality.
Clone server, written in VB. (And to be clear, I had NO access to any existing server code: it was written simply by seeing what the client did when I tried to talk to it.)
Clone client for UNIX, only good for "parking" an avater.

Web Applications
Various PHP based applications to solve puzzles that were being run on the Quiz Call TV channel.


I'm sure there are lots more, but that's what I remember for now.

What's most irritating, is that I can't actually think of anything that I've written that's likely to still be in use, apart from some code contributed to other peoples' projects. (e.g. the econet code in BeebEm.)

Sorry

Just a quick note to apologise for not actually getting to RR and for no BBS. I had some family issues, compounded by my not planning to be away well enough.

I'm absolutely gutted not to have been there, and so sorry to everybody expecting me. It seems that Dave didn't get my message, either, which didn't help. I'll do better next time!!

Websites down

My apologies to anybody trying to access any of the websites I run; it appears that my hosting provider has a problem, and any access to any website is giving a page saying "Great Success ! Apache is working on your cPanel® and WHM™ Server". This normally appears when I point a domain at the server without having set it up in the control panel, and uploaded some content.

It's been down 24 hours that I know of so far.. at least I'm not relying on them for mail or anything else. And this only a week or so after I give them a glowing referance on a review site ... but I guess it is the first incidence of downtime that I've had with them in the almost two years I've used them.

We're just in the middle of listing some items on eBay, so I'm rather glad that this time we didn't rely on self-hosted images, as otherwise none of them would be showing up! (Several images in other posts in this blog will appear broken, though, sorry..)

Econet and furry batteries.

Firstly, I think I'm going to disable keyboard navigation on Opera, after yet again managing to press something that sent me forward or back a page and lost all I typed when I came back here. Let's try again.

OK, it's been a while since we had an update.

I've replaced my econet network cabling with some of PhilB's brand spanking new econet socket boxes. If you're into econet, then I really must recommend these. They link together with standard Cat5 fly-leads or cable, and have built in terminators where required.

That didn't help with my A5000 econet problems, however. Indeed, shortly afterwards the blasted thing wouldn't power up at all.

I put a plea out on comp.sys.acorn.misc and very soon have three offers of replacement machines. They really must be a nice bunch on there!

But a but of reading up has enlightened me to a standard problem with A5000s - Acorn, in their infinite wisdom, decided to solder Ni-Cad batteries directly onto the motherboard. You would have thought they would have learned their lesson with the exploding battery packs on the Masters. Anyway, after 15+ years, these batteries grow fur, and leak battery acid all over the place, wrecking tracks and burning the legs off chips..

So, with two replacement machines here, plus my original, I have three fury batteries, and none of the machines will work properly. I clean out Maplin of tagged Ni-cads (they don't have anything remotely pin compatible, so I'll have to solder them in on leads.) and rip out the batteries and clean up as best as I can the boards here. One looks like it's had it, with a fair bit of damage. The second required one track repair, and that is now firing up to the desktop. The third, my original machine, looks OK, but still won't power up. I'll have to get back to that.

Next task is, of course, to rebuild a whole machine. I'm going to use the SD-IDE drive I got from Mark at retroclinic, which is already formatted. I just need to work out how to copy disc-to-disc on a machine with only one IDE interface, as it is reluctant to co-exist with another drive.

I may have to set up another fileserver, fire up the A5000 with the hard drive, and copy everything off across the econet, then copy it all back again. Assuming the econet works now .....

Snail Mail

I'd forgotten why it gets called Snail Mail. I ordered a 512MB mini-SD card on Monday, so I could re-load the A5000 and get the econet up and running again. I'm still waiting for them to get here. 5-12 business days, the eBay listing says.. I guess that means I could still be waiting this time next week.

It's the fault of instantaneous worldwide communications, of course. It's equally as easy to view the website of a shop next door as one at the other side of the world. And where eBay is concerned, the stuff could be coming from literally anywhere. The problem comes when you actually order stuff - the shop next door will probably walk round with it, but for the most part, UK sellers will post it and you'll get things next day or at least within a couple of days. The silly Hong Kong eBay seller will take much longer.

Back in the days of ordering things by post, when it took as long for someone to get your order as it did for the delivery to get to you, we expected things to take their time. Now, when the order is placed instantly, we expect things to arrive quicker. And they don't.

I guess I'm just being impatient... But I've several things I need to get sorted out in time for Acorn World at Retro Reunited, and I need to rebuild the fileserver before I can do them ..

In the meantime, I'm just hoping the postal disputes in London don't get worse and spread up here.