Yaffle's Corner

The FlowMusic Store in Action

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:38:22 +0200

When I wrote this article I stated at the end that I hoped that Pure had arrangements with all the music publishers.

Since then, there has been a further firmware upgrade to the radio, and the release notes for that upgrade stated that there were "Fundamental Changes. User interface updates for FlowSongs track licensing. ". It pointed us at this page.

Yes, it seems that, despite the fact that you can purchase a CD once and have the right to play it as many times as your little heart desires, as soon as you purchase it and use the "Internet" to store the content for you, certain entities (we don't know whom they are) suddenly get cold feet. I bet its because they know they can't change the format on us any more and require us to re-purchase music we already have.

This author has purchased, at different points in time, the Double Vinyl/Double Cassette/Double CD versions of Jeff Wayne's War of the World's and I think the relevant publisher has had quite enough money. I have purchased the Collector's Edition of same (with 7 CD's and a DVD) and I have dared to place the first 3 CD's on my computer so I can stream them to whereever I like.

Never mind, I found a spare tenner down the back of the bank account, and decided to use that to trial the FlowMusic service instead of enjoying this week's selection of Montezuma's birthday chocolates.

So how well does it work? Well, as I was writing the above paragraph, the station I had chosen to listen to in an attempt to find something I thought I could purchase, the station was playing :

Ian Dury & The Blockheads: Hit me with your rythm stick.

Well, a no brainer wasn't it? So I hit the "flow" soft button. The radio analysed the track, identified the song, offered it for purchase at 79p. I had the choice to buy or not. I elected to buy. The system then asked me to enter my pin. I entered that using the scroll and select option the radio offers, and then selected it.

An email confirming the purchase came in, the radio informed me that the track was available for download. But downloading is not necessary, all I need to do now is select "The Lounge" as the source, choose options and select "My Tracks" and then scroll through already provided menus which allow you to choose by Artist, Album and certain other options.

After selection, it took the radio a while to actually start playing the track, but remember, this service is beta and so we should expect some teething problems. I might not be the only geek with nothing else to do on a Saturday afternoon.

So all told, I am a prospective fan of this service - let's hope that certain luddites get a clue.

A Music Store with a difference

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:13:17 +0200

The Internet already has lots of ways allowing you purchase music tracks legally so that you can enjoy them on whichever bit of technology suits you best, so in one sense it seems odd that another has appeared.

However, I'm sure you've all been in the situation that you're listening to music on the radio and you decide you like the track. Its possible that the broadcaster will give you enough details that you could go off to your favourite store and buy the track. But sometimes you don't get the opportunity to make a note of the details before going off to search for the track, and then, you may forget to go looking for it, or have forgotten the details, so now you can't search for it.

The people behind the Pure Evoke Flow (and other radios which use The Lounge to organise their material) have just released a new firmware upgrade for their radios so that now when you're listening to music, via DAB, FM, or Internet radio one of the "soft" buttons is labelled "Flow". Pressing that will cause the radio to communicate with severs at "The Lounge" and attempt to analyze the music stream currently being listened to. If it succeeds it will offer you a chance to purchase the track. Tracks are normally priced between 79p and £1.29 dependant upon publisher.

Purchased tracks are stored against your The Lounge account, and are available for streaming on any of the radios you have registered with that account. If you should want to download a track to your computer - possibly for streaming on something else - you can.

For the time being, the service is in beta, so expect some problems to start with. However, that means you can currently get a free 90 day subscription to the service, you just need an account on The Lounge. After that, you'll be offered an annual subscription which, at £2.99 hardly breaks the bank.

Sounds like a good idea on Pure's part - let's just hope they have arrangements in place with all the music publishers.

The Pros and Cons of Location Awareness

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:53:17 +0200

We all use location aware software and services these days. Lots of us use them on our mobile phone so we can tweet our location along with a comment. Thus when you type "I am at a restaurant" you can include a link to (probably) a Google Maps location which shows where you are, and even which restaurant. We do this because we want people to know where to find us.

But what if location awareness could be used to stalk you? Sadly it can. I've read a couple of articles this week about this issue. This one from The Register will allow you to read up on the subject.

As the article makes clear, an attacker does need to rely on a couple of things. First, he needs to be able to trick you into somehow visiting his web site. Next, he needs to rely on your router having either its default password or no password at all, and finally he needs you not to have changed the default ESSID. If you just took your router out of the box, plugged it in and it worked, you are probably at risk. Hopefully, you've put on a non-default, and reasonably secure pasword and changed the ESSID. This makes it harder. But if he gets your router's MAC address, and its been logged by Google, he could use it to turn up at your front door.

So its probably a good job there is a positive item in the tech news. Some research has been done allowing two sites who know the location of the other to exchange data without the hopes of any eaves dropper or man in the middle ever being able to listen in on the communications. This article explains all. Still, a product with this technology in is unlikely for some time, which is a pity because its exactly the sort of thing likely to really wind up over zealous governments.

Its time to think up a longer key for your WiFi network

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0200

The very first entry in this blog was this one, where I described a means of easily generating a 63 digit hex key by using a phrase from a favourite book.

Yesterday afternoon, a message with a link to this article dropped into my mail box.

For just a very few dollars you can now stress test the security of any WPA or WPA2 secured wireless network. My guess is that an awful lot of networks will be vulnerable to being cracked this way, so its definitely time for one of those 63 hex digit keys if the security of your wireless network is in any way important.

Protecting the phone

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:20:03 +0200

So you have this mobile phone. Its an expensive piece of kit and a pain to replace. Worse, these days we have all sorts of information on them that we wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands.

If you're very organised, i.e. you kept the packing box it was sent in, then you can phone your mobile phone company, and have them block your account and the IMEI. Blocking the IMEI takes a day or two to propagate around all the UK phone providers, but after that, the phone is totally useless to anyone who may have taken it, no matter what SIM they put in it. The phone will also be useless to you should you get it back. Surely, there is a better way?

If you have a phone that is smart enough, then there certainly is. This morning I read this review of Track and Protect which runs on many Symbian 3rd Edition phones and all Symbian 5th Edition phones. I am not going to review this software, although its the one I've chosen, so read the linked article if you're interested.

When I tweeted that I'd found some suitable software, a friend of mine asked me about WaveSecure. This latter software has similar functionality to Track and Protect and is available for Symbian, Android and others. It differs in two respects and these are charging model and what happens if a thief inserts an alien (i.e. not yours) SIM in the phone.

Track and Protect can be downloaded for free. This will give you some minimum protection. To get the best use of it, when your phone is lost/stolen, you'll want the ability to send it remote commands, or try and locate it. This is done by sending silent SMS commands to your phone. These SMS messages use up a pre-purchased credit. I purchased 15 credits for 4.99 euros (£4.31 at today's exchange rate). I won't have to purchase any more credits until I've used up the ones I've purchased. With Wave Secure, you pay £19.90 for the software, including the first year's subscription, and then you pay again next year, so this is rather like a standard insurance contract. I prefer the Track and Protect charging method which is why I chose this software.

The other difference is what happens if someone inserts an alien SIM into your phone. With Track and Protect, the phone immediately notifies the track and protect server, which can then allow you to continue sending remote commands to the phone. Wave Secure just locks the phone at that point, meaning the phone is useless to the thief, but also to you.

So you pays your money and you makes your choice, but either way, they can't make lots of phone calls at my expense and, given I have my Twitter, Skype and Email available on my phone, they won't be able to pretend to be me either.

Fringless

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:47:47 +0200

You may have read in the press the arguments that have been occurring between Fring and Skype. You can find The Register's article on the subject here.

In any event, this has (largely) rendered my copy of Fring useless as what I use it for mainly these days is to make the odd Skype call - after all - I have a good balance left which I don't wish to lose.

Fortunately, I read on All About Symbian that a new version of Skype for Symbian had been released which had a rather lower memory footprint, so this lunch time I downloaded it.

It appears to be not bad, the call quality is good and I tested it against a switchboard. Fring had only recently included DTMF capability in their software, even after all these years, and it was still limited to the * and # buttons. Numbers were not possible. Its as simple as pi with the Skype app which just uses the phone's own dialler, just like when you're making a call over the mobile network.

One other nice thing, when you fire up the Skype Client it warns you about data charges over 3G networks and suggests you either get an unlimited data tariff or join a WiFi network. Needless to say, I'm using it over my Wifi network at the moment.

One thing I'm unable to test at the moment is whether it receives incoming calls any better than Fring did.

You may recall I tested a SkypeIn number with Fring about a year ago and whilst the call eventually came through, most callers were fed up of the ring tone and gave up. I always put that down to the Fring gateway being slow. So I'd be interested to know from anyone using the native Skype app. and who has a SkypeIN number how well it works.

Ensuring SSL where its useful

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:31:58 +0200

There are sites out there on the web that offer both HTTP and HTTPS versions of themselves. In such cases it is generally a good idea to use the SSL enabled site. The trouble is that most of us rarely type the http when jumping off to a site and as for typing https, well, most people don't, even when visiting their bank's web site.

In the case of the bank site, these are designed to force you to use SSL from login and through the entire session until logoff. Many of the sites that offer both an enabled and non-enabled site don't. You can drop back to HTTP just by hitting the wrong link.

The Register reports in this article on a new add-on for Firefox that enforces the use of SSL on these hybrid sites. You can also tweak it to tell it about other sites you may be aware of that aren't supported from install. You can download the add-on from here.

A strange error in the log file

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:57:38 +0200

I've been spending a happy day re-building my Linux server. It has been off for ages. After the network address kept changing when I tried to force the Netgear to do things it just didn't want to do I'd turned it off. Today I decided, mostly because I wanted to play with LDAP, to get it back on the network.

Getting it back on the network was easy enough, I just had to plug a keyboard in and use my single monitor plugged into it briefly.

Once up on the network, re-configuring most of the services to use the new IP address was easy, but despite me configuring BIND with the new details, it just would not start.

Here is the error I found in the syslog

named[4035]: couldn't open pid file '/var/run/bind/run/named/named.pid': Stale NFS file handle

Now this is odd as I don't use NFS and I don't have an automounter of any description.

A quick Google found me a solution, perform an fsck. One other person had fixed his problem that way - by dint of going down to single user mode and doing a manual fsck. Well, by now, I'd unplugged the keyboard and put the monitor back on the XP box, so I wanted to avoid doing the single user thing if possible.

If you want to ensure your system performs an fsck on reboot, irrespective of the settings of any tuneable paramaters on the fileing system, the thing to do is

shutdown -rF now

The -r ensures a reboot takes place, the -F (note the capital) ensures that an fsck occurs and of course, the operand at the end causes the shutdown to take place at the time you type it.

Quite why a stray corruption on the filing system should make the kernel think there is an odd NFS file handle in use I'm not sure. Probably a bit of magic in the corrupted file, but its easily fixed with this arrangement and of course, if you were working with a server located in a hosted environment, it would work on that without a major downtime. Just advise the data centre staff that you're rebooting the box so that a pair of "intelligent hands" is ready should the fsck go pear shaped.

Google Maps revisited

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:29:34 +0200

I've just upgraded Google Maps on my phone. In Symbian land it has just received voice search capability. The item telling me about this suggested I speak clearly.

Well, I have the radio on in one corner of the room as I catch up with two weeks worth of The Naked Scientist podcast and the washing machine in the other, but I moved to the couch in order to find as quiet a spot as I could.

I fired it up, configured it to use British English, pressed the green talk button, whereupon it invited me to "Speak Now" and muttered "Bus Station" at it.

There was a pause and then lots of little flags came up, in all the places where I know there to be bus stops. Might be useful in a town I didn't know as well as I know the local bus routes, but given the thing has the bus station marked down as a known location I give it a "close but no cigar" rating on this utterly non-scientific test.

Before the screaming begins

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:21:17 +0200

Well, its Wednesday, so high time for a wibble.

I've picked the subject from the title of the program being broadcast on R7's The Seventh Dimension as I arrived home. I was tuning in for the Doctor Who episode afterwards, but it seemed apt.

Today, I was issued my logins to all the network services and had to build a Linux system to act as my workstation. All of my years of using Linux and I have only rarely used the various X-Windows based windowing systems available.

I've opted for KDE which seems to be a reasonable choice and I've managed to install just about all the packages I need, including the remote desktop stuff needed to log into the Windows Terminal Server for some of the systems I need.

There are, as you might expect, a couple of teething issues with my set up, but Gavin will be in tomorrow so I'll get him to help me tweak those last couple of things so I can do the job with aplomb (I do hope he isn't going to tell me I should have chosen Gnome).

Tomorrow, I'll be dealing with customers, rather than offering my advice to other members of the First Line team as they deal with their queues, and hopefully I'll get to perform the full second line role sooner rather than later.

Oh, Merula (from whom I purchased the current BT line) prodded their mail servers into life yesterday. I finally got the auto-response mails from the two requests I sent to kill the line. Today, I got the confirmation it should have been done, and lo, an attempt to dial my number now results in the three toned bleep. Goodbye BT.

BT - would you credit it?

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:16:00 +0200

Long time readers of this blog will remember the trouble I had with bills at my last abode. You can find an article here which itself contains links to earlier articles.

As the linked to article states I did give them my forwarding address, but no bill has ever arrived here, until today, in the shape of a demand from a debt chasing company.

After discussion, I admitted the debt was mine and explained I'd had all sorts of trouble getting bills out of BT. They wanted to make all sorts of arrangements, of course, but I stuck to my guns and refused to enter any permanent arrangement until after my first salary date. They seem to have gone for it.

Which brings me to the good news that I've cancelled the BT line at this address. Well, no need for it now. Havn't had ADSL for ages and only had it for incoming support calls - and it looks better on a CV to have a land line number. Now that is no longer an issue either, it can go. So good bye BT, for ever. I won't miss you.

The first week is done

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:15:42 +0200

So, I've done my first week on a strange new planet, fortunately I didn't run into any naughty bug eyed monsters.

Having worked from home for the last six or so years, re-joining the commuting rat race has taken some getting used to. Because of the timings of busses and trains, in order to get into work (in Bath) on time, I have to leave the flat no later than 07:25 and that gives me the choice of the 07:26 or the 07:32, both of which call at Lawrence Hill Railway. Depending upon which bus you catch, you then get to spend 10 or 15 minutes lurking around before the 3 minute hop to Temple Meads. However, this morning, the bus ran a blinder and got me there in time to catch the 07:35. This is a through train and there is no need to change.

My view is that today being Friday, lots of people were not travelling, so there were less people fishing around in their pockets and handbags (which they always wait until they're on the bus for, rather than sort it out before the bus arrives) so there was considerably less delay. Of course, this did mean that I didn't have the chance to do the couple of things at Temple Meads I'd intended to do before the connecting train, but there you are, one can't have things both ways like the political parties do.

But enough of the travel already, save to say its about a 12 minute walk from the station to the offices so I'm actually getting some daily exercise too.

This week I've been riding shot gun with members of First Line Tech Support and, as I'm eventually going to be Second Line - the person they all turn to - I've been offering advice on matters I already have some idea about. I know, from having received my personnel papers, that computers, phones and desk space have been ordered for me, but without a login of my own yet, I still have a bit to learn navigating my way around the support systems. Still, its all been written in-house and to work with the NetSuite system which they use as their main ticketing system. Fortunately I have past history with NetSuite, so finding my way around that is relatively easy - and I finally managed to persuade a couple of colleagues to slow down enough to show me where they were clicking through on the internal systems in order to find the information they needed.

By the end of the week, I know where a good deal of it is and the only real problem is that the system known as the portal will insist on logging you in as the last customer you pretended to be in order to test something. Of course, all the long time staff know to log in again, but as I don't yet have a password, there are a few things I havn't been able to stress test yet.

As always in networking, there are times when you need access to systems outside of your own support infrastructure. At CensorNet I used to log into a friendly customer's server and type suitable commands in order to see how the "rest of the world" outside our systems were viewing things. Lacking that ability at the new location I made use of my mobile phone and for the first time, my unlimited data plan has come into its own.

A while ago, you may remember I wrote this review of PuTTY on the N97. Well, the review hardly does it justice as, working from home, I never really had to use the software, using PuTTY on the computers on my network instead. Well, I can say I am even more enamoured of this piece of software now. Remember those 8 touch buttons that give you access to "difficult" keys such as the pipe symbol or the control or alt keys? Well, sometimes they get in the way. You can remove (hide) them with a swipe, and bring them back with another swipe once you've read the output that was obscured. If a key you need (such as Esc) is not one of the 8 soft-keys, no matter, you can re-configure the session so that one of the 8 key positions suddenly becomes Esc.

So what was I using PuTTY for? Well mostly to run commands such as dig and whois on servers without my new employer's network in order to see what the rest of the world was seeing. Came in very handy when I diagnosed a mis-configuration of a registry record for a domain meaning the name servers for .com were giving out the wrong name server details for a customer domain and thus, no one could find it.

So at the end of this first week, I still have a lot to learn, but I'm looking forward to getting my own log in credentials so I can find my way around the portal fully. With luck I'll get to use PuTTY on the new computer too. Whilst the phone is fine - it is a little hunt and peck.

Its all come together

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:57:49 +0200

Well, I'm happy to say that everything has come together nicely.

As usual I was the one that put the bins out yesterday and sloped off down to the cashpoint afterwards. Checked for delivered postal mail on the way back and found a few items, one of which was the P60 from CensorNet. Then I sat back in front of this keyboard and discovered an email with no subject, but the contents were good.

Yes, I've been offered a job as a Second Line Support Engineer which I have accepted. It starts next Tuesday, just right for the new tax year which will keep bean counters everywhere smiling all over.

This is all timed rather nicely as not only has it come in just before Easter, meaning Easter will be a happier affair than it was otherwise going to be, but just before my birthday, which happens to be today.

So like an honest person I started phoning round the various offices of the DWP and the local council to advise them that my status has changed. Dealing with Bristol City Council was a breeze. After a brief chat on the phone, everything else was done by email. Clean, simple, effecient. Yes, the Council will pay me one more month's benefit to cover my rental this month as they appreciate that I won't receive my first pay day until the end of the month.

Compare and contrast with Job Centre Plus (or the Joke Shop as they're known here). I asked them about money to cover rail or bus fares for the coming month. At least not everyone who works there is an idiot. The helpful woman on the phone said "If I sign you off now, thats it, they won't consider any claim. But come into the office tomorrow and they might consider some money from their contingency fund." So, I have to go into their offices on the hope of being assisted. As one of my acquiantances on a bulletin board said "Where is the incerntive for honesty when they treat you like that?" Well, there is none at all. It is hardly surprising some people feel compelled to cheat on the benefits.

Still, we must look on the bright side. At least I'm free of their "Thou shalt" method of management. I rather feel a dose of the boot being on the other foot coming on.

In the mean time there should be somewhat less articles about mobile phones on the blog, although as the company I am going to work for deal in VoIP systems amongst other things, the telephonic coverage will not go away entirely.

I'll never make a wildlife camera man

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:29:48 +0200

Well peeps, it has become apparant that I'll never make a wildlife camera man. Way too impatient by half.

I had just made another cup of tea and glanced out the window to discover not one, but two herons. Sadly, they were far enough apart that I had to take this short video, rather than a single caption, to show them both.

Fiddling with the camera immediately afterwards and I discovered one of them had flown away whilst I was prodding, so I sat and watched the other one for ages. I've taken a couple more shots, but what I wanted was a shot, or video, of this second one as it flew away.

I made the mistake of looking away for a second - I swear the damn thing waited.

I have even more respect than I already had for these wildlife photographers who take hours, nay, days in order to bring us those shots that thrill us so much on TV.

Even more control (in the future)

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:14:15 +0100

You will have read in the last posting that I now have VoIP working thanks to having a fully open (firmware wise) Netgear router donated by a friend of mine.

Falling into my mailbox today was a link to this article which was discussing the availability of non-vendor supplied (but open) firmware for Linksys routers. It also mentioned that the link to another site you can find therein also provide firmware for many other routers.

So I went and took a look at dd-wrt.com and searched it's database for support for Netgear routers.

There is no current support for the WGR614V9 but it is marked as a "Work in Progress" so I will re-check, from time to time, to see if it offers all the facilities mentioned in the article once they release some suitable code. It definitely would seem worth a play.