Total wirelessness

The availabilty of wireless connectectivity in the UK can be a bit sporadic as I have learnt over the week I didn’t have it in the house, and I relied on my phones for internet connectivity. A lesson this need has taught me is that handset designers need to remember that the goal of wifi is wirelessness. Its pointless to replace the need for an RJ45 with the need for powerlead.

i.e. energy efficiency and battery size and life become noticable if you use a modern mobile the way it was intended. HTC…I am talking to you. …

Arghh! Snipsnap

Finding old blog posts is not easy on Snipsnap; it creates a snip named on the basis of a date/serial concatenation, and does not/cannot index the date against any title specified, or at least not as far as I can see. (I have created a Tag aka Category label of “Blog” but this will only listed manually tagged articles, and it seems, attribute the serial i.e. the final component of the name, which is the day ordinal, to it. Not too useful, by which I mean useless.)

ooOOOoo

Amended, slightly, on 11th August, when copied to wordpress. This is one of the crucial reasons I decided to get off snipsnap, together with the dying community,growing legacy environment to run it and the excessive cost of hosting, since you need root privilidge to install snipsnap. DFL 11 August 2013 …

Internet on the move

In which David first comes across Orange’s adult content filters….

I moved into a rented flat last weekend, it was all a bit exciting because our original plan had been to drive to London with our stuff on the Saturday and drive home on Sunday. We wisely decided not to; the journey to the station, normally 20 minutes took two hours because of the snow. Anyway we got there and moved in. Rented accomodation doesn’t include either phone or broadband so I spoke to BT to get the phones in and since they have lead times it meant that I was without a WiFi LAN at home for the week. It hasn’t been that long since we first got broadband at home but its been very noticeable not having it. …

Un-Unlimited BT Internet

I have an “Unlimited” download contract with BT Broadband and I received a Fair Usage policy warning in November. It seems that if their “Unlimited” customers look likely to exceed 100Gb download per calendar month, they receive a warning letter, but if they exceed the limit for two months in a row, they’ll restrict the download speed to 1 Mbps for a further month during peak times. (This is 1/7th of the speed I usually get.)

This seems a bit disproportionate to me since online games, and streaming content from the TV companies replayer sites become unusable. What do the think a residential site uses broadband for? Anyway, I rang them to discuss this, and have posted my notes at a new page called BT Broadband, which discusses the fairness, transparancy and management measures. It also has a link to Ofcom’s site. (Further thoughts and notes are held on the BT Home Hub page. ) …

Scalable Computing

The “Scalable Computing” section of the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network has published an “article, called “Cloud – why now?” by me, Dave Levy. It is a brief article looking at some of  the thoughts I developed over the last year about why organisations are developing new architectural models for IT delivery and how they’ll do it. It looks at the computer science, the economics and the way in which scale is self fulfilling. The scale of the problem, of which there are three dimensions, (data, complexity & connectivity) inspires scalable IT, which itself enables the scale of the solution, and enables higher levels of scale. …

Cloud why now?

I wrote and published a paper, called Cloud why now? on the Knowledge Transfer Network site. How new is Cloud Computing? It is a clear evolution if two trends in IT architecture that have had an immense and limited success. The successful trend is distributed computing and the less successful one utility computing. What is driving this evolution and why now? This article has a quick look at the trends that have brought this to this point and looks at the fact that like most economic revolutions, it’s a confluence of both socio/economics and science. The article concludes by looking at the paradox of data, to see how it is both a driver of change, and an inhibitor. …

Wish, Boomy icons and imagemagick

I need to write a program for managing my windows host, well actually, someone else’s windows laptop. I fired up TCL/TK and discovered that I haven’t copied my tcl/tk icon library from my home systems and I decided to improve my library, which is a big mistake.

I went looking on the ‘net and found the lovely Boomy icons. Annoyingly the transparency representation doesn’t work on my platform and the lovely transparency on the GIFs comes out a delightful shade of pink. There is no .bmp set; the .png set work and look fine. GIMP allegedly supports batch operations, as does Imagemagik. I have been impressed with Jonathan Soma’s trip map http://www.triptropnyc.com/ site about the New York transport system, which uses Imagemagik ever since I saw it, so an excuse to play with it would be good.

The alternative might be to find and install the TCL/TK IMG package which seems to be at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkimg/.

I have opened a wiki page here, to record my notes, successes and failures, which now includes how to use ImageMagick to perform a simple format conversion. …