(Not a great picture as it's taken with my phone, but I think you'll get the rough gist.)

I'd been putting off booking flights for Debconf8 while the house wasn't sold, as I just couldn't justify the money when I wasn't sure what my outgoings would be like. However today I finally got round to booking something, figuring that I either needed to do so now or the prices would go up far too much for me to be able to. My flights are as follows:

DUB->MAD 2008-08-07 18:25 -> 2008-08-07 21:50
MAD->EZE 2008-08-08 01:25 -> 2008-08-08 08:40

EZE->MAD 2008-08-17 21:25 -> 2008-08-18 14:30
MAD->DUB 2008-08-18 16:10 -> 2008-08-18 17:35

This does mean I'm arriving a day early, but it halved the cost of the flights and hopefully paying for an extra night won't cost that much...

Just before the New Year we accepted an offer on our house in Norwich, which had been up for sale since September. It was a bit lower than we'd hoped for, but the buyer was an investor and so we hoped it would be quick and not involve too much hassle.

How wrong we were. We finally completed on Friday, with the money hitting our account today (thanks to the Ulster Bank being a bit shit about telling our solicitor how much was outstanding on the mortgage). I'd become convinced that it was going to fall through, that we wouldn't be able to find a new buyer and that we were going to end up having to rent out a house that it wasn't convenient for us to check up on (due to the radioactive body of water between us and it). So I am somewhat relieved to finally be rid of it.

I've been asked about the v3 DG834G in the past (mine is a v2) and always answered that I don't know anything about it. Earlier this week Ben asked me about it and let me have a login to his. He also took pictures, which are on the OpenWRT DG834G page.

Some comments, based on this:

• The ADAM2 bootloader is different. Looking at the output of strings on it I can't see the checksum message seen in the v2 version. I also can't see the FTP server strings I'd expect. However the default config appears to specify an IP of 169.254.87.1 so it might be worth nmaping that when the router is coming up and seeing if anything is open.
• The wireless card is no longer on a mini PCI card. I assume it's still connected electrically the same way, but I guess this is cheaper for Netgear to manufacture.
• The CPU is slightly different, a TNETD7200ZDW instead of a TNETD7301GDU. No idea if this makes any major difference.
• The board appears to have JTAG and serial port headers easily accessible. And possibly even JTAG for the wifi.

I think it should be easy enough to get OpenWRT up and running on this (possibly someone has even done so already); someone just needs to hook up a serial console and do some prodding.

My last laptop had a serial port, but only when it was inserted into its bulking docking station. My laptop of the past 2.5 years doesn't have one. I used to spend a lot of time in datacenters wanting to configure devices over a serial console, so as a result I've been using USB to serial converters for some time. And I've never really been that happy with them.

My first device was a Belkin, using the belkin_sa driver under Linux. It was free (always a plus) and was fine for basic 9600 8N1, but didn't work with my eTrex GPS or my smartcard reader. I just assumed they were picky about what they wanted to talk to - I didn't need to use them often with my laptop and my desktop has plenty of serial ports thanks to a 4 port Moxa card.

I then bought a cypress_m8 device, as Simon had one and claimed to be happy with it. While again it was mostly ok for datacentre usage it didn't work with the GPS/smartcard reader. Also I'd sometimes see dropped characters especially when driving it at 115,200.

I just assumed this was all a limitation of the devices; I'd have said it was the fact they were cheap and nasty but I know the retail price of the Belkin wasn't that cheap. I asked around on IRC and people said they'd had no issues with pl2303 based devices. So I bought one from DealExtreme for a bargain price, figuring it was worth a try. And it was. It works with my smartcard reader and my GPS. It doesn't drop characters anywhere near as readily, even at high speeds. And it was cheap as chips. I've seen others complain about the pl2303, but it's definitely the best of the 3 USB to serial chipsets I've tried.

Dear Lazyweb,

What is currently the best GPS chipset suitable for walking? Something I can pair up with my E70 to get tracks for importing to OpenStreetMap is the sort of thing I'm looking for. I can find various reviews that suggest the SirfStar III is best for the low speeds associated with walking, but they're all at least a year old. Has nothing better come along since? What about the SkyTraq Venus 5?

I mentioned on my switch to Movable Type post that there were a few things that were hopefully going to happen RSN and that I'd talk about them if they did.

Well, one of them did, and Steve helpfully dropped me in it earlier in the week - I was granted write access to the debian-keyring. It's worth pointing out that while Steve did some prodding around this the process started quite some time ago; back in November James Troup (the other current keyring maintainer, and at the time the only one) contacted me regarding an offer I'd made to help out in whatever way I could. As a result I got involved in the keyring RT queue and did some basic triage and trying to point people in the right direction, where such help didn't require any keyring privileges. I also started thinking about how keyring maintenance could be shared in a trackable fashion. I made some suggestions to James and he was largely in favour with a few suggestions and wishlists.

I'll get into discussing exactly how it goes at a later point in time, but for the moment I want to get a better feel for the process and procedures to fine tune things. To that end I've been working my way through the keyring RT queue, and have removed quite a few keys of retired developers, as well as doing a handful of replacements for developers who'd lost or had their key compromised. There's still a few more tickets in progress and I'm trying my best to work through them in a timely manner - if you have an outstanding ticket and haven't heard from me then please do feel to ping it.

My grandfather (my last living grandparent) was found dead in his flat today at 11am. He lived alone in Liverpool (his choice; my mother had offered to help him move to Newry in the past but he hadn't wanted to) and when my uncle failed to get hold of him yesterday for his weekly phone call he became worried. When there was still no response this morning my mother called the police who ended up breaking down the door of his flat. He was apparently found in bed, which hopefully means it was quick and without suffering.

It's been a while since I was close to him; when I was much younger he would take me into the centre of Belfast when he visited and we would wander round, always ending up with a trip to the Electronics Centre, where I would disappear into large boxes of pruck, and Anderson & MacCauley's for lunch. More recently I haven't known what to say to him, which was a bit of a shame.

He died aged 81, with all his own hair and possession of his mental faculties, which doesn't seem like bad going. I think he would have found it very difficult to have had to rely on others to live his life, so perhaps in some ways this was better. *sigh*

Since I noticed the Movable Type Open Source release I've been considering switching over to it; my Blosxom install is just a tad crufty and I wanted something that wasn't going to require a lot of effort (it's hard enough to get round to posting these days without having to worry about the underlying system). Dom's packaging of MT and Ganneff's switch gave me some confidence it might be a sane move, so here we are.

Of course the style now completely conflicts with the rest of my site (I should probably update it all, but I don't really do HTML/CSS so it can wait for now), there's still no real content and I've no doubt broken a whole bunch of links (which I'll try to fix up as I notice any that are used a lot), but I've kept putting this off and the longer I do so the worse it'll get.

(I might have some real life things to blog about, but they all seem to be in the RSN category and there's no point talking about them unless they actually happen.)

As I type this my internet connection is being once again powered by my DG834G. It's also very dark, but that's because I'm observing Earthhour (I don't think it'll change the world, but I don't mind sitting in the dark that much and there's only me in the house). After my last OpenWRT/AR7 experiment I thought I'd bricked the Netgear. I ended up using my BT Home Hub as a stop gap solution and wondered how to proceed. I bought a Conexant Accessrunner USB modem and tried it with the WGT634U. This proved more stable than the USB Speedtouch, but still resulted in a couple of line drops a day at least. AR7 still seemed the way forward. I picked up a D-Link DSL-502T off eBay. This has a USB port, an ethernet port and no wireless. However it's AR7 based and has 4MB of flash and 16MB of RAM; the same as the Netgear. It also has a serial header already soldered on, so it was easy to connect my level shifter up and have a play. I built up a recent OpenWRT and managed to install it successfully and then hook it up to my ADSL. All seemed quite stable and I was feeling pretty happy. In parallel with this I'd picked up a cheap D-Link G604T off eBay - this has a 4 port switch and wireless and is basically the same hardware as the Netgear. It was listed as faulty, but I was hoping to be able to use it for parts or at the very least for testing. As it turned out it worked perfectly; didn't need to reflash it or anything to get it going. I put the image I had working on the 502T on it and hooked it up. Again, everything seemed stable. I managed to get the wireless detected ok, but the driver doesn't seem to support AP mode that well - there are big warnings in dmesg when you enable it. It's an acx111 chipset and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of upstream activity - there's some work on a version using the in kernel 802.11 stack, but it doesn't currently compile with 2.6.24 AFAICT. Anyway. I had working ADSL with OpenWRT, albeit without wireless (having the switch was useful though, as the router lives beside the media box but also needs to be connected to the switch upstairs in the study). I'd chased Enta a week ago about IPv6 but still not heard anything, so I gave them another prod. This time I got a speedy response indicated my account was now enabled for IPv6 and providing me with a /64. I added +ipv6 to /etc/ppp/options and restarted PPP and it all just started working. In addition I've configured up radvd on the box so everything on the ethernet autoconfigs. Flush with the success of all this I thought I'd try my Netgear again and see if it was really dead or if I could get the original firmware back on it. For some reason that worked first time and the router booted fine. So I thought I'd try OpenWRT again, given that I had an image I knew worked fine on another AR7 router - if it didn't work on the Netgear I'd know there was some sort of hardware difference or problem rather than a build issue. And it worked. My DG834G is now running OpenWRT SVN r10685, doing IPv6 and generally everything I need except for wireless. I've updated my DG834G page a little bit, including a link to the OpenWRT config I'm using. Hopefully the wireless will get there; certainly most chipsets seem to be getting much improved upstream support these days and I'm sure it must be possible for the ACX guys to make use of the in kernel stack to reduce their work.

El Reg reviewed the Archos 705 yesterday. They only gave it 50%, which I think is a little harsh. I bought one of these back in November when they first came out, as something to help easy my daily commute by train. I have to say I don't regret the purchase; while there are various niggles that annoy me it basically does what I want. My main drive was the size of the screen. There are plenty of options available if you want in the region of 4", but I wanted something bigger that could still be shoved in a bag without any hassle. The 705's 7" screen is great. I can sit it on the tray table on the train and it gives a clear viewable image that doesn't leave me squinting trying to see it. The second concern was the battery life. At 7" you start to get into the UMPC area. However there didn't seem to be anything around that both offered enough battery life and had the grunt to decode DivX. I need a guaranteed 2hrs (ideally a bit longer) so I can watch something without being interrupted. I've certainly had over 3hrs on the Archos and various reviews claim it'll do 5hr for video without problems. Archos call the 705 a DVR. I've no idea why; I certainly wouldn't consider it one. I have the DVR station, but I've only used it to connect the Archos up to a hotel room TV and never for actually recording anything. There's no tuner (neither analog nor digital), so you need a Freeview/cable/satellite or similar box to provide a signal. Plus it seems pointless to convert a digital TV signal to analog and then for the Archos to have to re-encode it. Much more sane to record TV on your PVR and pull the file off that and onto the 705. Except there you hit a bit of a problem. By default the Archos supports DivX and WMV. To get MPEG2 or H.264 support, or indeed AC3 audio, you need to pay extra for a license that will enable the appropriate codec. This is annoying and I've ended up just using mencoder to convert Freeview records to an Archos friendly format rather than shelling out more for the codecs. Archos do seem to have dropped the ball here. The MPEG2 license fee seems to be $2.50 per device. The TI licensing seems to be about $2 for MPEG2 + AC3. Archos sell the plugin for €19.99. I doubt AC3 licensing is over $15, which rules out Archos merely keeping the cost down for customers by allowing them to pick and chose which codecs they want to avoid paying license fees. The 705 also comes with a web browser. Which, of course, you have to pay for. I ended up getting this thrown in with my 705 + DVR station bundle. It's powered by Opera and reasonable enough. The only time I've really made use of it is while staying in a hotel; it was quite nifty to have the 705 hooked up to the TV and be able to lie on the bed with the keyboard remote control and lookup film times or interesting places to go. Internet access is provided by wifi; if it had bluetooth as well then I might make use of it on the train, but as it is it's not really something I use much. As I said at the start I'm still happy with my purchase. It's not a cheap item, but it has the screen size and battery life I wanted and there wasn't a lot else out that offered both. Having to pay for codecs is a bad move on Archos' part, but I've avoided doing so by re-encoding. If you want something that's a decent media player of this size then the 705 is definitely worth considering; if you're not sure about the size aspect you may be better off with a 605 (the 4.3" screen version) or even something from Cowon (who unfortunately don't seem to have anything in the 7" range). Finally, if you already own a generation 5 Archos device, you might be interested to know that shell access has been obtained. The device is pretty locked down (signed kernel modules, no /dev/mem, signed root cramfs filesystem), but there's an arcwelder exploit to get an ssh login over wifi and an Archos Hacking forum on Archosfans.

I hacked my brother's Wii this weekend. It was fairly painless (and pointless at present). All you need is a copy of Zelda: Twilight Princess (which I don't have, hence using my brother's Wii for this) and an SD card. You use the Twilight Hack as a Zelda saved game, which then causes a buffer overrun when you try to talk to the first character in the game. This is exploited to load a boot loader which loads and runs a boot.elf file off an SD card in the Wii's memory card slot. Pretty easy to do. There's not a lot out there at present. Wiibrew seems to be the main hub of activity. I tried the GameCube Linux Proof of Concept Linux port; once they add USB support it might actually be useful as that'll open up mass storage and input via a keyboard. There's a Sega Genesis emulator on Wiibrew which isn't too bad, but I found it a bit temperamental at reading ROM images. Still, it's a start and it's pretty nifty that you can do this without having to modify your Wii in any way. I expect more groovy homebrew will appear as the hardware of the Wii gets better mapped out.

Last.fm tag:cover I blame Flash but it's actually not been bad; the odd terrible choice, a few excellent versions (some of which were new to me) and mostly just acceptable covers that give me a reasonable range of stuff to listen to at work.

I tried again this weekend to OpenWRT my Netgear DG834G ADSL router with SVN r10500. Less joy this time; it boots the kernel and says something along the lines of "Please wait while OpenWRT does its thang", prints a message about loading the FPU emulator and sits there. However I'm pretty sure this isn't OpenWRT's fault; trying to flash the router back to the stock Netgear image is failing. ADAM2 does the erase ok, but once it gets to trying to do the flash it just sits there even when left for hours. I don't know if this is because the flash blocks are going or some other reason, but I think I can be fairly sure the hardware is on the blink. I'll try again to turn it back into a normal device, but somehow I don't rate my chances. So, having broken my primary ADSL router I fell back to my WGT634U + Speedtouch USB combo. I'd found my other frog and hoped it might prove more stable, but no. Got a maximum of about half an hour of connect time. Which leads me to believe the original Speedtouch just isn't very good at either ADSL Max or a full 8Mb/s (yes, I live in the middle of nowhere but in general I get full ADSL Max connect speeds). I gave up at this point (it was Sunday night) and on Monday decided to have a look for cheap routers on eBay. And then I remembered I had a BT Home Hub lying around. It's locked to BT by default, but I knew there were various discussions on putting Thompson Speedtouch 7G firmware on it that would open things up. It meant finding my Windows box and booting it (Wine wouldn't cut it unfortunately due to magic network voodoo or something) in order to do the upgrade, but I now at least have a stable 8Mb/s connection again. The Home Hub is running Linux but it's a Broadcom chipset with no source for the ADSL drivers that I'm aware of, so I don't hold a lot of hope for hacking it. However I have a D-Link DSL-502T on its way (for less than a tenner) so I haven't given up on AR7 yet.

Since I've moved to Castlerock I've started using my DG834G to provide my ADSL again, as it was quick to setup and easily found in all the boxes. Up until now I've just been using it with the normal Netgear firmware, but I'm getting to the point where enough of the rest of the house is sorted that I want to think about the network layout. Part of that is enabling IPv6 (I'm with an Entanet reseller these days, and Enta claim to do IPv6), part of it is not bridging the wireless and wired networks (I'd like to be able to trust the wired one a bit more) and part of it is just being able to run useful bits on the router itself. Anyway. I had built up an OpenWRT SVN image last month and tonight I decided was the time to try it, having been putting it off for ages. Epic fail. Managed to get the backup of the Netgear image done fine, eventually got the new image on there, waited and waited and no joy. Wouldn't even ping on the LAN side. Further investigation showed that it would ping for a few seconds when first power cycled and then die. So I had to find my serial console level shifter so I could have a look. All signs point to it failing when loading the wireless or ADSL firmware blobs. Bah. I spent a while trying to get the old firmware back on it; ADAM2 seems really unhappy if it receives unexpected traffic (like, say, DNS requests because my network thinks the router is the DNS server/gateway) while you're ftping an MTD image. I got there, but decided I'd try out my WGT634U setup again, which is what I used in Norwich. Found the frog, fired up the router, changed my old Black Cat details to the new Enta ones and crossed my fingers. At first all appeared well (well, except for no IPv6 PPP; must email Enta to see if they need to tweak settings at their end for my username), but after a while it became apparent that the ADSL connection was flakey; it was resyncing every couple of minutes. Bum. It might just be the frog; I do have another one somewhere, but I ended up just falling back to the DG834G with the stock Netgear firmware ie exactly where I started this evening. I've pulled latest OpenWRT SVN and I see a few kernel/VLYNQ patches regarding AR7, so I shall try another build and see what happens. Epic fail. I shouldn't play with networking on a school night.

I was bought a pair of these for Christmas. For the past few years I've been using a pair of Hitachi TMP028s - cheap clip on headphones that I've found far better than the popular ear bud style, but nothing special. The Sennheisers are much better again. They have a neat little padded cup that means they make a good fit with your ears, the headband is reasonably adjustable (I've had issues with my glasses with other headphones) and they come with a carry case and fold flat which means throwing them in my bag for my train commute much easier. All in all I've been very impressed in my use over the past month. And then today I finally put some batteries in to power the noise cancellation function. Wow. Much more effective than I expected. I was able to knock the volume on my iAudio down a fair bit and still hear the music better than usual. The noise of the train was still present, but reduced significantly to the point where it wasn't an issue at all. Definitely recommended.

My. That's a mouthful of a title. I went to this event on Friday, which was run by OpenIsland. I don't really think I was the target audience; I'm already a convert and aware of the opportunities which Free Software offers. However, there were a few bits of interest to me. Brian Doran, director of the Southern Regional College talked about including discussion of Open Source in their computer related courses. He didn't commit to more use in the colleges' IT infrastructure (and indeed Netcraft reports the website as being hosted by a Win2k3/IIS combo), but it's still a significant step forward IMO - rather than just being spoon fed MS based product people will hopefully be encouraged to think about the options available and evaluate them on their merits. We'll see if it pans out in practice. Also notable was Reg Empey, NI Minister for Employment and Learning, giving a speech involving Open Source. It got hijacked into discussion about how they were going to invest in higher education in NI and fund more PHDs in a targeted manor, but I still think the fact that a member of the NI Assembly got up and used the words Open Source (or possibly Free and Open Source Software; I can't remember exactly which speaker used that once a sentence) is quite incredible. Whether or not he's fully aware of it, someone on his staff must have done some research, and decided that it was something government was prepared to think about, or at the very least not boycott. During the day I realised that I'm prejudiced towards Free Software. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. I will, in general, accept slightly less functionality as long as the Free option fulfils my primary needs. And I've got used to hanging around with people who also work this way, or at the very least consider Free Software on a level playing field with proprietary stuff. I was reminded that a lot of people work the other way; either they're not aware of the Free alternatives, or they view them with a natural suspicion. So it was really good to see people standing up and talking about how they'd built their businesses on Free Software, and even better, about how they were pushing back upstream fixes/features they'd needed as part of their business. I don't know if anyone in the audience was converted, but it's certainly the sort of thing I like to see - it's important to appreciate that as well as Free Software being a great resource, it's also often beneficial to share any changes you make from a business point of view, as it tends to make things easier for you in the long run. Hopefully the conference did some good in terms of making people aware of Free Software (well, mostly Open Source was talked about, but both got mentioned). I wasn't convinced that there was a need, but having talked to various people I think it's just that I have got used to being surrounded by converts and perhaps lost sight of the fact that there are still plenty of people out there who aren't yet giving Free Software a chance. There are plans for this to be an annual event, so I look forward to the next one (and I think there will be various more targeted meetings over the next year too; I know there was considerable interest in covering the use of Free Software in health).

I am pleased to discover that my Sea Monkeys are not the only dirty buggers having a threesome. (We have office sea monkeys. They freak out my coworkers.)

My body hates Mondays. Over the weekend I get up at 9am or later. My coffee consumption is also minimal. This morning I was up at the usual 5:30am and was on my 4th cup of coffee before 10am. And we're not talking weak coffee - my cow orkers have been known to pour the pot out if it doesn't meet with their approval for strength. This thunking between the weekend and my weekday routine means that Mondays are sort of a blur for me. Thankfully I seem to fall into more of a rhythm by Tuesday. (This post is a substitute for any technical content. I'll try to think of some soonish.)

The UK mirror service is great. They run a whole bunch of mirrors that mean I don't have to use transatlantic bandwidth to get stuff. Like, say, the latest Linux kernel. However they have a really annoying way of displaying indexes over HTTP, where they won't put everything on the same page and instead break it up. Which I find really annoying. To the point that I'm favouring www.ie.kernel.org over www.uk.kernel.org when I want to browse for the right file rather than manually typing it in. Is it just me annoyed by this?