Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Broadband: Part 2

After getting a MAC code from Orange to enable me to change suppliers, the next step was to sit back and wait for the changeover date. My new supplier, IDNet, had advised me within an hour or so of signing up when the switchover would happen. After my previous experiences with Orange, I was a bit skeptical as to whether the changeover would happen when it was supposed to.

But lo and hold, at the appointed date/time, I checked my router and saw there was no connection to Orange (not that unusual of course) so I tried logging my router in with my new IDNet details. Voila! The connection was there, and a massive improvement in speed too. I was typically getting around 400kbps with Orange - now with IDNet I was getting around 4Mbps.

Now after a couple of weeks, the connection has settled down and runs at around 3Mbps, without the continual disconnections I was getting with Orange. This has made the Internet usable again, and it is a relief to be finally rid of Orange.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Arsenal end of season

Finally, the season we'd all rather forget has finished. Arsene Wenger has been so successful in his 10 years at Arsenal that a cup final appearance and qualification for the Champions League are seen as a failure.

All the way through the season we showed great inconsistency, and never quite got a good long run going. Of course, there are positives to take from the season. Diaby and Clichy both returned from serious long term injuries, and both, but Clichy in particular, showed great form. Diaby suffered a bit at times from being played out of position, but plenty of times he showed his class. Both Denilson and Justin Hoyte emerged as good players - Hoyte returning from a season long loan at Sunderland showed that it is possible to come back from a loan spell and get into the team.

Unfortunately, the negatives outweighed the positives. Our defence showed great fragility at times, and it seemed to become almost inevitable that we would go a goal down in every game. What a transformation froma year ago when the went through most of the Champions League without conceding a goal. Our inconsistency cost us points against teams that we should easily turn over. We only lost once in the league to one of the other top teams, which shows we can compete at the top level, we just need to carry that form through in every game. Our finishing was woeful at times, and highlighted how badly we missed Henry and Van Persie for the second half of the season. Also, it showed how we haven't been able to replace the goals we could rely on from midfield players in the form of Ljungberg and Pires.

As for summer transfers, the inevitable speculation has started. Likely departures include Flamini, Baptista, Almunia and Aliadiere. Youngsters Lupoli and Muamba have already gone. Players coming in seems to be dependent to a certain extent on how much money Wenger can generate from player sales, although there must be some money in the pot. When Arsenal refinanced the stadium loan, one condition was net transfer spending per year of £14 million, so don't expect real big money signings. Hopefully we can get a goal scoring midfielder. Bendtner will come back from his loan at Birmingham, so that is almost like a new signing, albeit an unproven one.

Hopefully the summer will be without too much speculation on possible takeovers. The last couple of weeks has seen a marked slow down in share trading since the board announced they would not sell up, with only the occasional trade of a couple of shares being reported. I was a bit curious as to why the board (who without David Dein own about 45%) were not raising their stakes to over 50% to ensure they remained as the majority share holders, but they have since spoken of 'friends' who own enough shares to take them over the 50% mark.

Hopefully as there are no dull International competitions in the summer, most of our players can get a good rest and come back fighting fit for the new season. It would be nice to have a season not plagued by injuries and see everyone back to their best.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Orange Broadband

A few years ago, when before Orange took over Wanadoo, I signed up to Wanadoo Broadband. I initially had a 512KB connection which compared to the old dial-up was amazing. Then an upgrade to 1MB followed, and again another upgrade to 2MB. All this time there were never any problems with the connection, and speeds were consistent and fast.

Sometime last year, Orange (having subsequently taken over Wanadoo) announced I was to receive a free upgrade to the 'up to 8MB' service. Great, I thought. It would be especially handy when downloading files.

After the upgrade was completed, I saw that my line speed was around 2.5MB. While this was a bit of a disappointment, subsequent reading of how ADSL works showed up the fact that unless you live right on top of your local exchange, you are unlikely to get anywhere 8MB. Still, at least I wasn't paying any more for it.

Then around Christmas 2006, I started to notice that the connection was dropping regularly. This is a real pain, especially if you are in the middle of an online transaction - did the transaction go through or not? My hardware hadn't changed, so I was confident the problem was either down to Orange or the exchange. I was due to move house in February, so didn't do much about it, as I thought moving house would at least rule out the possibility of dodgy internal phone wiring.

So I moved house, and it took Orange 3 weeks to get the Broadband up and running at my new address. Once it was up and running, what did I find? Surprise, Surprise, regular disconnections. Not only that, but the speeds were abysmal - typically between 200-400kbps. The only time I saw it higher was early one Sunday morning, when I got speeds of 1.5Mb. This proved that higher speeds were possible, and so it was either bad contention at the exchange, or some other unknown Orange problem.

As the service was pretty much unusable for most of the time, I phoned them up to see what they would do about sorting the connection out. This is where the fun and games started.

Their Technical Support is located in India, and they clearly read from a script (which seems to include the phrase 'I apologize for the inconvenience' every other sentence), which indicates that they have no real expertise. After explaining the problem, the guy I spoke to finally ran out of options from his script and said he was going to arrange a line test. Call back in 24 hours for the results of the test, he said. I duly called back, navigated the convoluted menu system, explained the problem again and asked for the test results - this time I was told that the line test department don't work at the weekend, please call back after 24 hours (which would be a Monday). Annoyed, I agreed to call back.

When Monday came, I called back. This time I was told that the line test results were not back and I should call back in 24 hours. This was starting to piss me off. I asked them to call me back when they had the results, as it was costing me a fortune to keep calling their premium rate number. They couldn't do this, they explained, as it would be a breach of account security to access an account unless the account holder was on the line. In that case, I asked, how were they going to update my account with the line test results if I wasn't on the line? 'I apologize for the inconvenience' was the reply.

Annoyed at this, I started looking around at other Broadband suppliers, as I was hard pressed to see Orange coming up with any solution. Then I came across a website called OrangeProblems, and I realised that what I was experiencing, both in terms of poor connection and support, seemed to be the norm for Orange. Countless posters on the forums had the same abysmal speeds that I was getting, and were getting the same run around as me from Technical Support.

So rather than waste any more of my time phoning India and getting the run around, I decided to move on. I phoned Orange to ask for my MAC code, and after being transferred to the 'convince them to stay' department, the guy tried to convince me that my connection problems were due to me using a dedicated Ethernet router, rather than the bog standard cheap USB Modem Orange supplies. Plug it back in and all my problems would be solved. I really couldn't be bothered to argue with him, so just insisted on him giving me my MAC code.

I have signed up with another provider, who informed within an hour when the connection would be active.

If you are thinking of signing up with Orange Broadband, don't bother. They make using the Internet a total pain in the arse.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Tweaking Ubuntu

After installing Ubuntu 7.04, I started to install extra software and 'tweak' the setup.

Extra software that I have installed includes Celestia, Google Earth, Stellarium, Tux Paint, Thunderbird, Ex Falso (for flac/ogg file tagging) and Childsplay.

A couple of problems that I came across:

  1. After installing Thunderbird and running it OK, it subsequently crashed at startup after restarting the computer the following day. Removing the folder .mozilla-thunderbird would fix the problem, but after setting up Thunderbird again, it would crash at startup again. I found a fix on the Ubuntu Forums, which was to blank out the default location for the start page. Weird. The fix is a bit awkward to do, as you have to rename the .mozilla-thunderbird folder, set Thunderbird up and remove the start page, then copy the Mail subfolder from the original .mozilla-thunderbird folder into the 'new' .mozilla-thunderbird folder.
  2. I couldn't play DVDs. After following the standard Ubuntu instructions on how to add DVD playback capability, the Totem Movie Player wouldn't play any DVDs. It flashed up an error 'There is no plugin to handle this movie'. A Google search turned up the solution in a Ubuntu bug report. The solution is to apt-get xine-ui. This installs some other library which then makes Totem work OK.
  3. I changed the standard font to Bitstream Vera Sans in System>Preferences>Font. To me, this font appears clearer than the standard Sans font.
  4. In Firefox, I'm used to clicking in the address bar and having the whole text selected (this is how it works in XP). In Ubuntu, no text is selected. To change this, you need to type about:config in the address bar and press enter. Then in the filter box type browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll. Change this value to True.
That's all for now, but I'll maybe find more issues as the days go by. Hopefully they will all be as minor as those that I have encountered so far.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Moving to Ubuntu: Part three

After spending an eternity defragging my hard drive, I was ready to try installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty). I really don't know why the Windows Defragmenter needs so many goes to properly defragment the drive - if I was doing this again I would research a third party Defragmenter.

I popped in the install/Live CD and booted the computer. Once the computer had booted into the CD, I selected the install option. You are presented with a number of simple questions regarding your locale. Then you get to the partition section. As I wanted to keep my existing XP installation so I can Dual Boot, I selected the option to manually edit the partition table.

I resized the existing Windows partition down to 15GB (after the cleanup and defrag, it was using 9GB). I created the required root and swap partitions, but I also created a /home partition. The home partition is where your user settings/files reside. The advantage of a separate home partition is that if you ever need to re-install the Operating System, your data remains intact in the home partition.

Once the partitioning was finished the install began. I had read that it can take up to an hour, but was pleasantly surprised to find it only took 15 minutes to install on my PC. You are then prompted to remove the CD so the system can reboot and start properly from the install.

This is the moment of truth - would the system recognise both the Ubuntu and XP installation? Yes it did. I selected the Ubuntu installation and it proceeded to start up. It forced a disk check during the start up, and found an error. This was a bit worrying. It then restarted after correcting the error and this time booted up OK. Phew! My new system was up and running. I then shut it down to test if I could still boot into XP OK. This also worked. It was then back into Ubuntu to stat installing some software!

The only problem I found (so far) was after I installed Google Earth. The rendering was very jumpy and not smooth at all. This was quite easy to fix - I needed to activate the restricted ATI graphics driver for my graphics card from the Restricted Drivers menu item.

I've still got a few things to setup and install, but so far it is looking good. And it runs really quickly too. I checked the memory consumption out of interest in the System Monitor and it was around 250MB - my XP installation would generally be around 400-500MB with a similar set of applications running. Make of that what you will.