Robert Leverington’s Blog

Last month it was the summer break at school and I went on holiday to Scotland and Ireland, but spent a lot of time at home too. On my travels I noticed a distinct difference between the budget airlines we travelled on - Ryanair and bmibaby. In fact, on a measure of customer service, I’d put them at opposite ends of the scale.

Quite frankly Ryanair were rude and quite poor in terms of quality; the queues very long, and they’d call you for flights stupidly too early. Another factor was the manner in which they spoke, treating paying consumers as if they were doing something bad “You must turn off your phones.” for example.

bmibaby on the other hand were very polite, and queues were virtually non-existent. While they did have similar policies to Ryanair they would be conveyed in a non-condescending way.

Overall I am still quite disappointed with airlines right now, after all we’re in the 21st century - it shouldn’t be necessary for all electronic equipment to be turned off on take off and landing, the ride shouldn’t be bumpy, there shouldn’t need to be queues. It’s probably going to be this way for a while, but we are overdue a change in the way air travel works.

For over a year now I’ve been trying to set up a network in my room, yet have succeeded at failing every time. Currently I have four systems semi-permanently based in my room; a desktop running Windows XP, a laptop running Windows XP, and two tower servers both running Ubuntu 8.04. It is impractical to purchase wireless cards or dongles for each of these, especially given the unreliability that they inherently have, so I bought myself a router and planned to tie them all together in one network; using one of the two servers as a proxy so the other three systems may access the internet.

Step one in this solution was finding a wireless card that was supported by the Linux Kernel. Firstly I tried a wireless to ethernet bridge, unfourtunatley this did not work (I haven’t worked out why, but it may perhaps be because it was designed for IP phones rather than conventional equipment); so I got myself a Belkin F5D7000 Wireless PCI Card and fitted into the designated proxy server and booted it up. A fresh copy of Ubuntu 8.04 was already installed on it so I thought it would just be a case of following the instructions in iwconfig, although it politely informed me that no wireless interfaces were available. After a few minues searching on the Linux Wireless website I discovered that extra files were needed to go in my firmware install directory; I broke out a 30m Cat5e cable I had and plugged it in to the downstairs router so I could download the files, unfourtunatley it wouldn’t detect the wired network by default either and so this is where I am now stuck. I recall Ubuntu 7.04 working fine out of the box with a wired DHCP network, although apparently this is not the case with Hardy Heron (which has lots of stuff that used to be working out of the box disabled, for some reason). Today I didn’t have the patience to research into my problem, perhaps one day I might get things working though.

Another thing making it difficult to do is that I can’t be connected to my wireless and wired network from my desktop simultaneously - that means that I have to constantly switch over the monitor cable if I am to have any internet connection. Apparently this has something to do with Windows XP only allowing one network interface at a time, once I start using the proxy his should no longer be an issue though.

Below is a diagram showing the proposed layout of my network.

Update 1: For anyone who is interested the device is “Belkin Unkown device 700f (rev 20)” and printout from lspci -n was “0200: 1799:700f”.

Yesterday marked the first day of the summer holidays. For quite a while I’ve been looking forward to them, while I used to enjoy school recently I’ve become highly demotivated and really wanted out (unfortunately that won’t be possible for another three years since there is really nowhere else to go other than sixth form); lessons are boring and slow, rules are enforced depending on how the teachers feel, and I’m seriously lacking any friends there - right now I just wish it could all be over and I could start working. The summer should be a break, where I can do what I like and stop worrying about homework for once; but, alas, this is not the case. Our English teacher is making us complete a piece of coursework and told us to e-mail it to her this Friday, one will also have to purchase and read To Kill a Mockingbird - also for English - and I have a tremendous amount of product design coursework to do because; via a majority decision between the product design teachers (our teacher disagreed, but the other two wanted to), the deadline was moved forward approximately five months meaning that a lot of the work will have to be done in my spare time. I never wanted to do product design anyway, I wanted to do electronics - but the system was confusing and all of the technology subjects were bundled into one “Product Design” class. Another factor is that I could probably spend all summer doing the product design, yet it will never be finished without teacher input, so another thing will be in the back of my mind.

I have plenty of other stuff to occupy myself with though, I’m working on a new computer program for password encryption and am going to Scotland and Ireland. So it’ll be fun, at least. Yesterday I and a couple of friends went up the hills near where we live and took some photographs (I’m trying to collect some photographs to use on my blog as a wallpaper), but only six were any good; I’ll need some more before being able to do it I suppose.

So I just upgraded Wordpress to the latest version (as kindly prompted to do by my administration panel) and decided that this would be a good opportunity to talk about my experience with Wordpress and having a blog in general over the three months I’ve been posting for.

Contrary to my original thoughts it has not been difficult to find topics to write about, almost every single day I have something that I want to talk about - of course this isn’t always translated into posts. I haven’t got very much feedback, although it is difficult to judge my readership as it stands - aside from the one or two people who I personally know that subscribe. In fact the most difficult part of having a blog has been developing a theme, currently it is rather bland, and although I’m trying to design an improved one this isn’t exactly going to plan; design creativity isn’t my forte, apparently. I’d like to start taking photographs to brighten up my blog, need a decent camera first though.

Wordpress itself is a dream to work with, the dashboard is elegant and smooth, and behind the scenes it is easy to develop themes with. While there are still many features that would be great to have, it’s awesome as it stands (I’d love to develop some stuff for it, but learning another codebase is something I don’t have much time or will power for at the moment).

I also recently purchased a VPS and have been using it quite a lot in an effort to centralize my SSH and SFTP sessions and allow me to connect to an environment I am used to and can work with from nearly anywhere. Since I have full control over it I’ve been able to connect to it from school after configuring it to run the OpenSSH daemon on port 443 rather than the conventional 22; this also makes it more secure, of course. While I am currently using sshfs with FUSE so that I can access files across systems from a single filesystem it does have disadvantages and it occasionally refuses to delete certain files.

Sports day yesterday wasn’t as bad as I originally expected, there was much waiting around - but that seamed to go quickly (and the day was more fun than lessons, contrary to my expectations). I took part in the form relay, since the girl who was original going to didn’t want to so they needed someone else, and I think I did fairly well helping the team to catch up even though we had fallen badly behind due to our first runner (we ended up coming fourth out of six teams in the race we did). Members of my form also took part in the shot putt (where we got full points) and the long jump. We then went on to do orienteering, this isn’t a traditional sport and wasn’t the most fun thing I’d done all day - needless to say, cheating was easy, and we lost due to our teacher prohibiting us from cheating like the other groups did. We also did badminton and football (although the format of both could have been improved).

After lunch we went outside and sat on the bank of the field and watched the house track events, I ended up doing the tug of war since we had insufficient competitors and was pushed into doing it by some of the people in my house. We won the first go, but lost on the second one. I had a nice time overall, and lots of other people did too (except, of course, the kids who had a miserable outlook of the day and were unwilling to participate - but they were bound to still be unhappy no matter what).