Lack-of-service-BT

It is probably not news to anybody that BT is totally incapable of providing decent support for their own services. Or even that they use illegal means such as lying and/or misselling to catch you as a customer.

However, like an idiot, I managed to get myself caught by them once again. Probably because of a naive believe that people can't be that bad all the time.

In January this year BT called me about switching to them for broadband. I used to be with Zen, who are very good, but they don't provide support after hours and over weekends which are the only times I have to resolve any issues. So when the BT guy called and confirmed SEVERAL TIMES that he can indeed provide me with 20MB broadband, 40Gb download, some other things AND A STATIC IP address, I decided to change.

Well, it is now June and my IP address has changed 4 times. When it changed the first time, in February, I submitted a complaint via the BT website. After a few days I received the normal confirmation with an incident number. To this day, I have not had a response. When it changed for the second time, I called (like an idiot) and merely was passed from one poor sod in India to another to get nothing resolved. This week, the IP changed again on 08.06.2011. Before I could even complain, it changed again today (10.06.2011). So I spent another hour being transferred between India and England and back to India just to be promised about an hour an a half (that, Mr BT translates to 90 minutes) ago that someone from customer services will call me back in 20 minutes. I have also submitted another online complaint and this time actually received an automated confirmation within a few minutes.

So, dear reader, if you have any idea who one is suppose to call to get BT issues resolved, please leave a comment. Or, just to show that you have read this, please leave a comment. I would like for as many people as possible to read this and not be caught in BT's dishonesty/incompetence. Tell your friends to read this and leave a comment. Maybe eventually some BT person with enough savvy, knowledge, influence and will to live, will read it, contact me and resolve the issue.

Another dissertation

So I'm almost at the end of my second MSc and hard at work with the writing of my dissertation. This time it is a MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology. So still very computery, but with a lot of Biology. Specifically molecular and synthetic biology.

I have decided to start writing this just to take a break from the dissertation every now and then. It has been difficult to get my thoughts organised and I hope thinking about something else every now and then will help.

Like last year I decided to use LaTeX. Unlike last year, I don't have to write a 10 to 15 thousand word document, but rather a 16 page write up of my research in the style of the Bioinformatics Journal. For this purpose I had to download a template provided by the Bioinformatics Journal.

I have selected applications again that will run on both Linux and Windows because my computer at uni runs Windows and all my computers at home run Linux. Off course the main requirement is that the software has to be open source.

Firstly there is Mendeley for managing references. It is quite good and I have been using it all year. It has a plug-in for OpenOffice and it works well with LaTeX too. Mendeley also keeps itself synchronised with a web account so when I work on a different computer I can synchronise that too with my references.

Then off course there is Texmaker that I used last year. I managed to set it up to run my own make script from one of the customizable menu items.

I managed to create a nice E-R diagram with DBDesigner4 for the mySQL database that I had to design and the rest of my graphics I have been making with Inkscape. As usual it is a bit of a faff to the graphics in the right place, but I found some nice tips here http://andrewjpage.com/index.php?/archives/48-Figure-spanning-2-columns-in-Latex.html.

I have had quite a bit of success this year running Windows applications on Linux using Wine. My favourite photo manipulation program is still Irfanview. It is not open source and you should really register it (which I have done). For £6 it is more than worth it though. I really don't mind supporting software like this little gem.

PDF-XChange Viewer is another application that I have really become attached too. I run it on both Windows and Linux. On Linux it runs quite successfully with Wine. It allows one to mark-up PDF documents, so unlike last year I don't have two files full of printed papers.

I also started using Dropbox this year. And boy, has that made my life easier! I now know my stuff is backed up and it is usually in at least three places, my PC at uni, my PC at home and my laptop. I only need to log on to the Internet and my computer is synchronised with the Dropbox website. If off course I am on somebody else's computer or a computer in one of the clusters at uni I only need to log onto the Dropbox website and download the document I need. Amazing.

Well, I should probably get back to the dissertation - or to bed, if I can convince myself to fall asleep ...

Categorical imperative

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Immanuel Kant (translated by James W. Ellington)

Reference: Wikipedia

The origin of serendepity

"It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table."

by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann

Reference: Wikipedia

Using LaTeX for your dissertation - part 1 (On my soapbox)

Why use LaTeX?

I don't know whether I'll ever be able to finish my dissertation for my MSc, but even if I don't, I thought I'd document the LaTeX environment I set up for myself. It might just be of use to someone else and save them all the time I wasted to discover things.

I could thank the Open University (in England) for wasting all of this time since they have never heard of anything other than Microsoft Word. They do say that you can use Open Office, but off course tutors HAVE to mark assignments using Word and if you've seen what Word can do to a Word document formatted by itself you'll know it is a somewhat futile gesture trying to get it to sensibly display a Word doc created with Open Office.

The OU will let you know with great enthusiasm that you can buy Microsoft Office for about £35. But if I'm going to spend £35 it will be on shoes for my daughter and not to enrich Bill Gates any further, even if he is going to give the money away to some unfortunate soul somewhere else. The reality is that my daughter still needs school shoes. The OU folks, as sincere as they might be, seem to be as out of touch with reality as the judges in this country.

Since I discovered many years ago that many academics (not those from the OU though) use LaTeX, I thought it would be great if I could use it for my dissertation. I'm always game for learning something new and if there ever is an opportunity to rebel against the blind, numbskull use of Microsoft applications, I'll go for it!!

I have two main reasons for using LaTeX. Firstly, it can be used cross-platform. I like being able to freely switch between Windows and Linux. It allows me to work anywhere and at any time. Secondly I like not to be forced to work in a GUI environment. It is faster and it is much more stable and again it allows me to work anywhere and at any time. Even if I don’t have any LaTeX stuff installed where I happen to find myself, my work doesn’t have to stop because I can use a plain editor to carry on writing. I can generate a pdf or RTF document whenever I get to a computer with my LaTeX apps installed.

Forums for getting help

Firstly I have to mention the forums I only discovered a week ago. I can’t believe that I didn’t come across them at the beginning of the year. I have done searches on Google for LaTeX related information for hours and hours but I never came across these forums. If I did, it would have save me a tremendous amount of time. So the first thing to do is to bookmark this site: www.latex-community.org

Choosing the right applications

I did try MikTex, but in the end decided to use a Linux environment for assembling my documents. I just open a terminal onto one of my Linux servers and run my scripts to create my document. The drive is Samba shared so I can edit my tex files with my GUI applications too.

Vi is my favourite text editor. I chose to use Texmaker as my editor when I do work in a GUI environment for the same reasons as previously stated. Texmaker is available for both Windows and Linux.

For my bibliography I decided to use JabRef. JabRef is written in Java and thus offers the same portability. JabRef creates a BibTex file and thus, when not in a GUI I can use vi to carry on working.

To give an example how these choices served me right I can relate to you my holiday story of August 2008. It was probably not the best time to go in terms of finances and considering the fact that I desperately needed to work on my dissertation. But, I haven’t seen my family for 5 years and I was desperate to see them and for them to meet my children. It was the best holiday that my daughter, my son and I have ever had, so it was the right choice.

However, three days before we were due to leave I switched my laptop on and for no apparent reason, all Windows could give me was a blue screen of death. I honestly did not have the time, energy or inclination to figure out why. I was just not interested.

Fortunately I had a choice of three operating systems on my laptop. With Windows failing, I was left with Ubuntu and Puppy Linux. Ubuntu off course would work, but so would Puppy. My preference was Puppy, just because it is so much smaller and quicker to do things. The only thing I haven’t bothered to get working on Puppy is JabRef because I haven’t bothered trying to get Java installed. I’ll get around to that sometime.

While on holiday I thought I’d ask friends and family who have more interest in Windows than me whether they have any ideas how I could restore the broken system. A friend suggested a Linux based utility for recovering Windows systems. It didn’t work because apparently there was no space in the registry to set an administrators password and one needed to log in as administrator to do the recovery. Then three weeks later I was going to show my cousin what the installation was doing. At this point it decided to start working again - for no apparent reason. Just in case you think I was mistaken, I did boot into Windows a few times over the three weeks to try things people suggested and every time I got the blue screen of death.

In the next few posts, I’ll discuss the scripts I wrote, software applications and LaTeX packages I use in more detail.

Getting Zoneminder to work as quick as possible

About a week ago I decided to see if there was any Linux software available for setting up a security system in one's house. It didn't take much searching to find Zoneminder. My time is quite restricted and thus I was looking for the quickest way to get something working.

I have a server available consisting of:

• a 1400 MHz Intel Celeron,
• 640 MB of RAM
• 120 GB hard drive
• a USB Aiptek Pencam
• a USB Logitech QuickCam Express

That by my standards is a lot for a server :-)

Firstly I donwloaded the ZoneMinder liveCD. That was quite painless. I burnt the downloaded image to a CD and did a reboot. The server started and both my USB webcams were working. The only thing I did have to do was to increase the minimum and maximum amounts for shared memory. I then had the liveCD install to my hard drive. Even this went smoothly but it does take at least a couple of hours to install. After the installation I changed the shmall and shmmax values in /etc/sysctl.conf. I just squared the number a couple of times. The proper way of calculating the amount of shared memory you should allocate is available on the Zoneminder website (see the FAQs), but I was lazy.

I'm quite religious about a server not having a GUI and being headless. So when I was sure everything worked well I set my default runlevel to 3 in the inittab.

I guess this was way too painless for my liking. They always say be careful what you wish for and I guess things couldn't be easier than that.

So, I started wondering whether I could add to my cameras by using my Hauppauge card. However, Zoneminder didn't pick this up too well. It did recognised the card but obviously lacked some drivers because the video devices were never required.

I thought I'd give Ubuntu a go. I'm not going to get into the Ubuntu effort too much because although Ubuntu picked the Hauppauge card up really well I then discovered there were some issues using the card with Zoneminder. There are workarounds that you can find more information on in the forums, but I didn't have time for that. My main problem was that Ubuntu didn't want to work well with my Logitech Quickcam. Ubuntu also managed to break my liveCD installation so I couldn't boot into that anymore.

I even tried re-installing the liveCD, but I still couldn't get the liveCD installation to boot - it just resulted in a kernel panic. Playing around with GRUB didn't help.

I thought I'd try one more alternative and if this didn't work I'd just delete all partitions and do a liveCD installation from scratch. This time I was going to try Fedora Core 8. Of the Linux distros, I'm the most familar with Fedora, hence my choice.

Once again everything went so smoothly I couldn't have asked for anything better. Here is what I did:


Step 1:
Install Fedora 8 from DVD. Make sure to install MySQL, Apache with PHP and (unless you have another installation for development) a C++ development environment because you are going to have to compile some drivers. I'm usually quite religious about not having development environments on servers too, but this is just my own little server and if it does ever move into a production environment I'll remove it again.

Step 2:
After the Fedora installation, install ZoneMinder. At the command prompt type: yum install zoneminder

Step 3:
Set the services to be started at startup
chkconfig --levels 345 httpd
chkconfig --levels 345 mysqld
chkconfig --levels 345 zoneminder

Step 4:
Create the ZoneMinder database with the following commands:
cd /usr/share/zoneminder/db
mysql < style="font-weight: bold;">Step 5:
Modify the following configuration file for Apache:
In /etc/httpd/conf.d/zoneminder.conf, remove the line containing: Deny from all

Step 6:
Change the shared memory by editing /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following lines or if they are modify them appropriately:

kernel.shmall = 134217728
kernel.shmmax = 134217728

Step 7:
If you are going to try everything before rebooting you will have to changes this manually. Do this with the following commands:
echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmall
echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
sysctl -p

Step 8:
Fedora Core 8 detect my Aiptek Pencam quite happily, but it does not have the drivers for the Logitech QuickCam Express. I firstly tried the gspca driver, but that didn't work. I then downloaded and compiled the quickcam driver and that works perfectly. Following are instructions for compiling and installing both drivers:

gspca:

wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Download/gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz
tar -xzf gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz
cd gspcav1-20071224
make
make install
/sbin/modprobe gspca

quickcam:

wget http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/qce-ga/qc-usb-0.6.6.tar.gz
tar xvzf qc-usb-0.6.6.tar.g
cd qc-usb-0.6.6
make all
make install
modprobe quickcam

Step 9:
Start zoneminder, apache and mysql with the following commands:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd start
/etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld start
/etc/rc.d/init.d/zoneminer start

Things might or might not work at this point. Rebooting though, would be your safest bet to make sure everything is properly installed for future use.

An implementation of the Web Economy Bullshit Generator

There exists a synergistic attitude in the market to revolutionise the use of vocabulary into a science of expressing cutting-edge senselessness to be perceived by the gullible as models to success .

Reference: Web Economy Bullshit Generator