I heard about these a while ago via American Express and their Traveller card which they just withdrew last year. Basically the concept is its a credit card with no credit, just whatever money you top up directly on to it, typically between £50-£5000. Its a bit like cash, and I guess similar to the EMV initiative and the Oyster card payment scheme. The upside is you can’t lose more than the topped up balance as there is no credit capability so in theory using it on the internet make sense. The downside is that you pay a percentage to top up and per transaction. You can have one from 10 years old so they can be used by kids and topped up by parents.
January 18, 2008
January 17, 2008
Hyper-V upgrade
I’ve upgraded my main server to the latest Windows Server 2008 build and installed Hyper-V. This box is Quad core with 4GB so it should be fine for running the Hyper-V environment. Hyper-V is an exciting update since it levearges the underlying hardware VM capabilities. For interest I just tried running Windows XP in VirtualPC under Windows XP under a Hyper-V session, and it works! and is surprinsingly fast, or at least no slower than natively.
What is amazing to me is that this relatively cheap commodity box combined with the Windows 2008/Hyper-V combo is akin to a mainframe from 10 years ago, think S/390 with MVS or VM/CMS which would have cost millions.
Anyway, as I find more info I’ll report it here, but its looking good.
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January 16, 2008
Spice up your life!
Last night we went to the O2 arena to see the Spice Girls reunion tour. If you haven’t been to the arena before then you are missing a great venue full of restaurants and entertainments. Its what an evening entertainment should be, relaxed and plenty of space. We were lucky enough to be on level 1 in the VIP area right by the runway at head height. We had some tv stars and footballers round about us, I had Stacey from EastEnders in the seat in front of me. Shortly before the start David Beckham came in and went down to the front of the runway to rapturous applause. Right on que at 20:30 the Spice Girls burst onto the stage. They did all their hits, both as a group and individually and they went straight through to 22:30. It was a non stop rollercoaster of hits and very enjoyable, my favourite being ‘Who do you think you are’ leading onto a solo runway fashion show parody by Posh on her own. I have to say it was a great night and worth every penny, who cares if they are doing it for the money! Every seat in the arena was filled, no gaps anywhere. I must say I would not want to sit up at the top tier (4) as I think I would have vertigo its so high and steep. Posh definitely got the biggest cheers every time she sang and I would say she was the crowds favourite. Anyway, it was a great night out!
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January 14, 2008
The Accidental Fix
As many of you know I was unimpressed by the poor fit of the battery cover for my Dopod C730 (Cavalier). Last week I ordered a 2250ma battery for my T-Mobile Mail, but unfortunately I received a battery for a C730. So I tried fitting it to my C730 as it included a new back to house the huge battery. Surprise, surprise this new (although hideously ugly) battery cover fits properly, Hooray!
Now I just need a trolley to carry it round with me, and I dare not shows its ugly hump in public.
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January 13, 2008
On the internet no one hears you scream!
On Saturday I had a call from someone because the email they sent me had bounced back to them as undeliverable. I immediately thought this must be a problem with this persons email skills, wrong name, domain etc. but I thought I’d check. I opened Outlook and saw the last email to me at this domain had arrived Thursday morning, and suspiciously, there was no junk mail since then … so alarms bells started ringing in the distance, but I wasn’t to worried as this was surely simple and quick to check and fix…how wrong I was!
My first inclination was to check the DNS settings at my ISP, especially the MX records. These were all fine and my MX was pointing as expected to Hotmail, as I use the Live Custom Domains option. So, nothing wrong there. Next stop the Live Admin for custom domains. Bingo! warning messages all over this console;
But Hang on! it says my DNS is not configured ‘Pending DNS Configuration’ and a careful check between this and my ISP DNS settings shows no differences … what gives? So after a struggle I find an email address to which Live support queries can be sent and ask them what the pending change is as there is no direct reference as to exactly what setting is wrong. After 30 mins I hadn’t got a reply (even automated) and I realised that I had used the failing email address so I resubmitted a new ticket. Shockingly, the new ticket was over 9000 higher than my last one half an hour previously! I guess a lot of people worldwide have issues with Live. Apart from the automated reply I have not received a reponse. So no immediate help there…
So, I needed to be more proactive and sent a few test emails which all disappeared without being received. So I decided to get low level and see if I could track what was actually happening so my first step was to see where the email sever was being told to send email in case my ISP DNS had failed.
I used the trusty NSLookup utility to see what was going on with DNS.
NSLookup -sil -qMX timcarmichael.com
Server: 209.68.2.46
Address: 209.68.2.46#53
Non-authoritative answer:
timcarmichael.com canonical name = blog.timcarmichael.com.
blog.timcarmichael.com canonical name = timcarmichael.wordpress.com.
timcarmichael.wordpress.com canonical name = lb.wordpress.com.
Authoritative answers can be found from:
wordpress.com
origin = ns1.wordpress.com
mail addr = mmmmmm.gmail.com
serial = 2005071858
refresh = 14400
retry = 7200
expire = 604800
minimum = 60
EEEK! wordpress.com have become my home nameserver! they obviously have no knowledge of my real settings and list the MX as GMail. No wonder I stopped receiving email. But there is no way to contact their support as they are on holiday… so I contact my ISP to see whats happening and how on earth my real settings got orphaned and wordpress took over. I didn’t even know that wordpress had nameservers.
Now I knew what the problem was I could fix it. I unlocked my domain at my ISP and reset the nameservers back to my ISP. Nothing more I could do now as DNS updates can take up to 48 hours to propagate.
That still leaves me with the question, still unanswered, how did wordpress.com become my nameserver? my domain was definitely locked at my ISP which means no-one but me should be able to make changes. So how did they?
I’ll update when I know … but I’m not holding my breath as to when I get a response. What this proves though is that when faced with a problem like this you are really on your own to resolve it, if you can, no matter how urgent and important it is.
The worst thing was I lost all my existing email in the hotmail account! Fortunately I have a backup, but this would definitely catch the unwary. When live domains eventually re-found the DNS was correct again it seemed to associate me to a brand new (and empty) hotmail account. So beware!
What a nightmare, and no-one to help! These free services are only good if you can sort any problems out yourself, assuming you can discover and understand the problem. So I hope this helps someone else, or me again in the future.
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January 10, 2008
If you like Skype, you’ll love this
3 are doing a great deal for Skype users. Buy a Skype phone from 3 on Pay As You Go for £49.95 and a you get ‘unlimited’ Skype calls over 3’s cellular network. The only constraint is that the PAYG service must be valid or renewed within 30 days of expiring. But of course you can buy a £10 non-expiring PAYG credit and then just use it as a Skype only phone. And its a very neat phone too! Cheaper and better looking and handling than the Belkin and Linksys Skype phones, both of which need Wi-Fi and therefore aren’t portable away from your home or a hotspot like the 3 phone.
Its not a smartphone, but is reasonable to use and for Skype alone its dead easy. Just click the central Skype button and Skype launches and you can make and receive Skype calls. Easy!
The only problem I’ve encountered is that the service frequently flip flops to 3G and back which seems to have less signal strength at home. Details here http://www.3skypephone.com/
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January 8, 2008
A real Android handset?
At CES there’s a buzz that the Wistron GW4 Linux phone could become one of the first real Android handsets. Apparently their rep announced that it was capable of running the Android image … the question is when can I get one?
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January 7, 2008
Do you actually run a datacenter?
I’m not a huge downloader of stuff from the internet but I do have a large and ever growing collection of digital photo’s which are getting ever larger individually because of increasing resolutions. Right now I probably have about 200GB of irreplaceable photos in digital format from holidays, family events etc. Looking back 10 years I’d qualify to be running a corporate datacenter with that much data, and I’d probably have a sophisticated tape backup system with robotic autoloader, offsite storage etc. That’s not likely to happen at my house, but in reality my personal requirements probably aren’t that much different to a datacenter in so far as I don’t want to lose that data and not be able to reliably and rapidly recover it somehow.
Yet today with the advent of £99 750GB external drives, how do we backup that precious data, indeed do we back it up? I run my home server with a 4 drive RAID-5 array and so have some protection from disk failures, yet I have had two separate disk failures in the past 2 years. If I didn’t have RAID-5 I’d have lost quite a lot of irreplaceable data. Even so, I am still at risk from destruction, fire of theft all of which would lose my data. As it happens I do keep a separate backup of the critical bits, but that’s at home too. Another factor is that backing up large data sets actually takes a lot of real time whether that’s to Blu-Ray media or even another hard disk.
Now I know people who have vastly larger collections of data than me, boosted by music and movie content which takes up more and more capacity. So now, even a spare 750GB drive isn’t enough as a backup and is potentially still exposed to the same disaster as the main data.
For me, I have taken to uploading my photos to Flickr so that I have a permanent backup, or do I? Actually Flickr make no guarantees that my photos are safe and their T&C’s state that as well. Its a good backup option though, as its unlikely to fail simultaneously (unless the world ends).
Unfortunately, until there is infinite bandwidth and unlimited storage to allow everything to exist in your own virtual datacenter on the web, many heavy users really do need to think about getting a disaster recovery plan in place for when they lose data, rather than if.
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January 6, 2008
Nokia Liam looks cool
I like the look of the upcoming Nokia Liam posted on Boy Genius Report, as it seems similar to my current favourite the HTC S-620 (aka T-Mobile Mail Dash, O2 Cosmo etc).
I don’t like the numeric pad being in the centre, I’d prefer it set of the left hand side so its easier to definitively locate (thats my pet hate on the Dopod C-730).
Poor Bhupinder Panesar of Vodafone whose name is plastered over the image. Perhaps he could have used our PowerPoint compiler and saved himself this problem and traced the leak to boot!
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January 5, 2008
Energy Efficient Danger!
I was pretty shocked to discover (thanks to BBC news) that energy saving light-bulbs contain mercury and are classified as hazardous waste. There are two effects of this; firstly, when they die you cannot just throw them away with domestic rubbish, they must be specially disposed of as hazardous waste; Secondly, and more worryingly, if you broke a light in your house/office, the official cleanup procedure issued by the DoE is to call in the local council hazardous waste team! and if not, you should open all the windows, wear a mask and rubbers gloves and thoroughly clean the area to remove toxic hazards. But from my schoolboy chemistry, I seem to remember that mercury must be caught and cannot be washed or scrubbed away.
This is pretty scary, especially for kids or people unaware of the dangers of mercury poisoning. Be warned!
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January 2, 2008
Enchanted
The new Walt Disney movie ‘Enchanted’ is a real nice, quality movie to take your kids to see. I really liked it and thoroughly recommend it if you have kids (and even if you don’t). Its just a well put together feel good movie.
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